Friendly encounters

My yellow sister

noreply@blogger.com (Douglas Blane) — Sat, 19 Oct 2024 16:23:00 +0000

The puzzled expression on the craggy features of our Corsican wildlife expert tells me that 'I've lost my yellow sister', doesn't make any sense to him, and what's more - the exaggerated Gallic shrug and receding back pointedly add - I am confusing him with someone who gives a merde.

Which leaves me both embarrassed by my schoolboy French and still short one younger sister, who has either wandered off into the sweet-scented, shrubby undergrowth, through which our coastal path is meandering, or plunged off the cliffs into the blue Mediterranean, a hundred feet below.

I'm betting the former but can't rule out the latter, which is why I'm willing to endure the contempt of rugged, manly Frenchmen. Sis has a habit of wandering off without saying where she’s going or why, although since it’s been a long walk already, the reason is fairly obvious, and confirmed five minutes later when she emerges from the bush behind us with the nonchalant stroll and pained expression of someone who's been searching for a good spot and failed to find it.

‘Tricky, was it?’ I ask her.

‘Very,’ she says, tight-lipped.

'My turn,' I say. 'Carry on and I'll catch up with you and the rest of the gang.'

'Be very careful,' she says. 'Some of the spikes on these plants are like crocodiles' teeth.'

'Are you OK?' she asks me, a few minutes later, as I rejoin her at the brow of a hill, where we get our first sight of the golden sands and blue-green sea of Plage de la Terre Sacrée.

'Barely,' I say, forestalling the concern beginning to appear on her face with a quick shake of the head.

'Did you know,' she says, taking the hint, 'that this rough undergrowth you get all over Corsica is called the maquis?'

‘Why would spiky undergrowth be named after the World War II French resistance?' I ask.

‘Other way round,’ she says, having researched well for this holiday, on which she’s finally persuaded me to accompany her.

'You get this stuff in the south of France, as well as here in Corsica,' she continues. 'It's ideal for hiding resistance fighters. That's why they came to be called after the terrain that concealed them.

'The name stuck because they - like the plants of the maquis - were tough, hardy and resourceful.'

‘And because nobody pissed on them?’ I suggest.

She tut-tuts, shakes her head and walks away. I’m getting a lot of scornful backs today. But I don’t care.

Blue skies and warm sunshine are beginning to ease the pain in my heart. The new pain in the nether regions might take a little longer.

Under the surface

noreply@blogger.com (Douglas Blane) — Thu, 10 Oct 2024 14:26:00 +0000

A great way to divert my son’s attention, if only briefly, from the lure of fragrant blossoms and free seeds is to ask him hard questions about art. He doesn’t have all the answers. Nobody does. But he’ll likely have pondered the question.

‘I loved Future Library,’ my sister says, as we soak up the sun over late lunch outside Modern 1 in Edinburgh. ‘I can see that’s art. But what about the Sarah Lucas? That reminded me of pained intestines tied in knots.’

He scratches his bearded chin and nods. ‘Yeah, but I thought it had a sensual curviness from some angles. It is art.’

‘Why?’ I ask him. ‘How can ladies’ tights stuffed with fluff be art? And how can the Lucas and say the Mona Lisa both be art? What can they possibly have in common?’

‘Not much visually,’ he says. ‘But one of the great discoveries of the 20^th century, according to Arthur C. Danto, was that something could be art without being pleasing to the eye. The history of art until then was all about aesthetics. Artworks had to be beautiful.’

‘Who’s Arthur C. Danto?’

‘Philosopher and art critic. Done a lot of thinking about the question: What is art? So have I. But he’s written more books than me.’

‘Yeah, but you’re here and he’s not. Tell us what you think.’

A little dachshund, from the next picnic-table, sausages it’s way between his feet, chasing a sycamore leaf and making him smile.

‘A good artist is trying to do something specific,’ he says. ‘So an artwork goes through a process of being made with intention. There is meaning in the artist’s mind.

‘Some contemporary art is missing that, I think. So when you look at it you, the viewer, don’t get any meaning from it. When you see good art and think about it, on the other hand, you don’t necessarily get all of its … Platonic meaning, if you like. You do get a shadow of that though. And it’s enough.

‘But you only get that because the artist put it there.’

‘What you’re saying reminds me of Hemingway’s thoughts about writing,’ I say. ‘He claims that most of the meaning of a good story is under the surface. The quality of what the writer does not say is the test of a good story. He called it the Iceberg Theory.’

‘That’s good,’ he says. ‘And quite similar to what I’m talking about.’

‘So what meaning did you get from Future Library?’ my sister asks.

‘The idea is appealing and original, I think,’ he says. ‘It’s an optimistic piece. There’s faith there that despite wars, floods and climate change, people will still be around in 100 years and will want to read books, rather than simply survive from one day to the next, in a post-apocalyptic hell.’

Much as I’m enjoying the chat, I have to stand up now to give space to the small apocalypse that my iceberged Americano has set off in my tummy. ‘Should we go look at the flowers?’ I ask and turn to get their response.

But they’ve gone. Never seen either move so fast. Largo is their usual speed, but from a sitting start they’ve leapt straight to allegro, leaving me with the friendly dachshund sniffing at my toes.

Looking over to the herbaceous border, I can see Sis shoving something into her pocket, in a manner that would be furtive in someone less elegant, while my son has an appreciative nose buried in some pale, pink phlox.

The dachshund looks up at me hopefully, so I offer the last corner of my raspberry almond flapjack, which he gobbles gratefully. ‘What is the meaning of a carnivore eating a vegan biscuit?’ I ask him.

He studies me with big brown eyes and ambles amicably away, in silence.

Secret library

noreply@blogger.com (Douglas Blane) — Thu, 10 Oct 2024 10:19:00 +0000

When we’re anywhere near a sunlit garden, chats with my son and sister become a losing battle for their attention. Rather than talking to me, they’d far rather be wandering among the plants, sniffing the blossoms or surreptitiously stuffing purloined seeds into their bulging pockets.

They’re both keen gardeners. And hardened seed bandits.

So as my son’s eyes stray towards the herbaceous borders surrounding the outdoor café tables at Edinburgh’s Modern 1, I struggle to pull his mind back to all the art we’ve been looking at, and the Katie Paterson piece that so impressed him, in particular.

'When you were doing your degree at Glasgow School of Art, you told me you'd made a breakthrough in your own understanding,' I remind him. 'You'd realised that art was about the process as much as the product.'

‘Maybe more so,’ he says. ‘I still believe that. It’s why I really liked the Paterson artwork. There’s a lot going on there.’

We had stumbled upon this seemingly innocuous piece on the wall of a small room on the second floor, and had been fortunate enough to have our puzzled pondering overheard by gallery attendant Jackie Lindsay, who asked if we would like to hear the full story.

We would.

‘This is a certificate made to look like tree rings,’ Jackie had explained. ‘In the centre it’s 2014 while the outer ring is 2114. That’s the year that a thousand Norway spruce trees will be harvested, which the artist has planted in a forest just north of Oslo.’

The wood from those trees will make the paper for a print-run of a newly published book. Each owner of one of the certificates will then be entitled to a copy of that book.

‘And what’s inside the book?’ my son asks.

‘Nobody knows,’ Jackie smiles. ‘Only the authors. Each year, beginning in 2014 with Margaret Atwood, an internationally celebrated writer is being invited to contribute a written piece.’

That story or poem is then locked away in the Silent Room of Oslo’s public library which, with its crafted layers of wood panelling and a glass drawer for each manuscript, etched with its author’s name, is in itself an artistic creation.

Other contributors so far to the slowly-growing book include David Mitchell, Elif Shafak, Han Kang and Tsitsi Dangarembga, Jackie tells us. ‘No one has read any of their stories, except the author. Not even Katie Paterson. And until 2114, no one will.

‘It’s a lovely idea isn’t it?’ She says, looking around our well-worn, fascinated faces, and smiling again.

‘But I don’t think any of us will get to read the stories.’

Future library

Drink to me, drink to my health

noreply@blogger.com (Douglas Blane) — Fri, 20 Sep 2024 20:50:00 +0000

Like any other new skill, looking at art gets easier the more you practise it, especially if you’re lucky enough to have a real artist wandering around the galleries with you.

But there is a downside. Slow learners often provoke an expert, particularly if the latter is a close family member who still unconsciously resents you, many years later, for thwarting his first artistic attempts to drink pink shampoo and stick his little fingers in the electricity sockets.

So when I try to impress my now fully-grown and highly capable son by dismissing an artwork in Edinburgh as ‘a feeble attempt to paint like Picasso’, he makes no effort to let me down gently.

‘Ha, ha, ha,’ he goes. My sister looks at the painting’s label and joins in merrily. ‘Ha, ha, ha,’ she goes.

You’ve guessed it. The painter is Picasso and the painting, of the American photographer Lee Miller, is quite well known, if you know anything about art. The joke’s on me.

But here’s the thing. Slow looking, as my son tells us frequently, is about you and the artwork, initially at least. You study the painting or sculpture and wait. You feel and think. You give it time. You let it percolate. You don’t read the label. You don’t ask an expert what it’s about. You certainly don’t google its context or its history.

None of this is easy, particularly when you’re just starting out. And more especially when you’re looking at modern art, which usually has scant aesthetic appeal or resemblance to anything that’s ever existed in the natural world, except perhaps in the inky depths of the ocean.

You feel the need for guidance strongly. The urge to latch on to facts that can provide a foothold in a swamp of shifting shapes is hard to resist. But you must. You’re learning a skill for yourself, not swotting for an exam or gaining erudition to impress people.

Slow looking can be practised alone. But it’s hugely helpful to have a couple of companions, and the combination of deep-thinking artist and another smart beginner is, I think, just about ideal.

So having passed a couple of pleasantly stimulating, slow-looking hours in National Galleries Scotland: Modern 1, my son, my sister and I figure we’ve earned a seat in the walled garden, bathed in warm sunshine today, along with whatever goodies the attractive café in the basement can provide. (A vegan raspberry almond flapjack and an iced americano with honeycomb syrup for me, if you'd like to know.)

‘Let’s chat about what we’ve seen,’ my son says, when we’ve got ourselves settled around a heavy-duty picnic table. ‘One of my favourites was the Katie Paterson. What was it called?'

'Future Library,' my sister reminds him.

'Yeah, that impressed me.‘

‘Tell us what you liked about it,’ Sis says, and he looks to the sky for inspiration before beginning to talk, hesitantly at first and then, as his thoughts clarify and coalesce, with considerable fluency.

