Riding the Waves to Eternity

Last July I mentioned that I had been in the departure lounge of Edinburgh Airport and had been struck by the futility of the exercise – taking an early flight to London to meet a couple of people and then flying all the way back home again.

I was in the departure lounge again this afternoon, this time flying dahn sarf to Sunningdale for a training course.  And my mood is different – partly because I like coming to Sunningdale and partly because I am re-reading Herman Hesse’s Siddhartha, a novel which I have not read for a great many years – thirty or so I think.   These two things seem to me to be linked.

One of the reasons I like Sunningdale is the element of retreat, the element of having an opportunity to be alone and to think whilst in pleasant surroundings.

And, of course, me being me, I find Hesse’s tale of the man who rejects the company and teachings of the Buddha in order to find enlightenment for himself to be a good text to set the pattern of my mood.

I am going on my way – not to seek another and better doctrine, for I know there is none, but to leave all doctrines and all teachers and to reach my goal alone – or to die.

There is a feeling that I often have that some kind of epiphany is just around the corner and that it will be here shortly.  It doesn’t happen, but that doesn’t stop me keeping my eye open for it lurking in the bushes somewhere.

There is a cliche aspect to this but perhaps it is no surprise that I am drawn to wild places and isolation, or to activities which encourage concentration to the exclusion of distractions in one’s surroundings.  I think, perhaps, that it is also linked to why I like rapper so much – being simultaneously an insider and an outsider – an eccentric if you will.

Rapper is not about the dance, it is about the assertion of the dance, about doing something which the observer may consider odd or eccentric because it is important to celebrate the odd and the eccentric and too eschew the bland homogeneity which would otherwise pass for existence.

We live in an age where homogeneity and conformity are revered; where corporate behaviours, attitudes and ideologies run rampant as the new orthodoxy (though this is not that far from the old orthodoxy):

• why build a guitar for yourself when you can buy a perfectly good factory made one from a shop?
• why go out into pubs and sword dance when you can go and watch football on the telly instead (and was there ever a more evilly destructive invention than football on telly in pubs)?
• why think for yourself when the press will do it for you?
• why seek out the wilderness when you can get steaming on a package trip to Ibiza?

No!  I reject that thinking.  We need to find and celebrate self-hood and to listen to our inner voice and follow its calling.  Not greed, not selfishness, but self-awareness until that time comes when, in the lovely words of Chris Wood, we just close our eyes and let go.

Lindsay at play

Just to keep honours even, after the previous set of prints of Amy, here’s one of Lindsay deeply engrossed in something or other.

It’s been a funny week and I’m in a funny mood.   I was sorely tempted by an early retirement offer which came round the office in the past couple of days although when I worked out the numbers as best I could it didn’t look like a goer.

I think that this is the first time that I have given this kind of thing some serious thought and it is at least in part a function of my age.   There are quite a few things that I would like to do more of and time has no time to spare.  While I am not going to apply for this, thoughts of the future are not far from my mind these days.

I’m flying down to London on Sunday for a training course out at Sunningdale.  I generally find the surroundings at Sunningdale very conducive to reflection and thought.  That is a good thing.

Meet Amy and Gizmo!

I mentioned a few months ago that I was taking more shots in Black and White on the digital camera.  Just recently I’ve been taking them as TIF images (ie without jpeg compression in the camera).  If the camera was more up to date I’d use raw, but it isn’t so I don’t.   I’ve then been playing with them in Paint Shop Pro 9 (a legal copy which I bought with a laptop some years ago) and trying to recapture something of the feel of a platinum toned print on Agfa paper.

The end result isn’t quite what I’m after but I’m getting happier.

Here’s another one – me and the lads.  From left to right we have my old warhorse Ovation Ultra which I bought in  1983, my hand built Stew-Mac 000, my Martin 000-15 and I’m playing the Martin D16GT.  Not in the picture is my nylon strung Spanish guitar.

They are all very different instruments with different responses and I enjoy playing them all, although I have a deep attachment to the Stew-Mac.  As I may have written before, there is something special about playing an instrument which you have built yourself even if -or possibly especially if- it is your first attempt.

There is also a great feeling of satisfaction to be had from the process of building: going from some bits of wood and a bottle of glue to something on which you can make music.

In an ideal world I’d like to build a couple more guitars, however there are space considerations in the house which make that difficult.  If I were to build more my first would be another Stew-Mac 000 kit but this time put on a sunburst finish and build in a pick-up and pre-amp.  The next would be an attempt to scratch build – probably something based on the old Gibson LG2/LG3 design if I could get hold of some decent plans.  If I got as far as a third it would be another scratch build – something like a Gibson SJ200 but with rosewood and spruce rather than maple.

Well, a boy can dream can’t he?

I was reading through the Blog of an acquaintance this morning and found myself thinking about hats and the wearing thereof by men.  One of the things which is immediately noticeable when watching archive or newsreel footage from before WW2 is that the men and boys are always wearing a hat.  In the UK this seems predominantly to have been the working man’s cloth cap, with Bowlers and Trilbies for the middle classes, and the American urban footage has plenty of Fedoras on show (and could you imagine Phillip Marlow without a Fedora)?

Why do we no longer do that? Why did it stop?   There remains the ubiquitous baseball cap of course – easily the best thing invented for keeping the rain off one’s glasses – but this does not, in the UK, have the same cultural feel about it.

Although Kirstin mutters darkly about it I like hats and I like wearing them: caps of course – baseball or my favourite grey Fisherman’s cap (I have a dark blue Breton one too but Lindsay keeps stealing it), my Panama in summer, a Fedora when out dancing, all good.  I used to like cloth caps too but it became expensive when I kept leaving them in taxis or on buses.  Floppy summer hats are always good and I have my Barmah soft and floppy sun hat still, bought in Darwin, NT, Australia in 1998.

It doesn’t seem to be like this elsewhere in Europe where the wearing of a hat continues to be taken seriously.  I remember in Vienna in late 2008 being struck by the number of hat makers in the City and their window displays of top-quality products; you have to love a city which gives so much time to the art of the noble Fedora!

In Rome or Paris to wear a fine hat is a sign that the wearer is saying yes to life and yet in the UK wearing much beyond a baseball cap is taken to be de facto evidence of eccentricity and to invite sniggers and giggles.

Sad.

The photos here are of yours’ truly modeling the new Mons Meg t-shirts by the way.  Every rapper team should have one.

It has been unusually cold here for a prolonged period.   Edinburgh tends to get cold in winter rather than snowy but usually the cold snaps go away for a couple of days and we get a pleasing variety.

Not this year.

It snowed before Christmas and has, I think, snowed every day since.  Despite the occasional mini thaw and slushing up it has always frozen up again and then snowed on top of the ice.  I know that the weather elsewhere is worse, the thing is that it is not usual for Edinburgh.

And a certain cabin-fever is setting in.  It has not been an easy process to get off the hill on some days and the car has been pretty much stationary for two weeks except for an emergency trip to get cat-litter (which is too heavy to carry back from the supermarket).

I keep picking up a guitar but don’t get further than strumming the same few chords over and over.  I’ve read a bit and failed miserably at several crosswords.  I keeping out our front window towards the Pentlands and wishing I could actually get out to them for a walk (a run being out of the question on ice-clad pavements) but my boots remain in the garage.  The picture below was taken from our front window this lunchtime.

The picture at the head of this post was from the window at sunset, although I’ve played with it a bit to make the contrast more dramatic.

In the meantime, Kirstin and I have booked a short break in Paris in March for her birthday which is always something to look forward to.