Mistaken Identity in a Baghdad Marketplace

I'll spare the details, which are discomforting and nearly always boring, and cut to the denouement. The sinister shadow on last month's scan turned out, upon clearer and more invasive inspection this week, to be nothing more than an aberration on the CT film. In fact a picture - more correctly a full length colour video - emerged of flawless rude health. A golden result; better even than I hoped for.

It isn't quite the appointment in Samarra; more like mistaken identity in a crowded marketplace but still, for me and my ceaselessly inventive imagination, an opportunity to sit down, catch my breath and take stock of what matters.

Something busy this way comes

Today I assume my role as Director of Weird on this year's Traquair Shakespeare production by being on the casting committee at the auditions, which last all afternoon and into the evening.

Next week are the youth auditions for the production and in a few weeks we should have a cast chosen and starting work. I'm looking forward to being involved, and to collaborating with some great people.

Yesterday we moved the giant pile of logs that remained from the clearing of our site. There's firewood for a couple of years, now stacked at the back of the property and hopefully out of the way of the construction process. Several friends and neighbours turned out to help lift, barrow and stack the monster pile, making short work of it.

The site now looks like it could support a house, and I begin to feel that I can build one, or at least put in an appearance in a 'third murderer' kind of role to the real builders.

We're auditioning various building firms and project managers at the moment. I'll let you know once we have a cast list.

Did I show you these ?

Snow on the Sware Hill at different times of the day. Jan 2010.

The other ten percent

My growing unease and dissociation with our house-building project shifted over the past couple of weeks when I accepted that I actually need to be hands-on in the building process. The cost of using a builder to build what we want is way beyond our funds. Although I currently possess very few of the skills needed to build a house, I have friends who do, I have time and I have a willingness to learn. I've also realised that it's a great project through which I can gain confidence in an area where I lack it; a giant to be slain.

What I've learned in theatre is that a creditable outcome can emerge from the 90% commitment that most of us can find for most projects and undertakings. It's the other ten percent that can make it extraordinary. But the other ten percent is the retention, the reserve, the backup, the plan B, the what if. I'm very good at what if, and anyway isn't that the cultural norm ? Going the extra ten percent - if you can find it - moves into total commitment, an outpouring, an adventure; uncool, somewhat fanatical, steady on there, don't go over the top, everything in moderation, healthy degree of scepticism.

Thinking about building a house - or at least being an active part of a house-build project - takes me way outside my comfort zone map and into a place where the ocean might tip off the edge of the world, but is also wildly exciting. It's an opportunity to go over ninety.

Melt

It's melting away. Here's a few final glimpses of our snowy season.

New Year, new socks

This week saw the launch of my new range of drama offerings for kids and young people. A course on Macbeth, a course in performance drama (leading to a small show in Feb) and weekly drama classes for little ones. It was an exercise in blind faith, with bookings so few that I considered cancelling each in turn when the day arrived, only to be surprised three days running with extra bookings, last-minute new arrivals and - in one case - a recommendation from someone who had attended the night before. Most promising set of bookings is for Myriad, the sequel to Oddity which we performed as a live radio show in the summer.

My sister in law has been staying with us, so lots of chats about theatre and business and self-employment and not losing heart and starting out small and having the courage of your convictions and holding one's nerve. Useful and relevant. I have to keep reminding myself that this theatre stuff is what I love to do and it always comes back to that however many side roads I go down. All roads lead back here. It's T. S. Eliot all over again, dammit.

At present my desk is littered with fabric masks, three empty coffee cups, an Elizabethan-style money pouch (with no money in it), a couple of scripts, a book of Celtic prayers, a pile of unanswered correspondence, an electric stapler, two computer magazines, a pocket watch, stamps, a Windows XP installation disk, a wooden ruler, several house designs (don't ask), a pair of gloves, a letter from the Borders Hospital, a book by John Taylor Gatto about approaches to education, a torch, a pair of socks (new) and two passports. An installation of my life.

Filigree

You get the picture.

Arctic

Here's today's satellite image of us.

On New Year's Day

A walk with friends through the snow-clad countryside.

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.