Wednesday, 1.30pm

Wednesday morning 10am

Wednesday morning, early

Keira

New member of the family. Actually we dog-share her with another family. We look after her from Sat - Tues every week. She likes it. We like it.

Mellow fruitfulness

Orange and gold leaves, damp earthy smells, purple and silver sunsets, and these transient beauties abound.

drains and mesh

so here are the drains, the floor pad with insulation beneath, and a steel mesh to bind them all.

Now covered in concrete we await delivery of the frame, on hold until the planning officer decides to release the building warrant. These people love their petty power. I wonder if he drives a big white car.

Is that it ?

I'm told this is the stage when the space looks the smallest. How can we possibly live in that ?

founds

Week 3: blockwork and concrete !

Digging down to build up

Construction begins August 2010 with trenches going much deeper than expected. The site originally sloped fairly sharply down to the Edderston Burn and was filled and levelled with builders rubbish from the building of our old house next door.

Finding the hard ground meant digging down nearly 2.5 metres towards the rear of the site. Consequently the foundations are so deep that we needed three times as much concrete to fill them.

Lucky I don't care at all about those green issues.

Suddenly September

Yes, yes; no posts for a few months. Not that you were looking...

Anyway, it's now August with its deep green, smoke and wafts of cooler evening air hinting at the season to come. We spent the summer in New Zealand (well.. the winter in Auckland- you know what I mean) and sojourned in Hong Kong on the way home. Extraordinary. Temple Street market. Those in the know will smile.

In NZ I ran some short drama courses for lively and enthusiastic home-schooled students, who always restore my faith in young people.

Back home there is now a large hole filled with concrete where once our garden grew. Dramatic beginnings to our little house project with deeper-than-expected trenches (nearly 2.5 metres at the far end) taking three concrete trucks to fill them even half full.

Photos to follow.
Possibly a separate bog site to record the build process. It's all in flux.

Easter 2010

The start of the Easter weekend and the ground is once again blanketed with snow. I had to dig the car out of a small drift yesterday, and we measured 24cm of snow on the drive on Wednesday.

Last night was our live radio performance and recording of Myriad, a comic sci-fi piece performed by an enthusiastic group of young people. CDs and a podcast will follow once I've edited the gigabyte of digital audio information down to something more manageable.

Meetings, coffee and taking stock over the next two weeks of school holiday.

Digest

House plans now lodged with the planning office at Borders Council. The long wait begins.

Went to see Rapture Theatre's rendition of Hamlet on Friday night, set in modern day Glasgow at the infamous Elsinore Corporation. Superbly done despite the potentially cheesy setting. Hamlet was played vulnerable, unpredictable, emotional. The whole production was tight, sparse, pacy. The ghost scene was successfully played for laughs, unlikely as it sounds, and the gravedigger was ironic and self-referencing. A good show, and right on our doorstep at the Eastgate Theatre.

Our rehearsals for Myriad race on, with only two left before the performance. I have a soundtrack to put together before next Monday, consisting mostly of explosions, electronic beeps and clicks, accelerating spaceships and menacing ambiences of one sort or another. What's not to enjoy ?

Macbeth rehearsals have also kicked off quietly with a workshop for some of the principal Weirds. This Thursday is a textual analysis of Act 1 Scene 3 and some playing around with movement and voice.

I'm reading The End Of Mr Y by Scarlett Thomas at the moment; part novel, part thought experiment - an interesting mish-mash. A friend lent me The Road by Cormac McCarthy but I might have to wait til the weather's more uplifting before subjecting myself to that

Went food shopping and noticed my momentary discomfort at taking a Sainsbury's reusable shopping bag into Tesco. What's that all about ?  Actually Sainsbury's promotional slogan for their reusable shopping bags "Take An Old Bag Shopping" almost deserves switching, but the prices don't.

Street View

Peebles is now on Google Earth Street View !
Have you noticed that wherever Google goes, it's summer ?

Anyway, it's worth a look at our pretty summer town.

Busy

Busy.

Have you seen this ?

http://www.wefeelfine.org

Whiteout

Yesterday I watched the sun rise over frostladen fields washed in pink and gold light. Everything bright and cold and still. Today someone's shaken the glass globe where Peebles nests. Snow tumbles up past my first-floor window.

Digest

Spent the weekend fighting with the new spiral binder machine, reprinting mis-cut pages and failing to find a quick way of working out which way round to put the binder combs into the machine. Notwithstanding, the Myriad scripts are now bound, labelled and ready for tonight's read-through and audition.

On Thursday I saw Roger Llewellyn perform Sherlock Holmes; The Death And Life at the Eastgate Theatre. An impressive one-man performance of a clever script.

House plans are ready to go to the planners. We're both feeling reconnected to the build project and excited about getting started. Now the trees are cleared and the snow has mostly melted away the place looks ready for a house to grow on it. Next hurdles are planning, engineering and costing.

Our family movie on Sunday was What's Eating Gilbert Grape ? Johnny Depp and Leonardo DiCaprio as you'd forgotten they were.

Simon and I saw Invictus at the weekend, and his DVD of 9 arrived. Screen feast.

Dramatic Intentions

Last night saw the culmination of one of my short drama courses in an evening of improvised sketches and games at the theatre, titled Dramatic Intentions. For some of the kids it was their first time on stage so they did well to make it all up as they went along. A fun evening despite my usual anxiety cramps beforehand.

A week of school half-term now then a new set of courses start up, including the radio performance on Myriad in March. This has attracted much interest and I'm looking forward to doing some off-the-wall geek comedy again.

Meanwhile house plans are thrusting forward again after a period up a side street when we ceased to feel the project was our own. Back on track now we are ready to put the planning application in and enter negotiations with the planners.

Winter draws on, with the pale faces and translucent skin tones that characterise this time of year. The birds and squirrels are ever-optimistic, emptying the feeders every other day and starting to flirt with each other in the bare branches of the trees.

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.