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FEED | Webstagram.

Will this work I wonder? I thought it would be fun to link to my instagram pics. LOTS OF CAT PICS! SO MANY CAT PICS. I SWEAR I DON’T HATE DOGS.

Oh look it worked! I think. Oops no, it is my own instagram stream rather than my pics.  Oh well. Back to the blog twiddling board.  You should look though.  They post great stuff.

All further attempts have failed.  I am being THWARTED by the internet.  Growl.

WORK DAMN YOU.

I think it did? Possibly? Note to self: Knock it off with the bright ideas. They only end in keyboard faceplanting.

1, 2, 1,2, 1,2,3,4…hold it…NOW!*

(apologies to original owner/creator – I don’t know who you are to credit you)

While discussing New Year Resolutions with the Baron, he showed me this pic.  This is his inspiration for 2012 and rather cheekily I have nicked it to be mine.

2011 wasn’t a splendid year for me. Lots of Hopeless Heights time and a bit of loss. Loss of people and a bit of loss of confidence due to illness and mental exploding giraffes. The Brain of Kiz has not been a happy place.

Anyway where was I?

Oh yes. MAGIC.  IT HAS TO HAPPEN. Or just life. Life would be excellent. Of the vaguely vertical, occasionally leaving the house quality. That might help the whole photography thing I love and generally used to fill my time with.  There is really only so many pictures I can post on instagram of my cat before dog lovers turn up and stamp my iphone into glass shards for the good of the eyes of the internet.

After this decision and a bit of a lie down, I started to make plans. For the mental bridge the hell out of here. And the conclusion is I am open to suggestions. Concrete plans just make me lie down a lot more. Add that to a mystery illness and I am forgetting how to use my legs.

Well there are some teeny wee plans. Planettes even.

One was to try and use this blog more.  Bizarrely I found myself worrying about posting anything.  So many go through my mind and get discarded.   Mainly through fear.  Fear of my appalling writing skills being critiqued.  Fear of putting myself here.  The only thing I really can write about is my life.  And that means actually me on this blog.  Nothing I could stand away from if someone objects to it.  Arrows would hit. *looks at picture*

The other was dig out Maw’s unused treadmill and trot on it a bit. My best thinking is done in the shower.  The staring at the tiles while scrubbing my hair lets my mind wander off and do thinky things without me getting in the way. But the lack of anything to write on in there lets me down. And generally the ideas are gone the minute I reach for a towel. A running friend was telling me how she finds that handy for thinking and generally improving misery brain. If I can amble (I am built for comfort, and definitely not speed, so no actual running for me thank you) along on a treadmill and stare into the middle distance will it have the same effect? Will it be easier to write down ideas without having to stop what I am doing?  Will a bit of deliberate exercise eject some of the exploding giraffes out of my headspace? Worth a shot. Especially since Maw has never used the damn thing.  Someone should make more use of it. Rather than going for the traditional hanging clothes on it that always happens to exercise equipment.

The mystery illness is somewhat getting in the way of the latter so I have focussed on the former for now.

Now the diagram makes me think of a place in Jupiter Artland. There is a piece by Ian Hamilton Finlay. A small bridge. On either side is a stone with the words “only connect” carved into it. I might as well try that eh? A new feature on this blog is a list of the blogs I read and enjoy.  It isn’t all of them, just the first ones that came to mind with a little twitter prompting.  I expect it to grow through the year.

Baby steps. I am still not sure what I want to do exactly with this blog but hopefully this year I am going to find out. 

Happy 2012. May it be where the magic happens for you.

*The title of the post is connected to the opening of a song from the 80’s.  Extra points if you can work it out

‘Mon Then!

I think I have said before that I wasn’t always Scottish.

