birds on the water, coffee on the boil

The cygnets have nearly lost all their grey. I saw the four of them fishing at the mouth of the Burn, where it spills next to West Sands and into the bay. Their parents were nowhere to be seen.

They'll be gone soon. I don't know where. Somewhere with a nice bit of water and a lack of predators hopefully.

My first espressos of the day. I started with tea and moved on to coffee. Usually it's the other way around. Usually I hammer the coffee down until I need something a touch more soothing. Today I've got it backwards. I will most likely move back to tea. The mixture of these espressos and Carmena Burana thundering through the flat is akin to plugging my fingers into a wall socket. I'm not sure I can type accurately as fast as their desire to move. It means I must occasionally break from typing and air-piano grandly along to the music. It means that my fingers get angry when my brain stops telling them what to type. They care not if it makes no sense, if it's gibberish and the mutterings of lunacy, they just want to keep typing, my ears want to hear the click of the keys, and my brain's not entirely sure what to give them. Adverbs help in this situation. Adding that -ly, weighing down sentences with needless enhancements keeps the fingers busy and lends a pleasing wordiness that seems good at the time but in the cold light of a caffeine comedown will need brutal and savage editing. Strunk & White's Elements of Style is firmly fixed to my writing conscience and must not be ignored.

The problem with the coffee is that it tastes so damned good. Espressos in particular. And I can make them in the comfort of my own home. It fuels the writing, not just the caffeine but the ritual - the short espresso cup next to the pint of water next to the mug of tea. Everything I need is there. I sip and type and flip pages and repeat. I write a sentence or a paragraph and take a sip and the texture and flavour reward every turn of phrase.

The door to the balcony's open and it's raining in the brilliant sunshine. One of the swans is fishing near the harbour lock. I can't tell if it's one of the cygnets or not. I hear the shouts of the lobstermen and watch as the swan drifts into the sparkle of reflected sunlight. I'm writing it all down, my fingers demand it. It's otherworldly, out my door and somewhere else entirely. And then it's gone, drifts out of view but drifting still in mind.

I think I'll make some more coffee and write some more.

I cannot think of anything I'd rather do right now.

monday repose

The weekend falls back into a bit of a haze. There was a lot of drinking, a lot of whiskies ordered alongside a lot of beers. A lot of headaches suffered and snooze buttons hit. Saturday morning it took a few moments to realise the remains of pizza on the table were the remains of MY pizza.

I performed in front of hundreds of people Saturday night, still suffering from Friday. Then the pub beckoned and back I went. Friendly faces appeared and we opened a bottle or two of wine. A shitty band took the stage and seemed incapable of using their instruments with shrieks of feedback. The only sanctuary was beer and banter and then, when the noise became unbearable, an escape to Aikman's and more beers - this time with whisky chasers. Just like Friday. Someone stole my Red Sox hat. The barman called time.

I wandered home hatless in the cold, refusing to succumb to pizza a second night. I got home and found my stolen hat on my bed. I drank a beer I didn't need and snacked on cheese and salami.

Now Monday's here and the coffee tastes good. I baked bread and wrote and cooked some lunch. Whatever I needed out of my system seems gone for now and there's quite a lot to do. Fuzzy memories and fresh baked bread, the echoes of laughter and the bemusement of all that's passed are not a bad way to start the week.

sinking fowl

Cormorants often look as though they're sinking. It seems like they're struggling to stay afloat, like they need to get the better of their buoyancy. I watch them from my window, their dark shapes barely bobbing along the top of the water. I expect them to disappear underneath the surface but they never do.

Time's sped up and March has arrived. The bitter cold today suggests that once again those heralding the start of Spring (myself included) have been a touch premature. Whether this cold is an anomaly or the beginning of another cold snap is beyond my meteorological capacity to predict. Even the Met Office seem noncommittal.

Life's been mostly quiet. Writing comes in starts and stops and while the clarity of my goals is pristine, my discipline still wants for patience.

A couple of nights ago an impromptu dinner party lit the flat up with wine, banter and goodwill. Nothing elaborate - penne bolognese with Ben & Jerry's and a supermarket chocolate tart for dessert. Chat ranged from bar friend etiquette, to pick-up lines, to the sorts of acrobatic feats on display in certain strip clubs. Lines that seemed etched in legend at the time now fade in memory, drowned out by the echoes tear-streamed laughter. That all-consuming outburst that you get lost in, laughing so hard you can't breathe. It seemed endless and then it ended, the guests head home and my flatmate and I sat sipping beers, watching The Boss raise hell at the Hammersmith Odeon in '75.

