Holiday doublethink

Ah! The Summer holidays!

They start tomorrow.

I'll repeat that for those of you in England (or probably elsewhere) who may be reeling in disbelief.  Yup, the Summer holidays, in this particular corner of Scotland, start at 3.15 tomorrow afternoon and don't end until Tuesday 21 August.

And, despite the fact that the weather is being accommodatingly very Summer-holiday-ish (although not swimsuits-outside-worthy quite yet), I am reminded of Nineteen Eighty-four.

No, not because that was (although it was, I'm sure) a particularly fine Summer holiday (we probably went to Frinton), nor because Summer holidays are my personal room 101 (far from it), but because of doublethink.

I find myself, as I contemplate the next six weeks, simultaneously thinking both:

Oh, hooray! The Summer holidays!  Less than 24 hours to go! No  alarm, no routine, no uniform, no dragging tired children out of bed or forcing them to do homework in a snatched hurry between bites of breakfast.  Long lazy days of doing nothing and enjoying it.  Hooray for the Summer holidays!

and

Oh help! That makes it 53 days. Or 1,272 hours.  Or 76,320 minutes before I get five seconds of peace.

Can't wait.

Five miles South (4)

Five miles south of here the ice cream has vanilla in it and the cheddar is yellow.

After nearly three years the ice cream has stopped surprising me.

The cheese, however, may take a little longer.

Scots, wha hae wi Wallace read...*

Great excitement at school on Friday:  the P1 bookbug bags arrived.

It was the end of Scottish Book Week, and here, where we still get free books given to every child every year from birth to five, they dished out three crackers to L and her classmates, whose front covers you can see in this post.  I honestly can't tell you which I like best. They're all awesome.  If you're looking for a book to give a five year old this Christmas, you won't go wrong with any of these.

But they also gave us Jordan's new Jaiket.

First line: Jordan wis in his bed sleepin.  He wis in the middle o a braw dream.

And I have removed it from L and told her she's not allowed to read it.

It's not a Scottish literature thing, obviously.  The three fantastic books which illustrate this post are all written by Scottish (or Scottish based) authors and I couldn't be more delighted with them. 

But it is a Scots thing. 

For a start, I don't happen to think Scots is a language.  Now, technically, there's no fixed definition of what's a language, what's an accent and what's a dialect. But if we assume that a dialect is somewhere between a language and an accent, I reckon Scots is a dialect.  Or, indeed, a vast number of different dialects which are markedly different if you live in Stornoway, Stranraer or Selkirk.  Indeed, people (or indeed folk) from Selkirk, a grand 20 miles away from where I sit, speak a completely different version of Scots from those in Hawick, or Galashiels, or Duns, each of which is less than 20 miles from the others.  

So if L reads, or has read to her (although not by me, because I'd mangle it), Jordan's new Jaiket she's not hearing anything that really resembles the words, accents and turns of phrase she hears out and about. 

The introduction to Jordan's new Jaiket, written, obviously, not in Scots, says:

Learning about Scotland helps children to develop a sense of who they are and their place in the world[...].  Exploring Scots language is an iimportant part of this learning.

Of course it is. I couldn't be more delighted for my children, and all other children wherever they are raised, to be given an real sense of the local culture: the literature, art and music, the dialects, architecture and landscape.  I want my children to appreciate the works of Robert Burns, John Buchan, James Kelman or Irvine Welsh (but not Walter Scott, because (whisper it) it's incredibly dull).

But not yet.  Not now.

L is five.  She is just on the cusp of learning to read and write, an explosion of literacy that is going to open up to her worlds of imagining and information.  She, and I, are so excited by this.  She can't get through her bedtime story at the moment without stopping me to read out words or sentences she has recognised, or to point to a punctuation mark and ask what it is and what it's doing.

So when she picks up Jordan's new Jaiket, and reads, in her voice which still has more than an echo of three formative years spent in southern England, "Jordan was in his bed sleeping",  she is undoing all the hard work her teacher has put in, teaching her to recognise that was is spelt with an a and ing makes the sound, and has the grammatical function, it does (although obviously she wouldn't express it like that), in whatever accent you choose to say it.

