New Year's Eve

Night, and the blue moon full; half the world in the new year and half of us still in the old. Snow tumbling softly through the street light outside, settling in a coarse white patina. Candles, food and wine, a company of friends gathering here from nearabouts bringing music and sweets.

A year ago we were newly returned, sitting amongst boxes and rediscovered books.

Christmas Eve 2009

Snow pix

The white frosting continues today; another six inches of snow fell at tea time and the place looks more Narnian by the hour.

Unsettling

Still chill

Snow continues to fall; snow on snow.

The practical upshot of this is that the first fall of snow settles and packs down, like the flour in the bottom of the sack, under its own weight or trodden down by small boys/Christmas revellers/car scrapers. It melts very slightly in the degree or so of warmth afforded by the midday sun and at night this millimetre of water freezes to a near frictionless surface of ice.

New snow overlays this miracle of physics with an impossibly beautiful covering of crisp yet powdery sugar frosting like a white sahara. "Treacherous" doesn't come near to describing this combination of awesome beauty and lethal potential. Broken bones and smashed cars abound, as do snowmen.

Simon and I spent the afternoon building ours and he's proof that those hours of reading Calvin and Hobbes were not wasted. He is a jolly, seasonal but strangely disturbing presence in the garden with his mushroom dark glasses and sharp sticks hair. A triumph.

Chill

Today Simon and I were walking back from town across the bridge when a breath of freezing air descended. The sky turned that colour of grey that heralds snow, and it began to sleet. All this happened in the space of 30 seconds, like it does on those weather maps. Shoulders hunched we hurried on, and half-way up the long hill to the house we stopped and looked as a wall of snowflakes swept down the street and turned all to a whiteout.

There's now several inches of snow lying like sugar on every surface; cars turned to soft white mounds, trees drooping with heaped powder and slender icicles. I watched two squirrels bounding through the deep snow on the lawn across to the bird table, ascend opposite sides of it and chomp into the seed I'd laid there. A moment later one of them went flying off the platform and landed in the snow, kicked superbly by the other. A tussle ensued with first one then the other being booted from the food shelf. A victor emerged and the other went off to tackle the squirrel-proof peanut holder.

It's now nearly midnight and minus 10 outside, according to the car's temperature reading. Could be a white Christmas at this rate.

More flooding photos

The River Tweed in spate.

You can click on any of these photos to get a full-size view.

Scroll down for more.

Peebles floods

Peebles caught the edge of the recent flooding. These were taken on the day the river broke its banks.

All is pervaded with the smell of turpentine

The news wires are alive this week with a shocking story of deceit, misinformation and deliberate falsification of data in the ongoing debate about climate change.

In an interesting coincidence with the upcoming summit in Copenhagen some e-mails between scientists at the University of East Anglia have been 'leaked' and a press story generated around their contents. The e-mails selected out for publication centre around a cover-page graph of mean temperatures derived from data from tree surveys. The depiction of the data from the period 1960 onwards was apparently adjusted to account for an anomaly wherein the mean temperature appears to fall from that year onwards. The fall in temperature didn't actually happen according to other temperature data and is a statistical anomaly related to how the tree data was collected. The adjustment produced a graph depicting a continuing rise, reflecting the actual temperature data more accurately and removing the need for an explanatory paragraph on the front cover.

Climate scientists should know better than to make adjustments to such a politically sensitive set of data, however mediocre its content, well intentioned their actions or passionate their zeal. The subsequent stories about conspiracies and hidden agendas have been predictable.

A series of triumphal press releases by sceptical scientists - most of them not climate scientists - and the Saudi Arabian government, have rewritten the substance of this correspondence as a conspiracy rivalling the Moon landing, Kennedy and Diana all rolled into one. A redrawn graph has become, through careful selection of e-mails from an eleven-year correspondence, a deftly planned and audaciously executed defrauding of the public by climate scientists; a re-framing of a completely natural process of global warming and cooling into a man-made phenomenon.

Shock jocks and newspapers of a particular hue have exulted. Lurid headlines have gushed like light sweet crude and the hills are alive with the sound of baying hounds. Few of the stories I've read have made any mention of the actual contents of the e-mail messages, concentrating instead on gripping headline statements about deceit, conspiracy, fraud, manipulation, secrets and lies. Misinformation abounds. The facts are far less interesting.

Thus far there's been little speculation about the agenda of these evil climate scientists who have apparently been hoodwinking us all these years. What's in it for them ? Who's paying them ? There's not much money in windmills, and research grants hardly justify such a massive collusion and lengthy creative accounting effort.

Watergate taught us to follow the money, but the trail emanating from the global warming conspiracy theory doesn't seem to go anywhere. What about the trail leading from the sceptical camp ? Well, the charge on Copenhagen is being lead by the Saudi Arabian government. Ah....

Full Circle

It's a year since our return across the world. Today I drove home in Autumnal twilight from visiting friends near Leicester, up England's eastern routes and across the A69 following Hadrian's Wall, past Lockerbie and into Peeblesshire through the rain-drenched hills over the Devil's Beeftub at Moffat.

The landscape in this late season is softened by weeks of steady rain; muted, grainy sepia and rust. In the dark outside my study window the owl is calling.

Edumacation vicissitudes

We've been lucky with schools. Both our children started out in a small local Catholic primary school in Scotland where the emphasis was on community, learning in small classes, thinking about other people. The school doubles as an integrated specialist centre for physically and intellectually disabled students so our two learned alongside kids in wheelchairs, with Downs syndrome, with big hills to climb.

