long distance fan

I wake up early.

The sun is bright.

Part of me wants to stay in bed.

I ignore it.

It's easy to ignore.

It's five in the morning.

I unplug my laptop and carry it to the one spot in the house that gets wifi.

My breathing stops. It makes no difference, I know that. But I still stop it. I hold my breath. Just like I breathe out if I take a long exposure shot with my camera. Just like, I've been told, I'd pull the trigger of a rifle on a hunt.

And then I check the Red Sox score.

You see, if I hold my breath, then they can't have lost the night before. And if they do, well, I might have grabbed a scrap of air when I shouldn't have. Superstitious? Hell yes. It is baseball, after all.

This morning it wasn't sunny, and it was seven. I had to be in work by ten and I debated about whether or not I should go for a run. The haar was in off the Firth. Pirate ghosts wandered the fields around the house and the running path beside the loch. My bed wanted me back in it. I didn't want to go for a run. I held my breath and checked the score.

Red Sox 10, Angels 1.

I went for my run. It's going to be a good season.

truths

Bad white wine does not go with ice cream. That is an absolute truth. I should know better, really, being a born again wine merchant. I should have finished my glass of white and scrounged for something more appropriate, a whisky, or a PX, or something suitably ice cream-friendly. The thing is, it doesn't really matter. Sometimes you just drink and eat what you like regardless. If that means I get booted from the hallowed halls of wine snobbery, so be it.

Speaking of ice cream, does anyone else out there like to eat it with a teaspoon, just to make it last longer? Because I do. I love it. That's another truth, every bit as absolute.

I've moved four miles closer to Edinburgh. Still just outside Linlithgow, but it's the other side that I'm just outside of. It's still the country, but different. There's a cockerel that makes a racket, not just at sun-up, but whenever he feels like it. There's an abundance of home-grown vegetables kicking about. There's a stray cat named Trailer Trash Tom. The sunshine yellow walls boast the remains of hippy home-school geography lessons, with a technicolour atlas of questionable borders. I keep the Raeburn topped up to keep the cottage warm. I sleep in a loft bed carved from a tree. My hosts call it the treehouse. I call it the belfry.

Flat, agent & job hunting continue apace.

for courses

I've spent a week trying not to write about a dog. It's harder than it reads. Canine behaviour is wonderfully idiosyncratic - it screams to be chronicled. A writer's cursed though: as soon as he, she or it mentions a canine, the writer buries himself (etc. etc.) under hundreds of years of literary cliché and universal dog truths expounded by people who were probably better both with dogs and writing than they, the writer, are or ever shall be.

I dealt with a daschund. E. B. White dealt with a daschund. I'd rather read E. B. White's words about daschunds than record my own. Recording requires reliving and I'd rather forget pandering to the pooch, thank you very much.

The non-canine parts of the week have been equine. Horses are just as nuts, have just as many pages of prose devoted to them and I'm even less qualified to share my nuggets of experience, such that they are, with the masses. Or even those that read this blog.

Unlike the canine, I don't want to forget any of it. I've enjoyed learning and re-learning. I can tack up now (not quickly), and even get Pico to stop when I tell her (on occasion). There's a heady rush when you get up to a fast canter and don't feel out of control. Horses smell better than daschunds.

Of course, the heady rush does little to dull the pain of nuts crushing against the saddle when you don't rise on the trot properly. Nothing does.

Cheerios

Breakfast cereal is a cornerstone of childhood. It was for me anyway. My mother and I battled constantly about it. Like all other red-blooded American children I wanted a bowl of cereal designed to put as much sugar into my bloodstream per spoonful as the laws of physics permitted. I read Calvin & Hobbes and was crushed to discover that Chocolate Frosted Sugar Bombs, Calvin’s breakfast of choice, were fictitious. Bill Waterson’s irony flew over my head along with my mother’s cooking spoon when I demanded Count Chocula for the nth time. To my mother’s credit, I never got it. We compromised. Which means she told me what cereal I was allowed and that’s what I ate. It was Honey Nut Cheerios. That was the confectionary limit of my permitted morning intake. I rebelled. I screamed that I hated Honey Nut Cheerios and never wanted to eat them again. I’d claim to go on strike. I’m not sure from what precisely. Neither was my mother, who would shrug and watch as moments after I went on strike I’d pour a glass of apple juice and fix myself a bowl of Cheerios, the episode forgotten with an immediacy that comes only with childhood and old age.

