Autumn mantlepiece

My mantelpiece in October

Here is my mantlepiece today, which can be contrasted with how it looked on July 2 (see blog entry for that day). Far left, a wooden table lamp. I cannot remember where it came from, but I very much like its shape and colour, which is like a conker. Panning across we find an orange and green patterned pig made out of a milk carton; two vouchers for the Robert Burns Centre cinema, valid for a year - a reward for turning out to explain Moffat Book Events at a careers day at Wallace Hall school in Thornhill; Swedish horse, a present from Pia and Barty my friends in Stockholm, holding down an appointment for breast x-ray; voter's card for the D&G council election in November; reeds in a glass jar containing unmarked aromatic liquid; tickets and parking vouchers for Lennoxlove Book festival in November; invitation to opening by the Provost of Glasgow of George Wyllie exhibition at the City Chambers; Russian doll - part of a set; another room freshener with reeds, containing l'Occitane's 'Fleurs Blanches'; yellow and blue painted milk carton pig; threeheaded cobra holding down 'World Cafe' event at Glasgow's Tramway in Nov; thank you card (gentians) from participant in our MBE Russia conference in Sept; 2013 calendar from the Russian Museum showing on the cover Boris Kustodiev's Merchant's wife drinking tea; small dish containing marbles; empty cardboard box, once containing a small bar of guest soap presumably taken from  a hotel bathroom.

The gentians on the card remind me of that remarkable, mysterious and unforgettable poem by D H Lawrence:

Bavarian Gentians

Not every man has gentians in his house
in soft September, at slow, sad Michaelmas.

Bavarian gentians, big and dark, only dark
darkening the daytime, torch-like, with the smoking blueness of 

Pluto's gloom,
ribbed and torch-like, with their blaze of darkness 

spread blue down flattening into points, flattened under 

the sweep of white day torch-flower of the blue-smoking darkness, 

Pluto's dark-blue daze,black lamps from the halls of Dis, 

burning dark blue, giving off darkness, blue darkness, 

as Demeter's pale lamps give off light,
lead me then, lead the way.

Reach me a gentian, give me a torch!
let me guide myself with the blue, forked torch 

of this flower down the darker and darker stairs, 

where blue is darkened on blueness even where 

Persephone goes, just now, from the frosted September
to the sightless realm where darkness is awake 

upon the dark and Persephone herself is but a voice
or a darkness invisible enfolded in the deeper dark
of the arms Plutonic, and pierced with the passion 

of dense gloom,among the splendour of torches of 

darkness, shedding darkness on
the lost bride and her groom.

Rimbaud: A reminder

'Il ne s'en ira pas'

A reminder of yesterday's birthday boy:

Génie Il est l’affection et le présent puisqu’il a fait la maison ouverte à l’hiver écumeux et à la rumeur de l’été—lui qui a purifié les boissons et les aliments—lui qu’est le charme des lieux fuyant et le délice surhumain des stations.—Il est l’affection et l’avenir, la force et l’amour que nous, debout dans les rages et les ennuis, nous voyons passer dans le ciel de tempête et les drapeaux d’extase. Il est l’amour, mesure parfaite et réinventée, raison merveilleuse et imprévue, et l’éternité: machine aimée des qualités fatales. Nous avons tous eu l’épouvante de sa concession et de la nétre: o jouissance de notre santé, élan de nos facultés, affection égoïste et passion pour lui,—lui qui nous aime pour sa vie infinie… Et nous nous le rappelons et il voyage…Et si l’Adoration s’en va, sonne, sa Promesse, sonne: "Arrière ces superstitions, ces anciens corps, ces ménages et ces ages. C’est cette époque-ci qui a sombré!" Il ne s’en ira pas, il ne redescendra pas d’un ciel, il n’accomplira pas la rédemption des colères de femmes et des gaîtés des hommes et de tout ce péché: car c’est fait, lui étant, et étant aimé. O ses souffles, ses têtes, ses courses; la terrible célérité de la perfection des formes et de l’action. O fécondité de l’esprit et immensité de l’univers! Son corps! Le dégagement rêvé, le brisement de la grâce croisée de violence nouvelle! Sa vue, sa vue! tous les agenouillages anciens et les peines relevés à sa suite. Son jour! l’abolition de toutes souffrances sonores et mouvantes dans la musique plus intense. Son pas! les migrations plus énormes que les anciennes invasions. O Lui et nous! l’orgueil plus bienveillant que les charités perdues. O monde!—et le chant clair des malheurs nouveaux! Il nous a connu tous et nous a tous aimé, sachons, cette nuit d’hiver, de cap en cap, du pôle tumultueux au château, de la foule à la plage, de regards en regards, forces et sentiments las, le héler et le voir, et le renvoyer, et sous les marées et au haut des déserts de neige, suivre ses vues,—ses souffles—son corps,—son jour.