Wherever you stand on the importance (or indeed existence) of the Scots language, at this stage, L, and all the other P1 children who were given this book, are being taught to read and write English, and it is in English that they will go on to read the vast majority of books, textbooks, exam papers, magazines, newspapers or advertisements.  Tacitly, the writer and publisher of Jordan's new Jaiket (which is, incidentally, a rubbish story - Jordan can't find his new jacket because his sister has put it on her snowman) know this, else why write the blurb in English?

L's school has a Burns competition. Each year around Burns night, the older children are encouraged to learn a Burns poem and to recite it in front of their classmates and the school.  I dearly hope she will take part and I'd love her to be able to do so with a swagger and a swing of Scots conviction.  But by that stage she will be older.  She will be reading and writing fluently in English, and regularly hearing the local dialect of Scots. She will have the knowledge and sophistication to recognise and understand the differences and to know that what is correct in one is not in the other.

But now, at five, she's not.  And to confuse her, or her classmates, is jist wrang.  




*With apologies to the shade of Robert Burns.

How to keep your children entertained for the whole* of the holidays

I had a shock on Tuesday.

It was the end of term.

Yes, readers South of the Border, you did read that right.  The END OF TERM.  On TUESDAY.  It's not even the last week in June and I have all of my children all of the time.

Until, even more weirdly to someone raised on English terms, the 12th of August.

As I said.  Weird. I'm sure I'll get used to it, but nonetheless, and I say this as someone whose children are still only in school/nursery half days, it has caught me unprepared.

Still, we have survived the first two days, unscathed, thanks mostly to the Toucan Box.

I was sent the Toucan Box about a month ago, and I foolishly started it then, but it is, genuinely, not only one of those "ideas I wish I'd had" but also one of the very few freebie/testy/bloggy things I've been sent that I will, honestly, be spending my hard earned cash on again.

It's a box which arrives at your door with no fewer than four (yes, four... if you eke them out, that's one a week, so 2/3 of the holidays done) crafty activities, a story book (Dazzle Duckling - I thought it was quite annoying, but that might just be because I have read it approximately fifty times in the last three weeks), colouring pictures, instructions, inspiration, and, and here's the impressive bit, all the stuff you need:  all the glue, the glitter, the paper, the funny little matchsticky things, the card, the sequins, even the bird seed. The whole bang lot.  All you provide is scissors.  For the distinctly craftily challenged, this is priceless.

Here's a little gallery of us making our stuff over the past four weeks.  Stupidly, as I've said, we started it pre-holidays, so now we've finished it and are going to have to get another one.  You, if you are five miles South of me, have three weeks to prepare. You have been warned....

How it arrived....

 We started with the peacock collage... (each of them had a different colour)

 

We did the colouring in, too

 Next up, the bird feeder.

Quite a lot of audience participation required here

In situ. Although if the truth be told, it didn't survive the combined onslaught of heavy rain and even heavier pigeons.  RIP bird feeder.

Next up, the toucan family.  This was our favourite.  I liked the very gloopy paint that didn't go everywhere when knocked over

and they liked the toucans (actually I'm quite proud of these too, although they are a little fragile for the amount of loving they've been getting):

And last but not least, we had the bird glider.

It doesn't glide:

But we enjoyed colouring it in:

The Toucan Box isn't cheap (if you sign up for one a month for a year it's £16.95 a month, and it's more expensive than that if you sign up for a shorter period of time), but it is absolutely, totally, from the bottom of my heart, worth it.   If you know me and have small children, these are your presents...

************************************

Full disclosure alert - they sent it to me for free.  But I honestly will be buying them in future.

*ish... but you could definitely call it 2/3...

It's not easy being green (2)

Hot on the heels of our eco-success (ahem) on Cramond beach (to be honest, it's hard to get worried about global warming when temperatures are sub-zero, or feel like it), we're embarking on green project number two.

And this is a biggie.  So big, in fact, that, if the truth be told, I've been putting it off.

We're trying to get Kitchen Canny.