Summers were different. Summer vacation arrived and my treat was that I could have whatever breakfast cereal I wanted. It’s only now that I see the wisdom in this. There’s a considerable gap between loading a child with sugar and sending him into a classroom with twenty other kids and loading a child with sugar and sending him careening into endless sunny days with bikes, beaches, woods and adventure around every corner. The former would result in the disaster while the latter was necessary, the more sugar the better for those summer days. Physicists and engineers seeking perpetual motion machines and better fuel efficiency should look at the output of a ten year-old boy on the Delaware shore after an intake of two or three bowls of Cap'n Crunch. Or, more often than not, Honey Nut Cheerios. My prize won I discovered I actually liked the cereal that was good for me rather than the one that gave me a rare preview into what a comedown from class As would be like. Perhaps I was institutionalised, and like Brooks in The Shawshank Redemption found my freedom to be too much, returning to the familiar in the face of it all.

Perhaps that’s a little melodramatic.

It amused my mother to no end though, that after the histrionics of school year breakfast I would gleefully return from the cereal aisle, wearing only a pair of Jams and a pair of flip-flops, and drop a box of my morning nemesis into her shopping trolley. As summer faded into September battle lines would be redrawn and the fights over breakfast bowls began again.

Trips back home come with little reminders of past behaviour. Every time I order fish, or a salad there’s a bemused comment about my dogmatic refusal to try new things in my youth. My parents marvel at the difference between then and now. I do too. I look at pictures of myself now and don’t recognise the face. In my head, my mirror image is that of my ten-year old self, brushing blonde locks out of my eyes while trying to ride my first 10 speed (grown-up) bike without killing myself. The scar on my eyebrow, the lines across my forehead, the ubiquitous stubble and bald head belong to someone else. I’m kicking and screaming again, not at the breakfast table but at the mirror, not out loud, but in my head.

The face in the mirror is me. I’m not riding my bike and I’m certainly not brushing my hair out of my face. I’m writing a book. I’m hosting wine tastings. I’m looking for a place to live in Edinburgh. I try to chat up beautiful women every once in awhile. Life is handing me the same breakfast compromise my mother did.

I was home for a few days. My nephews had been the week before and they left a half a box of their breakfast cereal. It was Honey Nut Cheerios. They tasted ace.

much ado about...

It's too hot in my parent's new house. I noticed it last summer but wrote it off. It was a hot summer, after all. Houses throughout London turned into saunas. It provided meat for several of my own blog posts, whether as a point of complaint itself or as a metaphor to be twisted sloppily into a complaint about something else. I expected it to be too hot.

I'm a bit surprised to find it too hot in March.

I'm not here to escape from the cold. I'm here, ostensibly, to get my laptop fixed. A hangover from its high velocity voyage out the rear windscreen of my deceased Cavalier, its hinges are askew. If it were a door it would be an inconvenience; a shove of a shoulder to close it and that's that. Sadly, it's a computer.

Every time the door shudders the house around it collapses.

London without money is odd. It's similar to sitting in my room in Linlithgow: a hermitage. Except instead of freezing my arse off, I can't breathe for the heat. And there are no cats to talk to.

My writing's pants of late. This post has set a new record for false starts. The tide's turning though, for this and other things. I'm so used to a sense of impending doom that I'm not sure what to call its opposite - not without sounding like an arrogant or hopelessly optimistic wanker at least.

Some new(ish) pics here.

restart

Sleep is fitful at the moment. I'm trying to restart the book. I never realised there were so many different shades of writer's block. The most recent has been tenacious. The grip loosens though, and I remember bit-by-bit what needs to be done. And bit-by-bit, I do it. It's slow though, almost interminable. It's also deeply disheartening.

