ISLAND LIFE: The Blue Cabin Blog

News

2012-01-21T17:50:00.001Z

Last night my mother went on ahead to be with my father. I'm sure I'll pick up this blog again soon but I think I'll see how it goes for a while. Apologies, and thanks again for the well-wishes, there have been some lovely comments & emails.

Subsequent edit: my sincere thanks for all your messages, on and off the blog, and I just wanted to add one thing which I hope will answer some people's concerns. We used a brief window of opportunity to get mum out of hospital (in her own car!) as planned; she was more than a little pleased to be home; she was greeted by Sammy the dog; the cats jumped up onto the bed; all the family were around and in and out; the medical support was magnificent and ensured that the great worry of comfort was professionally and sensitively covered; insofar as possible it was business as usual; and mum went on peacefully, and with family all around.

Thanks

2012-01-16T10:32:00.004Z

Sincere thanks to all those who have sent well-wishes, on and off this blog – mum has had a fight on her hands but I don't know anyone with more fight in them and I'm pleased to say she is now gaining ground! A little more sustenance, rest and teamwork and hopefully it will be business as usual – I've missed posting to the blog but normal service, as they say, should resume shortly..

Waiting game

2012-01-13T09:27:00.000Z

Our priorities are elsewhere for the moment – as a family, we're all champing at the bit to get my mother home and I haven't seen very much of the island – so posts will be a little sporadic. One thing to look forward to (apart from said homecoming) is using a little infrared-operated camera which we have been loaned, to try get some footage of the island otters – looking forward to that, and will post in due course :)

Bring back Matron

2012-01-11T01:07:00.001Z

It used to be, your GP could refer you to hospital, but that was too simple. Now, the only way into an NHS hospital, other than for long-arranged procedures with specific consultants, is through A&E. My mother being unwell this morning, with dehydration and an infection – too unwell to manage fluids and medication – I manoeuvred her straight from bed to car and headed to our local hospital. We arrived at 11am and were processed by inches through the A&E before being taken, at 2.30pm, to a ward where we were processed by inches all over again.

I'm afraid my tolerance for some of the idiocies of the Health Service tends to be stretched to breaking point by these protracted inductions, where the next person doesn't know what the last person did, and the patient ends up exhausted, untreated and in the dark. I could catalogue the issues – they included an antibiotic drip being removed and discarded while it was still three-quarters unused; the saline drip which replaced it being unplugged for routine toilet operations and then left hanging free, not much use to anyone; no directions for meds being left for the night staff – but the things that got me most hot and bothered were to do with a perennial bugbear of mine: the way in which the valuable resource of committed family members is eschewed by the medical and nursing staff, to the detriment of patient care.

I ended up in confrontation with said staff more than once, and I'm not even a confrontational person by nature. When it comes to knowing my mother, I'm sorry, but I have a fifty year advantage over the nursing staff. As to her recent medical history, the painful or weak areas to watch out for, and the best ways to effect a transfer from bed to wheelchair, wheelchair to bed, bed to bed, bed to toilet and toilet to wheelchair, without causing unnecessary discomfort or distress – well, for five years I have provided round the clock care for 70-80 hours per week, transfers are second nature and there is no part of my mother or her regime with which I am not intimately familiar. It's not a boast, it's a fact. When the time came for mum to be transferred from trolley to bed, I said to the assembling bodies that mum had lost her speech, that I was her main carer, that I knew the danger areas and that I would be happy to do the transfer myself. Not only were they uninterested in the danger areas (mum has extreme right-sided weakness since suffering a stroke six years ago, two replacement hips and a replacement knee, and sundry other wear and tear issues), but they looked at me as if I had two heads and drew the curtain between between me and them with the casual and entirely unfounded assertion that they could manage, thank-you. I was sent to the corridor, where I tried deep breathing without much success. (As an aside, although I don't in fact have two heads, I do have two hats, a carer's and a non-carer's, and I was wearing my carer's hat at that moment.) After perhaps thirty seconds, mum's cries of pain and indignation were too much, and I burst through the curtain and gave them all the angry diatribe version of, 'I told you so'.

In fairness, when the next transfer, from bed to bed, was called for, so was I – I was asked if I would like to do it and I said that if they were about to try whatever they tried an hour earlier, then yes, I would very much like to do it. Suffice to say, the patient was relieved, and smiled for the first time today..

I know I'm on a rant and I should stop, but before I do: what is it about visiting times in hospitals? 2.30pm - 4.30pm and 7.00pm - 8.30pm? That's not visiting, that's dropping by – at times which suit the hospital staff and have little to do with patient care and morale. Don't they realise how important relatives and friends are, vis-a-vis getting better, to someone who has been plucked from his or her familiar world and dropped into planet hospital? It was my second rather public confrontation of the day, and I won a couple of concessions but the ban stayed largely in place. To me, banning visitors because they get in the way when you're trying to do ward stuff is like banning midwives because they get in the way when you're trying to plump up the pillows of the mother-to-be.

One good thing – mum will probably be discharged soon so that the hospital can get rid of me. She perked up pretty well by late afternoon, being made of the right stuff, so fingers crossed.

Don't get me started on able-bodied people who park in disabled spaces...

****

(Subsequent edit): I don't mean to say that there aren't excellent and caring individuals in the hospital – we met several during the day. I blame the fact that the health service seems to comprise disparate little hierarchies which don't communicate with each other very well. Each has a few individuals at the top to whom those below are unduly deferential, and these individuals expect, and too often get, the same deferential treatment from people outside the service – you and I. The culture does not invite the asking of questions or the timely provision of information. Rules and procedures are rolled out which may work some of the time, but which are essentially inward-looking, designed to make operations more efficient or working conditions easier – for those within the service. That's fine up to a point, but if the patient doesn't have a voice (directly or indirectly), surely the emphasis is too much on systems and not enough on care.

The Face of a Nation

2012-01-08T23:54:00.001Z

As it's going to be a long night, I intend to embark – re-embark – on a long journey.

On February 27th 1942, a few weeks after Pearl Harbor, Alistair Cooke left 'the air of tobacco-choked energy that is the Washington odor of panic', and set off to sample the mood in thirty-four out of the fifty-two states of his adopted country, as they prepared for war.

Cooke was sponsored on his epic journey (by car, rail and air, but mostly by car – he managed to go through five sets of tyres) by the British Broadcasting Corporation. The experience was to feed many dispatches during the war, and in 1945 he typed up his account just in time for it to be rendered unpublishable by the end of hostilities . . . and put it in the back of a closet in his New York apartment. It lay undisturbed for fifty-nine years before being rediscovered, to Cooke's amazement and delight, by his secretary Patti Yasek just a fortnight before his death.

The manuscript was headed The Face of a Nation, but was published (in 2006) under the title Alistair Cooke's American Journey – Life on the Home Front in the Second World War, with an excellent Introduction by the great Haold Evans. I've read it before but I'm going to read it again, if only because one day I'd like to follow his clockwise circumlocomotion of the United States, and write up the experience myself.

Along the way, Cooke talked to everyone he met, and he came away with a subjective but richly evocative snapshot of a nation which was already channelling all its energies and resources into – more than one person told him so – 'someone else's war'.

Congratulations to Banque Populaire V

2012-01-07T21:36:00.002Z

Banque Populaire V

(photo: Mark Lloyd)

The Jules Verne Trophy for the fastest circumnavigation of the globe by sailing vessel was claimed today by the trimaran Banque Populaire V when she sailed into Brest after taking a fraction under three days off the previous record-holder, Groupama 3.

In the nautical equivalent of forty-five back-to-back Le Mans races, Banque Populaire and her thirteen-man crew did over 29,000 nautical miles in 45 days, 13 hours, 42 minutes and 53 seconds: an average speed of twenty-six knots.

Quite unbelievable. Twenty-six knots, you can take it from me, feels fast in any boat over any distance.

The Merchant Hotel

2012-01-06T21:08:00.001Z

In one of his longer pieces, entitled 'How Things Even Out' (from What I'd Say To The Martians), Jack Handey makes this observation:

"Things tend to even out. Religion, some people say, has caused wars and fighting. Yes, but it's also boring to sit through a church service, so it evens out. One moment you're depressed because your doctor tells you that you have alcoholism. But then you cheer up when you go home and find a hidden bottle of vodka you had forgotten about..."

If life is about contrasts, then Lynn and I and our four guests have had our fair share in the last couple of days. After a challenging twenty-four hours of high winds and torrential rain, during which the rowing boat sank and was holed, the cabin roof developed a(nother) leak and the island's water supply failed, we found ourselves at the opposite end of the spectrum, luxuriating in hot tubs and huge beds, with hot running water, lights that come on without a visit to the generator shed, fine dining (well, we always have fine dining but this time Lynn could relax and leave it to others), and generally a level of pampering we haven't enjoyed for some time - and certainly not on our own doorstep.

By way of thanks for their New Year stay on Islandmore, our friends had booked us all into Belfast's finest hotel, The Merchant, in the city's Cathedral Quarter. It was our first visit, and it won't be our last - we should add a night in The Merchant to our list of requirements for visitors, which at present extends only to signing the visitor's book.

By virtue of a special relationship with two of Scotland's best city hotels - the Bonham in Edinburgh and the Blythswood Square in Glasgow, both of which always manage to get it right (in our humble opinion) – we enjoy making comparisons, and The Merchant, I have to say, gets it right too. Having had a good drenching crossing to the mainland in the morning, the girls were offered the use of the hotel's sauna, steam room and rooftop jacuzzi, despite the fact that they were checking in way too early. Our room was impeccable and enormous, as was the bathroom, and indeed the shower; there was a welcome note from the general manager Adrian McLaughlin, a (glass) bottle of water on each bedside table (complimentary chocolates later), real coffee in the dresser and best-quality cotton on the bed.

Most important, the staff managed to be professional, helpful and informal, all at the same time – an elusive combination even in the best hotels, which always seems to us to come from the top down: if the owners and managers have the right relationship with the staff, the staff will extend the same courtesy to guests.

As you can see, the public areas are sumptuous to the point of decadence, and another box was ticked when we found a blazing fire in the cocktail lounge – talking of which, the margaritas were up to the standard of the Inn of the Anasazi in Santa Fe, New Mexico, and that's high...

Back to reality now – but we know how to do blazing fires too, and I fix a mean margarita, if I say so myself. On the other hand, there's everything to be said for a rooftop jacuzzi. A person can dream...

Water water..

2012-01-03T11:21:00.001Z

Seems that water crises, like everything else, come in threes.