Did you know:

• The average Scottish household throws away edible food (not apple cores, not chicken bones, actual food you can eat) worth £430 a year
• That's £1,000,000,000 of wasted food per year.
• And of that £18,000,000 worth is still in date?

 And that's just Scotland...

And now you do know, don't you think that's something that needs changing?

I was a bit cynical, if the truth be told.  This is all part of Time to Share, a Tots100 initiative, linking bloggers with local charities, and when I signed up, I thought I'd be helping single mothers in Galashiels, or drug-users in Innerleithen (while obviously making no generalisations about either of those two towns, which have been entirely picked at random, caveat, caveat).  So when I was asked to spend an hour at Changeworks, an environmental charity in Edinburgh, I thought yeah, well, I said I would but...

...but. The thing is, they convinced me. This stuff matters. Look at those statistics.  Just think if that food could, as my mother was always telling me, be parcelled up and sent to "the starving children in Africa", or if that money could be used to help the single mothers of Galashiels or the drug-users of Innerleithen.

And, unlike with my nappies, this really is something I can do, a small thing admittedly, but something that is me, making my own tiny difference.

The problem is, I'm frightened to.

Because they've given me a kit. A Kitchen Canny kit.  And I have to take part in an experiment.  I'm not allowed, for a week, to chuck anything away that could have been eaten (potato peelings and eggshells are excepted).  And at the end I have to look at it and work out how much it's all worth.  And then I have to change.

And I really don't want to.  Because I suspect, in a way that blogging is supposed to, but sort of doesn't always, it's going to hold a mirror up to me, and I'm going to find out that I'm not as nice, or as good, as I think I am.

Because I'm pretty smug when it comes to this sort of stuff.  My mother, born in 1946, is the sort of child of rationing that reuses everything. Leftovers was a meal in our house: in a "What's for dinner?",  "Leftovers" way.  Best before dates were a target, not a guideline.  Bowls of dripping gathered strata, like geological sites, which, come to think of it, was a pretty good representation of their age.

And while I'm not quite that bad, I've inherited a lot of it.  I always use up my leftovers; I try to cook only what we're going to eat; I compost (much easier now we don't live in London); I make soups; I check what food and smells like before I chuck it, regardless of what the packaging says; I decide what meals we're going to have that week and only buy the food we need; I cut the brown bits out of fruit; I freeze manky bananas for smoothies and cakes... I'm good, I really am.  Or at least I think I am.

And I suspect that once I start using my kit, I'll be horrified.

So it starts tomorrow.  Come back in a week to find out how we did.

Five miles south (2)

Here's another thing I'd understand if I lived on the other side of that Border...

When the holidays are.

No-one tells you this when you move to Scotland.  No-one says to you:

Yeah, well, it's pretty much the same: most of the people are lovely, but some are not. Most of the food is great, but some isn't.  Most of the weather is the same: iffy, but then you'll randomly get the most utterly gorgeous week when you're not expecting it.  They drive on the same side, they speak the same language but their holidays are utterly different.

Here's a thing.  Easter Monday's not a bank holiday here.

That has totally and utterly flummoxed and confused me.  B told me and I didn't believe him. I googled it, but of course everyone knows you can get the internet to prove any point you want, so that wasn't nearly reliable enough. But there it is, in black and white, on the calendar. Bank holiday (UK except Scotland).

Ah, and I was rather relying on him having that day off.  Whoops.

There's no August bank holiday here either.  Or there is, but it's at the other end of the month. 

I'm not complaining about this - we actually get an extra bank holiday compared with England and Wales (nine, compared to your paltry eight, should you care) - but I am finding it very hard to get my head around.

You don't realise how much you take certain things for granted.  The school year, for instance. Starts in September, as any ful kno.

Except when it doesn't.  Mid-August here.  Totally scuppered our holiday plans this year that has.  Won't be making that mistake again.   Turns out that if you want to go on holiday with English friends there's a pretty small window when you're all on holiday together and you need to book those weeks pronto.

What's the logic behind all this?  I rather thought the religious holidays would be universal, especially as Scotland has a reputation (which I'm not sure it deserves) of being more godly than England.  Clearly not though.  As for the others, I understand why we get St Andrews Day, but I don't understand why we get an extra day off on 2 January.  Are they really codifying the fact that Hogmanay's a bigger party?

