(Written 29 November)
Trainblog
Another Sunday, another train to London Kings Cross, this time because I have a meeting to attend in London at 09.00 tomorrow. I can’t say that I am hugely impressed by having to be in London at 09.00 on a Monday morning, especially given that Monday 30th is a public holiday in Scotland for St. Andrew’s Day, but I suppose that I can console myself with the thought of some overtime for Sunday travel and working on a holiday.
I have been working over the past couple of days on a song by Georges Brasses called La Princesse et le Croque-Notes which can roughly be translated as the Princess and the Guitar Player. I have a literal translation pretty much sorted and am now looking at how to make a song in English out of it. The text is not without its difficulties and my plan was to work on it this afternoon on the train. However I was waylaid, distracted and beguiled by William Heaney’s “Memoires of a Master Forger” which I bought yesterday. I read a few pages last night and this morning, but read over 250 without a break to finish it in around three and a half hours of this journey.
It is a wonderful novel – like M. R. James with an uplifting ending. It is odd, mind, and to some extent plays in the same field as Neil Gaiman and Clive Barker, and while reading it the vague memory of a short story which I read many years ago but can’t quite place was scratching at my memory.
Music on the trip has been provided by Goun, Porcupine Tree and Muckram Wakes, and jolly good it has been too. The Muckram Wakes (“A Map of Derbyshire”) is a bit of an oddity – classic English folk music from the early nineteen seventies with all of the pros and cons which come with that: good material impeccably performed but a tad over-earnest.
(later)
So, then, an evening alone in London on a cold and very wet Sunday night. What joy! Having satisfied my refined metropolitan epicurean tastes with a plate of cod and chips with a side salad and a pint of good bitter, I went out for a walk in the rain. I crossed the Golden Jubilee Bridge to the just in front of the Festival Hall where there was a forlorn German Market being wind-lashed I am happy to report that my new shoes are waterproof and that I took quite a lot of handheld shots, some of which are used here. A further pint helped me make a start on Haruki Murakami’s “Kafka on the Shore” and then to bed for an early night.
(30 November)
Conference blog
Sparking unwanted memories of dreadful presentations at the European Commission in Brussels, it is as well that this meeting is not being held on the upper floors of a building with open windows or I might be compelled to launch myself from them to avoid this maelstrom of acronyms and bad PowerPoint. The presenters are uniformly grey men in grey suits uttering grey words in a grey tone. The only splash of colour is in their ties which are no doubt meant to be signifiers of the boiling churning of humour and creativity trapped within their unprepossessing exteriors. To no avail. They are inherently and irredeemably grey: you can tell them by the way they walk you know.
How appalling it must be to live in a world so grey that one’s fantasy is to migrate to beige. Do androids dream of magnolia wall coverings?
(later)
The flight up took us over the Lake District with the Solway shimmering to the west. There was a dusting of snow on the hills and as we flew on we were treated to a fine sunset, initially behind Ailsa Craig with the North Antrim coast rippling along the horizon and then of the Isle of Arran with the Mull of Kintyre beyond.
I was home in time to ha
ve a pleasant tea and then down to the Village Inn where not only was the Caledonian Double Dark pouring superbly well, but we also had a really, really good Mons Meg practice night with our version of the Winlaton Dance flying.
This morning brought a cracking sunrise, some photos of which are also shown here, taken from our spare bedroom window and looking South East towards the Pentland Hills.
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