A birthday and a wedding

My new grandson, Olly (or Ollie) arrived safely yesterday morning and today's the royal wedding, so routine is up the spout along with any literary thoughts. A friend has recommended My Life so Far, the memoir written by filmmaker Sir Denis Foreman about his childhood in Moffat - a copy is on its way from Amazon. But before that arrives, I am going to spend a week on the water, pottering around the creeks and inlets of the Firth of Clyde. What book to take? There are books on board the converted fishing vessel or 'puffer', so maybe I will rely on pot luck. More news when I return.

A night in the forest

I decided to spend last night (Easter Sunday April 24/Monday April 25) in the forest. After a winter in town, the dark and the quiet takes some getting used to. As soon as it was light, I got up to let the hens out and found that four of them were out already - they can fly up and get over the fence of their enclosure which is more to keep foxes out than them in. Their water had run out, so I refilled that and checked for eggs in the straw. One of them stubbornly lays in the same place just outside the fence, bolshy behaviour that must bestow some kind of reproductive advantage (were her eggs fertilised). Harry is coming up to try his hand at fishing this morning mainly I suspect in order to legitimise possession of maggots as bait. I attended the Easter service at St John's, Burnside in Moffat, and was aghast at the well meant use of a 'modern' form of service. Tinkering with both the traditional form and magnificent language of the liturgy must be responsible for much of the decline in church attendance, a colossal failure of judgement and extraordinary arrogance on the part of the church authorities. But the message gets through, and the congregation is a model of friendliness and welcome. It seems that the new wording and form of service was chosen for the service yesterday 'in case there were visitors'. Well, if I count as a visitor, take it from me: I would have preferred the Prayer Book and King James.

Candle in the dark

I nearly forgot - Khristos voskrese! Christ is risen! To which the reply (all together now) is Da! Vo istinu voskres ! (Yes, he is risen indeed). On this day in Russia - when their Easter coincides with ours - , or in Greece, you go to church at night with candles which are lit at midnight as the great day begins and everyone kisses each other with the greeting above. Once, in a small village in Greece, I watched as a whole coachload of parishioners drove away down the winding mountain road, each one clutching their lighted candle in the dark.