And why the beginning of August and not the end? Or indeed the end and not the beginning?   My understanding on the school year point was that it started in September because that was after the harvest and when farming families didn't need their children so much any more.  Is that not true? Or is it true but not true in Scotland that isn't so predominantly arable?

And how doubly confusing is it to get my head around the fact that bank holidays are not only different (they are, in fact devolved, interestingly) but that they are also discretionary.  Your employer gets to choose.  So when the rest of the country, both North and South, is enjoying its extra Tuesday off for the Jubilee, spare a thought for the employees of the Scottish Borders Council, who aren't getting it.  Suspect there'll be a lot of empty schools round here that day...

Five miles south (1)

If I stepped out of my front door, strolled through next door's garden, (and the one beyond that), swam across the river (not recommended) and kept walking for about five miles, I'd be in England.

If I got in the car and went by a recommended route, it'd take about eight.  Or ten, if I went the long way round.

But either way,  it's not very far.  It doesn't have to be a very clear day for me to see it, either.

It's nearly two years (21 months actually) since we moved here.  And most days, living in Scotland, or at least this particular part of it, feels pretty much like living anywhere else in the UK (or at least those bits of it I have lived in).  And on those days I wonder what all the fuss is about Scotland and England being different (don't worry, that's as political as this particular post is going to get).

And then every now and then, something happens and I think:

Weird.

And up until now, I've sat on those thoughts, because I've felt as though I haven't lived here long enough to comment, or that maybe it's not here, it's me.

But, you know what, I think it's ok.  I've come to the conclusion that I can point out the stuff that's different without people thinking it's patronising, or getting snippy (not that anyone has, of course, but that doesn't stop me worrying), or that I don't love those differences.  Because I do, they just surprise me.

Like today.  Because L came back from nursery full of the story of Jack and the Beanstalk*. And we all know what the Giant says, don't we?

That's right:

Fee Fi Fo Fum, I smell the blood of an Englishman.

Only apparently he doesn't. Of course he doesn't.  Why would he, here?  That's not very scary if you're not English is it?

Apparently, he says

Fee Fi Fo Fum, I smell the blood of a boy.

Which, doesn't, to me, at least, have quite the same ring. Not to mention that it won't scan at all with the next line:

Be he alive, or be he dead, I'll grind his bones to make my bread.

but that apparently didn't feature either.

I didn't tell L that wasn't the version I knew, but it got me thinking. Is this just a sanitised version for the under 5's (that we'd also have got in Hammersmith) and do older Scots get the gruesome (but nationally inappropriate) version?  Or is this the one that's been handed down north of the Border since giants really did walk the earth?

And are there other fairy stories out there that are going to surprise me?  I've just about got used to calling Father Christmas Santa. Is there anything else I should know about?

*******************************************************************

*Actually it turns out that Jack and the Beanstalk is, according to Wikipedia (from which I've also taken the Arthur Rackham image) an English folk tale. Which explains the version I remember. But then if that's the case, why not just stick with that?

And a ps.  Apparently (thank you Wikipedia) there is a French rock musical called Jack et le haricot magique.  Unaccountably it hasn't yet had its British premiere, but click the link to find out what we're missing.

Politics. This time it's personal.

So, apparently, after lots of hot air on both sides of the Border, we're going to get a vote.

Scottish Independence. Here we come.  Or not, clearly, depending on what happens in 2014.

And, somehow, it feels personal.

Because I'm English.  Born there. Bred there.  But Scotland is my home.  And the home of my husband (Scottish) and my children (well, what are they?).  It's where I live and where I hope to die.  I belong here now.

But if Scotland, and the Scots (does that include me?  Do I get a vote? Will they be breathalysing voters for evidence of Irn Bru before they let them enter the polling stations?  And what about the many, many Scots living in London, or Luton, or Lusaka?) vote to end the Union, for right or wrong that will feel like a rejection.