From there to New Zealand, to a large and culturally diverse primary school with a challenging diet of intellectual rigour, competitive sports, performing arts, active learning, public speaking and celebrating each other's achievements with a blizzard of certificates, awards and prizes for success in almost anything. It mirrored my own experience of education in New Zealand, again in a period of curricular emphasis on creativity, diversity of experience, integration of disciplines.

Back in Scotland the new curriculum, introduced while we were away and echoing the New Zealand model, is slowly finding its feet and promises to widen and deepen the experience of children in primary and secondary schools. While I am increasingly suspicious of the value of factory-style education in rigid peer-groupings, I can't deny that we've been lucky thus far.

Returning to visit New Zealand after only a year I was sad to find that in the primary education sector some lunatics have once again taken over the asylum. The diverse curriculum introduced in 2001, which attracted international interest for its innovation and depth, has been shelved in favour of a narrow-band approach focussed on "numeracy" and "literacy".

Election-winning slogans like "students leave school unable to read and write" and "New Zealand low in international numeracy tables" are guaranteed to drive such reforms, despite their meaninglessness. The averages used for league tables are distorted by a sizeable group of the culturally disenfranchised. The headlines about illiterate new employees fail to take account of education's delayed effect.

Young people with questionable numeracy and literacy skills now in the New Zealand workforce were at primary school in the late 1980s and 90s, a period when the same policy of narrow focus on literacy and numeracy was being strictly implemented. They are proof of its failure, not cause for reform.

Indeed international studies over decades, and the experience of western nations in the past 30 years shows that a narrow focus on numeracy and literacy in primary schools produces the opposite of its intended outcome. Why ? Because there's no point in being able to write a good sentence if you have nothing to write about. Because being able to manipulate numbers is pointless if you don't know what the results mean.

Good writers need interesting experiences to write about, without which there are no good books to read. Imaginative number manipulation needs imagination (d'oh!) and an experience of the empirical world to which to apply it.

Relevant childhood education is about breadth of experience, physical adventure, imagination, honing skills, reading and writing great stories and from real experiences, discovering knowledge, playing with possibilities and making sense of the world using as many different measures as possible: mathematical, artistic, literary, scientific, cultural, spiritual, theatrical, sporting, and in as many different forms as possible.

In a good education a child finds passions, which carry them through life in work, relationships, explorations, and they discover creativity which enables them to adapt to life's vicissitudes, take risks and sharp turns, accept and capitalise on its unfairness.

Without this tide at the start of our ventures, our whole life can lie in shallows. New Zealand schools' new narrow focus will produce yet another generation of kiwi students with narrow focus and a limited sense of context; beige fodder for industry.

It is a discarded opportunity and I'm sad about it.

Glimpsing Asia

In retrospect watching Blade Runner a few days before visiting Hong Kong was probably unwise, given the immersion with which I watch movies. I only had 24 hours there, half of which I slept through, and so only ten more than I spent on the film, but it was enough to get a glimpse.

An inadvertent speciality of mine when travelling is making my way through the rush hours of major cities using public transport. It looked simple on the map. I hadn't allowed for the millions of other people.

Leaving my luggage with the surly operators of Hong Kong airport's Left Luggage facility I trailed my little wheeled cabin bag to the airport express train and thence to the high-pressure circulatory system that is the Hong Kong MTR, or subway system. It was New York all over again; millions of purposeful commuters pouring in arterial streams through a labyrinth of tunnels, platforms and trains. Most of the signage was in Chinese with English subtitles except the ticket machines and some of the overview maps, which were just in Chinese.

I bumbled along, having slept only fitfully in 36 hours, tight-lipped lest the words "does anybody here speak English ?" slip out, finding my way somehow to North Point from which my hotel was - to quote the website - an easy five minute walk. Riding up innumerable escalators I came to a choice of six different street exits, none of which suggested my hotel's address. No matter; it would surely be obvious.

An hour later, in a back-lane street market selling live fish, very recently deceased chickens, interesting dried herbs, long-dead and dessicated cephalopods and packets of steaming rice wrapped in large green leaves I asked a woman street vendor about the road I sought. A shrug and a vague wave down an even narrower alley. I was now in Ankh-Morpork and wishing my luggage had legs. Each little street spilled on to another little market, or occasionally back to one of the thundering main roads clogged with buses, trams, taxis, people, bikes, cars and hand-carts, the floors of skyscraper canyons overhung with electric tram lines, bamboo scaffolding, clothes on drying racks hanging from apartment windows, giant neon advertising signs, and thousands of air-conditioning units. I wasn't in Kansas any more and all the signs were in Chinese.

Wandering in ever-widening circles from the MTR station I had several adventures and did eventually stumble upon the hotel, a fine modern luxurious hotel - thanks to my travel agents for recommending it. There probably is a way to get there from the MTR in five minutes but I - I took the road less travelled by, and that made all the difference.

A shower, a sleep and a change of clothes before setting out again into the city streets.

Nuance

Nuance

With the cathedrals thundering
at him, history proving
him the two-faced god, there were
the few who waited on him
in the small hours, undaunted
by the absence of an echo
to their Amens. Physics’ suggestion
is they were not wrong. Reality
is composed of waves and particles
coming at us as the Janus-faced
chooses. We must not despair.
The invisible is yet susceptible
of being inferred. To pray, perhaps, is
to have a part in an infinitesimal deflection.