There was a westerly gale during the night, so the rowing boat was swamped; when that was sorted, six of us, plus luggage, plus Eddie, got a good soaking as we crossed to the mainland; and last but as a matter or fact most, having suspected there was a burst pipe somewhere on the island, I checked the meter on the mainland to discover there was..

The others have headed to Belfast, and I'm going to gather up some tools and return to Islandmore to see what I can find.

Always more convenient when these things happen in summer!

Fine food, fires and fireships

2012-01-01T22:02:00.000Z

To go by the temperature, Old Year's night 2011 might have been in September. After a feast laid on by Lynn in the kitchen (where there was no heating and no need for any) we went outside to welcome the benign spirits of the coming year with our customary bonfire; and although the six of us were wrapped up, it was more from habit than necessity, there being enough heat from the fire to keep us cosy warm before, during and after the countdown to midnight.

On the stroke of twelve there were the obligatory hugs and well wishes, followed by the obligatory popping of corks – and that would have been enough to satisfy the exacting Hogmanay requirements of my five (Scottish) companions; but this year we had a further ritual planned. Earlier in the day, our friend Lucy had folded a small fleet of paper boats, and the idea was originally to launch them off the jetty, inscribed with our wishes for 2012. In the event, there was a brisk southwesterly wind and the tide was fully out, so even if it had set sail from the very end of the jetty, the entire fleet would have made land on Islandmore ten feet, and less than ten seconds, later.

So the lough was out of the question, and we resorted to an altogether smaller body of water. You may be able to make out a bucket-shaped object on the bench behind the fire. It's actually a turquoise-coloured garden trug, filled to the brim with water. Given the space constraints, we chose three of the sturdiest vessels, and I equipped each one with a mast in the shape of a mini sparkler; a strategically placed match; and a cargo of scrunched-up tissue paper. Before the launch ceremony, I gave each a spray of lighter fluid; and on Richard's signal we placed them tenderly on the briny foam and gave up our silent wishes to the gods. I tried to put a flame to the tip of the first mast/sparkler, but in the breeze it was hopeless, and the spirit-soaked tissue paper which was to have given us the grand finale, ended up providing a trio of fireships which blazed spectacularly for several seconds and then succumbed, sinking by turns to the bottom of the trug and leaving a slick of burning lighter fluid on the surface.

An excellent start to the year.

Behind you!

2011-12-31T09:29:00.001Z

Happy New Year when it comes

2011-12-30T11:03:00.003Z

When four friends from Edinburgh said during the summer that they'd like to spend New Year on the island, my first reaction, with the memory of last New Year's chaos and misery still raw, was that they were off their rockers. Now, it just seems like a bit of a gamble that paid off. They arrive tonight, and although we expect a bit of rain and a lot of wind, the forecast is for unseasonal warmth, and we have laid plans for Old Year's night which will hopefully involve feasting and merriment, but most certainly the habit-turned-tradition of a fire on the foreshore – this year with a twist.

If I don't get a chance to post (I hope to), may I wish everyone a happy and fulfilled 2012 when it comes :-)

PS: Today's happens to be the 600th Blue Cabin Blog post – who would have thought? Certainly not me a couple of years ago!

Strangford Lough's microclimate

2011-12-29T20:05:00.000Z

Well, the forecast gales did come to Northern Ireland, but they passed to the north of us. As you can see from the video, the high tide threatened to come over the sea wall, but conditions were no more than boisterous – thanks, once again, to Strangford's fabled microclimate.

What goes around..

2011-12-27T21:35:00.000Z

A year ago today – a nice way to enjoy a fruit coctail, but the ice wasn't from the freezer...

I can't remember the last time we let the second stove go out the day before Christmas Eve, and didn't bother relighting it until after Boxing Day. Yesterday, I was chopping wood in my shirt sleeves. At first light this morning, as I rowed out to fetch the dinghy, I looked back at the cabin, and a pale salmon sky above Eagle Hill, and even the flue from the living room stove was bereft of smoke. We've been positively basking in the unseasonal warmth, and touching wood.

Apparently we are about to pay for it, because in the next few days Northern Ireland is to be visited by severe – and lasting – westerly gales; but whatever January and February have in store, the winter has been nicely shortened.

Thanks be to . . . Poseidon.

'Silence in Vermont'

2011-12-24T21:14:00.001Z

This is how Alistair Cooke descibed Christmas in Vermont, in his Letter From America of 29th December 1995:-

"If I were asked what was most memorable about this Christmas, I should have to say an experience unknown to most people in a temperate climate: the experience of absolute silence . . .

. . . I was, I am, sitting in a room in a typical white-painted wooden old colonial New England house on a little hilltop in northern Vermont, looking out of high Georgian windows through narrowed eyelids – simply because what I see through the windows is blinding whiteness. A world, a planet of snow rolling away as a white valley, up into the wooded foothills, all the trees having branches like dropping swords of snow, and on beyond up the distant white mountains to, as Johnny Mercer said, a blue umbrella sky."

Now that's Christmas.

Season's Greetings

2011-12-22T16:27:00.001Z

I'd like to wish anyone who drops by this blog a very Happy Christmas - may it be filled with laughter and may you be surrounded in 2012 and beyond by warmth and light.

PS: If I understand him correctly, Eddie says Woof! to his many canine friends.

Vent de la Louisiane

2011-12-20T23:08:00.000Z

The Cabildo

The biggest property deal in history was finalised in this New Orleans building two hundred and eight years ago today.

The previous year (1802) Thomas Jefferson had sent future president James Monroe and his Minister to France Robert Livingston, to Paris, to discuss with Napoleon Bonaparte the purchase of the strategically vital port of New Orleans, which France had herself only recently acquired from Spain. New Orleans was the most important port on the Gulf of Mexico, and of course the gateway to the Mississippi, and Monroe and Livingston were authorised by Jefferson to go, if necessary, to 10 million dollars.

Imagine their surprise . . . It turned out that not only was Napoleon prepared to let New Orleans go (his ambitions for North America having been dimmed by his failure to secure a foothold in Central America, which would have been seen as a more valuable prize) – he was also prepared to throw in the entire territory of Louisiana if the US would up their offer to 15 million. Given that Louisiana, at that time, was almost five times the size of France, stretching from the Gulf of Mexico to Canada, it's unsurprising that the negotiators went out on a limb and committed Jefferson to 15 million dollars without express authorisation.

The Louisiana Purchase was not only the biggest, but easily the best property deal in history. For three cents an acre, it doubled the size of the United States and paved the way for westward expansion under the banner of Manifest Destiny.

The green part of the map shows the extent of the United States before the Purchase. The staunchly anti-federalist Jefferson, who believed the prospective New Orleans deal was outside the scope of the Constitution, was embarrassed enough to have sent negotiators to secure the port in the first place. He must have been mortified when they came back with Louisiana.

Tyrella Beach (Pebbles In The Sand)

2011-12-19T01:40:00.000Z

For a while during the summer I couldn't get Melanie Safka's 1971 song, Pebbles In The Sand, out of my head, so I decided to make this video of Tyrella Beach at sunset, and use the song as the soundtrack. Even for a short video, during the editing you tend to listen to the music again and again to get the pacing half right, so if it was in my head before...

Meet the author, whether you like it or not

2011-12-17T21:35:00.000Z

'Whenever you read a good book, it's like the author is right there, in the room, talking to you, which is why I don't like to read good books.'

That's funny (it's Jack Handey – of course it's funny), but as usual, there's an element of truth . . .

All kinds of prescriptions, proscriptions and rules of thumb are found in how-to guides for writers of fiction – show, don't tell; active, not passive; don't intrude; use fewer adjectives; use fewer adverbs; use fewer words – but for me, the one about not intruding is the most important, and probably the hardest to observe.

'One by one, the helicopters drifted down at a shallow angle, like sycamore seeds in autumn, and headed for the flight deck . . .'

If I were to come across this (made up) passage, my mind's eye would not be seeing helicopters descending from the sky like sycamore seeds; it would be seeing an author gazing out the window and thinking, 'What do helicopters look like when they descend from the sky? Sycamore seeds?' It doesn't really matter how skillful the writing is in other areas, or how gripping the plot – after I've glimpsed the author tap-tapping on his or her laptop, I sometimes find it hard to get them out of my mind.

Any excuse..

2011-12-16T18:30:00.000Z

This afternoon, while I was engaged in a bit of boat maintenance (repair actually – the rowing boat sprang a leak during the night), this very handsome shag dropped by and gave me an excuse to drop the tools and pick up the camera for ten minutes:-

Pioneer woman

2011-12-14T18:20:00.001Z

Today, Lynn and I took advantage of a window in the weather to go for firewood.

Recently, the moon has been full (high tides - good for wood-gathering) and the tides favourable (high water in early afternoon), but the wind has been strong, persistent and in the west, making it impossible to land a boat on our favourite wood-gathering island with any prospect of leaving again. Lynn, fire-master extaordinaire, has been rationing the flow of fuel to the two wood-burners. Last night, when she was on her own on the island, she sawed and chopped the last of our supply of firewood in appalling conditions after dark, and visited each stove three times during the night, at 1am, 4am and 6.30am, to keep a trickle of heat in the cabin - which, as I've said before, has the insulation values of a tent..

Had I been the pioneer I always wanted to be, while my eye would have fallen on Lynn for many, many reasons, one of them would have been her dogged (and cheerful) self-reliance..

Hadron, Hamlet and the Higgs boson

2011-12-13T22:47:00.000Z

Physics must be fun, and particle physics even funner. My invention of a new word there is by way of being a nod to one of the things physicists seem to have most fun with – naming things. The language of physics is quirky, colourful and often poetic. What other branch of science would have given names like Up, Down, Strange, Charm, Top and Bottom to six tiny little bitty things (types of quark) which have never been studied because they are incapable of being seen – incapable, in fact, of existing on their own, per se, as it were. We just know by inference that they're there, and we know that with leptons and bosons they make up, well, everything there is in this universe.

Today, the physicists were really having fun, because they announced to the scientific community, and the rest of the world, that they were 'tantalisingly close' to proving the existence of the Holy Grail of physics, the Higgs boson. The existence of the Higgs boson was posited in 1964 by three groups of physicists working independently of one another – Peter Biggs was simply the lucky one whose name was borrowed at the time.

As Eddie Cassie used to say, I don't know anything about anything, but my understanding is that the Higgs boson is important because it is thought to form (I'm struggling here) a field . . . lets just say it's the thing through which those building blocks of matter, the quarks, bosons and leptons, must pass in order to acquire mass. Without mass, the little fellows would go here, there and everywhere without actually being anything at all – they would exist, but they wouldn't, on their own, have any mass and therefore couldn't, on their own, add up to anything meaningful like, say, you and me. If the Higgs boson is proven, it will be the final piece in the jigsaw of the Standard Model of Particle Physics – the explanation of matter.