A rejection of England and the English.  And, given that I am English, a rejection of me, by a country in which I have never felt anything but welcome.

I'm sure, in the years to come, we will hear plenty of arguments about how it's not England that subsidises Scotland, but the South East that subsidises the rest of the country (ies), or about how Scotland's in an arc of prosperity that includes Ireland and Iceland (bet Alex Salmond's wishing he'd never come up with that one), or economic this and social that, and what would happen with the pound, or the NHS, or defence, and how we do or don't need each other (and whether we ever have), and I suspect that I will have an opinion (ill-founded or otherwise) on many of these.

But for now, this isn't an opinion, it's an emotion.  And it feels personal.  And I don't like it.

You can take the girl out of England...

L and I are listening to the Proclaimers, unofficial patron saints of Scotland (where we have now lived for 18 months).

"Why are they singing in French?" wonders L.

Not fully assimilated yet then.

Where are your children from? (Tick all that apply)

We've just filled in our census.

I know that technically we're not supposed to do it until Sunday, but there was an internet option, and that version didn't seem to care when we did it, so we've done it.

And we've struggled with the bits about how many rooms we've got (if there are builders in them and they only have half a wall and a bit of steel do they count?) and what our job titles are (am I a consultant or a lawyer? Or both?) and grumbled at the fact that caring for small children doesn't count as caring, and avoided any discussion about religion by not commenting on each other's answers to that question.

But then they ask about nationality.

And ethnicity.

And those are easy.  Right?  Because I'm white and British.  My passport says so. Which makes me, most times I'm asked, "White British". And I quite like that because it's a great catch-all for the fact that while I was born and brought up in England, my heritage is part English, and part Scottish and a bit Jewish and a bit French and a bit German and a bit, probably, if you go back far enough, Gothic or Pictish or Danish.   And when I tick that "British" box, for me it covers all those and more; a one word answer for the fantastic melting pot that the last two thousand or so years of immigration has made this country.  And "White"? Well, I am. Specially this time of year...

But that's not, or at least not here in Scotland (and I don't know if the English and Welsh census is different) what the census wants to know.  Instead I get:

14. What do you feel is your national identity?


Scottish
English
Welsh
Northern Irish
British
Other


and


15.  What is your ethnic group*?


A. White:


Scottish
Other British
Irish
Gypsy/Traveller
Polish
Other white ethnic group

And for question 14, I can tick all that apply, but for question 15, I get one shot only.

And in a way, that's fine for me.  Because I can, and do, feel both English and British so on the nationality question I can tick both.  Out of the list of "ethnicities" I guess I'm "Other British".

But what about the girls?  What about the baby I'm carrying?  Because three out of the four of them have to be on this census too. They're all under four.  They have no understanding of any of these concepts.  How on earth can we say what nationality they "feel"?

We asked L:


Where are you from? London or here?
Here.  And London.
So that's clear.  Not.  And where that question is nebulous, and personal, the next one deals, apparently, in facts.  What is their ethnic group?  Well?  They're white, that much is obvious.  But what about the rest? Their mother is a hotchpotch of European immigration and their father is half-Scottish and half-English and, despite a recognisably Scottish name, if anyone traced his ancestry, is probably just as much a muddle of different things as I am.  They were all born in England and now live in Scotland where we expect them to remain. Their passports just say "British".  At the moment they all talk like me, but the Scottish lilt is creeping in.

So what are they?  They're not Scottish, but then nor are they notScottish  and the census effectively asks them (or us on their behalf) to choose.  Bearing in mind that in years to come, the genealogical investigations of my grandchildren's grandchildren will rely on this census, this feels like it matters.  In addition, what B and I pick makes a statement to the governments, both in Edinburgh and Westminster, about more than just our children. It makes, or at least it feels like it makes,  a statement, and this is presumably why they ask the question, about our attitudes to the Union as a whole.

So we've bent the rules, for the children and for B.  We've ticked, if not quite "all of the above" on nationality, half the available options: Scottish and English and British, and on ethnicity we've gone for option B:

B: Mixed or multiple ethnic groups (please write in)

So we wrote: Mixed British (Scottish/English).  