‘For me, good art is about the process …’ he begins

Banksy – Queen Street Art

noreply@blogger.com (Douglas Blane) — Mon, 07 Aug 2023 14:22:00 +0000

‘The artworld is a huge hungry amoeba,’ my son informs us, before shifting his attention to the menu in the Italian restaurant we’ve found for lunch, following our visit to the Banksy exhibition at the Gallery of Modern Art in Glasgow. He likes to make us work for his artistic insights, these days.

So I nod and go ‘Yeah sure’ like I know what he means, but my sister bites. ‘How’s that?’ she asks him.

‘Well it’s like this,’ he says, then gives his full attention to pouring balsamic vinegar into a little yellow dish of olive oil, dipping his artisan bread in the pre-emulsion, and gnawing the end of it with obvious relish.

‘I remember we used to have conversations and you weren’t annoying,’ I tell him.

‘No you don’t,’ he says.

‘No I don’t,’ I say.

‘Huge hungry amoeba,’ sis prompts.

‘Yeah well, Banksy began far outside the artworld, right? Outside the law, in fact. He was a graffiti artist, defacing public property for fun and respect, and trying not to get arrested. But look at him now. Art gallery exhibitions. Sotheby auctions. Money to burn.

‘The artworld amoeba saw something tasty, enfolded it in its tentacles and swallowed it whole.’

‘Pseudopodia,’ I tell him. ‘An octopus has tentacles. An amoeba has pseudopodia.’

‘Zatright?’ he says. ‘I almost went octopus but thought amoeba gave a better feel for the amorphous artworld engulfing its prey. It’s not the first time, either – Van Gogh, Duchamp, Pollock, Basquiat.

‘You can’t throw shit at the artworld for long, because it’s a shape-shifter. It’ll reach out and swallow you whole, no matter how far back you stand. Tracey Emin once got ridiculed for claiming her bed was an artwork, but she's now a professor at the Royal Academy of Arts. You could hardly get more mainstream artworld.’

This restaurant offers few vegan options, so I stick with the artisan bread and olive oil starter, while sis goes for a large pizza, and my son orders enough food to feed a horse with a tapeworm. He’s a working man these days.

‘But did you enjoy the exhibition?’ I ask him.

‘Well yeah, obviously,’ he says.

‘Thought you would. Banksy’s stuff has the same playful surface and thought-provoking depth I see in the art you make.’

‘Some critics refuse to see any depth,’ he tells me. ‘They say that real art is complex and challenging, so if people are queuing round the block, it must be too easy to be art.’

‘That assumes people are stupid and only art critics can recognise art,’ sis says.

‘Some of them even say that. Don’t talk to me about art critics!’ He waggles a large slice of pizza and melting cheese, in a way that might be aggressive if it wasn’t so limp and floppy.

‘An art critic is someone who can’t draw, paint or sculpt, has no original ideas but craves recognition, and needs people to listen to him. So he writes shit for money.’

He scratches his bearded chin and looks me in the eye, and I know what’s coming.

‘Just like you.’

‘Favourite part of the show?’ I ask, ignoring the abuse.

‘I liked the words as much as the images,’ he says. ‘Words can add something to art. Sometimes they are the art – like in Yoko Ono’s Grapefruit.

‘Couple of things Banksy wrote stick in my mind. ‘It’s not art unless it has the potential to be a disaster. That feels true to me. You can't know how it'll turn out when you begin a piece of art – and you have to take chances.

‘I think my favourite though was his story about a child telling Picasso that when he grew up he wanted to be an artist.

‘You can’t do both,' Picasso told him.

Slow looking

noreply@blogger.com (Douglas Blane) — Tue, 07 Feb 2023 11:10:00 +0000

The Blute-Fin Windmill (Glasgow Museums)

It's been a while since my artist son and I got together without domestic stuff weighing us down and slowing the pace of our lightning brains and scintillating conversations.

So we've arranged to meet in the French Gallery at Kelvingrove and take in some paintings, and the first thing I do wrong is start reading the labels, my thinking being that an uneducated viewer like myself needs guidance on what he's supposed to be looking at.

'No! No!' he tells me. ‘What you already know about a painting isn't relevant on your first encounter. It's just you and the artwork. Look at it. Engage with it. Notice things. Put them into words, if it helps. It’s called Slow Looking.

'So take your time and tell me what you see here,' he nods towards a small work mounted at eye level and framed by ornate brass, as most of the paintings in this gallery seem to be.

'It's a windmill,' I tell him. 'Up on a hill against a blue sky with fluffy clouds, viewed from what looks like an allotment that has a rickety old garden shed, lit by the sun. I like the shed. It’s bright and homely. In fact the whole scene sort of glows.'

‘Very good. What else can you see? Look more closely.'

I step in and notice French flags on top of the windmill and a viewing tower beside it. 'Why are there French flags on the windmill and a viewing tower beside it?' I ask him.

‘Because this is The Blute-Fin Windmill, Montmartre, painted by Vincent Van Gogh,’ my sister reads from the label, having either failed to get the memo or decided to ignore it, as aunts often do.

‘This windmill was a popular tourist attraction,’ she reads on. ‘Because of the magnificent views it gave over the city of Paris.’

I stare expectantly at my son, waiting for him to repeat the admonition to engage with the artwork before reading anything about it. But of course he doesn’t. Correcting dads when they’re wrong comes naturally. Correcting aunts would be rude.

‘I’ve noticed something about these little figures milling around the windmill,’ I tell him. ‘Viewed from a few feet away they’re clearly people. One's even holding an umbrella. But up close they’re just splodges of colour. How does a painter do that? Is it planned precisely or does he just go blob, splash, dash and see what happens?’

He pauses, trying to put into words a skill that exists quite happily without language. ‘It’s not really either of those,’ he says. ‘You sort of feel your way into it and the feeling transmits itself to your hand without going through your … intellect. You get the essence of the thing and your hand moves.

‘You can even look at it afterwards and wonder how you did it – and sometimes you just don’t know.’

‘So does that mean art can’t be taught?’ I ask.

‘Can anything really be taught?’ he replies.

‘I guess not,’ I say. ‘You just have to learn stuff yourself, don’t you?’

A little splodge of colour beside me grows much more animated than Van Gogh’s on the viewing tower. ‘You do remember I was a teacher for 30 years,’ it tells me. ‘Are you saying I didn’t teach anybody anything, in all that bloody time?’

My son gives me a long look then shakes his head sadly. ‘You're still learning about slow looking, chief,’ he says. ‘But you're the best I've ever seen at slow thinking.’

While my guitar gently weeps

noreply@blogger.com (Douglas Blane) — Fri, 13 Aug 2021 08:22:00 +0000

"Someone once said they found me intimidating," Bob tells me as we're sat in his back garden, sipping coffee from his bean-to-cup machine, a thing I'd never heard of, whose price when I looked it up later provoked a small pang of envy for a lifestyle that delivers mellow coffee on the patio, a specialist workshop in the extension and a black beast of a BMW in the driveway.

Surprised at first by this depiction of a man that in 50 years I’ve never heard raise his voice, much less lose his temper, I eventually hit on the answer. “You’re good-looking and carry yourself with an air of confidence,” I tell him. “Some might find that intimidating. You also look down your nose at people.”

“I’m six feet three,” he says. “I can’t help it.”

“And you’re witty which intimidates the humourless.”

Bob's wife Kim steps through the French windows with a packet of large, hospitable biscuits, briefly stays to chat, then returns to her Zoom call with other international aquaculture experts.

Bob sips his coffee and nibbles a biscuit, while following the flight of a butterfly that’s finding slim pickings on the patio, and asks a hesitant question.

“How’s your treatment going?”

“Better than I was led to expect,” I tell him. “Hot flushes and tiredness are the main side-effects. Oh and a weird one I noticed the other day when I was in the shower and made the mistake of looking straight down.”

Bob squirms. “Steady on,” he says. “We’re men. We can be good friends without sharing intimate secrets from the shower-room.”

“It’s my legs,” I tell him and he visibly relaxes.

“What’s weird about your legs?”

“They’ve gone bald,” I tell him. “Well, half of them. All the hair has vanished from the outside of each leg. The insides are as hairy as ever.”

“Look,” I add, rolling up my trousers for inspection.

“Bugger me, you’re right,” Bob says. “Did you ask your doc why?”

“Yeah, she said loss of body hair was a side-effect of the hormone treatment. I’d have to get used to looking like a plucked chicken, she said.”

Bob shakes his head. “Harsh but you’re not even that,” he says. You’re a half-plucked chicken. You’re a chicken somebody started plucking, got a phone call from the wife and forgot all about.

“Speaking of plucking, would you like to see the guitars I’m making?”

Happy to drop the subject of my health and always interested in another man’s workshop, I concur and we head inside. A resinous blend of shellac and pinewood welcomes me, as we enter a white-walled room, well-equipped with dark work surfaces and lined with tools, shelves and enticing, grainy woods.

“Looks professional,” I tell him. “I’m guessing making a guitar that sounds good - and looks good - is highly technical. Takes a lot of experience?”

He smiles. “Somebody once said it was easy: you just cut down a tree and take away all the bits that aren’t a guitar.”

“Michaelangelo?”

“Probably,” he picks up a lovely, light-coloured piece of wood. “This is spruce, a favourite for the soundboard. I’ve been using some very old – and very expensive – spruce from the Dolomites. The cool mountain air makes trees grow slowly there, and evenly. Gives you a wood that’s light, strong and resonant.

From our student days together, I remember mellow evenings with beer, girls and Bob on guitar, but I never knew he made them.

“I didn’t then. Built my first three from kits – oh, years ago now. Gave me confidence to start building from scratch. For the moment, I’ve settled on a design that combines classical guitar ideas with techniques for strong steel string constructions. All my guitars are finished with French Polish. Takes a while but produces a lovely, fragile sheen that lets the top vibrate better than a heavy lacquer finish.”

I shake my head with that mix of envy and admiration that craftsmen have inspired in me since I was a boy watching my Dad build TV sets in a small bedroom-workshop, filled with the smoky scent of rosin-core solder.

“Gimme some technical terms, Bob, so I can look them up later and learn more.”

“Sure.” He rubs his chin. “Well, there’s silking, purfling and kerfing.”

“Don’t just make shit up – that’s my job.”

“Silking – small cross-grain lines in the wood, a sign of a perfectly quarter sawn top,” he says. “Purfling – a narrow decorative edge inlaid into the top of a stringed instrument. Kerfing – strips of wood glued around the inside seams to add strength and stability.

