Takes a lot of effort to stay connected

A portrait of a third rate artist as a young man turned old prematurely but still fairly happy with his lot in life.

Every so often you find yourself siting on a rocky outcrop in Ibiza thinking deep, meaningful and positive thoughts. You design complex bass lines, line draw time machines, write short stories about petty crime, plan some kind of major (or petty) crime or fraud, come up with off the cuff recipes for tasty but unusual food combinations that would shock TV chefs, have a fantasy about a lost lottery ticket, complete one of the crucial conversations that  you never quite finished and write the prologue to a book about the vacuous and wasteful nature of modern conceptual art. You do these things in what seems like a few seconds but in actual fact is an entire lifetime; that's odd but it'd all fit on a Post-It note in Pittman Shorthand. Then before you know it you're back in West Lothian wondering about the life span of varieties of overgrown lettuce, the dirt damage done to rhubarb by incessant rain and the prospect of a warm but strangely cloudy weekend in the North East. As you do this you remember that there are eight slices of Pastrami in the fridge just waiting for you but the mustard is running low and you're not sure how fresh the bread is. You feel anxiety for a moment but it passes as the gamekeeper whistles to the young peasants somewhere in the distance and your mind goes blank again. It is at this precise point you realise that you can't quite remember the title of the Joni Mitchell song that is by now running backwards in your head but you rather like the rhythmic sound of the tumble dryer in the other room (the one we seldom mention) but you never did get yourself educated at Eton or Oxford despite that elaborate South Sea Bubble  related scam carried out in England and now you must get back and check on Twitter because...you never really know.

Heartbreaker stringbreaker

Tommy: Almost from a safe distance.

Too busy a weekend: Tommy Mackay at the Beehive in the Grassmarket, City of Edinburgh, his production of Oliver Pissed; funny, brilliant, quirky and full of random moments when guitar strings snap and stun the captive audience. Go see, he's on most days at 2100. Then lots of other weekender things I'm not talking about here.

Yesterday, as below, entertained by the CBQ man and his good lady, box set received also c/w grilled sea bass. Yum.

In other irrelevant news our house was magically struck by a combination of the Wrath of God and lightning at 1800 tonight, that ended the prospect of two hours of the Simpsons. So all the lights, TV, computers, cookers etc. stopped. God had spoken and we listened. We ate lukewarm pasta for tea and repented in sack cloth and white wine. The power came back on at 2115, now I'm checking emails. I do love a good power surge, spike and the unkindest cut of all.

Sometimes sound stops

Ali Graham Barclay

‎'Eastwind7''s tribute to CBQ's interpretation of 'On a Clear Day' ......

MTV on a clear day CLOUDLAND BLUE QUARTET.wmv

www.youtube.com

an MTV tribute to cloudland blue quartet's heart rending interpretation of the song ON A CLEAR DAY

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Mugs

We're into our custom mugs these days. The tea and coffee just taste the same however.

Cake and eat it

Even when you're old and cynical you still get affected by things despite all the inner conflict and conflicted denial you may feel. Most of our world here in the relatively stable and affluent west is good and deserves appreciation. It can't all be allowed to be polluted by the politicians, corporate dogs, kill-joys and those in the know in the media and the shadows. Kittens, puppies, sunny days, football victories and breath taking views all should be celebrated, music, light, life, babies and chocolate, music, nice motor cars and wine and feeling light headed and wonderfully happy for no particular reason. Enjoying the food or the TV you like without guilt or any necessary explanation, liking what you like, loving who you love. I'm actually enjoying bits of the Olympics, there's nothing at all wrong with seeing people do well and vicariously sharing in and feasting on that special moment that belongs to someone else but is on public display. Pity the BBC can't quite strike a balance in their coverage between hysteria and ordinary news reporting.

Those three graces

1. Thank you for the world so sweet, thank you for the food we eat, thank you for the birds that sing, thank you Lord for everything.

2. Some hae meet and canna eat, some wad eat that want it, but we hae meet and we can eat, so let he Lord be thankit.

3. God is great and God is good and we thank Him for this food, by God's hand we must be fed so thank you for our daily bread.

Ariston v Indesit

OMO = On my own.

I used to get excited about getting a new kitchen appliance, Rolls Razors, Hotpoint and Electrolux. Cheap tin and weak electric motors set in white concrete. Each one comes with a free packet of Daz or Tide and a set of wooden tongs with which to capture the hot, wet clothes. Oh and a booklet filled with cartoon housewife images, smiling and hanging out the washing wearing a swirling skirt in some suburban garden. The prose was hardly John Betjeman but it was instructive and by and large read by the consumer, who in those days could read. There were however no extended guarantees or warranty, just a useless certificate that the Co-op gave out that was rendered useless after any kind of actual use. Sure enough six months down the road a critical hose pipe or jubilee clip would fail and the elongated repair process would begin following a kitchen flood. A man in overalls came, sucked his teeth and pronounced the machine dead, or very near death. Terms like “a bad batch” and “Monday morning and Friday afternoon models” became familiar. It wasn’t just a broken washing machine, it was the death of British Industry.

