Pub tea

Obvious snowy car photo.

Obvious snowy tree photo.

After abandoning various Sunday plans we couched for a while and then drifted uphill through the snow for a pub tea. Nicely placed in the warm Arms of Duddingston; tried three beers, drank one properly(completely) and pigged on chips and shrimps, Ali chomped on a North Sea fish pie. We returned using the navigational power of magic sticks and the untried Wenceslas method of deep snow walking. This involves singing the Carol in a hearty, trudging fashion and enjoying the heat that "was in the very sod". There was also the issue of who would be king and who would be page. Being a middle aged page didn't work for me, not a great career move in my view. I also resisted the temptation to throw handmade snow balls at the neighbours windows mainly thanks to being in temporary Slovak king mode at the time.

On our return to the ice-house the feuding cats were now at peace, Second Life was being seconded into Third Life (where virtual people build alternative lives on real laptops) and Strictly X-Factor come Jungle was rapidly replaced by an episode of Bones or something similar on Sky 1. The thaw and a brave new dawn is just around the corner according to the Second Life Facebook Met Office.

Doctor Blog

Another kind of pear - as imagined by a local artist.

Served today by his Royal Highness the manager of Tesco EH30 who was proudly wearing his manager's badge. "Why don't you employ more people on the checkouts?" I asked. He didn't give me a straight answer, "I often work on the checkout when we we're busy". You have to ask yourself what kind of organisation allows the manager to work on checkouts wearing a dumb badge and a pink tie? I did however refrain from questioning his management style and moved the conversation on by telling him that most DVDs and Lego in the store were cheaper than their counterparts on Amazon, (I think). Not that I'm a good price geek...

Dr Who, Dr Prog, Dr Blog...I'm seeing a pattern here.

Snow news day

Snow celebrations. Photo by remote CBQ.

Well worn car looking almost clean thanks to the application of a convenient blizzard.

Eventually it came to the point where the sky could hold no more snow, we were seated in the warmth and comfort of the Dakota at this critical moment, in the company of the illustrious Mr & Mrs CBQ. My Cornish sardines were by now a distant memory as the frozen material continued to fall, as ever regardless of our outstanding travel plans and hopes for the weekend. Next day our trip to the frozen north was cancelled when we ran out of stamina but applied good sense and consumed pancakes at Kinross. That was pretty much that as they say.

Bleak Ocean Terminal Shopping Mall view - last weekend.

Nice pair

His n' hers: Predictable.

I'm drinking more than my fair share of pouring yogurt or am I pouring more than my fair share of drinking yogurt? As usual I can't think straight or even perpendicularly, a great word to use from time to time. "Pour on the nutritious goodness" it says on the carton, illustrated by a glowing spoon and translucent berries and cereal type accessories. It is also satisfying and has a fantastic pouting but more likely pouring texture apparently, "ahh Danone!" all the good people chirp. Not sure about you but I'm up for a taxi to the Dakota, easy on the scallops.

Opinions and Quiz. Anyway which one was/is better Judee Sill, Judy Tzuke or Judy Collins and which one was immortalised by HMHB?

There are questions in corners of my mind that lurk

like how do the road gritters get to work

answer me that and you could win a cruise

Here's Judie Tzuke to take us up to the News

Fife Speak

Passed on from the good people at the Daily Reckless.

Dr P

Mmmm, a nice bottle of Dr P.

M40

Back home after two days out there on my favourite road, the M40. It runs and runs and then it stops, then it starts and we all move on, as does life in general. The best part is the company provided by the programming of friendly Radio 4, odd, eclectic: Arthur Miller, the design of public toilets, multi-choice examinations and their origins, opera, the Electric Light Orchestra and Dublin. I live and as far as my deteriorating memory and powers of concentration allow I learn.

Top things today:

Emma's Spagbol reheated in the microwave.

Strangely nippy and likable Peugeot 207.

Against all the odds a Costa latte that I enjoyed and finished.

4 eggs, two sausages.

A clear ariel view of England and Scotland all the way home thanks to no clouds.

A snooze.

Potential snow and winter weather, (better to learn to love it and live with it I suppose).

Never had it...