Genie He is affection and the present moment because he has thrown open the house to the snow foam of winter and to the noises of summer—he who purified drinking water and food—who is the enchantment fleeing places and the superhuman delight of resting places.—He is affection and future, the strength and love which we, erect in rage and boredom, see pass by in the sky of storms and the flags of ecstasy. He is love, perfect and reinvented measure, miraculous, unforeseen reason, and eternity: machine loved for its qualities of fate. We have all known the terror of his concession and ours: delight in our health, power of our faculties, selfish affection and passion for him,—he who loves us because his life is infinity… And we recall him and he sets forth…And if Adoration moves, rings, his Promise, rings: "Down with these superstitions, these other bodies, these couples and ages. This is the time which has gone under!" He will not go away, he will not come down again from some heaven, he will not redeem the anger of women, the laughter of men, or all that sin: for it is done now, since he is and since he is loved. His breathing, his heads, his racings; the terrifying swiftness of form and action when they are perfect. Fertility of the mind and vastness of the world! His body! the dreamed-of liberation, the collapse of grace joined with new violence! All that he sees! all the ancient kneelings and the penalties canceled as he passes by. His day! the abolition of all noisy and restless suffering within more intense music. His step! migrations more tremendous than early invasions. O He and I! pride more benevolent than lost charity. O world!—and the limpid song of new woe! He knew us all and loved us, may we, this winter night, from cape to cape, from the noisy pole to the castle, from the crowd to the beach, from vision to vision, our strength and our feelings tired, hail him and see him and send him away, and under tides and on the summit of snow deserts follow his eyes,—his breathing—his body,—his day.

[from Illuminations (1872-1874?)]

from Rimbaud: Complete Works, Selected Letters, a Bilingual Edition

Translated by Wallace Fowlie and revised by Seth Whidden

Our first AGM

Happy birthday, Arthur Rimbaud! Poet and arms dealer.

We held our first Moffat Book Events AGM yesterday evening, a landmark in the affairs of any organisation. We are positioning ourselves as facilitators of all the arts in Moffat and area, as our chairman Andrew Wheatcroft explained in his chairman's report - as follows:

Moffat Book Events

Chairman’s Report for Inaugural AGM

Fri Oct 19 2012 at 7pm MDCI

Moffat Book Events (MBE) started in 2010 as a community group, founded by Marilyn Elliott and Elizabeth Roberts. They took advice from Alistair Moffat who runs the highly successful Borders Book Festival. Alistair told them two things: it would take them 10 years to establish MBE on the scene, and they needed £10,000 as start-up funds.  Advice and practical help was also generously provided by Carolyn Yates, Dumfries and Galloway’s Literature Development Officer. Elizabeth supplied the startup cash.

In spring 2011, MBE launched its first event: ‘Love and Marriage in Moffat’ – a celebration to coincide with the launch by Persephone Books of ‘Miss Buncle’s Book’, their reissue of a best seller by local author D E Stevenson. In autumn 2011, our programme explored matters as various as Scotland’s DNA ‘Identity – Jeans or Genes’ (Alistair Moffat making the first of what we hope was the first of many appearances under our auspices), advice on children’s books with Guardian children’s books editor Julia Eccleshare and the introduction of ‘The Moffalump’ - Moffat story teller Angus Sinclair’s imaginary beastie.

It was MBE’s accountant Gerald McGill who advised the organizing committee to apply for Scottish Charitable Incorporated Organisation status. A constitution was agreed in July 2011 and SCIO status was granted in December last year. The granting of charitable status was an important development, giving us a framework and a structure – and an identity beyond that of just  a group of enthusiasts.