Announcements in physics don't get much bigger (or presumably funner), so it was fitting that Rolf-Dieter Neuer, director-general of Cern, who operate the Hadron Collider which made the 'tantalising glimpse' possible, should introduce a little drama by invoking the greatest wordsmith of them all when he addressed his peers:

'We still need many more collisions next year to get a definite answer on the Shakespeare question on the Higgs: "To be or not to be . . ." '

Excellent.

I've posted about this before (here), but if you want to know more about how quarks, leptons, bosons, mesons, hadrons and baryons fit into the scheme of things, you might enjoy this:-

'Strange Charm' by Vlogbrothers

A dog on the edge

2011-12-11T21:05:00.001Z

Sea dog

2011-12-10T21:06:00.001Z

For a dog who doesn't really enjoy the water all that much (as in swimming in it), Eddie looks very much at home in a boat.

Eddie and Lilly

2011-12-08T18:09:00.001Z

Eddie and Lilly at The Blue Cabin

Who can say whether romance is in the air, but they walked all the way round the island today, and I think we can take 'firm friends' as read. They only met yesterday..

Tish Hinojosa, Closer Still

2011-12-06T22:49:00.001Z

I don't know why really, but five or six of my top ten performers are female singer-songwriters. This is Tish Hinojosa singing one of my favourites, Closer Still. She's at the Ostsee Festival in Kiel, Germany and what I like most about this performance is that it's just two years ago, she's looking great – and we're almost the same age. Tish, who sings in both Spanish and English, was born on this day in 1955 in San Antonio, Texas.

We were introduced to her by our dear friends Leslie and Andrew, and a few days before they moved to Santa Fe, we travelled to Glasgow with them to see her perform. We were in the front row, and I embarrassed L&A (remember Amiga?) by going up to Tish and asking her to sing something for 'Our good friends, shortly to leave us for New Mexico'. She was most gracias about it, and introduced the song by saying, 'You know, there's something about Northern New Mexico . . .'

There sure is.

Brent geese rising

2011-12-04T22:26:00.001Z

This video, taken on the mobile yesterday, was more or less accidental. I didn't know the geese were there until a sentry bird saw me and sounded the alarm – fortunately, I had the phone in my hand, and in camcorder mode, because I'd just taken a series of short videos for a YouTube project I've been thinking about for a while (I'll probably upload that one in a week or two). Anyway, hope you enjoy – there's nothing like a flight of geese against the sunset!

Blackstaff Press eBook video by Millar Grattan Media

2011-12-03T22:13:00.000Z

Gary Grattan of MGM (that's Millar Grattan Media, not the other one) kindly sent me a link to the video he made for Blackstaff Press at the Linenhall Library recently, to mark the launch of Blackstaff's new eBook list. The weatherbeaten old guy in the video is me..

Gary – sorry to edit out the library material and all the other authors, but the file size was enormous :) I thought the whole production was very slick and a propos by the way, and I'll be in touch as discussed about The Blue Cabin movie spectacular in due course! M

The link to the Belfast Telegraph Online piece by Gary, which has the entire video, is here.

No post

2011-12-02T18:44:00.001Z

I won't be posting tonight (if you know what mean) because I have an editing job to finish, on a tight deadline, and paid editing jobs don't grow on trees!

Lucky me

2011-11-30T20:01:00.001Z

Times like this, I realise how lucky I am. An hour ago we crossed in a gale, gusting to 60mph. The boat took a good hammering and so did we, and if I was more than a little apprehensive, Lynn was downright frightened, and I don't blame her. In fact, I don't know how she puts up with it sometimes.

On eBooks

2011-11-28T09:55:00.001Z

Responding to Friday's post about The Blue Cabin going digital, our friend Laura, a lover of books – by which I mean books – had this to say (with a smiley face of course):

"Don't go digital, books are supposed to have pages & not batteries & they are supposed to dry out after you've dropped them in the bath, not implode, and they are supposed to gather dust until you rediscover them 10 years later and you're supposed to be able to leave them on park benches and wonder about who will pick them up. They are also meant to keep you healthy, lugging large weights around is a great aerobic workout. Do you want to play a part in the death of libraries? Where's your sense of social responsibility!!"

I pointed out that the jury was still out for me but that Lynn was in the market for an eBook device because she is a voracious reader and, being island-bound much of the time, doesn't get to the bookshops often enough to feed her habit. To this, Laura offered Amazon:

"It does great reviews & after a few purchases suggests BOOKS (with real pages) that you may enjoy. It has, however, to my great disappointment, strayed into Kindle territory (I wonder if it is so named cos it's subliminally encouraging everyone to burn their real books; maybe they could have been less subtle and called it Bonfire or Conflagration or something more obvious)."

I responded that our internet connection on the island is so patchy, searching sites like Amazon is an exercise in frustration – to post to this blog, for example, I do the writing and prepare the image off-line, then access my Blogger account and hope for the best (many a time the laptop has almost ended up, to borrow a phrase from our Sicilian friends, 'feeding the fishes') – and so far I haven't heard back from Laura. She'll have an answer though – she usually does.

One thing's for sure: she's not alone!

One after the other in succession..

2011-11-27T22:43:00.001Z

When I correspond, as earlier today, with someone to whom words are important, I subconsciously self-edit as I go – perhaps we all do. It doesn't mean foregoing a conversational tone, or inserting every pronoun: 'Heard it was meant for Lynn and me' would be fine, but 'Heard it was meant for Lynn and I' would be run through the mental grammar checker and auto-corrected. So, when I said this:

'You know that feeling when you're digging a hole for yourself and you start trying to dig yourself out. . .'

there must have been a systems failure, because I was talking to someone who could spot a tautological construction at a hundred pages – not that they would dream of mentioning it. I might have got away with, 'You know that feeling when you're digging a hole for yourself and you start digging all the harder. . .' but hindsight is a fine thing.

In a 1988 campaign speech in Ohio, George H W Bush said, 'It's no exaggeration to say the undecideds could go one way or another', and Barack Obama once campaigned under the slogan, 'Beliefs we can believe in'. The first is a howler; the second, you could make a case for in the name of rhetoric. Many more have become acceptable through usage: 'free gift', 'unsolved mystery', 'short summary', 'new innovation' and the more contemporary 'digital download' to name a few. But my favourite tautology is by someone who is famous for its cousin, the paradoxical contradiction – Peter 'Yogi' Berra, the baseball legend. Berra once said:

'It's like deja vu, all over again.'

Which gives me an excuse for another Yogi Berra quote. When giving directions to his house, he used to say, 'When you get to a fork in the road, take it.' It was meant humorously, but the directions were good: whichever road you chose, you got to the house.

Tyrella beach

2011-11-26T20:47:00.001Z

This rather 'could be anything' picture, taken on my mobile, is actually of plover rising from Tyrella beach, where I was walking mum's dog Sammy this afternoon. Time was, I always had a camera to hand – I must get back into the habit.

The virtual Blue Cabin

2011-11-25T17:14:00.001Z

How surreal is island life sometimes.

Yesterday I was at the Waterfront Hall in Belfast with a glass of sauvignon blanc in one hand a nibble in the other, celebrating the launch of Blackstaff Press's eBook list and watching myself and five other Blackstaff authors give our impressions and expectations of this brave new virtual world in a promotional video; at this moment, I am sitting in semi-darkness in my office at the cabin, a pair of ridiculous-looking fleece trousers pulled over my jeans, two extra layers on my top half (one cashmere, one fleece) and a wooley hat, hoping that the dongle in my laptop will hold an internet connection long enough to upload this post and looking forward to migrating north, to the living room, where a blazing woodburner awaits.

The Blue Cabin, I'm honoured to say, is in the first wave of Blackstaff's books to be published in digital format, and as of yesterday is available for Kindle, iPhone, iPad, iPod touch, Sony Reader, PC, Mac and Android.

The link to the Kindle Edition of The Blue Cabin on amazon.co.uk is here, and on amazon.com here.

Otter on the jetty

2011-11-24T17:18:00.001Z

We hadn't seen an otter for months, then this morning I was gazing out the window when I should have been working, and a young otter (pesumably this year's cub) climbed up onto the jetty, stared at me for a moment and plopped back into the water. Fortunately, Lynn came to the window quick enough to corroborate my story..

Masterchef: The Professionals

2011-11-22T18:13:00.001Z

I caught the tail end of Masterchef: The Professionals on BBC2 last night, and I was so nonplussed by what presenters Monica Galetti and Gregg Wallace said to this guy that I watched some of it again on i-player a moment ago, just in case either I had misunderstood/misheard – or alternatively they weren't being serious. Amazingly, they were being serious. It would appear that Harley, a professional chef from Hull, is a seriously good cook, because both judges were impressed by his efforts; but Monica told him to 'get a shave and a haircut' before coming back and Gregg prefaced his remarks by saying, 'well, you hippie..' (granted, in the nicest possible way).

Neither Galetti nor Gregg meant any offence of course, and none was taken – Harley seems to be laid-back and decent enough to take it in his stride – but I just thought: is this not a tiny bit judgemental? Shouldn't the judges be concentrating on the dishes rather than the grooming? Was the length of the contestant's hair (not even particularly long by the way) not, well... irrelevant, and indeed none of their business? I couldn't help thinking that had this been a female contestant, she would hardly have been sent to the hairdressers.

I'll bet the guy comes back all clean-shaven and crew-cut, which is fine I suppose, but the only credit will go to him and his easy-going nature.

Maybe it's just me.

Great minds

2011-11-20T22:01:00.001Z

Alistair Cooke reads 'Letter From America'

During her years as a BBC Governor, my mother fought the good fight on a number of issues which came up again and again in the boardroom. One was docu-dramas (she doesn't much like them); another was the commercialization of the Olympics (she doesn't care for that either); but the one issue which put her at odds with more producers than any other, was her cast iron conviction that extreme violence on television, fictionalized or real, is taken so far, so often that most of us accept it, and some of us copy it.

This is a passage from Alistair Cooke's Letter From America No.1816, from December 1983, entitled 'Hype':-

'Somebody – it may have been me – once said that a fire is easier to film than an idea. And this truth is, unfortunately, the first article of faith in the credo of all television news cameramen who are not afraid to move in for the first spurt of blood from a dying man, to remind us old film buffs of that ghastly shot of a body slumping out of a car in Bonnie and Clyde, which alas set the mode for a thousand subsequent blood baths.'

Great minds. 'Cookie' (not my nickname – I got that from John Cole) was born on this day in 1908.

