On poetry, inspiration and other things.

I've had Robert Burns on my mind for the past few weeks, mainly because I've been working on a sequence of new poems with a Burns theme. I've always loved the poet and his work, or perhaps that should read the poet in his work. When we first moved up here, when I was a thirteen year old romantic, before age and cynicism got to me, we lived not too far away from Burns Cottage in Alloway, the poet's birthplace. I used to walk there on fine saturday mornings and loiter in the cottage, hoping for a sight of a ghost who remained all too elusive. Sometimes I would vary it by wandering along the nearby banks and braes o' Bonnie Doon, or across the auld brig, over which Tam O' Shanter's grey mare Meg leapt and 'brought off her master hale but left behind her ain grey tail.' It was all grist to my own poetic mill which was grinding fast and furious back then. Later, I persuaded my father to drive me out to Mauchline, Mossgiel and further afield to Ellisland in Dumfriesshire.
Later, I had a couple of collections published, as I have related elsewhere on this blog, and even won Arts Council awards for them. I was on my way. My head was as full of potential poems as an egg is full of meat. I loved doing readings, never minded standing up and speaking in public (still don't) although I was also writing for radio, so envisaged myself being a poet and a playwright for ever and ever and exploring a million ideas.
Then, about thirty years ago (yes, I can be that precise about it - and I was still quite young!) I stopped writing poetry altogether. I wrote plays, lots of them, and books of various kinds, fiction and non fiction, stories, articles, reviews, all sorts of things. Was reasonably successful. But it's hard to describe the feeling I had whenever I tried to write a poem. Actually, most of the time, I didn't even try. Whenever I attempt to analyse it myself, even now, I - who love to describe things - find it almost impossible to relate what happened. The nearest I can come to it is to say that a door slammed shut in my head. I was going through a bad patch, that's for sure. I was in a sense, fighting for my survival, and I think now that my mind, spirit, what you will, had to throw out baby and bathwater together, as a way of preserving my sanity! Something had to go, some sensitivity - and the poetry went with it. And it worked, because I was fine.
It was, I suppose, like a door to a garden. Or something wilder than a garden, a landscape, something complex and enticing and uncircumscribed. It was out there. A place of endless possibilities. But like Alice, grown large and clumsy, I could no longer go there. I knew it still existed, remembered it with nostalgia, and a certain amount of impatience, but it was quite beyond my power to access it.
Over the years though, I found that I was becoming less and less happy with a great deal of what I was writing. I wrote several plays where my inclination was increasingly to pare down, weaving images and meanings together. Line endings mattered. The rhythm of the words mattered. I didn't want to tell everything. Didn't want to be obvious. Sometimes people would 'get' it and sometimes they wouldn't. But I think it was something in me that very slowly, very surely, was nudging me back towards that door, that key, that old beloved landscape.
Last year it came back. Why? Well, I could give you a million possible reasons, to do with the stars, and a certain holy well, and a resolution of some kind and sources of inspiration and muses. But in reality, I think it was just time, and all it needed was a trigger, and eventually, inevitably, it came.
Since then I've been writing poems. Lots of them. Some are - obviously - better than others. I have a lot of catching up to do.
But the most fruitful source of inspiration at the moment, has been Burns himself. My last stage play was called Burns on the Solway. It had mixed reviews, ranging from ecstatic to appalled. (I favour the ecstatic ones myself!) But I was aware, even as I was writing it, that it wasn't saying all that I wanted to say - nor was it saying it in the words I wanted to use.
The voice that was consistently in my head was Jean Armour, not Rab. She had always been in my head, ever since those childhood days at Ellisland. And even more, later, when I had read scholarly accounts of her 'unsuitability' to be the wife of such a man. Burns scholars (particularly men) have always been more attracted to the likes of Highland Mary who loved him and then conveniently died. Never underestimate how engrained is this fantasy in certain male psyches - the tragic mistress who either kills herself, or dies horribly, like Anna Karenina or Madame Bovary - a sad memory who need never trouble her lover with her lingering, ageing presence. And then of course, there's Clarinda, beautiful, teasing, ultimately unavailable so not his problem. Ae fond kiss and then we sever. Nothing becomes a woman like the leaving of her.
But a wife - one who got children, got untidy, got tired, got fat, got wrinkles, who loved him and understood him all too horribly well, who was helplessly, physically attracted to him but not above laying about her with a ladle - oh that would never do for the scholars. And yet, and yet - I have always been fascinated by Jean, admiring her to the point of obsession.
So although my new poems began, like my play, with Burns on the Solway - and unashamedly borrowed some of my own imagery - the more I have written, the more I have found myself writing in Jean's voice with little excursions elsewhere - when, for instance, Nancy McLehose herself, and latterly Jessy Lewars had something to say. The picture that is emerging is beginning to intrigue even me. I may post the odd poem on here, but they are very much works in progress at the moment. More as it happens.

