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.