Now showing

2011-11-19T22:27:00.001Z

Rock Layers
Lynn McGregor RSW
Kilmorack Gallery, Inverness-shire

I've just spent a happy hour updating Lynn's website with current and forthcoming exhibitions. She is showing in Christmas exhibitions at Fisher Gallery, Pittenweem; Aberfeldy Gallery; Kilmorack Gallery, Inverness-shire (above); Strathearn Gallery, Crieff; and McAuley Fine Art at William Street Gallery, Edinburgh (from next weekend).

The William Street Gallery exhibition is a little different – they have asked gallery artists to provide A5-sized paintings, as it's Christmas, and Lynn gave them two (sadly, we sent them off without taking jpegs) That exhibition runs from Saturday 26th November.

Blown away

2011-11-17T16:51:00.001Z

It doesn't look like much but I've just spent a frustrating half hour trying to get to that boat you can see in top right of the pic. The wind is coming from the south, ie directly up the sound, and I can't manage to row across it - on the last try I was blown into the weed halfway to the wreck and Lynn came out to help me drag the rowing boat back through the shallows.

Aargh. I was keen to catch the 5 o'clock post - never mind.

Silent attack dog..

2011-11-15T21:13:00.000Z

Not really – just a little game Eddie plays when we've been away. Has some funny ideas, Eddie.

Madcap

2011-11-13T22:26:00.001Z

A correspondent from Martha's Vineyard, Massachusetts, who I get the feeling has forgotten more about boats than most of us will ever know, picked up on the tiny picture in yesterday's blog:-

"I do have one question: there is a lovely looking little gaff cutter with top mast (if my eyes don't deceive me) on your blog today...do you know any more about her? She's a beauty."

She certainly is. Her name is Madcap and as far as I know she is the oldest surviving Bristol Channel Pilot Cutter, built in Cardiff in the same year that Thomas Mann, who wrote Death in Venice, was born: 1875. Why mention Thomas Mann? You might well ask.

***

It would be wrong to mention coastal Massachusetts without giving you this little gem from the great Jack Handey:-

"As I maneuvered my one-man sub into the enemy harbour, I smiled a little smile to myself. It amused me to think that the people of Massachusetts did not even realise that a Connecticut resident was right under their very noses."

Water water

2011-11-12T20:52:00.001Z

Somewhere out there is a diver named James Jennings, working along the length of Islandmore's water supply pipe with one of those 007 submersible scooters, searching for any signs of damage. Actually, he told me later that visibility was so poor he ended up going most of the way hand-over-hand. The good news is that the pipe was looking pretty good for its age – an amazing forty-five years..

The day had started with a quick look round the back of the cabin, before I left for the mainland, for any burst pipes, the water supply having failed around ten o'clock last night. No joy, so I fetched the dinghy and crossed Ringhaddy Sound with two lists taking shape in my mind – who to call with a view to getting a diver down to Ringhaddy should it prove likely the burst was underwater; and what obscure 3/4" or 1/2" alcathene compression fittings I was going to need from Jackie Brown's hardware store in Ballynahinch, to repair the damage when we found it, on dry land or otherwise.

I called John Scott, who looks after the boats and moorings in the anchorage, and he put me on to the extremely helpful Morris Smith, who put me on to his diver friend Norman Wallace, who immediately offered to put the gear in his car and stand by in case he was needed. People are so kind. I checked the meter by the old quay on the mainland, found that the dial was rotating at an alarming rate, and turned off the stop valve. It would make no difference to Lynn, back at the Blue Cabin, because she'd been without water for ten hours already. Normally, that would be a minor inconvenience, but we can't light the woodburner when there isn't a water supply, and the woodburner is the only source of heat (and hot water).

Next stop Seaforde, to pick up mum, who volunteered herself to come with me on what was bound to be an uncertain enterprise. Challenged though she is by her stroke, mum is always up for an adventure.

We drove to Jackie Bown's, where there was the usual Saturday morning queue, and I presented my list at the counter to Jackie himself. Now, anyone who has read The Blue Cabin will know that on a very similar mission some years ago, I wandered round to the shelving at the back of the warehouse looking for bits, and Jackie frightened the life out of me by yelling at me from behind and asking what I was doing. Don't get me wrong, Jackie is actually a very nice guy – he just doesn't like customers disappearing round the back and getting up to heaven knows what round there. Imagine my surprise, then, when he looked at my list and said, 'Come on round the back and we'll see what we can find.' What? Round the back? Me? Well, of course I followed him. Meekly, at a distance. He found a black alcathene joint and demonstrated how it would work, with only the addition of a sleeve, for either old 3/4" or new 25mm pipe. 'Just the job,' I said, 'I'll take four. And a 10ft length of 25mm pipe. Please.' Then I followed him – meekly, at a distance – back to the counter. 'That should get you going,' he said, with a big smile, and off I went, as in a dream.

So, to Ringhaddy, where I left mum with a cup of coffee and a tuna sandwich, and took the dinghy across the sound to Islandmore, landing roughly at the point where I knew the pipe emerged from the water and snaked up the forsehore to a stop valve buried in the bank above the high water mark. When sheep grazed the island, the stop valve was easily found, but since our end of the island has been given over to trees, the grass has become clumped and thick, and I'm willing to believe I looked a bit of a sight, crawling around on the bank, throwing fistfuls of grass over my shoulder and plunging my hand into every likely-looking crevice to feel for the pipe. Eventually, I stumbled upon it, and fetched a crescent wrench from the boat. I shut off the valve, thus isolating the island; then returned to the meter on the mainland, and turned on the mains. If the meter still rotated wildly, I would know the break was under the sound, and it would be over to the divers. Or, as it turned out, another diver altogether, the aforementioned James, who happened to be putting on his gear for some recreational diving and who offered (I should have guessed) to do the job himself. We both studied the dial, and yes, it was moving, but only at a very slow, stop-go pace. I called Morris, who called Norman to tell him there was no need for a full-on repair mission, and that James was going to take a quick look anyway for peace of mind.

While James "My name's Jennings, James Jennings" Jennings aqua-scootered into the murky depths of Ringhaddy Sound, I had a quick coffee with mum and then headed to The Blue Cabin to collect Lynn so that we could walk the length of the pipe from opposite ends, going from sheep-trough to sheep-trough, looking for signs of a burst. En route, we bumped into Brian McFerran, whose family own the island, out pottering in a dinghy with his dog, and he too joined the search. At the abandoned farm yard to the North of the cabin, I found a drinker with a working water supply, so we knew the problem had to be between there and the cabin. Lynn walked the last part of the pipeline, and I took the boat directly to the cabin with a view to working my way towards her. In the event, she had moved along pretty fast and we ended up meeting on the steep bank behind the cabin. To my questioning look she shook her head and shrugged, and we stood there, temporarily stumped.
Then Lynn said, 'Can you hear that?'
My hearing is going the way of my mother's.
'Hear what?'
'Running water.'
Just under the back wall of the cabin, obscured by grass (that's not true, I just said that because I had already made my early morning inspection at the back of the cabin) there was a little jet of water, which turned out to be coming from a fractured half-inch alcathene pipe. Bingo. No celebrations, because frankly I was feeling a bit of a twit, but bingo nevertheless.

Water is restored, Lynn is warm in the cabin and the world is no longer, as Sean O'Casey would say, in a state of chassis.

It's rainin' - rainin' in my house

2011-11-11T17:22:00.001Z

You would think that 40 ltrs. of bitumastic paint would have done the trick, and for a while it seemed that way, but today the felt roof was tested to the limits, and found wanting. Six leaks in three rooms - I don't know what's for the best but we're not going to go through another winter like the last one, so I suspect I'm about to get a crash course in off-season felting. Ah well.

'You're gonna need a bigger boat.'

2011-11-10T18:04:00.000Z

Hard to think of the late Roy Scheider, who was born on this day in 1932, without thinking of Jaws, and the scene (above) where Police Chief Martin Brody sees the shark for the first time. Interestingly, the famous line, 'You're gonna need a bigger boat', wasn't in Carl Gottlieb's script – it was improvised by Scheider.

Everyone remembers the body-in-the-submerged-wreck scene, which produced such a scream from the audience in pre-screening that director Stephen Spielberg re-shot it to draw out the moment for maximum effect. But for me, the most memorable shot was the so-called 'Jaws shot', when Brody is sitting on a deckchair on the beach and realises that young Alex Kintner has been killed by the shark. It was a cinematic first, a 'forward-tracking, zoom out' shot where the camera tracks in to Scheider's face and simultaneously zooms out, creating a visually unsettling but highly effective blurring-in-motion of the background. A similar effect, but in reverse – 'forward-zoom, reverse tracking' – was used by Irmin Roberts in the movie Vertigo, with Jimmy Stewart.

Joe Frazier

2011-11-08T22:15:00.000Z

'Smokin' Joe Frazier in training in 1971

By all acounts Joe Frazier, who died today, was a sensitive and generous-minded person outside the ring. Inside it, his relentlessness inspired fear among his boxing peers, even those who beat him; and of course there were only two – Muhammad Ali and George Foreman. Foreman was interviewed for BBC News tonight and he said (I think I'm quoting word for word), 'When I got in the ring I was frightened. I was hoping I'd never have to fight him, but I did...' On the night, he kept knocking Frazier down, and Frazier kept getting up again. 'I knocked him down six times, and the fight was over but he got up again and he was looking for me. What a tough man.'

"The Spencer Tracy of the '80s"

2011-11-07T18:38:00.000Z

That's what the Los Angeles Times said, and I know what they meant. The above still, from a 1971 cult classic movie, even has echoes of my favourite Spencer Tracy movie, Bad Day at Black Rock.

The man standing in the Nevada desert was a hero of mine throughout the 1970s, and I suppose still is. If you're wondering about the movie, it may help you to know that the car is a 1970 Dodge Challenger. No? What about this: the distance from Denver, Colorado to San Francisco is 1,270 miles, and in the movie a car delivery contractor called Kowalski takes a bet that he can do it in fifteen hours – that's an average of just over 80 mph. Of course, the authorities are not as enthusiastic as the protagonist, and the result is the ultimate rebel without a cause road movie and, for my money, a whole series of better chase sequences even than Bullitt (which is saying something).

'Cool, with an edge', seems to sum up the critics' view of this man's acting persona through the 70s, 80s and 90s.

This is from the movie:-

Super Soul (a blind DJ following the star's exploits): '...our lone driver, the last American hero, the electric centaur, the, the demi-god, the super driver of the golden west! Two nasty Nazi cars are close behind the beautiful lone driver. The police numbers are gettin' closer, closer, closer to our soul hero, in his soul mobile, yeah baby! They about to strike. They gonna get him. Smash him. Rape... the last beautiful free soul on this planet... The question is not when he's gonna stop, but who is gonna stop him.'