A wee poem for my dad.

Every year (because I think it's on TV in the UK just about every year) I watch that superb film the Railway Children, and at the moment when Bobbie meets the train, I start to cry. I know why I'm crying, and I know too why every other woman I know, who loved her dad and lost him, also sheds a little tear at that precise moment. I've heard that many men are similarly affected and for much the same reason, by the movie Field of Dreams. But the Railway Children does it for me every time. And this year, I thought I would have to write a poem about it, and so I did.

DADDY MY
Dad, dead these fourteen years,
came to the door in a dream last night.
He still does this, a little less
often perhaps, but always
with a wee ache of normality.

I rushed through the room to
take his hand which
seemed oddly cool and small.
In life his hands were warm and
chipped and tinted with paint.
He was a dad who fixed things.

Waking I remembered how
the Railway Children makes me cry
with my incurable need to be Bobbie
in that daddy my daddy moment
meeting my own perfect train.

Novels and poems and other things

Having acquired a new PC a few weeks ago, with all the usual attendant miseries, too boring to go into here, I can't say I've done anything much in the intervening period except keep on top of the bread and butter work, write a few poems, and post bits of The Corncrake on here. Today felt like the first day of spring - warm, sunny, balmy. Can't help but feel that - as they say in Scotland - we'll pay for it - but it was nice to see that big yellow thing in the sky whose name I have forgotten. Rather like when the Isle of Arran emerges from the mists after days of invisibility and you think 'oh yes - there's an island out there, isn't there?'
All of which is to say that I am faffing about trying to decide what to work on next. I am in the position of having begun two different novels, one called The Physic Garden and one called The Marigold Child. Both of them are on my mind rather because one is slightly more 'literary' than the other but both are historical. On the other hand, I had a sudden revelation about the slightly less literary book, and have altered my approach to it quite drastically, which might, I suppose, make it a little more literary as well - although it's still a damn good story, even if I do say so myself.
At the moment, I am using one as displacement activity for the other. Not a good idea, but something that many writers will be familiar with. I must take a decision, take the plunge and decide to go with one or the other. My plan is to draft one of them out completely, and then turn my attention to the other one while I am leaving the first one to lie fallow. By the summer, I should have drafts of two new novels. That's the idea anyway. By the end of the year I should have revised drafts of two new novels. You will notice that there is no mention of plays in here. That's because I have given up on them and decided to use that creative energy, all those voices, in poems. Every play I wrote, latterly, wanted to be a poem. Nobody wanted the plays. But oddly enough, they do seem to want the poems. Better to go with the flow for now.