These unplanned blips punctuate my life at the moment; an unexpected dinner party, a trip to see my god-daughter, the odd evening of improv comedy (I'm performing again and loving it).

I need these things. It all blends together otherwise.

Without them I'd be staring out the window, wondering if the cormorants are sinking.

wee update.

My camera's sitting on the kitchen table, useless on this mute, bleak day. The sun was out this morning only for its rising. It crept above the water and for a few moments it lit up the sea and the sand. The low-hanging pall obscured it soon afterward and has done so since.

I've been pondering ghosts and shadows and trying to work out the difference between motivation and purpose. Destiny and humanity play their part.

I've also been reading a lot about baseball.

dualities

It's a grey day and the sea's calm. The soft surf laps the shore with a fizz; it sounds like a fresh-poured gin and tonic.

A few days ago my flatmate and I threw a baseball around in the afternoon sun. Walkers were out in force, along with their dogs or partners, sometimes both. We got the odd look - baseball is uncommon in Scotland. The banter was about baseball; chat regarding the Red Sox and Spring Training, the state of the team and the league. In the afternoon sun the summer seems close and spring even closer.

The next morning I woke up to a ghostly grey light from the window. I staggered, yawning, and saw the harbour veiled in white, a deluge of snowflakes whipping past my window. It was still early, most of the snow untouched. I snapped a bunch of pics on my wanderings to and from work. As enthralling as the weather was the reaction to it. Every spare patch of snow found people building snowmen, every hill and incline found sledgers with hastily purchased and sometimes makeshift, improvised vehicles. It was like rain in the dessert; grown men and women sticking out their tongues to catch the snowflakes, the whistle of the odd snowball flying by my ear.

And now it's a grey day with calm, whispering seas. There's no sign of the snow. The lonely mounds of former snowmen, the last reminders of winter's last(?) hurrah have all melted away, leaving carrot noses and branch arms looking out of place and odd on their patches of grass. Former limbs are now just debris.

I look back on the last few days, from the afternoon sun to the fleeting blizzard and now to the mild calm, and I find some memorable nuggets. I took my UK citizenship test yesterday, and passed. Failure frightened me more for the ignomony than anything else. I can't mention the questions I was asked due to some sort of confidentiality agreement. They don't really matter. I knew the vast majority of them. I checked aftwards and think - think, mind you - I only got one wrong.

There's a ways to go yet. Passing the test is the first step towards UK citizenship. I've been here for 20 years and it's taken me this long to start looking towards getting a passport. It's always been on my mind. I don't think you can live more than half your life somewhere and not be changed somewhat by it. I think that duality suits me. It's not that I'm more American than British, or the other way around. I'm not entirely either, really. Ideas of loyalty and patriotism frequently confound me, though moreso how misaligned the judgement of those qualities seem to be. Instead I'll stick to my ideals, and remain loyal to those. I think that makes me a more valuable citizen of either country, and soon to be both.

Conflict will always exist, no doubt. I'll bristle at the odd barb against the States, especially those steeped in ignorance. Complaints about peculiarly British traits will continue to irk. But I've made peace with these things before, quite successfully. I remain intensely curious about both countries, their startling similarities and their vast chasms of difference.

It's just a piece of paper, a passport, a small sheet of legitimacy. Recognition for the duality I accepted a long time ago. It means little or everything, depending on my mood.

It's just me, standing on a beach on a grey day in Scotland, throwing a baseball while the sea whispers and fizzes, smiling at the odd looks cast my way.

finally

finally
Originally uploaded by rwhbray

Woke up the other morning and this is what I saw. There's quite a lot to write here, but thought I'd share this first. Expect a long, rambling entry very soon.

univeral law and the disarray of a desk

I can't really clean my desk at the moment. The laws of the universe forbid it. Well, they make it very difficult. Matter can neither be created or destroyed, you see, whilst important paperwork can be created in vast, immeasurable quantities and yet... still cannot be destroyed. Temporarily lost? Yes. But only at the time, that singular moment, that it is needed most.

