Has the Government Bitten off More than It Can Chew?

~ Sarada Gray ~ 3 Comments

I did go for a bike ride on Tuesday and it was great – cold but exhilarating. I only went about 20 miles but it made me feel alive again.

Yoga went well yesterday; the students were amused by my hoodie; they all came back and most of them have paid for the term, so that’s very encouraging.

I think I do want to try fasting again; I think it’s a matter of getting used to it. A few years back I couldn’t have gone all day on just fruit and yogurt; now I do it regularly. It’s bound to be a shock to the system the first time you do something like that but it was beneficial in the end – I feel totally cleared out. I think next time I might do what OH does which is to fast lunchtime to lunchtime; I think that’s much more doable. But whatever I achieve in that line is nothing compared to those who fast for Ramadan – and less than nothing compared to those on hunger strike for Palestine. And thank god, today they have all – bar one who is not in imminent danger – ended their fast, in response to the government not awarding a contract to Elbit systems. It’s been a game of brinkmanship, the government prepared to go right to the wire, but in the end they presumably didn’t want these young lives on their hands and so made concessions. I’m mightily relieved; I’m also completely in awe of people who can undertake such a commitment and carry it through; at their age I was struggling to give up smoking and could no more have gone on hunger strike than flown to the moon.

Elbit systems describes itself as delivering ‘cutting-edge defense technology and multi-domain solutions for global security across air, land, sea, cyber, and space.’ They don’t mention war or killing; in fact you’d have to read between the lines almost to figure out that they sell weapons. I’ve been watching Wolf Hall again, and there’s a scene where Cromwell comes across a whip like a cat-o-nine-tails but with thorns tied to each strand. ‘Who makes these things?’ he asks in horror. And I heard recently of a type of weapon * which when falling mimics the screams of women and children so as to entice men to run towards it and so get blown up – and I ask exactly the same question. Who makes these things? Who even comes up with an idea like that? What sort of mentality does it take to work in such an industry? I can’t imagine it. Yet these people get away with doing it while protesters who disable their weapons are called terrorists. *I can’t swear to it that Elbit makes these but they make some pretty horrendous things.

I’m struggling to focus today as there are only two days till the wedding and I don’t want to forget anything vital. I have lists and reminders and there is really nothing to worry about – but that doesn’t stop my brain. You’d think that if I keep busy I wouldn’t have time to worry but my brain is equal to that one – it just creates separate chambers of worry in the mind and expands its anxiety capacity. The only solution is non-attachment and calm, so I’m off to practise some of that. I shan’t be posting tomorrow but will be back on Monday with photos and a blow-by-blow account of the wedding.

Kirk out

Of Fasting and Camels

~ Sarada Gray ~ 1 Comment

I’ve come to the conclusion that fasting doesn’t agree with me. For a short period it’s fine but any longer and I start to feel ill. I daresay this means I just haven’t had enough practice, but last night I felt shivery and when I woke I couldn’t sleep with all sorts of unidentifiable anxieties going round like washing in a tumble-drier and keeping me awake for hours. And even when I did sleep I had a nightmare… still I guess it might all be part of the elimination process – just so long as it doesn’t eliminate me in the process.

It’s back to yoga this morning and a reasonable number of people have signed up, so that’s all good. I have a sweat shirt now which says ‘I’m only here for the savasana’ (relaxation) so that should lighten the mood a little. I always like to lighten the mood especially with beginners since lots of them have had scary experiences with yoga in the past (when I started with Sivananda the classes began with six rounds of sun salutations which I found so strenuous that I nearly gave up; even to this day I have a mental block about surya namaskar.) Only being there for the savasana exactly summed up my attitude as a beginner too. So today we’re going to do a slightly easier version of the camel, a kneeling backward bend. This is really beneficial for opening the chest and shoulders and for flexibility in the back. I expect they’ll find it murderous, lol.

image removed on request

I struggle to do the full posture nowadays but that won’t matter because once I demonstrate a pose they all want to do it so I just show them the easier version.

Only four days till the wedding!

Kirk out

Eliminate!