...so good. It's true and a measure of the strangled life and the slow death of free speech. You can still think what you like but keep your mouth shut and tow the heavy and abstract party line. Me, myself and my other various unattached selves are happy and most probably have never have it or any other indefinite thing so good or at the very least a good deal better than average and most certainly far beyond a lot of what most people have to put up with, also and in parallel trying not to be smug about it. The only outstanding issues are:

A small piece of roast beef stuck somewhere in my top teeth.

The need to find a donor car to provide a catalytic converter for Mr Cougar.

The lifting of the humiliating feeling of falling on my fat bum in mud at the football while deftly trying to trap a ball and failing spectacularly.

The small matter of repairing the frazzled Irish economy - help is at hand from a team of experts being released by our national disgrace RBS however.

Not looking forward to some sustained up and coming Flybe new and miserable experiences.

Once these minor irritations evaporate, it'll all be good.

Cranberry Diaries

Moving swiftly away from quasi-religious and unfathomable ideas and their observation we return once again to the thrust and drive provided by the moon and seasons and numerous pagan marks upon the calender. This leads us into various activities designed to keep out the cold and remove the shuffling unknown creatures currently living in the roof space. Thus the mincemeat making begins and strong drink, honey and the fruits of many strange lands come together in cooking pots and eventually in pastry cases.

Honey is light and Marmite is dark, opposites from nature and jars. The two strike a breakfast balance when applied to golden toasted bread and scoffed. Both products can trace their history back into the Garden of Eden where early man and a few friends toiled under the yoke of pre-Tesco ignorance to produce the malt and without any decent protective clothing robbed the bees of their precious honey. The boys were badly stung but reckoned it to be worthwhile, the ladies loved that sweet sticky syrup apparently. After a while Marmite and honey were wrapped in leaves and mud, then as industry developed stored in clay jars and cleaned up yogurt pots and exported westwards to the Greater-Mediterranean area, so Bill Bryson or someone says anyway.

Free Kirk

“The fact that a corrupt tree can bear good fruit is a truth that religious traditionalists find hard to accept, just as strong atheists find it difficult to admit that the corrupt tree of religion can at times produce beautiful fruit. Everything that we have achieved of any worth or beauty has emerged from the harsh soil of nature.” Richard Holloway.

Listening to god and all that.

The men in authority who will always take charge of any religion once it has established itself are suspicious of people who claim to hear the divine voice; the kind of people who in fact get religions going in the first place. That is why leaders who take over a faith always close down the “community radio” and replace it with an officially written version of the divine encounter, a book. The main advantage of this is that it gives them much more control over their followers than would have been possible had they been allowed to tune directly into the voice of god. That line has been disconnected for centuries it seems…

…but listen and take heart, in the deep darkness and the all consuming loneliness of the universe there is a voice, there and gone, here and distant. From the stars to the inner reaches of the soul, it speaks, it murmurs, it calls but few listen, fewer understand and it seems none obey. If we consider ourselves lost we are not just where we are, we are where we have placed ourselves, by the single, stupid and irresponsible act of not listening. In another separate, exciting development the Free Kirk have voted that you can sing to god (in his general direction anyway) or even play a musical instrument of some sort (provided that it‘s not an accordion), turns out that he doesn’t mind music and hollering after all. Who says that god is inflexible and set in his/her ways?

Sunburst Les Paul in an Edinburgh junk shop for £5.00, one broken machine head. The year is 1971.

Lunch

Lunch today in Portsmouth. The spectral spectre of the sugar and dough sign, alluring looking and blinking in the rainy mist, all misty in the blinking rain. Foraging for food and a Harry Potter wand but after a brief struggle I ended with just the food, a receipt and crumbs in my lap. On the 'plane I read a long book about a short subject, "time and eternal forgiveness" or something or was it the other way round. By the time I got to the end of it I was sadder and wiser and following on from that experience eventually happier again. That's the power of the written word and the bleak and barren conscious mind for you. After a while I was home, the travel a long way behind but there remains in me a sneaking suspicion, cloaked at the back side of my soul that I'll travel again, in the customary manner using some kind of machine, some day soon.

Alcohol

Alcohol is a fuel, is poison, has no taste, tastes good, is an acquired taste, can be mixed, can be diluted, can be savoured, comes in numerous forms, generally liquid, clear or coloured, cheap or very expensive, banned but legal, popular but hated, creative and destructive, fun or ugly, tells the truth or tells lies, knocks you out or peps you up, makes you quiet, makes you loud, makes you go home, makes you come out, is serious, is stupid, is grim, is healthy, kills germs, burns out organs, wrinkles skin, keeps you young, part of religious ceremonies, not part of religious ceremonies, misunderstood, fully explained, drunk in secret, drunk in public, made in Scotland (also available in other countries across the globe).