New Computers and Call Centre Hell

As any writer will tell you, changing computers is the single most dreaded event. You put it off as long as possible, you back-up and compulsively print out, you think 'I won't do it this week, I'll wait a bit' and whichever way you look at it, you know it's going to be pure hell. It always is.
I've just done it, and it was pure hell and the ramifications are still rumbling on, causing me to waste time, tear out my hair, and call upon God to witness that I have never done anything to deserve such pain and angst. Let nobody, not even PC World (the main culprits in this instance) tell you that they will make the transition smooth and pain free. They won't and they haven't. The actual events - though I have them written out in full for my own records - are too vastly complicated to be anything but boring, so I won't list them here. Save to say that I wanted (a) a new PC with Vista and Office 2007 and (b) a full data transfer from my old PC, as well as a health check, and whatever needed doing to make it run properly. It's an elderly (hmm, well, 5 years) HP and a good computer, and I wanted to be able to use it as a word processor, unconnected to the internet. Let me say right from the start that the old PC, bought from PC World has never given me a moment's trouble. Well hardly any. And the new one seems to be working pretty well too. And I like Office 2007 very much indeed, even though I have to make sure I save documents in the old format when I'm attaching them to emails, since most people's older versions can't read them without downloading something else. But these are minor points. No, what happened with PC World was that for about two weeks they didn't do what they said they would do and never phoned me to let me know what was going on. I spent a fortnight running back and forth to the store, to the extent that they have just, very kindly, sent me a cheque for £50 to cover my unneccessary petrol expenses. I spent what in retrospect seems like hours speaking to polite young men in call centres (in Sheffield, so they told me. We got quite friendly.) On more than one occasion I was forced to take a couple of Kalms. You know that feeling you get when you would like to go out and smash something? Possibly a computer.
The old PC is up and running again after a fashion, but seems sluggish and unhappy, and faintly off colour, like somebody recovering from the flu. Also they succeeded in corrupting a heap of files, so I have had to re-install all kinds of things. The old, old, old PC with its old old version of Word, which I have been using for word processing for some time, was wonderful, fast, clear, easy. I long for its return, and eye it as it sits forlornly in a corner of the room, waiting to be formatted and taken to the saleroom. It has never been online, and it doesn't really have any private data on it. Unfortunately, it only had an old fashioned floppy drive, and even that didn't seem to be working properly, so whatever you put on it was precarious to say the least. Otherwise, I would be using it yet.
But PC World weren't the only culprits. No, Orange weren't exactly angels either. More polite young men tried to get my broadband to work with Vista. I have been on and off the phone to them as well, and on and offline more times than I care to recall, and yesterday I had to try fiddling with it myself, in an effort to get it to work. (Which, eventually, I'm pleased to say, it did although not thanks to any of the helpful young men at Orange.) I'm writing this from elsewhere, so I'm still not sure if my solution is permanent or temporary, which for someone trying to run an internet business is challenging to say the least.
I am seriously thinking of reverting to Pen and Paper.
Meanwhile, this week, the Bank got a standing order wrong, and paid my accountant twice over.
Yesterday, Sky phoned me to offer me a month's free trial of films and sport. The only snag was that you had to set it up, and then if you didn't want to continue with it permanently, you had to let them know within 24 hours. You mean, I asked the bright young woman on the end of the line, you mean I have to phone Sky? (press one for... press two for...)
Well yes, she said.
In that case, thank-you very much but I don't think I'll bother, I said.

Torchwood, Norman Wisdom and a Bit of Jamie

I spent most of yesterday evening sitting on the couch like a slug and watching TV in between playing with the new PC and finding out some of what Vista can do. (quite a lot as it turns out, and very elegantly, but sometimes the speed of my typing causes it to throw a bit of a wobbly) so here's a little TV review.
Torchwood is back - I never quite got into it the way I got into wonderful Doctor Who, but this new series seemed watchable, and entertaining, if only for the sight of Buffy's Spike (for whom I must confess I had a very soft spot in his previous vampire incarnation) dressed like an escapee from Pirates of The Caribbean, kissing Captain Jack. This lead me to a bit of mild speculation as to why it's OK for heterosexual men, and gays of either sex to incorporate their fantasies into their writing - and don't get me wrong - they often do it very well indeed! - but when us middle aged heterosexual women try to do it, we are roundly slated for being romantic or sentimental or both. This is not, incidentally a criticism of those who get away with it. More a plea that all of us should be allowed to do it and when we do it well, accorded the same leeway as the rest of you.
After that, and mainly because by that stage I couldn't bear to leave the fireside for the relative chill of the study, I watched a programme about an aged Norman Wisdom and his family's problems in finding suitable care for him. I found this a distasteful and exploitative little programme, masquerading as public service broadcasting - what do we do with our old folk? As one who sometimes feels that she is hurtling through life at twice the speed of light, it should have been interesting and thought provoking but it was simply undignified and embarrassing and depressing, and the most depressing thing about it was that his family had allowed it to be made at all.
It was, however, Jamie Oliver who eventually drove me back to the PC. Chickens are one thing, and I know we're all getting fatter, (especially while watching television in a wintry stupor) but sitting people in baths of oil while a scrawny doctor reduces them to tears by implying that they are going to DIE VERY SOON, all so that Jamie can be solicitous and offer a solution - well, it quickly became unwatchable. In fact curiously enough, while the programme about chickens would almost certainly have made people look at the alternative to the miserable battery farmed option, this week's offering probably had people rushing for the crisps and coke through sheer misery and panic. If the programme about Norman Wisdom was a wee knock, this was full on car crash television. Better by far to watch kissing time agents and get a vicarious thrill out of it. At least that may have given some of us an aerobic lift.