~ Sarada Gray ~ 3 Comments

It’s a time of elimination for me. My body is throwing things out (you don’t need to know the details) so I’m doing a fruit and yoghurt fast today; this usually works quite well to clear out the system and then I can start again. I’d like to be able to fast from food altogether but I still find that very difficult; it’s always easier for me to take something up than to abstain from it. Besides which, meals puncuate the day and if you work from home you need these markers to break up the time.

The wedding preparations are almost complete; Holly says there’s nothing else to do their end and we all have our outfits sorted our end. The speech is coming together but still not flowing or sounding natural so I’ll need to practise. I’m hoping when we get there I can get hold of an iron because after the journey my dress is going to be somewhat creased.

I’m going for a bike ride shortly as we finally have a day which is neither icy nor teeming with rain. I know some people ride in the ice and snow but that’s not me: apart from the cold there’s the very real danger of slipping and falling and the last thing I want to do is spend time lying down in the snow waiting for help to come. But it’s quite depressing being confined to barracks by bad weather especially when the bike is standing outside glaring at you reproachfully… I’ll just have a short ride; normally in the cold I go somewhere I can get a cup of tea and warm up but I think I’ll just keep it local today.

I could write a whole post about the tea shops of Dumfries and Galloway – in fact maybe someone has. Maybe someone’s written a whole book about them. The traditional tea shop flourishes up here because there are far fewer chains. I daresay there are loads in Glasgow and Edinburgh; places where you can pay upwards of a fiver for a latte and nearly a tenner if you add a muffin – but here in D&G you hardly see any at all. There’s the odd Costa, mostly in out of town shopping areas, but I don’t recall seeing a Starbucks or anything else. So that’s refreshing – in fact chains in general are far less prevalent than elsewhere. A case in point: our daughter gave us a voucher for a meal out but although it’s accepted by a number of chains, there are none in Dumfries so we’ll have to wait until we go to Carlisle or Glasgow.

I’m off now to do a spot more elimination. Forget laxatives – fruit and yoghurt do the trick just as well.

Kirk out

Here’s a run-down of the best tea shops in D&G; I’ve been to four or five on this list.

Another Weekend Gone

~ Sarada Gray ~ 4 Comments

Another weekend has gone by without a bike ride; on Saturday it was still to icy and on Sunday too cold and wet. Today is not much better; there’s supposed to be a little window in the persistent rain but in any case I don’t think I’ll go today as I had a really crappy night and it’s not good to ride tired, especially in the cold and wet.

We watched a horribly fascinating programme last night about catfishing in Kilmarnock. Not that Kilmarnock is particularly a centre for catfishing, just that most of the activity was centred there, which makes it unusual as in the main the perpetrators are thousands of miles away in some basement in India or the Phillipines. ‘David’ appeared to be a good-looking man (if you like that sort of thing; lantern-jawed and six-packed) in his early thirties, a doctor with a lovely house and car; just the sort of guy you might go for if you weren’t me. And lots of women did; they chatted online and on the phone but when ‘David’ consistently found reasons not to meet in real life they grew suspicious. Enter ‘David’s cousin, a woman called Adele, who comes along to a meet to reassure them that David is definitely real and a good guy and has just been unavoidably called away at the last minute. Some give him the benefit of the doubt; some cut him off, whereupon he turns abusive. One woman goes to the police but they say he hasn’t committed an offence so there’s nothing they can do. It gets curiouser: one woman watches ‘David’ deliver flowers to her mother’s house and sees that he is not driving a BMW as he claims but a Corsa. Eventually she turns the tables on David and stalks him at work; when they agree a meeting she phones him and sees a figure answering the phone. But it’s not David. It’s not even a man. It’s a woman. It’s Adele, who pretended to be David’s friend and who delivered the flowers claiming to be a florist. What the -? How -? She was a staff nurse in the hospital and had gone to extraordinary lengths to perpetuate this deception including using a voice modulator so none of her victims ever suspected she wasn’t a man. She spent so much time phoning and stalking people I wondered how she found time to go to work. She was eventually suspended by the hospital pending an investigation and one of the women – who by now had formed a support group – went to the press with the story. In the end there was enough evidence for her to be arrested and charged and she went to prison. But it’s not over – after coming out of prison and being bound over, she started catfishing again almost immediately, this time in Dalkeith. She was arrested and imprisoned no fewer than three times but after the third time she did finally try to address the causes of her offending. So there is hope.

