Southern Upland Partnership

Some 15 years ago, somewhere out and about in the upper Clyde valley, I came across a simple A4 typewritten sheet flyer announcing the formation of The Southern Uplands Partnership, a new membership organisation 'to keep people living and working in the southern uplands of Scotland'. I joined, and at the SUP AGM held yesterday at the Buccleuch Arms hotel, I was co-opted onto the board. This pleases me greatly, because all my life I have enjoyed building bridges, for practical purposes, and that is what the SUP aims to do from coast to coast, making life better for the people and places we live in. Vyvyan Wood-Gee, local champion of horse trails, is also a new member of the SUP board, and we hope - for example - to find a way to enable people to use the many miles of new road being built for the wind farms in our region.

My copy of The Coming of the King - The First Book of Merlin by one of our session leaders at Moffat Book Event Oct 15/16 2011, Nikolai Tolstoy, arrived this morning. It is a long book - 850 pages -, setting the legend of Arthur in the ancient British kingdoms of Strathclyde and Reged, based on much scholarly research and exploration on the ground.

Friends Evening at Brodies

Moffat Book Events' first Friends Evening at Brodies on a lovely sunny evening (Tues June 28)was a most enjoyable and productive gathering. We toasted our new chairman, Adam Dillon, who outlined plans for our October 15/16 2011 event on the theme of identity: its manifold aspects from the mythical ability of characters such as Merlin to 'shape-change', Merlin's connection with Moffat (his cave on Hartfell); the role of DNA in enabling us to trace our personal history; the stories we tell ourselves and how to compile an oral community history; the importance of the presentation of self through dress etc. What promises to be a fascinating day with something for every taste will end, as has become traditional for MBE, with a festive tea at our venue, the Moffat House hotel. New ideas were invited, and will be explored such as adding a creative writing workshop session, perhaps on the Sunday morning, and, through the good offices of Andrew Wheatcroft, inviting a representative from the Chinese book industry to attend the October event to see how a community book event can work for the benefit of all.

What Travel Really Broadens

I got back from London on Sunday evening, after a pretty typical journey – set off to Euston from South Ken on my usual tube but as I was about to change at Victoria onto the Victoria line there was an announcement that the Victoria line was closed for repairs/engineering work so I continued to Embankment and got the Northern line, which lands you at a station new to me called Euston (Charing Cross branch) - a long walk to the mainline station. On the concourse there was an announcement that because of the theft of copper wire, a whole area of signals had been knocked out and a train to Manchester Airport had been cancelled. There was a mile-long queue for (my) Glasgow train as a result, because all the Manchester Airport passengers transferred onto that one. I got a seat, and we proceeded to Milton Keynes where we came to a complete stop for nearly an hour because of the self-same signalling problems. Luckily, I avoided a three hour wait at Carlisle having missed my scheduled connection to Lockerbie because son in law Jim gallantly offered to come and pick me up.

Yesterday, I was to go to the dentist in Lanark but instead Jim and I spent the morning poring over spreadsheets to see where our business is going. We (Jim, Elly and I) have formed a family partnership, Forestry Purposes LLP www.forestrypurposes.com. Work should soon be starting to convert 21 Well Road (the 18th cent cottage previously used as a builders yard next to Elly & Jim’s house) into two offices upstairs and a ‘workshop’ and shower room/WC downstairs. We plan to let one office and the workshop, and will make a garden - fruit & veg ,hens etc plus a ‘sit-ooterie’ for me because I have no garden at my house in School Lane.

Jim had a setback with the spruce beer which was continuing to ferment in the bottles, then, having cracked that, the drink was losing fizz because he discovered that the bottles he had bought were only airtight if filled with hot liquid (don’t ask). Anyway, we should have some of - hopefully fizzy 0.5%, therefore 'soft', spruce beer for two occasions in Moffat this week: a Moffat Book Events Friends Evening tonight and the AGM of the Southern Upland Partnership tomorrow. Elly is o/c sales, and she and a friend Elaine will be swinging into action in Sept to do tastings with a view to get orders within an area roughly bounded by Glasgow & Edinburgh to the north, Carlisle to the south to begin with.