I've posted some of the pictures from my St Andrews jaunt last Wednesday. Enjoy. There are a couple that I'm pretty proud of - I love the sheep (even though it's not that great a picture).

flocks

The sun shone bright over the Forth. The careless and optimistic would think spring had come early. I've had too many winters in Scotland to succumb to such foolishness. I've also had too many winters in Scotland to waste such weather.

The bridge sat empty and Fifi's stereo blared boogie-worthy tunes. Further north the light on the bare trees turned the smallest, youngest, branches purple. When, just past Cupar, the painfully slow tractor took the turning to Kenback and Dairsie Castle, I followed it. It's a quiet road, a narrow road. Past the tractor and left after the narrow bridge came a knackered old land rover, hazards flashing, arm waving. I slowed. In the distance an army of sheep, chased by a dog and a quad bike. I stopped. They swarmed around Fifi, bleating and confused. I laughed and assembled camera and lens. Up the hill towards Strathkinness a falcon sat on a fencepost, pretending to be asleep. I didn't stop. The midday sun lit the bay and town below, the mouth of the Eden glowed.

Sometimes the road behind the tractor is the better road.

February is blurry so far.

The wine job is surreal. The routine resembles the memory of a dream weeks after you've woken up. The details fade into broad strokes and the boundaries blur. My shifts are brief and, if in the morning, I forget by the evening that I've worked at all.

I get paid for it. Not very much though.

barometer

While England and Wales recoiled from the strange atmospheric and seasonal phenomenon known as "winter" - taking them by surprise yet again - we received only a light dusting of snow, most of which is gone now. It made for a stunning run this morning. The canal froze over and the fresh snow on the ice revealed the tracks of swans and other birds, searching for holes in the ice to find food. I planned to return with my camera, but all was melting as I ran back.

The barometer in the hall fascinates me. It has a section for 'Change'. It's not qualified by anything else. The other categories are all specific, ranging from 'Very Dry' to 'Heavy Rain'. 'Change' could be anything. As it's a barometer, it's probably a change of weather. A paltry detail. I still like to see the hand pointing to change. I cross my fingers and smile, excited, and hoping it's for the better.

The winter light was amazing today. But the snow was gone.

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Things are odd in Russia, what with killer squirrels and extreme gambling.

Capitulation

It seems like it should mean more than surrender. Perhaps because it has more syllables. I distrust simple synonyms. There should be a modicum of variation in meaning between words, even if it's only a hair's breadth. I prefer capitulation to surrender regardless. Irrespective of their identical meanings, surrender seems to be something demanded by another party, while capitulation is a decision one makes for oneself. That could just be the candy coating on a bitter pill though, I don't know.

I accepted a job at a small wine merchant in Edinburgh last week. I start soon.

The book's prologue is proving excruciating to rewrite, but worth it.

Beethoven's Sonatas and The Be Good Tanya's The Littlest Birds compete for airtime on my playlist at the moment. An odd mix, but a good one.

New pics

destiny, coincidence and the universe

I didn't sleep well last night.

I inadvertently murdered the peacock butterfly.

Yes, the nice one I took a picture of.

No, I don't feel particularly good about it.

Yes, I stepped on it in the dark.

Yes, I probably, as I was debating, should have let it go - or at least moved it somewhere that I wouldn't step on it.

In any case, it put a sour note on the morning debate. The morning debate was whether I was to go to a wine tasting or not. I decided to go. Good champagne at 1030 in the morning, even if I have to spit it out, consoles my guilty, butterfly-murdering conscience.

The tasting was nice. Some of the wines were good. Met some old colleagues. Then, for no reason, I looked at the back of my clipboard. There was an old name tag on it. It said "Andy Cook Luvians Bottle Shop" on it.

How fucking weird is that? My old flatmate/boss/best mate's clipboard? At a tasting I nearly didn't go to, and wouldn't have gone to if I hadn't killed the butterfly? The wines were overshadowed by a sense of weirdness and destiny for the rest of the tasting. I kept expecting something hugely important and life-changing to happen. I had another glass of Tokaji just to make sure I didn't miss it.

Nothing else happened. We ate lunch, I said goodbye to my mates and grabbed my car with 2 minutes left on the meter.

It was kind of disappointing: destiny quickly replaced by peculiar coincidence. I'm beginning to think that's how the universe works.