Hoped for Connor MacLeod, got Para Handy

Could be the story of my life!

The much heralded Gathering took place in Edinburgh this weekend and by all accounts was a terrific event. When I first heard the title of this Homecoming event naturally, I pictured Christopher Lambert in his most gorgeous and best role – Highlander! The actual Gathering 2009, was more Scottish than the Scots and was aimed at attracting the Diaspora, rather than indigenous fantasy fans. Sword dances rather than supernatural sword fights.
http://www.clangathering.org/

Escaping this crushing disappointment, I headed to Glasgow. The Clyde was full of vessels, civil and naval, both old and new. The sword-fighting theme persisted, with pirate ships booming canons and swashing their buckles in front of the BBC building next to the Glasgow Science Centre.
Then I spotted the Vital Spark. Oh bliss, such memories of the Para Handy stories and the original programmes of my childhood. However, I'm told that some idiot wiped the tapes of the old programmes. Not all is lost as the remakes are fine, proving that it is not always the case that there can be only one!

http://www.parahandy.tv/

http://www.neilmunro.co.uk/

http://wapedia.mobi/en/Para_Handy

Visualising summer

Can I have my money back? This is not the summer I ordered online last month. No, what you’ve sent is wet, thundery and miserable. I want the blazing hot sunshine I was promised by that there weatherman. And by all the foolish optimists who spent the whole of May telling each other that the summer would be long and hot.

I suppose I’ll have to make do with a virtual summer. One that happens in my mind, or in memory.

To start this off here is a pic of a BBQ, the one and only so far this year that Sig Other and I have managed to create. We are a bit out of practice, so some things got closer to the charcoal than planned!

I adore veggie BBQ food. I used to like non-veggie, but that was a quarter century ago or more. I got hooked on BBQ food when, as a teenager I went to Canada for a stay. There, on the spacious balcony of a distant cousin’s penthouse flat on Yonge St in Toronto, we BBQ’d every night. This was BBQ at its most civilised.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Yonge_Street

It continued during my stay in some other distant cousin’s cabin on Lake Kashagawigamog. There are no pics of this lake as the interwebby thingy is not a suitable place to display my first and last attempt at fishing. It was a traumatic event, sitting in a small boat in the middle of the night in the middle of the lake being eaten by insects and dangling live bait off a line into the water. Most hideously, I can never forget being accidentally slapped in the face by a wriggling dying frog with which one clumsy fishing companion had baited his hook. Fortunately, I managed not to catch anything, so never faced cooking and eating something I’d killed myself –shudder!

Eventually I had to come home, leaving behind sun and BBQs but I soon invested in a small BBQ for Dad’s next birthday, so I could convert the family to this way of eating. They were happy to be converted, but we never managed the level of civilisation of my first BBQs. And rarely has the weather managed to stay hot enough to provide optimum BBQ conditions either.

I became rather adept at creating homemade dead-burgers, but have never managed to find a way of making a veggie meat-substitute burger. Until recently!

TVP burger

Soak TVP (textured vegetable protein) in water for ten minutes until it is swollen but not at all runny.
Prepare breadcrumbs (I used gluten free wholemeal bread, as it is so much lighter than ordinary)
A small amount of tahini
Very finely chop spring onion
Very finely chop a little fresh herbs of your choice
Beaten egg
Seasoning

Mix all together adding whatever extra is needed to make the mix fairly sticky and shape into very small patties. Large sized ones will crumble too easily.

These are still too delicate to grill straight onto the BBQ, so use a vegetable basket or fish griller or some other tool to contain the burgers and so that they can be turned over easily.

The easiest way to cook veggie BBQ is to skewer a selection of veggies on bamboo skewers and baste with BBQ sauce. My favourite vegetables are aubergine, which is great, sliced lengthways and brushed with marinade, as is courgette.

Halloumi cheese is substantial enough to withstand the BBQ treatment as long as you avoid the low fat one, which is too watery, so shrinks to nothing.

But actually, the very best thing about BBQs is the social aspect. It is great to share food outdoors and to take ages over cooking, chatting and enjoying a small bottle or two of Peroni, and leaving the clearing up till some other time.

Disappointed for decades

Forty years ago, someone walked on the moon. A select few followed in subsequent moon landings then it all went quiet. Plenty of satellites and other person-free objects have been launched into space, especially on behalf of the military/industrial complex. They don’t seem to need permission from an earth-tied population to spend copious amounts of money. They just commit grand theft of our taxes and spend it on boy’s toys to float around spying on everyone or various other competitive willy waving exploits to the benefit of no one, except the aforementioned military/industrial complex (and their immoral shareholders).