Plans for 2012 were soon under way. A coffee morning to raise funds was held at Moffat Town Hall on St Patrick’s Day 2012. A garden-themed event ‘Beyond the Garden Gate’ on Sat May 26 was a great success, with a ‘Gardens Open’ day organized by Tina Fox and a team of volunteers on Sunday May 27. Janet Wheatcroft had a Free Weekend for All at  Craigieburn, and my strongest memory is of children roaming the garden trying to find the Moffalump

Looking ahead, we have lots of plans for 2013 and beyond, fund raising permitting. There is no shortage of ideas but we need to be ambitious in developing the kind of plans that will attract serious levels of support. With that in mind, we are very lucky to be working with Alan Thomson, a well-respected figure on the D&G arts scene. He took over the organization of our extremely successful international conference last month: ‘Russia: Lessons and Legacy’. He is now helping us broaden our horizons,  applying to take part in Creative Scotland and Scottish Natural Heritage’s ‘Open Country’ scheme, Day of the Region 2013 and to  apply for Creative Scotland’s Creative Places’ award in 2014.

So we have a double strategy. In the immediate term we want to put on a growing number of events. The first of this we hope will be an event centred on crime fiction – Murder in Moffat is the provisional title, for next  Spring. Scottish  Crime Fiction is becoming –like Scandinavian Crime Fiction- an important and identifiable category of writing. Our major task is to find the funds to make it possible. At the same time we are we are aiming to consolidate our partnership with the Russian state library for foreign publications (a result of ‘Russia: Lessons and Legacy ) The collaboration will play an active role in the UK Year of Russian Culture and Language in 2014. It celebrates  the 400^thanniversary the building of the Globe Theatre and the 450^th of Shakespeare’s death. All parts of the United Kingdom will be involved and we hope, working with The British Council, to make a significant contribution to the celebrations in Scotland. We shall use this activity a major part of our Creative Places application.

All this may seem very ambitious. It is. However,  the lesson of Alistair Moffat’s success with the Borders Book Festival and the development of Wigtown is that big ideas can sometimes be more be more achievable than something more modest. My belief that our great asset is Moffat itself. When we had the Beyond the Garden Gate event, and also ‘Russia: Lessons and Legacy, the speakers were entranced by the town.

This is why we are so anxious to extend our membership, and to bring  together fresh ideas and effective enthusiasm. I stepped into the shoes of Adam Dillon, and it was only then that I realized the opportunity that we have to put Moffat on the big map as a centre of creativity: publishing books, writing books, enthusiastic readers, theatre, music, - and more.

Andrew Wheatcroft

Oct 19 2012

Entryism

Watch out! He's behind you!

According to Wikipedia, 'entryism' is a political strategy in which an organisation or state encourages its members or supporters to join another, usually larger organisation in an attempt to expand influence and expand their ideas and program. In situations where the organization being "entered" is hostile to entrism, the entrists may engage in a degree of subterfuge to hide the fact that they are an organisation in their own right. In some cases the alleged entryists perceive themselves as supporters of a newspaper and not members of an organization. While Marxists argue that entryism flows from the "demands of the class struggle", others allege it is more akin to infiltration.
Entryism does not involve dissolving the small organisation into the larger one. Entryism is often carried out in secrecy and often in organisations run on Leninist lines. The strategy of entryism is as old as politics itself.

I am interested in entryism because I am working on a novel in which the protagonist - a woman of a similar age and interests to myself  - decides to infiltrate a university department with a view to expose the covert political bias which, contrary to all traditions of academic objectivity, underlies the teaching and reading matter of the course.

My first real life experience of 'entryism' was in the Edward Heath 'Who governs Britain'? General Election campaign of February 1974. I had very recently moved into the house that was to be the family home for 35 years, in Chelsea. The constituency was traditionally Conservative, but I did not like Ted Heath - I had met him while working as a journalist in south Wales some years before - I did not share his enthusiasm for the European project, known misleadingly as the Common Market and so I decided to join the south Stanley (our ward) campaign team lobbying for the Liberal candidate, whose name was confusingly similar to the Conservative candidate's. We were a fairly small group living in a very limited geographical area. One of our number, we began to realise, suffered from some sort of undefined learning difficulty - he was what would now be known as 'vulnerable'. Another was a very impressive chap always very well turned out in a conventional suit compared to the rest of us who were pretty typical of late twenty/early thirtysomething Chelsea residents in those days - dungarees, cords and various other casual outfits. Our candidate, who was an alcoholic restaurateur, duly went down to an ignominious defeat at the polls. We, the Liberal campaigning team, met at a local pub to drink to our defeat and to go our separate ways. Once the drinks were in, the young man in the suit tapped his glass and said: 'I think it only right to tell you that I have been working with this group as part of my training'. Yes, he had been using us as an exercise, he claimed for the Foreign Office - but perhaps he meant MI6 or MI5. He left the pub and we never saw him again in our little neck of the woods. 