So yesterday our faithful Ariston failed after seven years of near criminal abuse centred around the mysterious programme 4, whatever that was for. I visited Comet, home of the good deal and special offer, none of which were in stock so it was a gleaming Indesit (7kg capacity I was told by a bored assistant) available for delivery between 0700 and 1200 this very Sunday, an offer I could hardly resist at an extra £15. I fits our busy schedule, apart from the sleeping in on Sunday part.  

More holiday snaps

Thin, cliff edge trees. 

Dead centre of Ibiza. 

The sun sets somewhere in the East. 

Barcelona bike taxi waits for a fare.

Holiday snaps

Useless and unwanted headphones strewn across a bus stop roof in Barcelona.

Pan tiles and vines: Cote d' Azur.

Serious but dead fish: the fish market, Mahon, Minorca.

An image of a young Spanish god, rocks and sticks on a cliff in Ibiza.

Car parked in the shade, the Zen Gardens of Nowhere, Ibiza.

A spectral piece of Majorca viewed from the sea.

Barcelona residents protest about noisy diesel engines running amok at peak times.

The blue, blue sea, a distant Nice,  a beautiful day in the South of France.

What did you see and do on your holidays?

Some time in Terminal 5

Terminal 5 roof, detail.

Returning to the UK via Terminal 5 at Heathrow, not much evidence of the Olympic Spirit being spread around. Here in Brave New Britain nobody can be trusted, not even the British. As soon as you get off the plane you're checked and photographed, then your passport is checked, then you're searched again. OK, now you are allowed to trawl the leaden halls, mixing with fellow travellers crippled with the hostile razzmatazz, marketing  and muzac, shopping in glittering prisons and canteens, then waiting, anonymous in rows as your steel birds are prepared.

Once the flight is called you're photo is checked, then your papers and passport. If you pass you can fly, if you fail the machine stops and you are cast out...somewhere, perhaps they  put you on a bus. I asked a few of the BA operators, MITIE staff and Border Control folks why these extra checks were in force, nobody answered, nobody quite knows, they just do what they are told it seems, eyes like saucers. A glitch in the great system then halts our plane's boarding, nobody explains, they stand, we all stand, nobody says anything, we stay in line. When you ask why you get no answer, just a nod to move on. So why bother with new passports, their chips and codes and images, why bother with on-line checks and bar codes?  We think we are British and can prove it but Britain or BA or BAA, whoever they are, isn't so sure.

Thank you sir!

It's great when the shared wisdom of the internet is available to the common, perplexed and stressed man when he requires something inspirational to draw upon for his guidance in the ways of primitive arts and secrets. There is no god, no science, no law, nothing out there. In fact there is only...whatever you call it.

Arrested Development

Oops, poor lady, I hope it wasn't her first tattoo, you have to admire her for going public with this.

I lifted this (lazily) from the Daily Telegraph Pole and I'm no great fan of Starkey but I am a great fan of history and the occasional rare burst of common sense:

 There are two arguments in David Starkey’s new series The Churchills. The first is that for Winston Churchill it was the process of writingMarlborough: his Life and Times in the early Thirties, a million-word megalith about his great ancestor John Churchill, first Duke of Marlborough, that transformed Winston into the masterful statesman we know. Churchill, Starkey maintains, was immersing himself in a story which in so many ways would anticipate his own: Marlborough, in his wars against Louis XVI and then in the Wars of the Spanish Succession, was fighting a power, France, whose parallels with the growing Nazi Germany Churchill couldn’t fail to acknowledge.

“France was a profoundly militarised power which expressed itself not only by warfare and foreign expansion but also in terms of its aspirations as a hegemonic culture; and also massive internal persecution of a minority – the Huguenots. When you read Churchill’s account of this you think, ‘Is he talking about Louis XVI… or about Hitler?’”

That would be a perfectly juicy thesis, enough certainly to sustain a series. But Starkey is an intellectual unable to resist stirring the pot as much as a toddler in wellies can resist a placid puddle. And so to argument B: The Churchills is about more than just Winston and his 18th-century ancestor. “The series has a not very well concealed propagandistic role on the importance of history – and the catastrophe that no modern politician has this kind of background,” Starkey says.

His point is that it was Churchill’s absorption in history that made him great. And though he says that the timing of The Churchills is accidental, he sees worrying similarities between now and the Thirties.

“I think there is a real sense now that we genuinely don’t know where we are, or what we are or where we’re going. We’ve lost confidence in our leaders in exactly the same way as happened in the Thirties. There’s a sense of some huge indefinable threat which is both from abroad and within our societies.”

The problem, he says, is that our politicians lack the historical perspective to assess the situation and then act accordingly.

“Arguably since the Twenties, but certainly since the Second World War, we’ve tended to try to understand the world through the so-called social sciences. It seems to me, for example, that the 2008 crash was the moment at which we realised that we don’t actually understand economics any more than a bean counter. Mervyn [King] was my colleague at LSE and he’s a deeply nice man. He’s one of the world’s top two or three academic economists. And he has no idea what he’s doing.”