The few useful scientific experiments carried out in space are fine, but where would we have been had space exploration kept up the early progress that put these brave souls up there 40 years ago. Just compare the rapid development of mobile phones since the 1980’s and the way those have been transformed from plastic bricks to the weird and wonderful variety, we have now. So, I firmly believe humankind could have taken an incredible journey in these 40 years had equivalent money been spent on getting us out of this gravity well and into the solar system, that was squandered in killing various populations across this planet.

Where were you when those historic pictures were beamed back to sitting rooms on Sol Three? I have clear memories of being allowed to stay up to watch this. I was optimistic of witnessing helmeted humans lumbering around on the moon and being gobbled up by moon monsters. I was beyond upset that nothing alien ate them. I’ve gotten over that disappointment and can see that meeting characters like the delightfully tusked demoiselle above, might not have encouraged space exploration. I do not believe we are ever going to be visited by an advanced species who will save us from ourselves. This is a common theme of much science fiction, but in reality, we have to become adults who can make their own decisions and not look to space (or other) gods to save us.

My other assumption on seeing the moon landing is that I would grow up and go into space. This was not a career aspiration to be an astronaut merely that we’d all be living and working in space or on other planets. I realise that this was optimistic and that a few decades was not going to produce anything Star Fleet would recognise, but I was hopeful as a child that science could do anything.

I remain disappointed that none of these expectations was ever met. In the way that I had grown up and accepted in young adulthood that I had run out of time to become a child prodigy, I approached middle age only occasionally railing against the fact that going into space was never to be my reality. However, I have a longer-term plan. It is now fairly easy to have a gram or two of one’s ashes sent into space, and the cost is reducing all the time as it becomes more popular. Try an online search for this and see how many organisations are offering this.

All three images were culled from this really fun site ...

http://picture-book.com/

Beyond the Cathode Ray Tube

http://www.tvhistory.tv/1937-BairdT14.JPG

My telly died. I ordered a new one on Wednesday and whaddayah know? It arrived this morning.

I am jinxed on the whole TV front. I have lost count of the TV's I've owned since my first black and white portable which my folks presented me with for my 18th birthday. That was fairly unusual at that time as most families sat around the one TV and watched whatever was on one of three dismal channels. Now, I have umpteen dismal channels, I-Player (or Play it Again Sam, as I labelled it) and goodness knows all what such as DVD and video. Still not a lot to watch.

But so many people live in households with more than one TV, even I with my pretentions to soft focus greenness feel the need for a portable TV and freeview box in my bedroom - not that I ever watch it, but habits die hard. However, I am unlikely ever to have a screen embedded in the bathroom wall in order to lie in ass-milked splendour while peering through the steam at Corrie.

Mother tells the story of their first TV. Grandfather, who was the original Inspector Gadget in many ways, decided to order the parts and assembled his own TV set in time for the Coronation of the Windsor Woman. According to mother, all the neighbours crowded in around this tiny screen to see the historic event. No doubt grandmother was proudly entertaining them all throughout the day. It obviously had a lasting impression!

As my previous two TV's have obligingly (from TV manufacturers viewpoint) keeled over soon after the guarantee ran out, I now have a five year warranty. At least that way, I get five years out of the goggle box instead of one or two.

Because it is not a colossal screen, I reckoned I could assemble the mount myself then wire it into the various boxes that lurk under my TV stand. I did this, for once, following the instructions and was quite pleased with myself when I noticed a bit left over.

Damn!

Oop N’awrth

Another of my ‘always wanted to do that’ tick-the-box activities is to visit the mysterious hinterlands adjacent to the M60 motorway. I persuaded Sig Other to accompany me to Bolton, situated on the A666 a short distance from the M60, for a day out in this north England industrial town.

In the centre there is a square outside the rather glorious architecture of the town hall. A temporary exhibition was housed in a marquee in the square. On entering, I found a small, but fascinating display featuring items of interest on the lives of Gypsy, Roma and Traveller people which was part of GRT History Month.

http://www.grthm.co.uk/index.php

Like many (I suspect) I am ignorant of the history of these minority ethnic groups in our local and European population and have no appreciation of lives lived, in some cases, so differently from my own. The link above goes to a truly educational site where I spent a considerable time being enlightened and humbled by the history of people who have contributed in many ways to our society.

The Bolton exhibition highlighted some examples of GRT people’s lives in north England where people live(d) and travel(led) on the canal system, while others bring their circuses and fairgrounds round the cities. Other exhibition boards outlined the terrible destruction of GRT lives in the run up to and during the holocaust. The link above gives harrowing details about this often neglected aspect of those years.