Plans for our Oct 15/16 2011 Moffat Book Event are shaping up nicely: a 'Transformers' workshop for children first thing, looking at shape-changers from Merlin to the present-day; Nikolai Tolstoy on Merlin and Moffat; Alistair Moffat on the ever-evolving story of our national DNA then after a break for lunch, Ruth Tittensor will lead a panel discussion on how to compile an oral history, drawing on her highly praised 2009 history of Whitelees From Peat Bog to Conifer Forest: An Oral History of Whitelee, its Community and Landscape. We hope to finish off a full day’s programme with a session by Moffat style consultant Moira Cox, on the presentation of self via colour and style before what is rapidly becoming our signature festive tea designed by Julie the baking genius at Moffat House hotel to match our Scottish traditional theme with some appropriate 21st century twists.

Sadly, all bar one of this year’s hens in the forest have been knocked off one by one in the past couple of weeks by predators unknown – leaving just little heaps of feathers. The sole survivor has stopped laying and our handyman Russell has installed two decorative silver pheasants to keep her company.

Looking to the weeks ahead:we (Elly, Jim, boys & me) have booked The Granary, a farmhouse just behind North Berwick, July 9-30. But I have a family wedding in NYC which means I will be away July 14-18 and have to be back in Moffat for a couple of meetings July 26-28. For some insane reason I am then booked to sail from Oban to Falmouth on a boat called the Bessie May July 31-Aug 6. Abi is doing her show Abi Roberts Takes You Up The Aisle www.abiroberts.com in Edinburgh in Aug – I thought I might catch it on Aug 10 with Elly for her birthday with the sister of a friend from university days who will be in Edinburgh that week staying with her daughter.

Next Mon July 4 I have organised a gathering up at Crookedstane to meet Michael Pawlyn, the architect of the Eden Project, who is coming up to suss out possibilities for a ‘destination’ visitor attraction to bring visitors to the area.

Potiche

I had planned to meet a friend for lunch at Geales, the fish place on Chelsea Green,but on my way to buy the Saturday papers, I passed the fishmonger so I rang and suggested we have something fishy at my place instead. I bought: scallops; a dressed crab; a jar of salmon roe, a salmon fillet and a lemon. We chatted in the kitchen while I cooked the salmon in a little water and olive oil, and the scallops with four slices of streaky bacon. We opened the jar of salmon eggs and scooped them out like a dip, onto salt and vinegar crisps while the fish was cooking. We have known each other for over 50 years, and learned 'Heureux qui, comme Ulysse', motif of my funerary pavement at Crookedstane Rig, together at school. She is celebrating the first anniversary of her new lease of life after a major heart operation last year, and now, with the operation safely behind her, is in the process of 'downsizing' from her family house as I did two years ago. She is looking for a flat in the same area of west London where she has lived for thirty years, disappointed to have been outbid a couple of weeks ago for a new build, evidence that the housing market in some areas is stronger than ever, some say at 2007 boom levels. Death, the journey of life, change and the passing of time are the themes of The Enigma of Arrival - both the book by V S Naipaul, a masterpiece which I finished reading and closed with regret just now, but will certainly re-read - and the appropriately mysterious painting that inspired it by Giorgio di Chirico. I have a bad habit of listening to BBCR4 as I read, and this morning heard a reference to Thoreau's On Walden Pond, extolling the virtues of simplicity and living close to nature. Nature and the passing seasons, the tending - or neglect - of gardens, the cultivation of fields and livestock are the backdrop to Naipaul's deceptively modest narrative, about a period of rural life and the people who drift in and out of the life of a small country estate in a Wiltshire valley which Naipaul nevertheless surreptitiously invests with profound philosophical significance, whereby the book becomes a meditation, not just on the writer's life, but on life itself. After lunch I went to see Potiche starring Catherine Deneuve and Gerard Depardieu - a brilliantly executed and witty comedy of family life and social history set in 1977 France. The only elephant in the room, in this case almost literally, is Depardieu who is now so colossally fat that hints in the plot at the fanning of an old flame between him and Deneuve strain credulity (like Depardieu's seams) to breaking point. There is a family business at the heart of the story, an umbrella factory started by Deneuve's father and at the start of the film, being run so badly by Deneuve's small town tyrant and bully of a husband that the workforce is on strike, her children refuse to have anything to do with the business and needless to say she is firmly sidelined to the role of 'trophy wife'(the translation of an untranslatable French word 'potiche'. Being myself a member of such a family, there was plenty to enjoy in her husband's come-uppance .