"Then there’s chatoyancy, Spanish Heel and a phrase that luthiers often use." He gives me that deadpan look of his.

"What's that?"

"'Oh shit!'"

“Right. What’s a luthier?”

“Me. Someone who makes stringed instruments, especially violins or guitars. Comes from the French for ‘lute’.”

It’s my turn to broach a sensitive topic. “How you doing since Archie died, Bob?”

"I miss him. He was a lovely dog."

"You think you'll get another?"

"Yes, we will. Another Labrador. We tried for a rescue dog, but you just can't get them now - everybody wants a dog to keep them company since the pandemic. So we're going to buy one."

"How much?"

"Couple of thousand."

"Wow! You got a name in mind?"

Bob scratches his chin. "I reckon good names for dogs have two syllables with a plosive in the middle - like 'p' or 'b' - or a sibilant. So I want to call him Basil."

"Not a common dog's name."

"No, but I like it. I don't know if I can get it past Kim, though.”

He gives me that look again. “Especially if it’s a girl.”

The Big Grey Man of Ben Macdui

noreply@blogger.com (Douglas Blane) — Thu, 15 Jul 2021 19:36:00 +0000

Macaroni balls. Sounds like something a cyclist gets after a long run in tight pants, doesn't it? Hands up when you know for sure that's not what they are.

I'm on a recce in the Cairngorms and I've tried to get up on to the plateau near Coire an t-Sneachda, where deep snowdrifts still cling to the walls of the corrie, even in mid June. Out of nowhere, gusts of wind so strong that they twice have me on my knees force me back down.

Having a coffee in the car while assessing alternative routes, I pull a little plastic bag from my backpack, courtesy of a kind friend who doesn't trust me to feed myself, take one of the mysterious, brown wrinkled balls between thumb and forefinger, and savour the sensual springiness as I squeeze. Dipping it in salt crystals from a silver-paper twist, I raise it to my lips and bite. The mouth-feel and flavour are deeply satisfying.

Draining the coffee, I wipe my lips and head up by a different route. Straight out of the car park, I meet a couple of young, street-clothed women pulled along by a perky Jack Russell on a long lead. They ask the way to the Cairngorm summit, so I point them to the Windy Ridge track. But visions of their little pet soaring like a kite, move me to warn of the likely strong gales up top. They thank me kindly, ignore me completely and push on.

My friend Iain reckons no one ever listens to him. That can't be true or I wouldn't know he says it. But I take his point. It's frustrating that you can't pass hard-won experience on to the young. Muttering about this, I find myself joined in my uphill trudge by a tall, dark, similarly muttering figure, with a woolly bunnet pulled down over his forehead and a scarf covering the lower half of his face up to his nose. His beef seems to be tourists rather than young people, but he sounds as disgruntled as me.

Falling silent as he matches his pace to mine with a loping, effortless stride, he fixes me with a disconcerting stare. I feel compelled to speak, so tell him my plan to come back and camp out on Ben Macdui, once I've recced the route.

"Wild camping, iss it?" he says, as he holds me with his glittering eye.

I sense disapproval but burble on. "I've been on a course in the Lake District and now I'm ready to go solo. I'm really looking forward to it. I want to test myself in tough conditions."

"On Ben Macdui?" he says, shaking his head. "You'll not haff heard of Am Fear Liath Mòr?"

"What's that?"

"It iss a who, not a what. The Big Grey Man of Ben Macdui."

He says no more and a sepulchral silence falls between us, as our footsteps crunch on the stony track, three of mine to two of his, in a syncopated, slightly stressed beat. I'm keen to hear more but hesitant to question him, so I study the plants beside the winding track, many of them more at home in cooler climes than Scotland.

Dark-hearted flowers of dwarf cornel peek out between clumps of Alpine lady's mantle, their silver-edged leaves spotted with shimmering dewdrops. Ragged deergrass blossoms seek the sun, while solitary bees sip nectar from cloudberry flowers, whose rose-orange fruits I last saw nestling in tall glasses in a Turku boardroom.

"Strange tales are told of Liath Mòr," my companion comes to life again. "Many more will never be told." He lapses into silence and I wonder if one lifetime will be enough to reach the end of this conversation.

"Sightings are rare," he starts up again, casting a glance in my direction. "But his presence is often felt and his footsteps heard in the mist ... behind you."

I suppress a shudder and try scepticism. "Yeah, but you get stories like that in the hills. Most told by tourists with scant experience of wind and mist and mountains."

My companion emits a guttural sound and I realise I've annoyed him. "Professor John Norman Collie wass not a tourist," he says. "He was an eminent scientist and mountaineer, the first to tell of Am Fear Liath Mòr."

Crunch, crunch on the track. This is a man who talks slow but walks deceptively fast, and I'm starting to pant as I struggle to keep pace, keen to hear his story.

“Collie heard footsteps stalking him, near the cloud-covered summit of the Ben. He told himself it was nonsense but the footsteps kept on coming. He was seized with terror. 'I took to my heels,’ he reported later, ‘staggering blindly among the boulders for four or five miles. There is something very queer about the top of Ben Macdui and I will not go back there again.’"

My companion turns his head to gauge my reaction. We walk on. Crunch, crunch, crunch. He speaks again. “Alexander Tewnion was not a tourist. He wass a naturalist and mountaineer. Will I tell you his story?”

By this time I can breathe or speak but not both, so I simply nod and he continues. "As Tewnion reached the top of Ben Macdui, the mist swirled across the Lairig Ghru, shrouding the mountain. He heard loud footsteps and a huge shape came charging at him. He pulled his revolver and fired three times.

“'When it still came on, I turned and hared down the path,’ he reported later, ‘reaching Glen Derry in a time that I have never bettered.’”

Crunch, crunch, crunch. I've heard more than enough to know I should find another mountain for my next camping expedtion. The wind is up again, as strong as ever, shrieking like a lost soul and trying to push me back down the mountain.

"What about you?" I ask and my companion's dark eyes turn towards me. "Have you ever encountered the Big Grey Man?"

The cloud is down now, clammy on our faces, as we approach the snow-banks in the headwall of Coire Cas. "I haff not," he says, lengthening his stride and pulling effortlessly away from me.

As the cloud closes around him his soft Highland tones sound in my ears one last time.

"But you have.”

Hello darkness my old friend (wild camping part 2)

noreply@blogger.com (Douglas Blane) — Sun, 30 May 2021 09:18:00 +0000

It turns out Paul and I have a lot in common. He plays the drums. I play the drums. He's a vegetarian. I'm a vegetarian. He's good-looking and knowledgeable. I'm ...

So anyway. Having ascended every peak in this part of the Lake District, and scaled most of the rock faces, Paul has picked out what he considers an ideal spot for my first night wild camping.

It's not exactly a spot, though, more a vast expanse of marsh and meandering river, cradled by craggy mountaintops. "It's called Great Moss," Paul tells me, as he plots a path across, after three hours hiking. I had pictured something more secluded for my first night under the stars. But Paul knows what he's doing.

"You'll see the sun rise in the morning over those hills behind us," he says, as we splash across the shallow water. Rejecting several sites as too hard or squelchy he chooses one for me, beside a mountain stream, and another fifty yards away for himself, and we pull the tents from our rucksacks.

Having learned all I know about tents from Carry on Camping, I expect erecting them to be tricky and time-consuming. But it happens so fast I almost miss it, colour coding and structural ribs made of sectioned tent-poles making it look so easy that I think even an idiot could do it. Fortunately.

"And there you are," Paul says. "A two-person tent ready for the night."

"How many persons?" I check.

"Two," He confirms. "This one's quite roomy."

Not to my eyes it isn't. But that's fine. Solo camping is the long-term plan, not snuggling up with a friend – partly because I want to experience the Cairngorm wilderness without distraction, as Nan Shepherd did, and partly because I don't have any friends willing to snuggle up with me on a mountaintop. (Yeah, I asked.)

During dinner, heated on the stoves and saucepans we carried in with us, Paul chats about wild camping around the country. The short version is that, barring a few exceptions, it's legal anywhere in Scotland and nowhere in England*.

After dinner, we wash our dishes in the mountain stream and Paul gets to his feet, eyeing the track behind us that leads to the peaks. "Do you feel up to it?" he asks. "It'll be easier now you've stowed your rucksack." True enough, I do have a pleasant floaty feeling, but I'm also wearier than I'd normally be after a six mile uphill hike, the after-effects of my second Covid vaccination yesterday.

It seems a shame not to try for the top, although it's not my main aim in being here, so we set off upwards. But short of the highest point in England, I have to call it a day and we turn back down, to prepare for the night.

The sun is sinking fast now, the warm afternoon yielding to a cool and peaceful gloaming. The air is still, as it has been all day, the only sound the soft splash of the stream we're camped beside, a soothing murmur that should help me sleep. Paul and I chat about the outdoor life as the light leeches away, before he wishes me goodnight and heads for his tent.

So here we are. The moment that's almost haunted my thoughts for over a year. For the next ten hours it's just me, the sky above, the earth beneath and the darkness.

Oh and the thick socks, long pants, thermal vest, woolly bunnet and four-seasons sleeping bag. The forecast is hard frost and I've come prepared. But after an hour I realise I'm not cold. I'm hot. The woolly bunnet stays on, partly because the air is already chilly as the day's heat radiates up through a cloudless sky, but mainly because it's a present from my son.

Not my son the artist, who often appears in these pages. This is another son you've never heard of. My firstborn. We were close when he was a boy. We made each other laugh. But he had a hard time as a young adult and found it easier to cut himself off from us.

Around three years ago he gradually began to come back into my life. We meet regularly now and go long walks together. He's a lovely man. The whole experience, lasting twenty years, has taught me something I didn't know about human biology. You can function at some level with a hole in your heart. But you get to live again when it heals.

The hat stays on, as does the watch he gave me that also shows temperature and compass direction. The socks come off, and the pants and vest. So now I'm stretched out nice and cosy, naked from the forehead down.

Cosy but by no means comfortable. I favoured quality for the rucksack and sleeping-bag, but economy for the mat, a mistake that's borne painfully in on me as the Lake District presses hard on my ribs and hip. I'm convinced sleep is impossible but I'm wrong.

At around 5 am, when it's - 6 ° C outside, I'm awoken by urgent messages from my nether regions that my arse is freezing off, as are my feet. I pull on socks and pants again and next thing I know it's 7am and I've almost missed the daybreak.