R. S. Thomas

Five days to Twelfth Night

I spent the week directing a production of Twelfth Night for a team of homeschooling families in South Auckland. The kids acted and the parents were the production team. A fine week working with fine people, and a superb two nights of performances; sharp, bright, pacy and alternately hilarious and poignant. The cast, many of whom also took part in my drama workshops a few weeks ago, was aged between 5 and 15 but would put the paces on actors twice or thrice their ages.

It was an ambitious project and today I've emerged blinking into the sunshine not quite believing that it's only been six days since we started. The joy of such projects, and the reason for their irresistible gravitational hold on me, is the alchemy of talents and skills they generate. I love directing that traffic, having faith in people's ability to surprise, and even the game of dodging the reflected glory that can so easily make directors think more of themselves than is healthy.

Example: a casual conversation with one of the mums a couple of weeks ago about scenery. I described a three-sided rotatable flat and we sketched something together on paper that might just work. The next day she produced technical drawings from her husband, a few days later he'd made two of them in the garage. We got them to the theatre this week and puzzled over what to paint on them. Another dad, a graphic artist, drew six architectural sketches of Italian streetscapes and gardens. Four mums, two overhead projectors and a can of paint later we had the ideal elements of a stage set that would endure wind and weather throughout the play.

Meanwhile another dad created Shakespeare's father's coat of arms on a banner which decorated an otherwise forlorn corner of the stage, several mums generated exhaustive lists of props, costumes, scene changes, prompts, exits and entrances. Consequently the backstage management rivalled air traffic control over Heathrow. One of the fathers even made REAL SWORDS (we didn't tell OSH) and so on it went. A community of families selflessly blending its skills and talents to produce a golden production which I'm proud to have been part of.

These children and young adult performers have had a rich immersive experience of theatre which will stay with them; an infinitesimal deflection R S Thomas talks about. Who remembers maths lessons with fondness, or at all ? But most of us remember childhood performances on stage, and the impact they had. My interest in, and respect for the homeschooling phenomenon grows as I see the opportunities for rethinking the fundamental priorities we bring to educating our successors.

Peebles, Southland

Thongor and the Boulders of Doom

Last weekend we drove north from Dunedin, stopping at a fine secondhand shop called The Oddity where I picked up all but two of the Thongor series of chronicles - you know the ones - for a few dollars. The titles tell all:
The Wizard of Lemuria (Thongor the Barbarian faces the vengeance of the Dragon Kings)
Thongor In The City Of Magicians
Thongor At The End Of Time (joyfully, not the last of the series !)
and Thongor Fights The Pirates of Tarakus
Several coffees and junk shops later we meandered through Oamaru.

Somewhere up that coast we stopped to view the Moeraki Boulders, an extraordinary collection of spherical rocks each about the height of a man and lying in the surf on a narrow sandy beach. Other tourists wandered, as we did, in a bemused way along the tight strip as waves broke over these dinosaur egg alien pod gallstones, as if luggage had been washed up from an unseen tragedy. I took photos, sat on one and wondered, as I often do, how to respond to them. Thongor would have known what to do.

In Oamaru two motels diverged on a wide street and we took the one less travelled by. It was, you may say, satisfactory.

Thereafter we headed upstream along the Waitaki river, stopping at Peebles.

That's right. Peebles.

there and back again

Just back from a weekend road trip with Brother Martyn taking in some of the beautiful Otago hinterland. We've been half-way to Mt Cook and over a mountain pass through snow and stunning landscapes where Lord of the Rings was filmed.

Photos when I've got them off the camera, I promise. Meanwhile I've caught a cold and enjoyed a day coughing my way around the steep Dunedin streets.

Ukulele albatross

Dunedin city faces, across its long harbour, a peninsula that doubles back and lies parallel to the shoreline. A drive out on this tongue of land ends at a high point where thousands of albatrosses arrive every year to mate, nest and raise their young.

At this Spring equniox, or at least near the first full moon after it, the birds are arriving and pairing so the colony is off limits to the public. I braved the threatening cold today and drove out there to watch the sea pounding the cliffs and see thousands of gulls also gathering and nesting along the edges of the land.

People also nest here in colonies of baches; small shed-like holiday houses that doubtless teem with families in the summer months, though they are closed and shuttered in the last of the wintry season.

I didn't see an albatross, and I contented myself with photographing swirling water and wheeling gulls. On the way back I stopped to look at the little boathouses that sit out from the shore on clusters of sturdy wooden posts. Some are plain and some painted gaudy colours or decorated with bright murals.

Tonight Marty took me to see the Wellington International Ukulele Orchestra at Dunedin's last remaining grand theatre. An unlikely treat; dry humoured and still blinking somewhat in the light of their success, they gave a grand evening's entertainment. They look like a collection of Open University lecturers and students clothed entirely from charity shops. The double-bass player, who suggested that his instrument was in fact a ukulele and that he was just very small, looked like a Tim Burton animation, and I'm sure that was Neil from the Young Ones sitting third from the left. Peculiarly New Zealand, with hints of the Conchords and undoubted musical genius.

This weekend is the mid-point of my current sojourn. It's also the full moon, and snow is forecast. I'm the furthest away from Scotland that I've ever been, and now I begin my return journey.

Entrances and exits

Every exit being an entrance somewhere else, I've now turned my attention to this week's trip to Dunedin. A hauntingly familiar city when I visited for the first time last year, I'm looking forward to spending more time there.

Last Friday I shared some fruits of the past two weeks' work at an exhibition of drama skits and sketches by the 30 children and young people who have taken part. I enjoyed seeing the subtle changes they've undergone, the emergence of new confidence and the excitement of performing for their parents and friends.