My desk sits in the corner of my room, to the left of the window. If it faced out the window I'd do nothing but stare. It's a hexagon. To the right lies a haphazard pile of manila envelopes filled with bank statements, car info, health documents, assorted 'important docs', receipts, demands, final demands and all manner of paper trail. More organised people would file these things. I move the envelopes behind the curtain and occasionally look frantically through them after a phone call from a withheld number.

The slide-out keyboard tray holds no keyboard. Submission chapters scrawled with red and black ink, redrafts and new additions to the final chapters of my novel, early-stage cover letters, more important documents and final demands and the first few sections of a Phd I'm editing sit there. They sit there because they are of immediate concern. If this were an office, they would be labeled 'urgent'.

There are no drawers in my desk, only shelves. One shelf carries several copies of submission chapters so poorly edited that I should just use them as scrap paper. I feel environmental guilt when I think about that shelf. It also holds various spare stationery items - envelopes and the like; Conqueror paper for important letters, printer paper for producing yet more poorly edited print-outs of submission chapters; it is the shelf of dead trees.

Dead laptops adorn the opposite shelf - three of them. Two iBooks and an old PowerBook, with a cylinder of blank CDs to keep them company. I really ought to eBay those sometime soon.

My printer lives on the bottom shelf, scattered spare ink cartridges strewn about and on top of it. I'm not printing much out at the moment, but I should be. Photos, writing, that sort of thing should be printed - pressed into reality from the scattered, fickle electrons on my MacBook.

Six corks lay in various places atop my desk, some from extraordinarily fine wines. I use most of them to prop my keyboard up, as its little feet broke some time ago and those are the kind of spares you never find anywhere. Some of the things here make more sense - my laptop speakers and laptop, my keyboard and mouse, mugs full of pens, staples, thumb tacks, paperclips, and a lollipop with a tequila worm in it. Four notebooks - two moleskin - and two sketchbooks. I've not sketched anything for years and I've only used two of the notebooks thus far. There's a photo of my nephews and assorted pens, a pair of Oakleys, an iPod and a few sets of headphones kicking about. I see another couple of important sheets of paper that I really ought to do something about as well. A quaich full of loose change sits in the corner, occasionally pilfered for the sake of a pint. Some novelty dice also linger amongst things, serving little purpose but to add to the sense of disarray.

And this is my desk reasonably tidy. Not clean or organised, but reasonably tidy.

To the left sits a pile of papers, an odds n' ends shoebox and more incredibly important documents as well as various cables needed to connect various things to my computer and my camera. My specs case is there too, and an unopened packet of drawing pencils. They might explain my unsketched books. I can see my counterpart Driver's License shoved between some untranscribed tasting notes. There's a copy of the lease for my flat underneath. More corks. A disposable camera that's been used but not developed for 5 years.

I cannot imagine what's on there. I'm not sure I want to.

Every time I tidy my desk it's that pile to the left that gets bigger. I tend to just chuck all of it over there.

The detritus on either side, the stuff underneath and the rubbish on top - every once in awhile it gets to me. I sit down to write and find it stunts me. Some people file things for the sake of organisation, for some piece of mind that comes with things being in their proper place, imposing order in a universe that's quite happy with its own order, thank you very much. I need to file things to avoid distraction. Organisation is a luxury, a bonus, but never really a necessity to me. The odd frantic search for a bit of paper doesn't bother me too much. But the odd pointless scrap of bureaucracy can spell disaster. An old tasting note peeking out from under the shoebox will pique my interest and that quickly leads to a wasted 5 minutes, hour, afternoon.

Matter cannot be created, but clutter and endless distractions seem to create, recreate, procreate, duplicate and accumulate without end. Perhaps it's time, finally, after three and a half months, to buy a filing cabinet.

Matter cannot be destroyed.

But it can be hidden.

lazy flurry

The winds abate and the clouds rise and a gentle flurry of snow drifts with a lazy abandon, often not bothered with gravity's grip. The sea laps instead of rages. The air has that crisp taste to it that comes with stillness. It pinches the inside of your nostrils, but doesn't hurt. The snowflakes move so slowly you can follow one for a good few seconds. I watch from the window, looking up from my notebook and scrawling script.

I've been thinking about India quite a bit of late.

It was a bit more than six months ago now, though it seems closer. Sometimes much closer. That's not a bad thing, really. I'm still writing it up. I don't know why it's taken so long. It's a peculiar project, writing about India. I can't make that move from pen and paper to the laptop. I'm still scribbling in the Moleskin I bought for the trip - a last minute purchase in Terminal 3 at Heathrow (along with some plug adapters and a couple of pens). I've lost the pens. The plug adapters turned out to be the wrong ones (India has two different plug standards - sometimes more) - I only bought them because I worried adapters I bought earlier might be wrong. Both claimed to be standard in 'Parts of India' and both failed to stipulate which parts.

