Saturday, 31 May 2014
Thursday, 15 May 2014
Wednesday, 14 May 2014
Scottish Islands Explorer: Staying on Flannan
Fascinating photos of the Flannan Isles via > Scottish Islands Explorer: Staying on Flannan: Not the easiest of landings, nor the most secure-looking steps, but this was the landing place for an expedition to the Flannan Isles ...
A place of (unsolved) mystery still - though for my taste much of the atmosphere is lost through the 'medium' of modern technology. It seems in a way a shame that you can go there on a fast boat with powerful lenses and take the place apart, in a sense. I can't help feeling that it's equally regrettable that visiting remote places these days seems to involve eye-popping amounts of ugly orange lycra, portable toilets, and hi-tech equipment. Oh for a wooden boat or a coracle, and a decent set of tweeds....or perhaps not....I suppose one must be 'practical'. Very unattractive however. But I suppose you aren't thinking about appearances when you're desperate for the toilet in the middle of a Force 9. Perhaps that's what happened to the three lighthouse-keepers! One of them made an especially violent curry, and they all....no of course not.
I wonder if they suffered from scurvy. It is possible, if they were there, unrelieved, for long stretches. I must read up on the mystery, and theories thereof.
Best account of Flannan that I can think of (the poem aside) is the fictionalised encapsulation in Neil Gunn's The Silver Darlings - they sail away, away west, beyond the horizon....and encounter wondrous things...
Haven't read that book for about ten years - not sure how much of my remembering is really from the book and how much is from my own imaginings.
A place of (unsolved) mystery still - though for my taste much of the atmosphere is lost through the 'medium' of modern technology. It seems in a way a shame that you can go there on a fast boat with powerful lenses and take the place apart, in a sense. I can't help feeling that it's equally regrettable that visiting remote places these days seems to involve eye-popping amounts of ugly orange lycra, portable toilets, and hi-tech equipment. Oh for a wooden boat or a coracle, and a decent set of tweeds....or perhaps not....I suppose one must be 'practical'. Very unattractive however. But I suppose you aren't thinking about appearances when you're desperate for the toilet in the middle of a Force 9. Perhaps that's what happened to the three lighthouse-keepers! One of them made an especially violent curry, and they all....no of course not.
I wonder if they suffered from scurvy. It is possible, if they were there, unrelieved, for long stretches. I must read up on the mystery, and theories thereof.
Best account of Flannan that I can think of (the poem aside) is the fictionalised encapsulation in Neil Gunn's The Silver Darlings - they sail away, away west, beyond the horizon....and encounter wondrous things...
Haven't read that book for about ten years - not sure how much of my remembering is really from the book and how much is from my own imaginings.
Saturday, 10 May 2014
Brain Fuel
One of the joys of life is food. When you're on a budget it can be difficult to eat well; I've had to learn how to do that. Food is fuel - fuel for the brain, fuel for the body, and most of all, fuel for the spirit. Without a healthy, varied diet, you might not actually get ill immediately, but you simply just don't feel good. I think even if I had lots of money to spend on food, I'd hate to waste it. I have a huge respect for it; I don't like ready-meals (been there, done that). I'm not keen on much out of packets - exceptions being Tesco crumble mix (39p), tinned tomato soup, Mr Kipling's French Fancies and sausage rolls out of the baker's. Home-made is almost always best. I rarely eat out and when I do I'm almost always disappointed with what appears before me - and actually quite annoyed. Why can't they cook, for God's sake?
I 'splashed out' on a bargain hotel break a few weeks ago ( as mentioned in a previous post). The food was so disgusting and repellent I could barely eat it. Over-cooked, bony fish, mushy potatoes, dry 'gateau', vile-tasting 'Lincolnshire' sausages at breakfast, liver pate that looked and smelled like dog muck - I could go on, but won't.
Well actually I probably will at some stage. Probably fairly soon if I'm honest.
In the meantime I've made a page to share some of my tried and tested low-cost recipes. I like them - you very well might not, so take your chances.
Here's the link. The first one is Lovage Soup. It's not everyone that has access to lovage (I do, obviously) but hey.
