Stopping the rot

Like the saturated timbers of the Mary Rose or the Great Pyramid keys structural parts of old buildings need cleaning and preservation regimes in place to keep them from turning really tatty. I've been doing a bit of that, just to beat the tat. Clear and unambiguous instructions are important and it's even more important that you follow them and don't drop the tin or drink the liquid. Butterfingers. Open the Ronseal carefully, apply with care, step back with care, avoid damp or excessive moisture with care, let it dry with care, watch it with care, clean the brush with care, store any remaining product with care, once dry apply a second coat with care (6 hours drying time). Live carefully. Don't touch wet paint with or brush against it without care. Don't thoughtlessly step into any older building that may be suffering from rot. It's risky. You may go through the floor or the ceiling might collapse on you and that would never do. 

Solar Art

As well as providing life and light to those of us currently spinning happily if a little confused on this marbled bowling ball the sun also likes to indulge in little pieces of impromptu art now and again, just for the fun of it. Here's a couple of pieces the sun shared with me recently. Just a matter of waiting for those pesky clouds to clear and the business of self expression can begin. All in all it's just another reason to love the sun. You may indeed worship it if you feel so inclined, I'm not taking things that far. The sun is of course not to be confused with the detestable rag top red top newspaper that criminally chose to steal it's name.

Shameless self promotion

Innocently trying out tools and stuff:

End of Autumn

How autumn took it's glowing and wonderful toll on the trees and leaves. Sun and stillness break up the shapes as the failing leaves wave goodbye, departing for the year while the spring seeds sleep deeply and untroubled before the coming winter.

I had a garden centre type lunch with Tommy Mackay who, little did I realise, was about to record this despite an awkward wrist injury:

1. Tommy Mackay ‏@TommyReckless  2h2 hours ago

   @Johnbarclay1 quickly did this just after you left.

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2. Alsatian Strangulation
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4. John Barclay ‏@Johnbarclay1  9m9 minutes ago

   @TommyReckless wonderful, must've been something in the soup, great guitar work by the way #brokenwrist

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5. Tommy Mackay ‏@TommyReckless  6m6 minutes ago

   @Johnbarclay1 stookie slide guitar #wristgate

   0 replies0 retweets1 like

Does Tusk suck?

Standing or at least remaining seated and not falling asleep or picking your nose in the presence of giants: I am now in the slow process of travelling back in time 37 years to the release of Tusk by Fleetwood Mac. At the time some said it was pish, no Rumours etc. Some said it was cool and experimental, others said too long, too thin on content. I didn't say anything, I was renovating a cottage and experiencing fatherhood for the first time, life was not straightforward and I was happy enough listening to a battered copy cassette of Rumours anyway. Music like that was on the back burner, I had other stuff to do. Time has passed so I'm now catching up on 1979's outstanding business via digital remastering, truly I don't know why but I sense a gap needs filling somehow (I'm also working through a cavernous Steely Dan gap via blurry YouTube renditions). It seems that there are many ways to make peace with the world but fewer ways to make peace with yourself without baffling revisitation and foggy exploration. 

Blue Moon

Once upon  time there was a blue moon. People everywhere looked up and stared, they could not believe that their piece of sky had been visited by a moon so blue, but there it was, clear for everyone to see. A strange, beautiful omen in the night sky which  they watched, wondered at, stared at and talked about it for hours and hours. 

So time passed and the moon shone down steadily through the night time and twilight hours on them and they just carried on with their own business peacefully. Some would be asleep whilst others worked and some, unsure as to how they should be just dreamed moonlit dreams neither fully awake nor deeply asleep. I'm not completely certain but I believe that many of them went on, simply and carefully, to live happily ever after. 

I'm no expert either but I think that it could all be down to the effect of living under the blue moon. Perhaps it's all just another fairy tale but you'll have to check that out for yourself.

Extra Hour

No I don't understand what this means either but I put it together and I like it.

View from the non-office this morning; seems time has moved backwards for me and everyone else as I slept. Very useful and quite convenient. For no clear reason, other than it was in my mind to do so I decided to have a quick listen to Grievous Angel by Gram Parsons, such was my befuddled state of consciousness. So that's pretty much how I spent my extra self indulgent hour, well doing that, drinking tea and freshening up in the shower.