Anyway, I'm still writing about India. I took notes while I was there, but never really got round to updating the journal during the trip. The notes I tapped into my (then) new iPhone or wrote in block caps on journal pages, marked by asterisks to separate them from my attempt at travel narrative. I have trouble with tense on travel narrative - I slip from past to present often, losing track and often shrugging my shoulders and scribbling onwards. Pen and ink make regret pointless; going back is not an option. It's something I can fix when I type it up, I tell myself.

And I tell myself to keep writing, keep remembering. That's why I cannot abandon my India notebook for the clatter of the keyboard. Something about the pen on paper, something about that curious scratching, keeps my memory sharp, keeps the detail from being lost. The banks of the Gomti in Lucknow, the stench of the Ganges, my constant sense of thrilled unease and total displacement all return as the pen pours.

My tense slips into the past. I'm wary of some of my memories, wondering idly if my mind's eye created a touch of filler for the gaps, writing only the details I'm sure of, leaving the odd question mark. Self-doubt in recollection isn't so uncommon - it gets worse as time goes on, as those brilliant days in July fall further back. Insight's worrisome. Often it's hindsight, something garnered on further reflection as the tense continues to slip. Most of my epiphanies on the trip were simple and probably came to many a traveller before me, if not all of them.

So I keep scribbling. I'm in Lucknow at the moment, touring a school along the banks of the river Gomti. The building amazes me. It seems of no continent: simply a testament to grandeur. It was to be a residence, apparently, but the owner died before completion and willed it to be turned into a school. Bamboo scaffolding adorns one of the wings in some attempt at restoration. There's a permeating damp from the river and the threatening, omnipresent monsoon. The morning began in Delhi and now I'm at the La Martiniere. After that we'll head to the famous Residency, landmark to the Mutiny of 1857. The tour guide drones on and does his best to bore the shit out of me. It's only the second day of the trip and there's so much to do.

I breathe deep and look up from the notebook.

I'm sitting at my table in the flat. It's darker out, but the odd flake drifts by, catching the light. It swirls and twirls and bounces about before disappearing on its course. The flat's empty and my tea's cold. It's not masala chai. I lose India and for a moment all the things of now come back to me and my breath shortens.

Another cup of tea and a glance down at the blue ink scrawled between the thin brown lines. I reread my last page or two.

I've lost track of tense again.

winter

winter
Originally uploaded by rwhbray

Just a wee shot of St Andrews pier in the recent gales. I'm working on a new post as well.

debates and morning weather updates

There is a small lump of melting snow lying in the bottom right corner of my window. Flurries fly every now and again, but as far as I can tell, that's the only snow that's settled. And it doesn't seem to be settling for long. I find it an outrage that London gets snow and St Andrews, perched on a rock jutting out into the North Sea, 400 miles to the north, gets fuck all.

Ah... nevermind. Since starting the last paragraph a blizzard has appeared, belting hail and snow against my window with an assaulting, though pleasing, rattle. Already the beach is turning white. In the space of 3 minutes. Even the seagulls look a mite unhappy.

There was a point to this post. I was pondering my morning run in the face of yet another north eastern wind. I wake up and every morning the waves loom larger. The howls, whispers and wails from out my window shriek louder.

*weather update* The sun is now trying to break through, the snow/hail has stopped and already the beach is reverting to its desaturated winter tan. It's been about 6 minutes since the blizzard conditions.

The blizzard's started again.

It's mostly hail now. But as soon as I type that, to spite me, it slips back to snow, and the rattle of falling ice is replaced by the hush that snow makes as it falls.

The sun's out, not a flake in the air.

A mist hangs over the beach, rising lazily towards the sun that lifts it. It's barely above freezing and there's a gale blowing. I can't decide if the weather's reached some level of stability, enough for me to go for my run. The sun hides again and the flakes start to fall and I value the comfort of my flat. No one would blame me if I don't go. I've no whip-cracking trainer, no drill sergeant there to demean me should I choose comfort and warmth.

The wind sounds louder than it did 5 minutes ago. And I still haven't decided whether I'm running or not.