But that’s the most bizarre case I’ve heard of; there was no attempt to extort money from any of her victims which is the usual way with romance fraud, so it’s a mystery why she did it. Was she a closet lesbian who got her kicks from targetting straight women? Did she secretly want to be a man? Mostly these things are about power and control so it was probably that. Anyway, I hope she gains some understanding and is able to stop reoffending.

Casualty was back on Saturday and we enjoyed that, though we’re not sure what direction it’s taking this time. Wot, no multiple-car pile-ups? No exploding fuel tankers teetering on the edge of bridges? No Ian charging to the rescue even though he’s been told to wait? No, just a couple of new junior doctors, one of whom is overconfident and beloved by his supervisor Flynn and the other of whom, though perfectly competent, is seriously lacking in confidence. She’s drawn the short straw and got Stevie as her supervisor but give me Stevie over Flynn any day. She’s rough, but like Dylan you know where you are. And there’s a new episode of The Night Manager, so I’m looking forward to that.

Which makes it seem as if I’ve just been sat on my arse all weekend in front of the telly, which I haven’t – but it’s hard to get out and about when the weather’s so bad. We went to the Palestine vigil on Saturday and had coffee with friends afterwards, and to Meeting on Sunday. I much prefer weekends when we can get out and about. But warmer days are coming…. eventually… so they say…

Kirk out

Why Do You Whisper, Whispering Bob?

~ Sarada Gray ~ 3 Comments

This time last year it was -4 degrees outside and we were huddled indoors with the front door perpetually open, tearing at boxes and periodically saying ‘kitchen,’ ‘garage’, ‘main bedroom,’ as the guys came in and making the poor frozen sods regular cups of tea. There was only one hitch, when the single bed wouldn’t go upstairs (we got rid of it in the end) but everything else went seamlessly and when the guys eventually left at around 3 pm we had most of the kitchen sorted and the bed put together upstairs. Last night we had a pizza and some cava to celebrate and thought about our highlights of the year. There’s so much to choose from it’s hard to say what they are, but motorbiking, swimming and wild camping are definitely some of mine. We’ve made friends and met some good people and feel very at home here. So that’s all good.

I’ve been wondering whether we are living in a post-satirical age. Not only because some aspects of politics are beyond satire but also because people generally appropriate satirical names they are given (Mr T excluded; I can’t see him renaming Truth Social as The Orange Blob). But take Bob Harris, for example, whose handle is now ‘Whispering Bob’ and who most likely calls his old show The Old Grey String Vest as the rest of us did at the time. I like Bob Harris; he’s easily parodied but takes it all in good part and I always try to listen to his Sounds of the Seventies on Sunday afternoons. He’s self-deprecating, lacking in ego and very knowledgeable about his subject besides also knowing a frightening number of people in the music biz. I only listen to radio 2 music-wise so I may be missing out, but as far as I can see nowadays there are very few maverick or individual DJs in the mould of John Peel or Kenny Everett (the latter was frequently sacked by the BBC for refusing to toe the line and ended up on Capital Radio – the London station, not the current model – where I listened to him avidly. John Peel got away with what he did because he was considered niche and a bit of a geek, but Everett was flamboyant and rebellious and I loved him. And while we’re on the subject let’s give a massive thumbs-down to Sue Lawley (odious woman) who outed him on Desert Island Discs as having AIDS. Or so I thought – but apparently the media has outed him first as they saw him come out of a clinic. But seemingly with no inkling that this might be a sensitive subject, she led with it and went on an on when she could have left it to him whether to talk about it. Odious woman – and patronising to boot. But it’s lovely to listen to him again (the subject is right at the top of the programme. She didn’t even allow him to draw breath.) Like Paxman on University Challenge, Sue Lawley is not missed; Kirsty Young is soooo much better. Mind you it has to be remembered that Everett did do a stint at the Tory Party Conference where he joked about kicking Michael Foot’s stick away. Not his finest hour.

