Cultural mores.

We have quite a lot of Japanese and Chinese in this area, attracted initially by the Foundation but many stay to make new lives for themselves. I'm ashamed to say I have trouble telling the difference between the nationalities. Just when I think I have it down the person in front of me turns out to be Korean. What they all have in common are excellent manners and the habit of bowing whenever they feel they have been given a service. After a customer has bowed their thanks to me I feel I want to bow back, so often do. Then I find myself bowing to the next customer who is probably local and thinks I have taken leave of my senses.

I'm in the middle of enforced belt- tightening (direct result of too much enjoyment it seems to me, and therefore VERY unfair) so last week, in desperate need of entertainment but unable to indulge in new reading matter, I splurged £5 on 5 books in the Red Cross shop and felt very pleased with myself for a nice tight clean and varied collection. The weekend weather was grim (still is), just right for reading and I dug into what I hoped would be a light, fluffy, feel-good chic-lit 'The Friday Night Knitting Club' by Kate Jacob. I was disappointed - dismally and depressingly. Not expecting great literature I forgave her the cliche phrases but couldn't forgive the cliche characters, for instance the Scottish grannie who was everything an American dreams a grannie living in Scotland should be and of course isn't. In that is same episode the word 'compact' arrived three times in three paragraphs. I suppose it's the polite New Yorker's way of saying small and a bit pokey.

None of this would have been especially serious - after all it's chic-lit not Virginia Woolf - but the story began to drag and I wondered what she was going to fill in the remaining pages with when suddenly the main character found she had cancer, advanced, and I thought 'Oh THAT'S how she's filling out the pages...' It felt like an afterthought. The tale was thereafter depressing, had spurious messages and a flagging, ineffectual attempt at a positive denouement, but was definitely not what I had signed up for, to use a cliche myself.

Rather strangely, Kate Jacob's book was published the same year as Joanna Trollope's 'Friday Nights' which has a similar theme. It isn't in the same league!

Feeling very gloomy, and still seeing nothing on TV worth watching, I reached for a third time into my little cache.

Kate Moss wrote 'The Labrynth' I couldn't get into that but thought she had something so the short novel (started life as a novella
apparently) set in modern times but also in Cathar country looked interestingly spooky. I miscalculated again. Cathars, as I should know by
now, came to very unpleasant ends and don't lend themselves to lighthearted literature. Much much better written than the Knitting Club it
was still too sad for my mood, which by now needed lifting out of the Slough and above the grey skies outside, thank you.

In desperation I reached for a third, Rose Tremain, the tale of an East European immigrant and his attempts to find work in England so he can send money back to his mother and daughter. It is as harsh and worrying as reading about such hard lives must be, shows British society in the shamefully hollow, celebrity-loving careless light it deserves, but her style makes it unsentimental reading with flashes of humour and human kindnesses that off-set the tragedies. Not too bad for the spirits and at least offers some food for the soul.

Still two more to go, one of which is by a new Swedish crime-writer. In the end I will return to crime. It's safe!

My 2 1/2 year old grandson chomped up two or three of his mum's Nurofen tabs (can hardly blame him as they look like those fruity sweeties he is given...) We thought/hoped he spat them out sharpish when the taste hit, checked with a local medic who pretty much shrugged his shoulders and said not to worry, so we didn't worry. Good thing the latest news about Nurofen Plus hadn't hit the headlines!

Theo, the great experimenter, has been known to eat worm tablets brought in for the dogs, and to climb the staircase on the outside of the bannisters until he got to the top, about 8 ft above a tiled floor, where, not quite knowing how to reverse, he hung for some time, like a koala bear, until noticed by his elder brother.

He systematically removed all the little caps from those springy door- stop thingies in my house in the three days the family stayed, and a towel holder in the downstairs loo fell to pieces in his hands. I wonder what he will find to dismantle at Christmas when they stay for 10 days and there is no outside activity to distract? My ex fixed child- frustraters on all the kitchen cupboards but I have a feeling has worked them out....