Pale violets

It rained all day yesterday, until evening when the sun came out and Harry and I went out to play in the burn. But before that: I sat listening to BBCR4 and realised it was a whole programme about Sweden! I quickly messaged my Swedish date. The tag on the TV screen - I always listen to the radio on the TV - said 'serial thrillers, music, and design' - which (you might guess) stood for Stig Larsson (The Girl With the Dragon Tattoo etc), Abba and Ikea. Well - it turns out that an extraordinary percentage of Europe's music is recorded in Sweden, not just Abba. Was it 40 per cent? I should have been listening more carefully. My date has changed his Facebook photograph to a picture of him at the wheel of a sailing boat with a pipe stuck in his mouth, looking like Thor Heyerdahl, one of my childhood heroes - , the man who crossed the Pacific on a raft called Kon Tiki. The successful Northern economies - Norway, Denmark and Sweden are all constitutional monarchies, and here I tip my hat to Knut my Norwegian lodger who saved my economic bacon, enabling me to make ends meet in the last years in London before I downsized. Knut was rather grand, a bon viveur in his 70's who worked in the financial services industry. He used to go racing with one of his best clients, returning the worse for wear and on one occasion a taxi driver rang my front doorbell with Knut's diary and wallet which he had dropped in the effort of staggering from the cab to his basement quarters in my house. Knut's father was a member of the Norwegian royal family who had been on the wrong side during the last war, so Knut's mother had divorced him and married a British naval officer and sent Knut to Stowe where he learned English like Eliza Doolittle so impeccable he might have been taken for a Hungarian. I am drawn to the displaced and the dispossessed, early on opting to learn everything I could about that other great Northern presence, Russia , whose emigres sparkled in dull suburbs, cheap hotels and attic rooms of America and western Europe throughout the last century, teaching the piano or giving lessons in their magnificent language. Later, when I used to host regular visits from Russians as part of my job, I was able to observe them for days on end both at home and abroad. Once, I had twelve members of the Moscow Arts Theatre to Sunday lunch in my tiny basement kitchen. It was a sunny day so we all went out into the garden afterwards to smoke and drink tea. I came back indoors to fetch something and found Oleg Efremov, Russia's Laurence Olivier, who played Hamlet, and Astrov in Uncle Vanya standing eating a cherry tomato. He started like a school boy discovered scrumping apples. Now, I think it wasn't about the tomato. He was snatching a moment alone, the one thing you weren't meant to savour if you were a good Soviet. Many years later, just before he died, he hosted lunch at Elly's hen party at the theatre (MXAT) in Moscow where a photograph of Gordon Craig hangs. Gordon Craig worked as a distinguished set designer at the Moscow Arts Theatre in the 1920's. His mother, Ellen Terry, used to stay with her entourage, Sir Henry Irving, his secretary Bram Stoker and hers Eleanor Marx (daughter of Karl) at Watermeetings, the farm in the upper Clyde Valley below the forest. Gordon was illegitimate so Ellen Terry gave him the surname 'Craig' after Ailsa the rock that sticks up in the sea between Scotland and Ireland aka Paddys' Milestone. We went up to the forest at midday yesterday and tried unsuccessfully to get the barbecue lit under the deck; luckily I had brought some pork pies and we cooked sausages on the stove indoors while Harry chased the hens and found a frog (1 v small) and slugs (3 large). We got so wet that it didn't matter any more, and the trees were enjoying it. And everywhere the slopes of rough tussocky turf were sparkling with thousands of tiny pale violets, like Russians.

Raffles

The impending nuptials, aka The Royal Wedding, Catherine and William makes me very glad I downsized in 2009 from the family home just round the corner from Raffles, a nightclub frequented by the royal princes and their entourage. One morning I came out of my front door and found one of Harry's loafers in the gutter where he had dropped it leaping into a car to escape the attentions of the press. Catherine - Kate as she was then - lived just round the other corner, in Old Church St where my son in law Jim used to bump into Woody Allen as Woody went off to work on his latest film and Jim walked Flo the family cairn terrier. That part of Chelsea was exactly where Henry VIII used to row up river to, to visit his friend Thomas More. The square where we lived was part of Thomas More's garden, and in the southwest corner of the square was Richard II's house, brought stone by stone from the City when it was in danger of being demolished. That house became for a time part of an ugly modern building housing the University Women's Institute, then passed into the hands of a city tycoon nicknamed Pretty Boy who incorporated it into a magnificent replica of a Tudor mansion. Chris Nolan, our pianist at the April 16 Love and Marriage book event, used to play in the famous Long Bar at Raffles hotel in Singapore.

Rain

Welcome, soft rain was falling at 1am this morning (Sat April 23). I know that, because I was awoken by 'prommers' returning home, which they continued to do in dribs and drabs until well after 4am. I sent an email to our local policeman at 2.22am and again at 4.16am suggesting wearily that the next time a 'prom' is held, some arrangement is made to ensure that the young revellers reach home without a bucket of water being tipped over them by an enraged householder. Happy Birthday, Shakespeare, by the way. I spent the wakeful hours pondering the budget for the October 15 Moffat Book Event - a new working title for which is Scotland's Family Tree which some may be surprised to see includes, controversially, Merlin (featured above , left in an illustration by Kevin Twedell for Count Nikolai Tolstoy's The Coming of The King – The First Book of Merlin published by Bantam in hardback ISBN 0593 013123 Price £12.95.In his earlier The Quest for Merlin, Tolstoy argues that Merlin was a historical shaman/druid adviser to the warlord we know as Arthur, and ended his days living in the hills above Moffat. Another real life magician (with words), Borders historian Alistair Moffat will also be talking about the DNA found in people living in Scotland today. I choose the order of my words carefully. It turns out, unsurprisingly that the DNA of Scotland's present occupants has more in common with the rest of Britain's natives than difference. Tolstoy considers that we here in Moffat live in territory known in Merlin's time as Rheged, so I am resolved to go to the visitor centre of that name just south of Carlisle to bone up on the subject before he comes up in Oct.

