I haven't been to the cinema since “Avatar” which drew me, out of curiosity, to drive the 40 mile round trip to Inverness to see it in 3D . I'm even waiting for the Harry Potter DVD rather than expose myself to the overwhelming smell of popcorn and nachos with chilli sauce and jalepenos. It's enough excitement for me to watch on the ex's big screen with a nice bottle of carefully chosen red or white sitting between us.

The films we watch from his vast collection don't always make enough impression on me to make me write about it here but “A Man Escaped” (Un condamné à mort s’est échappe) by Robert Bresson was impressive. Bresson who was imprisoned by the Nazis for being a member of the French Resistance, based it on the memoires of André Devigny who was imprisoned for the same reason. The film was made in 1952 and is notable for the tension it generates through very little action beyond the chiselling away of minute areas of a wooden door panel to get at the lock then the painstaking collection of fibres from a mattress to converted into rope. There’s little or no dialogue and no music except very occasionally - Wagner I think. The next week we watched a film noire whose title I have forgotten (so not much of an impression!) about a heist on a jewelry store. That film has 45 minutes of complete silence whilst the burglary is being carried out. Also french film. They are v. good at subtlety.

As yet I haven't seen any reason to change my 'favourite film' list in my profile on the blog.

Last week came a change of routine when I invited a friend to watch Tilda Swinton in 'I am love' on my own, not quite so huge, screen. Tilda is utterly fascinating because she can look so beautiful and so darned ugly, also there's the whole androgynous 'Orlando' thing going on that oddly gives her a otherworldly aura, as though she's just stepped out of a UFO. In most of “I Am Love” she looks beautiful and is dressed in the best that Italian design can provide. The music by John Adams is as lush as the surroundings so from a visual and auditory view it's delicious, add to that the salivary response to the food - a major feature in the production, and we both found it a significant viewing experience. There were moments when it got a bit OTT either erring on the pretentious, or the clichéd, and the sex scene (in which Tilda's breasts figure largely) was a passage lifted straight from D H Lawrence. I hate the shots of insects and flowers that intersperse the shots of twining bodies, presumably to denote mother nature in her most riotous thrusting moments, emphasising the difference between this heightened real-life experienceand the divorced reality of Emma's usual life.

I was complacently assuming I’d absorbed and understood the emotional content so knew where it was all going when I was suddenly shocked by an event that cut right through the comfortable haze I'd lapsed into. Judging by reviews I’ve read on-line I may have been the only one surprised. After that I was more alert and curious to see how it would end, finally quite pleased by the symbolism of the cave. Her former life did look like shadows on the wall.

My viewing companion who married a very polite, slightly old fashioned, gentleman of 80+ a few years back, remarked, during the full frontal, 'oh I don't think H would have enjoyed this much'

It was a bit sweaty!


Two posts in one day - I must be avoiding something !

Endangered species?

The range of herbal medicines we stock will be depleted this year if the companies that produce them can't afford to have all their tinctures and pills licenced, each licence costing in the region of £2000 a pop. Already we have heard that Black Cohosh, helpful to some people for controlling hot flushes, is for the chop, though to my amusement a customer came in for some yesterday - sent by her GP! BC has been accused of causing liver failure in at least one case which, when one reads how often NHS prescribed drugs kill people, doesn't seem too bad really.

It's undoubtedly the big drug companies that are responsible for the enthusiastic enforcement of this EU legislation and I can't believe there won't be an outcry when the results are finally noticed by the public. Of course by then it won't do any good. There has been a petition going for ages but we fear it's like the Iraq war, already a done deal.

I have to confess to have been sitting on the shelf along with the remedies but in the 'undecided' section for years because none of them are of any help to me when I have asthma badly. I'm eternally grateful to conventional medicine for the relief it brings me, even if there is a cost to be paid later. On the other hand nothing the doc can give me actually cures the condition or even gives remission, whereas acupuncture does bring long-term relief and homeopathy gave me a cortisone-free year when I was living in Brussels. My previously judicious measuring scales have been tipped in the last year however because I've suffered side-effects from medicine prescribed to bring my BP down when the usual ones were substitued by cheaper versions of foriegn manufacture. Then there are others I've been threatened with that sound even worse. For instance one warns it causes incontinence in a percentage of recipients. Well thanks, but no thanks. I have this nightmare now of being hospitalised or institutionalised and forced to take these the order of some careless consultant then being on the receiving end of bad-tempered, overworked nurses and, not knowing the reason , thinking it's all my poor body's fault.