And while we realise that "mixed" is really asking about skin colour, and that none of them is, by any normal criteria, "mixed race", that seems the only way of saying, as clearly as we can, that they (and we) are a muddle. And we're proud of it.



*Incidentally wikipedia defines "ethnicity" as:

a group of people whose members identify with each other, through a common heritage, often consisting of a common language, a common culture (often including a shared religion) and an ideology that stresses common ancestry or endogamy., "...in general it is a highly biologically self-perpetuating group sharing an interest in a homeland connected with a specific geographical area, a common language and traditions, including food preferences, and a common religious faith".

How much you think all of that can and should be applied to the English, the Welsh, the Scottish or any other group I suppose is going to be personal.  I'm definitely not convinced by the "highly biologically self-perpetuating" bit though.  Or the "food preferences".  If the latter is true, I'm not sure my children share an ethnicity....

The Gallery - Trees

 

You will not be surprised if I tell you that this is not the Scottish Borders.  Nor it it March 2011.  It's June 2006, B and I have just celebrated our first wedding anniversary, L is a twinkle in our joint eyes and we are at the Pont du Gard.

I could have, or perhaps should have, taken a picture of a tree in our garden, or in the park, or on the way to nursery this week for the Gallery, but I know lots of others (click the Gallery link to see them) will post cheery Spring-like blossomy pictures, and while it remains dreich and miserable (and snowy, at the weekend, although only in that slushy, melt by lunchtime, make a mess of the bottom of your jeans way) and the trees remain resolutely un-photogenic, I thought I'd cheer myself up.

So here you have it.  Self-indulgent trees.  Roll on Summer holidays!

Oh, and if you're not familiar with the adjective "dreich", there's a great definition here.  Needs more usage, I say, because it's definitely not limited to Scotland.

2010 in pictures

Some significant years in my life:

1976, 1989, 1994, 1995, 1999, 2002, 2005, 2007, 2008...

And now 2010:  It started somewhere over the mid-Atlantic, and ended with an Upstairs Downstairs marathon and a Thai meal.  I started as a Londoner, an employee, a mum of three and ended as a rural-dweller, a Scot (by adoption anyway), a consultant, and with the weeks until I have four ticking away a lot quicker than I expected.  

We passed through a third birthday, two second birthdays, Tunisia, Spain, the North of England (several times) and a great deal of weather.  We said a lot of sad goodbyes, and just as many happy hellos (and hello agains).

And here we are, ten days in, 2011 definitely underway, and I'm looking back at the year that was.  In pictures.  Sian at Mummytips has set up a competition, which I absolutely want to win (the prize is a ticket to CyberMummy, and the predicted arrival of number 4 some three weeks earlier means I'm reluctant to go out and spend the money now, but am nonetheless twitching in case it does all work out, I can go, and then then there aren't any tickets left. (I was sceptical last year, couldn't go anyway, and then saw how much fun everyone else had....)).

So here goes.  This was 2010.

 

Here's to 2011...... 

You can take the girl out of the South...

We’ve been here for six months now.  Six months which have flown by, and which have seen the girls settle happily into nursery, us embark on some epic building plans (no permission yet, we wait in hope), the whole family make some new, and hopefully to be good, friends, me start a new working life as a consultant, and baby number four make its very early, very nauseating, “appearance”.

So anyway, to mark six months in Scotland, we spent a week with my parents in Essex (yes, that’s my guilty secret) and I realised something.

I realised that the arable fields, thatched cottages and gentle lack of hills feel familiar, even when I'm in a part of the country I've never visited before.  That I can go into a shop in Cambridge, or Tonbridge, or Barnes (we did our usual flit around the South East), and not feel self-conscious.  That I can open my mouth and let the words come out without wondering what assumptions are being made about me.   I just feel at home, like that is where I belong.

Which is odd.  Odd on all sorts of fronts.  I have been made to feel nothing but welcome here.  We had friends staying last week, including, as it happens, another Essex girl, and she spent one morning wandering round town and came back saying; “People here are so friendly and welcoming”.  And they are.   Everyone smiles and chats.  They stop to smile at the girls, and ask about them.  People in shops pass the time of day, and chat about the weather (not as unremittingly bad as I feared, either).  Nor have I experienced so much as a minute of the much-vaunted (in certain areas of the press) “anti-English feeling”, perhaps because the English, and the Border, are only five miles away...