Down memory lane

A few random notes and observations from an occasional visitor to London: Fitzrovia, the Georgian village between the Euston Road to the north and Mayfair to the south has undergone a great revival. Fitzroy Square has largely been pedestrianised, and Guy Ritchie is restoring two houses on the south side of the green grass square, which on Thursday was decked with two white tents for a summer party. After my meeting at No.6, I decided to walk home and set off south to Oxford Circus, on down Regent St, across into Hanover St and then zig-zag into Brook St where I saw a branch of Jo Malone, the British luxury brand (candles, perfume). Always on the lokout for possible outlets for our Zacharry's organic Scottish spruce essential oil, I went in. An assistant explained that the brand now belongs to US cosmetics giant Estee Lauder, and wrote the office HQ address in nearby Grosvenor St for me. There, the receptionist explained that everyone had gone for a meeting in New York, but gave me the MD's name and telephone number, and his PA's to follow up. On I went, past Claridge's hotel and down the west side of Berkeley Square, across Curzon St by which time I had been walking for about three quarters of an hour, and my feet were getting sore. I decided to cross Piccadilly and get a bus the rest of the way. I know every corner of this part of London, having lived there - first as an A level student at the redoubtable Westminster tutors in Curzon Place where I shared a flat with Vidal Sasson in 1961 (well, we had adjoining flats in the same small building across the road from where Hugh Hefner opened his Playboy Club; I went to the gala opening with Tim Bligh, then Harold Macmillan's PPS). From my bedroom window I could see John Osborne and Albert Finney going in to see their agent; I shopped for groceries in Shepherd Market; as a young journalist, I later interviewed Stirling Moss in his ultra-modern house tucked in behind Hamilton Place and did visiting celebrity interviews at the Westbury hotel in Conduit St where they used to stay. Yesterday (Friday June 24), an odd experience which I am still trying to fathom: at Victoria Station, on my way back from a meeting in Kent, I picked up a copy of the free Evening Standard newspaper. Continuing across the concourse, I noticed at another booth, a man standing beside a stock of copies of the same paper but also with a colour magazine. I waved my newspaper at him and made to pick up the magazine, but he stopped me and told me that the first one 'came from a different firm' and that I had to return the newspaper I had picked up to the other stand some way back. I put the copy down on a ledge on the stand, took the replacement paper plus magazine and walked on, the man shouting after me 'You didn't, did you'. 'No', I thought 'I didn't - because I cannot understand why on earth I should'. I think this may be an entry for my 'Recession' or 'Austerity' Diary. As a footnote, after some years of hob-nobbing with the famous and interviewing people who had done/were doing interesting things, I decided it was time I myself did something interesting instead of recording other people's deeds. Reader, I became a property developer in Los Angeles, then planted a forest where I built a house, which is now on the edge of the biggest windfarm on land in Europe. More in my next...