On leaving behind the exhibition, we walked about the town centre which in terms of shops is largely interchangeable with anywhere else, except for the statue of Fred Dibnah cast by sculptor Jane Robbins.
http://www.janerobbins.com/gallery.html

Bolton also has a little aquarium in the basement of their library building. It has been there since 1941 and now has a collection of fish from international waters. The long tailed knife fish is particularly impressive.
http://www.boltonmuseums.org.uk/aquarium/fish-collection/giant-green-knifefish/

The countryside around Bolton is hilly and when I visited, it was looking its best in the sun. A run through the hills on windy country roads then back down the A666 completed this day out.

Chucking things out just makes room for more clutter

But at least I’ll have more space temporarily.
It is nearly eight years since my last radical and major clear out of stuff. It took about 6 weeks of disciplined sorting and chucking out. I did it in three passes of weeding out in what turned into a systematic clearance of space stealers. The time has come to do it again! I’ve made a decision that since I am once more suffocating under a paper drift despite my efforts to implement a paperless home, it all needs sorted and sifted to reclaim my living space.

When I calculate my carbon footprint and look at the square footage I inhabit I feel righteous as I think how – comparatively – little space I live in. Of course this is measured against a western lifestyle rather than what most people actually have to live in, so I can’t justify the warm glow of ‘greenness’ as in reality I use a lot of resources and am aware how fortunate I am to live the way I do. However, I try to make efforts to cut down where I can and I’ve embarked on a big tidy-up in order to make the most of such space as I do have available.

Aside from the relentless paper, most of it unsolicited that pops through my letterbox daily, I appear to be running a handbag and shoe-breeding programme, which has spilled over from the assigned cupboard and into the hall. Sometimes this programme produces hitherto unknown shoes and handbags which I protest that I have no knowledge of acquiring and this has led to a complete inability to ever find the right bag or footwear as required. I suspect I am sometimes guilty of buying new when I’ve simply forgotten owning numerous similar shoes/bags.

On my previous clear out, the local charity shops benefitted from many items of clothing, boxes of ornaments and 500 books. While I have been careful not to let it build up to those levels again, I am beginning to have to store boxes of books in the wardrobe, which is just daft. If I can’t display the books, then really why do I keep them? Edinburgh has an excellent library system, so if I did give away a book I wanted in the future, I should be able to get it quite easily again.

I’m not a complete hoarder, at least not by many people’s standards, as I can reason with myself fairly easily to get rid of unused things. Knowing lots of stuff can be sold in charity shops helps, as it doesn’t feel like waste then. In the eight years since I last did this, there are lots more online resources to help plan a systematic declutter. I won’t list any as they are so easy to find and it is probably best for a potential declutterer to find the system that best fits their nature.

On the other hand, I did read up on some Feng Shui tips last time around. I got quite enthused about finding the Ba Gua and positioning furniture in the correct corners of the room and so on. I even went as far as purchasing a compass so I could get the directions right.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pa_Kua

I went to one of those intimidating outdoors shops – the ones with stringy Munroe-baggers lurking in the doorway. The eager assistant completely misread his customer in my case and recommended the complicated type of compass used by the army in energetic outdoor manoeuvres. He looked nonplussed as I explained I only wanted a simple compass to use at home. I felt any more information, especially about Feng Shui, may have disturbed his views of humankind and decided not to go into too much detail. Friends of the type who are au fait with these establishments have refused to accompany me on these sorts of missions in case it destroys their credibility. Possibly, the search for an indoor sleeping bag tipped them over the edge. I just wanted a little sleeping bag I could take for staying over in people's warm comfortable houses, not some arctic weight hi-tech effort. Duh!

Anyhow, if relevant I'll post updates on progress with the declutter and welcome any suggestions for making it more streamlined.

Men and Balls (1)

(AKA how many people can I offend in one post?)

I launch into this subject in frustration with the endless time, money and resources spent on the irritant that is sport. I object on numerous grounds but principally that of irrelevance to many people’s lives and of the damaging tribalism that sports engenders in many otherwise functional adults.

In my (vigorously denied) joyless feminist state, I find nothing to celebrate in the emotional outpouring of those who insist on following individual sports teams and whose sense of national identity seems somehow welded to the progress or otherwise of their national sports team. As a Scot, I find this particularly inexplicable.