Quickly unzipping the sleeping-bag and tent, I pull on trousers and top and step into a cool morning under a rosy sky, as dawn turns to sunrise and the first rays illuminate the mountaintops, then travel down towards us. It's too good an opportunity to miss, so before packing up, I sit down to meditate, with my back to a rock, facing the sunrise.

Half an hour later, leaving nothing behind us, Paul and I set off, with the sun still warming our way. On the hike down, the chat ranges widely. We compare old injuries, as men do when they're getting to know each other – fractures, sprains, slipped discs, broken hearts. Paul wins the first. I've got him beat on all the rest.

I ask if he considers Ringo a good drummer and nod agreement when he tells me he didn't, but having listened to the thoughts of other great drummers, he does now. He asks if I believe in reincarnation and nods agreement when I say I don't know and it doesn't matter: the principle's the same however you get there – don't harm any living thing.

On the last leg, we again pass the little black lambs who, I 'm guessing, look much better for their night of wild camping than I do. At the cars, Paul and I unload our backpacks and prepare to part.

I have warm memories of our day and a half together. If I want advice or instruction on any other outdoor activity, he's the man I'll call. We bump elbows, say goodbye and drive off in opposite directions.

Next stop Ben Macdui in the snow.

Find Paul at Rock n Ridge

* Longer version of wild camping law.

Wild camping

noreply@blogger.com (Douglas Blane) — Tue, 11 May 2021 20:42:00 +0000

My companion raises
an eyebrow but says nothing, as another manly moan escapes my aching body. Soft words and sympathy are not part of Paul's job on this trip.

Taking me up to the Scafell range, pushing me on if he has to, and showing me how to survive overnight in what promises to be seriously sub-zero temperatures, despite the fact that the sun this morning is blazing down from a big blue sky ... are.

Having grown up in the Ayrshire countryside, not far from Glen Afton, I'd done lots of running and walking in the hills, over the years, without feeling the need for outdoor activity lessons. Seemed like asking someone to teach me how to breathe. But having reached the ripe old age of none-of-your-business without ever camping in the wild, I got a craving to try it last year while reading Nan Shepherd's 'The Living Mountain'. I wanted to experience a dawn like she describes, in which "I hardly breathe - I am an image in a ball of glass.”

I also wanted to push myself a little, scare myself a bit, without doing anything as stupid as detaching my retinas by diving head-first off a cliff with an elastic band round my ankles. I'd tried Go Ape in the Trossachs, with a friend, which isn't scary but is exhilarating, especially the initial 400 metre zip-wire over a wooded valley. I'd gone coasteering, which allowed us to pose in figure-hugging wetsuits and jump off cliffs into the sea.

But feeling enough fear to push past, I've found, gets more difficult as the years tick away and emotional scar tissue hardens into the imprint of experience. Just one source of terror from earlier times might, I suspect, still be in there, biding its time to turn my palms wet and my legs wobbly. The scent of tobacco smoke can still carry me back to black nights with the wind howling, when my Dad would come upstairs and lie beside me, his strong presence soothing my fears and helping me drift off to sleep.

Yep, as a wee boy I was scared of the dark. Imagination conjured monsters from the night. So spending one inside a small tent up a mountain, when you can't see but can hear what's sneaking up on you, may well trigger some of that atavistic dread. Good. That's what I'm looking for.

The expedition gets off to a shaky start, however, when I don't find Paul until an hour later than we'd agreed, by which time I'm feeling agitated, having misread the map, parked in the wrong place and got to wondering if I'm going to balls up my keenly anticipated but long Covid-delayed expedition before it starts.

When we eventually do meet up, exactly where Paul said he'd be, I am reassured by his soft Yorkshire accent and air of calm competence, as he shows me how to insert the tent, stove and saucepan he's brought for me into a rucksack I thought was already packed as tight as six badgers in a biscuit tin.

That done we head off into upper Eskdale, past a pair of tiny black lambs whose large eyes and plaintive bleats make us both go a little soppy. I think I'm going to like this guy. But I'm already beginning to hate my backpack. Paul is moving light and easy, while I trudge along behind, trying to get the hang of walking with a small, knobbly horse on my back.

It's a gorgeous morning, the Esk below us sparkling white as it rushes over rocks, and translucent green where deep, inviting pools collect the icy waters from the mountains. We pause briefly beside one of these, for a cup of tea and a chat about the other activities Paul offers.

Besides wild camping, these include navigation, abseiling, rock climbing, via ferrata, canoeing, winter skills and a host of others, including ghyll scrambling.

"You've heard of canyoning," Paul explains. "Well ghyll scrambling is similar except you go upstream instead of down. It's a lot of fun."

"Do you have to carry a rucksack?" I ask.

"No," he tells me.

"I'm in."

(To be continued.)

Find Paul at RocknRidge

Let me count the ways

noreply@blogger.com (Douglas Blane) — Tue, 18 Feb 2020 12:17:00 +0000

The sign on the toilet wall in Nuclear Medicine warns me, for the sake of other users, to aim accurately and avoid the toilet seat, "since your urine is now radioactive".

Well, that's a new one. Little did I realise, as a fresh-faced physics student, learning that an excited nucleus decays by emitting high-energy particles, that one day I'd be pissing them.

"What's your superpower, Douglas?"

"I can shoot gamma rays out my penis."

"Respect, man."

Another sign advises me to avoid "young children and pregnant ladies" for a couple of days, until I no longer glow in the dark or set off smoke-alarms.

All this because I'm having a bone scan to see if the cancerous cells that migrated long since from my prostate have found a new home and started raising a family. But I almost didn't make the appointment. As I was leaving the house, I got a call from a young member of my own family.

"Hi, how you doing?" His usual preamble to bad news.

"Headed to the hospital. You OK?"

"Yeah. Well. Kind of."

"What's up?" I ask, with a sinking feeling.

"Well I was driving to college this morning and the sun started rising in the east, ahead of me. The world changed from black and white to beautiful colour - like the 1960s, I guess, for you hippies.

"It glowed like the dawn of the last day. Trees on the horizon stood stark and black against a sky that ...

"I get it. It looked nice."

"Nice? This was a symphony in the sky. It was a Shakespearean sonnet of a sunrise. It ..."

"I'm late for a hospital test. Could we get to the action?"

"I've locked my keys in my car."

"Oh dear."

"With the engine running."

"Bugger."

"And I'm thinking you must have done it yourself."

Well of course I have.

"So have you any helpful suggestions?"

"Not really," I tell him. "I did it in my drive. Car key, house keys, engine running. What I did was shinny up the ivy, force open a window and search every nook and cranny in my house, for the spare keys I knew were in there."

"Can't do that," he says. "I'm in a layby out in the country. What's a cranny?"

"Little crack, I think. What are you going to do?"

"Phone Linda and get her out with the spare key. But I'm an hour away. She won't be happy."

Silence stretches between us. "You'll survive," I tell him confidently.

"Course I will," he says in the same tone.

And he did, I heard later. But when I told the story to a friend, her comment annoyed me initially. "What a Blane thing to do," she said.

On reflection, though, she was right. Locking your keys in your car is hard. But my son did it and I've done it. Another close member of the family went one better.

She locked herself in her car - don't ask me how - and had to be rescued by the man next door.

It's some kind of genetic thing, I think, travelling down from my Dad's side of the family. My Mum's were all switched on, wide awake, super-alert. Dad was dopey. Two of his sisters were dopier still. My cousins, their kids, were so lightly attached to reality you felt they'd wandered in from a nearby dimension, and were searching for the door back out again.

They used to make me smile. But self-awareness grew as time passed. I'm just as dopey and I think I've figured out why. I once met Howard Gardner at an educational event in Glasgow. He was affable and persuasive, so I read a fair bit about his Multiple Intelligences theory.

IQ tests measure only two intelligences, Gardner says - linguistic and logical/mathematical. Quite a number of others exist, including spatial, emotional, interpersonal, kinaesthetic and so on.

High IQ runs in our family so people think we're smart, for a while. Then they realise something Gardner never mentioned. If multiple intelligences exist then so too must something else - which sadly we've got.

Multiple stupidities.

Be afraid

noreply@blogger.com (Douglas Blane) — Tue, 17 Dec 2019 20:49:00 +0000

Funny thing, fear. I thought I knew what it felt like. An emotion so essentially human shouldn't, after decades on Earth, come as a surprise. But it did to me.

Having had a couple of days to ponder what happened, I believe I've been mistaking fright for fear.

I once came off a Scottish mountain by an unfamiliar route, enticed by a virgin snowfield spread beneath me, sparkling in the low winter sun. Having negotiated the steepest part of the descent, I took my hood off, so I could sense the isolation, hear the stillness and feel the cold from the snow that stretched away from me, as far as I could see.

Instead what I heard was an echoing sound of rushing water from somewhere below my feet. I realised that I'd wandered onto a snow-bridge high across a stream in serious spate. My stomach lurched. I pictured falling twenty or thirty feet into a raging torrent, gasping for air and being seized and tossed by the flood, with no way out of the darkness, until I breathed no more.

Gingerly I stepped backwards, following my own footsteps, until the sound of angry water faded, then turned and walked briskly away, my boots crunching in the fallen snow. There's no denying I got a fright. But I don't think what I felt was fear. It happened too fast.

Fear, I've discovered, needs time to build, as you slowly grasp what is about to happen. It also needs uncertainty. If you can take a fast decision and act on it, fright fades before becoming fear.

Let me share with you how I learned what real fear feels like.

It's late at night in Killearn and the wind that's been blowing from the west all day has dropped to less than a whisper. The skeletal, leafless trees outside my house are dead still now. A small glass of Dalwhinnie and a mince pie have served as a nice nightcap and I'm anticipating the delicious sensation when I slip between the sheets and every nerve-end in my body basks in the heat from the electric blanket. The intense pleasure often puts me to sleep in seconds.

Tonight, though, I want to read a few more pages of a Peter May novel. May has a knack of writing small details of place and weather that convince you it's fact you're reading and not fiction. Cast Iron is the last in a series featuring his forensics expert, Enzo McLeod, and although it grips and I want to know the ending, I'm thinking that's enough murder mysteries for a while.

I expect you know this, but the thing about murder mysteries is that somebody always gets murdered. Read too many and you see serial killers around every corner.

A young woman's body is being lifted from a lake as I start drifting off to sleep. I put the book down, turn the light off and lie quietly in the darkness. There is no sound anywhere in the world that I can hear. And then ...

