How do we define home?

May 31, 2011 By in Family, Nostalgia Tags: , , , , , , , , , , , 3 Comments

White planter with slogan 'home is where your story begins'.

I saw today that Taransay – the former home of the Castaways – is up for sale. Unfortunately I don’t have a spare £2million to spend on it, but seeing the news has left me thinking all day about my own childhood, which I spent in the Western Isles.

Although I haven’t lived there for nearly twenty years, the countless days I spent playing on the beaches and walking in the hills were happy ones, and I will always feel a deep connection to the place. I am convinced that growing up somewhere so isolated – where the relationship between the people, the land and the sea is still a strong one, and where there is still a real awareness of the rhythms of nature – has shaped my character in fairly fundamental ways. It also says something about the sense of community on the islands that even having been away for so long, when I go back and visit now I still have people asking when I got ‘home’. Continue reading →

Bon voyage DorkyDad!

May 30, 2011 By in Poetry Tags: , , , , , , , , , , , 3 Comments

A view of Paris including the Eiffel Tower

Dear DorkyMum,

Well, the day has almost arrived.  Tomorrow morning I board an Air France flight to Paris, and tomorrow evening I compete in the first knock-out round of the World Cup of Slam Poetry. The first heat will be a tough one — the United States, Canada, Brazil and Scotland. If this were football, I think I know how it would go.  Only two of us will go through to the semi-finals on Thursday. And this isn’t football.

How did I get here? The truth is, by accident. You will recall how engaged I was in the Free Fringe Spoken Word activities last August. It was fantastic, and just as an aside, it is people like Peter Buckley Hill and Richard Tyrone Jones who keep the true spirit of the Fringe alive and burning bright. I decided to go listen to the last Slam of the season — Utter Has Talent — and cheer on my good friend Bram Gieben. The stakes were high — Slam Champion of the Free Fringe, a paid gig in London and a pound of sausage meat. At the last minute one of the scheduled competitors didn’t show up. I was asked to fill in and, well, I won. That led to an invitation to compete in the Scottish National Slam Championships in Glasgow this March as part of the Aye Write Festival. My greatest hope that night was to make it out of the first round. Something strange happened again that evening, though, and I was somehow declared the winner.

So now I am off to Paris. More specifically, the 20th arrondissement, home to the Pere-Lachaise Cemetery where Chopin, Sarah Bernhardt, Edith Piaf, Oscar Wilde, Moliere and Jim Morrison all presumably rest in peace. Wikipedia describes the neighborhood as “an old working-class area now in rapid transformation.” Just what it is transforming to is less clear, though they do add, “this gritty area is probably going to be on of your main night-crawling venues.”

Someone named Gwen is to meet me at the airport, but I have no idea where I will be staying. Apparently friends have been asked to stick random poets in their garrets. But I am off for a grand adventure, the sort of thing I couldn’t possibly have imagined just last summer. The World Cup of Slam, 17 nations battling for the crown, and for the first time in the six-year history of the event, Scotland is represented.

Let’s get it on.

All my love, DorkyDad

*

Photo by Andrea Maschio on Unsplash

Continue reading →

The Book I’d Like to Write: 373 Friends

May 27, 2011 By in Blogging, Family, Travel Tags: , , , , , , , , , , 22 Comments

person using smartphone to look at Facebook

At the last count, I had 373 Facebook friends.

There is more than sixty years difference between my youngest and oldest friends. A dozen of them are related to me. There are seven Sarahs, and three Tims, but only one Wendy.

Some of them are people I went to school or university with, and some of them are former colleagues. There are a lot of fellow mums, journalists, and poets. Three of them are people with whom I shared a tent on the Arctic ice sheet. A small handful of them are people I know through online communities – parenting and photography – who I’ve never actually met.

My friends include several MSPs, one MP, and a former US Congressman. One of my friends made news around the world for disrupting Benjamin Netanyahu’s speech at the Jewish Federation General Assembly, while another once superglued themselves to a British Prime Minister. One of my friends has featured in a Blackberry advert, and one of them turned down the opportunity to go on Oprah. Continue reading →

No More Romance on the Railways

May 23, 2011 By in Nostalgia, Travel Tags: , , , , , , , , , , , , , 2 Comments

woman standing on railway platform

I was so sad to read articles in the Scotsman and Observer this weekend noting that the restaurant cars on East Coast trains have been sent to the great railway heaven in the sky.

I can’t claim to have been a regular of the silver service dining cars – it has been at least three years since I made the journey from Waverley to Kings Cross at all – but I have some wonderful memories of them from the early days of my and DorkyDad’s relationship.

Back in those pre DorkySon days, we sometimes used to trundle down to London for the weekend, and usually tried to time it so that we had lunch on the train. It wasn’t exactly Michelin standard, but there was something very romantic about sitting at a proper table with a white linen tablecloth and silver cutlery, while we sped past fields full of cows and horses.

I was always filled with huge admiration for the staff members, who, despite the shoogling and shaking, managed to delicately transfer bread rolls from basket to plate without dropping them, and pour generous glasses of wine without spilling them.  Oh how they must have laughed at this fine dining novice, the time she knocked a large tumbler of water into DorkyDad’s lap… Continue reading →

Raise a glass to those we’ve loved and lost

May 22, 2011 By in Family, Nostalgia Tags: , , , , 2 Comments

A group of my old school friends ran the Edinburgh marathon today, in memory of a friend of ours – Peter – who lost his life in a car accident just over a year ago.

They were raising money for Riding for the Disabled, an excellent cause, and if you can spare a couple of quid I know they would be thrilled with any additional donations.

I still haven’t quite found the right words to talk about how much I miss my friend. He was one of those rare people who you could go months without speaking to, and then pick up right where you left off, without a hint of awkwardness. He was a sweet and gentle person, with a wonderful laugh and a wicked sense of humour. He sent lovely chatty, handwritten letters. He would regularly leave me rambling, drunken, voicemails at 3am after he’d been out on a Friday night. He was probably the kindest person I’ve known in my life. I think of his family every day, and can’t imagine how hard the last year must have been for them.

Peter was a guest at our wedding – and gave us a gift of the two beautiful wine glasses in the picture above. We don’t use them often, but every so often it feels right to take them out and drink a toast to him. I imagine that tonight will be one of those nights.

I know I won’t be the only one who has lost a friend far too early in life. There is no way to make sense of these things, not much we can do but find our own ways to remember and honour. I could never have run the marathon, but I am so proud of those that did, especially his brother.  I hope tonight that they are sitting and chatting about all the wonderful times they had with Peter, and that they will join me in raising a glass to his memory.