New Ventures and The Curiosity Cabinet on Audible.

Apologies to my irregularly regular readers for a rather big gap in posts to this blog. The main reason (other than seasonal distractions) has been that I have spent the last few months taking stock of where I'm at with my writing and perhaps more importantly trying to decide where I want to go next. Obviously, this is the right time of year to put some of those decisions into practice.
As I've said elsewhere on this blog, somewhere about mid 2007, poetry came back into my life. It was sudden and unexpected - a lightning strike really - and to be honest, I wondered if it would stay. But so far, fingers crossed, it has, and I find myself working on more poems than I have written for some twenty five years. Nobody ever made much of a living from poems, but I don't really care about that. I'm too busy thinking about the insights they bring with them.
Yet another change was inspired by a friend and excellent critic who read The Curiosity Cabinet and told me that - although he liked the whole book - he thought the historical sections were somehow better imagined and therefore more successful in many ways than the modern sections. On reflection, I reckon he's right, and this too helped me to see that the novel I have been struggling with for the last couple of years wasn't working too well because it is crying out to be a historical novel - and I was desperately trying to turn it into a contemporary solution to an old mystery - with marketing in mind.
I had written some 75 pages of it, very very slowly, and found myself disliking quite a lot of it. So I have temporarily shelved it - the basic theme and story is a good one, so I'll certainly be going back to it. But to give myself breathing space, I am now deep into a novel set in Glasgow a couple of hundred years ago. It's a reasonably literary story about a loving male friendship, a tragedy, and changing times and so far I'm enchanted by it. I hope that one of these days, some editors might be enchanted by it as well!
Incidentally, if you would like to read The Curiosity Cabinet you can now find a download from the excellent Audible - a very good unabridged reading from a reputable company.
Meanwhile, I have something for you to read - this week, and for some weeks to come - but I'll save it for a new post, later on today.

The Scent of Blue, final version



For anyone who can't (or doesn't want to!) get hold of the poetry pamphlet, here's the last draft of the title poem, which seems to strike a chord with a number of people, particularly women. There's an earlier version of this somewhere on here - but this is the one that was published.




THE SCENT OF BLUE

A concert in Edinburgh, years ago.
She manages to find a single seat,
sees a famous conductor,
silver haired, sharp featured like some
bird of prey, but smaller than you would
expect in evening dress.
On his arm a thin woman,
taller than he is, strides with
striking face and hair, a cloud of
grey blonde curls around her head.
Not a young woman but a
diva surely, inhabiting her clothes,
inhabiting her skin with such confidence.
She wants to be like that some day,
longs for self possession
and she remembers the scent of her,
musky, mysterious, a heavy, night time
scent, like flowers after dark.
The scent of passion.
The scent of money.
The scent of blue.

She searches for the scent for years.
Her mother wore Tweed.
Now she wishes she could
open a wardrobe door, and
smell the scent of Tweed, her
mother’s plain sweet scent,
almost as much as she
wishes she could tell her mother so.

As a girl, she wears Bluebell,
fresh and full of hope, or
Diorissimo, like the lilac she once
carried through the streets,
on her way from meeting a man
she desired and admired, thinking
Girl with Lilac, still so young,
self conscious, not possessed.
Later, she tries luscious l’Air du Temps and
Je Reviens and Fleurs de Rocaille
but they are none of them the scent of blue.
She wears Chanel, briefly, with
dreams of Marilyn,
loves to watch her, loves to hear her voice,
soothing as chocolate but
Number Five is not her scent,
never suits her, never will.

