We've had really mixed weather this summer in the UK, and every time it rains the English whinge. (We've got some of the mildest kindest weather anywhere on the planet, but we whine about it constantly.) Now I happen to like summer rain, in a strange way. Every time I open the back door to find clouds and drizzle and a blustery breeze I say to Mr Ashbless: "Ooh - feels like Scotland!" And I want to Go. Oh how I want to go, up to the west coast of the Highlands, through Glencoe and to the islands. It's like homesickness. It's like being in love.
When Mr Ashbless and I went on our very first cottage holiday together, back in 1992 or so, it was to Scotland - in fact it was to that tiny white blob of a house in the picture at the top there (I took the photo in 2007 when we returned to Ardnamurchan). We've been back to the country every couple of years since. I've only written
one short story set there though. Maybe I should do more.
Scotland was where I first saw a wild heron, and deer jumping a six-foot fence. Where I picked garnets up on the sea-shore. Where I ran down a tropical-white beach in the pissing rain on my own, because even the dogs wouldn't get out of the car. Where the lobster came out to look at us and I decided I wasn't eating animals anymore. Where, in 1992, I decided I didn't want to be dead after all.
In fact, here's almost the precise spot I decided it was worth being alive:
The Scotland of my mind of course is not a realistic place: it's an idealised, permanent-late-summer vacation Scotland. If I had to live there year round I think the long nights would kill me. But that doesn't stop me wanting it, desperately.
I want cloud shadows chasing across open hillsides and sodden little tufts of bog cotton bowing in the wind. I want sheep bleating outside my bedroom window. I want pink-ringed jellyfish swaying in Caribbean-clear waters. I want the smell of the sea and peatwater. I want sea-lochs so calm it looks like you could walk across them. I want, above all, the huge open silences. And the sense of my smallness.
While I pine,
Shanna Germain has been posting photos from her recent roadtrip with
Nikki Magennis,
here. And making me pine even more.
This weekend I'm indulging my inner six-year-old and going to see the Walking with Dinosaurs show. I'm very excited - I always wanted Jurassic Park to be real!
Wheeeeeeeee!
I have a lot of respect for TV chef Jamie Oliver*, who has tried to do something useful with his celebrity by publicising the outrageous conditions battery animals are kept in and trying to promote instead the eating of animals that have been farmed humanely.
Thank you to everyone who wished Mr Ashbless well when he lost his job. The Good News is - he's got a new one! It pays much better! It's going to involve lots of travel to exciting new places*!
Dear Friends of the Departed...
Here's Kerri Sharp, the original Black Lace Editor and the woman to whom I owe my writing career, giving the eulogy:
Want to hear a funny story? I only found this out myself on that night: A young female relative of a certain multi-millionaire not totally unconnected with the Virgin brand (who owned Black Lace at the time) was seconded to Black Lace for work experience. She was given a fiction manuscript to read. She quit the job in horror on her first day, saying she was being "asked to read things she wasn't comfortable with." The book? My novella Bear Skin in Enchanted. Yes, I drove someone out of a job!
I love hair. You know that, don't you. This is not the only picture by this photographer (or indeed the only picture of this model) that I have burned my eyes out leching over.
We're not dead yet!
Today's kinky Victorian art is Saint Eulalia (painted 1885) by John William Waterhouse, possibly my favourite (late) Pre-Raphaelite. In fact I think this is the first Victorian painting I looked at all those years ago and thought, "Hey - hold on. There's something pervy going on here, isn't there?" because it's fairly clear that the corpse of the virgin martyr is intended to be an object of admiration and desire for the viewer. Great Waterhousian red hair though, and in every way a fantastic painting.
That noise is me blowing my own trumpet. You didn't know I was supple enough to Blow My Own, did you? Look - there on my wall over my computer desk is the lovely certificate those fab people at Jade: the international art and literature magazine sent me.
The text, since you're not likely to be able to read it unless you have the keen sight of the Elves, goes: