Today's Walk - Clunie

Beavers have had a go at the saplings by the water

A dank and silent pool, that always reminds me of the one at the entrance to Moria, in Lord of the Rings

Finally it feels like Spring is, well, not quite here, but definitely On Its Way.  The snowdrops are over and suddenly daffodils are everywhere.  I went over to my regular haunt - Loch Clunie - with my binoculars, hoping to see an osprey. The male has returned to Loch of the Lowes which is just a few miles further along the road, and you just never know.  I was also keeping an eye out for kites, which I'm seeing more frequently these days.

Not today though.  I did see a number of buzzards, three whooper swans, two mute swans, and some long-tailed tits, and that was about it except for the usual pheasants, crows, and mallard ducks.  And a solitary lapwing flying over the road - I think there might have been another sitting in a field, in fact I'm fairly sure of it, and I hope they are a pair and will nest.

I had a look for frog spawn -  again, nothing.  It is a bit early for it here.

It's still bitterly cold when the sun goes in and the wind blows, but at least the days are longer and there is some warmth around.  

I feel that my brain is still in winter-mode.  Not just my brain - my whole system.

Perhaps I need a de-tox or something.

Or perhaps I should just wait, and see how I feel as the year unfolds...

I haven't forgotten about Tuppence, by the way.  He's fine.  The sweat lodge did him a power of good....

More on all that,  later............

Daevid Allen - Sacred Geometry

Nothing Is Required But Freedom - Berfrois

Nothing Is Required But Freedom - Berfrois



Kant.  Worth a read.

Today's Walk - inside my Own Head

I haven't been outside for a couple of days, except to post a letter, as I've been feeling very ill with a fluey cold.  After one day's respite the weather has continued to be awful again anyway - chilly, steady rain, low skies, interspersed with bouts of 'wind'.  (Which reminds me - I need to summon up the strenf to rescue Tuppence from the ersatz sweat lodge sometime soon.)
Everything is muddy and wintry and Somme-like, still.  Few signs of Spring - certainly nothing much to indicate that the world is coming alive again.
I've been feeling so feeble I've barely read a thing.  However, I did finish one of my last charity shop buys - 'Hello',  Leslie Phillips' autobiography, which I expected to find interesting. I always enjoy his films. However, the book doesn't go into nearly enough detail for my liking.  About anything, really. Which is quite infuriating.  I shouldn't complain though.  I suppose he's had such a long career he would have needed to write several volumes in order to do it all justice, and I'm sure he probably couldn't be bothered.  I get the feeling too that he's probably held back a lot in order to preserve other people's secrets and dignity - and possibly his own.  There is a recent documentary about him on Youtube, I think, if you care to seek it out.
I still haven't finished my second charity shop buy - James Shapiro's '1599 - A Year in the Life of William Shakespeare'.  I tend to read last thing at night, generally, and two or three lines of '1599' and I'm off to sleep.    It's tremendously well-researched (edifying springs to mind) but not sufficiently gripping to keep me awake at 1 a.m..
Which is all to the good as far as I'm concerned.
I listened to a programme about dark matter on Radio Four this morning.  I think it was In Our Time with Melvyn Bragg.  Apparently (and think I sort of knew this before I heard the programme) dark matter is what holds the universe together, only nobody knows what it is.  They aren't even sure what it isn't.  They only know that it's there because it affects other things.  I got quite excited, listening, because that makes complete sense to me.  Or at least it gives me the feeling that it would, if only I sat down and thought about it for a while.  It could even explain human nature and the concept of Good and Evil.  It's the concept of Shadow writ large. And it's not an abstract concept - it really does seem to be that way, in the nature of the energies of which we are a part.   There is some kind of interactive dynamic, between dark and light,  and the one, so it would appear, I think, really cannot exist without the other.  Besides the obvious analogies there's a whole philosophical treatise to be written about that - to add to the hundreds if not thousands already in progress.  Nobody can have completed one because nobody yet knows what the subject really is.
I find it tremendously exciting to learn more about the Universe as I hurtle grave-wards. Perhaps I am going to return to the place 'from whence I came', i.e. Somewhere Out There, and will be recycled as a dark matter 'atom' (not that anyone knows if there are such things in dark matter).  Or perhaps I'll be a bubble in the Soup Dragon's cauldron.
I must read more about it.

