Reading

I've been visiting one of my favourite blogs more often recently and I have to say it really is staggering how kimbofo does it. She keeps up not just Reading Matters but two other blogs as well, to an exceptional standard, as well as holding down a job and apparently being gifted in many other ways. She's an inspiration and I'm saying that because she has inspired me to get off my fat arse (well, my pert and attractive arse actually) and get some serious reading done.

Now kimbofo has apparently got through on average more than a book a week for the whole of 2007. I know I can't do that but.. maybe I can manage a book a fortnight. I know some of you may think it a philistine kind of excercise, to just crank out pages as if they were something in a mass production process (Come to think of it, that's just what they are most of them) but I feel that if I don't get down to it in that kind of way then I'll never get anywhere.

My problem is not my schedule or my work or anything else; it's me. So having identified the problem I'm doing something about it. I remember I once posted some (whisper it) New Year's resolutions on this here blog but I can't find the fucker so I must have thought it too embarassing and deleted it. Anyhoo, I'm not making "resolutions" this year, I'm just trying to catch up.

So I've given myself a start. It's still a day or so to go before 2008 actually (and it seems, improbably) arrives and I've got a good start into A Star Called Henry by Roddy Doyle. This comes hot on the heels (by my standards) of Paula Spencer which I picked up at a ludicrously high price when I was stuck in Gothenburg airport with not even a newspaper to read. That was just excellent; I think I finished it just as we were landing at Glasgow. I was amazed at how immersed I was in the thing.

So there you are, readers. That's the plan. Am I not just precious?

This I Know

The only person who ever made me unhappy - was me.

Well Give Me That Old Time Religion

I see he's converted to my old religion. Praise the Lord again. In that way of speaking he has when he's taking a long time to get to the point he said, of sending troops to Iraq:-

"In the end, there is a judgement that, I think if you have faith about these things, you realise that judgement is made by other people... and if you believe in God, it's made by God as well."

I mean, it's pathetic. He might as well have said, "A big boy made me do it and ran away." Other people of course being GWB. The man's just spineless.

Image taken from:- www.bbc.co.uk/blogs/ni/tony-blair-2-halo.jpg

The Shortest Day .....

.... has passed. Praise the Lord!

Winter

I hate winter. That's to say I hate the winters I normally have to endure - I mean just cold wet, miserable weather - if there is a snowfall it is usually a one day thing quickly followed by rain and slush. I just hate it, the mud, glaur and shittyness of it. But I do like real winter, you know the kind of winter you get if you're lucky enough to live somewhere like ... New York. Now that's a good winter. Freezing cold enough to stop the trains and snowfalls that smother the whole state.

Have you ever experienced that magical moment when you get up in the morning and you look out of the window, and the snow is just fucking car-deep. There's that glorious light refelecting off of the new snow and if you're really lucky it's still coming down in lumps. You leap with tingling anticipation to the TV and the announcer is announcing in drama-laden tones that the trains are off. Yippee! Quickly check the cupboards - food enough, coffee to brew, bread to toast, fridge full of goodies. A whole day - a whole glorious day ahead of doing nothing but looking out of the window at the gorgeous streetscape, brewing coffee and reading. Bliss.

It's happened to me only a couple of times, three at most; twice when I was living in Hoboken and once was in Riga in Latvia one October about ten years ago. I was staying in a hotel then in the old city centre looking out onto streets devoid of trolley cars and people struggling to get to anywhere, and I just sat at the window and smiled like I had won the lottery. I think it's the cosy, trapped inside, back to the womb, kind of feeling that I really like. It's a feeling best experienced, in my opinion, alone.

Back And Hopeful

I thought it was time to get back to the blog. I hope you haven't all deserted me although, as you've been unable to read this blog for so long, I'll be surprised - not to say flabbergasted - if anybody comes along to read it at all.

Never mind there comes a time when a man has to do etc. etc. And I need to something other than work and sleep. I've been away from the blogosphere for so long now I'm sure that a so much has moved on and left me behind. It's good to see my old friend Lingo Slinger is going on from strength to strength. She always satisfies.

So here we are... Looking forward to Christmas? Well we're getting all set and hopefully it will be a peaceful and loving festival. I'm very ambivalent about Christmas. On the one hand I hate the commercialisation of it (although I'm not at all religious so why should I care), but I do like the togetherness of it and the hope that comes up within me that differences can be put aside and families can be ... one.

Dreams

I suppose I'm like too many other people who believe they lead unique lives and have such an interesting story to tell. The point of this blog, at one time, was to tell some of the stories which are inside my head. Trouble is making that journey from my head onto the screen. I have spent more years than I care to think about travelling and, in the course of that you cannot fail to rack up experiences, good and bad, forgettable and unforgettable, memories warm and cringe inducing.

