Go on, have another song

And some pictures too

Found in Translation

As I spend time in that cabin in the woods, with Sylvain Tesson, enjoying his writing and marvelling as his Consolations of the Forest builds and develops with each passing day, becoming almost essays at times, Jamie-esque even, demanding to be read several times before moving on to the next day on the mountain or out on the iced lake, I find myself longing for a translation of his Long Walk that I know does not yet exist.  Searches find only L’Axe du Loup in his native French.

But all is not lost, for the site stats on these humble pages can sometimes reveal the marvels of this modern age.  I do not delve into social media.  There are no feeds here for twitter or facebook, but the terms do crop up from time to time.

And a growing back catalogue of articles continues to be found thanks to the wonders of the search engine.  Just the other day I had a comment, from a new reader, on an article written a while back.  It was on a book, and a translation, and it got me thinking.

I had come across a volume by an unknown author in a certain bookshop.  Unknown to me that is, though Annemarie Schwarzenbach had travelled with the redoubtable Ella Maillart in bygone days.  Her version of their Afghan journey had been published, in English.  Since then Maillart’s The Cruel Way has been given a revamp, and the paperback will join me in the tent in a few weeks time – it’s a no-go zone for hardbacks.  Before then I’ll listen to Maillart herself, in a BBC recording from 1987, at the age of 84, part of the marvellous Travel Writers CD, of which I now have two copies having thought the original to be mislaid only for it turn up where it should have been; but I digress.

There is another Schwarzenbach on The Bedside Table, and she’ll shortly be taking me to Persia.  For that comment was advising me of the publication of Death in Persia earlier this month.  And the post came from Lucy Renner Jones, who just happened to be the translator of the work, and a previous Schwarzenbach publication that remains on the list.  I do like it when authors put a word in here and there, like Miriam Darlington has done before, Mark Charlton too.

So whilst I dip into Persia, once I escape from the taiga, I’ve a proposition for our young translator – L’Axe du Loup, in English, pleeease.  I can’t be the only one.

A Wee Song For Everyone

It’s Time

Humbling

I was all set, in full rant mode.  But within minutes of Kate Humble appearing on the box it was forgotten, and I was taken elsewhere.

I had read an interview with the blonde and curly-mopped one a few days earlier, over at Wanderlust, and was looking forward to Wild Shepherdess airing on our screens.  But in that first episode, in the High Pamir mountains of Afghanistan, my expectations were exceeded.

It’s all about People & Places for me, and the Wakhan Valley and the villagers clinging to life with their flocks did it for me.  Gladly would I have tucked into that steaming sheips’ heid stew served up at the end, blood, guts and all.  I hope the families were well rewarded for this intrusion from the west, and much more than in the price of a valuable member of the flock and a rare nosh up.

Yurts were packed on yaks’ backs, all poles, trellis, crown and rolls of felt, as the families moved from the high plains to lower ground.  Coloured finery came out for the occasion.  Every night the flocks are gathered, safe from marauding wolves, and milked, by hand.  Children know no other life than gathering and tending, milking, and packing.  Few survive.

Bread is made, flatbreads, stretched over a yak dung fire; and butter is churned, for hours, by hand, and for hours more, in a smoky yurt; womens’ work, as most of it is.

Life expectancy is a pitiful 35 years, each one of those hard years etched deeply in toughened skin.  Back here there are parts of this civilised, democratised, developed, fourth most unequal society that we have allowed to be created, that are not far behind.  But life in the High Pamir seems so much richer than the degradation on our streets.

I’m looking forward to hearing what our Welsh shepherd makes of the altiplano alpacas.  But I won’t be reading a preview in The Scotsman next weekend, which was the subject of the rant.

For some years now I’ve tried to take some time out of a Saturday morning, a pot of fresh-brewed decaff and a morning paper or two on the kitchen table.  It’s the book reviews, and the travel articles that prompt the purchase, my only version of the dead-tree press these days.  One paper fell by the wayside, as book reviews space was decimated.

But The Scotsman retained excellent book reviews; eight full pages.  And the family got a seven day TV guide.  Until last weekend.

For the Saturday magazine had a revamp.  Books were cut from eight pages to four.  Even television was a victim of The Cuts, with only two days scheduled instead of seven.  And for that pitiful output I’m expected to pay a higher cover price.

So The Scotsman can add at least one more to the 50,000 or so ex-readers, circulation plummeting to 30,000 or so these days.  They can explain to advertisers why that is so; though even that is only done half yearly now as they escape the monthly audits of the nationals by downgrading their own status to that of a regional.  It is dead.