The movie is Vanishing Point and the star, Barry Newman – who happens to be 73 today.

Jim Hunsdale

2011-11-05T22:05:00.000Z

Jim and Cathleen Hunsdale

Today we said goodbye to a stalwart of the Strangford Lough community and a good friend of the family, Jim Hunsdale: a character and a gentleman – and a seaman through and through. His son, Jim Jnr. (always 'Young Jim' to this family), wrote a few tender and poignant lines of poetry for the service of thanksgiving, which ended with these words:

'Smell the roses... share the love and wear each day like a fine silk glove.'

His father did just that all his life, and I'm sure we could all do worse than follow his example.

Eddie's big (weekly) adventure

2011-11-04T19:19:00.000Z

We had to laugh – Lynn mentioned going for wood on the next island and Eddie stationed himself on the jetty in case we left him behind. It's one of the highlights of Eddie's week because he thinks he might see Billy. Sadly, Billy hasn't been there for the last few visits so we're beginning to wonder about him.

Getting old

2011-11-03T17:44:00.001Z

Having just hefted a reluctant 4kw generator out of a coggly boat in a stiff wind and dragged it up the jetty an inch at a time, Lynn and I are off for hot baths..

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The Spruce Goose

2011-11-01T22:52:00.000Z

I'm jumping the gun a bit here, but I'm not sure I'll get to the blog tomorrow, the sixty-fourth anniversary of one of the most remarkable moments in aviation history.

On 2nd November 1947, off Long Beach, California, Howard Hughes took the controls of the H-4 flying boat, the largest aircraft ever built (I mean at the time, but as a matter of fact it had a wider wingspan than a Boeing 747), and taxied to and fro several times over the course of a couple of hours before accellerating to takeoff speed and lumbering into the air. He remained airborne for almost a mile, flying 70ft above the water and reaching a speed of 135mph – whether intentionally or not we'll never know, because when the chief designer asked Hughes later, that's what he said: 'You'll never know.'

Already controversial because of the enormous government investment in its development, and rendered obsolete two years before by the end of the war in the Pacific (it had been conceived as a troop and transport carrier), the H-4 would never fly again. Hughes had it sent to a climate-controlled hangar where a permanent crew of 300 maintained it in good flying order until his death in 1976, firing up the eight Pratt and Whitney radial engines once a month for twenty-nine years.

Detractors called the H-4 the 'Spruce Goose', a name which naturally, and to Howard Hughes's eternal dismay, stuck. It's a misnomer, because although the airframe was built entirely from timber and fabric (!), the wood was birch, not spruce.

For a fascinating portrait of Howard Hughes I can recommend Howard, The Amazing Mr.Hughes by Noah Dietrich, which is available from Amazon here. It's no longer in print, more's the pity, and a used copy will cost you almost £40. I must try to find mine..

Very Halloween

2011-10-31T15:58:00.001Z

I thought I'd grab the moment - I've been trying to get on in the office at the back of the cabin, and it was so dark outside at 3pm (!) I had to resort to candles (if you've just dropped by and are wondering why I don't turn the lights on, it's because we rely on a generator and when Lynn is in her studio we tend not to run it, as it's kinda boisterous).

Now if I was writing a ghost story...

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Jimmy Savile

2011-10-29T22:39:00.000+01:00

Sir Jimmy Savile, OBE

Very sad to hear that Jimmy Savile passed away last night, as I've always had a soft spot for him. Excellent, though, that he died peacefully and in his own bed.

Jimmy Savile was a lifelong bachelor, and I think I'm right in saying he lived with his mother until she died, after which he kept her room just as she'd left it. His achievements in sports, radio and television were obviously enormous, but he rarely talked about his other achievement – raising £40,000,000 for Stoke Mandeville Hospital and numerous other causes.

Such an enigmatic character – larger than life in public, quiet and self-effacing in private. There was a revealing interview on BBC tonight with a friend of forty years called Howard Silverman, a hairdresser in Jimmy's home town of Leeds. Savile was Silverman's best man six years ago. The interview was revealing because it was in such sharp contrast to others with celebrity colleagues who, when asked to descibe the man, could only say that he was... 'Jimmy Savile'. They obviously liked him, but you might assume that if lifelong colleagues couldn't get through the public persona, he was perhaps he was some kind of off-mic, off-camera loner. Silverman made it clear, though, that Savile was neither lonely nor solitary; that he had many close friends with whom he socialised (apparently he never ate in); but that few of them happened to be famous. Savile never saw himself as anything other than an ordinary bloke – in private. Silverman described being woken up, now and then, to his friend's celebrity status in the course of conversation. He might mention The Beatles, and Savile might say, 'I remember when I sat next to John Lennon on a flight to New York...' Extraordinary.

Painting Killyleagh Pink

2011-10-28T18:10:00.001+01:00

As it was Paint The Town Pink Day in Killyleagh, in aid of Breast Cancer Awareness, we popped into Picnic Cafe for a breakfast special, Pink Porridge. Lynn followed with one of Cath's amazing Friands (Pink) and I had... two poached eggs on half a toasted bagel - not just as pink but I was thinking pink as I ate it.

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..and tonight

2011-10-27T18:04:00.001+01:00

I know, same ole same ole.

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Ringhaddy Sound tonight

2011-10-26T18:50:00.001+01:00

This was 10 minutes ago - my mobile doesn't really do night-time, so I hope this conveys at least some of the atmosphere of the moment.

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Affordable Art Fair Hampstead Heath

2011-10-25T22:16:00.001+01:00

'Shallows' Lynn McGregor RSW

From this Thursday, Lynn (http://www.lynnmcgregor.co.uk/) is showing at the North London Affordable Art Fair, Hampstead Heath, with Frames Contemporary Gallery (Stand 7). The fair runs from Thursday to Sunday and times, directions etc. are on the Affordable Art Fair website here. Fingers crossed – the galleries seem to have been having as tough a time as anyone recently.

Island seasons

2011-10-24T18:09:00.000+01:00

All the signs are in place on the island which put the turn of the seasons beyond, as they used to say, peradventure.

When I crossed Ringhaddy Sound this afternoon it was in a chill rain. Nothing unusual about that, but when you add that half a dozen cormorants were watching at close quarters from recently vacated mooring buoys; a pair of herring gulls has replaced the terns (gone to Africa) on our raft; the faithful dabchicks (or at least one of the pair) have returned to their fishing beat opposite the cabin; the brent geese, back from Canada's Northern Archipelago, are in Pawle Sound for the winter; and the mushrooms between the jetty and the cabin, after a heroic flush of growth, have succumbed to the wet – then you know it's time to layer up and hope that this winter doesn't live up to the forecast.

Another development this morning: Lynn saw a seal pup in the shallows just to the north, so we're hoping we may have company for a while. Grey seals pup in October/November, and after a few weeks on a high-fat, high-protein diet of mother's milk, the young are left to fend for themselves. When they get hungry enough, they teach themselves to fish – no hand-holding in the seal world. We're hoping we may be the beneficiaries of this post-abandonment hiatus in their life cycle...

Johnny Carson

2011-10-23T22:44:00.000+01:00

Johnny Carson with Bette Midler

(a picture really does speak a thousand words..)

Several of our friends don't own a television, and of course a good many more have only ever been able to receive terrestrial channels. Still, I doubt whether even within these increasingly select groups, there will be more than a handful who haven't heard of Johnny Carson – which says as much about Johnny Carson as it does about American popular culture, or talk shows or even television.

Most Americans smile when you mention Johnny Carson, and in my limited experience of American TV, I can't off hand think of anyone else of whom you could say that, except perhaps (put your hand on your heart and raise your eyes to heaven) Walter Cronkite.

I think of two things when I hear Carson's name. One is the occasion that Lynn and her good friend Judy, courtesy of the then producer of the Tonight Show, were plucked from the queue outside the studio and escorted to the VIP row in front of the stage. Johnny's guest for the night was a hero of Lynn's, Steve Martin, there to talk about the imminent release of the movie Three Amigos – which makes it 1986. Lynn is an impeccable judge of character, and she liked Steve Martin as much in person as she had on screen. The same for Johnny Carson. Everybody liked Johnny.

The second thing I think about is something I was told about Carson years ago, and found hard to believe – I still do, although it's patently true. Despite the fact that in front of the cameras he was relaxed, chatty, funny, erudite and indeed everything you would expect him to be as the king of the talk shows, when the little red light went out he was reticent, awkward and painfully shy. His fellow talk show host Dick Cavett once said, 'I felt sorry for Johnny in that he was so socially uncomfortable. I've hardly ever met anybody who had as hard a time as he did.'

Isn't that something? I warmed to him for that because I share the same affliction (though sadly mine doesn't go away when the cameras roll; it gets worse).

Carson didn't give interviews as a rule, and when he did he used to provide, in advance, the following list of ten answers which were intended to cover any question he might conceivably be asked:

1. Yes, I did.
2. Not a bit of truth in that rumor.
3. Only twice in my life, both times on Saturday.
4. I can do either, but I prefer the first.
5. No. Kumquats.
6. I can’t answer that question.
7. Toads and tarantulas.
8. Turkestan, Denmark, Chile, and the Komandorskie Islands.
9. As often as possible, but I’m not very good at it yet. I need much more practice.
10. It happened to some old friends of mine, and it’s a story I’ll never forget

Johnny Carson died in January 2005. He would have been 86 today.

[Thank-you, by the way, to a correspondent in Martha's Vineyard for putting me right on the spelling of 'Cronkite' and 'Cavett'!]

Five (well, six) top reads

2011-10-22T10:33:00.001+01:00

Spangle at The Oliva Reader book blog kindly asked me to name five books which have changed my life. Not easy but for better or worse:

http://theolivareader.blogspot.com/2011/10/chapers-in-my-life-week-4.html

Gaddafi – shame on us

2011-10-21T19:12:00.000+01:00

I must admit, the appalling images of Gaddafi's capture and death have left me with the same sense of shame and guilt as the revelations about rendition flights for terrorist suspects, or the abuses in Abu Ghraib.

