Notable users of the ES-335 or one of its variations include Chuck Berry, B B King, Alvin Lee, Eric Clapton, Richie Blackmore, Larry Carlton, Freddy King, Dave Grohl and Alex Lifeson. Yakety Yak, Yakety Yak, don't talk back. Blah, blah, blah.
A picture once hung on the wall,
But then it wasn’t there at all.
A dirty mark and a pin hole show,
Where that stupid picture didn’t used to go.
Date Collection: The slow hobby of date collection and consumption is moving on at a pace that might be said to be comfortably slow. The dates of the date palm are harvested by experts and then stuffed by beginners. It can best be described as being a process. We use both exotic and mundane fillings. Examples might be and are not limited to: Diced grapefruit and brown sugar, crushed cumquat, slivers of anchovies in oil and sardine paste, coriander and mushroom, Malteser and sweet pickle, shortbread (crushed) with clotted cream and brandy, scrambled egg and peanut butter and of course finely chopped Mars Bar.
Doctored dates are popular in
Catholic and Islamic countries across the world thanks to various works of Biblical
fraud. In an apocryphal story Jesus turned a pile of donkey dung into sweet
dates flavoured with cinnamon and the honey from wild (or fairly upset as I
understand) bees and distributed them amongst the poor and the Roman colonists
in order to illustrate some now lost teaching points via a forgotten parable. Hence
“The Miracle of the Lost Parable”, a new film due out in December 2024 on
Netflix starring literally a cast of thousands of CGI peasants and funded by
the Date Marketing Board of Canada. Expect a sharp uptake in date demand that
party season.
Dates are a fruit. Did I say date and mean data or did I say data and mean date?
Velux Window
Collection* and Exhibition: We’ve been secretly accumulating these roof windows and hiding them
in the house in various cupboards, box rooms, secret passages and at times in
plain sight. It’s such fun to confuse house guests and unwelcome visitors with
the pitter patter of rain or the scrape of a low hanging tree branch on a
discretely placed Velux frame high up in the darkness of an unlit bedroom.
They can also be
a useful source of extra ventilation in a confined space, simply follow the
manufacturer’s instructions and the installer’s advice.
We also collect long and sharp, pointy knives and there’s an axe under the bed**.
*Frames without names.
**The long, fingery tendrils of mean spirit tree branches may decide to interfere with your sleep pattern in ways that could be unpleasant or even dangerous. They do this by accessing your space via the Velux window. It comes from their deep and understandable dislike of humankind.
Fuel Duty: They came down from the hills. Red diesel in the tanks of their Landrovers and quad bikes. Roads were built for softies. The secret paths, glens and gradients were all theirs. They had tamed the wilderness with the whip of the 4 x 4. The dogs loved it all, riding shotgun as the heather parted before them. The sheep were less sure but queued up for turnips and the deer stayed away. That's what deer tend to do.
As for people, they know their place in the organic machine, crammed in a car park before pottering into the wild purple yonder on their bikes or in their new boots. The latest water bottles from Tisos on display, dangling from backpacks. Soon the sky will be slipping into the colour of the diesel as the sun sinks into the western sky.
In the countryside water is a vital resource, just getting it into the ground and into animals can be a challenge.
Not all holiday homes make the cut, some are just too basic and rustic for the wide eyed townies. The landscape is scattered with the wreckage of a failed colonial economic theory.
Lost in our own country, shadows on a strange hillside, scouring the landscape for clues. The traces of what might have gone before disguised with lichen, moss and heather. A motorway of rabbit paths.
Old stones and broken timbers. Now banished and crushed by nature's persistence, treasonous history and it's repeated excuses. The landowners thought they knew best and the locals were no better than cattle to them. Their portraits still hang in their empty halls. They died in their arrogance without issue or remorse and still their influence drips down like a dirty oil spill on the land. This peculiar economy is their legacy.
The truth is always troublesome, bothering the soul and tarnishing the dream. It was a nice day to be up there anyway and the deer on the hills were in fine form. Could do with a few weeks of rain though.
Aga cookers get
hot very gradually. There’s no hurrying an Aga. They are the plodding dinosaurs
of the cookery universe. Jurassic and basic. Functional in an unhurried world
of their own. But you can still burn the food if not careful. That’s plenty pent up and uncontrollable heat for you.
I am the Master
of the Aga. Bow down. I can shuffle the pots. It’s a form of dance fused with
the management of sources of intense heat and burning metal. You could lose your fingerprints or fingertips. It’s
very dangerous but when it works out for you it’s satisfying in an abstract and ancient way. However the naan bread that became a biscuit was less successful.
As children we burned many books and things, mostly sausages and some books, some Ladybird books. Currently I am burning logs. Logs harvested by the great wind of the winter of 2022 that flattened Edzell Woods and many others. Now we burn their tree bones. There’s nothing else to do with the piles of timber debris. I don’t know what environmentalists might make of this action. When nature fights back the rules change and the logs are harvested.
If you see the internet as a great cloud that covers the land then you’ve obviously never visited the backyard, backwards arse of the beautiful back of beyond. We were there and there was no waves to speak of other than stray blips of digital distortion that refuse to be gathered together into a pattern of credible pixels. Cloudy blips of inconsequence that flew overhead and for a short while promoted baseless optimism then for a longer while some stiff resignation, acceptance and gallows humour. The crawling of the Twitter Bots, the Facebook Posts, the refreshed screens, those reflected creations of repeated opinions, swirling in the mind’s eye of an invisible force that asks no questions but always asks questions.
We just communicate badly because we quickly forget everything we ever said. We outsourced the memories to a memory bank that’s in crisis but doesn’t know it so reality is no longer recognized as a thing. How did it happen? More badly presented history perhaps. How did they (?) amuse themselves back in the day when alcohol, sex between consenting adults, sex with horses (??) and imagination was banned by the all seeing, bespeckled eye of the Kirk? Now we can see everything but understand nothing. I no longer feel at home on your cloud. Nothing good will come of this digital withdrawal. Well maybe not. We all need a break sometimes.