Well I didn’t feel Scottish. I was born in mainland Europe. My birth was registered as British with a bonus registration in Edinburgh. We then lived in England for a number of years before circumstances eventually led my family to settling in Scotland.   So I always felt I began as European and worked my way along to becoming Scots.  Of course when I arrived in Scotland I was utterly bewildered. Scotland has a language, a culture, a huge developed identity.  I had no idea before I arrived.  My mostly Scottish parents had never said, never explained anything about their/our homeland.  Their accents were light and they rarely even used Scottish words that I can recall. But I realise now that when you are surrounded by non-scots there are two paths to choose. One is the full Scot, no quarter given with language, singing Flower of Scotland when pished. And the other is choosing the quieter road, using the English words instead of your childhood scots ones to save on endless explanations.  The second path I think has often been used in the past as Scottish manners. As I got older I realised the Scots automatically used two languages. “proper” English at school etc. (or a vague attempt with Miss Jean Brodie style teachers correcting poor English) and the Scots you spoke to friends and family.  You answered in the language you are spoken to. Or at least you did then. (I suspect my father may have gone the first path when he had a drink in him but I was never present for these times)

It feels different now.  You don’t have to be educated to travel (there was nothing like that to aid in the development and usage of “proper” english,) the tv quite often speaks with a Scottish accent thanks to the efforts of broadcasters to promote more regional news and entertainment efforts. I also I wonder if this is, in part, because of the internet too. In the days before it you made your choice about whether or not you carried your scots with you to another land, the loud or the quiet path.  But since you can travel the world now without even having to leave your chair then the language doesn’t automatically get adjusted. And we aren’t just a wee bit popped on the top of England any more. The loud road is less a conscious donning of national identity and Scottish people being just themselves. The internet means we get the opportunity to show who we are without tweaking for tourists or being the party Scots in the bar far from home.  (though we still do that very well I have to admit)  

And the best example I have seen of Scots being splendidly and hilariously ourselves with a global audience was this week with “Hurricane Bawbag”  Not strictly a hurricane but it will certainly do.  The windspeeds were definitely comparable so the name felt entirely appropriate. Along with the other names tried out such as Marydoll, Boaby, and Senga before Bawbag and the great Scottish sense of humour won out. And trended on twitter worldwide.

And I have never been so glad of it. I was home alone, am currently suffering a bout of Labyrinthitis (not ideal for battling wheelie bins in gale force winds) and the potential to be terrified out of my wits by groaning trees swaying, debris whizzing past the windows and the wind battering off the house was seriously high.

But I wasn’t. Thanks to the internet and specifically twitter. It provided me with up to date information from the council, the police and the main news bodies.  Up to date travel information for my family and minute by minute weather reports. And a lot of laughs.  The thing that really binds Scots together more than the language is that sense of humour. The jokes made in the face of the winds, things being blown over, the wind turbine that somehow managed to catch fire.  The brilliant OMG TRAMPOLINE youtube video that did the rounds.  And the media embracing the Bawbag name.  (STV’S slightly prim explanation of exactly what a bawbag is utterly hilarious. I give them kudos for mentioning Jeremy Clarkson in the same paragraph. Nicely done)

Wonderful stuff. A scary situation made normal.  And weirdly, fun. I had one of the best days even while lying down and swearing while the house shoogled under the onslaught of the extreme weather. Like somebody said: “You may take our garden furniture but you will never take our patter”

I belong to you Scotland.  And I swear (as much as I can before my maw tells me off,) I have never been happier about it.

Dancing In High Places

I remember the first time I met Michael.

It was a ludicrous hour of the morning, at a party that was attempting to last for 3 days. It probably did. For some, possibly alcoholic, reason I don’t remember much else about that party, just him. But towering over proceedings at well over 6 foot something or other, with a mop of dark curls, bright blue eyes and a demented grin, even at age 18 or so, he did tend to draw the eye.

I thought he had one of the most of the beautiful faces I had ever seen. I drunkenly told him that years later and he pulled as many stupid faces as he could manage while laughing uproariously. I hit him and huffed but I never changed my mind.