The Spring progresses, but through mood swings of torrential downpour and dazzling brightness, an adolescent season of promise.

I'm enjoying tamarilloes, Vogel's bread, seeing Tuis in the bottle brush trees, strong sunlight, the sea.

I'm not enjoying the Auckland motorway.

Young promise

The blossom is in full flower here in Auckland. The first dusting of green on the deciduous trees is lime-green, changing by the day, and tonight the new moon lay in the old moon's arms. I started my second week of drama workshops with a younger group; a day spent shifting my expectations away from those set by last week's deep teenagers.

Dramatic tendencies

A week in New Zealand and I'm half-way through the first week-long workshop of drama activities, this one with a group of creative and enthusiastic home-schooled teenagers. They are a pleasure to work with; full of fun, focussed and genuinely interested in learning.

Don't get me started on the countless times this isn't the case.

Home-schooling is sometimes regarded with suspicion, or a cynical air, but this network of families home-schooling their children is a model of good practice, with living evidence of success and difference in groups of kids like the one I have the privilege of working with this week.

Hotel California

The theory was that a night's sleep in a hotel near the airport mid-way between the UK and New Zealand would alleviate the jet-lag effect of a 26-hour journey.

The evidence is positive; it's only taken me a couple of days to adjust to being eleven hours ahead of myself and, yes, the Los Angeles Airport Hilton is very nice thank you.

Well, I say that. The entrance is grandiose, the facade impressive in that smoked glass monolith kind of way, and the corridors are spacious and richly furnished with art and faux-antique couches. The actual rooms seem to have been an after-thought, squeezed around the edges of the magnificent approaches.

I had my fill of American TV, lost my battle with the telephone system, had a fine breakfast and a comfortable day resting in the public spaces and even took a walk. 'Walk ?' asked the concierge when I asked where might be a good place for this activity. 'Well..er.. there's a park about 10 blocks, you could get a taxi.' Was there anywhere I could walk from the Hotel ?

Following his directions I walked alone along tired boulevards lined with old parked cars. I walked for five blocks past hotels, private houses, rest homes, industrial parks and vacant lots in the humid Los Angeles sunshine. Every few minutes a planeload of people passed over me, ruffling my hair and landing moments later at LAX just across the way. I had the sidewalks entirely to myself.

It's worth saying too that travelling through this American port, which I've done several times now, was smooth and relatively stress-free. The staff were relaxed and friendly, a marked contrast to a few years ago when many of the staff were clearly on a hair-trigger.

Bard head

I have Shakespeare on the brain, what with the early stages of Macbeth in preparation (next year's Traquair production, where I am 'Director of Weird') and an upcoming production of Twelfth Night in New Zealand, where I am arriving at the last minute and appearing to direct operations. Icing the cake, in reality. This, combined with various workshop commitments here and black-clothed coffee-enriched meetings about future events, makes for a pleasing combination of activities occasionally darkened by last-minute frenzies and glimpses into the 'what about money ?' chasm.

I co-presented an adult workshop on Sunday about the RSC method of reading Shakespearean texts (I was doing the improvisation, status and physical theatre bits) which I found thought-provoking and inspiring. There are plans for more, based on the positive feedback we got, so more irons in the fire. Meanwhile it is timely new understandings for Twelfth Night.

House plans continue to limp along; we've moved up to roof shapes, square metres of window glass and definitions of 'combustible' now, so that has to be progress, doesn't it ?

Oddity

The sci-fi week was a great success, though I say so myself. Actually the feedback from kids and parents and other audience members said this too. Presented as a live performance of a radio play, with ample sound effects both recorded and live, smoke, light show and some audience participation we had a fun final evening. Audience members commented that it felt like looking in on the backroom of a theatre during a show. Wires trailing around, sound and light desks in constant use and two computers feeding in the recordings, it was a hive of casual-looking activity.

I'm certainly minded to do more of this style, radio being a long-term love of mine and a much underrated medium in my opinion.

Preparing now for an all-day workshop on Shakespearean acting which I'm presenting jointly with two others, and on a production of Twelfth Night in New Zealand in October. An exciting couple of months coming up.

sci-fi week

I'm running another drama school this week, focussed on lighting, sound and video. It's a chance to shamelessly indulge my love of sci-fi, reprising and reworking a script from 7 years ago called The Oddity. The resulting performance will be a light, sound and video version of the play, performed as a radio drama with unexpected audience involvement.

My antique lighting equipment, zero-88 manual desk (it pre-dates the Jester) and monster Studiomaster sound desk will all feature, dragged out of their long-term storage in a village hall attic and dusted down for the occasion. The stuff is built like military hardware and can only add to the retro 1950s look we're going for.

Now, where are those ray guns...

I've been travelling

July is holiday season and we've been travelling about the UK catching up with friends and family, rediscovering the huge variety of urban and rural landscapes in this country.

A couple of days ago we navigated the post-modern wilderness that is Milton Keynes, thankfully with the help of a satnav system. Like Canberra this city is encircled by concentric ring roads punctuated with identical roundabouts. Even the satnav was losing the will to live as she recited "At the roundabout go straight across, second exit" for the ninth time, though she did eventually direct us into a concrete shopping centre the size of a small European country. Yes, I hear your cries of "why ?" and "what were you thinking ?" so let me just say that this was part of a larger story arc concerning new school shoes. Let's not go there.

