What I think...

If this is global warming I really don't want it.  I'm fed up and ready to moan my wee heid aff with all the disruption that the snow has caused for the past many days. I'm equally fed up whether trudging out in it or stuck in the house looking out at it.

My (and everyone else's life) has been cancelled, or that's how it feels.  All this time on my hands means I'm spending a lot of it reading trivia online. Or looking out at the deserted street where no one is moving apart from the wildlife. But I've passed the point of interest in tracks left in the snow by the local fox population, or the antics of the penguins on Edinburgh Zoo's Penguin Cam.

Yesterday, there were some interesting cloud formations to photograph while hanging out the window. The sun came out at times and lit up the clouds with brilliant colours. Today has been uniformly grey as the cloud has closed in and the flakes of snow are getting larger.

Some news does get through.  A friend went into labour yesterday and had to go to hospital by ambulance as her street was impassible by car. What a bloody nightmare, except that my friend is resourceful and practical and just got on with getting herself safe and giving birth to a delightful baby boy.

I've spent several days anxious about how my daughter is getting to her work in all this. She lives at the bottom of a very steep hill and works many miles away in an establishment built in an exposed part of West Lothian that gets snow before and after anywhere else. This week she has been night shift which means at the end of a long shift she has to get home after a night of heavy snow while tired out. The boyfriend has had to resort to borrowing his dad's 4x4 to get her to and fro a couple of times. Even then, it's been touch and go on the roads.

Much praise is being heaped on the efforts by essential staff to get to work in all this, and it's nice that government and community are appreciative of staff who manage somehow to get to work.  Here in Edinburgh, I'm thankful that I've been able to get buses to wherever I've been going so far this week.

Infuriatingly, snow hasn't prevented three lads going to wherever it is to promote their World Cup losing team's bid to host the damn thing later this century. Their frolics in the field of pointless tribal games serve only to  alienate non sports fans even further. Collectively, the one who looks good in knickers on bill boards, the one who hates poor people and lies about respecting the Scots and the dim aristo who failed to keep his hair, will no doubt be given uncalled for publicity regardless of the outcome of the vote.

Much more of this and I'm going to be driven to seek out house bound pensioners and forcibly buy them milk and bread. Assuming there is still food in the shops.

Sunday in East Lothian

Brandishing my Scottish Heritage membership card, I made my way to Dirleton Castle in East Lothian.

The village of Dirleton is quaint and pretty and completely picturesque. I immediately began plotting to find ways to retire there when the time comes.

The castle is set in lovely grounds which boast the world’s longest herbaceous border. This must be a wonderful sight in the height of summer and even this late in the season was impressive in colour and variety of planting.

Some pretty flowers that came out well when I fiddled about with the settings on my camera.

Squash recipes and wee meander

I’ve been playing in the kitchen with the lovely squashes and pumpkins available this season. Here are three recipes I thought turned out pretty well.

Butternut Squash Casserole
Few handfuls of kasha
Medium leek, sliced
One small or half a large butternut squash, cubed
Sliced green pepper

Glass red wine

Veg oil

1 tsp sweet paprika

1 tbsp tomato puree

Liquid veg stock

Seasonings

Toast the kasha, then set aside while you gently fry the butternut squash, leeks and green pepper. Add garlic if liked.

Slosh in red wine, liquid veg stock, paprika and tomato puree. Then add the toasted kasha and enough water to cover.

Cook either on the stovetop in a covered pan or transfer to a casserole dish and cook in a very moderate oven until the kasha swells and reaches the desired consistency – probably 45-60 minutes.

Stuffed Harlequin Squash
Harlequin squash are a handy two-portion size in a distinct colour combination of pale orangey/cream and green.

One harlequin squash
Small onion chopped
3 sliced sun dried tomatoes
Two handfuls chopped peanuts
Few oz Jarlsberg cheese, grated
Fine breadcrumbs
Parsley, finely chopped
Bouillon powder

Cut the squash in half and place cut side down on an oiled baking sheet and cook in a medium oven until soft enough to be scooped out.
Fry the onion and mix with the cooked squash, sun dried tomatoes, peanuts, bouillon powder and cheese. Pack the mix back into the squash shells and top with the breadcrumbs and parsley. Dot with butter and cook in the oven for 10 minutes or until heated through and the breadcrumbs are crisped.

Pumpkin Flan

Filling

One slice of pumpkin such as Ironbark pumpkin

One egg

Bouillon powder

Grated nutmeg

Flan base

Two handfuls of each of the following:

Pumpkin seeds

Sunflower seeds

Ground almonds

Melted butter to mix

Seasoning

Roast chunks of pumpkin in veg oil in the oven until very soft. Drain and puree thoroughly. When cool, mix with well beaten egg, nutmeg and bouillon powder.

Grind the seeds and add to the ground almonds. Mix into the melted butter and season. Press into individual flan bases and cook in the oven till firm.

Place the pumpkin mix in the flan bases and return to the oven to cook till set.

The photographs are of lovely flowers I was sent – obviously ‘coz I am so deserving. But probably coz Sig Other is exhibiting his brains with some Belgians, Norwegians, assorted Celtic fringe representatives, Baltic teams and other English folks in Holland this weekend. Well done to his team which won top of his section of clever people who can recall the right facts at the right time, assisted by an ability to make links between disparate clues to get answers correct. So I get to be in Edinburgh and enjoy flowers rather than be a ‘QUAG(B)’ (quizzing wife and girlfriend (boyfriend)).