The navvies' graveyard

Navvies

 

The search is on for the identity of the 37 navvies buried in anonymous graves marked only by river stones at Elvanfoot.  These navvies (from ‘navigators’, because they came over from Ireland originally to dig our British canal system) died in 1847 of typhus  http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Epidemic_typhus

This sort of typhus is spread by lice in unhygienic, crowded and cold conditions. The navvies in Elvanfoot lived in miserable turf huts.

‘A major epidemic occurred in Ireland between 1816 and 1819, during the famine caused by a world-wide reduction in temperature known as the Year Without a Summer. An estimated 100,000 Irish perished. Typhus appeared again in the late 1830s, and yet another major typhus epidemic occurred during the Great Irish Famine between 1846 and 1849. The Irish typhus spread to England, where it was sometimes called "Irish fever" and was noted for its virulence. It killed people of all social classes, as lice were endemic and inescapable, but it hit particularly hard in the lower or "unwashed" social strata.’ So: it looks as if these particular ‘navvies’ could have come over from Ireland in 1847 because of the famine at home.

Dick Sullivan (http://www.victorianweb.org/history/work/sullivan/10.html) writes: 'By 1846, 200,000 men were building railways of which possibly half would have been labourers doing navvy-like work.  Wherever they went they impacted on unspoilt innocent landscapes like elemental forces, crashing out of a stillness, a hush, caused by expectation of their coming, bursting out like a train from a tunnel, all steam and fire, ferocity and danger. Once the early lines were laid, navvies came spilling in on the railways already built by their own people, cluttering up country railway stations (harassing rustic station masters), choking the highways with bird cages and baggage, prams, clocks, frying pans and bedsteads. Their impact on a tranquil rural population usually enlivened it, frequently debauched it, and always scandalised the ruling gentry. 'The females were corrupted, many of them,' said a contractor of the mid-Northamptonshire villages in the 183os, 'and went away with the men, and lived amongst them in habits that civilised language will scarcely allow a description of.'
The 1846 Committee was particularly worried. What if the marauding habits of the navvy lingered on, endemically, and damaged forever the docility of the rustic labourer? The Deputy Clerk of the Peace for Dumfriesshire already despaired for the moral health of the community.

'In what way?' asked the Committee.

'In the drunkenness of the little boys and the going together of men and women to live without marriage.'
Abandoned mistresses, he almost implied, littered the parish welfare system. Local lads were debauched by drinking, swearing, fighting, and tobacco: boys, said the Deputy, aghast, of twelve and fourteen. And they earned ten shillings a week carrying blunted picks to the blacksmith's shop for sharpening.
And the Queen's peace?

'On pay days,' replied the Deputy, 'I should say the place is quite uninhabitable.'

Essential further reading: The Great Hunger Ireland 1845-9 by Cecil Woodham-Smith Hamish Hamilton 1962

Chariot of Bacchus

Note tigers

Chariot of Bacchus, part of a royal French marriage procession, that of the Dauphin of France to Marie-Josephe de Saxe in 1747. Happy days, while they lasted.

Brideshead revisited?

This photograph was taken on Oxford High St in 1964. It was carefully posed by the man standing at the apex of the revellers atop a vintage Rolls Royce, and taken by a professional photographer. We were each supplied with a bottle of Bollinger. A slogan current at the time in ads for a petrol company was 'Put a tiger in your tank'. Tigers traditionally pulled Bacchus's chariot. There is an odd man out in the photograph, his head just visible at the back of the car. He was one of the admirers of my dark-haired friend and flatmate who is partly obscuring my face with an upturned bottle just below our choreographer/host. He was a naval officer, and taught us how to make scrambled egg - we were all three of us absolutely clueless in the kitchen. My other flatmate sitting next to her was born and brought up at Wightwick Manor, one of the most perfect examples of Arts and Crafts architecture and interiors. What are my emotions, contemplating this scene? A detached admiration for the artistic flair shown by the organiser of the photograph. We did drink a lot of champagne, particularly in the summer. Pimms or champagne was the order of the day. We were all poised on the verge of the Sixties, about to change the way we dressed, cut our hair, the music we listened to. We were happy, miserable, accident prone (I spent part of that summer, or was it the following one, in a plaster cast on one leg, broken in a car accident, being driven by a boyfriend back to his digs). Fights broke out at parties - once, my then Italian boyfriend threatened another with a knife. Drugs other than alcohol were so rare that the few who were on heroin or marijuana were well known by their faces and names, regarded with distant awe. Men looked middleaged, dandies wore carnations in their buttonholes, evening clothes. Dark glasses worn during the day were known to be a sure sign of decadence. Sports cars were driven. Men picked up the tab at dinners, we all ate out frequently in big groups. We were known as 'birds'. It was a period of radical transition, we all of us drifted without any trouble whatsoever into jobs in London. My friends and I first moved, lock stock and a variety of boyfriends flitting in and out rather than living in, to Knightsbridge. Then our transient world began to turn into something very different - careers, marriages, children, breakdowns, suicides, murders, death. It was all there ahead of us, as we posed on that Rolls in the High St that afternoon in June.

