Dawn manoeuvres

I suppose it's Sod's Law that just after eleven, on the coldest night of the winter so far, when Lynn's mum and sister just happened to be staying, the woodburner refused to draw and the cabin living room filled with acrid smoke.

There was nothing for it but to open the draught fully, hope for the best and turn in. A quick check in the small hours revealed that the stove had more or less gone out, though the smell of smoke was still pretty overwhelming, and we were able to go back to bed with the comforting thought that we were less likely to die of carbon monoxide poisoning, even if hypothermia couldn't be completely ruled out.

I had to be off the island today, so at crack of sparrow I was on the roof with a chimney brush and Lynn was at the stove with a vacuum cleaner, catching as much as possible of the soot which tends to come out in clouds from every orifice when we sweep the flue.

Job done, I made my way back along the roof ridge, taking a dive in the process because without the heat of the stove, the felt had acquired a layer of ice during the night. All good on leaving the island though..

Noel and Coco

Lunched with Lynn McGregor at Picnic Delicatessen. Not a bad word spoken about anyone but very funny.
- MF, 29th November 2010

"Lunched with Coco Chanel. Not a good word spoken about anyone but very funny."
- Noel Coward, 29th November 1948

Fair days

'Fair days have oft contracted wind and rain.'* And snow.. This was Tyrella beach this afternoon, where we took mum's dog for a run - the pics are separated by a quarter of an hour.

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*Milton, Samson Agonistes

'I am deceased'

I mentioned on Monday that I had sent for a copy of The Life and Death of Sandy Stone.

I think it's safe to say that neither Barry Humphries, nor his agent, nor his publisher will read this post; so I'm going to perform an act of brazen literary vandalism and give a potted version of one of Sandy Stone's lengthy monologues. Bear in mind that Sandy Stone was intended to be heard and seen, not read - as Clive James put it (Approximately in the vicinity of Barry Humphries), 'You have to have seen the shows, or at least listened to the records, to realise that the Sandy transcripts collected in A Nice Night's Entertainment (London, 1982), falsify the character by moving as fast as you can read, whereas the sentences should produce themselves the way Sandy speaks, glacially.'

***

There is just a bed and a chair in the centre of a dimly lit stage. Sandy is sitting in the chair, nursing a hot water bottle, and there is a large hump beneath the mauve candlewick coverlet on the bed.

"I AM DECEASED

With the resultant consequence that there has been a considerable change in my lifestyle. I've never had a day's illness in my life so this little setback came as much as a surprise to me as it did to Beryl, my good wife…

Beryl was on her Scandinavian leg [of her Women's Weekly World Discovery Tour] when she received Gweneth Longmire's tragic news of my decease. I wrecked Helsinki for Beryl - if ever a man ruined Scandinavia for a loved one it was me. And she could have caught her death rushing out of that sauna as quick as she did…

My wife must have a bit of Scotch blood in her because she got a few quotes on me first - she put out tenders - but in the end she settled for a very reasonable little local firm of funeral directors…

Beryl's a marvellous little person though. There she was - sitting in the back seat of the cortege like Lady Muck whizzing out to the cremmie, her plate full and her cup of grief running over, but she still had the presence of mind to get the driver to pull over outside our local jeweller's shop so she could drop off my watch to get the wristband shortened. Not many women would have thought of that.

In accordance with Beryl's tasteful request [Family only please] there weren't too many out there to see me off. There was only Beryl. And me up to a point. Oh, and Thelma Bullock and the Longmires. And the Nettletons without their kiddies. And Valda - dear Valda Clissold - she was there, bless her heart, a true Clissold. And she was terribly upset too, underneath, in all probability. And there was Nurse Younghusband, and Greg Younghusband. Nurse Younghusband's young husband. And there were three very very distressed people at the back of the chapel. I've never seen more distressed-looking people in my life. Turned out they were waiting for the nine forty-five service. Still it was very nice of them to put their heads around the corner. They were not called upon to do so...

…I suppose that when you catch the ferry you're bound to leave something on the jetty, some bit of unfinished business. We all leave undone those things which we ought to have done. But there is one thing I wish I had achieved before I handed in my marbles and jumped the twig. Every morning I woke up full of good intentions - but somehow I kept putting it off and in the end I didn't blessed well do it … defrost the fridge! I mean I thought about it. I was thinking about it the day I passed away, as a matter of fact. That was a funny old day: something's made that day stick in my memory…"

Winter's blast

'The summer's beauty yields to winter's blast.'