King Crimson - Larks' Tongues in Aspic

Today's Walk - Clunie

Loch Clunie - again.  A very dreich day, and I was tired, so didn't walk round it as I usually do.  I admired the masses of snowdrops, which will be followed by an even better display of bluebells as Spring progresses.  Unfortunately my present camera is very basic and can't do them justice.
Good views of Castle Hill (flat-topped mound on the far side) and of the island, with the Bishop of Dunkeld's house.  Obviously it doesn't belong to the Bishop of Dunkeld any more - and hasn't for a couple of hundred years, as I remember.  It's a shell now.  What a shame.  It must have been a great place to hole up in on a wild and stormy night...the only access by boat...looking out at the churning black waters of the loch from an upper window, while sipping a glass of best brandy and gnawing a peacock's leg (or your own, if supplies were low), and driftwood smouldered in the stone fireplace...
The house did actually burn down in the 1950s, but I'm unsure why.  Possibly smouldering driftwood.
Wildlife spotted today included a herd of about a dozen roe deer in a field (unusual to see such a large group in the open), flocks of geese (greylags I think...) and cormorants on the trees on the island.  Mallards and tufted ducks on the loch.  Various small birds such as blackies, robins, coal tits and wrens active in the surrounding woods.

Gin, Cigarettes, and Desperation: The Carson McCullers Diet

Gin, Cigarettes, and Desperation: The Carson McCullers Diet



I'm a big fan.

Fart fart fart &c.., oh - and higher selves...

'FART FART FART OWF DE AUTOBAN.  FART FART FART OWF DE AUTOBAN. FART FART FART OWF.....'
'No, he's not cured yet.  Put him back in, and give him an extra knee rug,'  I shouted to Geoffrey, through the hole in the wall.  I shouted because I was on the settee, with my feet up, picking my nose and reading the letters page of the 'Daily Bugle', and Geoffrey was Outside, by the Ersatz Sweat Lodge, which we'd built by the Old Midden, from a kit we'd bought from Val Nark's eco-health-shop.
'Right-oh.'
'And turn the dial up to 'red'.'
'Okey-doke.'
'And make sure you close the door properly this time.  We don't want any heat to leak out, like it did before.'  Not to mention his tiresome singing, I thought to myself.  But I didn't say it out loud. Which is unusual for me.
'Like it did before, when it was YOUR turn to close it by the way.  Anything else?'
'Pick up a barrel of best brandy, three pounds of baccy, some tea-bags and a bag of jellybabies when you're passing the tunnels.  Oh, and a pint of milk.  Make that two.  And a tin of Campbell's meatballs - I feel like having something different for tea.  I'm going to curry them.'
Anyway.  As you'll have gathered, if you've been following things recently,  Tuppence has been suffering from an intractable fever and pickled onion flavr Monster Munch addiction after his stay in gaol; on the advice of Val Nark we built an Ersatz sweat lodge for him to stay in till he's cured.
So far there's been no change in his condition, except that he keeps singing any Kraftwerk song which includes the word FAHRT,  phonetically, in a heavy and terrible German accent.
We're not sure how long the cure is supposed to take - there was nothing in the instructions and Val was a bit vague time-scale-wise. 'Just till he's better, for God's sake!" she barked.  "Now go away and use your common sense.  I WOULD say consult your 'higher selves' using hazel rod divining twigs, but I know you've not got those.   Higher selves, that is, not the twigs.   The twigs are available to buy in my shop, prices starting from £10.99 per individual twig.  You two idiots, with your persistently oafish refusal to address your vile processed meat, alcohol, salty snax and baccy predilections will probably remain on the basest, crudest and most repulsive level for the rest of your unnatural lives.  Anyway I've sixty pallets of flapjacks to ship to North America and I need to focus.'
'Level?  Level of what?'
'Spiritual development, of course. An ability to commune with your higher selves.  Me and Dave do that all the time, of course, what with us being vegan and having an eco-business and living in yurts and all.  But you two never, ever will.  Be able to, that is.  Now sod off and let me get on.'
Oh dear.  Higher selves though?  I was intrigued...
'Just get me the Monster Munches and I'll be right as rain,'  a thin voice wailed as Geoffrey secured the flaps and thumped the pegs into the ground with a mallet. 'I'm bored in here.  I know it's meant to be hot and dark and sweaty and it's all for my own good but I'm fed up now - please let me out.  And if you don't let me out, rest assured that I'll wreak a horrible revenge...you know I will....'

Next time....Tuppence finally gets out of the sweat lodge, and Geoffrey and I run away from him and his wrath, on the pretext of setting off to find our higher selves.....

Jock Mckay Aka Jack Mckay (1930)

My late father had a habit of saying 'Aye aye, Jock Mackay' during lulls in conversation.  I'd no idea that there really ever was a Jock Mackay, but good grief here he is on Youtube, in the 'flesh', and wearing a delightful 'double tartan' outfit that I can imagine might appeal to the Tupfinder General.  Someone kind on Twitter pointed it out to me.