All the Devils Are Here

The Hundred of Axstane

I have over one hundred pictures in my house, most of them all in one room, hung from floor to ceiling on every wall - even above the doorway. This one is a map of the Hundred of Axstane in Kent where I spent my childhood. The River Thames marks its northern boundary, and the river Darent runs through it. My present postcode in Moffat includes the letters 'AX' and immediately before I came to Moffat, I lived for many years in a place with 'stane' (stone) in its name. To understand my home county of Kent, I recommend a book: All The Devils Are Here by David Seabrook. There is a chapter in it about the mad Victorian artist Richard Dadd who murdered his father in the grounds of Cobham Hall where my daughters went to school. I was also at school in Kent, further from home in the Weald, at Benenden. Seabrook's book has a chapter on Margate where T S Eliot wrote the greatest poem of the 20th century: The Waste Land. It is a poem about the First World War, written in the aftermath by someone who was not a soldier, or at the front. Nevertheless, it should be part of the events being set in motion to remember that war from 2014 to 2018. There is a reference to my home territory in Ian Fleming's  Bond novel Moonraker,  a scene where the villain attempts to kill Bond by releasing an industrial-sized roll of paper from a Reed's paper lorry in an attempt to crush 007 in his sports car as he follows the truck up the aptly named Death Hill, not far from our front door and just short of Brand's Hatch the motor racing circuit. The area is favoured by south London villains of the Brinks Mat variety.  Darenth valley was the site of many paper mills as well as the only early (4th century) Christian house church in the world. The only other one is (or maybe, in light of the recent bombings, that should be 'was'?) in Syria.  I left the house where my parents and siblings lived for a boarding school at Bexhill on Sea when I was 7, since when it ceased to be home in the sense that most people speak of 'home' - a place where I felt I securely belonged. How can people who had a proper home for the whole of their childhood and youth ever regard those of us who were sent away to school at that age as 'privileged'?

The Mill Leat

Birch tree on the leat

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The Mill Leat

That autumn morning, the sun came over the line of hills just after 8 o’clock.

Before that, there was a golden glow in the clear pale sky, faint at first, then ever stronger,  illuminating the long curving line of the hills. The hills made a black line on the horizon, where they met the sky. Along the top of the hills there were dark green conifers, then green fields further down, where sheep were grazing .

 Above the pitched slate roofs of the houses in the valley, pebbledash bungalows in the foreground, bigger stone or white-rendered villas beyond, smoke rose in the still air between the alternating tall evergreen columns and spreading branches of ornamental trees in a scene of classical serenity.

Down from the high hills, through the valley ran the mill stream to join the river.

The stream ran differently every day: chuckling along on fine days; in a roaring torrent after rain. Once, in the depth of winter, it was blocked entirely by ice floes piled up in irregular rectangles- a mini-ice age, an arctic in miniature. The rocks and pebbles it ran over were large and small, some were old slabs of masonry, some were whinstones bearing traces of fossil remains.

The former mill leat was a beautiful geometric shape; a clear-cut, tapering curve of fine bright green grass, trees and shrubs, sparkling with yellow wildflowers in spring and pink-and-white cuckoo flowers in summer. Now, in autumn, the grass was strewn with the golden leaves of the great birch trees that grew there and overhung the ditch that ran along the outer curve of the leat, alongside the road from the little town that curved round on its way up the hill.