Thomas Sackville, The Mirror for Magistrates' (1563)

Belfast at Christmas

Belfast City Hall does Christmas well, and the Continental Market, with it's wrapped-up night-time throng and it's bustle, it's irresistably seasonal scents of cinnamon and mulled wine, is an annual heart-warmer to which we always take Lynn's mum when we collect her from the airport. My only advice: unless your stomach is up to twenty-seven courses from every corner of Europe, on the hoof, sweet and savoury by turns, eat before you go.

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Oz: Around Australia on a Triumph

Tonight we attended the launch of our friend Geoff Hill's latest travel book, co-written with fellow journalist Colin O'Carroll and telling the story of the pair's epic adventure from Adelaide to Adelaide on a pair of Triumph motorcycles in spring of this year. The photograph is of Geoff with his mum Sadie and her now traditional launch party cake - a tour de force designed around the book itself.

The book is called Oz - around Australia on a Triumph, and has the same 'pick me up' look and feel as Geoff's earlier travel books.

I followed the Adelaide Adventure blog during their trip, so I know that Colin and Geoff share a sense of humour, a distinctly off-beat view of the world and a great deal of talent, and I'm really looking forward to the read. Inscribed copies of the book have already taken care of three Christmas presents and I'm sure there will be more.

This time there was a film crew on hand and the DVD is due to be released in January 2011, a documentary to follow in due course.

I didn't want to burst his balloon tonight, but I still see Geoff's Australian road trip as something of a warm-up for the real thing, to take place on Islandmore in the future, date as yet unspecified. Watch this space..

Mark Twain on proofreaders

It has been fascinating looking at the publishing business from, as it were, the other side of the fence.

Mark Twain

Writing being such a personal business, I'm aware that writers' attitudes to copy-editors and proofreaders are often ambivalent. Mark Twain was downright hostile – the Giles Coren of the nineteenth century – and in a letter from 1889 he had this to say:

'Yesterday Mr. Hall wrote that the printer's proof-reader was improving my punctuation for me, & I telegraphed orders to have him shot without giving him time to pray.'

This is a passage from a letter he wrote in July 1897 to his publisher, Chatto & Windus:

'This latest batch, beginning with page 145 and running to page 192, starts out like all that went before it – with my punctuation ignored and their insanities substituted for it. I have read two pages of it – I can't stand any more ...'



The Life and Death of Sandy Stone

'Sandy Stone' aka Barry Humphries (photo Lewis Morley)

Barry Humphries gave his first British solo performances, in his friend Peter Cook's Establishment Club, in 1962. Upstairs from the club was the studio of photographer Lewis Morley, many of whose portraits have become as iconic as their celebrated or glamorous subjects. His most famous was of Christine Keeler astride an Arne Jacobsen chair like the one on which he posed for this photograph:-

Inevitably, Humphries and Morley were introduced, and forty-five years later, to celebrate the performer's fifty years in show business, a set of photographs were commissioned which included Dame Edna, Sir Les Patterson the Cultural Attache, Humphries himself - and, easily my favourite Barry Humphries character, the elderly, childless, simple-living, down-home Sandy Stone, whose monologues from his living room in the Melbourne suburbs featured in the Establishment Club shows and were later collated, edited and published as The Life and Death of Sandy Stone, in 1990.

I leant my copy some years ago to a friend, and when I asked him how he got on he was… polite. I can see how Sandy's soliloquies might seems a little dull, inasmuch as nothing actually happens - for the show, Sandy sits alone in his wheelchair, centre-stage, clutching a hot water bottle - but for a gentle, funny and unutterably poignant study of a lonely but self-contained, even positive old man and his daily ruminations, The Life and Death of Sandy Stone can't be beaten.

I don't think Humphries does Sandy Stone much these days, more's the pity - but if the opportunity arises before the great man retires, I'd love to see a live performance.

I've ordered a copy of the book to replace the one I leant, and will post a passage or two in due course.

Deep Thoughts

...not mine, Jack Handey's.

If you're feeling a little blue, like me, then maybe a couple of Handeyisms will cheer you up:-

"As the evening sky faded from a salmon color to a sort of flint gray, I thought back to the salmon I caught that morning, and how gray he was, and how I named him Flint."