We think of ourselves as an enlightened and humane democracy, but our media give us second by second coverage of a man's capture, mistreatment and apparent summary execution by what is meant, after all, to be a fledgling democracy – and no-one tells our children that summary execution is wrong. In my view, should Gaddafi have personally tortured and killed a thousand innocent people, there is no justification for his summary execution. Two wrongs don't make a right – they just make us as bad as he was. There is no parallel with killing an enemy on the battlefield or sending drones to bomb a target – surely, when we take our enemy alive, he should stay alive pending due process. There was no hint of triumphalism from western leaders, which is excellent as far as it goes, and I'm not saying we should be horrified or even surprised by the actions of Gaddafi's captors, who were all too familiar with his bloody history – but someone, whether the commentators or David Cameron or Barack Obama, should surely have reminded us that they were wrong.

Amnesty International, Gaddafi's widow Safiya and the UN Commissioner for Human Rights have all called for an investigation into the circumstances of Gaddafi's death, and I very much hope that someone listens.

Killyleagh Library saved - Result!

2011-10-20T19:24:00.001+01:00

I haven't been able to confirm this myself, but I'm told by a trusted correspondent that Killyleagh Library, for which the community has fought so hard, has been saved from the threat of closure. Fantastic news - libraries are the lifeblood of so many communities, and the potential to become even more so, with investment and vision, is limitless. Excellent!!

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Chapters In My Life

2011-10-18T22:21:00.004+01:00

On Saturday I'm to have the honour of guest posting on the (mainly) book blog The Oliva Reader (http://theolivareader.blogspot.com/) for a series called Chapters In My Life. Guest bloggers list five books that have changed their lives, and I have to say it's a challenge: five is ... not very many. I've been mulling it over today, and will return to it on Thursday - I'm pretty sure of three, but a dozen titles are competing for the balance. Good fun though - concentrates the mind! I'll do a link on Saturday.

'After'

2011-10-17T17:12:00.001+01:00

It may not look like much, but this is the 'after' pic (taken this afternoon) to the one in last Friday's post about weatherproofing the cabin. It's raining heavily and a strong southwesterly wind is hitting the front wall, but you'll have to take my word for it - it's a lot less breezy inside than it was a week ago :)

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'The first citizen of the world'

2011-10-15T22:54:00.000+01:00

Main Street, Denison, Texas

I began to write this post last night, and had to abandon it because the signal was too weak to maintain an internet connection on the island. The subject - the excuse - was the anniversary of a great man's birth, so at first I thought I had missed the boat; but just now I was struck by the absurdity of that idea: the man himself is not here, at least in any corporeal sense, to celebrate or otherwise, since he died in March 1969 - and what's in a date?

That his birthplace was Denison, Texas won't help you with his identity unless, like a lawyer friend of mine in Edinburgh, your special subject is 'Presidents of The United States'. Nor will the fact that he was a military man - just over half the presidents in history were soldiers before they took office (including, incidentally, one of the most colourful, whose father was born an hour from here in County Antrim - Andrew 'Old Hickory' Jackson). If I said that he was responsible for the Bay of Pigs invasion in 1962, you might jump to the conclusion that I was talking about John F Kennedy. The oldest president in office? Well, at the time he was - but he was a mere 70 when he left office, which rules out Ronald Reagan, who was 77.

A few more people than normal may have thought of this man recently, with the Institute of Fiscal Studies' prediction that child poverty in the UK would rise to around a quarter of all children by 2020, and the moral question, as to spending priorities, that that statistic poses, because he once said, 'Every gun that is made, every warship launched, every rocket fired signifies, in the final sense, a theft from those who hunger and are not fed, those who are cold and not clothed. The world in arms is not spending money alone, it is spending. . . the hopes of its children.' For a career soldier, quite a quote.

He was one of two men considered by Franklin Delano Roosevelt for the job of Supreme Commander, Allied Forces in 1942. The other was General George Marshall; so there you have it - Dwight D (for David) 'Ike' Eisenhower, architect of victory in Europe and judged by historians one of the ten most effective presidents in history, was born in Denison, Texas on 14th October 1890, one hundred and twenty-one years ago . . .yesterday.

When Eisenhower died, Richard Nixon said: 'Some men are considered great because they lead great armies or they lead powerful nations. For eight years now, Dwight Eisenhower has neither commanded an army nor led a nation; and yet he remained through his final days the world's most admired and respected man, truly the first citizen of the world.'

Battening down the hatches

2011-10-13T20:19:00.000+01:00

With plummeting temperatures (!) forecast from the weekend, we thought we should enlist the services of a professional to help with the final stage of our autumn weatherproofing programme. Francie Melville is the kind of can-do, no-fuss character anyone would enjoy working with, and with his help we finished tarring the roof, got a coat of gloss paint on all the windows at the back of the cabin, draught-proofed the front door and three of the windows, and scrapped, repaired, sealed and weather-coated the remaining front-facing section of the weatherboarding, which we would otherwise have had to leave for Spring 2012.

After our experience last winter, when the cabin literally froze and Lynn's tolerance of island living was stretched to breaking-point, it's good to know that the temperature inside won't auto-adjust to the temperature outside, and that there (hopefully) won't have to be buckets and tupperware bowls placed at strategic points in the living room, kitchen and my office.

***

Thanks, by the way, to everyone who offered advice in the event of total water immersion of a mobile phone. My own phone will be returned to Planet Orange in the morning, where I imagine they have some kind of intensive care unit for smartphones - I see rows of water-damaged androids tucked up in bowls of rice; soothing background music; and an army of specially-trained attendants doing the rounds at intervals with moisture meters. Every so often a smartphone will splutter and light up, and another team will wheel it out, spruce it up and release it once more into our world..

Too smartphone

2011-10-11T22:57:00.000+01:00

I was going to say, I don't know what I'd do without my smartphone; but since last night, when I fell off the jetty into five feet of water with my smartphone in my pocket, I know all too well. I'd reach for it all the time, I'd miss it, I'd want it and from time to time I'd even need it. They're so smart these days that not only do they contain your life, they have lives of their own. If I lose my smartphone in the big city, I just have to log on to the internet and the phone will tell me which cafe I left it in, wipe its own memory remotely on command, and/or display a message with my contact details when someone tries to use it; which means I can retrieve my smartphone and have a latte to celebrate.

What happened was that I walked to the bottom of the jetty to set the stern anchor on the rowing boat, something I have to do every night if I don't want the boat to get caught under the jetty on the rising tide, and sink. I hadn't scrubbed the walkway for a few weeks, so it was pretty slick, and when I swung the anchor behind me a couple of times and let go, my feet went from under me and I went with the anchor. I swallowed a fair amount of seawater and felt a sensation somewhere in the grey area between extreme surprise and mild shock. Even in mid-fall, before hitting the water, I had reached for my smartphone in the hope that I could somehow hold it above my head and keep it dry - I was prepared to die to save my smartphone - but I never even got my hand into my pocket. Instead, I found the the phone through the fabric and cupped it tightly against my left thigh. What was I thinking, that my hand was waterproof? The thing is, in extreme emergencies like this - a child in the water, a dog in danger of drowning, a smartphone at risk - you don't think at all, you just react.

When, standing in the shallows, I finally managed to extricate the phone from the sodden and clinging folds of my trousers, I discovered it was still on - as a matter of fact, the screen looked perfectly normal. Relieved beyond words, I fumbled with the back until the battery popped out; strode - stumbled - up the foreshore to the cabin, shed my clothes and fished out Lynn's hairdryer from a basket in the bedroom; where I stood, naked and shivering, holding the smartphone in one hand and the hairdryer in the other, and praying that my first aid was effective, and in time. Sad to say, it was neither. After perhaps five minutes I decided to replace the battery and turn it on..

Now, you don't want to find this out for yourself, so you're going to have to take my word for it. When an Android smartphone knows that it is sick beyond help, three smug-looking little androids skateboard across the bottom of the screen doing an SOS dance in semaphore. It's as if, on its deathbed, the phone has decided to have the last laugh by going beyond smart and into the realms of smart-ass. I couldn't help smiling, but I'm determined not to allow my next smartphone to become so familiar.

Who said what?

2011-10-10T19:59:00.000+01:00

Mark Twain at home

I understand better now why people say, 'I think it was X who said...' or, 'Someone once said...'

You can't be too careful. Apparently the most mis-quoted figure of the last century or so is Mark Twain because, as Robert Hirst, General Editor of the University of California's Mark Twain Project, says (thanks to Barbara Mikkelson of snopes.com for this quote): 'It's like an insurance policy. Attributing something to Mark Twain adds to the joke. When they first hear his name, people are disposed to laugh; they're ready to laugh. That's the chief reason he's saddled with so much stuff that isn't his."

For example:-

'There are three kinds of lies: lies, damn lies, and statistics.'
Twain used this in his autobiography but correctly attributed it to Benjamin Disraeli.

'The only two certainties in life are death and taxes.'
This was used by Twain but without attribution - it probably came from Benjamin Franklin in 1789.

'Reports of my death have been greatly exaggerated.'
What he actually said was, 'The report of my death is an exaggeration." (Curiously enough, I like the real version better.)

'Wagner's music is better than it sounds.'
Twain often used this quote, but appropriately credited it to the humorist Edgar Wilson Nye.

I'm as guilty as anyone. I often quote the humourist Jack Handey on this blog, and months ago I led with this:

'When I die, I want to go peacefully in my sleep, like my grandfather - not screaming in terror like his passengers..'

It is - was - my favourite Handey quote, but it turns out not to be one of his. It is, well.. someone else's (no-one seems to know whose). I have this on the best authority, and in fact the same authority drew my attention to the Mark Twain mis-attributions, of which there are many more.

Never mind, I'll find another Handey favourite. What about this:-

'If you ever go temporarily insane, don't shoot somebody, like a lot of people do. Instead, try to get some weeding done, because you'd really be surprised.'

Or:

'Here's a good joke to do during an earthquake: straddle a big crack in the ground, and if it opens wider, go "Whoa! Whoa!" and flail your arms around, like you're going to fall in.'

:-)

Bearing gifts

2011-10-09T21:16:00.001+01:00

Some people bring a bottle of wine...

This is more our thing though. Hilly and Nial (Ringhaddy Daffodils) often bring something from the garden when they come to the island for a meal, and Lynn's eyes lit up as usual on Thursday night. Since leaving Scotland, where she and her father nurtured a vegetable garden of prodigious year-round productivity, Lynn has vicariously enjoyed Hilly and Nial's :)

Search Dogs and Me - Neil Powell

2011-10-08T21:48:00.000+01:00

Charco in Tollymore Forest

Neil Powell and I share a publisher, and as he was signing copies of his new book Search Dogs and Me - One Man and his Life-saving Dogs, in the Belfast branch of Waterstones today, I popped in to introduce myself and to buy an inscribed copy for a friend's - a dog-loving friend's - birthday. What a nice chap he turned out to be, and as far as I could tell he was selling plenty of books. Charco (above) was with him and wore his celebrity status well..