A low stone wall, made of great granite blocks, as mighty as if for a castle, was set in the rough turf on the north side of the stream,  some distance back from the edge. This rampart ran along the whole length of the leat from its widest point near the bridge, to the point of the curve, where it ended: the petrified prow of a great stone ship, anchored for ever,  high above the rocks in the stream below. Boys played here. They could climb down from the prow onto the rocks, and back up again. Here, too, the ditch joined the stream, and the great round mouth of a storm drain gaped in a tantalizing ‘O’.

The arched footbridge across the stream joined the big old houses on the north, along Well Road, to the scheme on the south side. It was a busy bridge, crossed and recrossed by school children, men with dogs, women with prams and shopping, youths on bikes. A metal fence ran along the roadside; one of the rails had been broken for years in a place where generations of short-cutters climbed over or through the rails. On the scheme side of the river was a flat open green grassy park, the water meadow, that flooded after heavy rain. Children played football in the park; there were swings and a see-saw. The park was bounded by two bridges: the arched footbridge with its wooden railings at the east end, and, at the west end, the road bridge and its embankment. You could edge under the road bridge, foot by foot, along the narrow ledge.

In the ditch with its puddles, dead leaves and wild flowers, its buttercups, dandelions, ladies smock or cuckoo flowers, an alder had seeded itself. Blackbirds often hopped there. Down by the stream,  ferns grew and a dark-leaved viburnum,heavy with crimson berries.  All along the banks of the stream were trees great and small:  alders, field maples, hornbeam, hazels, ash trees, yews, rowans, elders, limes, oaks and willows. The birch trees dropped their gold and green leaves onto the soft green grass; their trunks were silvery and mossy, their branches reached high into the clear blue sky. After high winds,  their fallen twigs were scattered all over the leat, the right size for bows and arrows, for waving and chasing and throwing into the turbulent water of the stream.

Along the stream’s south bank, near the water’s edge, were stray traces and remnants of a forgotten fence:  short metal uprights, handy now to hold onto, to step down onto a patch of sand or into the stream.

Birds flew and perched and hopped on the leat – rooks, pigeons, robins and blackbirds.

From the leat you can look up to the hills that circle this valley. Because the hills encircle the valley, this is a special place, once called ‘a cauldron’, where weather was made and it was sacred.

Great rivers

The Amazon

The Hudson

The Thames

I only learned today that the online bookseller Amazon, like that famous imprint Thames and Hudson, is named after a great river. Until now, I had always vaguely associated Amazon with those fearful warrior ladies. Asked last week to recommend a novel to fellow creative writing classmates, I chose The River by Rumer Godden. It is a brilliant evocation of India, and family life from the viewpoint of an observant child.  The transition from childhood is gradual,  progressing through familiar steps but then suddenly and shockingly accelerates. The end is so unbearably sad that this time round I could not bring myself to re-read the last few pages.

Celebration

Celebration (l to r): Andrew Wheatcroft, Alan Thomson, Ann Shukman, Marilyn Elliott, Donald Smith and Elizabeth Roberts

Yesterday evening the organising committee of our Russian conference met in the early evening at Brodies to celebrate the great success of the event. We hope shortly to be posting conference papers, conference recording and many photographs on our website. Next steps include: a Memorandum of Understanding with our Russian partner, the All-Union State Library for Foreign Literature, Moscow; publication of bilingual editions; exchange of writers in residence; a translators conference and active participation in the upcoming UK Year of Russian Language and Culture Jan-Dec 2014.

Tate Moffat?

An idea is gaining ground: that Moffat's Old Academy building should become Scotland's Centre for the European Avant Garde. The core of the collection will be Richard Demarco's remarkable archive of 1.2m black-and-white photographs, taken over 60 years of working with the cutting edge of experimental art and artists. He also has a considerable art collection - see sample at Edinburgh's Summerhall (formerly Dicks veterinary college). Suggestions, comments welcome.