Wolves - Howling - In Nature

From one Woolf to another....

The Recorded Voice Of Virginia Woolf

The Ersatz Sweat Lodge

Tuppence's fever is still raging and we haven't found any Monster Munch.

In desperation, we turned to Val Nark in the hope that she might give us some of her 'own-made'.  Of course, given her plans for stocking her farm shop freezer with choice 'Spring lamb' (see recent posts),  we knew that she might give us advice that would finish him off.  But we were prepared to run that risk.

'Tuppence is diseased Tuppy,' said Geoffrey, flapping from mantlepiece to window to arm of settee, and back again, as he always does when he's anxious, 'And what's more he's pumped full of Lem-sip.  He's not organic any more.   Val won't want him in her freezer.  I'm sure of it.'

'All right.  Let's bite the bullet and go up to the tourist car park.  She'll probably be in the post office yurt today.  I think it's her day for posting out orders from her Ebay wholefoods shop.'

'Try creating an ersatz sweat lodge of course,'  snapped Val, when we turned up, shame-faced and nervous. 'And ply him with Junior Aspirin.  The Monster Munch carry-on is simply the ravings of a spoilt and horribly precocious child, and must be ignored at all costs. Don't you two have ANY common sense? Not that I need to ask. You're as thick as two short planks. Three, probably.  If not four.  Or indeed five.'

'I've already given him my tartan knee rug.  And we've got him on a Lem-sip drip,' I replied,  dander up.

'Yes the laudanum didn't work,' added Geoffrey, 'We thought perhaps an opium tabloid and some senna tea...well perhaps not the senna tea...'  I gave him a look, and he fell silent.

Val gripped a piece of string between her teeth and glared at us as she ripped the last piece of brown packing tape from its cardboard roll.

'Oh stop being pathetic and get on with it. I've six boxes of goji berry flapjacks to send out to valued customers in the next post and I don't want any bad feedback. Some of us DO have a life you know!'

And she padded barefoot across the multi-coloured rag rug flooring to the back of the yurt, and an untidy pile of books which Dave sells - or tries to - online.  'Here.  You owe me five pounds and think yourselves lucky I'm not charging you postage.  I know you haven't got the money on you and I know you think you'll get away with not paying me.  But you're completely wrong.  I will hound you until I get my money and I am not put off by extortionate Small Claims Court charges.  It's the principle that matters to me.  I expect to be paid tomorrow morning at first light.  Now go away.'  She threw us a slim, tattered, paperback volume entitled 'How to Cure Everything with an Ersatz Sweat Lodge',  by Mrs Stanley Wrench, dated 1933.

More on what we did next,  later...........

or find more Tales in my e-books, on Amazon, here...http://www.amazon.co.uk/Sea-Penguin-Part-Five-Selections-ebook/dp/B00FW19E0Y/ref=pd_rhf_gw_p_img_2?ie=UTF8&refRID=1HAYA6ZJ8R7A2B0XRWNX

Monster Munch, and the Lack thereof

Tuppence's fever reached a crisis last night.  It seemed to occur after an argument we had about who was really responsible for getting him out of gaol.  Geoffrey and I brought the gelignite,  and set the charge...
'But I sawed through my shackles Uncle Tuppy!' shrilled Tuppence. 'If I hadn't done that you'd have had to do it and you simply wouldn't have coped with the bending over!  Not with your dicky back that you're always going on about.'
And with that he fell back on his pillows, exhausted.
We'll have to find some more Monster Munch (pickled onion flavour) and find them fast.  But where?  Over in her health shop yurt Val Nark sells an 'own-made' version, adapted from a Betty Crocker recipe,  alongside her flapjacks and her sesame snaps, but that won't do, obviously.  What we need is the 'real deal' - a Walkers multi-pack, crammed with salt, sugar and chemicals.  Hopefully then my nephew will get the Roses back in his woolly little cheeks.
Yes - Roses chocolates.  He's partial to them too. Only the soft centres though.  He doesn't like caramels or anything with nuts.

More updates from the sick-bay later.

Find plenty more Tuppy and Tuppence tales here http://www.amazon.co.uk/Kate-Smart/e/B008MFK3NE/ref=sr_ntt_srch_lnk_1?qid=1422011440&sr=8-1

Today's Walk - Loch Clunie (again)

Loch frozen over (all but), geese huddled on the far side, buzzards keening to each other in the freezing cold.  Lots and lots of snowdrops.
Blue sky reflected in the ice.  The air was very still.  We threw stones onto the ice and there was a ringing echo.
I go here a lot and I've described this place before, so I won't go into it all again.  Click on the links below if you'd like to know more.