It takes two to blether.

Looking for a book to replace the Stieg Larsson an unlikely candidate popped up - ‘Gillian the Dreamer’ by Neil Munro. Munro probably wins the prize for the ‘most unread’ author in my collection of Scottish authors, certainly unread by me. I have judged that past Scots writers who didn’t make it on the international scene probably didn’t make it for good reasons that have nothing to do with the dastardly English conspiracy blamed by many, and I’ve yet to feel that’s an unfair judgement. However a friend urged me to read this particular book because it’s her favourite, the hero reminding her strongly of herself. This lad sees things differently to other people and is dismissed by most as unfit to live in his world, impractical and useless. In the pre-Napoleonic War days, before the loss of the Gaelic traditions, he might have become a bard but by the time he is grown there is no place for him. My friend tells me she felt like that as she grew up. She is an artist now and has found her niche, is allowed to be who and as she wants to be, both by herself and those charmed by her art. She is most comfortable reading Victorian fiction, loves Dickens, loves the Scots writers I dismiss in so cavalier a fashion, has recently embarked into the Restoration plays, is not of this world.

I confess I haven’t yet managed to get into the book but I’ll make an effort for her sake and also because thoughts of ‘To the Lighthouse’ have given me a different perspective on the people around me, a perspective which I hope will last at least for a while now. Lily Briscoe, the artist in TTL, sees Mrs Ramsay as the lynch-pin in their group, and tries to paint her, to put her feelings about her into the composition. Mr. Ramsay and the odious Charles Tansley scarcely see her at all, in fact they scarcely see anything that is going on around them, only the intellectualising that is going on in their heads. Tansley anyway dismisses women as incapable of producing anything meaningful in art.

Now Virginia had an axe to grind, as did many women of her generation (and we have to be grateful that they honed it so sharp). This axe causes her to present the tableaux within her novel with the subtitles: Women are discounted as important; men are talking heads.

That’s all a bit too simplistic in my opinion (and VW can never be accused of that sin in a final assessment. I’m only extracting bits now for the sake of my thought-line). I see the interaction between the men and women in this novel more as a result of personality differences, but that doesn’t mean a very important section of humanity isn’t getting overlooked. They are the listeners; the observers; the seers. They don’t form policies or express thoughts in a way that changes the world order, they are simply catalysts who, by gentle degrees, enable others to do that. In VW's novel they are the women but recently I’ve been noticing some men in the groups around me who were performing the same function, observing, enabling, supporting, and doing it almost unconsciously, with absolutely no motives or agenda that they have consciously formulated; they simply do it. Without them the memorable moments would not have happened, the group may even have failed, there being no cohesive element to hold it together.

I always come back to the same observation: Many can talk; very few can listen.

Yesterday a chap came into the shop at the same time as the local minister and joined in our conversation (it’s such a small space that that is almost inevitable behaviour; maybe I should call the shop 'The Wee Blether'). Once the minister left this man continued to talk for nearly two hours. If he had been boring or hard work I would have found a way to extract myself (there was no way HE was going to extract himself) but he was actually very interesting, having spent time in the US and in Belarus from whence his wife hails. As I know nothing about Russia and am always interested in people’s reactions to the overgrown and rather scary spawn of our loins across the Atlantic I enjoyed what he had to tell me. The hands-on reality of life in Belarus seems to be in marked contrast to the life now lived in our country and the States where there is less and less direct connection between money, food and labour. Money is represented by plastic cards; the labour involved in making it is done through numbers on a computer; food is shrink-wrapped commodity to be found in the supermarket and bought with the plastic.

The Talker told me that his mother-in-law earned three fields from the communist party for her work with them, her area still being run on largely communistic lines. One field produces potatoes for trade (to eat and make vodka). One field is for grazing; one for growing vegetables for the table but also for trade. She tills them herself. This is the norm. There is industry but little export. The land is still being ‘cleaned’ of caesium-137 fall-out from Chernobyl. There’s no internet connection where his ma-in-law lives, and to get a mobile phone to work involves climbing onto the roof of the house. Another world, yet not Africa!

Less enjoyable were some of the facts about Belarus during WW2 when the Nazis killed 2 - 3 million of the population (about a third) and destroyed 209 out of 290 cities. Sometimes it becomes hard to forgive the Germans their efficiency at everything they undertake.

It also brings me to another train of thought...

but that’s enough for now.