And there's the whole statin thing. I'm told there was a programme about statins on Channel 4 recently - around the time I'd just succumbed to medical pressure and taken the beastly things for four days which was enough to bring on a headache the like of which I have never had before. It didn't go away, night or day, until I stopped taking the inoffensive-looking little white poppers. I read about a pilot who had had to give up flying, thereby losing his livelihood, because of the neuropathy brought on on by this medication. It's great that they work for some folk but for others they cause more problems than they alleviate. The drug companies continue to swear to their safety though their trials are of dubious reliability - small numbers, research done by chemists with shares in the drug company concerned and so on. It's enough to make one become a conspiracy theorist.

People will still be able to get their herbal medies over the Internet from the USA or non-EU countries, but we won't be able to sell them in the shop or order them in or we'll be burned as witches I suppose.

Because I know how my own psyche and soul work I am inclined to think that whatever people believe will heal them will heal them. This is as often disproved as proved of course, but I do know of at least two women who when told they had a cancer that 'must' be operated on and then bombarded by chemotherapy sturdily declared there is no 'must' about anything, there are always choices, and they went to homeopathic hospitals for injections of mistletoe which they claim make them feel revitalised - quite the opposite experience suffered by the poor souls who go down the allopathic route. These brave ladies, one into her eighties now, came out the other side of their treatments triumphantly in remission.

The house is thick with the smell of a Full English: sausage, bacon, mushrooms. tomatoes and -chips by special request. Once every three weeks g’son stays overnight when he’s visiting his father. This started because his poor mother found it difficult to deal with the grumps before and after the visit and it worked better to have him leave from my house. Happily he doesn’t get the grumps with me. Mothers always bear the brunt of the troubled emotions - I remember! Things are better now but there is always some tension in him, though his visits have been pared down by Saturday morning school and the grumps have faded a little as he gets better at dealing with his father’s probing questions and bitterness. Still, he needs building up for the experience.

He also needs, more cheerfully, building up for the front line in the scrum. As above, second from the left next to the green gumguard, and invisible in the front line of pre-scrumdown. He is, we are told, a useful rugby player, has won his full colours and when the star player dislocated a shoulder and broke a collar bone he was promoted to prop forward (I think) in which place he gets the full force of the collapse if there is one, so his mother has checked the insurance. The bruises he comes home with are appalling but he tells the tale of each one with relish. Apart from the real and present danger we have much to thank rugby for. It’s been instrumental in a breakthrough at school. He now has respect from the girls (some of them, probably not the academics) as a jock and glory in the eyes of the ankle-biters. The team are going On Tour before the end of term; also a good thing as he gets used to being away from home. I don’t think they are playing the All Blacks.

Now I have time to review my week. It’s been a long one. Daughter went to London to do one of the stages of her cranial osteopathy trainings and happily was able to stay with her sister. She came back tired and , having had time to see her life from a distance for a few days, reluctant to take up the reins of four jobs, in variable order depending on the times: osteopathy, the shop, her son, and her partner who still has terrible back pain (waiting for a scan, probably facing another operation) and depression. I don’t know how she does it and am full of admiration. She is like her father, able to put her head down and get on with things, determined and very, very able They are both Aries. Don’t know if that explains anything.

All three of the offspring are working really hard and it does rather put me to shame. Still, I take heart in having got a few things right. Not sure what...

On a personal level not much to report. I bought two nice stone rubbings of Pictish carvings, an eagle and a deer. The chap uses beeswax crayons on cotton for the rubbing and then prints the results again onto cotton. They are a reasonable price but when I went to ask about getting them framed found I would have to spend rather more on one frame than I paid for both rubbings so I’m a bit stumped. Good ready-made frames aren’t easy to get up here and they are an awkward shape - square. Didn’t see anything helpful in Tesco!

I do most of my shopping on line or from catalogues these days. We don’t have much choice of clothing for instance. Daughter came back with ecstatic reports of a girly afternoon spent with her sister trying on dresses in Chiswick. She scored two little numbers from the sales, £20 each and looking amazing. One skimpy bit of nothing I never would have been able to wear but she takes after her father’s mother there too - that flat-chested lady must have looked very good in flapper styles in her day.

Reading has been taking a back burner but I’ve been enjoying re-reading Reginald Hill, especially ‘Arms and the Woman’ which book I read parts of the first time through, wanting to follow the main story. Now I have been back to read Ellie Pascoe’s ‘Comfort Blanket’ which might have been, at a guess an enjoyable exercise for RH as well as Ellie. I like his style and I like that he obviously enjoys himself when he writes, enjoys using his erudition, putting lots of quotes into the mouths of his characters, (never gratuitously) using the characters to toy with themes that interest or amuse him, experimenting with form. He’s always surprising. Long may his ink last.