...and back (minus cardigan, keys and brooch)

Richard Demarco human hurricane

Sarah Fraser, author of the Last Highlander

Adrian Turpin, director of the Wigtown Book Festival

A memorable day out at the Wigtown Book Festival yesterday. It was breezy and sunny by the time I arrived, and I was able to leave my brolly in the car. In the hallway I saw and had a quick word with Adrian Turpin, the talented young organiser of the festival, looking cheerful, dressed casually in white shirt and jeans, striking exactly the right note, ie being seen out and about, welcoming and accessible to us (largely elderly) festival goers. Being a weekday, the age of the audience is to be expected - the retired or self-employed are free on weekdays, as well as school children or 'students' of all ages, who were also there in force.  I had arrived an hour early for my first event so went into the first floor cafe for a good broccoli quiche and salad. The Main Hall in the County Buildings was packed for Sarah Fraser, talking about one of her husband's family forebears, the 18th century Lord Lovat who was executed in the Tower of London for treason, aged 80. It was so hot, with the sun pouring in the windows despite the half closed venetian blinds that I took my cardigan off and alas forgot to reach behind to retrieve it from the seat and take it with me at the end of the session. I only realised what I had done when I got out of my car at the end of the day and went to reach for my house keys in the pocket - lo! no pocket, no cardigan. I had also pinned on it an amber and silver brooch, an item of jewellery given to me in the times when I was hopping back and forth to Moscow in the days when the Baltic States (where amber comes from in chunks) were part of the Soviet Empire. But back to my Day Out: after S. Fraser, I was very glad of the offer of a quick cup of tea with Carolyn Yates our D&G Literature Development officer (thanks!) in Reading Lasses, then back to the hall for Richard Demarco 'In Conversation'. I have known Richard for forty years, since my sister was administrator of his gallery in Melville Crescent, Edinburgh. He is an unsettling presence, now the same age as the unlamented late Lord Lovat was when he got the chop but luckily for us all still very much alive and kicking. He showed, and commented briskly on, a series of black-and-white slides, some upside down and some back to front but that didn't matter. They recorded a life of unrelenting opposition to complacency and comfortable assumptions. After the slide show, the curtains were opened and the lights switched on for his 'conversation' and questions. Richard celebrates Romano-Celtic culture throughout Europe - a geographical expression in which he includes Scotland. His archive consists of 1,200,000 photographs and a collection of 20th entury art by geniuses such as Joseph Beuys, Ian Hamilton Finlay, George Wylye and Paul Neagu. Richard is an artist too, of course. Not only or even so much his works on paper but his inspired 'performances' such as the voyage on a replica of Darwin's Beagle across the Irish Sea to James Joyce's Martello Tower in Dublin or the performance of Macbeth in the ruined abbey on Inchcolm. His life is a performance, camera round neck, purposeful, focused. He needs a home for his archive, and would not mind if it were in Wigtown near Whithorn - Demarco is a Christian and likes the idea of pilgrimage. 'The most important of the arts is agriculture' he reminded us yesterday, as he showed a slide of 'the road to Meikle Seggie'. More detail of his life and extraordinary career is on the web and on wikipedia. Those of us brushed by this human hurricane find ourselves knocked a bit sideways by his undiminished, unrelenting insistence that we raise our game and our eyes. It's a bit frightening, actually.

Off to Wigtown

The current Lord Lovat

Richard Demarco

Sefton with scars from nail bomb

I'm off to Wigtown today, to hear Richard Demarco 'In Conversation'. Before Richard, I have booked to hear Sarah Fraser on her forebear Simon, Lord Lovat. Every oldest son in the house of Lovat is named Simon, called 'Shimi', as I learned from another descendant, Veronica, the late Lady Maclean widow of Sir Fitzroy of 'Eastern Approaches' fame. I will report back tomorrow.

On the subject of seasonal recipes: I invented a salad yesterday evening as follows:- a little leftover pilau rice (Uncle Ben's instant - excellent) to which I added some wilted spinach bought in a bag from the Co-op, some crispy bacon and a very ripe plum tomato, sliced. I seasoned the mix with some freshly ground black pepper and voila. For afters I had a very hard pear with gorgonzola - the watery hardness of the pear was more than compensated by the creamy, salty cheese which I spread on each slice of the quartered fruit.

The tragic news of the former member of the household cavalry found dead beside his children in a Hampshire lane yesterday brought back memories of the day when he was blown up by the IRA with his horse, Sefton. We walked our dogs every day in Hyde Park past the spot before my husband crossed back to his office in Grosvenor Place, including on the day the incident happened. He was at his desk overlooking Buckingham Palace when the explosion occurred. We had many near-misses of that sort. My daughter left Harrods half an hour before another IRA bomb went off, killing one person, outside the store one Christmas week. The front door of the house opposite ours, where the Deputy Leader of the House of Commons was living at the time, was blown in by the IRA one summer morning when I was on my own with my two children.