Monday 26 2004
Never! The Daleks have been voted the least scary screen villans.... I remember being terrified of these evil metal lumps and of Scooby Doo's baddies. Esther & I thought it hillarious to run round with our arm raised over our heads bleating metallically 'exxxxxxterrrrminate'. In the same way, we thought we really looked like Adam from Adam & the Ants if we slapped some sellotape over our noses. Imagination is great.
Several weeks ago we went to see The Durutti Column play at King Tut's. For months I'd heard a compelling and complex guitar sound as part of Stan's music: sparse and rich with the quietness of a single man playing one instrument. It was nice, like cushions are nice: there but not grabbing of attention.
Anyhoo....the gig was superb: the band were preceded by a bunch of boys who had confused hilarious Jim Morrison-style posturing with dynamic stage presence.
Then silence and from stage-right entered a tiny stick of a man with a Hiroshima-mushroom of thick grey hair which framed his pointy withered face. A child's body swaddled in baggy jeans. This was Vini Reilly was followed by a lanky pot-bellied man in a linen suit and dark glasses who we were later to call Bruce Mitchell. As a child of grunge, I thought I knew good guitar - but this was something else. He made these sounds, like saddend angels strumming magical harps, which were astounding to come from a guitar not a piano (thought he played both at the same time on occasion). The drummer in his linen suit was a character pinched straight out of a Graham Greene novel, and with his brushes he spanked the drums as if they were the bums of naughty girls. All in all, they were amazing.
Sunday 11 2004
This Easter sunday I watched a church service on the tv and felt all holy: it's a scandal for a former church-gal like me, but I couldn't remember why Good Friday is good but then I remembered that like a lot of things in English the meaning is the exact opposite of what you might think it means. Hence what we call a Good day, the Germans call Mouring Friday (Karfreitag).
This opposition of meaning makes me smile in memory of my Granny, who, like many Orcadians, made use of a phrase which to an outsider seems mean a negative statement but actually is positive though perhaps with a bit of regret. If I was to ask 'do we need more coal for the night?' she'd reply 'I doubt it indeed' (doubt pronounced 'doot') or she'd keek up to the sky and say 'I doot it'll rain soon buddo'. I love this phrase - it's comeagainst and awkward in the way it means the opposite to what it seems it means.
It's been 4 months since I was home and so the homesickness is setting in: for family and friends and the land and sea; for the silence and the greetings of 'neighgh' which mean - hello, how are you and it's good to see you' from some of the more taciturn folks I ken from my days as the grumpy barmaid in the public bar of the Stromness Hotel.
From the kitchen wafts the heavenly fume of our casserole: truly a celebration of God's gift to Man on this day of celebration of resurrection. Composed of tender scottish beef and mellowly bitter Isle of Skye Porridge Oat ale. In eating it we shall commit two of the seven sins - gluttony and greed. We shall consume it accompanied by Pink Fir potatoes we got at yesterday's farmers' market and some cabbage, which I'll stir fry with nutmeg and a noblet of butter. Yum!
We have been eating rather well of late - hence my continued lurks and bats, alas. Yesterday Stan invented a fabulous chicken thing: wild garlic chicken...
take two chicken breasts and slice then down the middle so that you have a deepish valley, but don't cut right through. Put them on individual squares of tin foil.
mix together equal quantities of smoked free-range bacon and wild garlic with seasoning.
pile this onto your hen tits & squish down into the slit.
Grate over some parmesan cheese & drizzle with a bit of olive oil and parcel up the foil so you have a shiny silver pastie - leave room round the chicken to enable the juices to steam and infuse the meat.
Bake for about 30-40 minutes at around 400°F.
Eat with tattie salad and a leafy salad too - marvel at your health!
I'd bought our wild garlic from Heart Buchanan on Byres road (which serves the best coffee ever) but it can be found growing wild in the countryside: look for longish dark green leaves and a subtle scent of garlic. Glasgow folks can tramp the cycle path from Lennoxtown to Kirkintilloch to find some.
Wednesday 07 2004
Hello Spring lambs! Have you been gambolling on the hillsides, skipping over bluebells and snowdrops whilst hiding eggs under tuffets of grass, listening to the call of new-born chicks? Here at Polkadot Towers, life has been a diamond set in a cirque of grim jewels: our computer broke - not a viral infection causing us to go the the digial VD clinic, but a whole entire breakdown whereby the screen showed black as our hearts caved inwards.
Are there any technical wizards out there? Why should a computer running Windows XP Professional continually crash so that even the most simple action with the most simple programis futile? Admitedly we run a lot of heavy progams, but nothing like we used to when Stan was doing animation: mostly Photoshop, Flash and things like that. Could it be too hot? We have the side off just now & it seems ok...
We reformatted our C drive & tried to reinstall XP - getting a horrendous series of Stop error codes (IRQ_NOT_LESS_OR_EQUAL and BAD_POOL_CALLER) and were advised to test our memory sticks: these were ok & eventually it all installed. Now, we're slowly installing programs expecting the next cataclysmic crash to happen at any moment: I'd got so used to Dreamweaver crashing every minute I would save after every word while composing this ballad of my days - oh the wit and wisdom I lost to this fucking machine!
On happier notes, the insurance from Stan's thieved camera came through - ¡hola! to scintillating studies of light and dark!
At work today, through our horribly intense work output, we discussed words: those we like, and those we dislike.
This was a favourite: I can see - or rather hear - why. It has a cluster of syllables: a slow languorous start with a bubbly babble ending plus a fairytale meaning which we'd all like to believe in: Fate as a glittery bubble, guiding us through our lives to meet the road chosen for us.
This was a hated word of Mrs.M. It does have a very hard 'g', with a 'eugh' sound to the first vowel. Perhaps in posh ladies boutiques this part of the drawers is pronounced "goooo-sehh".
Entering our language in the 13th century this taboo word came to us from Old Norse and Middle Low German. The oldest root of the word means 'a hollow place' but today is considered a 'dirty' word for a part of the female body, and its use in defaming someone shocks both from the stark harsh sound and the implicit opinion expressed of the female genitalia: that is is the worst thing imaginable. In Francis Grose's Classical Dictionary Of The Vulgar Tongue it is "a nasty name for a nasty thing".
This is one of my favourites: not really because I love to sleep but because I love the noise of it as it's said: a slow slide which the slightly wanky could say represents the gradual loss of consciousness as we glide into sleep. The constant 'eee' could be the sustained period of rest where our brains unload that days' doings and the plosive 'p' the body now fully recharged popping us awake to commit our heads and bodies to another days' thought and toil.
see the bbc's survey (ages old - I am so behind the times)