Maybe I shouldn't have taken that photo of him with the chain- saw. It was a 'working' plastic toy but may have given him ideas. The dummy makes him look so harmless too.
His loving family have nicknamed him 'Seek-and-destroy'.

My car, born 2002, one careful owner, is getting a bit long in the gasket, so it was with heart in mouth I left it for it's MOT today. Hooray and thanks be to excellent workmanship by VW, it has passed yet another year.

It does have intermittent starting problems which make my palms sweat when I find myself in a queue for petrol or sitting in the drive-thru' car wash..... Will it start or will I be covered with embarrassment whilst it chugs and refuses to fire? This eventuality will bring all the men in the vicinity rushing to tell me what to do and what not to do... I know it will fire up in the end, create an appalling smell of oil, and glide off as if nothing had happened, but in the meantime I have to listen politely to all their theories and their anecdotes about the garage where I have had it checked twice ( of course it behaves beautifully for them!)

Time to play in the shop today so, without book or extra crosswords, I paged through the blogs following on from mine. Strangely they were mostly foreign. First was a poetry blog from Malaysia and, though I couldn't read the verses, the sound as I played the syllables phonetically in my head, was beautiful. Then came a shoal of Muslim ladies with bright photos of themselves and their families. They were succeeded by blogs in Arabic script with more family photos. After them I found myself in India amongst pictures of the Ganges and Indian architecture, more unreadable words but lots of strong energy, and finally a couple of book review sites from the States and Australia,.

Do these sites change daily? I suspect they are called up in arbitrary fashion, like a bingo drum. I started with Chillside's site and got a succession of quilters so perhaps there is a word- association sorting going on, though why that should get me so many foreign sites beats me.

Tried Walled Garden then as the starting point and got a school education site then several sites about US politics. Don't think the word-association theory works after all.

I shall use this for scrying I think. Could work as well as Runes or the I Ching and is a lot less messy than entrails. For today I'll take the heavy preponderance of unreadable language as a hint to start enjoying the visual and brooding less on the Word.

Sandy's first (unpowered) flight.

Sequence works from the bottom up.

On the way to the airfield he said: 'I've overcome my fear of heights gran!"
I almost screeched to a halt. 'You had a fear of heights and you let me buy you a voucher for a gliding lesson?!!!'
'Oh yeah. But I'm OK now. Really!'

He was VERY excited - and also nervous - during what seemed to me to be an interminable wait for the tow plane pilot to get back from a domestic duty, and other planes to land. The instructor, ex-RAF, was brilliant, cheery, oozing inspiring confidence and enthusiasm. He taught Sanders the controls and proceedure whilst they waited. Sanders got pinker and pinker. I got very windblown and admired the scenery - and the ever changing cloudscape.

Then the tow pilot arrived (at least they weren't being winched up.. that is really hard to watch) got through the check in the ex-RAF Chipmunk (Supermunk) tug, and suddenly everything was Go. They were off. They were a foot off the ground, higher at first than the tow-plane then levelling out together and getting higher until they were nearly into the clouds. The tow line dropped and the plane disappeared. They circled in front of the dark underside of a cumulous cloud for a while then they too disappeared. For twenty minutes, or a hundred years, I stared up at the sky which seemed to change all the time. Could that be good? When they, at last, reappeared and approached for landing they were doing a lot of banking and - wobbling? but the landing looked smooth enough.

The recovery landrover gave me a lift down to meet them. Sandy was ecstatic. Wanted to go up again. Hasn't stopped talking about it. He's saving up for a glider.

The instructor said with a certain careful blandness: 'Conditions were interesting up there,' shooting a look at a colleague that told me Sanders had had a more exciting flight than normal. I was right about the changing clouds. Conditions included thermals that suddenly cut out and a 'wave' that gives the same effect as being in a boat on a choppy sea. A blustery wind was an additional factor.

Wouldn't have suited granny.

I do love stained glass and the sun was shining through this window whilst a packed church listened to tributes to a good friend. I couldn't take my own photo which was a shame as the light reflected around was almost more beautiful than the window itself.