41 years

Funny when you realise that many things happened 41 years ago, I could make a list but I won't bore you or myself any further. Deliberate mistake: the image is of the CD not the vinyl version. Back in the day (authentic Canadian expression) the word digital was unknown, cassettes were new and you could see Led Zep and Barclay James Harvest for less than a £1 in any given student refectory. (Sounds like many an old man rant recalling when you could enjoy Gracie Fields, Bing Crosby and the Marx Bros. and still get change, a bottle of cream soda and a fish supper for two sterilised Robertson's jam jars and a farthing.)

Hats

I like hats and the idea of hats but sadly I'm not a hat person.

Dull as a new phone

The dull, unsexy, unfunky but practical new phone. This device is mainly used to listen to voicemail, trial predictive text quirks and take photos of random events at home, at work and in outer space (mostly from a vantage point here on earth).

The cobbles of George Street Edinburgh (detail).

I have never before written about my cobbles obsession, so this is a first, an ode if you will to the lovely, stony cold cobbles and their parking markings, painted on irreverently by the people from the council who we assume know what they are doing. It seems though that someone else needs to champion the cobbles.

Now that I've written about the cobble thing I need never mention it again. Job done.

The rich have suffered enough*

Small child's well constructed view of the sky, the clouds and stuff like that.

Conversations with my small grandchildren are generally more rewarding than the external regular adult kind I endure most days. Yesterday we wandered around the Foggy Foggy Forrest mulling over numerous important topics mostly stick related. In a wood sticks seem to be of most importance to kids with lots of wild speculation about their properties; who would win in a battle between two people fighting with sticks if one stick was a sword stick and the other stick was a gun stick? That’s tricky, it also assumes that nobody will come along and imagine a hand grenade stick or cruise missile stick and so on. One upmanship is only tolerable up to the point that the game allows, not quite like the real world. Most of today’s sticks were regular swords however, best suited to trashing any remaining nettles, attacking innocent stone walls and testing their metal [sic] against other sticks, normally those still attached to their parent trees.

Above our heads an aircraft was circling in a curious manner, three times it passed over at quite a low altitude. The pilot was in an airport queue no doubt but you can’t help thinking that maybe he needs some where to ditch, a field for a forced language or a clear piece of road to use as a makeshift runway. Thankfully not the case today.

Once the stick debate ran out we moved onto woodland animals, which was the most dangerous? Badgers always seem a bit menacing to me despite their “Wind in the Willows” image and of course foxes, but the ones that actually cause the most trouble to us mere humans are pheasants. Completely stupid and with no road sense every journey around here means trying to avoid the scrawny females and the bright but seriously dim males. As this unravelled we rapidly moved up the animal scales with comparisons of animal battles. Who would win between a lion and a tiger? Seemed to me like a straight draw but if the tiger has his tail on fire then he’d surely be mad as hell and just shave it. Not sure who would be setting the tiger’s tail alight however. Then there are the trolls currently based under bridges looking for a toll or a forfeit, small kids love this idea though they tend to dispute the under-bridge areas as totally troll habitat preferring some ogres or goblins to be under there. Trolls need to sell themselves a little more aggressively in modern film and literature.

Vampire Zombie grandfather (far right) floats around supporting cast of grand kids.

Eventually we moved on from sticks and the call of the wild, random aircraft observations and troll watching back to the house. Here I was about to make a cauliflower cheese. It was something I had been fantasising about for a few days all based around a blurred and recurring childhood memory (that had returned like a long lost postcard back into my head) of eating cauliflower cheese at home with my parents as a small boy in the fifties in black and white. It had been burned in places (a good thing) and contained some of the green parts of the vegetable, these had been coated in cheese and were, as far as I was concerned particularly sought after. I resolved to replicate the suddenly memorable dish from my middle-aged flashback. It seemed simple enough; from ASDA I purchased a cauliflower for a pound (and thanks to a BOGOF offer also received a green and sprouting bunch of broccoli for the same cash), I was all set. I knew a tub of unloved cheese sauce lay hidden in the freezer so I copped that and boiled up the chopped cauli. Then for the cheese topping, this was to be a combination of those exotic cheeses that sleep, untouched in the bottom of the fridge following some cheese and crackers feeding frenzy many moons ago. Those left over flavoured bits with no clear purpose or inherent natural attractiveness, next to the half tub of Philadelphia. These same pieces were duly grated and set to one side, as all the good cooks say. Everything was plopped into a casserole and left under the grill to brown and congeal nicely. Unfortunately when the time came I could not devour the meal with the vigour and enjoyment I had anticipated, in fact I didn‘t touch it at all. Too much home made soup before hand. Maybe tomorrow.