Two loud knocks on my bedroom door,

I am fully awake instantly. My mind races. Did I dream it? I don't think so. Was it the wind? There is no wind. Can it be one of my sons, both of whom have keys to my house? No, because they don't knock; they open the front door and call out. Is it mice, a few of which have recently got in from my garden?

I'm clutching at straws and I know it. Only humans knock on doors. I've had a bad fright and I don't know why, or what to do about it. I'm uncertain and confused. Fear starts to build.

I realise I'm going to have to get up, go to the door and open it. My best hope now is that I dreamt it. But as I'm pulling on my trousers the loud double knock comes again.

I scrabble with both hands at the top of the bedside table and take three steps towards the door. Fear has reached a peak. Fright plus uncertainty plus the almost certain knowledge that something bad is about to happen.

I look down to see what I've grabbed to defend myself. A small hair-dryer and a ventolin inhaler. If my midnight caller has wet hair and a wheeze, I'm in a strong negotiating position.

I open the door quickly, fully expecting to be confronted by a large male, intent on who knows what.

There is no one there. Moving fast, I search every room in the house. Nothing. As I return slowly to the bedroom, I hear the loud double knock again and this time locate it more precisely. It's not my bedroom door. It's the loft, immediately above the door.

I search the loft with a torch. Nothing.

Eventually I give up and go back to bed. Sleep proves elusive as I try to figure out what could so convincingly simulate a man knocking on my bedroom door.

Days later, I still don't have an answer. If anyone does, please let me know. I welcome any sensible suggestions. I did an internet search, of course, and the answer came back clearly.

Racoons.

I don't think it's racoons.

You can keep it

noreply@blogger.com (Douglas Blane) — Sun, 15 Dec 2019 18:41:00 +0000

Well that's enough real life for now, thanks. You can't say I haven't given it a fair shake.

I've been doing practically nothing but real life since I got the diagnosis five years ago. That's long enough to have formed a solid opinion based on hard facts.

I once asked a friend what he thought about a TV programme from the distant past called Muffin the Mule:

"Tried it," he replied. "Didnae like it."

Well that's pretty much my verdict on real life. I might check back in five years, to see if the psychos, liars and bastards are still running our country, as well their own. But right now I'm going to focus on friends, family and writing, all of which raise my spirits, while current affairs have, for years, been dragging them down.

There is a small problem, though, with having writing as your occupation and main method of relaxing.

Critics excuse me while I spit.

Even my talented friend Gregor, who used to write a light-hearted fortnightly newspaper column, got the occasional bad review. I loved his stuff. So did almost everyone else. But you can't please all your readers.

One serious-minded soul wrote to the paper, describing one of Gregor's offerings as "worthless and uninteresting small talk." Now despite his rugged looks and firm, well-muscled thighs, honed by cycling to a hardness that makes you ... ahem, sorry. Despite all that, Gregor is a sensitive soul and he cried on my shoulder.

But only for a brief moment. Writers inhabit a world unknown to normal people, a world filled with rejection. The phrase you hear most often is "Not for me". I once got a rejection letter from some young punk straight out of journalism school who said he "aimed to discourage tired jokes and hoary old clichés".

Eventually though, if you persist, you find a few editors who like your clichés, offer kind words of encouragement and even pay you real money once a month. But to get there you have to turn a blind ear to countless critics, and maybe possess the kind of mentality that makes someone run straight at a bull.

So having been forged in the fires of rejection, Gregor soon wiped away his tears and doubled down on his trademark style of taking a lateral look at life and drawing lessons from the quirkier aspects he finds there. He wrote an entertaining piece on how he did his ironing, which his critic described as "ridiculous and juvenile" and the rest of us really enjoyed.

And isn't this, dear friends, a lesson to us all in these dark December days, made so much bleaker and more depressing by the prospect of five more years of Tory theft, hatred, ignorance and stupidity?

Don't let people talk you into giving up or changing what you know is right. Look after friends, family and anyone less fortunate than yourself. These bad times will pass.

Scientific studies have shown that the vast majority of us are decent human beings, genetically predisposed to care for each other. The cruel, the greedy and the selfish are in the minority. They are running things now but they won't be forever. If nothing else, climate change might drown the fuckers when the Thames bursts its banks.

And if all that science can't cheer you up, take a look at Muffin the Mule, with his good friend Annette Mills.

Why don't we sing along with Annette and see if the little chap will come out for us?

We want Muffin, Muffin the Mule,
Dear old Muffin, playing the fool,
We want Muffin, everybody sing,
We want Muffin the Mule.

Backwards and in high heels

noreply@blogger.com (Douglas Blane) — Tue, 30 Oct 2018 17:49:00 +0000

Jocelyn Bell, just after she discovered the pulsars

I'm sure you've noticed there are far fewer women than men on any list of famous scientists through the ages.

There's a reason for this imbalance. Female brains are not up to the job. Science is too hard for them, especially physics, the hardest science of all.

At least that's the story a senior male physicist presented to a roomful of young researchers, mostly female, during a conference at CERN recently on gender issues and high energy physics.

Not surprisingly his presentation went down like the Titanic. CERN promptly disowned it and suspended Prof Strumia "from any activity at CERN", pending an investigation.

Now I'm not and never have been a woman, contrary to what my friend Al says. Not in this life anyway. As a Buddhist, I probably was in a past life and will be again, which is nice. So instead of applying my currently male brain to the issue I decide to consult my friend Ann, who besides being a woman is also a physicist and a feminist.

I have no doubt she can give me the facts and the female perspective.

But I have to admit to a slight problem with Ann. Tall, confident and clever, she scares and attracts me in equal measure. Which means when I chat to her my savoir-faire sometimes crumbles, like a gluten-free roll.

I once made the mistake of telling her she reminded me of an Amazon. "You think I sell books and don't pay tax?" she said, with a frown that pushed my panic button.

"Strong, scary warrior-women, enemies of ancient Greece, thought to be a myth but some evidence that they existed, I only meant ..."

She pats me gently on the back, cracking a couple of ribs. "Stop burbling," she says. "I know what Amazons are. Why did you want to talk to me about female brains? Are you struggling to understand them again?"

"Not me," I say, leading the way to the table in the corner of the Burnbrae, where Al and I usually take lunch after a session at the gym. "This Italian prof who claims there's loads of evidence that it's men who are discriminated against in science careers - and in life generally - and not women."

"I saw that," she says, studying the menu. "What do you recommend?"

So we order veggie breakfast and coffee for two from the young waitress who, convinced by our constant bickering that Al and I are an ageing gay couple, studies Ann with surreptitious interest.

"Are you going to take notes?" she asks me.

"If you don't mind. Means I can quote you accurately."

"No problem," she says, popping a mushroom in her mouth. "Let's start with the reaction from CERN and the audience of young scientists. To me it looks incredibly ineffectual.

"This guy trots out graphs and charts and quotes scientific papers that he claims supports the idea that women are under-represented at the top of the physics tree, because their brains aren't up to climbing it, and what does CERN do?"

"Apologises for any offence caused," I say. "Then removes his presentation from its website."

"Exactly," Ann says. "They stick their fingers in their ears and go 'Na na na, can't hear you.' They try to shut down the discussion and sidestep the lorryloads of shit headed their way for hosting this guy in the first place. Does that work? Of course it doesn't. All it does is feed the knuckle-draggers' conviction that they're being lied to. That it's political correctness gone mad. That the 'cultural marxists' that Strumia explicitly blames are covering-up the truth."

I have no idea what a cultural marxist is. Maybe I'll ask her later. Right now I'm more concerned by the vigorous manner with which she's brandishing a vegetarian sausage to punctuate her points. I guess no one's ever died of vegetarian sausage wounds, but I don't want to be the first.

Moving my chair back six inches I put the key question to her. "So what is the scientific truth about female brains?"

"I'm glad you asked me," she says. "Here is what we know."

To be continued.

Head of a chicken

noreply@blogger.com (Douglas Blane) — Thu, 27 Sep 2018 15:37:00 +0000

I don't recommend playing chicken with a bull. I really don’t. A male adult Ayrshire – that guy in the picture – weighs around three quarters of a tonne. I'm barely a tenth of that, soaking wet.

So a contest between me and a bull can have only one outcome, you might imagine.

But you're forgetting that I'm close to the pinnacle of four billion years of evolution and the bull isn’t. Well technically he is too, I suppose. But us monkeys had it harder so we should be smarter.

You have to wonder then why I'm running as hard as I can, straight at this stupendous specimen of malehood. Basically I'm playing chicken with one of the most dangerous animals in Scotland. And I'm not making this up.

Here's the explanation I figured out later. At the time I wasn't doing much real thinking, as you'll see.

Running is like writing. If you're easily discouraged - if you need a sunny day, perfect conditions or warm words of encouragement - you will never get anywhere.

So this morning I'd bounced out of bed resolved to increase my distance, in this comeback programme, from three miles to six. And that remained pretty much the only thought in my head all morning. So I changed into running gear, drove to the start of my usual route, parked the car, walked for five minutes to warm up and started running.

Fifteen minutes later, as I reach the part of the track where Loch Lomond appears, way down to my right, brooded over by dark Grampians, I notice a dozen adult Ayrshires, on and around the track up ahead, chewing the cud and shooting the breeze.

They all turn their heads to look at me with that disbelieving, “What the Hell is that?” expression cows reserve for anything that isn't grass.

The altered angles allow me to see clearly, by the fact that his head is as wide as my front door, that the cow in the centre of the track facing me is actually a well-muscled bull, with terrifying testicles the size of a sackful of turnips.

At this point, about fifty paces out from the herd, a few sparks sputter in my four billion-year-old brain, eliminating right - a barbed-wire fence – and left – a steep ditch then heather moorland. Finally they also eliminate - and here's where the runner ape-brain misfires - turning back. Because we’ve only done two miles and the plan was six.

It's a clear decision with no options. Keep running. Now 20 paces from mister bull and going well, I do my best to seem harmless, by making shush-shush sounds and easing slightly right of the centre of the track, as I run towards him without slowing. Most of the herd is to his right, my left, and I don’t want the big guy to think I’m going after his women.

At the very last moment the bull takes a grudging half-step to his right, giving me space to ease past, so close that I'm tempted to pat his ample bottom in a bonding gesture that would cement our friendly encounter.

A lonely brain-cell, briefly sparking, tells me not to be an idiot, so I don't. I simply run on, feeling like someone has painted a bullseye on my back and dropped me in a field of archers.