I Quagged in Tallinn one year which was fine as Tallinn is just the most glorious old city, and I got to be in a fun quiz team with Nicolas Parsons. Delightful old gentleman, but we failed in our aim (everyone in the team’s aim except NP) to come last, in spite of our disinclination to contradict a national treasure when he proposed incorrect answers.

I’ve just read that back, and can assure myself that it makes sense, at least to me.

And here’s a pic of Tallinn showing a view of the old city merging in the distance with the new.

The Girlz Viewz

The Girlz decided to meet up for a chill out. Said chill out involved insignificant amounts of C2H5OH compared to the norm before we all grew up and chose to behave decorously on ‘school’ nites. Hence, I am home in sufficient time to post this.

We ate, drank and conducted in-depth analysis of the doings of our nearest and dearest. Oddly, we appear to have crossed a Rubicon between feelings of yeuch at parental sexual relationships to now trying to set up dates between our respective widowed progenitors. Although my suggestion of a civil partnership for two dads was perhaps premature.

However, this post is supposed to be a quasi-official rant – at the tramsbuggeration of our fair city.

While marooned en omnibus on Leith St on my way to the girlz-rendezvous I had far too long to anti-ogle (as in try not to look but be helplessly drawn to the awfulness of) the male objects not working on the tramscrash, i.e. holes in road.

These individuals are now notorious for standing around gazing down deep holes and generally posing to no useful effect. Here, therefore is my argument: if this nation is to be ripped off for this political vanity project we, the concerned citizens, should at least have pretty boys to look at in the aforementioned poses. I vote for sweet faced young hunks artistically sporting sexy smears of dust highlighting delicious bone structure.

NOT dirty, sweaty unfortunates who are going commando-style in the August heat.

P, who knows much about such issues confirmed that the hole-in-the-road-diggers are indeed commando-style explained in precise detail just why. Apparently, it’s all to do with – er, um, boy-pants (?) Mercifully failed to understand the finer points here.

Anyway, this is a plea for pretty boys so those stuck on the bus can be enchanted with the view. And I can’t imagine anyone will disagree.

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.

Bloggers break

I'm taking a little break from blogging and indeed from normal day to day life. My mission is to check out if Slartibartfast actually deserved his coveted award.


http://www.bbc.co.uk/cult/hitchhikers/guide/slartibartfast.shtml


My progress should be followable at either of these sites, where depending on the light available you can also judge his work.


http://www.bt.no/kamera/article313110.ece?lang=en


http://www.hurtigruten.com/en/norway/map/

General meanderings

Since I am fondly imagining that spring is just around the corner, I took myself off to look at a little nature this weekend. Briefly, as it was still perishing and in fact deteriorated into a drenching smirr* on Saturday.

Up in the Bathgate hills I came across the Korean war memorial. This is a small landscaped area just off the road where there is a little replica pagoda built to commemorate the service people who were killed in the Korean war. I know nothing about this, but it seems like yet another conflict which has taken lives of, no doubt perfectly peaceful Korean women and children for absolutely no good enough reason. However, this is a lovely spot and if service personnel are killed in a war then this is as nice a place as any for their friends and family to come to seek some recognition of their loss. http://www.geograph.org.uk/photo/11532
http://www.geo.ed.ac.uk/scotgaz/features/featurefirst10318.html

Less contentiously, I found myself in Crammond at 7.30am yesterday because I took a wrong turning and not being minded to just turn back and retrace my steps, I ended up stopping in a parking place in front of the river Almond. Movement on the other side of the river caught my eye and I saw three deer on the path by the river. I jumped out of the car and tried to take some pics with the camera on my phone. These were pretty hopeless as it is a phone not a camera and I don't spend much time getting to know how to use it. Here are a couple of the less blurred examples.

You just have to take my word for it that there are three deer in the picture!

No deer, but a weir in the distance.

My camera, which has been temperamental for some months is now officially defunct. I'm temporarily borrowing my daughter's, but that may refuse to work outside parties and nightclubs which are the only places she takes pics.

* http://www.rampantscotland.com/parliamo/blparliamo_weather.htm

Inchoate urge

I have an inchoate urge to do some knitting now the days are shortening, and in the distant past I recall being a more than proficient knitter. I can make this claim in great confidence as no examples of my knitting are now extant! This prompted an online search for fractal knitting after mentioning this urge to significant other who was once promised a fractal jersey. He cannot recall who offered this but I took it upon myself to look into the creative possibilities.

Fractals are features of mathematics often seen as arcane by the anti-logicians amongst us. They tend to be mentioned by those who enjoy describing the Fibonacci Sequence and casually tossing around references to recursive algorithms.

Mathematicians assert their inability to describe fractals in Euclidean geometry, but fractal analysis can be done using computers. There are links in all this to sacred geometry which is concerned with the patterns of monoliths, shells or even the harmonies in music. In other words there are certain designs which appear constant in nature and human design which can be described using mathematics, but fractals, despite their complexity, or because of this are useful in many sciences including medicine.

Fractals are not just esoteric creations in maths labs but occur almost mundanely in nature. Clouds and ferns are fractals, as are those pointy shaped cauliflowers on sale in upmarket whole food shops.
All well and good, but when I looked into the mass of fractal crafts online, there is a vast range of patterns and examples of fractal knitting, quilting and needle point just for starters. But somehow I doubt that sig other is going to receive a fractal jersey for the dreaded December pressie fest from me. Any knitting I take up will have to be easier that all that, so it may be he will get a Dr Who scarf masquerading as a moebius strip.