*please ignore irrelevant blog title, allegedly a quote from Peter Mandelson.

Ace of bass

I saw the sign and it opened up my eyes, I saw the sign.

No one's gonna drag you up,

To get to the light where you belong.

But where do you belong?

Life is demanding,

Without understanding.

Project dawn. Day 1, went well, went out in the weather, worked for a number of hours, car wash and cleaners, returned home with shopping and miscellaneous grandchildren, filled the lounge with unexpected and unwelcome smoke. Invented a device and devised an invention. Cat and toad avoidance strategy kicked in. Built a better kind of soup utilising the mystery potatoes (49p) but no cauliflower as yet, allowed it all to mature. Read numerous stories, bedtime and ....relax. Rose wine.

Car wash art

From the early blue period: 25 seconds in.

The darkness descends: 37 seconds.

Close to the warm rinse, the blow over and the ultimate release: 58 seconds.

Traditional

Traditional Thursday evening post. A recipe for Rocky Rhodes, easy if you try, you need:

Marshmallows, Mars Bars, Maltesers, Double Deckers, Chocolate, Milky Bar, Galaxy and other stuff. Nuke in the microwave and pour into a bowl and allow to cool. Once it has solidified you eat it but not it all.

Tonight looking for a address in Dalkeith (in the pouring rain), I did the unmanly thing and stopped to ask instructions from a group of blokes fixing a car (in the pouring rain). I am never in Dalkeith but it turned out one of the men worked for me twenty years ago, last time I saw him was five years ago in France. Odd (in the pouring rain). His directions were perfect.

Picture of the artist as a middle-aged man, thanks to Julien Pierrefeu.

Useful/complex

The promise of an endless stream of Asian/English/Russian/you name it music and entertainment, a billion blogged downloads and Internet scratchings, news from any unreliable source and the thrust for information and illicit commerce, images and hunger, vapid sexual content and MasterCard and Visa symbols. Offers and traps, engines that are powerless but full of fruitless searches, their infected results spinning in a spiral. The exhausted replicants and number coded names and addresses of the Second Life disciples and the Facebook junkies, the cyber warriors now returned from the war, destined to become the cyber wanderers, left wondering. Sometimes I call up the Google screen and stare into the snow white letterbox with it‘s grey boundary lines: I have no words to type in there, there is nothing that I want to type there. Everything is accessible and available but there is nothing there that is interesting. Walk away from the screen.

Funny that spell check thinks Google should be goggle.

Brains are useful, complex things. Sensitive fleshly thinking machines that can run for up to a hundred years without any major problems. It is gratifying that they are well enough made to allow this and so enable the owner to forget about them, mostly. They also act as houses for the soul and somehow, in some hard to understand and even harder way to explore smoothly accommodate the person and the personality. Some people boil this down to electrical impulses, connections and tiny fiddly bits, others see these processes as a blue green haze with yellow edges, visible to dogs and eagles but not to fellow humans. I don’t know either way, I admire the ghostly mystery inhabiting others mostly from a safe distance and occasionally and more enjoyably right up close. Regular brain feeding is required but again the type of essential food cannot be categorised, everybody, every brain feeds differently. When brains break down it’s not so good, things can change rapidly, tragically or slowly but noticeably. In this though I believe the soul remains constant, it may however see or perceive the world a little differently and that can be disturbing for both the owner and those outside. Seems you never know where those thoughts will lead you. Look after your head and in time you will grow into yourself.

A fistful of Hendrix: it’s exasperating sometimes that great bands and musicians didn’t do more with their talent. Perhaps though that’s it, leave them always wanting more. Leave them.