We have had three accidents in the last twenty-four hours (‘they come in threes’, said the GA darkly). Someone put something through one of the glass panels in the greenhouse; the kitchen tap wobbled on its moorings, came loose suddenly, and erupted like Old Faithful – some exciting moments ensued till the relevant stopcock was […]
Herd cats. Keep the peace between the tenor and the soprano in a travelling opera company. Organize Benedictines. But do not, if you value your sanity, engage on a building job with two gaffers and no underlings. The peace has been kept hitherto by Dr Biswell, who is currently in the Beautiful South, and we […]
There is a large triangular chunk of rough land out beyond the garden. It’s hard to know what to call it. Stuff. Raw topography.Whatever it is, if left to its own devices it produces inconceivably large amounts of willow-herb and dock; I suppose it would settle to forest in a decade or so but meanwhile […]
There was once a hairy chap called Garry who we hoped would do most of the painting, but unfortunately, he is out on the rigs –– his regular employment –– having been suddenly summoned away by an exciting helicopter. So I am getting round the upstairs windows, which are going to have to be painted […]
Naboland is a Scandinavian word meaning ‘the neighbouring land’ – I’m not at all sure if it’s semiotically fixed to one particular spot, or means ‘the place next door’ from wherever you happen to be. We went down to Fife yesterday, which is our personal Naboland, from that point of view. It was rather a […]
I went up the scaffolding today to paint the gutter and the upstairs window-frames. By the time you’re up two storeys on a scaffold, it feels like a very long way up; quite pleasant, once you get over seeing the ground between your feet, a strange little temporary world, gritty with stone-dust and bits […]
The Scottish Professor is devoted to two magazines – one is FMR which is an unspeakably chichi art mag aimed at rich ladies (if you think of the Burlington Magazine you have sort of hit the general area but since FMR is in Italian it is much, much more so, and molto elegante). The other […]
The Turra Show, what else? Most of the North-East seemed to be there; but alas, not Winston the Horse. Everyone having been up since five doing the hair-weaves, dreadlocks, manicure, etc., it was discovered at the last minute that he was too big to fit in the borrowed horse-box. There was a great deal […]
Dr Biswell, Ganimedino and I headed off at about lunchtime to witness a major local event, the Banff to Macduff Swimming Race. Banff and Macduff are effectively twin towns. Banff is an erstwhile county seat, which has doctors and lawyers in it and is respectable. Macduff is a fishing town, and contains ships’ chandlers and […]
With recent discussions of Keys in Rogue Semiotics, I thought it perhaps worth throwing into the equation a little scrap on the subject of the Key of England (one imagines with ease the parallel universe in which it might be simply “Key, of England”) especially since Prandial is interested currently in those of us who […]