And I’m not even going to think about the rest of the paper, for it would line the litter tray if puss had such a thing.  But he doesn’t so it goes straight to the recycling pile, a victim of editorial policy – a grand paper once, a grand title; but one with colours nailed to the mast, and opinions I have no interest in reading.

Now I told you I wasn’t going to rant.  Think I need another does of La Humble.  Where’s that iPlayer?  Any suggestions for a weekly book section?

PS  And just because it’s Monday morning, here’s one to really rant about.

Baikal

I make no secret of my interest in Russia, and as I browse the shelves I could probably focus that on the distant, the isolation, and the hardship.  Peninsulas like Kola or Kamchatka feature.  But above all is the vastness of Siberia; the land of the gulag, of icy wastes and outcast lepers; The Trans-Siberian, the BAM and the Amur.  And Baikal.

Baikal holds one fifth of the world’s entire stock of freshwater.  Just take a few seconds to let that sink in.  It is longer than the road from Glasgow to London, and 50 miles wide.  Water flows in from 334 tributaries, but only one river, the Angara, flows out,  west and north to the Yenisei and thence to the Arctic.  If the inflow was all diverted it would take 400 years for the Angara to drain the lake.

In the depths are creatures found nowhere else on the planet.  In winter ice forms to a depth of four feet.  Railways and roads have gone where ships steam in the summer, ships built on the Clyde.

So when I find a book on Siberia, centred on Baikal it grabs my attention.  And when it promises something along the lines of Guy Grieve’s Call of the Wild, I sit up.  A man seeking wilderness, changing his life, escaping, surviving.

I heard Sylvain Tesson on the radio a few weeks ago.  He is French, and speaks English perfectly, Russian too I suspect.  His book had arrived a few days earlier, and has tempted me from the shelf whilst I indulged other places and other times.  I escaped into sword & sandal  – grateful as always to Manda Scott – for a few days, and that cleared the mind for Tesson, and Baikal.

He was no stranger to the area, and I find that a decade ago he walked from the gulag in Yakutsk to India, in the footsteps of one of the great escapes and survivals of all time.  I’m assuming here he had Slavomir Rawicz’s The Long Walk as his inspiration, which is a wonderful tale in itself, and I’m hoping that Tesson’s Axis of Wolf may be available in translation.  The search is on.

But meantime I’ve joined him in a hut, it is no more than that, 10ft by 10ft, in the middle of the taiga, where he spent six months, alone, voluntarily.  If he wants to see another face, hear another voice, he has a five hour trudge.  Heading south it would take all day.  There are no roads, no village; and much time and space for introspection, and discovery; for reading, and for writing

He took some books with him, seventy of them; real books, with pages and covers, to sit on a shelf.  Now there’s an exercise.  What books would you take with you?  His list is interesting.  He did try some electronic assistance but the solar powered computer imploded in the first couple of days, unable to cope at minus 30.

I’m going to enjoy this one.  I may tell you more later.

There is landscape, climbs above the tree-line, and water to be walked on.  Hunting is prohibited and the woods play host to wolves, and to bears when they begin to wake.  He threw half a dozen bottles of vodka into the snow, to recover in a few months when he might need it, as the snow melts.

But his first decision was a tough one.  How many varieties of Heinz ketchup are available in your supermarket?  They make 15, and all of them are on the shelf in Irkutsk.  He selects only one, eighteen bottles of Super Hot Tapas.  15 varieties, it’s what drove him away from the world.  He’s going to be good company, and that’s why my eyes are nipping these days.

Midsummer

So is the year half full, or is it half empty?  I look out the window, through eyes nipping with too many hours in the dark – by-election result deep in the night.  There might only be half a dozen of them but too many have I sat through of late, reading or whatever.

But those squinting orbs gaze out, and there is a thistle.  It has upwards of twenty heads waiting; waiting to burst into purple and fluff.  And it is a jaggy thistle, very.  The policies are somewhat overgrown at the moment.  Waist high are the seed heads and wildflowers and weeds.  Nettles are taking over, triffid-like, and they attack you, through clothing.

But poke about in them one must, for there are eggs out there, somewhere.  The chickens are on the loose early today, for one escaped when the food hopper was being topped up.  And they are card-carrying chooks; one out, all out.  I’ve been in the habit of confining them to a run, at least until lunch, in the hope that eggs may appear where they are supposed to be.  But they hold on to them, the very antithesis of the schoolboy in the bath, or anywhere, as it happens.  And clutches of eggs are hidden deep in the undergrowth.