It’s not even an accent thing:  B, after being brought up in Edinburgh by one Scottish and one English parent, followed by eighteen years in the South, sounds (other than when very drunk, or very nervous) pretty much exactly like me.  I’ve met just as many people who have “English” (aka Posh Scots) accents as I have those who are identifiably “Scottish”  from their speech.   Even at the girls’ nursery there’s a range of accents from Scottish to English to Irish.  So however much it might feel like it, I don’t actually stand out because of that.

I think, loath though I am to admit it, that I am, in my bones, a Southerner. I suspect, that had we moved to Manchester, or Newcastle , or Birmingham, I’d be feeling exactly the same.    And I’ve never thought that before.  Other than a year in Moscow, I’ve lived my whole life, including the four years at University, within a hundred miles of London, and I suspect, from that vantage point, that I’ve poo-pooed the idea of a North/South divide, the idea that there is a difference.   

I’ve certainly been very sceptical of the idea that I had roots in the South – I remember saying as much to my mother when she questioned our move.  I said B felt strongly he belonged in Scotland, and I just didn’t feel like that about Essex, or London, or the South East.

I'm reading Map Addict at the moment, I'm not very far in, but the author, Mike Parker, mentions that he used to have a large map of the British Isles on his wall.  When people came to visit, he would give them a pin and say: "Put it in the place where you belong".  And it stopped me in my tracks, because, at the moment, I just don't know.

So I wonder.  I feel incredibly lucky to be here. The people are lovely, the house is beyond my wildest dreams (or will be when the Council and the builders have done their stuff) and the countryside is indescribably beautiful.  I don't want to be back in the South East. I don't wish we'd bought a house in Essex instead.  But Scotland itself is not, yet, home.  I wonder how long it will take before it is...

Remember, remember... oh, you forgot.

Remember, remember...

Remember drifting smoke, tasting of excitement. Remember toffee apples sticking your teeth together.  Remember ketchup oozing out of a hot dog onto your gloves.  Remember having one cheek blazing from the fire, and the other tingling with the cold.  Remember writing your name in a sparkler, and wishing you had a shorter one (name not sparkler).  Remember the crash as the guy falls into the heart of the flames, sending up a shower of sparks, more exciting than the coloured ones.  Remember ooh!  And aah!

Remember gunpowder, treason and plot.

Unless you live in the Scottish Borders apparently.

It's very odd.  We spent last week with my parents, and down there every second village is bedecked with posters for its bonfire party, each boasting different attractions; and vying with each other for the best, or wackiest, or most noisy (my personal favourite: the Battle-of-Britain-themed bonfire, which seems strangely inappropriate somehow).

Anyway, we have friends staying this week, and it being a Friday night, I thought it would be a nice thing to do with all our girls this evening: an hour or two of wrapping up warm, and eating too much sugar, squealing a lot, and generally exhausting them out:  followed hopefully by an extra hour in bed tomorrow.

But we can't.  Because there's nothing.  Not in our town, or the next, or the next.  In fact the only fireworks event I've heard of is a good twenty miles away and  even if we'd wanted to go that far it was last night.

Why?

I thought it was a Scottish thing.  It's notable that the one bonfire I have discovered was in England.  But then I realised Guy Fawkes tried to blow up a Scottish King (James was VI before he was I after all), so surely the Scots would be just as keen as the English to burn him in effigy.  Nonetheless, I wondered whether those north of the Border had a bit of sneaking sympathy for the incompetent chap's efforts to destroy the English parliament, but B assures me (as does everyone else I've asked) that the Scots normally go just as much of a bundle on the flames and bangs as the English do.  The image* above is from Edinburgh's 2009 celebrations, so they've clearly remembered....

So why not here? Or maybe it's: why not this year?  And, more importantly, how am I going to get my extra hour in bed now?