The cruel devil robbing our imaginations

Some clever artist somewhere has been able to turn the cartoon Cruella Deville into  a real (?) person without using an actress. Strange thought really, turning cartoons into real people, presumably it's been well explored elsewhere but it strikes me as a kind of Halloween horror scenario. Loose cartoons running around the world like in Roger Rabbit. When I was a kid I was fascinated by the cartoon Cruella; her rich bitch, slutty look and her evil intentions. I also liked her demonic car. Of course it makes no sense now but who cares, she was only every visible to me via one rare trip to the cinema and the odd appearance on Disney Time. All this material was carefully rationed by the corporations back then, before the days of piracy and constant feeds and streaming. Funny how the lack of content and the image starvation I felt only added to the intensity of the experience. The images were sharper and more imagined, now in the deconstructed present day all the mystery and proper magic  is gone and only cynical exploitation and exhausted, digitised messages remain. Our imaginations fail to get the exercise they need if it's all put on a plate in front of you.

P.S. I must stop spelling prostate as prostrate or prostitute or whatever it is I'm doing wrong.

At least a year

Me: It's confirmed that I'm at least a year behind the times, this lady from Aberdeen, Kathryn Joseph won Scottish Album of the year 2015 and I've only just heard of her thanks to a few minutes trawling around the BBC iPlayer. I sometimes wonder how much of anything I take in or absorb. She's a strangely talented and striking lady, 40+ and enjoying some commercial success and all that goes with it, now a little later in life. Her music is a bit dark and heavily piano driven and in my view a bit intense and disturbing (doesn't make it bad). So not for her the normal route to stardom. She has a strong back story, is a mum, waiting 17 years, being a barmaid in Aberdeen's Lemon Tree and something of a reluctant performer but it's all changed now for her. Website etc. here.

Favourite Tweet

Whilst I quite enjoy using Twitter, though mostly reading the tweets of others, seldom sending my own, I rather liked the one I sent the other day.

John Barclay ‏@Johnbarclay1  35m35 minutes ago

@Support #Twitter! Stop telling me I've been away when I've been here all the time! #FFS

You see Twitter keeps repeating tweets and tells me that all this stuff happened "while I was away". Well I wasn't away, I just wasn't giving 100% of my attention to Twitter like I'm supposed to, so that's not how I see my relationship with it. Neither do I care if I may have missed something from yesterday but still I find my feed full of regurgitated tweets that in all probability I've already seen because (shock, horror) Twitter doesn't really know what's going on anyway. It just assumes things because of bloody algorithms, settings or IP addresses or the like. Of course there will be no reply or acknowledgement, robots don't care.

In other news I actually finished this guitar after a long struggle and lot of bad soldering, unnecessary fiddling and the switching of switches. So that'll be the end of this series of tedious photographs.

It was all going so well

Pyro'd, polished and the shielding paint applied. 

Pickups, bridge and scratch plate, just a few odd wires to tie together, so I thought.

I actually thought that I'd finish this guitar today, it was going well. Then I hit a wall soldering together the electrical components, probably the simplest part of the job. It seems that there is some gremlin in the pots or switch or inside my head that is well and truly catching me out at every turn. Soldering, then unsoldering, replacing components and fiddling with a variety of wires (there are about eight altogether, how many combinations can I get wrong?) has got me exactly nowhere in particular. So I quit. Another day, a decent sleep and  the world and this project may seem more logical and cooperative. Basically it's a matter of trolling around the internet for help and trying to decode the various non standard wiring colours that I seem to be confronted with.

Headstock shot

Curiously sunny weather allowed me to get out, generate some sawdust  and hack at a few pieces of wood on the B&D workbench, that's guitar building. Best done outside to minimise mess and keep me clean and breathing. First time out also for the Dremel routing bits I purchased in the USA during the summer. They really worked well, I also sculpted a pick guard and a pickup holder and corrected one or two pyrography mistakes made along the way. The photo above shows another take on the Viking raven design (the bird that took messages between the gods) that I've added onto the headstock. Still a lot to do but getting closer to some kind of finish.

Cats, guitars and mystery fruit

AM: So just embarking on a project that sees a Creamery hand wound single coil pickup mated with a Bare-knuckle humbucker in a Telecaster body. This guitar may well be the ultimate of noisy, raw power ultimates (or a complete fizzled out flop). At this point it goes under the working title of "Raven". That is because I'm currently drawing a Viking style raven on it. Somehow the dragons don't get a name check.