Beyond MK (going North) is that indistinct area of the country known as The Midlands. Lying somewhere between The North and The South it includes Leicester, where old friends now live and whom we visited overnight and caught up on five years. A fine time.

The drive north cut through Shropshire, the homeland of the speed camera, which seems to be suffering in the recession. Most of the towns and villages we passed through had boarded up pubs, shops or industrial sites with weed-strewn car parks barricaded with concrete blocks. Even wealthy Macclesfield has empty shops, gaps sites and endless sales.

On the upside were two relaxed and pleasant days in London enjoying the Science Museum, a photographic exhibition, The Globe Theatre (we sat in on a rehearsal) and a stroll down the South Bank amidst street performers and living statues. London has an amplified familiarity because of its ubiquity in BBC dramas like Spooks and I thoroughly enjoyed rediscovering its vitality and rich sense of history.

Before this trip I completed the first of two planned drama schools at the local theatre. A group of ten children learned and performed Joe of Arabia, which I'd rewritten for the week. It worked out well and there was favourable comment from the audience of parents and friends. While easy to please at one level I always look for the next level of surprise at the accomplishment of the kids after only a week, as well as enjoyment of the dialogue at an adult level. My spies in the audience reported both reactions, so I was pleased with it.

Next week sees the second of these events; a video, sound and lighting course with a sci-fi theme. Could be fun.

Joke

There are 10 types of people in the world: those who understand binary & those who don't.

Rites of passage

Another day, another rite of passage. Simon and three friends all left Primary school yesterday, the entire year group surrounded by a crowd of (mostly) mothers taking photos. They had adorned their T-shirts and faces with felt pen signatures and messages, a strange looking crew of almost-adolescents ritually painted for their journey.

The mixed emotions arising from leaving their educational cradles and starting seven long weeks of summer holiday manifested mostly in wild whoops, play-fights, fierce group hugs for the cameras, sudden departures when they'd had enough or glimpsed the edge.

The boy plus his three friends became the Four Chefs for the evening, having spent the past few days gathering at different houses and cooking together. Four families met at the first house for dips and drinks, processed to our house for tacos, fajitas, chilli mince and vegetarian fillings, various sour cream dishes, champagne and other drinks. Carrying our drinks through the twilight and down the hill we enjoyed creme brulee, crusted with a blowtorch, together with more drinks and a dessert wine. At the final destination at the bottom of the hill Simon had set up his chocolate fountain (seriously) and happy kids dipped chopped fruit in hot chocolate while the adults had coffee, chocolates, fruit and ..er.. drinks.

It was a grand evening, a rite of passage for parents watching our children shaking off a few more clouds of glory and taking tentative steps on the damp earth.

The end of term

Simon finishes Primary School for the second time today. He's adopting the high ground position which comes from experience, guiding some of his 'first time' friends through the day, avoiding the tearful mothers and making sure he gets every signature on his t-shirt this time.

It's also our first summer school holiday since January 2008 and very welcome for all that. The weather is warm, the landscape is green, the midges are biting.

I have two theatre projects planned for the summer holiday, both at the Eastgate Theatre. They're dependent on bookings, so time will tell, but I collected a pile of costumes and props the other day in anticipation. Richard and I drove back from Traquair with the Odyssey full of bags of costumes and with two rigged ships masts riding high out of the sunroof. We got some looks driving down the High Street, Richard hanging on white-knuckled to the ends of the masts, though many will have assumed we were just left over from last week's Beltane parades. More on the Beltane festival week once I've processed the photos.

Today I have two appointments with computer tuition clients; a growing band of mainly pensioners and older people who responded to my little advert in the local magazine. It's fun helping people get to grips with their computers and I have Jenny in New Zealand to thank for getting me started on the computer training thing.

Tonight we have a progressive supper with friends to mark the end of term and to give Simon and three friends another opportunity to cook a meal for us all. They're catering for 19 of us tonight, with each course at a different house. The highlight might be flaming the 19 creme brulee dishes with Andrew's blowtorch !

Outdoor Shakespeare

For the past two weeks I've been involved behind the scenes at Othello, the latest production from Shakespeare At Traquair. It's an outdoor promenade in one of the most beautiful gardens in the Borders. Tonight's the final performance, with an expected 150+ audience; a logistical challenge. It's also bucketing with rain and thunder and lightning at the moment, but this is Scotland and it could change in a heartbeat.

The long road to Silloth

On Saturday we finished burying my Grandmother.

She died in 2005 and most of her ashes lie in an unremarkable banked field of wild grasses and young trees near those of my Uncle Chris, who died of cancer some ten years before her. But some of her remained in a small enamelled container, travelling about with my Uncle Andy on the back of his motorbike, tucked in his luggage as he packed his other belongings and moved to his new home aboard a boat in Dover.

A few weeks ago she was collected by my Mum and after a scenic tour of Essex, Wiltshire and York they made the trip North here to Peebles, where she rested until this past weekend.

My Grandmother Mary was widowed in 1943 when my Grandfather Bill piloted his warplane over the Solway Firth after a test flight and collided with a young Canadian flyer. They had been married seven years, my Mother was four, my Uncle Chris not yet born. Bill was buried in a tiny churchyard in Causewayhead, near the Victorian seaside town of Silloth, in a plot of what became thirty or so RAF graves amongst the local dead. He had been stationed at the huge RAF base which dominated the area and whose runway and aircraft hangars are still there today, overgrown and reoccupied by farms and local businesses.