Which was my ultimate frustration this week. Buying ink for an Epsom printer. I did get Tescos versions in the end but they are still pricey. The real ones - well I might as well have bought a new printer. I just hope the damn thing works now and I can get on with my project.

Update: It printed out 120 pages without hesitation, repetion or whatever the third thing is they have to avoid on 'Just a Minute.' Result!

More conversations

A page or two back I was blethering about how hard I find it to speak my truth without it becoming divisive - or something like that. Perhaps it was about how often I find myself arguing with friends and how hard I find keeping my mouth shut even though I’ve had plenty of time to learn the sense in the maxim ‘least said soonest mended.’

I never did write the follow-up to the conversation about virginity and ‘saving oneself.’ I thought of it just now. No idea why. It might have been another conversation I had with a customer today. She was once in a foursome - three women and one man. She’s in a another unconventional set-up just now which isn’t really working for her... but enough of that. The second conversation I had that past week also strayed into the interesting topic of sexual mores. I have a friend who had very unsatisfactory parents, a drunken violent father and a critical self-centred mother. In her young teens she escaped from the poisonous atmosphere in the family home to a nearby artist’s colony and there led a life I can only be jealous of because it sounds so idyllic and interesting and so far removed from my stodgy teenage years at a grammar school when the most exciting highlights were getting the lead in the school play, finding a boyfriend and having almost-the-whole-way sex in a shelter on the promenade on a wet and windy night. (We used my bed for the real thing not too many days later. Much more comfortable.)

Our lunch-time was enlivined by J’s accounts of the stream of shy young artist students arriving to learn at the seat of the master, of musicians dropping by for a night or two, jamming for hours drunk on home-made wine; of long languorous afternoons spent in the garden and the fields, only visiting the house for wine or lemonade and bread. To earn a little pocket money she and the artist’s daughters helped with the humble tidying up work on stained glass pieces finishing the leadings whilst around the adults (many of them now household names) discussed and discoursed (I’m imagining here) probably shaping the way she now leads her life. There was never any money but somehow they always seemed to have enough to make meals look like banquets, and there was that wine to get tipsy on.

In this halcyon existence the fact that the daughters were sleeping with and having sex with their father hardly registered as remarkable. Whilst I was listening to her I thought I could be watching a rather well-directed film - probably by a French director for lightness of touch . Slow and sensuous, with lots of sunlit out-door scenes, yellow meadow flowers and a babbling stream, it would seem as though there was to be no story only a gentle comfortable portrayal of the artist’s life, rather pastel with lots of use of the fisheye lens, then this extra dimension would slide into consciousness unheralded, and the viewer would be left to make up their own minds how they felt about it.

My friend was also matter-of-fact when she got to this part, matter-of-fact in the way that a person is when they are aware that there may be a difference of opinion here. She knows me well enough to know I’m not easily shocked except by ugliness, and the way this had been happening it wasn’t ugly. I believed her when she told me that the girls went on to have quite normal successful (or not, but anyway normal) relationships in later life and were perfectly happy with the situation both at the time and now. Unfortunately everything changed in Arcadia when a biographer blew the whole affair into the media . The regular members of the loosely knit colony either faded away because they disliked the attention or withdrew in on themselves for the same reason.

The lunchtime conversation had been very pleasant thus far. We enjoyed agreeing that it’s wrong to criticise other people’s way of life, especially when we don’t fully understand the circumstances. My friend declared she would never, for instance, criticism any religious person for their practices however bizarre or distasteful they are to our cultural upbringing.
Uh-oh!
Red lights are now appearing all around me as she states firmly that even female circumcision cannot be condemned if it’s a custom of the socio-religious ethos.

I squawked in horror. We laughed to cover the moment. We got the bill.

We’re still friends. I just know I’ll convince her that she’s wrong!

CATHOLIC COFFEE MORNING IN ROME

Four Catholic men and a Catholic woman were having coffee in St.Peters Square.

The first Catholic man tells his friends, "My son is a priest, when he walks into a room,
everyone calls him 'Father'."

The second Catholic man chirps, "My son is a Bishop. When he walks into a room
people call him 'Your Grace'."

The third Catholic gent says, "My son is a Cardinal. When he enters a room
everyone bows their head and says 'Your Eminence'."

