HUMBLE APOLOGIES

Our computer died and we've only just got the new (actually, acquired) one up and running on tinternet: hence, lack of recent posts.

Also, despite switching to 'Layout' rather than 'Template' on Blogger, I'm still not getting a 'post title' box when composing posts, a small but persistent irritation for anyone using RSS - not to mention me - which I suspect is due to my ham-fisted buggering about with HTML in order to change the font and colour scheme about two years ago...I shall be conferring with Ningauble and Sheelba.

In the meantime...I note that Andrew Motion's endangered word is 'skirr', which I'm sure is used by Leiber in a Fafhrd and Mouser story - the Mouser parries and his opponent's blade skirrs past his ear, or somesuch.

THE PRAM IN THE HALL/RECALLED TO LIFE?

Recently came across this in a copy of the Scottish Review of Books from May last year. An article by Alan Riach on MacDiarmid, quoting the poem 'The Two Parents':

I love my little son, and yet when he was ill,
I could not confine myself to his bedside.
I was impatient of his squalid little needs,
His laboured breathing and the fretful way he cried
And longed for my wide range of interests again,
Whereas his mother sank without another care
To that dread level of nothing but life itself
And stayed day and night, till he was better, there.

Women may pretend, yet they always dismiss
Everything but mere being just like this.

According to the article the son, Michael, was three when this was published. The line "To that dread level of nothing but life itself" makes me think of Ted Hughes' poetry.

MacDiarmid wasn't the only one to resent his children. In an essay, 'Fires', Raymond Carver is absolutely bleak and uncompromising when he considers the effect his children had on his writing:

During these ferocious years of parenting, I usually didn't have the time, or the heart, to think about working on anything very lengthy. The circumstances of my life, the "grip and slog" of it, in D.H. Lawrence's phrase, did not permit it. [...] This hit-and-miss way of writing lasted for nearly two decades. There were good times back there, of course; certain grown-up pleasures and satisfactions that only parents have access to. But I'd take poison before I'd go through that time again.

From Call If You Need Me.

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I'm reasonably sure my reluctance, bordering on inability, to post or indeed read anything on the internet for the past couple of months is linked to mild SAD. I noticed on my way back home today that there was still a little light in the sky at around a quarter to six. Makes a hell of a difference. I haven't even been able to read much, other than a bit of poetry.

WINTERING


Not been very active, post- or comment-wise recently. Please for no-one to feel snubbed. I am succumbing to the now blindingly obvious and going into hibernation for a while.

GILDED IF NOT GOLDEN

In one of Alan Garner's essays, he writes about the deep attachment he has to his particular corner of Cheshire, his - and here he has to reach for foreign words for which, he says, there is no English equivalent: from Russian, rodina; from German, heimat. I'd always thought that heimat translated roughly as homeland, but a native German speaker recently put me right: it's not just your home town but the area around it, the woods, the fields, the paths, and the bond that one feels with them.

I experienced this myself in August, not for the first time and not unexpectedly. Doctor Jon-avec-le-Lotus was shortly to get married and had decided that he didn't want to go down the beer and strippers route; in fact he preferred that the two of us should head north and tackle a hill and camp out, something we hadn't done for years. I was content with this and so off we went. Stag day was celebrated in the pissing rain with steak cooked on a primus and champagne drunk out of unbreakable children's mugs, within sight of the cloudbase covering Lochnagar. I believe we were both quite happy. Happier still that the weather was so rotten come the evening it made a hotel the only sensible option.

The following day we drove north from Ballater - at speed, a Lotus being constitutionally incapable of doing anything else - up the A939, over the Lecht summit and down again towards Tomintoul. Fourteen twisty miles after Tomintoul you come to Grantown-on-Spey, a fair-sized town which sits in the Strathspey running SW to Boat of Garten and Aviemore, NE towards a thousand distilleries. Due north lies Dava Moor and Lochindorb. I've driven in to Grantown-on-Spey a few times, knew the strath at this point to be arrestingly beautiful and was looking forward to seeing it again. The effect as you drop off the bleak high ground and into sight of greenery and fields is like a balm.

But more than this, I know that north of the town is the beginning of what I continue to think of as my own country, the edges or boundaries of it, at any rate. Even a Mark II Elise makes a hell of a racket, but as we turned a bend and got a first sniff of the valley I realised I was becoming insensible to the engine, and to any conversation, which I was scarcely able to carry on with. It wasn't unlike being mildly stoned, the same feeling of detachment, calm and lightness, of being in some way carried. As I say, it wasn't unexpected though it was unsought.

Sadly we were not heading north, but turned west along the A95, a surprisingly broad and good-quality road for the Highlands, to my mind. Mechanically efficient.

Later, as we reached the Drumochter summit on the A9, Doctor Jon remarked that that was a really striking view as well. Indeed it is, bleak and spectacular; but every time I see it I feel sad, and something closes up inside me, and the defences acquired through years spent living in a foreign country begin to raise. It's the prospect of the south, and the knowledge that the Highlands (for want of a better and less loaded word) are being left behind; and something cries out against that.

*

Duncan Williamson died at 1am in Kirkcaldy on November 8th. RIP.

JOLLIES


On hols as of tomorrow, though just how much rest we're going to get with Thing #1 and Thing #2 is open to question. Hol reading, more in hope than expectation, is Puck of Pook's Hill and Rewards and Fairies on a hot tip from Yvonne, and courtesy of Books and Ink in Banbury because both books are OP in Britain; Love and War in the Apennines by Eric Newby; the remainder of Italian Tales from the Age of Shakespeare.

We won't be doing a spot of roof tiling on a Venetian palazzo. I just like the painting, and haven't posted an image for a while.

QUITE BUSY, QUITE TIRED

In the past few weeks and months we have found, bought and moved house. New baby is due on Monday. Moreover, our two year-old is making full use of the new space and has discovered he can run like a fuckin' deer.

Have been locked out of my email account.

Reading, when I can, Kipling's Plain Tales from the Hills with delight; reading Mark Lynas's Six Degrees with nothing less than choking horror. It makes everything else redundant, frankly.