"As the light changed from red to green to yellow and back to red again, I sat there thinking about life. Was it nothing more than a bunch of honking and yelling? Sometimes it seemed that way."

"I can picture in my mind a world without war, a world without hate. And I can picture us attacking that world, because they'd never expect it."

If you're feeling really down, suicidally down, try this one:

"If you ever fall off the Sears Tower, just go real limp, because maybe you'll look like a dummy and people will try to catch you because, hey, free dummy."

[For an earlier post about Jack Handey, with a few biographical details, click here]

A literary hero

Camp De Mar, Majorca

In 1980 I went on holiday, just myself, to Majorca, to a quiet hotel overlooking the bay at Camp De Mar, a short bus ride from Palma. I mention it because I remember packing a short-wave radio, with the sole purpose of tuning in to BBC's World Service and listening to Alistair Cooke's Letter From America. In twenty-four years I only missed a handful, and even those I have read several times.

I didn't want to let the day go by without mentioning my literary hero: had he lived another six years, he would have been a hundred and two today.

Sir Percy Fitzpatrick - PS to yesterday's post

I'm not sure why this is, but I find that more often than not, people who comment on my blog posts do so by email. I've had two on the subject of yesterday's post, and they both make good points. So, this is in the way of an edit - two edits - to my post about Sir Percy Fizpatrick and Jock of the Bushveld.

First, the caption under the painting of Jock is misleading, in that the character in the book who said, 'It was my dawg!' was not the narrator Fitzpatrick, but Old Rocky, and Rocky was referring not to Jock but to his own (unnamed) dog who had saved his master from an attack by a wounded buffalo but was himself trampled to death in the process.

Second, the opening words of the Preface, 'Sonny, you kin reckon it dead sure, thar's something wrong 'bout a thing that don't explain itself" are not the narrator's, but again belong to Old Rocky. I may have given the impression that the book was written in the vernacular, which it certainly wasn't. Having said that, Fitzpatrick did use the vernacular in direct speech throughout, something few writers manage without intruding (Mark Twain was the master). This is No. 7 of Elmore Leonard's Ten Rules of Good Writing:

'Use regional dialogue, patois, sparingly. Once you start spelling words in dialogue phonetically and loading the page with apostophes, you won't be able to stop..'

One more edit: I meant to credit the illustrator, British wildlife artist Edmund Caldwell, who was commissioned by Fitzpatrick to gather material for the wonderful drawings and paintings in the book while on safari in the Lowveld in 1906.

And a final note to KH, if you happen to read this post: given your sensibilities a propos our canine companions, this particular book may not be for you!

Jock Of The Bushveld

Jock

"It was my dawg!"

By a curious and perhaps unfortunate association, Remembrance Day always reminds me of my most treasured possession.

On 27th October 1919, South African politician, financier and author Sir Percy Fitzpatrick, suggested that the dead of the Great War be remembered by a moment's silence on the anniversary of the Armistice. His suggestion was forwarded to King George V, who was enthusiastic and who proclaimed, on 17th November 1919, that two minutes' silence should be observed annually in perpetuity, on the eleventh hour of the eleventh day of the eleventh month.

Percy Fitzpatrick, in the course of a colourful career, had worked during the 1880s as a prospector's assistant and ox-wagon transport rider in the goldfields of the Transvaal. He was friendly with Rudyard Kipling, who persuaded him to write a children's book based on his experiences. Jock of the Bushveld was an instant success and has become a classic, going through over ninety editions to date. How's this for an opening line:

 "Sonny, you kin reckon it dead sure, thar's something wrong 'bout a thing that don't explain itself."

It has always been a favourite, and as an engagement present my mother had my rather battered copy rebound in green leather and gold-leaf by a local book-binder named Sidney Aitken, who combined artistry with sensitivity by including the original cover illustration opposite the frontispiece in the rebound edition.

Jock of the Bushveld is the third thing I would rescue, after Lynn and Eddie, if the cabin went on fire.

Charmingly, Sidney made a mistake when he reset the spine. It reads:

Jock of the Bushveld
by
Sir Percy Fitzgerald

I love that.

Fitzpatrick died in 1931 aged 68, and is buried near Port Elizabeth in South Africa's Eastern Cape, at a beauty spot called the Look Out, overlooking the Sunday's River Valley.

Sunday's River

A gift horse

This log washed ashore after the recent storms - waste not want not we say.