In a conversation on this subject this afternoon with a New Zealander, she too agreed that it was potentially unhealthy, at least on a collective level if not individually to have a sense of patriotism so bound up with a bunch of (almost always) fallible males and their (normally) balls. As in foot/base/tennis etc. Even the success of the NZ rugby players was apparently not temptation enough for her to succumb to national sporting pride. We further agreed that sitting watching sport on TV is boring.

One potentially damaging element is the emotional rollercoaster ride that supporting a sports team/person causes, not least to the sensitive and vulnerable amongst us. Nevertheless, for those with a need for external excitement, then supporting a sportsperson might provide a useful distraction from the tedium of their lives and they accept the downs with the ups. (Ok, I have tried to write that without sounding patronising, but can’t find a way, so just take the patronising as read.)

There are interesting personality typings to be done on those who support an always-winning team/person compared with those who cleave to a losing side. There are also societal theories to be concocted about belonging and peer pressure. There may even be something positive for some people in following their sporting hero’s, but I’m not about to investigate the mental processes of the Barmy Army who are apparently those committed to following the mediocre England men’s cricket team rather than the England cricket team which wins all the time.
http://www.ecb.co.uk/news/womens/

Returning to the negative aspects of supporting sports, perhaps worst of all, for Scottish sensibilities, is the case of those blue and green excrescences polluting Glasgow with entrenched and frequently violent sectarianism. The resources spent combating this brutal behaviour and belief system are not working and change will not happen without a level of courage alien to any politician because of their innate fear of the howling of the primitives on both sides of that manufactured gulf.
https://www.scotland.gov.uk/Resource/Doc/160254/0043618.pdf

Oddly, every time they misbehave there are grown adults who feel ashamed for their country and think foreigners will judge the Scots by the actions of the hooligans. Why? I most certainly do not. They are deluded if they imagine that they are representing this or any other country on my or other sane people’s behalf. They are individuals displaying their inadequacies and desperate need to belong and to define themselves and their tribalism in an absurd and wholly inappropriate manner. They fit Freud’s descriptions of savage primitives.

And I feel a lot better for getting that off my chest.

While I accept that my NZ pal and I may not be amongst the sports-philiacs majority, I thought it was worth thinking more laterally about the phenomenon. And, despite not being a Freudian analyst, I am reminded of his Totem and Taboo in which the dear old chap expounds his now somewhat neglected (can’t think why !?) theory of tribalism.
http://www.answers.com/topic/totem-and-taboo-psychoanalysis

Not direcely relevant to this discussion, but worth comment, he also provides an entertainingly baroque discussion about taboo. His concept is that at some time in the dim and distant, some bloke had a lot of sons and all the women of the tribe. When they reached adulthood, he expelled the sons who had become jealous of his control of the women. His disgruntled sons therefore used this as a reason to kill off Papa. All of this explained with a splendid disregard for early modern anthropology and blatant disrespect of the 19th/ 20th C feminist movement. There is no doubt that the active sisters of the first decade of the 20th century would have had another view of this. Although, I do have a sneaking suspicion that there is something in the boys killing Pater theory, but the whole Freudian taboo theory is best left for another day.

In case anyone imagined I have any expertise in this subject, I can cheerfully state that is not quite the case. How I interpret this part of Freud’s thinking is that he examined religion as a primitive tribal phenomenon. He saw the early development of religion as a response to a primitive need to project insecurities onto a magical omnipotence. His theory is explained in the third essay of the T & T book, Animism, Magic and the Omnipotence of Thought.

In this essay, he links superstition, projection of an inner mental system onto the outer world and a level of delusional, even obsessional thinking. Taking this on a superficial level, I think it might be possible to make the case for analysing the striking similarity between belief in the magical abilities of the sports team/person and value/resilience/mental health of the inner personality. On the other hand, this is my equivalent of thinking aloud and perhaps, if I am being honest, I will clutch at any straw to affirm my dislike of sport being used as a tool for affiliation with the nation.

Should these teasing glimpses into Freud’s writing prompt any sensitive soul to rush off and read that work, I feel I should counsel you to his exceptional and unjustifiable racism. While there can be no excuse for his ignorant attitudes, he was a white, over-privileged male of his time reflecting the prevailing attitudes.

I know it is not possible, but consider how his theory might have evolved if instead of posturing in Vienna about South Seas traditional people’s, he could have witnessed the fanatical tribal behaviours of the more extreme modern sports fans.

This post is entitled Men and Balls (1), in the expectation that I will sometime get around to writing subsequent post(s) on my views about sport. You cannot say you haven’t been warned. But it won’t be in the immediate future as I am not coherent at all about the *%”+@ Oh my god my blood pressure … olympics.