I 'splashed out' on a bargain hotel break a few weeks ago ( as mentioned in a previous post). The food was so disgusting and repellent I could barely eat it. Over-cooked, bony fish, mushy potatoes, dry 'gateau', vile-tasting 'Lincolnshire' sausages at breakfast, liver pate that looked and smelled like dog muck - I could go on, but won't.
Well actually I probably will at some stage. Probably fairly soon if I'm honest.
In the meantime I've made a page to share some of my tried and tested low-cost recipes. I like them - you very well might not, so take your chances.
Here's the link. The first one is Lovage Soup. It's not everyone that has access to lovage (I do, obviously) but hey.
Sunday, 4 May 2014
Thursday, 1 May 2014
Two of my favourite book illustrations
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| from Kenneth Graham's Wind in the Willows, illustrated by EH Shepard |
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| from The Gashleycrumb Tinies by Edward Gorey |
Sunday, 27 April 2014
Simone de Beauvoir Would Have Been 106 Today
From January 9th. Simone de Beauvoir Would Have Been 106 Today
Reminds me to re-read The Woman Destroyed and She Came to Stay. I'm currently reading Iris Murdoch's The Sandcastle - similar theme to She Came to Stay, but not nearly so 'astringent'. As I recall, at any rate. It's been twenty years or more since I read it. Jealousies and emotional threat and all manner of insecurities. Middle class intellectuals do them so well. The rest of us have to either ignore them or repress them or suppress them with medication (prescribed or otherwise) and pretend we have wonderful lives while we get on with earning a living, cleaning the toilet and doing the shopping.
Then we go berserk and kill ourselves and/or whoever else looks at us the wrong way on a dull Wednesday.
Or perhaps we only dream about that while we wait for some ghastly disease to finish us off.
Ah, happy days.
Reminds me to re-read The Woman Destroyed and She Came to Stay. I'm currently reading Iris Murdoch's The Sandcastle - similar theme to She Came to Stay, but not nearly so 'astringent'. As I recall, at any rate. It's been twenty years or more since I read it. Jealousies and emotional threat and all manner of insecurities. Middle class intellectuals do them so well. The rest of us have to either ignore them or repress them or suppress them with medication (prescribed or otherwise) and pretend we have wonderful lives while we get on with earning a living, cleaning the toilet and doing the shopping.
Then we go berserk and kill ourselves and/or whoever else looks at us the wrong way on a dull Wednesday.
Or perhaps we only dream about that while we wait for some ghastly disease to finish us off.
Ah, happy days.
Saturday, 19 April 2014
Star Trek 5: The Final Frontier (7/9) Movie CLIP - Approach to Sha Ka Re...
There will always be something magical about Star Trek (original), for me.
Wednesday, 16 April 2014
Link to article about Tolkein
I am a Lord of the Rings fan. I didn't read it until I was about twelve or thirteen, and I read The Hobbit, after that. I also love Wind in the Willows. I can't really be bothered to explain why, so here is a link to a lengthy article (which actually I haven't quite finished reading!) in the London Review of Books by someone who, I think, feels similarly. Germaine Greer apparently described LOTR as her 'nightmare'. I don't think I'd get along very well with her.
People go on about the elves. The elves are not the point. If you don't understand that, then you won't like the book. #thatisall
‘I am in fact a hobbit,’ Tolkien wrote once,
in all but size. I like gardens, trees and unmechanised farmlands; I smoke a pipe, and like good plain food (unrefrigerated), but detest French cooking; I like, and even dare to wear in these dull days, ornamental waistcoats. I am fond of mushrooms (out of a field); have a very simple sense of humour (which even my appreciative critics find tiresome); I go to bed late and get up late (when possible). I do not travel much.'
He sounds like my kind of person.
I liked the Lord of the Rings films by the way, hugely, but I do not like the Hobbit ones, at all.
Ambitions of Age #1. The Road... is Everlong...
I was half-watching a programme on BBC4 about the A303 when the presenter mentioned a quote from Hilaire Belloc's 1923 book, The Road. It appealed to me tremendously and I looked it up immediately. Ah, the miracle of the internet. Within a couple of clicks I had ordered the book from Amazon (yes, I know...)