I've only had time for a quick flick, but I can tell I'm going to enjoy the read. This is from Chapter 7, about a bearded collie pup Neil had just acquired, called Pepper:-

"From the beginning it was obvious that Pepper had star quality... By the time he was twelve weeks old, I had taught him to bark on command, to come when he was called and that 'find it' meant he had to go and search for a tennis ball. By six months he had learned that 'find him' meant he had to search for a person hidden upwind. Then he quickly grasped the next stage, which was that having found the person, he had to come back to me and bark to let me know that he had made the find. Later still, I taught him that having come back and barked, the new command 'show me' meant he then had to run back to wherever the person was hiding, leading me to the body. Pepper loved it..."

Had they ever met, Eddie would have been in awe of Pepper.

Rain stopped play

2011-10-07T17:23:00.001+01:00

Today's project was the long-postponed painting of the cabin roof, a game of cat and mouse with the weather in which we could only claim partial victory as you can see. Still, we're 9/10ths there and the long-range forecast for Monday (my next day on the island) gives cloudy skies with patchy sunshine - and no rain; so fingers crossed..

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No-one likes Goodbye

2011-10-05T17:54:00.000+01:00

When Max and Digby left the island after a week-long stay, Eddie was bereft. He spent an inordinate amount of time sitting on the jetty, and for a few days, every time I returned to the island he looked behind and not at me as I stepped out of the boat, hoping I had passengers. I was a little offended but I understood.

Faithbook

2011-10-03T21:03:00.002+01:00

I've posted about this before, but I always keep an eye out for changes on the billboard in front of Stormont Presbyterian Church, and this is from a couple of days ago:

Faithbook
You've got a Friend request from God

Shine Services

2011-10-02T23:57:00.000+01:00

If you happen to live within twenty miles of Kilkeel, Co.Down...

Yesterday, courtesy of Yellow Pages, I organised a firm of carpet cleaners (as I thought) to come to my mother's house near Seaforde, and several bizarre, almost spooky things happened one after the other:-

They turned up on time
They were polite, friendly and businesslike, all at the same time
They agreed to add to the job a two-seater setee which one of mum's cats had practically lived in for some time; an extra carpet in addition to the living room one they quoted for; and the windows, inside and out
They were into moving everything themselves, though in practice I couldn't stand there and watch them
They were scrupulously tidy
They did accept a cup of tea, but they barely stopped to drink it
They did a really excellent job - I've never seen (the house has never seen, even when it was new) such squeaky-clean windows
They added a little for the extras, but not enough, given the time it took them

As you can see, I was impressed, and I see from their website (http://www.shineservices.co.uk/) they also do cars, caravans and commercial premises.

They're quite a young outfit and they deserve to do well :)

'Farm Bell'

2011-10-01T23:30:00.000+01:00

I doubt whether many people - on this side, anyway, of what we have been calling 'the big pond' for at least three hundred years - will guess who might have painted this charming, folksy scene from rural Georgia known simply as 'Farm Bell'.

Well, it was a charming, folksy, former president of the United States - Jimmy Carter. I like it, I must say, and I always had a soft spot for the peanut farmer from Georgia who first taught Sunday School at the age of eighteen; won the Democatic primary on an anti-segregation ticket in 1970 to become Governor of Georgia; put the family's peanut farm in the hands of a blind trust (to avoid even the hint of a conflict of interest) when he became the 39th president in 1977; missed by cruel minutes, and with great good grace, the release of the Iran Hostages when he left office in 1981; returned to Plains, Georgia to find that the trust had so mismanaged the farm he was in debt by a million dollars; founded the Carter Centre whose contributions to democracy, inter-state conflict resolution and human rights were recognised by his receiving the Nobel Peace Prize in 2002 . . . and who still teaches Sunday School sixty-nine years later.

It's Jimmy Carter's 87th birthday today, and I hope he's had a good one.

Thank-you

2011-09-30T19:36:00.000+01:00

I sent out a mass e-mailing yesterday and today, in blocks, asking contacts to check out the links, loading times and any other issues on my new website http://www.thebluecabin.com/. The replies have been really useful (and often amusing) I must say. People have taken a lot of trouble and a few problems have been thrown up, though most of them have been minor and fixable. It might otherwise have taken me weeks to discover them - so I'm most grateful :)

Late harvest, Strangford Lough

2011-09-28T18:44:00.000+01:00

It seems that due to the summer we didn't really have, harvest has been late this year - or in some cases unsuccessful. This is Quarterland Bay, Strangford Lough at about 1pm today. We skirt Quarterland in the car every time we return to the island, and it's always worth having the camera on the back seat - Canada geese graze the hill every Spring, and on some days in early summer there are a hundred or more Eider in the bay. I once watched a single porpoise work it's way methodically round the shoreline, presumably looking for an exit. Perhaps porpoises use our own method of escaping a maze: keep the hedge on your left (or right) shoulder and walk - it may take a while but eventually you will emerge.

Billy Watts guitar solo - Eric Burdon and The Animals, House of the Rising Sun

2011-09-27T23:16:00.000+01:00

Two years ago Lynn and I travelled to Edinburgh to see our friend Bill Watts, from Los Angeles, play guitar with Eric Burdon and The Animals. It was a fantastic concert, revelatory in the sense that Burdon still has that amazing voice - he didn't record classics like We Gotta Get Out of This Place and Don't Let Me Be Misunderstood yesterday, but as soon as he opened his mouth . . .

The highlight of the night, of course, was House Of The Rising Sun - or it would have been, had the audience not been turfed out onto South Clerk Street when the Queen's Hall fire alarm went off during the first set. The fire brigade duly attended, checked out the hall and gave the all-clear, the concensus being that someone had snuck into the toilets for a cigarette. We filed back in after only half an hour, and were treated to three more songs and some virtuoso guitar by Bill . . . before the alarm sounded again, and this time they wouldn't let us back in.

I have to say, no-one really minded - we were all on a high and the only murmur of discontent went like this: 'All this way and no House of the Rising Sun!' Ah well.

We had arranged to meet Bill afterwards, so we went back into the hall and talked our way past several officials to get backstage. Actually, that's not quite true - we were told in no uncertain terms we couldn't go backstage, so we just kept walking and talking, opened the first door we came to, and there was the band, packing up and drifting off. You can't miss Bill - he has a smile that matches his personality. Warm and open. We hadn't seen him for years so it was great to catch up; and of course we knew it was likely enough a few more years would go by before we saw him again.

Anyway, we were thrilled when Bill's mum June, one of our dearest friends, sent the link to this YouTube video from San Javier Jazz Festival in Spain. Hope you enjoy - it's the song we missed.. Billy Watts on guitar, of course.

William Faulkner

2011-09-25T22:21:00.000+01:00

William Faulkner

In my second book Still On The Sound, I mentioned a novel called My Side Of The Mountain by Jean Craighead George, which I had hugely enjoyed as a youngster. I wrote to the author, then aged 90 and living in Chappaqua, New York (as far as I know, she still is), and she sent a charming reply which ended with a reference to my 'auspicious last name'.

The only Faulkner novel I had read was As I Lay Dying, and I knew almost nothing about the man himself. So I did a little research and discovered that his family name was not, in fact, Faulkner, but 'Falkner'. Exactly when and how it came to be changed is, like many of the details of Faulkner's colourful life, a matter of debate. It may have been that his records as an employee of Remington Repeater Rifles had the name wrong, and it somehow stuck; or (a much better story) that his name was miss-spelt on the title page of his first novel, and that when asked if he would like it changed, he replied, 'Either way suits me'.

But it's a detail. The remarkable thing about William Faulkner is that without having graduated from either high school or university - much of his education came from his mother Maud and a black woman named Caroline Barr who helped to raise him - and against a background of poverty and depression (the Depression) in Mississippi, the most disadvantaged of all the southern states, he managed to produce one of the most monumental bodies of work in the history of American literature; mostly, even later in his career, to pay the bills.

He hated the notion of celebrity, and my favourite story about him is that when he was told he had won the Nobel Prize for Literature in 1949, he didn't even mention it to his teenaged daughter - she found out when the school principal called her in to talk about it.

Faulkner was interviewed by The Paris Review in 1956, and said this about writers and writing:-

"Let the writer take up surgery or bricklaying if he is interested in technique. There is no mechanical way to get the writing done, no shortcut. The young writer would be a fool to follow a theory. Teach yourself by your own mistakes; people learn only by error. The good artist believes that nobody is good enough to give him advice. He has supreme vanity. No matter how much he admires the old writer, he wants to beat him."

The reason William Faulkner came to mind was that he was born on this day in 1897.

If it squeaks..

2011-09-23T18:25:00.001+01:00

...Eddie will put on a display/make an exhibition of himself to get hold of it.

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Bingo

2011-09-20T23:32:00.001+01:00

I have just pressed "upload" and my shiny new website seems to be live at http://www.thebluecabin.com/

No doubt there will be issues like missing links, lengthy upload times or whatever - if you do drop by, I would appreciate hearing about them; meantime I'll keep a low profile as far as promotion etc is concerned, and wait till the dust settles..

Almost done

2011-09-18T22:42:00.001+01:00

I hope to put my new website to bed by mid-week. I've just populated the slide show, which will be on the Home page, and it's now a matter of final (ha ha) tweaks and dealing with optimisation before it goes live. It had better be worth it - I've learnt a lot but it has taken far too much of my time in the last few weeks, often between 2 and 4 in the morning or until the battery in the laptop has given out.

I decided to put the above pic (from December 2008) on this post because it typifies how you can fritter away hours on the smallest detail when you're building a website. I must have tried it large, medium and small; portrait, landscape, transparent and rotated; beshadowed, bordered and otherwise b------d about with before finally, believe it or not, discarding it altogether, albeit in favour of a similar pic taken in the same late evening session, and from almost the same spot: Ringdufferin, looking south towards the Mournes.

Fine words

2011-09-16T18:59:00.001+01:00

Monkey said he rode into town on the Chainsaw of Justice, but I personally think he was milking the moment.

Monkey and Murray are in the house

2011-09-15T17:11:00.001+01:00

Pretty much a working visit this time - this afternoon they were on firewood detail at the back of the island.

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Jack Handey, he say

2011-09-14T19:36:00.000+01:00

Sorry to keep going on about Jack Handey. Well, not really:-

Handey's offbeat humour seems to spring from the same two words that aspiring novelists use when they're still looking at a blank sheet of paper: 'What if?'

'I bet if you were in some old west gang, and you were dragging a guy along the ground with your horse, it'd probably make you really mad to look back and see him reading a magazine.'