We didn’t see each other often after I left Edinburgh and the night for a life of bucolic boredom and daylight. We would periodically bump into each other in the nightclub dark, mouths close to ears to be heard about the whomp whomp whomp of the loud music, me on tiptoe and him stooped over, winding his body around and over me like a particularly odd tree. We would rip the pish out of each other, flirt, I would sit with a bit of a petted lip while he told me off about the state of my health with firm instructions not to quit on my body. Whole years of feelings, views, smiles and tears would be compressed into half an hour or less, He could tell me off, make a heartfelt apology for a past crime on his knees and make me blush, all in one conversation. I still don’t know he did it. He knew everyone, was everywhere and he could still make you feel you were the only important thing in front of him. That kind of laser focus was unnerving, flattering and completely Michael. Every time I assumed his attention was occupied with something, he would turn and catch a detail I expected him to miss. I am still in awe. More than once, as I left the post club street social at 3am, breaking away from the crowd to go home, I would hear him calling my name and find him galloping after me to kiss me goodbye. He seemed able to scan a space and find anyone he wanted. He was always on the dancefloor, arms and legs every which way. He couldn’t see something without climbing it. Walls, lamp posts and even on one memorable occasion, a party one floor up in a tenement via the scaffolding outside. Much to the surprise of the guests inside who turned round at the sound of knocking to find him peering in the bay window. You didn’t know what he would do next but whatever it was would be so him you would wonder how you hadn’t expected it all along.

He had a way of tilting his head and looking at you so seriously. A still pause while you waited for his lips to quirk into that grin and the devils to dance in his eyes. And dance they always did, even as the mop of curly hair grew long enough to be restrained in a ponytail and laughter lines started to trace across his face. I think those devils were what led him. Thinking and doing were never far apart. What those devils saw was where Michael’s feet would soon be dancing. It was the most wonderful thing about him. His passion for life, for people, for everything. Amazing. And a little frightening. There was safety in Michael’s hands but always that little bit of danger in his eyes. Those devils always had him dancing on an edge somewhere. Quite often a physical one, while laughing at people worriedly calling him back. I think I both loved and hated those devils. They gave Michael his spark, his energetic magic that drew you in but I genuinely worried the price of that magic some day would be Michael. That he would some day burn out and leave us in quiet darkness.

I was wrong, in the end those little dancing devils didn’t take Michael. A car did.

But I will always remember his magic.

Time

 

Last month Bill Alston died.

And another piece of a world that made me… me disappeared.

He was my art teacher at this point in my life.  Well, in a way he was one of the ones responsible for getting me there.

My home life was not easy.  Up to age nearly 8 I was used to an entirely different life.  When it ended, any change after that just rocked me.  Most of my childhood memories seem overlaid with the emotion of fear.  That any second someone was going to shift the goalposts on me and my life was going to crumple up again.  All the sureness I had about who I was up to that point had vanished.  I looked different to everyone else, I sounded different, I was suddenly an outsider who just couldn’t blend any more.  I stopped trying to do things since trying something and not being able to do it made you obvious, gave more grist for the teasing mill.  So you can picture how well I managed the jump to secondary school at age 12.   I spent the first year feeling very lost, a tiny fish in too large a pond.  In second year, at age 13, was when I met Mr Alston. And his class was the first place where I felt happy and most importantly, safe in a very long time.  I could do what was asked of me in that class. I was never made to feel stupid. If you forgot your homework, Mr Alston was apt to shrug and say “people forget things, I forget things too”  For someone who absented herself out of her brain a lot to get through a week this was such a relief.  It removed the dread often felt while going into other teacher’s classrooms. 

My happiest memories of school are in that classroom. It was warm and bright with a tiled floor and the standard belfast sinks. Writing about it suddenly makes me remember the smell of the paints and the vinegary tang that hung round the door of the tiny darkroom.  I remember a poster of Billie Holiday on the side of a cupboard, staring soulfully into the middle distance, with the white flowers in her hair.  Oddly I seem to remember it as it being the brightest art room despite the one along from it being on the corner of the building with far more windows.  Funny how the mind plays tricks on you like that.