But I care little.  The laburnum cascades yellow fountains, flickering in the breeze.  Deep within, the seed-feeding plate disappears, but still empties far too quickly.  The pheasant harvests the scatterings below.  Red flowers emerge on the hawthorn, and the rowan promises a rich harvest – or is it a harsh winter?  And lost in the maple hedge, fully foliaged to full height now, siskins squabble over sunflower hearts.

The goldfinches are absent friends now, but their cousins are still here in numbers.  It is siskins though that catch the eye as darts of yellow and green flit from fence to feeder.  And the house martins are busy, chirping away as they work.

And being a fine evening we managed a collective cycle, an hour before bed, among the midges.  True to form the old grasshopper was left trailing on the hills, trailing in the wake of a seven year old, whooping past.

The time from winter to summer solstice has flown, for it has been busy.  Gala week has been and gone.  The raft race was a first this year, fun on the water, 35 teams splashing and laughing where only a few years ago there were but half a dozen.  I’m still waiting on the call for the car treasure hunt prize.  The quiz team were put off by a rogue cancellation phone call, opposition presumably.  And the school float in the parade made a lot of noise dressed in bright motley, like the children onboard.  The pipe band, which we had been due to follow, complained of the noise and some baton-twirlers were spaced out in between.  But we couldn’t hear the pipes, or the drums.  And the crafty old grasshopper had his earplugs as oil drums were battered, cymbals crashed and whistles blown as the parade meandered through the town.  Vuvuzelas next time too.

Urchin the Elder sang and danced in the bandstand.  Ding dong the witch is dead, gangnam style; and the drama group gave her a certificate, Most Improved Junior.  Brilliant.

And the school has had the closing assembly.  Four head off to the academy, tears flowing, but that was just the parents, the entire gathering in fact.  Off they go, leaving 28 behind, joining another 800 or so, ready to thrive.

Only a couple more days now, a few days until the wings are clipped and there is more than me to think about until half three.  They’ll need lunch too for goodness sake.  Midsummer, don’t you just love it?

 

 

Questionable Time

There’s been an unedifying rammy brewing these last few days.  It all started before the latest light entertainment from the House of Dimbleby aired the other night.  Before we even switched on there had been formal complaints lodged with the BBC.  But these were not just the usual rag tag of moaners.  Oh no, it was none other than Patrick Harvie of the Scottish Green Party, and the Electoral Reform Society, who were roused to rabble.

And rightly so.  For we then witnessed much wriggling in the chair, press releases and announcements.  It’s not a programme on Independence, protested the Beeb, adding that they’d balanced the audience exactly 50/50 from a pool of mainly public school teenagers who get to cross the box for the first time in next year’s vote, and may then miss out on other elections pending their coming of age.

But, they went on to say, it’s not about independence, despite that carefully selected audience, so we haven’t even bothered making a pretence of balancing the panel.  And we don’t do by-election programmes, (unless they happen to be in say Eastleigh, or Corby we recall), so there’s no need for the Greens or the Lib-Dems to get a seat at the table.

Instead we had Galloway and Farage, a pair of comedians who between them can’t muster as much as a cooncillor far less a parliamentarian in these parts, selected to play  a role to the couple of million or so tuning in from south of the border.  Galloway did stand for Holyrood, but his presence did not come close to being required.  Ukip do have a candidate at Aberdeen Donside this week, and he may well increase the voting share from the trifling 0.8% base, but I suspect it is a deposit that will not be returned.

Many of us are left wondering why Farage has been allowed this platform for his own brand of faux rage more times in the last four years than any other politician in the land.

Thankfully, amongst four unionist politicos and one lone nationalist, we had Lesley Riddoch, and she rose above all around her.  She’s long been known to be a fan of devo-max, but that of course is not on offer.  And despite the ravings and rantings around her she explained calmly, clearly and with logic, why she would be voting Yes.  It’s the sort of voice we need to hear, but having come out, so to speak, I guess there’s not a remote chance of her getting her excellent phone-in show of yesteryear back on the airwaves from Pacific Quay.

Despite all that the debate moves on, and I’m greatly heartened by the launch of The Common Weal, which term was aired on these pages a few weeks ago.  A website has now launched, and the programme will be discussed at many conferences and meetings, political or otherwise.  Even the tired old kirk approves, and promises to participate.  What sort of Scotland do we want to shape?  It’s your only chance, and the Common Weal is a brilliant place to start.  Go on, you know you want to.

For if we leave it to the press and the state-funded broadcaster, it’s just going to be more of Thursday night’s farce over the next 15 months.  And you know where that will end.