Or:

'If you're a young mafia gangster out on your first date, I bet it's really embarrassing if someone tries to kill you.'

Here for the duration

2011-09-12T18:05:00.001+01:00

Having made use of a brief window of opportunity to leave the island this morning with Lynn's mum, who was flying to Edinburgh, we only made it back again by following a zig-zag route between headlands, looking for the quietest water; and now that we're here, we couldn't leave even if we wanted to. It's forecast to moderate by mid-evening - good news because I have to be on the mainland first thing tomorrow.

Colin Firth

2011-09-10T21:32:00.000+01:00

Funny the things that spur you on. Discovering that Colin Firth, whose birthday it is today, is just four years younger than me, made me think Lynn is right - I should start going to the gym. I realise I can't manage the looks, but I can have a go at the weight..

After humans..

2011-09-09T16:40:00.000+01:00

I haven't tried this, but I'm pretty sure if you asked a dozen people in the street, 'What is the planet's most intelligent animal, after humans?', you would get a list which included these:-

Dogs
Chimps
Dolphins
Whales
Elephants
Foxes

Obviously, all of the above deserve a place in the top ten, for their intelligence/memory/communication skills/cunning or whatever; but it's now reckoned that the most derserving all-rounder is an animal we see quite often in Strangford Lough - the humble porpoise.

Below is a picture of a school of porpoises which was passing by the Blue Cabin heading south. I took half a dozen photos, none of which actually includes a porpoise, and for me, this strengthens their claim for runner-up (after us) in the intelligence stakes: clearly some wise guy amongst them saw that I was trying to take a picture and said, 'Watch for the right forefinger. We need to coordinate the dive with the forefinger. And... dive. And... dive. Excellent.'

The Oriel Gallery, Dublin

2011-09-07T18:31:00.000+01:00

Further to yesterday's post, the reason we were in Dublin was to deliver two of Lynn's paintings to the excellent Oriel Gallery on Clare Street. The Oriel is Ireland's oldest independent gallery and work is shown over three sumptuous floors. Lynn has been showing there for a year now, and Monday's additions included these:-

'Shore Weed, Islandmore'
Lynn McGregor RSW

'Light After Rain'
Lynn McGregor RSW

Il y a des macarons..

2011-09-06T18:26:00.001+01:00

..et il y a Laduree.

Lynn and I were in Dublin yesterday, delivering paintings to the Oriel Gallery. I'll be posting about the Oriel again, but first things first: en route, we called at Brown Thomas on Grafton Street for some Laduree macaroons. If you're into macaroons, you'll know there is a tremendous variation in terms of quality - but for exactly the right combination of crisp outer shell, chewy and flavoursome ganache filling, and last but not least, colour, you can't beat Laduree. Hardly surprising, since they invented the macaroon at the turn of the last century, and have been selling them ever since in their flagship store at 18 Rue Royale, Paris. Every season, they add a new flavour.

Sadly, Laduree are only represented in the British Isles in London (Harrods and Covent Garden) and Dublin, so their macaroons are not easy to find; added to which, they don't travel well, so having them posted is a poor - and risky - option.

Nothing like building to an anticlimax.

Henry Ford II

2011-09-04T08:47:00.002+01:00

Henry Ford II with the Ford Mustang at the 1964 World's Fair, Flushing Meadows, New York

For some years my mother was a professional genealogist, and in an old computer at the back of a cupboard there are the results of her extensive research into her side of the Faulkner family - the Forsythes and the Sewells. We haven't got around to digging out this precious family resource, but when we do I expect I shall revisit the Fords.

The connection is that when Henry, who was born on this day in 1917 to Edsel and Eleanor Ford, was taken back to the family home in Detroit, we can assume that my great-aunt Annie (Sewell) was waiting for him: she was his nanny.

Sneak preview

2011-09-02T18:58:00.000+01:00

Website under construction

Just to show that I haven't been twiddling my thumbs all day..

One down, one to go

2011-09-01T19:51:00.000+01:00

Island Trees

Having intended to spend the day on my own website, I got waylaid by Lynn's - here it is in all its glory, with most of her recent work added:-

http://www.lynnmcgregor.co.uk/

Tomorrow it's the turn of the new Blue Cabin website - I may not be able to put it to bed entirely, but as they say in these parts, I can sicken it.

Graduation Day

2011-08-31T19:02:00.001+01:00

It has been a day of positives. As I write, I am sitting on the veranda with a glass of wine, watching a tern competing for sprats with a shoal of mackerel in Ringhaddy Sound; Lynn and I have just spent the afternoon putting a shiny new roof on her studio; and in this morning's post I received a certificate to say I had passed my proofreading course. Tomorrow I must progress my website (including a proofreading page) and tidy up my CV - the challenge is to persuade someone to hire me!

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William Friedkin, almost

2011-08-30T22:18:00.000+01:00

I sat down at 11.30 last night, intending to post about William Friedkin, the American movie director (if the name rings a bell but you can't place the blockbuster, think rotating heads, willful bedsteads and projectile vomit the colour of pea soup - come to think of it, I bet it was pea soup), but I suddenly remembered I had left the rowing boat high and dry, half underneath the jetty, and the tide was coming in. My intention had been to catch it when it floated, and walk it further down the jetty so that it would be at the right place for 7.30am this morning, my departure time.

I was way too late. The rowing boat had risen with the tide, met with the underside of the jetty, and succumbed without a murmur. The night was perfectly still, the moon was strong and the boat appeared as a ghostly glimmer about six feet beneath the surface. Of course, it's not the first time, and I set about recovering it in a well-rehearsed routine involving chest waders, a boat hook and a prodigious amount of baling with a plastic bucket.

By the time I had tied the boat as far down as the incoming tide allowed, and thrown out the stern anchor, it was half past midnight and I decided Friedkin could wait.

Orla Guerin in Libya

2011-08-28T22:24:00.002+01:00

I don't know why, with so many harrowing reports coming out of Libya, I should have found this one so affecting. It was the excellent Orla Guerin's report this evening for the BBC, from a smoking warehouse at the former base of the Khamis Brigade, run by one of Gadaffi's sons, fifteen miles from Tripoli, where the crew had uncovered evidence of a massacre of up to 130 civilian prisoners in the last days of the regime:

"...there was worse to come... We can't show you the kind of pictures that would convey the horror of what happened in here, and it's very hard to even imagine the terror in the last few moments for these men who were trapped inside. What we can say for certain is that they were shown absolutely no mercy...

...They promised them water at sunset, but they came with guns instead...

...Husbands and fathers and sons were gunned down in here; men who never lived to see a free Libya."

Several things occurred to me after watching Guerin's very moving report: I will be thinking about these poor men for some time; I don't know how the news crews cope with what they have to witness; and most important, may this please not be the tip of the iceberg - someone, I think it was the BBC's correspondent in Benghasi, said tonight that of 55,000 people missing since the start of the rebellion, only 11,000 have been accounted for.

Spoilt for choice

2011-08-27T21:55:00.000+01:00

Every so often, I browse my images looking for one that will work as the main background pic for my website-in-progress; there are 26,000 of them though, so I've been breaking them down into bitesize chunks. I should just go for one and be done with it, as I'm wasting too much time - structurally, this one works quite well, but I really wanted blue skies and sunshine. Onwards..

Clarice Cliff Charger update

2011-08-26T18:38:00.000+01:00

Perhaps some people will remember my post from June about this Clarice Cliff charger. Well, after a sleepless night last night (for both sender and recipient), I can confirm that the charger arrived safely at the home of its very charming and enthusiatic new owner at 4 o'clock this afternoon. It crossed the Irish Sea in one piece due to the packing skills of Sean at the Mail Boxes Etc. depot in Belfast; and I would like to thank Johnathan, a follower of this blog, for starting the ball rolling - three people approached me about the charger and both seller and eventual buyer were delighted with the outcome.

I knew this blog would come in handy one day..

Fife Guide

2011-08-25T19:25:00.001+01:00

Two years ago I was walking Eddie on the skerries off Pittenweem, and took a picture of West Shore in the late afternoon sun. It made its way onto my blog, I can't recall in what context, and then three months ago I was asked by the designers of this year's Fife Guide if they could use it for their cover shot. I said no problem, sent them a hi-res jpeg and said how pleased I was. They replied that they wanted to get away from the usual iconic Fife photographs of boats in the harbour, the Forth Rail Bridge and so on, and I said, 'Are you saying my photograph isn't iconic?' I didn't hear back on that, and in fact began to worry that they might have taken me seriously. However, three copies of the guide, complete with my photograph and even a credit for this blog, came through the letterbox at the weekend, so all is well - no offence was taken and I think it looks pretty good. Iconic even.

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Meaghan, Marley & Sam

2011-08-24T23:50:00.001+01:00

For no special reason, may I introduce Meaghan, Marley and Sam (Sam may not need an introduction as she has appeared on this blog many times). Meaghan and Marley belong to my sister, Sam to my mother.

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Riders In The Sky

2011-08-23T23:12:00.000+01:00

Riders In The Sky
(Joey The Cow Polka King, Ranger Doug, Too Slim and Woody Paul)

Back when, I drove Lynn crazy on a road trip through New Mexico by playing Riders In The Sky (not the song but the C&W band - that's Comedy & Western) at full volume on the car stereo. They may not be to your taste, but it's easy to see why Riders In The Sky are one of the biggest-selling, best-loved, most enduring C&W bands in America: they play and sing pretty well, they don't take themselves too seriously (slogan: "It may not be the Easy Way.. but it's the COWBOY Way!"), and if you're a suggestible type like me, they can bring a smile to your eye, and then a tear, in quick succession.

This one, My Oklahoma, is of the "tear" variety:-

In their own words: "And so, the never-ending trail drive continues. The ponies are rested and watered and America's Favorite Cowboys are ready to saddle up and ride, bringing good beef to hungry people wherever they may be. Yes, Riders In The Sky are truly an exception to the rule. It would be the Easy Way to call it a career after 30-plus years, but it wouldn't be...the Cowboy Way!"

The one on the right in the top picture (middle top in the video) is Woody Paul, who happens to be 62 today.

PS: Leslie it's your fault, you introduced me to RITS :)

Petits glands..

2011-08-21T21:35:00.000+01:00

Every so often you come across a publishing statistic that makes you smile, as an author (J K Rowling was turned down by eight publishers before Bloomsbury saw something in Harry Potter, and so on). Well, I read today that Peter Mayle's A Year In Provence, which spawned a genre - and indeed a lifestyle - and went on to sell over six million copies, had a modest enough start when it was published in 1989: Hamish Hamilton decided on an initial print run of 3,000 copies.