A bit of a blur

Yesterday (Thursday April 21 in Scotland)was hot, hot,hot. And I have lost my sun hat, a reliable old denim number. The working day started bright and early with a call from our lawyer about the water supply to our premises up in the forest, and a long telephone conversation with a neighbour similarly affected. It's not often that you hear the words 'It was my eagles' breeding season....'. I once accepted an invitation to dine chez the Bird Man and one of his eagles was sitting quietly on a tractor tyre in a corner of the room. Then off to the Moffat Initiative for a Moffat Book Events meeting picking up threads from our last Saturday's event. Next time, we vow to: understand how the tickets work (you tear off the perforated portion and keep all the bits so you know exactly how many have been sold - duh -); to bolster income, you schedule a whole meeting just about sponsorship - who to approach and for how much; review the marketing strategy and decide that next time we can spend less on advertising, put more effort into word of mouth and the 'social media' such as Twitter and Facebook. That day's April 21 Moffat News had mis-reported, we thought, the numbers who attended Love and Marriage, so a letter was drafted to the editor putting that straight ; we started to look ahead to our Sat October 15 event - talk of a 'Reivers High Tea', wenches, roistering, music etc to go along with Alistair Moffat's research into 'Scottish' DNA (or, here in Moffat, 'Rheged' according to Nikolai Tolstoy - seconds out)! Then, at midday off with daughter Elly to collect a sample box of Zacharry's spruce beer from the forest to take to Duncan Turnbull at his Cairn Foods shop in Biggar for another feedback session. I stop by the post box at the metal gate, so still and for so long that Elly thinks I have had a stroke but I am just reading and approving the lawyer's letter on my Blackberry about our water supply. According to Duncan, an international food merchant, we must consider if the bottle is slightly too tall for comfortable shelf fit. We line a number of similar quality soft drinks up on the counter: the Bundaberg 'stubby' is the shortest, next comes Fentiman's, then - the same height as Zacharry's - Luscombe elderflower bubbly. The label reminds Duncan of 'a sauce bottle' - but in a good way, with our retro sunburst rays and Yogi bear cartoon trees. The colour reminds him of Bitter Lemon; the taste for some reason puts him in mind of American Cream Soda. He ambushes a couple of unwary customers and Elly and I hide behind the cereals unit while he offers them a couple of test beakers. 'Mmm. Delicious!' We passed the taste test! While Elly shops for delicacies from Duncan's well-stocked shelves, I pop next door to Atkinson Pryce Books and thank Chris for bringing a stall to last Saturday's event. She is enthusiastic about coming to Moffat for October, and Merlin and I promise her that we will credit AP's contribution in our promotional literature this time, an oversight on our part last Sat. A quick cheese and tomato toastie at the Cross Keys, then back to Moffat for a much-yearned for cup of tea. The boys' paddling pool in the garden is full of tadpoles and rather muddy lumps of water- weed and reed brought to make them feel at home, plus a couple of old rough bits of wood to allow the frogs to exit when they are ready. Outside my sitting room window, the heat shimmers over the park and the burn. A knock at my door. Elly wonders if I can just pop across to collect Harry's bike, which she, just hours now away from giving birth to Ollie, couldn't manage and has left under the watchful gaze of a 4 year old girl who looks at me reproachfully as I wheel it away, as if I am a thief. At 5.22pm I succumb to a glass of semillon blanc and a very old re-run of 'Relocation, Relocation.