After a nervy few seconds I risk a look round, to discover the entire group has lost interest in me and gone back to contemplating the meaning of grass. I relax and run. At exactly three miles out, I turn. By the time I reach the cows again, the bull has wandered off across the heather.

I make it home entirely – though perhaps undeservedly – safe and intact.

And the moral of this story is?

I don’t know why you’d ask a misfiring ape-brain. But perhaps this old Japanese proverb fits the bill - and I’m not making this up either:

“It is better to be the head of a chicken than the arse of an ox.”

Different strokes

noreply@blogger.com (Douglas Blane) — Mon, 16 Apr 2018 17:03:00 +0000

Your life is meant to flash before your eyes when you're dying.

But I seem to have suffered some kind of brain damage, so mine doesn't flash so much as flicker fitfully, and I haven't got past the time my brother wrote 'Miss Bryan is an arse' on my English jotter, getting me into terrible trouble, when we arrive at the hospital, the ambulance crew manhandles me into a wheelchair, and we hurtle along the corridor into A & E at Forth Valley Hospital.

Larbert is a place I know only through road signs, so I'm pretty vague about where I am. Who I am and how I am are also questions to which I have no clear answer. Dongles Something and not so good, I'm guessing, or I wouldn't be here.

I try to relax in the comfy bed, as smartly-uniformed young women bustle around, taking blood from my arm and measuring its pressure. Not the same blood of course. Once outside my veins it's at atmospheric. Inside my arteries it hit 180/150 in the ambulance, but is now back at a high but survivable level of 150/100.

Having poked, pricked and questioned me, the doctors and nurses depart to deal with other patients, while using their test results to ponder what happened and how they're going to respond.

One slim young woman, who got her nursing degree last year from Stirling University, takes my right hand in hers and tells me to squeeze as hard as I can. She repeats this with my left. "Yes there's some loss of strength in your right hand," she declares.

"I wasn't squeezing as hard as I could," I confess. "I didn't want to hurt you."

She tut-tuts and shakes her head. "As hard as you can this time please," she says and the habits of a lifetime kick in as I follow a female's instructions exactly.

"Fine," she says and strides off, leaving me to lie on the bed and reflect on how I got here, now that normal brain activity seems to have resumed.

The day had begun so well, as the rows and columns on the giant spreadsheet I created when I became self-employed danced into line, summing consistently in all directions. This meant I was ready to transfer the incomes and expenditures to my tax return, and submit it.

But then a small, strange incident occurred, like the fluttering leaf that's the first sign of a violent storm approaching.

I lost peripheral vision at one side. My right hand coming in to the keyboard kept taking me by surprise, appearing out of nowhere as if it belonged to somebody else. I'd had a similar episode a couple of days earlier, which passed uneventfully, so at first I wasn't concerned. I did email Rachel to say "I've got vision disturbance again."

When she read "I'be got vidion disturvance" she figured there might be something going wrong, smart cookie that she is, and Skype phoned me.

The second leaf fluttered down when I tried to explain the incident as a result of visual stress caused by peering for hours at thousands of numbers. "There's 500 rows in my spreadsheet," I told her. "And 50 columns. So that makes ....."

I couldn't do the sum. Only blankness lay in my brain, where a number should have appeared. Rachel insisted it was a hard sum. But I knew it wasn't. My brain is below average at many things, such as organising, talking sense and understanding what it's told. But it is good with numbers. For simple sums it just sees the answer.

Blankness is scary. So I'd guess this was when my blood pressure began to rocket. Suspecting a stroke, Rachel started asking questions, such as my sons' names and the current Prime Minister. I got the former but not the latter, but encouraged her to continue, hoping the mental activity would help me recover.

The third leaf came tumbling down when I started stumbling over the words I was trying to say. Clear in my head, they were coming out garbled from my mouth. Rachel asked me to count in threes and I didn't understand. She simplified to "What is 3 plus 3?"

I had no idea and the gathering storm engulfed me. I slumped to the floor, convinced my brain was suffering irreparable damage and I'd be confined to a wheelchair, unable to speak, for the rest of my life. I hoped I'd die instead.

Rachel phoned an ambulance, which came within 10 minutes, and brought me to Larbert hospital, while the paramedic sat in the back, chatting calmly and monitoring my blood pressure. My speech slowly returned and by the time we reached the hospital my brain was still fuzzy but just about working.

After all the tests and talking, the hospital staff sent me home late that day, with a driver and a diagnosis of transient ischaemic attack, also known as mini-stroke.

The diagnosis was probably wrong, the doctors decided two weeks later. But that's a story for another day.

Friendly but forgetful

noreply@blogger.com (Douglas Blane) — Sat, 23 Dec 2017 17:39:00 +0000

Photo by Jeff Moriarty

So I just spent 15 minutes looking for my running top, and getting increasingly frustrated because it wasn't anywhere I'd expect it to be.

Minutes earlier I'd had it in my hand when I answered the phone. So I knew it couldn't be far away. But could I find it? I could not.

I searched the living-room, my bedroom, the bathroom, the understairs cupboard and the car in the drive. By the second time around I was getting really frustrated at this waste of time, because I've a list of things to do before Christmas as long as my python-shaped draught-excluder (that's not a euphemism, by the way).

I was also getting annoyed with myself, both for putting the sweater somewhere stupid and for not being smart enough to figure out how stupid I could be. Getting annoyed with yourself is inevitable at these times, I find. But it's far from helpful.

"You're an idiot."

"I know. But that means so are you."

"You're a bigger idiot."

"Shut up."

It's even less helpful if this conversation with yourself - about the only unfriendly encounter I have, since ageing suaveness eased out youthful angst - takes place when you're searching your car, within earshot of your next-door neighbour. Who's had doubts about my mental stability since she saw me refilling the bird-feeder in my underpants. (And no I don't have a bird-feeder in my underpants. Don't be a smartarse.)

In the end I give up and do an internet search on the difference between dementia and absent-mindedness. (I'll start saying 'googled' when they start paying their taxes.)

Turns out I've nothing to worrry about because they're completely different. Dementia is far more than ordinary forgetfulness or occasional foggy thinking, according to Professor June Andrews of the University of Stirling. "You need to start worrying only if you experience a significant, progressive downturn in your mental capacity."

So if your mental capacity never turned up in the first place you're fine, is how I read that.

Which is reassuring. But to tell the truth I'm still a little worried. Eventually I found the sweater and I went for my run. And I was still wearing it when I returned. Which is all good. But where I found it is the worrying part.

You'll have figured it out already, I'm sure, because surveys show that Friendly Encounter readers are in the top percentile for intelligence. And good looks.

It's a small comfort that I also worked it out eventually. I didn't stumble across the sweater, while hunting around in an increasingly haphazard fashion, searching places it couldn't rationally be, like the oven, the fridge or the dog. No, I stood still and asked myself what Sherlock Holmes would do in these circumstances.

"When you have eliminated the impossible, whatever remains, however improbable, must be the truth."

"You think I'm wearing it?"

"I think you should consider the possibility."

I look down. "You're right, I'm wearing it. Damn and blast. I've just wasted 15 minutes searching for a sweater I already put on."

"What are you?"

"Shut up."

Once again this conversation with myself should ideally have taken place inside my house and not in my drive.

"Are you all right?" asks my next-door, rather atttractive neighbour. "You seem to be falling out with yourself a lot these days."

"I'm fine thanks, Stevie. I'm going for a run."

"Very impressive in this weather. Is that a bird-feeder in your running shorts or are you just pleased to see me?"

"Have a nice Christmas, Stevie."

"You too, Douglas."

And off I went on my last run before an afternoon of mince-pies and excess, to demonstrate our joy at the baby Jesus, undoes all my hard-earned fitness and means I start the coming year with the same pot-bellied arteries I did last year.

So I'd like to take this opportunity to wish a merry christmas to all our readers, in the words of Tiny Tim: "Tiptoe through the window, by the window, that is where I'll be. Come tiptoe through the tulips ..."

No, hang on. Wrong Tiny Tim. Here's the one I want:

"A Merry Christmas to us all; God bless us, every one!"

See you next year, guys. I'm looking forward to it and I'll tell you why.

It's not 2017. That's something we all want to forget.

Blown out of all proportion

noreply@blogger.com (Douglas Blane) — Tue, 28 Nov 2017 15:26:00 +0000

It's hard to know what to say when the first thing a guest encounters, on entering your house, is a white packet in the hall, bearing the words "Inflatable cow pump".

A quizzical eyebrow, a tightening of the lips and a foot wedged firmly in the front door, to prevent its closing, convey her reaction clearly, without words: "You better have a good explanation, son."

As regular readers know, thinking fast is for me practically a superpower. But I take my time over this one. Rejecting my first thought - to lead the way upstairs and show her the inflatable cow standing perkily on the cabinet beside my bed - I decide on a full explanation of how the little chap got there in the first place.

"Why don't you come in, close the door and I'll tell you all about it?" I suggest.

"I'm fine here," she says.

"It's starting to rain."

"I like rain."

I sigh, take a seat on the bottom step of the stairway leading up from the hall, and cast my mind back to yesterday's expedition. "It began when Linda, my son's fiancée, sent us out to buy a bed for my grandson."

"You went out to buy a bed," my guest says, raising the other eyebrow. "And returned with an inflatable cow?"

"It seemed a good idea. My son thought so too. It was a joint decision."

"I haven't met your son. Is he a lot like you?

"Some say so."

"Does Linda have grey hair and a worried expression?"

"No, why would she?"

"Just a thought."

"Well, it wasn't only a cow. We also got a wee book, a hat with a fox's face on, and a plastic telephone with little wheels, so he could zoom around the floor with it."

"But no bed?" she says.

"No bed. The shop had a white one and a black one and we couldn't decide."

"Was Linda happy with your haul, when you got back?"

"Not happy, exactly. I wouldn't say happy. She wasn't jumping for joy."

"How would you describe her?"

"Tell you the truth I didn't see her. I'm only going by what my son told me later. By the time we got back to the flat he was looking kinda pensive. He said maybe I should go home and take the cow with me, as it might push Linda over the edge.

"I dunno what edge he meant. But I said I would and that's why it's in my house, where my grandson can play with it, any time he comes to visit."

My guest shakes her head. "It's a good story," she says. "It has the ring of truth to it. But I haven't been here before, so for all I know this inflatable cow is your best friend and you talk to her all the time."

"What if I do?" I say. "Writing is a tough job. Plenty of writers talk to inanimate objects. It helps us concentrate."