Kirk out

Wedding, Wedding, Wedding

~ Sarada Gray ~ 7 Comments

I can’t think of anything but our daughter’s wedding at the moment. I don’t have anything to do with the planning – and they’re getting a package so the organisers will deal with the details – but I can’t settle to anything else right now. There’s nothing for me to do but make sure the car is in working order and get my outfit together; I got some shoes from ebay the other day which fit perfectly, go well with everything and are extremely comfortable to boot (no pun intended) so one day I shall try on the whole ensemble and make sure there are no problems with it, then all we have to do is get ourselves to the venue. I was a little worried about this as the weather is somewhat dicey at the moment and we either have to negotiate the M6 or else the dreaded A66 across the Pennines – but thankfully next weekend it’s looking to be wet and somewhat milder; not great for the photos but at least we should get there without any problems.

One wedding is said to bring on another – or at least, memories of another – and I find myself reminiscing about our wedding, or welding as we called it. It was a very simple affair and as I’ve blogged about it before I won’t bore you with the details but you can read about it here. And here, if you’re really a glutton for punishment, is an account of our 25th anniversary.

But since I can’t spend the next two weeks in a conjugal haze, I must think about something else. So let’s go back to Rebus. Jon mentioned last year’s adaptation and I checked it out and discovered that I’d already watched a couple. I tried it again but had the same problem as before, which is that adaptations don’t really do it for me. I need to read the books. Yesterday I read one of the theses I mentioned on Rebus and post-industrial Scotland and it had some interesting points to make about Rebus’s character paralleling Scotland in the post-Thatcher era. Scotland (and possibly Wales and Northern Ireland too) suffered more than England from the ruthless monetarism Thatcher foisted on the country; a lot of attention has been paid to the industrial heartlands of the north and rightly so, but Scotland was basically thrown to the wolves. The thesis focuses on the state of the country since then, how this has fuelled the independence movement, and how DI Rebus’s character exemplifies the lack of direction of the ‘heroic artisan’ ie the working class male with marketable skills, now forced to reinvent himself as ‘marketing man’ or ‘Westminster man.’ It was an interesting read, if a little repetitive towards the end. And now I’ve lost the link but I think I’ve given you enough links to be going on with so I’ll stop.

Short post today because I’ve lost my mind. Wedding in nine days!!!!!!

Kirk out

Rebus, Rebus, Rebus

~ Sarada Gray ~ 7 Comments

I’ve been re-reading some of the Rebus books over the holiday and I’m keeping it up; having a book stand makes it a whole lot easier. I’m not sure how many more Rebus books Rankin can squeeze out, if any; there are at least eight since Exit Music – the one where Rebus officially retires – and with each one he worms his way into cases by dint of serendipity, subterfuge or sheer bloody-mindedness; all of which is totally in character for a detective who might be dead but just won’t lie down and let himself be buried. The most recent one, Midnight and Blue, sees Rebus in prison for the murder of his arch-enemy Cafferty (is he guilty? Like everything else about him it’s a grey area) but 2025 might be the first year in decades that hasn’t seen a new Rebus novel; normally they come out in time for Christmas and I buy them as soon as they appear. Rebus is an endlessly fascinating character and half the time we’re never quite sure if he’s on the side of the angels. He usually is, but not always…

Rankin is phenomenally successful but I guess had he been American he would have come under a lot more pressure to Hollywoodise (or Netflix-ise) the character. But it’s impossible to imagine Rebus outside Edinburgh. He might make the odd foray to Glasgow or Aberdeen and even to London (Tooth and Nail) but in the main Rebus stays in Edinburgh and the world comes to Rebus.