Stories told by gardens

For a book event organiser, the AGM of a society founded to celebrate buildings might not seem an obvious way to pursue an interest in story-telling. But yesterday's AGM of the Georgian Group proved me wrong. The guest speaker was Richard Wheeler, billed (wrongly, as he explained - he has a more complicated NT remit now -) as Curator of Parks and Gardens The National Trust. With the help of a series of slides, he showed how features placed in a landscape, such as towers or temples, demonstrate the garden owner's allegiance to philosophical or political ideas, or versions of history, as at Stourhead and Stowe. An axis leading, for instance from the front of a house to a distant church spire across a cruciform body of water mimics that at Versailles, symbolising the Christian vision of eternity. Afterwards, I asked him what he makes of the sudden outcrop of gigantic features in the British landscape, from the Angel of the North to the White Horse in Kent, and those proposed or in course of construction, such as The Great Unknown at Gretna and Charles Jencks's Northumbriana on the east coast. Do these monuments have a philosophical purpose, and if so, what ? Land Art is another way of telling our story, or stories, posing questions or suggesting answers. My own modest contribution to the genre is an installation I have commissioned, to be placed in a ruined sheep 'stell' (drystone shelter) at Crookedstane: an engraved round slate pavement bearing lines from the poem by Joachim du Bellay 'Heureux qui, comme Ulysse' - appropriate because of its reference to the legend of Jason and the Golden Fleece which the artist, sculptor Peter Coates, will reference with a small central medallion inset with lines of fleecy gold. Peter did much of the work at Ian Hamilton Finlay's wonderful sculpture garden at Little Sparta - one of Scotland's greatest (perhaps the greatest) works of 20th century art, as well as the pavement engraved with the names of British trees and their Latin botanical names, retrospectively dedicated to the memory of Diana, Princess of Wales, at the entrance to the Serpentine Gallery in London's Hyde Park - or does the garden become Kensington Gardens on that side of the road? Probably. The story behind my pavement installation is that I learned the poem by heart at school, and kept myself going during a pilgrimage to Canterbury from St Martin in The Fields by reciting it over and over again when the going got tough.

Climate change?

I am indebted to The Writer's Almanac for the following: 'On this day (June 23 - ER) in 1801, Samuel Taylor Coleridge sent a letter from his house in Keswick, in Cumbria. He wrote: "O that you had now before your eyes the delicious picture of Lake, and River, and Bridge, and Cottage, and spacious Field with its pathway, and woody Hill with its spring verdure, and mountain with the snow yet lingering in fantastic patches upon it (ER's emphasis)'. Really ?? On June 23?? It was chilly yesterday both in Moffat and later on when I got to London, and met a friend for supper at a restaurant where we were able to sit at a table outside on the pavement. I wore my woollen jacket most of the time, although for the first hour or so the sun was warming my back. My friend and I both worked for Thomson Newspapers in Cardiff in the 1960's, before she went on to a distinguished career as a foreign correspondent and author. Yesterday, she was mulling over an invitation to repeat a visit she made in 1957 with another journalist to what was the then newly-opened (under Nikita Khrushchev) USSR. I urged her to consider accepting, because I enjoy reading accounts of return visits especially one so long - it would be 55 years - after the first. Another topic of conversation was an absurd attempt by the Human Resources department of an academic institution where she still teaches to cost her contribution by breaking down her job into segments: student contacts, correcting work, time in class etc. As my friend said, it is like asking a surgeon to try to break down the component aspects of his job, apportioning lesser cost to 'patient contact' compared with time spent actually wielding the knife. I am adding this anecdote to my new 'Austerity Diary' where I am recording instances of how the cuts are biting. So far, entries range from the existential : the despair of young neighbour, contemplating the prospects for her young family as she struggles to complete a professional qualification to entitle her to a decent salary - to the practical e.g. the station room at Lockerbie was closed all day yesterday 'due to staff shortages'. My beady eye will be kept on the size of chocolate bars and other such indices of national decline, or 'belt tightening'. My supper companion and I were remembering how, in our early travels, in countries like Italy and Spain they used to give you sweets instead of change because small coinage in the currency was worthless. On an entirely more cheerful note: my Swedish friend emailed to say he has dispatched a jar of 'gramskottmarmelat' - a seasonal delicacy as prized as Beaujolais Nouveau, a spread or 'jam' made from new spruce shoots.