Cat guards windfall mystery fruit.

We suspect that they are quinces but we're not quite sure. A bit of a naming crisis really. No idea quite what to do with them either.

PM - OK: about 33% through the first stage of pyrography so lots to do, a bit of carving and wood butchery, then routing (for that non-standard pickup), then sanding, then oils and on and on. Oh and maybe a bit of border burning with the heat gun.

Zen and the tube

When you have temporary drainage tube burrowed inside your tummy it's a) hard to ignore and b) hard not to be intrigued by it and it's mechanics. The human body is strange, disgusting and wonderful and I'm currently appreciating those facts. My tube has now been in place for two weeks, like some now familiar alien parasite poking through my stomach and somehow now, neatly fitting into my slightly stilted lifestyle. The inconvenience and occasional discomfort has normalised as has the creeping, restricted movement and the slow and steady pace at which I try to do things. Stumbling or bumping into things or animals and small children jumping on the tummy are glaring moments of immediate danger that spark mild panic and clumsy body language reactions. But I am learning to cope and remain relaxed (?) and adopting some Zen-like processes of patience  in my concerns over my place in the great NHS queue that I find myself invisibly in. One day the buff or possibly white envelope will arrive and the great creaking gears of hope and recovery will grind slowly into motion. In the mean time I just drink more cranberry juice and sleep all night unless the cats start a fight, nothing to complain about really.

Subliminal Messages

Due the high volume of sales calls that I'm not experiencing I've decided to faff around with various half-baked ideas, post them here using Blogger's reasonably resilient upload method and then stick them elsewhere on the web for future use. Generations of the yet to be born will thank me in due course. I therefore apologise for the complete lack of meaningful content contained in this post (even worse than usual) but it's all a means to an end.

Reverse golden dawn

So, here's yesterday's golden pre-sundown spectacular glowing onto the nearby trees. Doesn't happen every day or even every week but when it does happen then it really happens and it was only me who saw and captured it as far as I can tell.

Attack of the robots

One of those days when the blog gets 795 hits in a very short period of time, I presume this amounts to some kind of bot attack from Soviet Russia (if it's still around) or some stray Play Station with stuck button. So far no damage done or actual interest shown. It could actually be a sort of attack of indifference, the kind of thing that hurts at a more emotional than physical level, lots of stats and numbers to buoy you up but no actual human interest or comment. You stroll away from the battle field feeling empty but still able to whistle a marching anthem, glazed over eyes and mind numb without the pleasure of having won anything. That's the wonderful randomness of the internet, like walking around blindfolded in a darkened room and just bumping into things that you can't possibly recognise and making no sound. 

Back on the Etsy trail  I've been trying format a better (?) image for the shop. As usual my lack of wherewithall lets be down, turns out that PicMonkey, though entertaining enough isn't quite flexible enough to deliver.

In a garden of mushrooms

Today's been a nice day, up at the crack of sometime and headed out in the calm and almost warm weather to Loch Leven for an LLL breakfast, taken at a leisurely, even elderly pace (it was my birthday yesterday). A brief, educational tour of Fife followed and then home where I found these chaps popping up through the grass.  Quite neat little 'scrooms, perfectly formed, damp and...well I'm not sure what they are really useful for. Maybe the squirrels or sparrows will eat them in due course or perhaps I'll absentmindedly step on them and that will be that. 

Not too difficult

Birthday: It's that time of year when you're a whole year older and I guess you reflect on things etc. etc. Well I probably will in good time but actually I've been busy (waiting on things to upload mostly) sticking stuff into my glorious new shop that has popped up here on Etsy, here's the link.  Of course Etsy is much more classy than eBay, a bit like comparing John Lewis to a car boot sale so I'm pleased to be there at last. Having said that if Etsy fails me then it's a slow descent into oblivion.

Etsy and me

So despite my various infirmities and having had baked potato and beans for lunch, a late lunch that is, I decided to get on with the Etsy project. This has remained on the back burner for a number of months but now that my stockpile of modified guitars is increasing to a silly size I need to get the shop open. Of course until you do it (open the shop) you don't really understand the work involved. So it was all about taking lots of photographs (as above, logs seem to make a good background), trying to edit them and then, along with scripts, descriptions and prices get them all uploaded on Etsy. Nothing really difficult here, just time consuming but hopefully it will all be worthwhile when the customers come rolling along.