She discovers Mitsouko.
Some tester in some chemist’s shop somewhere.
An old, old fashioned scent,
syncopated, unexpected, not to every taste.
Whenever she wears it,
women ask her what it is,
I love your scent they say.
How strange the way scent lingers in the mind.
How strange the way scent
changes on warm skin.
On her it ripens to something peachy,
mossy, rich and singular.
But it is not the scent of blue.

She loses her heart.
It is an affair of telephone lines
more profound, more sweet and
bitter even than Mitsouko,
a sad song in the dark,
and the colour of that time is blue.

Afterwards, she searches through
Bellodgia, Apres L’Ondee,
Nuit de Noel, Mon Peche, Apercu
until drawn by nostalgia
she finds Joy,
dearly bought roses and jasmine,
a summer garden in one small bottle.
She marries in Joy.
But she wears Mitsouko
and she forgets the scent of blue.

Older, she discovers Arpege,
not just rose and jasmine but
bergamot, orange blossom, peach,
vanilla, ylang ylang,
one essence piled on another like the
notes on the piano she
used to, sometimes still does, play:
love songs mostly.
Oh this is not a scent for the very young.
It is too dark for that
a memory of something lost,
an unfinished story.
This scent has a past.

She sees him across a room.
Another woman ushers him,
this way and that, makes introductions,
a little charmed the way women
always did flutter irresistably around this man.
It used to make her smile the way
women flocked around this
wolf who walked alone who
belonged to nobody but himself.

She is wearing Arpege.
Not a scent for the very young,
vertiginous as the layers of time between.
With age comes wisdom,
but as when mud is
stirred at the bottom of a pool,
memories bubble to the surface.
Not wisely but too well they loved.
Now, they are waving across the
chasm of the years.
They speak, in measured tones,
they speak and walk away,
they speak again in careful words, that
every now and then
recall the scent of

No.
It will not do.
Only in dreams
can one innocently recapture that
first fine careless

So much more is forgotten
than is ever remembered.
And the clock insists
let it be let it be.

1911.
One summer evening
a young man observes the way
twilight closes the flowers,
whose scent lingers on the last heat of the day,
the way the light goes out of the sky,
painting it dark blue, how
soon the war will tear this place apart.
How soon all things resort to sadness.

In a new century,
She finds among jasmine and rose,
vanilla and violet,
a dark twist of anise, like the
twist of a knife.
First last always.
The scent of the diva.
The scent of passion.
Fine beyond imagining.
She sees it is essentially
sad, sad, sad, a
sad scent:
L’Heure Bleue.
The beautiful bitter perilous scent of blue.

November Blues

Almost the end of November, and what have I achieved this month? Sweet nothing, that's what.
Is it the time of year or the time of life? I don't know.
I have sat at my desk and tried to write, regularly, but the results have been something less than inspiring.
I have done a lot of thinking and the results of that have been a bit more interesting, but faintly depressing as well.
I am chasing my tail to make some money but the bills get higher and the earnings get lower, and after a while, you wonder what it's all about.
The mornings are dark and the evenings are darker and you work away but nobody wants what you have written...
Welcome to the world of freelance writing.
You may remember that - a longish while ago - I mentioned a play called The Physic Garden and how I was waiting to hear from David McLennan at the Oran Mor about it.
Have I heard from him? You bet your sweet life I haven't. Not a word, zero, zilch, nada.
BUT, having lived with William (the gardener) and Thomas (the botany lecturer) for all these months, I have begun to think that there is more to these characters and their relationship than meets the eye, much much more than I have been tinkering with in the play - and so I have begun to write their story as a novel. Thomas is the one telling it. And it suddenly seems to have the potential to be a serious, funny, moving and literary story.
All of which fits in with the doubts that have been besetting me with increasing regularity over the past couple of months. I think I have seriously short changed myself for years and years in the pursuit of the elusive will o' the wisp of commercial success. Nothing wrong, I might add, with a bit of commercial success. But when you find that you are increasingly tailoring what you write to the demands of some elusive market - and actually, you still aren't making any money out of it, however, professionally you behave - you do start to wonder. I must admit, that over the past few months, I have started to think that I have been selling myself short for years. I used to have the potential to be a writer of some consequence. One or two of my plays have shown the literary skills I used to have. So have a few of the poems. I should have been more true to myself all those years ago. I should have written what I wanted to write, explored all those ideas I wanted to explore, grown and stretched myself. Instead, I have the uneasy feeling that I have run up and down a series of dead ends, and the result has been that I am ill considered among people who used to admire what I did - and I still haven't made any money. Worst of both worlds really. This is a cautionary tale. Be true to yourself above all else. What I need to do (as a friend recently pointed out, succinctly) is 'fail better.' How right he is.
I'm about to give it another try.

