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.

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.

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.

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.