It isn’t just King, or economists in general, that Starkey feels have failed. “It seems to me the same is true with the management of our social policy, the health service… infinite academic resources have been devoted to the so-called social sciences. It’s obvious we have no understanding of how they work at all. I think the so-called social sciences frankly are mumbo jumbo. If you want to begin to understand the strangeness, the patterns – in so far as there are patterns – of human behaviour then there’s only one way of doing it. That’s by looking at what human beings have done before. And if you do it systematically it’s called history.”

The Great Scottish Summer

Actual Greggs steak bake and actual simulated coffee.

Baby Swifts in the coal cellar, either asleep or awake, I'm not sure.

Seen in Perthshire, nicely overgrown and possibly in the wrong place.

Today it rained so much a train derailed, the motorway closed, there were landslips and every second road was flooded. Journeys that normally took an hour took about an hour and fifteen minutes. The delay made me so hungry I ate a packet of crisps. It reminded me of the time I bit into a Gregg's steak bake and burned my tongue, at least I didn't bite my mouth, that's the worst self inflicted food related experience of all. Anyway the steak bake whilst baked doesn't really have much steak in it, it does contain bits of dead animal cooked up in a brown sauce however, yum. It's an iconic snack here in Scotia.


So after all the transport and traffic delays and strange dank, putrid water lying in pools across the roads and housing schemes I wished, for once, I wasn't here. Please tourists, explorers and aliens, don't bother coming to Scotland (stay in London and soak up the Olympics) everything is truly shite up here these days.

Perthshire Rambler

Every so often you come across a tree that has a chain wrapped around it's trunk. Why does this happen? I don't really know but that's just some of the Perthshire magic that you may or may not come across as you wander through the Perthshire wilderness. Go wild in the country if you will.

Banned by the Brand Police

Olympics organisers have warned businesses that during London 2012 their advertising should not include a list of banned words, including "gold", "silver" and "bronze", "summer", "sponsors" and "London". Publicans have been advised that blackboards advertising live TV coverage must not refer to beer brands or brewers without an Olympics deal, while caterers and restaurateurs have been told not to advertise dishes that could be construed as having an association with the event. At the 40 Olympics venues, 800 retailers have been banned from serving chips to avoid infringing fast-food rights secured by McDonald's.Watch out then all you small businesses, gangsters and ordinary people.

Sporting integrity

Here's a cat who looks like a cat (Syrus)  we lost about five long years ago. We were both pretty upset when Syrus disappeared and searched for him for months, years even. That's what cat people do. Ali spotted this fellow a few days ago and for a moment was...not sure. Today I saw him perched on a wall and looked him up and down and met his gaze. He's a nice, placid, well worn cat but he's not Syrus. You think that anyway and then you start thinking about the film Sommersby, mistaken identity, loss and almost exact replicas. No, it wasn't him.

So far 2012 has been the year of the phrase "sporting integrity". A fashionable term that's un-managed use has allowed footballing professionals, pundits and fans the opportunity to jump from scandalous quicksand to a moral high ground made of concrete - set up in their own mind's mixer. The trouble is the more you use the phrase the less it comes to mean and the more the concrete turns to quicksand. In life the truth is that you cant really trust anybody or be sure of very much...even cats are confusing these days.

Knitting the Olympics

Just back home from a week in the Perthshire hills feeding and having fun with a variety of my children and grandchildren. Some random photos may follow but right now I've just had a really good "good night's" sleep and a strong cup of lukewarm coffee. It's Sunday morning and I feel fine if a little sore in places.

In the wider world the Olympic Games in London remain difficult for the parochial and conflicted Scots to handle as the build up progresses, most of us just don't get it and dislike the corporate big boys, politicians and BBC running the whole show in a way that squeezes the joy and life completely out of it. Nice therefore to see this alternative knitted tribute...

Cabin fever

Regular rain, the unravelling of the great Scottish summer, TV on the Fritz, maybe too much chocolate or bacon, excess amounts of corn syrup, lack of sleep or space or whatever. These things spawn strange pastimes, generate new skills, boundary stretching artworks and explorations around the edge of all gravity and ability.

Abandoned petrol station

There are plenty of used up, closed down petrol stations here and there but this one is a pretty good example of a business that's just died as a result of enforced road changes and neglect. Nobody it seems has tried to convert it to a car wash or Chinese restaurant either so it's slowly rusting back into the weeds and damp landscape. It's just by the old A9 in Calvine, a few lonely miles north of Blair Atholl, Perthshire, Scotland. The rerouted (and always controversial) A9 runs past only a few yards away, close but not close enough.

Public service assistance

If your for sale sign becomes dangerously squint then there are people driving around who will quietly and carefully fix it for you by applying the universal rule of three. That means: First we spot the problem. Second we give you an unspecified but reasonable amount of time to fix it. Thirdly, we note you've done hee-haw, you're ambivalent towards stuff, maybe lazy or stupid so we intervene. We cannot tolerate a maladjusted and crooked universe,  we must fix things, it's what we do. Next on the hit list: RBS, Barclays, the Conservative Party, the music industry and Syria.