A Room With A View - TV Version

I was so irritated by the latest television version of this classic novel that I had to wait for a day or two, just to calm down, before posting about it. Have to say I mostly hated it.
This is a much loved book as far as I'm concerned, one I read over and over again - and always find something new in it. But what could have possessed the ubiquitous Andrew Davies to change the ending so radically and what could have possessed whoever was in charge to let him? Or does he now have so much power in television circles that nobody dares to question him ?
If you haven't already watched it, don't. Go and buy the excellent movie version instead.
There were other faults with the production too, although it seems like overkill to detail them here. But one did wonder whether the casting director had quite deliberately chosen plain Brits so that he or she could contrast them with beautiful Italians. Plainness would have been forgiveable. It was just that the young men in particular had a lumpish and underanimated quality that made you wonder why anybody could ever have fallen for them. George came across as just a bit of a lad instead of the wonderful, complex and troubled young man of the novel and the film. Plus the accents, particularly Cecil's (who is written to perfection in the novel) were dodgy in the extreme. But all of this pales into insignificance beside Davies' inexplicable and wrong headed decision to kill off our hero in the war and show us a last scene with Lucy and a young Italian (admittedly a much more beautiful Italian than poor dead George) picnicking in the Florentine hills with the implication that there might just be a bit of obligatory Davies bonking round the corner.
It was AWFUL and not just because it wasn't Forster's ending at all. Because the new ending was predicted right at the start of this adaptation, and then throughout, by various flashes forward to a shorn and short skirted Lucy alone in Florence, the whole lovely balance of the book and the movie, the inevitability of the ending which is at once romantic and revolutionary, the headlong rush of it all, was not just upset but completely and utterly destroyed. Which perhaps explainswhy it left me feeling not just upset but incandescent with rage. I'll have to go and watch the film again, just to get a sense of perspective!

The Scent of Blue - Poetry Pamphlet


I've just published (or rather Wordarts has published) my own poetry pamphlet, called The Scent of Blue. In due course, it should be available from my eBay shop, The Scottish Home and from the Scottish Pamphlet Poetry website.

My last collection of poetry was published more than 25 years ago.
Since then, I've written plays for radio and the stage, novels, and histories. But this new collection comes as something of a surprise even to me. I hope that it will be the first of many. There are poems old and new here, one or two of which have already been published in magazines and anthologies including a poem called Thread, which was published in Antonia Fraser's anthology of Scottish Love Poetry. There are previously unpublished recollections of time spent in Finland and Poland And there are poems which reflect my passion for vintage perfumes and textiles, sensual, tactile things and how they can serve to reawaken memories as well as reminding us of milestones in our lives. Incidentally, if anyone is wondering about the cover picture, it's a piece of very old Chinese embroidery, slightly timeworn and rather beautiful - I'm hoping it's appropriate to the collection itself!
Meanwhile, just to give you a flavour, here's an example:


MIDNIGHT SUN

Is it day or night?
The city streets
clasp the heat fast and
late drunks tumble home to sleep.

Is it day or night?
In the warm forest
marsh marigolds jostle for a place,
small lilies crouch in hooded green,
confused thrushes chatter
like shattered glass.

Is it day or night?
Small creatures furrow
lightly on the lake in
random, purposeful lines.
Mosquitoes pilot in and bite.
Black beetles toddle to the
water’s edge.
The surface is streaked with
pollen, soft as a man’s hair.

Is it night or day?
The sun that makes a narrow angle
with the lake’s thin line
considers for a moment
along the slender
very rim of the dark
and rises again.