Don’t get me wrong, I don’t think Mr Alston ever set out to be the Robin Williams to our confused Pucks.  He was just gloriously himself.  The other teachers concentrated on getting you through exams (very well I do admit,) Mr Alston just let you be as artistic as you could be and experiment.  You could go to him and say “I want to try this slightly weird thing with this medium on that” and he would just go “ok” and quite often whisk something out of a cupboard that would aid you. He would look at your work and see something in it when you thought you had made a pig’s ear of it.  I thought I had taken a brilliant photo once, from a different angle from everyone else that day and on developing it, was utterly deflated to find it just looked dull. Mr Alston looked at it a moment, went away and came back with a better quality of photo paper than the usual stuff they let us use for me to reprint it on. And suddenly I found I had a photo I was really proud of. I still have it somewhere, in a scrapbook.  I watched him casually drawing faces in his after school art club and was fascinated, he happily taught me, and after that, would let me march through the art department borrowing unnerved kids from other classes trying to catch their image on paper, I remember being allowed experiment with pastels while everyone else painted, wearing the tip of a finger flat blending great swathes of colour together while listening to him talk about all kinds of things.  About how different the world was when he was our age, “in those days if you wanted to go to uni or art school, you just *went*” but always encouraging our further education dreams with “remember you can think just as well as they can”

That last one really stuck with me. That was the phrase that made me decide that yes, I was going to go to university when no one else thought I could.  All the mistakes I have made in my life, my one real regret is I never saw him again and properly thanked him.  For his time, his attention and that bit of wisdom that gave me enough faith in myself to make a choice and choose a change in my life. For the first time ever.  And when I had the opportunity to say something worthwhile to say to teens, I found I had a piece of wisdom to pass along. I hope it carries a few of them into adulthood the same way it did me.

Thank you Mr Alston.

Bill Alston’s Website

Whoops.

Hold that thought. I refuse to admit defeat.

Stop The Presses

A lost week. Still trying to find my place in the world, in 2011, in my own head.

So take this as a placeholder while I am hanging off this cliff by my fingernails with indiana jones theme music booming in the background, ok?

Never leave home without a rope and the proper footwear.

Wrap My Words Around You

This probably is a bit of a cop out on the posting front but I promise there are more wordy posts coming.  I just really like that “Think” takes pride of place in the centre of this Wordle. For this year I hope to keep it that way.

Edit: Hmm, how to make this work? Excuse me, I shall go tinker a bit.

Edit again: AHA! Though, sorry, only tiddly size. Please to be clicking through to see the original in a less eye screwing up size.

Touch Of Frost

I have spent the last month in the germy grip of various plagues finally culminating in FLU.  That is right.  It wasn’t just flu, it was FLU, with all the pain, tears and lung tearing coughing the uppercase suggests.  The last day I remember with any clarity was Christmas Day and even then I only remember roast chicken and a bottle of gaviscon.  I am considering quitting future Decembers for safety purposes.  (my nearest and dearest are going to kill me if I croakily whinge at them any more at this time of year)

 

It is certainly no coincidence that my last update was the last day in November.

 

And what did I threaten then?  Oh yes. A post about my cat.  Which would make things easier for me because all this time being sick as a dog in the house has meant she and I have spent a major amount of time together this month.

 

So to start off with here is a pic of her visiting me in bed after a trip in the recycling bin. 

 

No, that isn’t dandruff. It is meringue dust. There was a fabulous sugar beard that she licked off before I could reach for the camera sadly.  There is a empty box in recycling that she loves to put her head in to lick out all the meringue crumbly bits in the bottom of it and no one has had the heart to move it out of her reach.  My cat has a serious sugar addiction (is this common? I don’t know how common this is,) you do not leave cake unattended in this house. You will return to some squished cake remnants festively garlanded with feline dribble.  And when I say unattended I mean look up at the tv mid cake chomp. I end up generally cradling my dessert in here like a much loved sugar baby.  Even then there will be a feline parrot on my shoulder pushing her face next to mine, stuffing her whiskers up my nose, in the hopes I miss my mouth and hit hers instead. 

 

I suspect she has enjoyed my illness more than I have. Lots of leftover food I was too sick to eat and a nice, toasty (feverish) owner collapsed out in bed to snooze on. Even the coughing was entertaining for her. “Wheeeeee! How long can I stay on? TIME ME!”  Inside my cat there is a hyperactive toddler waiting to get out.

 

And so starts my year of blogging.  Onwards and cross everything that it is upward.  Or you are doomed to suffer through a lot more cat pics since I have commited to posting once a week for 2011.  Place your bets please on how long I last!

Two Lefts

or part hurdy blurp in a series where I wave my idealism about.