Mourning would have been a perfunctory exercise during that war. My Grandmother was moved out of her RAF accommodation in Wiltshire several days later, became a mother of two six months on, filed the telegram and the few letters of condolence in a brown envelope which I found amongst papers and photos in a cake tin after she died.

So last weekend three generations of us undertook to reunite my Grandmother and my Grandfather 66 years after they were unexpectedly parted. Silloth is a little over two hours from Peebles and Carlisle was a pleasant overnight stop, including a walk through deserted streets of ornate Victorian brick houses to a downtown restaurant. The easy 30-minute drive to Silloth next morning lengthened to an hour and a half as we failed several times to achieve the critical velocity needed to escape Carlisle's gravitational pull. Finally on the right B-road west we met a 'Road Closed' notice. An elaborate sequence of detour signs took us through every village and hamlet in Northwest Cumbria before depositing us back on the same B-road half a mile and forty minutes later.

It was my Grandmother's last journey, the long road to Silloth and back to her first love, on the day before the anniversary of his death. She took the scenic route; her habit in life. It was fitting, humourous and poignant that we meandered through the same villages and byways visited by my Grandfather in the last few weeks of his life, searching with increasing exasperation for local accommodation for his wife and little daughter to join him on his extended posting in Cumbria.

In the 1980s my Grandmother finally learned what it was he was doing up there. An official secret for all those years, he was a test pilot on a programme developing a bomb that would bounce across water and explode upon impact with a dam wall. It became known as the Bouncing Bomb, delivered by the Dam Busters squadron, and Bill was one of its unsung casualties.

He is buried in Causewayhead Cemetery in the shadow of two wartime aircraft hangars. Buried next to him is a pilot from New Zealand, on the other side a Canadian. The plot is simple, well-kept, quiet. By his grave is a stand of blues irises, one of my Grandmother's favourite flowers.

We laid the last remnants of her in the bed with the irises, by the headstone. An old photograph of three smiling young people watched over this. In its battered silver frame it had stood on the mantlepiece in my Great-Aunt Elsie's house; her brother Bill, her friend Mary and herself standing in a roadway by a church, arms across each other's shoulders.

We recalled some stories, shed some tears, and I walked away with a sense of having done a good thing, somehow enriching my own soft earth, and of honouring our forebears.

Bad Apple

My smugness since acquiring a Mac has been almost unbearable.
"It just works" etc.

And it does. Years of driving around in a Windows PC jalopy with my head regularly under the bonnet fixing, updating, scanning, debugging, reinstalling and rebooting made the experience of the Mac like stepping on to the bridge of the Enterprise.

Unfortunately I ran into the Romulans this week (keep up..) with Apple's latest software update killing off my printer drivers. This just as I finished my publicity leaflet for my two drama schools in the summer holiday. There's a way round it (I won't bore you) but it's annoying and switches me straight back to that computercidal red mist that was a regular feature of my week. If anyone has some photon torpedoes for this problem do let me know.

Info about the drama schools is at www.centrestagedrama.com

Coraline

Took Simon and a friend to see Coraline 3D on Saturday; a great adaptation of a gothic book by Neil Gaiman. 3D technology is used intelligently to bring stop-motion style animation to life and sensibly avoiding cheap frights. The story unfolds slowly, building the expectation and shifting into Hitchcock-like suggestions that all is not as it seems.

Was it worth the hour and a half drive into Edinburgh with 35 minute traffic jam at Leith on a nearly empty tank ? Hmm.

new house plan

Here's this week's plan from the architect. Reduced floor space means we spend less of the next 20 years working for the bank. Comments welcome. And yes, I know the door hits the couch in the TV room at the moment. One of them will have to go.

Second floor plan will follow when I have time to draw it up.

Fab

Last week the kids and I climbed the Scott Monument in Edinburgh. It's Thunderbird Three in stone, towering over Princes Street and only dwarfed at Christmas when the Winter Gardens ferris wheel goes up next to it. Four levels are accessed by spiral stone steps barely one person wide. In the windy crow's nest you see over the jumbled rooftops to the sea, the mountains. You can probably see seven counties, though these days they're called Regions or Authorities as in a soviet novel.

Below us were the excavated remains of Princes Street. The whole mile or so has been dug back to the soil to make room for Edinburgh's new tram system. It promises to give a character and elegance to this grand parade that really hasn't been there for decades.

Yesterday I walked the length of it, through swirling dust and raucous road drills, after a meeting about a Government contract to assist with education workshops. It's a nice little job to add to my modest portfolio, and I remembered my Auckland education job with fondness once again. The downside of self-employment is the endless self-promotion, but perhaps that's good for my soul.

The claustrophobic and vertiginous climb was worth it for the view.

You can't teach a chicken old jokes

We live on the edge of town, the magnificent southern uplands rolling away from just behind our house. Bonnington Road narrows from a broad avenue of fine Edwardian houses to a country lane winding deep into the Manor Valley. Skylarks overhead, rounded fields ploughed over centuries; cows, horses, sheep, occasional grand farmhouses, a ring of heather-patched hills and, of course, free-range chickens.

Simon and I have taken to cycling out here, taking the level road along Bonnington, puffing slightly up over the cattle grid mid-way, sometimes doing the full circle and mounting an assault on the Sware hill. A long near-vertical pushing a bike.

Yesterday we stopped, as usual, to view the free-range chicken farm where eggs can be bought from the honesty box at the end of the farm driveway. These chooks truly free range, radiating out from their giant shed across two fields, bobbing and scratching like so many clockwork toys. The artists and creatives amongst them can be seen in the farther fields, around the edges and less frequented rises and hollows. Around the corner, a ragged brigade had even escaped the fields, striding down the road, finding tasty morsels in the long grass. A troupe of wandering minstrels in their shreds and patches, they scattered noisily to the shelter of the verges as we cycled by.