She pulls her collar up, takes her foot from the door and turns to leave. "I'm sure it does," she says. "I'm just worried that sometimes the cow talks back to you."

"Of course the cow doesn't talk back to me," I tell her. "That would be nuts."

She gets into her car and, just like that, she is gone. I wander through to the kitchen, make myself a cup of black coffee, climb the stairs to the bedroom, pat the cow on the head and say, "That didn't go well, old girl."

"Never mind, you've still got me," Ermintrude replies. "Would you like some milk in that coffee?"

Pigs' penises and horse manure

noreply@blogger.com (Douglas Blane) — Sat, 25 Nov 2017 16:03:00 +0000

Some pigs' penises look almost human

Those of you with long memories might recall the very first Friendly, inspired by a rant from my son, released in December 2012 for heaven's sake doesn't time fly.*

I enjoy rants. They make me laugh. But since my son got a car, a good degree, a son of his own and a girlfriend - not in that order I suspect - he seems to have mellowed, and the rants come far less frequently than before, forcing me to look further afield for my amusement.

Last weekend on an enjoyable writing workshop in London, a group of us were asked to compose a little rant, in the style of someone we knew, on a topic assigned to each of us randomly.

I got Organic Food, heard my son's distinctive voice in my head and wrote the following.

"Well first of all it's a daft name. All life is organic so all food is organic. What would inorganic food look like?

"Welly boots. They're inorganic. A light bulb. That's inorganic. Slabs of sodding concrete. They're inorganic. Try eating any of those pal, and see how long your teeth can take it.

"The whole thing is ridiculous, if you ask me. Organic is just a label for luring gullible, middle-class housewives into Waitrose, to buy carrots shaped like pigs' penises and mushrooms with lumps of horseshit stuck to them."

The guy running the workshop, a louche writer and actor called Paul Bassett Davies in pink corduroy trousers - I don't know what he's called in jeans - then asked us to reverse the rant, using the same character's voice.

Once again my son, who's capable of arguing either side of a position, and would have made a great politican if he wasn't a human, spoke clearly in my head and his words ran down my arm, through my fingers and onto the page:

"You can't beat organic food. It's packed with vitamins, minerals and big lumps of horseshit. Who wouldn't want to eat carrots shaped like pigs' penises?

"I've had nothing but organic food for a year now, and just take a look at this body. Feel how hard that muscle is.

"No not that one. Up a bit. That's it. Rock hard isn't it? Well, that's what organic food does for you, pal."

The man in the pink trousers commended me on my sense of humour, but he didn't realise that I don't make this stuff up. It comes straight from my son's brain, usually via his mouth and my ears, but not necessarily, I have just discovered.

So the plan now is to try to tune in to other people's thoughts, and see if they can communicate with me in the same way. Then I'll never have to leave the house again.

*My favourite ancient Chinese proverb, often attributed to Confucius: "Time flies like an arrow. Fruit flies like a banana."

** Harry Confucius from Auchinleck.

The physics of big girls

noreply@blogger.com (Douglas Blane) — Thu, 09 Nov 2017 12:38:00 +0000

We all have our feminine side, science tells us. Even women, although theirs is often harder to find.

My own was obvious from an early age, when I used to pick wild flowers and take them home to my mum. She loved them. The bigger boys I met on the way home were less impressed. I'm not a fast learner, but eventually even I managed to associate the blossoms in my hand with the lumps on my face, and stayed away from the flowers.

I went further and tried to suppress my whole feminine side. But you know when you push down on a bubble in an omelette, it just pops up somewhere else? I started dressing differently to other boys and soon I was getting gigs as a male model. That's a photo of me on the catwalk in my early twenties.

Soon though I had to choose between fashion and physics and it wasn't hard. You can reconnect with your girly side at any age, but if you don't stuff tensors into your brain when it's young and vibrant, they just won't stick.

Females are in the minority in physics, but physicists are the least sexist people I know. They're more interested in brains than body parts, so my colleagues wouldn't have batted an eyelid, I'm sure, if my feminine side had come out to play with them. But I kinda lost touch with her, over the years, even cracking jokes about her absence.

"I got in touch with my feminine side once," I'd say. "But she didn't like me. Last I heard she was shacked up with a spot-welder in Cowdenbeath."

It made a few folk laugh but it wasn't true. She was still in there, beavering away, if you'll pardon the expression. And in recent years she's been re-asserting herself. I know this because people have been breaking off in the middle of a chat with me to say stuff like, "Don't be such a big girl, Douglas".

I'm thinking this is one of those perspective-dependent epithet situations: I'm assertive. You're pushy. He's a grizzly bear. I'm curvy. You're buxom. She's a hippopotamus. I'm sensitive. You're touchy. He's a big girl.

Maybe I am sensitive, but so were Keats and Shelley and no one accused them of being big girls. Why? Because Keats and Shelley wrote romantic poetry and were young and handsome, that's why. If you have smouldering good looks then it's fine to have a sensitive side. But if your face looks like it's gone well past smouldering and burst into flames, which someone then beat out with an empty fire extinguisher, they call you a big girl. That's my experience anyway.

So by now you're thinking, where's the science? Well, I'll tell you. I took a test recently to see how much of my feminine side had survived, and it was reassuring. Turns out I'm 67% feminine and 78% masculine, which is well above average on both scores. (They don't add to 100%, as you'd expect, because each is a separate percentage.)

Some of my friends have taken the test, but I'd like to encourage all my readers to do so, and post the result in the comments below or on Facebook.

Come on feminine sides. I bet you can't beat mine.

There will be prizes.

Gender role test

Tell me if I'm close

noreply@blogger.com (Douglas Blane) — Sat, 09 Sep 2017 14:13:00 +0000

The subject has popped into just about every conversation I've been having this week, so there's no getting away from it, I'm afraid. Much as I'd rather talk to you about music, physics or Al's bulging broccoli, I'm going to have to touch briefly on the subject of sex.

Please don't be alarmed. We are all scientists here. There's no way we're going to toss off any cheap double entendres. We know that's not why you come here.

So I'm sat in the Drake in Woodlands Road, having a friendly half pint and sharing haloumi and asparagus fritters, for god's sake, with my friend Lucas, who's been doing some fancy software development for us, when he makes a remark that baffles me for a moment, before I realise that he's jumped to a conclusion that I guess is pretty widespread.

I've been telling him about the time I officially became a Buddhist, more or less accidentally, when I attended a seminar in Strasbourg, a couple of years ago, conducted by the Dalai Lama. At the end of the two-day event, spoken in Tibetan, but translated into earphone English, the audience were invited to take five Buddhist vows.

Essentially the same in all branches of Buddhism, these precepts are to abstain from harming living things, stealing, sexual misconduct, lying and intoxication. They're pretty much how I live my life and number one, in particular, is what first drew me to Buddhism. So I went ahead and vowed.

But it isn't the first precept that has caught Lucas's attention. "The sex part must be easy for you nowadays," he comments and I'm puzzled for a moment before the penny drops.

"Ah, you mean at my age?"

"Well, you are a lot older than me. And even I am starting to find it tiresome. All that thrusting is hard work, don't you think?"

At this point he tries to match the action to the words, as far as can be done from a seated position with a forkful of fancy cheese on its way to your face, and I think I see the problem.

"Don't stab yourself in the eye," I say. "But show me that again please."

He does so, confirming my suspicions. "You're doing it wrong," I tell him. "That looks like you're trying to shake cake crumbs out of your lap. What you should be doing is this."

I demonstrate, he continues with his version and Rachel returns from the toilet and raises a manicured eyebrow. "Would you guys like to be alone?" she says and I think quickly.

"Lucas was showing me how to dance the Watusi," I say and she shakes her head.

"That's not the Watusi," she says. "That's the Bugaloo. The Watusi goes like this."

Right about now the boss man at the Drake, a hipster with gelled hair and a ginger beard, decides we've crossed a line and comes out from behind the bar. "I have no idea what you three are doing," he says. "But take it outside. You're frightening my dog."

"On the subject of sex," Lucas says, when we're out on the pavement with wisps of water vapour rising from the road in bright afternoon sunshine. "Did you see the latest news? Fifty percent of men don't know where the vagina is."

I ponder this for a moment. "That's tabloid nonsense," I tell him. "Humans would have gone extinct long since, if it was true. The name isn't the object. What's clearly happened is a bunch of guys have failed to match labels and body parts on a diagram of the female reproductive system. Which isn't surprising because it's more complicated than the London underground."

"You're right of course," Lucas says. "Amazes me how babies find their way out, when I get lost going from Waterloo to King's Cross. There's no way 50% of men can't find a vagina in real life. Assuming they can find a woman, of course."

"I'm not so sure," Rachel says. "At least 50% of men can't find the toilet bowl when they're having a pee."

She wanders off along Woodlands Road towards her flat, but can't resist a parting shot over her shoulder. "And I don't think either of you could find your bum with both hands," she says.

Lucas looks at me. I look at Lucas.

"She's right," he says.

"She always is," I tell him.

Road rage

noreply@blogger.com (Douglas Blane) — Tue, 29 Aug 2017 20:07:00 +0000

A silver, stiletto-heeled shoe, looking forlorn on the low wall protecting the entrance to Stewart Street Police Station, hints at a night out that started in smiles, but went south. I briefly wonder if its owner is still banged up in the cells or has hirpled home, oblivious of her loss, on just one shoe.

Once inside I rapidly lose interest in Cinderella's fate, as two young police officers take a firm grip on my arms, while making soothing sounds that fail to reassure me. "It's just procedure for the closed circuit TV, sir. No need to be alarmed."

Leading me to a narrow, windowless interview room, they gesture to a hard chair behind a wooden table and sit down opposite me, blocking the only exit. The thought that I might not be going home today flits across my frontal lobes and I shove it away.

My churchgoing grandmother, when I was a boy, always assured me that "the truth shall make you free", and for many years I believed her. Doubts crept in when I took the sole rap several times for teenage group misdemeanours. But on the occasion about which I'm being questioned today I had acted alone and, having just signed away my right to a lawyer, possess only the truth on my side. I'm thinking maybe I should have gone with the lawyer.

At the end of the interview, which takes about half an hour, giving me plenty of time to tell my story, the young constable who's been asking the questions, while his colleague writes my answers laboriously in his notebook, studies me for a moment and reaches a decision. "Having considered your answers to my questions, sir, and your explanation of what happened, I'm afraid I have to charge you with the offence of acting in such a way as to cause fear and alarm to another road user."