The church was packed full of people who had known Donald and, I would say, had all loved him, for one reason or another. Headmaster of an Academy (the Scottish variety, not the newly minted English version) he rebelled against the pen-pushing and box-ticking that Heads are supposed to occupy their time with, so there were plenty of stories of him losing vital papers in the village stream whilst hurrying to a football training, or crawling on hands and knees under the secretaries window to get out of school without being caught - so he could get to a football training. It was said that he would rather take a bollocking himself than let a student take it, and that the children who couldn't hope to achieve much academically he would get to smile by letting them drop chalk into his ever-present coffee cup from time to time.

I remember that the first time I went to a book fair he sat down beside me and talked to me like an old friend. I heard another book dealer say exactly the same thing. We had both been far more welcomed by Donald into the book trade than by the head honcho, King Larry - but then as I say that I remember something else that was repeated several times about Donald this afternoon - he never said a bad word about anyone.

Probably the main reason I enjoyed being at that particular book fair was the time I spent with Donald. It struck me very early on in my connection with the trade that there are still a few potential curiosities amongst its occasionally grumpy, often dusty denizens. I was quite entranced by actually being talked to by one of them. It helped that he loved poetry and went to Oxford, which city I imagine saw the beginnings of his book-collecting. His collection, when I finally got to see it, was - is - enviable. He had many of the books I would have loved to have for myself, always first editions, often in beautiful condition and far beyond my financial reach, all crammed unceremoniously into a small, smoky, ash-filled room in a council house. I only hope he is happily rooting through the Akashic records now, and that they are suitably well-bound.

For my part I'm frustrated by not being able to express the essence of a man that I didn't know for very long, or even meet up with very often, but who somehow made a vast impression on me. He probably influenced me more than many people I've known much longer and much better. What I am mournfully aware of is the loss of a big personality who made everyone he came in contact with feel important to him, even a bit interesting for a while. Thank you Donald.

One of the results of spending 10 days with my younger grandsons is to get me very hot under the collar about state education and since I can't add more photos at present I may as well vent! Fin is 5yrs 6mths and is at school from 9am to 3pm ish - it might be later. After that he gets homework. The school is already 'grouping' them - in my day that would have been called streaming - and his mum is thinking of getting him extra tuition in maths and reading because if he falls behind he feels a failure. The ethos seems to be entirely structured to achievement and results of a measurable kind, no interest paid to social development, and far far from nurturing the whole child. It's soulless. The reading books are unimaginative and - soulless too, no rhythm, no enjoyment of language... A million miles from Dr. Zeus.

Both parents would like a Steiner School in the area but already the state education has taken their son beyond the point where that system would want to try to integrate him. Steiner claimed that a child forced to read, write or do anything before the appropriate age would suffer from depression when he/she arrived at that age and lose interest in learning. This might sound ridiculous but none of my three read until they were well past 10yrs have all done well with degrees etc. and are, in the main, well-balanced, emotionally mature human beings.

OK there are other factors but - I still think it's all going horribly wrong!!

Ballater belles and beasts.

There were many more but I only managed to get these - hope the Ex got some. 'Oor Wullie' is by Bryn and Marilyn who run the wonderful Deeside Books.

Hadji's on safari.

Auditioning for Chainsaw Massacre 2

Probably the best photo opportunity of the Hadji hols was in Iain's yard.

Oh dear. Just had news of a book-collector friend's death. I had been meaning to contact him... Lesson there....

I suppose one has to get used to this now!

Two days with more activity than usual for this person: The last Harry P (in 3D) Friday in Inverness, followed by afternoon lunch (lupper or sunch) by the bay. On Saturday I spent 2 hours standing in the sunshine with my grandson, watching gliders being put together like balsa wood models and then winched into the air on piano strings. Unlike me he is passionate about flying and longing to go up in a glider. He wasn't put off by the sight of the tiny cockpit and the abrupt ascent on the end of a ridiculously thin hawser so I'm giving him a trial lesson for his birthday.

Did I remember the camera? Of course not.

I got a sunburnt nose and cheeks. Very unglamorous.

Today the funeral of a friend's mother brought another very good friend back into my life for an hour or two. Wish we lived closer.