Lots of Merlot and a man from Glasgow…

June 1, 2011 By DorkyMum in Poetry Tags: coupe du monde, coupe du monde du slam, Edinburgh, France, Glasgow, La coupe du monde de slam poésie, Paris, performance poet, performance poetry, Poetry, Scotland, slam poetry, Slam Poetry World Cup, Young Dawkins, Young Dawkins Poet 1 Comment

man on scooter in French city

Dear DorkyMum,

Well, they weren’t kidding when they called it the Coupe du Monde — The World Cup of Slam Poetry. Now in it’s fifth year, there are competitors here from 16 countries, including Gabon, Brazil, Portugal, Russia and the Seychelles. We are indeed a Rainbow Nation of Slammers.

The whole event is being run by a wiry man with a styled afro named Pilote. He rides around on the narrow, hilly streets of the the 20th arrondissement on a banged-up scooter with a wrap-around roll cage, dashing from venue to venue, always smiling. This is a big cultural event for this part of Paris — there are banners everywhere and a local elected woman politician showed up to help officially get things kicked off in an opening ceremony last night at the Place Frehel. We drank Merlot and cheered. Continue reading →

How do we define home?

May 31, 2011 By DorkyMum in Family, Nostalgia Tags: America, childhood, definition of home, Edinburgh, going home, Harris, home, parenting, Scotland, Taransay, United States, what is home 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 DorkyMum in Poetry Tags: coupe du monde, coupe du monde du slam, Edinburgh, La coupe du monde de slam poésie, Paris, performance poetry, Poetry, Poetry Slam World Cup, slam poet, slam poetry, Young Dawkins, Young Dawkins Poet 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 →

No More Romance on the Railways

May 23, 2011 By DorkyMum in Nostalgia, Travel Tags: dining, dining car, dining carriage, Edinburgh, Edinburgh to London train, finance, food, rail travel, railway, railways, restaurant, romance, train travel, trains 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 →

The importance of Scotland’s voluntary sector

May 9, 2011 By DorkyMum in Activism, Family, Scotland Tags: Birth Resource Centre, BRC, charitable giving, charity, Edinburgh, fundraising, parenting, PPC, pregnancy, Pregnancy and Parents Centre, Scotland, scottish politics, third sector, voluntary sector Leave a comment

Neon sign saying Do Something Great

It was great to see that the mini-profile of Lothians List MSP Kezia Dugdale in the weekend papers stated that she is keen to focus on improving things for the voluntary sector. As someone who previously worked for an environmental NGO, and spent as much time scrabbling around trying to raise my own salary as I did on campaigning, I can confirm that a shake-up of the funding system for the third sector would be very welcome.

In the SNP Manifesto section on the voluntary sector they certainly seem to be saying all the right things, but it’s important that MSPs from across the parties keep up the pressure on the new Scottish Government to actually deliver their promises.

I’m hoping that cross-party support for a strong voluntary sector will be good news for an Edinburgh organisation very dear to my heart – the Pregnancy and Parents Centre. Continue reading →

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