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Sister Wendy on The One Show

My TV quote of the week is from the lovely Sister Wendy Beckett, who should have tact added to her universally-accepted attributes of humility and intelligence. When Jason Manford, on Monday evening's One Show, held up the first of two paintings by youngsters and said, 'What do you think of this?', Sister Wendy smiled sweetly and replied: 'I think it's given the artist great pleasure to do that!'

A summer in Quilchena

Quilchena Ranch

(the pass is above and behind the barns)

I just knew that, sooner or later, the internet would come in handy.

Yesterday morning I received an email with the subject, 'A summer in Quilchena', and my heart missed a beat. Quilchena is the ranch in Canada where I spent a life-changing gap year - heavens - thirty-four years ago.

Before I tell you who the email was from, I want to say that his name took me in my mind's eye to a pass, a steep-sided, pine-fringed gap between a pair of rocky outcrops, where I sat on a horse looking out over the picture-perfect (in a Head 'em off at the pass kind of way) Nicola Valley, in the ranching country between the Rockies and the Coast Mountains of beautiful British Columbia.

Five or six hours earlier, I had been unsaddling and rubbing down the dude horses in a corral behind the horse barn - I was the dude wrangler for a month or two during the summer - when Jonathan Smyth appeared at the rail and asked, in mild distress, if I could help him out.

As I remember it, it was a Sunday - closing day at the ranch's general store where Jonathan had just taken a summer job - and the two of us has ridden out early that morning so that he could take his first look at Quilchena's 32,000 acres. Among his responsibilities was the safe keeping of the key to the store's coke machine, and he had had it in his pocket when we crossed the river and rode up and out on two of the ranch's most reliable saddle horses - he rode a roan called Bush and I was on Old Bull, a buckskin whose temperament was as even as his gait. We rode as far as the branding corrals, moved a few cattle just for fun and saw, as I recall, two black bears moving through the trees in the distance.

When we got back, I headed straight out again with a party of hotel guests, and it was their horses that I was cooling down when Jonathan appeared, asking for help. He had lost the key to the coke machine somewhere on our meandering trek across the ranch, and having just started on the job, did not relish the thought of telling his boss, Elmer O'Hanley, when he started back on Monday.

So, we headed out again - my third ride of the day - in the forlorn hope that one of us might spot the reflection of sunlight on steel somewhere in the browning grass of the ranch's summer pasture. We tried to retrace our steps exactly, but after several hours we had gone full circle and found ourselves sitting the horses at the above-mentioned pass, looking down on the barns, the corrals, the bunkhouses, and in the far distance, the dark, sinewy length of Lake Nicola. We admitted defeat but agreed it had been worth a try, and Jonathan rehearsed his speech for the following morning. I didn't really know why he was so worried, because Elmer was no ogre - he was as kind and pleasant a man as you could wish to meet. Perhaps, now I think about it, that's why Jonathan felt so badly.

We were about to move on when I looked by force of habit at the ground, and there, an inch from Old Bull's left foreleg, was the key. Had I been the ol' Montana cowboy I aspired to be, I would have said, 'Well I'll be a sonofagun', but I did take the opportunity to say what all the hands at Quilchena used to say to make a point: 'Holy shit!'

Jonathan: wherever you are, if by some chance you find yourself reading this post, I'm wondering - have the fates continued to smile on you in the intervening years?

Which drags me back to the point, and yesterday's unexpected email. It was from Brendan O'Hanley, Elmer's then sixteen-year-old son, who had been at his computer at four in the morning in Edmonton, Alberta, nursing a cold, and had thought, 'I wonder what would pop up if I googled that Irish guy from the summer of 1976?'

Sandwich Tern, Strangford Lough. In November..

I snatched this photograph earlier today on my mobile phone, and you're going to have to take my word for it: it's a Sandwich Tern, and not only have I never seen one on Ringhaddy Sound, it shouldn't even be in the country.

Around five hundred Sandwich Terns breed in Strangford Lough, but come September they migrate to southern Europe or North Africa; so why this single adult should still be here is a mystery. Perhaps it's disoriented for some reason. Certainly, it won't have anything to do with injury, weakness or age - the migratory instinct is so strong it would make the journey, or die trying.

I hope the feedig is good enough to see it through the winter - I don't see why not. It's going to be a long one though. If I get a chance, I will post a better picture.