Art History

Have signed up for an Art History class at Glasgow University, partly because it's something I've wanted to do for ages, and partly because I have a hankering for somebody to teach me something, rather than the other way around! I looked for something closer to home, but all the local classes seemed to be vocational: modules with tests and homework. I wanted a bit of the real lifelong learning that the government is always banging on about. Except that they lie. They don't really subscribe to the idea of lifelong learning at all, or only insofar as it's a way of making people more employable. Which is all very worthy. But it's just possible that we may occasionally want to find out about something for its own sake, to learn for the sake of learning, and not for the sake of the piece of paper at the end of it.
The lecturer on this particular course is in his eighties. He is gentle, non didactic, and brimming with the wisdom of his years. This will be his last course, so I'm lucky to have signed up. In the first class he burst into song, in a beautifully melodic tenor voice - 'she was just the sort of girl me boys that nature did intend, to walk right through the world me boys, without a Grecian bend..' Did we know what a Grecian bend was? No but all of us knew the song, and all of us had wondered. He explained, and proceeded to use it as an introduction to a lecture on Greek art and architecture. Not sure what he's planning for next week, but I can't wait.

Windscale Accident

Having written a play about Chernobyl (Wormwood, produced at the Traverse Theatre in Edinburgh) I've been following recent radio and TV programmes which have been marking the 50th anniversary of the terrible accident at Windscale (now renamed Sellafield) with some interest. I was a very young child when all this happened, and knew next to nothing about it, although it occurs to me now, that my late father, a scientist, must have been well aware of it, and this was perhaps why - although he worked with radio isotopes for much of his (somewhat foreshortened) life - he still had a healthy scepticism about the nuclear industry and would ask searching and awkward questions about hidden costs, whenever he chanced to be at one of those 'ain't nuclear power grand' presentations.
What struck me most about last night's excellent BBC documentary about the accident (apart from the utterly superb and scurrilous last line, of course) was the way the scientists had been well and truly stitched up by the politicians of the time - and the press had more or less swallowed the whole lying story. That, and the fact that as the surrounding countryside was being showered with radioactive elements which included deadly-beyond-belief Polonium, the residents of nearby Seascale were treated like mushrooms, ie kept in the dark and fed shit. People only removed themselves and their children when workers at the plant managed to get messages home. There was no planned evacuation.
The news at the time was a cover-up that the soviets would have been proud of.
All of which leads me to wonder why so many politicians are now astonished to find that the media savvy population at large don't ever really believe a word they say. Particularly when that word is intended to reassure and prevent panic. Or as they say in Scots, the only language where a double positive can mean completely the opposite - 'aye, right!'

Cash in the Attic - Puns R Us

Have been watching Cash in the Attic, over lunch. This masquerades as 'research' though how much I ever learn from it about my particular branch of collectables (ie textiles, see The Scottish Home ) I wouldn't know. A couple of weeks ago, somebody wrote to the Radio Times about the number of puns in this programme and how it was driving them daft. Now I was vaguely aware that the pun count was fairly heavy, but you don't notice every single one until somebody points them out to you. So we sat there, today, over our yoghurt and fruit, and started counting them. Actually, we soon lost count. Every single comment, every single bit of whatever passes for a script was just a long succession of godawful smartass puns. Why do they do it?
Each programme has exactly the same structure. The participants and presenters are filmed 'discovering' things that just happen to be lurking in the front of cupboards, and then the participants are persuaded to sell these family heirlooms for what sometimes seems to be a mess of pottage. Well, I know they're all willing volunteers, but it does occasionally look as though some gentle browbeating goes on. Then, they do quite well with the first few lots, after which there is a short spell in the middle where a few lots don't quite make the grade (ooh, says the presenter, maybe Phyllis and Albert won't manage their sky diving trip after all) only for things to look up with the final few lots. Are they the final few lots? Doubt it. I've never been to an auction room yet where every sale followed the same rigid pattern.
So why do they do it? It's as if the programme makers somehow get into a rut that they simply can't get out of. The heavy handed structure - we don't need it. We won't complain if you shake it up and cheat us of our expectations a bit. We're only watching because we're working from home, we're having lunch, we're nosy, we like to see what other people have in their cupboards, and we quite like to listen to what the experts have to say about various pieces and without the awful lame puns. Please. Gonnae no dae that? Gonnae no?