I think one of the many reasons I am not a parent (apart from never meeting anyone who looked like their gene pool could overcome the Nessies lurking in mine) is as I get older the more I realise just how hard it is.  Being a parent and doing it right is to accept a job that takes up every waking moment, most of your sleeping ones (not to mention giving up on any privacy in the bathroom) and try and make yourself unnecessary.  You get it right if your kids don’t need you to drive them.  Merely accepting the passenger seat and keeping your hands off the steering wheel in their lives as they grow must be the hardest thing of all. 

 

I think I am rather lucky that my parents really planned.  Not just in the taking their time to decide if they were ready for kids but actually discussing how they were going to raise them.  Admittedly, the rest of our lives has been a rather fly by the seat of our pants affair but the groundwork was laid and the template was created.  All questions would be answered.  If they didn’t know the answers they would get a book to ensure they COULD answer. (we have quite a collection of reference books still from a time when they really weren’t cheap. Including a tome on trees. Apparently I went through a phase of pointing at every single tree I saw and asking what it was.)  And if they didn’t know or couldn’t teach me what I wanted to know then they would find someone who could.  So despite my family struggling on a low income I had my choice of lessons in things. 

 

So what did I pick beyond the usual dance lessons, Brownies, music tuition etc etc?

 

Religion. 

 

Now, I come from a very non religious family. None of my nearest and dearest, as far I know, have set foot in a church unless for a wedding or funeral for probably decades.  Sundays are more likely to involve a trip to a church of DIY (Homebase) to gaze at kitchens we can’t afford.  The only god bothering that really takes place in Hopeless Heights is the inadvertent calling on the deities for assistance while wading through the weekly Everest of the laundry pile.   But when I was about 5 or 6 I informed my rather confused parents that I wanted to go to my local church and Sunday school.  To their everlasting credit, my parents appear not have not blinked at this and my firmly atheist father would drop me off at the church, go and play snooker and then retrieve his child, who was  no doubt bubbling with extremely strange religious questions (the main memory I have of these Sundays is seeing a picture of God in the big beardy dude in robes persona and really wondering how he could sit up in heaven and see everything. Was he floating face down above the clouds?  Where was he when there were no clouds? If he WAS floating like that how did he see what was happening near his feet? )  and my father listened, and never said a word about how he thought it was all complete nonsense.  The more I think about that, the more amazed and proud I am that neither of my parents tried to force any of their personal beliefs on me.  Despite me having church connections on and off right up till my teens. Sunday School, Bible Class, Girls Brigade, I did the lot.   (I am not sure if I ever fully believed but the community of it kept calling to me I think. Much village life revolves round a church so it is an easy thing to grow up in.)

 

Then I helped out in a Religious Education class at school. All these different ideas, all these ANSWERS, my parents trained me well.  There were books, quizzes, puzzles.  I thought I was getting answers but really, I ended up with more questions. It was like flipping open the bonnet on humanity and poking about in the engine wondering how it goes.

 

So I went and did a degree in religion and social anthropology.  A completely non-vocational degree but naturally my remaining parent accepted my choice (though was still mildly baffled by the draw of religion for me)  and did her best with (lack of) money.  And I loved it.  There was a world that expected you to have a brain and use it.  I realise now how important that is for someone state schooled. In a state school it doesn’t require much to be a big fish in a little pond.  It is right that you experience that world and spend time with people of varying abilities but at the same time I feel like there should be a true challenge in a life as well, as a next step.  The chance to spend time with people of similar or stronger abilities and from different locations.  To be the little fish in the big pond and grow. Even if you are one of the breeding poor so feared by Tory peers  True, it doesn’t necessarily have to be university but we should be providing options not taking them away. Decent vocational qualifications. Retraining schemes for the unemployed.  The government should really be working on being the hands off parent in the passenger seat here.

 

I am not sure where I am going with this.  I am never really sure of anything except I want to ask more questions (and the right pond perhaps.)  I just know that watching schoolchildren protest about cuts to education around the UK, not touching the poppies on the Cenotaph in London and attempting to protect a police van from vandals, well, perhaps youth isn’t as doomed as we think it is.  I see a lot of young people asking questions, good questions. And they do deserve both answers and education.

 

I think I better make the next blog post a long ramble about my cat.