Further on one was not so lucky; surprised by one of the infrequent cars it was food for crows, a bloody sight.

What a way to go though, for a chicken.

consulting on the latest plan

Here's our latest plan for a house on our little plot. It's based on a 7.2m square tower, with extensions to the side (for the stairs) and to the back to catch the sun and accommodate the open living area. The stairs are wrapped around the edge because with three floors they have to be isolated with fire doors.

The plan is done on a site called Floorplanner and you can view the plans there at this link:
http://www.floorplanner.com/projects/18527665-ed-road-plan

The embedded plan below only seems to show two of the floors, but if you're serious do go and look at the full plan on the site. The 3D view is pretty cool.

This one's out for consultation, so all contributions are welcome ! Click on the comments link below.

chalk lines and jigsaws

You would think there would a limited number of ways to arrange a few rooms on a postage stamp of land, but the thick and growing file of drawings on the table suggests otherwise. Our house planning goes in fits and starts, along with enthusiasm, but it feels like we're getting closer to a final plan. This week I was marking out areas with chalk spray to see just how little garden we might have left, and mentally earmarking trees for recycling. A friend produced a photoshopped view of the plot with his own house - a three-storey wooden tower - on our plot. It works, surprisingly, because it matches the large stone villa (our old house) and reduces its dominance over the plot. I hadn't appreciated just how much our old place looms over the plot until he pointed it out.

Meanwhile we've made little cut-outs of the rooms we envisage and are trying to jigsaw them into a workable shape. Tricky, and rather contrived as they should really be 3D. Still, it gives the impression of progress.

Today's shopping list

Milk
lactose free milk
potatoes
tomatoes
tins toms
sugar
margarine/spread
bagels
dish cloths
cranberry drink
ham/other packed lunch fillings

Comments

Feel free to add comments to any of the blog entries by clicking on the 'comments' link below. This takes you to a screen where you can read any comments left about a particular post and to add comments of your own. Contributing a comment makes the blog interactive; a conversation if you will.

Obviously some posts are easier to comment on than others. Here's a starter:
What film have you seen recently which you enjoyed or which made you think ?

A few weeks ago I went to see Doubt, which I thoroughly enjoyed for its intelligent script, quality acting and deep themes. Last week I saw Monsters vs Aliens which was full of funny dialogue and film references, though I wish I'd gone for the 3D version.

How about you ?

Driftwood

Descent

Celtic Dragon

Moray

Rescue

Here are driftwood photos I've been editing.

Push Up

On to week 3 of 100pushups (see http://hundredpushups.com/) with sore shoulders.

Whispers of Shakespeare

Last night I was asked to photograph a local production at the Eastgate theatre, titled So Long Lives This. It was a collection of songs, sonnets, pieces of drama and dance all connected by a loose narrative about Queen Elizabeth, Will Shakespeare, The Earl of Southampton and various other of the usual suspects. It was a gentle, occasionally dramatic piece performed in the round in an intimate atmosphere with minimal staging and rich costuming.

I've missed this; subtle and imaginative theatre woven around the life and work of Shakespeare. In Auckland I worked with a fine group of young people and dedicated parents to produce an abridged and minimal Julius Caesar, and with various groups in school holidays on some of my own Shakespearean pieces. It's one of things I like best in theatre, and I'm looking forward to doing more of it.

More info here:
http://www.shakespeare-at-traquair.co.uk/

A life in pictures

This week a friend passed on to me a collection of several hundred slides taken by a distant uncle of his over forty-odd years. When the man died his slides and old camera gear ended up in my friend's attic, emerging this week as bin-fodder and intercepted by me.

The slides, mostly taken in Edinburgh, divide into distinct categories. Many are up-close images of flowers, leaves, and a few of trees, clouds etc, all taken in the Botanical Gardens. There's a collection of monochromes of pavements, snow, shadows and various textured surfaces, and the other set is of dressed mannequins in fashionable shop windows on Princes Street.

This last set is what caught my eye; striking and complex images involving the dressed models, the lettering on the window's surface, the reflections in the shop window of Edinburgh Castle and of people passing by. He used high quality lenses so the light and the depth of field is superb, the models are shot to seem animated or engaged in conversation with each other. The reflections show the different layers existing simultaneously, overlaid on to a single static image. The older ones depict 1950s fashions, green Edinburgh omnibuses, people in hats and overcoats.

Looking through them on an old slide projector I tried to picture this man, this distant uncle seeing the finished picture in his head, finding the right angles and setting up all the manual controls of his Contax camera. What was he seeing in these images, what were they for ?

I read an article this week titled 'Don't Die With Your Music Still In You' and I've been thinking about how creativity flows through us. I wonder what he did with his slides, beyond selecting and arranging them in carousels, storing them meticulously in archive boxes. I felt privileged to have seen something of his creativity.

RSS

I'm enjoying RSS feeds. The Mac's Mail programme can subscribe to these via the little orange RSS icon on many websites. Every time the website is updated with new material a descriptive headline (or sometimes the whole article) is downloaded to my RSS reader. I check to see what might be of interest before looking at the website.

Currently I'm subcribed to Curious Read, Lifehacker, Indexed, BBC PM programme, and Zen Habits, amongst others.