I don’t want to attempt a review of any of the novels, much less a critique of Rebus’s character – others have done that more thoroughly than I could; in fact at least one person has written a thesis on him. Rankin’s no slouch academically either; though Rebus himself is not highly educated, when Rankin wrote Knots and Crosses he thought he was writing a clever post-modern puzzle and discovered that instead he’d written a crime novel. Fortunately he stuck with that genre else I’d never have read him; I can’t stand post-modernism.

I started reading Rankin for one reason only: to teach myself about plot. In the dark days of the nineties when I was writing odd scraps in stolen moments, I lamented the fact that I could write description and dialogue but that anything resembling plot simply eluded me. I felt as if this were a special skill only certain people were born with and which I could never acquire; however it was clear to me that my writing would never move on unless I did acquire it. And everyone was talking about Rankin, so I went to him. I can’t remember the first book I read but I was completely hooked, even if it did take me two or three goes to understand all the ins and outs of the plot. Then I read them all, from Knots and Crosses to whatever the latest one was, and set about acquiring each new volume as it emerged. Fortunately we had a good library in Leicester so I didn’t have to buy them.

Did it teach me about plot? I’m sure it did, though not in a way I could put on a bar chart. It just seeped in; the knowledge that there were ways of writing about events without being dull or repetitive; ways which added to the interest of the narrative and were in keeping with a highly skilled writing style. But first you have to create the events; and in this respect I think my process is probably quite different from Rankin’s. He reportedly starts with news clippings on his desk which he arranges and rearranges until they start to tell a story. He is famous for interweaving plots which nearly always turn out to be connected in some way (though there is the occasional red herring) and that’s where it starts. For me though, plot emerges as I write. I start with an idea or a character and let it go from there. For example, one story I’m working on at the moment is called The Black Box. One Christmas a woman receives a gift from a mysterious figure called The Giver. He turns up as the family are exchanging presents and is dressed all in black like the Milk Tray man (there’s a reference lost on anyone under fifty.) He gives her a present which turns out to be a black box a bit like a toaster with a slot at the top. At the point of writing I had no idea where this was going; but it turned out that if she inserted a hand in the slot she would discover a whole hidden world. Is it a real place or a part of herself? Don’t ask me – I’m just the writer; it will emerge as I write and then I’ll let you know – but I suspect it’s connected to those dark days of the nineties when I hardly had any time to write.

Anyway, the Rebus I’m on at the moment is A Song for the Dark Times, one of the post-retirement books. I’m trying to read books from different stages to get a handle on the whole trajectory; next on the list is Black and Blue which goes back twenty years or more. This project may take a while…

https://www.waterstones.com/booklist/395026/ian-rankin-john-rebus-novels-in-order

Kirk out

Ox and Ass and Angel

~ Sarada Gray ~ 4 Comments

There’s a song by Curtis Mayfield called Back to the World, about being on a plane and forgetting all the pain and sorrow and anger of the world and having to come back to it when you land – and that’s pretty much my feeling at the moment. At Christmas/New Year I take a break from things; I don’t campaign or look at emails, I don’t look at the news and any snippets of doom I do happen to hear I can safely file away for later. But there comes a point when you have to go back to the world, and that point has arrived because today, the 6th January, marks the end of the Christmas season and the beginning of Epiphany. This is quite big in Catholic countries where they mark the arrival of the Magi but here it practically goes unnoticed. Basically the three kings are remembered at Christmas and put back in the box with the ox, ass and angel till next year. But it’s still the bleak mid-winter – till this afternoon at least – and we have to put the tree and the lights away which will leave everything feeling as bare as a winter oak, dark and unclothed against the sky.