So much for the truth shall make you free, Gran. But as the constable explains what happens next, I realise with relief that I won't be joining last night's revelers in the cells, because it will be months before my case comes up before the Sheriff.

Back home, I ponder this fear and alarm I'm accused of causing. A quick internet search suggests it's a catch-all used by the police to cover a wide variety of offences, including spraying tomato sauce around a kitchen, behaving aggressively with a black pudding, and distracting drivers by rambling naked in Midlothian.

My own offence seems trivial in comparison. All I'd done was get out of my car at the lights, approach the twatmobile behind me and say to the driver, "You shouldn't accelerate when someone's overtaking you, unless you're trying to kill them," before returning to my car and driving away. Admittedly I had tried to open his door so that he could hear me better, and he'd slammed it shut and locked it. Granted, he did look somewhat alarmed.

But why? If I was a fit-looking man in my thirties, driving a big, black Range Rover, would a grey-haired pensioner coming to talk to me cause me fear and alarm? I don't think so. There were no threats. I was fully clothed at the time. My hands were at my sides. They did not contain a black pudding.

I can think of plenty of things that would cause fear and alarm to me. A triangular fin approaching fast in the sea. An email from my ex-wife. Two police officers at my front door. The opening line "Sometimes it's hard to be a woman" from a pub-singer with lank, black hair and a guitar. I have never yet heard the end of that most horrific of all country songs, because my ears fill with blood at the first few notes of its maudlin mimicry of real music. Fearful and alarming, for sure.

But a retired teacher coming to talk to me? Nah. Not a chance.

So what is the moral of this story? Mind your own business? Don't get out of your car? Never object to dangerous behaviour by other people? I don't think so. Let me tell you about Immanual Kant.

Stop. Come back. It'll be quick and painless, I promise.

Kant's categorical imperative is the ethical principle I live by and it goes like this: "Act only according to that maxim by which you can at the same time will that it should become a universal law."

So if you're wondering if something is the right thing to do, imagine a world where everyone did it. If you don't like that world then the action is unethical. If you do like it, then you should take the action. It's your duty. Even if it's difficult. Laws are made by politicians, who can be venal and self-serving. The categorical imperative tells you what's right and wrong beyond human laws.

So if a similar situation happens again, will I point out the error of his ways to a dickless driver whose ego is so fragile that when overtaken by a scruffy old banger he accelerates, putting the lives of the occupants of three cars, including his own, in serious peril?

The categorical imperative says I must, because if everyone did then some of these numbnuts would feel the social pressure and change their behaviour, and lives would be saved.

On the other hand I now possess a little pink slip called a Recorded Police Warning, the nice constable, on considering my story and consulting his superior, having chosen this paper rap on the knuckles, rather than sending me to the big bad sheriff.

And here's the problem. My pink slip says no further action will be taken, but the incident will be kept on file for two years during which, should I re-offend in a similar fashion, it can be dragged up and counted against me.

So what if I encounter another boneheaded driver, out there on the highways? Will I do what the nice policeman insists and stay in my car? Or will I point out the error of his ways, knowing that his fear and alarm in the present could save somebody's life in the future? I think I know the answer but I am not 100% certain. And that worries me. I am way too old to start disappointing myself now.

Sometimes it's hard to be a man.

It's not drupey

noreply@blogger.com (Douglas Blane) — Wed, 23 Aug 2017 20:52:00 +0000

My sister is a keen student of nature, so on returning from a long walk, looking flushed and healthy, she starts telling me about everything she's seen in the trees, flowers and fields, not far from the house we both grew up in. My attention wanders after a while, so I ask a question intended to demonstrate my interest that has exactly the opposite effect.

"I told you that already," she says, with some asperity and I have to admit it's a refrain I'm hearing from lots of people these days. First signs of a failing memory, perhaps. But I have a better theory. My brain has learned to filter key ideas from conversational noise.

"You can't expect me to register every word you say," I explain, while carelessly turning to look out the window at the dreich, autumnal morning. "A lot of it is stream of consciousness dr ..."

A slight alteration of the atmosphere in the room behind me, imperceptible to anyone less sensitive than myself, stops my mouth from landing the rest of me in a deep, dark hole with alligators in it. As it is, I'm hanging over the pit by my fingertips.

"What?" my sister hisses, which isn't easy with a word that has no sibilants.

"Stream of consciousness? You cheeky bugger!"

"Highly regarded literary device," I back-pedal furiously. "Joyce and Faulkner were exponents. Also Virginia Woolf, although some say 'interior monologue' is a better term for most of her work."

"Really?" Helen addresses my back, while my front hunkers down in fear and alarm. "And what about dr...? That was going to be dross, wasn't it? Or even drivel!"

"Certainly not," I say. "Neither of those."

"What was it then?" she says. "I can't think of any other words."

"It could have been loads of them," I tell her. "There are hundreds of words in English that start with 'dr...': Dragons. Dreadlocks. Dragonflies. Dromedaries. Drumsticks. Drupaceous."

"There's no such word as drupaceous," she interrupts.

"There is," I tell her with relief, as the way out of the hole reveals itself to me in all its elegant perfection. As a poet Helen is fascinated by words.

"What does it mean then?" she says.

"Not having all the properties of a drupe, but very close," I say, and she raises an imperious eyebrow so I hurry on. "A drupe is a fleshy fruit with a hard stone surrounding a seed."

"Like peaches and plums?" she says.

"Also nectarines, apricots, cherries and olives," I say. "And almonds."

"Almonds are nuts," she says.

"Technically no," I tell her. "They're the seeds of a drupe. Walnuts, pecans and pistachio nuts aren't nuts either. Some people say they're drupes. Others spot small differences and say they're ..."

"Drupaceous," she says.

"Correct. Not having all the properties of a drupe, but very close."

"Hmm," she says. "That was an interesting but deviously irrelevant diversion. You still haven't come up with a plausible word that starts with dr and isn't drivel or something equally offensive."

"Yes I have," I tell her. "I was going to say 'stream of consciousness drupaciousness'."

"No you weren't," she says. "Because that is drivel."

"It's a metaphor," I tell her. "It's the quality of having flesh on the outside, then a hard stone you have to penetrate to get to the seed inside - that kernel of truth, interest and originality in all your conversation."

I give her my frank, manly expression that oozes sincerity. She doesn't buy it. Never has, come to think of it.

"If I wasn't too refined and feminine," she says, raising her right leg and swinging the sturdy hiking boot on the end of it in a menacing manner, "I would show you the best way to penetrate a hard stone to get to the seed inside."

Hello darkness my old friend

noreply@blogger.com (Douglas Blane) — Tue, 18 Jul 2017 20:16:00 +0000

You wouldn't expect Space to have a smell would you? Because there's nothing much there. That's kinda why it's called Space, isn't it?

Well you'd be wrong. Space smells burnt. (At least it does in our neck of the woods. Elsewhere it smells of raspberries and rum, but that's another story.)

We know about the burnt smell of Space because astronauts carry it back to the International Space Station on their spacesuits, when they've been outside. ”The best description I can come up with is metallic,” said Don Pettit. “It reminded me of pleasant, sweet-smelling welding fumes.”

To Alexander Gerst it had a combination of fragrances, “namely walnuts and the brake pads of a motorbike.”

So what has the smell of Space to do with that photo of my younger son and myself at his Glasgow School of Art degree show, where his main exhibit was that elegant urn, painstakingly assembled from the walls of the room, which he'd pulled down and cut up into little bricks?

“Deconstructing GSA” he'd called it and I'd asked him what it all meant. I should have known better, his standard answer to “What does it mean?” being “It doesn't mean anything. It's art.”

After four years of being asked the question, his response has become dismissively minimalist. It's not easy to convey the sound he makes through the written word, but allow me to try.

Stand up, shrug your shoulders, as he's doing in the photo, and say out loud “I don't know”. Now keep repeating the sentence, gradually removing all consonants, while retaining the vocalised intonation.

What you're left with, if you do it right, is like the grin of the Cheshire Cat. The substance has gone but the sense remains. It sounds like 'Ah-u-oh', and the vocalisation is roughly re-mi-do (D-E-C).

Got it? Now let's join up the dots. My smart son kept telling me, all the time he was at Art School, that science and art are far more similar than they seem. They are, he believes, two roads to the same distant destination.

I think I now agree with him. He as an artist and I as a scientist are both trying to comprehend the strange universe our mums shoved us out into, without handbook or roadmap, and it is far from easy.

Some scientists suffer from an ossified certainty. They have acquired so much knowledge and authority that they've come to equate these with understanding. The best scientists know that's nonsense.

“I was born not knowing and have had only a little time to change that here and there,” said Richard Feynman, one of the greatest scientists of the 20th century, and a man not known for his modesty.

The correct response of any scientist or artist to the ineffably weird world we inhabit is not dogmatic conviction. It's the sound my son makes when I ask him what it means.

Space has a smell. It also has a sound. “Ah-u-oh” is, I believe, one of the fundamental sounds of the universe. It's the sound of space.

It's the sound of art.

It's the sound of science.

Question of time

noreply@blogger.com (Douglas Blane) — Sat, 12 Dec 2015 21:01:00 +0000

When workload is heavy, Friendly Encounters become less frequent. So we've enlisted experienced reporters to fill the gaps with short, topical news stories. (But remember what Walt Whitman said: "Whatever satisfies the soul is truth.")

Reports that David Dimbleby has turned into a hot-air balloon have been greatly exaggerated, say experts.

"He's not mature enough," said Dr Turnovah Newleaf, a biologist at Sussex University. "Metamorphosis into a hot-air balloon is part of the life-cycle of the Dimblebys. But David hasn't reached that stage yet."

His father Richard Dimbleby did his best work after the change, she added. "He used to float above Royal Weddings emitting a sonorous, incomprehensible rumble. It was very soothing."

Dr Phil McCracken, a Glasgow psychiatrist, said: "Close study by scientists resulted in the discovery of Dimbleby Waves. These led to a breakthrough in the treatment of mental disorders, when a machine was invented that could create the waves electronically."

Dimbleby Waves make humans feel secure, said Dr McCracken. "They bypass the bullshit deflectors in our brains. So hospitals use the machines to pacify disturbed patients who believe Britain is run by psychopaths."

Although David has not yet metamorphosed, the change is inevitable, said Dr Newleaf. "You might as well try to stop a caterpillar becoming a butterfly as a Dimbleby turning into a hot-air balloon.

"It's his destiny."