So does anybody want to know? That's not the correct question, is it? The question is; have I got the talent to communicate? That's the nub. That story below there - the one about me and Allie nicking the Good Companions tent and taking it off to Blairgowrie berry picking. That was the start of a great wee adventure for two boys. It was, for me at least, one of those defining experiences of childhood which, even now over forty years later, I can still recall with a clarity that startles me. I can remember so many of those small things that separately don't amount to much but strung together could make an interesting narrative, if only I could.

In those days there was not the proliferation of street lights that we have now and, when you looked across the Clyde from Greenock to Helensburgh you could clearly see the main street leading out of Helensburgh. The street lighting over much of the town did not make much of an impression to a watcher across the river but Sinclair Street with its bright yellow lighting stood out tracing a path from the coastline north and east towards Loch Lomond. For a boy with a fascination for maps this was intriguing. Like a life size map was laid out in front of me, drawing me in, leading me towards the distant hills.

Much of my life has been like that, looking from where I am wondering what it is like somewhere else. It's an itch I like to keep scratching. Or at least I would like to. Anyway, here we were disembarking from the Gourock to Helensburgh ferry and making our way with high hopes and blissful naivety towards Sinclair Street and the road north to Loch Lomond, Crianlarich, Lochearnhead, St. Fillan's, Crieff, Perth and, finally, Blairgowrie. It's not a great distance, maybe just over a hundred miles; you could drive it in a couple of hours. But for us it was like embarking on a safari or a trek to India. I don't remember discussing it with my mother, but I suppose I must have. I guess she thought that as I was going with Allie then itwould be OK. He was a sensible boy, a year older than me and with an air of maturity beyond his fifteen years.

Ramblings

I've been contributing here so infrequently I think some of you (my fondly imagined regular audience) may think I've given up altogether. Well here I am; back again. I don't often comment on current affairs but one or two items just got my goat recently and, while the last thing that I want to sound like is yet another why-oh-why merchant, I would like to express myself. It's what a blog is for after all.

I'm not going to refer, except very briefly, to events at Virginia Tech. What can anyone say about that, other than how inevitable it was that the crazies of the US gun lobby would come out and declare that such an event would not have been as bad if the campus had not been decreed to be a gun free environment. So that's what they want is it? A world where it is the norm for everyone learning or teaching or working at a university is armed with a gun?

No, it's not that event which has, well depressed me really. If something is almost guaranteed to upset me it is cruelty to children. And this past week we've had the sight of four odious slags avoiding a jail sentence after being foung guilty of cruelty against two toddlers in their "care" who they forced to fight each other, until the little boy and girl were so upset they tried to get away. But these slime were so entertained by what the kids were going through they goaded them on as if they were directing a dog-fight.

That they were not sent to jail is a scandal. The judge should think shame on himself. They"did not pose a danger to the public". The man is a fucking cretin. They sure posed a danger to the children they were supposed to be looking after, and they should be properly punished for it.

And now this. Oh I know there are cruelties and misery being heaped upon children the world over every minute of every day but sometimes something happens that brings it into sharp focus. The fat slags of North Prospect, Plymouth have more in common than they might think with the Taliban.

Lawrence Donegan

Maybe I should start a Lawrence Donegan fan club. Only of his books though; I'm no great fan of his weekend scribblings for the Herald. I've just finished No News At Throat Lake which is just a great read. I'm not surpised as Four Iron In The Soul was just the absolute definition of unputdownable. Maybe I'm overdoing the hyperbole but I think the man is the master of making the prosaic memorable. It's been a good number of years since I read Four Iron In The Soul, nine or more in fact, but the pleasant memory lingers on. I also read California Dreaming and, although I didn't think it had the depth that Four Iron had, it too was an unfailingly good read.

I love non-fiction of the class that Donegan can produce. Although he is not a travel writer in the same way that you could describe Paul Theroux or Eric Newby, in my humble opinion he is their equal in the art of human study. I see, looking at the fly-leaf, that he wrote Throat Lake in 1999 and I wonder at his lack of such good product since. Am I being unfair? I see there is something called Quiet Please about marshalling at the Ryder Cup. It's not brilliantly reviewed on Amazon but if I can find a second hand copy I'll be happy to read it.

My real point here is that I wonder if there are other readers out there who think that Donegan is under-achieving? Let me know; in fact, Lawrence, please pitch in. You're too good to be languishing in whatever place you are just now. I love your writing and I need more.

The Grass Is Riz

Isn't it great! The clocks have sprung forward and by some miracle of time and arithmetic it's still light when it's nearly eight thirty at night. So last night I bounded home and dragged the golf clubs out, and me and the big fella had a five hole tournament. He won at the last hole, but who cares - it was great. Summer is almost on us.