Littoral

Thus far the book festival season has failed to tempt me.  The recent Boswell festival, and the current Borders event, both have excellent speakers and, tempting though it is to travel just to hear the superb John Sessions, I’ve refrained.

But it may be different in a couple of weeks.  Here’s a list of just a few of the names on offer, at one event, many of which the regular reader may recognise from previous witterings on these pages:

Gavin Francis

John Lister-Kaye

Esther Woolfson

Miriam Darlington

Andrew Greig

Linda Cracknell

That’s quite a line-up, and one that would tempt me many a mile.  It’s all part of the Littoral strand of the East Neuk Festival, and it takes place over the first week in July.

East Neuk? I hear some say.  Which quaint part of some hobbitesque grove is that?

Actually it’s my ancestral stomping ground, for I hail from a long line of farm labourers in a certain corner of the Kingdom of Fife – that’s correct, cross the Forth Bridge and turn right, and keep going, and going a bit more.

Kilrenny church is one of the venues, and they’ll be trampling the ancestral bones in that ancient kirk-yard.  Ainster (that’s Anstruther to the outside world) is another favourite too, venue of one of the best fish suppers on offer, and an excellent museum, focussing on fishing and life for my ancestral fishwives.

So it’s a good spot for genealogy in this household; ergo a trip just might be possible.  There’s stuff for the weans too, a Foraging Workshop, on at the same time as Creative Writing, an insight into landscape writing, outdoors with wellies and notebooks on the hoof, with Linda Cracknell.   I’ve one of her works on the shelf, part of the reading destined for an impending trip back to Netherlands with tent and bikes.  But sod it, that workshop clashes with Miriam Darlington talking about otters.  Angst indeed.

Esther Woolfson, who has an excellent essay in today’s Sunday Herald, is talking about birdsong; and John Lister-Kaye will be being himself, tales of Aigas, and otters and Maxwell perhaps.  Gavin Francis will be there, with his massive mitts and snoticles.

But, I’m told, it’s the same weekend as The Ghamelawallah’s birthday bash, and it’s his half-century.  Move the party through to Fife I’m thinking, but I might have a tough job selling that to The Mistress.  Mind you their elder offspring is just up the road in Clootie City…….

In Gaza Again

There are times when a subject crops up often, and so soon after Dervla aired her views another view of Gaza is published. And when it comes from a prize-winning author, one whose writing a decade ago opened a whole new world of people and places, of writing, then a place had to be found on that old bedside table.

Louisa Waugh is the lady in question, though she’s added her middle initial, B, for this one.  Meet Me In Gaza is her take on six years of living and writing, and loving.

Louisa came to Gaza after a period as an aid worker in Ramallah.  She brought messages and kisses for the family of friends she had made in the West Bank; families that were unable to meet and pass on those kisses personally.

We are treated to all the angst of the border crossings, the searches and the tunnels.  But more than that we are treated to life, to people and to humanity amongst the debris and detritus that oppression and occupation brings.

Her work began in late 2007, was interrupted for six weeks or so when she had to leave and renew visas, and again for what should have been a week but turned into a couple of months.  Since the work ended she’s returned again, several times, to see friends and to witness the changes as Hamas exerts itself.

But the main change, as Dervla found too, was Cast Lead – that appalling period of death and destruction.  Louisa Waugh had approached the crossing one night, with that stomach-churning foreboding we all get from time to time.  Something was wrong.  She was heading for Brussels, and a conference she didn’t want to attend, an absence of a week looming over her.

The crossings closed that night, and it was only after the Israelis withdrew, Cast Lead having destroyed the very fabric of life, ripped families to shreds, a couple of months later, that she was able to return, and to witness the death and the damage and the stoic refusal among the Gazans and the Bedouin, the farmers unable to plant their ancestral lands.

But return she did, back to work, back to friends and dinner invitations; back to the beach and the hammam.

She was there too when the Freedom Flotilla tied up at the port, the first foreign vessels in over 40 years.  And she ventured out with the fisherman, hounded to a 6 mile limit of over fishing that decimated fish stocks and made an expensive luxury of a Mediterranean staple.  1993 it was that the Oslo Accord decreed a 20 mile limit.  Bugger that, imposed the Israelis.

It is a book that will make you smile, that draws you in.  It helps that Waugh immersed herself in work and culture, honed up her Arabic.  After her stunning story of her year in Mongolia, in Hearing Birds Fly, I knew she would take me there.  And I was not disappointed.  She brings us a much lighter view of the Strip, without anger, without demands.  She brings us life, from one of the world’s troubled spots.

How Others See Us