Oh, I forgot to tell you – OH and I were on the telly on Friday. We went to visit this cottage in the nearby village of Tothorwald (Tothorrald) with a friend. It was very interesting and unlike most thatched cottages which are constructed from thick wooden beams, this was made from actual tree trunks or branches, chosen for their ‘crooked’ shape, hence the name ‘Cruck Cottage’. As OH says, it makes you feel you could build it yourself (spoiler alert: we couldn’t.) Cruck Cottage was lived in as recently as the 70s, albeit by people who chose to experience that life rather than those who had no choice, and was fitted out with furniture and equipment to give an idea of what life was like. And there were men with video cameras. I didn’t give them a second thought; I imagined they were filming for the museum or the local council or something and when one of them asked me for an interview I said yes. It was only later that I found out that they were from ITV, and that night we ended up on the local news. I can’t post a video for copyright reasons but it’s on ITV1 on Friday, at around 7.12 – but you’ll only get it if you’re in the Borders region. If you’re really keen you could put in an Edinburgh postcode and then you’ll be able to see it (Dumfries doesn’t work for some reason.) As I said to the TV man, the thing that strikes you as you look around is that most of the objects there were made by hand – and when you think about the amount of work that goes into maintaining a house like that, it makes you come over all faint. I have to say that although we came over quite well, if I’d known it was for the telly I’d have made a bit more effort with my appearance though….

Cruck Cottage is open a few days a year when they have volunteers on hand and make a peat fire, but at other times you can knock on a volunteer’s door for a key and they’ll come and show you round. That’s the sort of place Dumfries and Galloway is.

Kirk out

PS I nearly wrote quite an angry post today because the moment I logged in I was offered photos of some celebrity woman (I’m not going to say who) in a bikini. Who the hell does wordpress think I am? It’s not enough that I struggle with jam jar lids and motorbike trousers but on top of that they just assume I’m a man – and the sort of man who would be interested in that, to boot? It really pisses me off. I may even complain.

Jumping Pages

~ Sarada Gray ~ 4 Comments

One of the bugbears of my life is the phenomenon of jumping pages. You know what I’m talking about; when you come onto a site and just click on something you see, only for the page to jump so that you’ve clicked on something else entirely. WordPress is a particularly persistent offender in this regard: this morning I managed to go all round the houses before clicking on the thing I actually wanted, which was to write a new post. They do it on purpose. You wait until you’re sure the page has fully loaded, then click on what you want only for it to jump mid-click so that once more you’re somewhere you didn’t want to be. It’s like a bus that changes its destination as you’re getting on: positively Kafkaesque. Patience is the answer of course; wait until the page is loaded, but since everything else on the internet tries to get you to click in an instant, it’s a hard balancing act.

My weekend was a game of two halves. Saturday was good; I went to the gym first thing and then met some people in town where we had a good chat before the silent vigil for Palestine. It’s always good to see people. After that I did some shopping, then came home, drank some wine and made a curry. Simple pleasures. I’ve also been re-reading several Rebus novels using my book stand, a Christmas present from the son which enables me to read while eating (or whatever.) But on Sunday I was dogged by inexplicable tiredness. I fell asleep during Quaker meeting, then I came home and fell asleep in front of a film (Rear Window, in case you’re interested, which is an absolutely stonking film. They’ve got an array of Hitchcocks on BBC iplayer at the moment; and in the evening we moved on to North by Northwest. How does he do it? Of all film directors Hitchcock is the hardest to catch in the act of creating suspense; he seems to do it with the minimum of trickery and yet it’s utterly compelling.) I even watched a bit of Ski Sunday in the afternoon, something I haven’t done for decades. And that was Sunday; basically me out cold in a variety of locations.

North by North-West is like South Riding (a novel by Winifred Holtby) in that it doesn’t exist; the compass directions are North, North-North-West, North by West and North-West by North, just as the Ridings of Yorkshire are North, West and East.

We are in the build-up to our daughter’s wedding now. Less than two weeks to go and a feeling of slight panic is setting in, though I don’t know what there is to panic about. We’ve both got our outfits and some shoes are arriving today for me to wear; apart from that all we have to do is get ourselves to the hotel the day before and all will be well. Oh wait – and we have to get a wedding present. And write a speech… I mentioned to the daughter a while back that either of us would be happy to give a speech but when I heard nothing back I assumed she didn’t want us to. But she does! She’d like us to write one between us and for me to deliver it. Excellent. Except that now we actually have to write one… Eek!

It’s been very cold here of late so I’ve not been out on the bike. Minus five this morning.

Kirk out