It's so long since I posted on this blog I'm feeling guilty. Somehow I've been running out of the energy and, as I'm doing this at work, I'm getting whiplash looking round for people coming at me from behind to discover me on the blog. Anyway, I'm here and I'm energised so the blog is not yet totally moribund. I'm back and I'm busy.

How Are You Irish?

Here's a nice picture, brings back good memories.

The beach at Bol.

In Memoriam

I like to come up to my son's bedroom occasionally and read. It's a nice loft conversion and it's quiet, with sometimes the only noise being the gentle patter of rain on the roof windows or when his beer fridge cuts in. It's a real boy's bedroom although at twenty one, going on twenty two, you'd think it's time he put aside the Star Wars posters ... or the special issue light sabre lying on its mount next to the certificates he got for being his high school sports champion three years in a row. He's a boy (I know he's a man but I always think of him as a boy) who likes to hold on to the past.

It's not always pristine but he's usually pretty tidy and the general impression is one of organised clutter. His shelves are filled with things he's collected over the years and which he cannot bring himself to throw away. Every small thing is invested with some precious memory of some special occasion. There's the baseball he bought when I took him and his brother to Yankee stadium; the golf ball wedged in a rock with the legend 'Play it as it lies' from our visit to the USPGA headquarters in Far Hills, New Jersey. A lot of the books we bought for him, but which he never read because he was never much of reader, are here because he hasn't the heart to throw them out.

In a corner is the Captain America outfit that his best friend, Jack, wore to another pal's 21st birthday party two weeks before he was killed in a road accident. There too are Jack's football training shoes, the left one worn out near the instep where he contacted the ball to make it curve goalwards. He was good at football and so many other things. There's his old fleece that he wore almost every time we saw him when he came by our house on the way to a bounce game at the park. I went with my son after Jack died to his flat where he picked up these mementoes of his best friend. He buried his face in the fleece and cried so much and I tried to comfort him. And all I could think of was how I would feel if it was him and not Jack who had been taken away and I do not know if I could live with that pain. We have to live with our selfishness.

And now I cannot bear to look at that picture I took of the two of them that night, my boy dressed as Superman and Jack as Captain America. They looked - it's so cruelly ironic - invulnerable. But our children are not invulnerable and bad things happen. I am blessed, I know I am, but I am also afraid.

Berry Picking

Berry-picking, said Allie. It seemed like a good idea to me even although I had only the vaguest idea what it meant. At fourteen most things to do with happenings outside the boundaries of Inverclyde seemed to me wonderfully exotic. A weekend camping trip to Dunoon was an adventure and a summer camp to Torquay seemed like a trip to another continent.

My mum didn't have much but she always did her best to get together enough money for us to go to the summer camp. It wasn't going to happen this year; the hard times were even harder and in that year of 1963 Allie and I were not going to be part of the expedition to England's south coast. We would miss it; the adventure of the long train journey, getting off the train at Torquay in our kilts and, rucsacs on back, canteens clanking, marching in step from the train station to the bus station to catch the bus to Watcombe. And the campsite, on a hillside just above Watcombe Beach was perfect. A paradise, with beautiful girls on the beach and a general store where we could buy John Players Tipped without having to worry about no-smoking laws for under-sixteens.

But in fairness to our widowed mothers Allie and I decided we couldn't afford, or we couldn't ask our mothers to afford, to fork out for the cost of the fortnight in Torquay; we would strike out on our own, maybe just hang around the local Scout camp, which was free and only cost the fare on the bus to Inverkip. And then we had a stroke of luck. One weekend we were mooching around the local camp headquarters hut and for some reason we were allowed into the back storage area unsupervised. Scrabbling on to the roof of the lockers we came across a tent, a nice condition Black's Good Companions two man job. Without a moment's anxiety we had it out of the hut and pitched on our site as if we'd owned it for years.

In those days of canvas tents you had to waterproof them, so that's what we did and now being owners of a tent we could go somewhere. Which is when Allie suggested berry-picking. It seemed to make eminent sense. We could earn as much as a pound a day! At least that was what Allie said and he seemed to know all about it, having been told about it by someone who knew someone who had been there a couple of years ago, maybe. Actually I didn't hesitate; Allie was about a year older than me, and generally took the lead in whatever scheme we were involved in. So we set to making plans on how we were going to get to Blairgowrie, the epicentre of berry-picking; fortunes awaited us.....

Imagine!

It's sometimes strange what people type into Google and find West Coast Ramblings. The most common search phrase that finds my blog might be 'An analysis of a poem by Keats' or 'TMA02' or some such associated with my OU studies and it's nice to see new visitors, isn't it. Imagine my surpise therefore when I discovered I was up there on Google for the search phrase 'Imagine all the proddies', because that is exactly the phrase that someone has typed in and found me. What do you think it means? Did John Lennon write another version of his most famous song especially for the Catholic/Protestant divide?