Sea frets

James K. Polk, the eleventh President of the United States, was responsible as no other single person, for America's policy of westward expansion in the 1840s under the doubtful banner of Manifest Destiny; and the ultimate prize, as far as he was concerned, was California, partly for the trade and naval advantage promised by it's sea ports and partly for the territorial symmetry offered by, as it were, an east-west clean sweep.

For others, the prize was California's fabled climate, and the Department of Tourism will tell you it's the same today. If you plan to visit though, and to take in San Francisco, you had better be aware of a phenomenon that lasts for much of the summer, and takes many a European tourist by surprise: the persistent fog that rolls in from San Francisco Bay during June, July and August, and makes for low temperatures and -literally - limited sightseeing. The fog is caused when warm, moist air from the Pacific travels over the cool California Current which runs offshore. This picture, taken on the 4th of July, should have been of San Francisco Bay and Golden Gate Bridge:

Obviously, sea mist (or sea frets in poetic moments) is common here as well, if less predictable. We watched the mist roll in from the south late this afternoon, and felt the chill on our faces as we crossed Ringhaddy Sound. The cabin disappeared, reappeared, disappeared again several times, and afterwards there was a pale, ghostly light as the sun filtered through the gossamer curtain left behind.

Norman Vincent Peale

Norman Vincent Peale

We have just been off-island for a day or two, in Edinburgh - always a bittersweet experience because on the one hand I love the city, but on the other it was the scene of a little life reversal which I haven't quite been able to put to bed, despite the passage of almost a decade and my best efforts to live by the words of Norman Vincent Peale: 'The tests of life are not meant to break you, but to make you.'

***

Christmas in Edinburgh starts officially on November 26th, when the lights are turned on by the Lord Provost and Princes Street Gardens becomes a romantic winter wonderland of market stalls, funfair, big wheel, carols, and the ultimate symbol of the season - ice skating under the stars.

Officially, that is. Unofficially, it starts when The Dome, the Graeco-Roman style bar and restaurant on George Street which was once the headquarters of the Commercial Bank of Scotland, says it starts. That is, on November 1st. If the spirit - or the Bah! Humbug! - of the season doesn't grab you when you pass by The Dome, your eyes are closed.

From outside, it's dramatic; from inside, breathtaking:-

***

Norman Vincent Peale was the controversial Protestant evangelist from Ohio whose book The Power of Positive Thinking, published in 1952, sold 5,000,000 copies and made the New York Times bestseller list for 186 weeks running. He once said, 'Christmas waves a magic wand over this world, and behold, everything is softer and more beautiful.'

Peale died in 1993 at the age of 95 - on Christmas Eve.

"More barn!"

Neil Young was born on this day in 1945.

Although the title track from his 1992 album Harvest Moon is probably among my top twenty favourite songs, I'm not a diehard Neil Young fan; but one of my oldest friends is. Sean and a couple of fellow devotees - connoisseurs might be a better word - hosted a Neil Young party in Bon'ess some years ago, at which I remember standing chatting to a cardboard horse with, as I recall, no name; and wondering about someone on the other side of the room, across whose chest were printed the words, "More barn!"

So I asked, and now, every time I hear a Neil Young track, Sean comes into my mind and "No barn!" rings in my ears.

In case you don't know it, the story is this. In 1972 producer Elliot Mazer persuaded Young to record some tracks in his Quadrofonic Sound Studios in Nashville, which became part of the Harvest album. Other tracks were recorded at Young's California ranch, and Mazer came to the ranch (along with Crosby and Nash, who also played on the album) to do the mixing. During recording, Mazer had set up PA speakers in the barn, to be used in place of headphones, a decision which produced a good deal of sound leakage which Young, in the event, enjoyed. When it came to the mixing session, Mazer ran one set of cables to the PA speakers still in the barn, and the other to the house; and Crosby, Nash and Young sat outside and listened. At one point, when Young was asked about balance he yelled, "More barn!"

That's it. The words were headed for immortality, and if you say "More barn" to any Neil Young fan, I guarantee they'll know what you mean and their eyes will shine with nostalgia, or affection - or even worship.

Proofreading for kicks

It bemuses Lynn, but I am so enjoying a proofreading course I've just started. The intention is to be able to offer my services as a freelance eventually, but for the moment it's surprisingly good fun - who would have thought? Possibly it's because a) I tend to doodle absently in the margins anyway, and the course simply requires that I doodle with a little more purpose; b) you get to use blue and red pens and also a pencil, which means a trip to the stationers; and c) I feel like a student again.. Bring it on!