You can even subscribe to this blog, and get a note downloaded when I post new stuff. Then again, why would you ?

My, How You've Grown

Bringing the significant changes of the past four years back to old haunts sets the challenge of reinvention. Good old T S Eliot described it in Journey Of The Magi:
"We returned to our places, these Kingdoms,
But no longer at ease here, in the old dispensation,"

The discomfort is in the shifted expectations I have of myself, work, other people. Before we left New Zealand I read some books about repatriation in which a common theme was one of finding a new space to occupy in an old familiar place. Don't get me wrong; it's an exciting and natural process, a confirmation of growth over stagnation, but the four-year gap has had a jarring effect on re-entry. I consciously resist the temptation to say 'my, how you've grown' to friends' children and former students who have doubled in height during our absence, though it is said to me in subtle ways.

My shifted space includes new and interesting friends, changed expectations of old friendships, more enjoyment of the countryside, daily cooking and baking, grappling with procrastination born of autonomy, a stripping back of material things. I wouldn't have predicted some of these.

Lomo

I have an old lomo camera which I picked up in a charity shop years ago. Never used it, but they seemingly have a cult following for the particular look they produce. It was unintended, apparently, a design fault but gained a following. Photoshop, of course, can be made to reproduce this effect, so here's my first attempts:

the last day of winter

Officially that is; St David's day tomorrow celebrates leeks and daffs but there's only the early green shoots of crocus bulbs in the garden at the moment. It helps to have these symbolic landmarks. I noticed the passing of the three-month line at the beginning of Feb (3 months since we arrived back in Peebles) and a shift of gear for us all. Those first 100 days of anything are a trial run, I find, a time to bed in new things. We've dropped below the 'welcome back' radar now and are part of the wider landscape (can you keep up with these metaphors ?). Habits and routines are revealing themselves, new connections and patterns.

Meanwhile the media continues to apply its blowtorch to our understanding of the economy and how much is true is anybody's guess. Bankers are the new witches, taking over temporarily from old Nazis and those with an unhealthy interest in children, and old-school socialists are cashing in on the interview circuits, sagely nodding and saying they told us it would all end in tears. Chocolate is the industry to be in just now, apparently.

A report came out last week condemning the myopic and monolithic education system that has grown out of the 'basics and testing' reforms of the Thatcher years, so more 'I told you so' quotes from former voices in the wilderness (including mine, if anyone was listening !). Apparently we shouldn't have thrown out all that dance and drama and sport and social studies.

At the start of the next hundred days comes my fitness regime, and it's going well so far. Check out http://hundredpushups.com/ to see my project for the six weeks of Lent. Anyone care to join me ?

I'm on week 1.

let us build a tent

We met with an architect yesterday, chatting over our plans and ideas, walking over the site of The Build. He asked if I'd heard of a book called A Pattern Language. This was enough to commend him to me, and I did feel we were talking the same language about what we want in the house. There was also a sense of relief about sharing responsibility for this huge undertaking. Remind me of this six weeks into the build process...
For some I've talked with the undertaking of travelling half-way round the world twice and rebuilding a life in each place seems a much bigger project than overseeing a house-build and I guess it's about confidence and familiarity. Somehow the relocation seemed like a no-brainer to me, maybe because I'd done it once already when I was young and invincible and it seemed to go without a hitch. The hitches revealed themselves later and I've spent those years unravelling them.
I put together an online scrapbook of pictures that express aspects of what I want in the house. It's here:



Click on the slideshow to see it on Picasa

air traffic over 24 hours

on the hour

There's news everywhere all the time. At the moment it's 30-40% economy-themed stories; factories and shops closing, unemployment, bank bailouts, political arguments about the 'right' approach. Radio news every hour, analysis inbetween, 24-hour news on TV, any amount of it on the interweb, all for the choosing - and I do. For me there's a fine line between finding it compelling and finding it compulsive, but there's something else. It's a culture's stream of consciousness, the prevailing wind of preoccupations and anxieties masquerading as information. In New Zealand the news was about injustice, race, road death, crime and local celebrities. Here in Scotland it's about money, class, far-away places, hierarchies. I couldn't get enough of it to begin with; the wall of sound in front of the speakers, where in New Zealand I heard the news through a glass pressed against the wall, sifting through endless individuals bitten by dogs. It's a phase of course. I'm used to those, and already I'm getting bored of it. The interweb at least allows a view into the way different cultures report events; New York Times, al-jazeera, the Onion, Arts and Letters. I checked out the New Zealand 'Stuff' website for, well, stuff on the recession over there. Top of the headlines were John Key getting the plaster off his broken arm, and a dog dying.

I've got new shoes

Drove to Edinburgh today in thickening snow, reaching virtual white-out on Leadburn Moor. Still, got some trainers and some walking boots for a fraction of their original price thanks to the credit crunch. Edinburgh was festive in its white blanket, with rooftops fringed with frosting and streets piled with ploughed snow. I shouldn't have had that piece of lemon cake though.

Mundane I know, but this is the extent of it some days !

More tilt-shifts

 
 
 

Here's more of those pictures (see below). At the top is a jetty in the Lake District, in the middle is Devonport from North Head, and at the bottom the bush railway in the Waitakeres.

Tilt Shift

 
 
 
 

I've been experimenting with an editing technique that produces these tilt-shifted pictures. Anyone recognise the places ?  All actual photos (taken by me) and edited to give the look of model-train style landscapes. It's quite compulsive, though slightly tricky to find appropriate pix. 

In other news, it's still snowing.