I was born and raised in the West of Scotland and although raised a Catholic I never identified with that section of the populace who were descended from the Irish Catholic. There were at my school more Dochertys and Gallaghers, O'Neills and McLaughlins, than there were more commonly perceived Scots names such as McDonald and Mackenzie etc. They were still running a weekly bus between Glasgow and Donegal in those days. But although many of my classmates aligned themselves as being Irish first, Scots second, Celtic supporting etc. I really never, except for a period when I used to take advantage of a free entry into Parkhead after shaking a collecting tin for one of the local priests, I really never felt myself to be in the same mould so to speak. Well I didn't have the genetic background for a start; my mother's side were originally Scots and Welsh and my father's lineage goes back to the Cromarty Firth area for some hundreds of years.


I suppose I must have made a conscious decision at some point that if I was going to support any team then for me it felt better to support the local team, Greenock Morton, and so I could stand aloof from all that Rangers/Celtic/Proddy/Catholic crap that so many people wanted to hang on to. Serving an apprenticeship in the local shipbuilding and marine engineering industry in the early sixties I was nevertheless exposed to anti Catholic bigotry and in my naievete my reaction was bemusement, perhaps even bewilderment. Still I was never tempted to react either by pretending to be what I wasn't or by going to the other extreme and adopting the green and white of the Catholic bigot.


We've moved on from those days and now although Orange marches and Irish republican marches in the west of Scotland are not entirely a thing of the past they, and the people who promote such things, are increasingly irrelevant and in the general perception so insignificant as to be nearly moribund. And a good thing too.


Anway the number one result for the Google search 'Imagine all the proddies' will take you to a letter in the on-line Scotsman which begins thus:


It was deeply disappointing to see Sam Galbraith's comments that Catholic schools are the "root cause of sectarianism" (your report, 26 December). As one who travels frequently in other European countries, and has seen separate Catholic schools in action with none of the prejudices that exist in Scotland, it is clear bigotry is bred in the home and the community.


Now I can't say I know Sam Galbraith but I used to live in the same scheme as him and looked up to him when I was a Boy Scout and he was a charismatic Venture Scout. His career as a consultant neuro-surgeon, Westminster MP and cabinet minister in a sense mirrored the heights he scaled as a first class mountaineer. He went to Greenock High School, the local 'proddy' school as we used to think of non-denominational schools in those days. And I agree with him; I just hate this separate school system we have in Scotland. It is divisive and it is also simply unfair. There is no justification for it and it should be scrapped. And it would be except for the disproportionate power wielded by the Catholic church in central Scotland local and national politics. I bow to no-one in my support of people to practice their religion but that religion should stand on its own two feet and not depend on an unfair advantage in order to achieve a dominant position in society.


This is a secular society and our schools should reflect this. Fuck religion. Now I welcome your comments on the above but here's a challenge for you; if you wish to offer an argument in favour of separate Catholic schools you are not allowed to use the word 'ethos'.

The Dreaded Lurgie

I got en email today from my friend the writer. Fuck; now I'll need to write back.

A Load Of Old Shite

Hello, as Clairwil, is wont to open her spiel with. I'm just logging in to let you know I'm still alive and not lying rotting behind the sofa, pierced through the heart with the sharp end of a baldy Christmas tree. No, I'm still here, just a little plagued yet with post-festive torpor. However I thought I'd shake myself to bring you my latest pearls of wisdom. Naw, I won't. I hate that stuff -

What abaht that Beckham? Million dollars a week! Fucking ludicrous.. blah blah blah.

The lumpen proletariat seem to like it but it's not me. I'm not your common or garden ranter, I'm a thinker, we're working on a higher plane here. So to get me in the mood I've got Ravi Shankar on the turntable (virtually speaking as I nicked it off the internet) and I'm sitting here in the lotus position while I consult my muse.......

Well my muse has told me to fuck off and leave her alone, as she's busy with the other lesbites, so I'll just have to get on with it myself. Anway who needs muses, a wee whisky is just as good and leaves a pleasanter glow.

I was thinking of doing another OU Course. This time another wee 10 pointer, Start Writing Poetry, but I left it too late to start the Feb. course so I'll need to wait now until May. Bummer but there you are. If I really intend to start it and if I really mean to make a good go of it I'll need to do a lot more writing than I'm doing at present. I know this but it's extremely difficult to achieve.

I know I've whinged on before about how busy I am and all that but it's no excuse really. I need to just get on with it. Pick a topic, batter out the words, Bob's your uncle. Couldn't be easier, just have to avoid sounding like all the other why-oh-why merchants who populate the blogosphere. I know, I'll start off with a haiku, three (or fewer) lines of no more than 17 syllables in total;

sitar bends sound

fingers fly

peace descends