The familiar things in life

Always having been wary of change, I find it infinitely reassuring that some things, like some people, never do.

On our last visit to Edinburgh we popped into Unicorn Antiques on Dundas Street, just around the corner from my first flat in the city (a basement in Cumberland Street - possibly the smallest and quirkiest flat in town - which I bought in 1987 for £7000). Unicorn has been going since 1967, and Nancy Duncan still sits at the same window - behind, I wouldn't be surprised, the same desk - as when I first popped in thirty-five years ago.

Unicorn is the proverbial Alladin's cave, and the only place to go, if you want to know, for good quality, bone-handled antique cutlery at the right price. Smaller antiques and bric-a-brac fill the single room off the street to bursting, and one of Edinburgh's best-kept secrets can be found in the sub-basement below: an extravagantly eclectic range of larger pieces in a series of interconnected rooms which stretch way back beneath the Georgian tenement.

Just one of Edinburgh's many jewels.

The eye of the storm

After a night of rattle and clatter, with rain drumming off the felt roof and miscellaneous unexplained bumps and slams coming from somewhere outside the cabin, we woke to find ourselves in the dead centre of the low which is passing slowly across the British Isles - the eye of the storm. Nothing stirred, the dinghy's bow rope hung limp from the jetty, and the sky was a cold and brittle blue: a perfect autumn morning. What a contrast.

The Curfew Bell - PS to yesterday's post

Having done a little research into the history of the curfew bell, I think I'll give up on the idea that Gray may have written 'curlew' and that a typesetter's error (or confusion between an old 'f' and an old 'l') gave us 'curfew'.

The curfew bell, which was sounded in mid-evening and was the signal to reduce (but not extinguish) all fires by raking ash over any burning logs, was introduced by Alfred The Great and was primarily a method of fire prevention; but the practice was eagerly adopted by William The Conqueror as a means of political control over his Anglo-Saxon subjects, in particular to discourage political gatherings in the evenings. The curfew law was eventually repealed by Henry I in 1103, but the custom persisted in some areas until well into the eighteenth century - hence, presumably, 'The curfew tolls the knell of parting day'.

I can't even argue that Gray wouldn't have used 'curfew' as shorthand for 'curfew bell', because he was in such good company - Milton did it in Il Penseroso:

'I hear the far-off curfew sound,
Over some wide-water'd shore..'

Or was it the 'far-off curlew sound'? No, I'll drop it.

Answers on a postcard..

If anyone has the answer to this question, I'd love to hear from them:

The first verse of Thomas Grey's very haunting Elegy Written in a Country Churchyard is always given (at least in any of my anthologies) as:

The curfew tolls the knell of parting day,

The lowing herd winds slowly o'er the lea

The plowman homeward plods his weary way,

And leaves the world to darkness and to me.

but I've always wondered if 'curfew' was intended by Grey as 'curlew', which would make more sense and would also square with the alliterative rhythm of the first line.

Does anyone know?

Edit on 7th November:
Oops - I meant 'Gray', not 'Grey'

A good 'shellacking'

Barack Obama conceded on Wednesday that he and the Democrats had been given a good 'shellacking' by voters. His party having lost control of the House of Representatives, it was pretty obvious what he meant, but I must admit I'd never heard the term before - at least not used in that way. My late father-in-law would have understood what it meant to be given a good shellacking, but he was a painter and decorator. Chambers says that the 'trounced' or 'heavily defeated' usage is informal North American - so, you learn something new every day.


Yesterday, events conspired to defeat my good intentions a propos writing and blogging - gave them, as I always say, a good shellacking. My mother managed to land up in casualty - ER, since we're talking American - after falling at home. It was a long evening, in the course of which, faithful to mum's perennial conviction that business comes first and the show must go on, I had to leave the hospital for an hour and a half to speak at a local book launch; but the end result was that we managed to argue mum out of hospital and into her own bed (the argument was with the doctors, not with mum), albeit battered, bruised and bestitched, by 11pm. After an ordeal which would have put me out of action and into a state of self-pity for days, my mother was laughing it off and getting on with life already. As she always says, 'It takes an old dog..'

Had I got to the blog, I was going to mention an historic event which, in the end, wasn't.