The fourth Catholic man says very proudly, "My son is the Pope.
When he walks into a room people call him 'Your Holiness'."

Since the lone Catholic woman was sipping her coffee in silence,
The four men give her a subtle, "Well....?"

She proudly replies, "I have a daughter,

SLIM

TALL

38D BREAST

24" WAIST

When she walks into a room, people say,

"Oh My God."

*
*
*

Isabel

Very disconcerting. I've just written a 10,000 word story about Isabel Goudie the famous local witch who is said to have been of great influence to witchcraft across Europe since her death and possibly even shaped the present day Wiccan cults. (I don't suppose for one minute she looked like the image above but I think the lady exudes my heroine's warrior spirit!)

Mine is a rather air-brushed, Hollywood tale I know, (and shows I have the makings of a good Mills and Boone writer hopefully!) but I 'm of a romantic turn of mind and I felt I had justifiable reasons for portraying her as a rather fine rebellious specimen of C17 womanhood. Possibly I've been too influenced by a novelist, J.W.Brodie-Innes, whose work of fantasy, published in 1915, was much approved by Dennis Wheatley. Brodie-Innes claims to have found substantiating evidence from 'contemporary' sources for the incidents that form the structure of his novel "The Devil's Mistress". The process of recovery of these documents he claims to have had access to would, in his own words, 'form exceedingly interesting matter for the Society for Psychical Research' by which I take him to mean there were supernatural forces at work leading him to his goals! Perhaps Isabel approved of his approach to the telling of her tale.

Anyway, the disconcerting bit is that I bought a recently published work by an academic entitled 'The Visions of Isobel Gowdie' and, apart from choosing to spell her name in a way I don't like, the writer of this authoritative , comprehensive, one might almost say exhaustive, work has rather brought me down to earth by claiming that poor Isabel would have been a lice-ridden peasant woman folded about in coarse homespun tartan, all soggy round the hems with farmyard muck, stinking from her unwashed body and the smell of the peat smoke (which is also quite sour and pleasant I know from experience) . Most unaesthetic.

The author has given me a few crumbs of hope. Her book includes transcripts of Isabel's 'confessions' which were said to be voluntary, and as the records of the actual trials still exist they can't be ignored. They, of course, show her in a much more gruesome and violent role than my tale allows, with an emphasis on the darker side of witchcraft (the practice of digging up the corpses of unshriven babes for instance.) In mitigation the author suggests that the confessions may have been made 'voluntarily' but only after some fairly unpleasant encouragement which itself has been airbrushed out of history. Furthermore, analysing the content of the confessions she has deduced that Isabel's statement didn't come as a single uninterrupted account of her doings as a witch but was the result of a succession of leading questions to which certain answers were expected - perhaps demanded.

It's still a dilemma: To be true to the accounts that remain, though they themselves may be distorted, or to continue with the illusion? I think I shall press on with my glamorised, sanitised version - after all folk tales are for entertainment and that's what Isabel has become to me, a lively, spirited young woman with a vivid imagination, possibly a natural talent for healing and otherwise influencing the natural world, who carries in herself the still-strong threads of earlier beliefs in the spirits of air, fire, earth and water.

It was a restrictive, dour age she lived in, an age of religious turmoil, when religious expression was changing in form and substance and the Scottish Parliament was trying to control the country through the strict, narrow tenets of Calvinism with its depressing emphasis on original sin. It was a time when almost any earthly pleasure was considered the work of the devil, a temptation thrown in the way of god-fearing folk to keep their sensibilities focused on their mortal life instead of on their salvation.

As Isabel herself might cry: Horse and hattock in the de'il's name! Ride on Isabel!

Wanted: TechnoPagan.

I've been struggling with sketches to go with my folk tales. Sketching isn't something that comes easily to me. Just when I think I've got a reasonable image I find it's become several sizes too big on the paper like this fairy/elf creature who is supposed to be so much smaller than the two fiddlers he enticed away to play for his companions under the hill for a hundred years. I know that with the wonders of Apple technology I should be able to either shrink him or increase the size of the fiddlers but I can't manage that either. This amount of failure is bad for me. The other techno-nightmare is my printer which after 8 years stalwart service is retiring. It prints a page then tells me there is a paper jam, which there isn't. I managed to persuade it (wih a thump, I kid you not) that it could go to two pages but after that it stopped and sent up a smug little notice to tell me it was out of ink.

I want it bewitched so it can't stop printing till I have finished with it.