"There are primal things which move us. Fire has the character of a free companion that has travelled with us from the first exile; only to see a fire, whether he need it or no, comforts every man. Again, to hear two voices outside at night after a silence, even in crowded cities, transforms the mind. A Roof also, large and mothering, satisfies us here in the north much more than modern necessity can explain; so we built in the beginning: the only way to carry off our rains and to bear the weight of our winter snows. A Tower far off arrests a man’s eye always: it is more than a break in the sky-line; it is an enemy’s watch or the rallying of a defence to whose aid we are summoned. Nor are these emotions a memory or a reversion only as one crude theory might pretend; we craved these things - the camp, the refuge, the sentinels in the dark, the hearth - before we made them; they are part of our human manner, and when this civilisation has perished they will reappear.
"Of these primal things the least obvious but the most important is The Road. It does not strike the sense as do those others I have mentioned; we are slow to feel its influence. We take it so much for granted that its original meaning escapes us. Men, indeed, whose pleasure it is perpetually to explore even their own country on foot, and to whom its every phase of climate is delightful, receive, somewhat tardily, the spirit of The Road. They feel a meaning in it; it grows to suggest the towns upon it, it explains its own vagaries, and it gives a unity to all that has arisen along its way. But for the mass The Road is silent; it is the humblest and the most subtle, but, as I have said, the greatest and most original of the spells which we inherit from the earliest of our race. It was the most imperative and the first of our necessities. It is older than building and than wells; before we were quite men we knew it, for the animals still have it to-day; they seek their food and their drinking-places, and, as I believe, their assemblies, by known tracks which they have made."
One of my long-held ambitions is to follow one of the ancient pilgrims' roads. There's something about travelling slowly, and walking. It's good for the soul. Perhaps travelling in a fast car or high speed train is also good for the soul. But it's different. Obviously. A bit like the difference between looking in a real library, or in a real bookshop, perhaps even travelling to a different town or city to find a certain book or bookshop, as I used to do when young; and finding and ordering a book within thirty seconds of hearing about it....
"There are primal things which move us. Fire has the character of a free companion that has travelled with us from the first exile; only to see a fire, whether he need it or no, comforts every man. Again, to hear two voices outside at night after a silence, even in crowded cities, transforms the mind. A Roof also, large and mothering, satisfies us here in the north much more than modern necessity can explain; so we built in the beginning: the only way to carry off our rains and to bear the weight of our winter snows. A Tower far off arrests a man’s eye always: it is more than a break in the sky-line; it is an enemy’s watch or the rallying of a defence to whose aid we are summoned. Nor are these emotions a memory or a reversion only as one crude theory might pretend; we craved these things - the camp, the refuge, the sentinels in the dark, the hearth - before we made them; they are part of our human manner, and when this civilisation has perished they will reappear.
"Of these primal things the least obvious but the most important is The Road. It does not strike the sense as do those others I have mentioned; we are slow to feel its influence. We take it so much for granted that its original meaning escapes us. Men, indeed, whose pleasure it is perpetually to explore even their own country on foot, and to whom its every phase of climate is delightful, receive, somewhat tardily, the spirit of The Road. They feel a meaning in it; it grows to suggest the towns upon it, it explains its own vagaries, and it gives a unity to all that has arisen along its way. But for the mass The Road is silent; it is the humblest and the most subtle, but, as I have said, the greatest and most original of the spells which we inherit from the earliest of our race. It was the most imperative and the first of our necessities. It is older than building and than wells; before we were quite men we knew it, for the animals still have it to-day; they seek their food and their drinking-places, and, as I believe, their assemblies, by known tracks which they have made."
One of my long-held ambitions is to follow one of the ancient pilgrims' roads. There's something about travelling slowly, and walking. It's good for the soul. Perhaps travelling in a fast car or high speed train is also good for the soul. But it's different. Obviously. A bit like the difference between looking in a real library, or in a real bookshop, perhaps even travelling to a different town or city to find a certain book or bookshop, as I used to do when young; and finding and ordering a book within thirty seconds of hearing about it....
Wednesday, 9 April 2014
Graham Chapman interviewed on Grampian TV 1987
Graham Chapman comes across as really charming (I'm not being sarcastic). He's my favourite Python, along with Michael Palin. No idea what happened to the interviewer. Style very much 'high 80s', I'm afraid. Shudder.
Saturday, 29 March 2014
Interview with Jean-Paul Sartre and Simone de Beauvoir
Fascinating stuff. Subtitles are pretty bad though.
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