On the same day as the mid-term congressional elections, the Navajo Nation elected it's first new president in three years. In the primaries, New Mexico senator Lynda Lovejoy had swept the boards, giving her opponent Ben Shelly a shellacking (I promise I didn't see the assonance coming), with 17,000 to 7,600 votes. But on the day, Shelly won 52.7% of the vote, narrowly defeating Lovejoy, who called for a recount. This dramatic upset in the fortunes of the clear favourite - sorry, favorite - appeared to be down to three factors: a) Lovejoy is a woman, and despite the matriarchal structure of Navajo culture, where descent is via the mother and women traditionally own more property and have greater rights than men to property and children in matrimonial disputes, there has never been a female Navajo leader; b) her drinking habits were called in question ( a cheap shot when you consider Churchill was said to drink champagne every morning and a quart of whisky a day) - anyway she denies drinking to excess; and c) she is married to a non-Navajo.

As in Northern Ireland, it appears that 'tradition' - the political wing of prejudice and tribalism - may have raised it's ugly head.

Deferred post

A family crisis having intervened, my post about Lynda Lovejoy's historic bid to become the first female leader of the Navajo Nation will have to wait.

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The incomparable Jack Handey

Scots Pines, Islandmore

'Many people never stop to realise that a tree is a living thing, not that different from a tall, leafy dog that has roots and is very quiet.'

If George Burns was the master of the spoken one-liner, then Jack Handey is the master of the written. Here is another of his tree observations:

'If trees could scream, would we be so cavalier about cutting them down? We might, if they screamed all the time, for no good reason.'

Jack Handey's comedic writing career took off in 1975 when Steve Martin introduced him to the producer of Saturday Night Live, and in fact he and Martin have collaborated many times since. As I say, he is not a stand-up - he writes for a living, his bestselling work being Deep Thoughts (and the series it spawned), first published by National Lampoon in 1984. The Berkely Publishing edition can still be bought from Amazon affiliates here.

For no very good reason, I may drop in a Jack Handey obseravtion now and then, but for the record, this is one of my favourites:

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

If I say that Handey lives in Santa Fe, New Mexico, anyone who knows me will understand how I first came across him..

La Bise

When the wind is in the North, two things - both season-appropriate - pop into my mind. One is the notion that a northerly is almost always a drying wind (without it the fabric of The Blue Cabin would hardly have stood so many winters); and the other is a song - Chris De Burgh's Lonely Sky, from his 1975 album Spanish Train, which starts like this:

'The cold north wind they call La Bise
Is swirling round about my knees,
Trees are crying leaves into the river..'



It's always been a favourite, and in the rather serendipitous way that life throws up unexpected connections, I found myself humming the song on a visit to Down Museum in Downpatrick. The museum is housed in the town's restored 18thC prison, and one wing is given over to installations and art exhibitions.

The Governor's Quarters, Downpatrick Gaol

The current exhibition, called Our Town, has views of Downpatrick by various noted artists, living and dead, and I stopped in front of this charming watercolour by Lydia De Burgh:

My mother used to be a keen painter and knew Lydia De Burgh, who lived near the family home in Seaforde, Co.Down; and in fact I remember meeting her myself many years ago, when as a teenager I exercised the horses - riding one, leading two (something you wouldn't see these days) - on the little country road that ran past her house. The De Burghs can trace their ancestry to many of the principle movers and shakers of European history, including Charlemagne and the man responsible for the world's most famous tapestry, the arrestingly-named Odo, Bishop of Bayeux.

Anyway, Lydia, who died in 2007, was Chris De Burgh's aunt. So there - he's practically a best friend.

***

'La Bise' is the name given to the northerly wind which blows from northeastern France to south of the Masif Central (where it is known as 'la bise noire'). The derivation is unknown, but it's striking that 'la bise' is also a colloquialism for a greeting - or parting - kiss on the cheek; and I find it entirely possible that at some point in history it occurred to someone that the dry North wind was given to planting a passing peck on France's left cheek as it swept through from north to south.

Hallowe'en - the aftermath

This is the shell of what was, until last night, the public toilet in Killyleagh. The building sits on the edge of a little green in the shadow of Killyleagh Castle, and therefore has - had - one of the prettiest locations of any WC in Northern Ireland.

As we parked the car to go into Picnic Delicatessen for a coffee this morning, I said, 'Bring back National Service', and as we went through the door we met a friend coming out who said, 'Bring back the birch.'

All agreed then. The only possible silver lining is that the eventual replacement might look less like, well.. a public toilet.

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