*Image from edinburgh-inspiringcapital.com.  Looks fab doesn't it?  Maybe that's one for next year....

Digitally re:Masterpieces - The Black Brook

When I was a moody and overly-romantic teenager (as against being a moody and overly-romantic 33-year-old, clearly) I loved this picture:

It's called the Black Brook and was painted in 1908 by the American artist John Singer Sargent. It's in the Tate Collection, although I can't actually work out if it's on display (and if so, in which Gallery).

Anyway, as I say, I loved it. I loved the melancholy feeling, and the fluidity of the water, and the placid beauty of the model.  I sort of hoped that when I grew up, I'd look like that, and probably that I'd float about in drifty clothes like that too.

Now I am grown up, I've realised the impracticality of wafty linen, and I've accepted that my face is my face, and very rarely looks placid.  I'm not really so given to imagining myself sitting dreamily by a rushy brook these days either, but I still love this painting.

I think now, it's more about the water, and the way the light sparkles, and the cold and freshness that you can feel, even through the oil and canvas, so, in trying to recreate it,  I started with this:

which I'm actually very pleased with, but it's not quite right.  Singer Sargent put a girl in his (his niece, Rose Marie Ormond) for a reason.  So I got myself a model.  Disappointingly that didn't entirely  make things easier. For a start Rose was probably a bit more helpful and accommodating, and she certainly wouldn't have refused to stop sucking her fingers. 

Sadly too, the way the path runs along the river doesn't allow for the same composition, and I wasn't prepared to risk drowning (I know, shameful lack of commitment).   I'm also not sure that the Tweed, one of Scotland's premier salmon fishing rivers, really qualifies as a brook, but I had to work with what I had, so here's my version:

The Black River (2010)

Linky below... go on, join in!  Do this painting, do another one, do a different art form altogether (Tracey Emin's Bed anyone?)...



Oh, and I do know what I want to do next month (clue, it's a sculpture) but again, it's a bit model-dependent, so I don't want to push my luck by telling you want it is, come back at the beginning of October to see if I've succeeded.

And if none of this is making any sense, click here to see what on earth it is that I'm trying to achieve...

The Gallery - One day of sunshine and showers, beaks and claws, pipes and drums.

Welcome to Sunday, 29 August 2010. This is what it looked like where we were:

This week, those of us who take part in the Gallery have been asked to take part in an almighty photo journal, a "what we all did on our Bank Holiday Sunday", a snapshot of blogging life, on one, for most of us probably not particularly important, Sunday in August. 

Because for three bloggers, Sian, Josie and Eva, it was an incredibly important day.  On 27 August, they flew out to Bangladesh to see first hand the work that Save The Children are doing.  They are already sending amazing posts, photos and tweets back.  Please think of them, read what they write, and support Save the Children.

Back in Blighty, and a million emotional  and humbling miles from the poverty they are experiencing, this is what we did. The Floors Castle Massed Pipe Bands Day. A wonderfully Scottish, goose-pimple-inducing, paddling-pool-fishing, falconry-watching, umbrella-sheltering, roast-hog-eating, caber-tossing, skirling, dancing, marching celebration of the idiosyncracies, charm, and weather that the British Bank Holiday (despite it not actually being a bank holiday in Scotland) is all about:

 

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I have a shame-faced admission.  I have amended this post after publishing, because I failed totally to put in the most important part - about the work Sian, Josie and Eva are doing for Save the Children, with the Blogladesh initiative.    I suppose that's a neat image for the way in which we all (at least I hope it's not just me) have brilliant intentions of doing something that helps those less fortunate, but get wrapped up in our own lives and forget to do even the little we can.  I am very ashamed, and apologise to them, and to Tara, who wanted to use the Gallery to publicise what they are doing.

In my defence, I'd left blank the paragraph I was going to put in so I could put the links in, then forgot to do so at midnight last night after a six hour drive and a bad night the night before, then published the post, then linked to the Gallery from my phone and the train, then realised and spent the rest of the day traipsing round London looking desperately for an internet cafe so I could make the amendment.  Without succcess.  I did fall in the Round Pond though, so I've got my comeuppance...