taubi

 

The pigeon entered our lives quite matter-of-factly but, all the same, the event was shrouded in an air of strangeness.  Why did he choose precisely Jenny's door, among all the doors he could have chosen on the long corridor on the second story of jenny's block of residential flats?  How did he gain entry to the block of flats anyway, all access doors to the street always being closed?  Could he have hatched in some recess on the cliff behind the block, and might his parents have been chased away or murdered by a cat, and could it be that he had somehow escaped detection by the cat, and had come now to present himself at jenny's door, somehow intuitively seeking her protection? 

We first heard his soft call from inside the flat and did not know whence it came and hence thought nothing of it.  Then about twenty minutes later we heard it again, clear and insistent.  This time Jenny opened the door and he waddled straight into the flat, as if he had been waiting to do just that.  He was very small; it seemed that he couldn't have been more than a few days out of his egg.  He had a strange swollen knobbly beak and a self-assured manner.  I thought that he probably belonged the goose family, and suspected that he was of Asian origin.  Jenny agreed that he looked strange, but had a hunch that he could be a pigeon.  After some searching online, sure enough, she came across a photo of a young pigeon whose appearance corresponded exactly with our little chick's.  We learned that the knobbly beak is only found in the young, and is replaced by a stronger one in adulthood.  We learned that of all birds the pigeon family is the most widespread and numerous, and that strictly speaking there is no agreed upon way to say when a pigeon is not also a dove.  

Jenny's childhood on a finca in rural Paraguay was filled with intimate animal friendships, from a horse and cows to pet parrots and a pet monkey, from a pet rat called fred whom she would smuggle into her school classes in the pocket of her coat, to a hen who would follow her as she walked several kilometres to school and wait for her by the school gate to then walk home with her after classes.  Could little pigeon have somehow sensed Jenny's love for all animals or why else would he have waited and called insistently like that at her door?  

In any event Jenny soon took him under her wing, making him a little nest under a leafy plant pot and feeding him by making a bottle of bird paste, pecked at by him through a hole in a condom stretched over the bottle opening (which, Jenny read, simulates the experience of having to reach into mama's beak.)  It wasn't always easy to ensure that he was eating enough and it required a fair amount of patience and dedication on Jenny's part.  

Jenny's love of animals, or perhaps her maternal instinct, made her instinctively help out pigeon, but it was to become a relationship not without its frustrations.  Although I still catch myself calling him just pigeon, Jenny has come to call him Taubi (Taube being the german for pigeon.) Taubi would shit indiscriminately all over the balcony, which hindered hanging up clothes to dry there.  He was free to fly off and discover the world if he wanted to (which any parent or parental representative would have wished of him) but instead he would perch there for hours cooing and purring and dancing himself into a trance.  He is not exactly a normal pigeon.  He is mostly obsessively attached to Jenny, and will flutter over to wherever she is sitting and, cooing all the time, will perform a purposefully choreographed dance in front of her (which jenny, perhaps correctly, interprets to be a courting dance.)  However, he is a single-minded and short-tempered creature, and it is not beyond him to behave aggressively even towards Jenny.   Over time he has warmed a little towards me and doesn't usually mind me picking him up, although when he is feeling truculent he is wont to deal me deft martial art swats with one wing, which always catch me unawares.  Jenny says he is jealous.  Sometimes he feigns to bite all of my fingers, but I don't think he means any harm because it really doesn't hurt.  It just tickles.  Perhaps it is just his way of showing affection.  

We took him to the cave where other wild pigeons would fly past but he never showed any interest in them.  We thought that all he needed was to meet a young female pigeon and he would be sorted for life - pigeons being monogamous - but no, he haughtily ignored any interest from other pigeons and didn't even seem fond of the rocky coast around the cave.  He might stay for a day or two, but would eventually fly the three kilometres or so back to Jenny's flat and be found invariably back on his balcony, coating everything with his droppings and annoying the neighbours with his mad cooing.  

We thought we had found the solution when we took him to the land Jenny had bought above Tierra del Trigo.  Surrounded by forested hills, he did seem to like the place more than the cave.  He was more contented, less given to his catatonic cooing, and would fly around and accompany Jenny on any outdoor project of hers.  However, we soon realised that he only stayed on the land as long as Jenny was also there.  If I stayed alone on the land with Taubi, he might stay for a few days with me, but at a certain point would take wing, and in a matter of hours Jenny would report that he had arrived back at the balcony in the south - a distance of perhaps twenty kilometres as the pigeon flies (and at least double by the twisty roads).  The homing instinct native to Taubi's breed has in his case been set, seemingly irrevocably, on the balcony of Jenny's flat.  Jenny suggests that we could try taking him across the sea to one of the neighbouring Canary islands and see if that doesn't flummox his homebound bind, or, failing that, try mainland Europe.

 

unalloyed love

"what two words come to your mind when you think of this cave?" asked mario when he came by to visit a few weeks before they pulled it down.  "pure love" i said without even thinking.   i suppose "love" would have done; "pure" only served as an intensifier due to the two word stipulation. now that they have pulled it down i reflect that it is wonderful to have loved a place to such a degree for so long at all, even if 'our cave' as such is no more.  as to the question of ownership of or entitlement to the cave, Jenny often reminded any disputer that it was Papa Teide who created the cave, and his creation it would for ever remain.  (El Teide is the volcanic vent which flung all of Tenerife above the sea in the first place.)  

how naïve of us to have imagined that our cave would probably be considered exceptional and exempted from the general cleansing.  "of course they want to remove the messy constructions put up all along the coast" we thought, "but anyone can see how much love and care we have put into this place." the particular beauty of this place is undeniable and overwhelming . . . or so we thought.  others concurred, and commented that this concave fold in the rock deserved be conserved - not inhabited by any one person, but kept open, empty and natural - as a place for contemplation.  we had left behind a fetching image of Jesus, pointing at his sacred heart, wearing a calm inscrutable mona lisa gaze, and with long flowing blonde hair, looking just like a mild-mannered jimmy page.  along with a statuette of the madonna with child, we thought that these icons might emanate peace and awaken an attitude of compassion among the catholic police force.  indeed i found that they had been respectfully removed from the cave and reverently placed under a cactus up the hill, whereas the door and window of the cave - which Jenny had once salvaged from a shipwreck - had been ripped out.  The morning they came to knock the walls down I was hiding out in Pepe's old cave by the sea, feeling like a fugitive because of the security men who came down with bright torches the night before.  I had wanted to spend one last night in the cave.  There was still a group of policemen standing by the scattered stones as I appeared the next morning and attempted to casually walk by.  I saw from their tense faces that they were here on a serious mission: to erase all illegal dwellings along the coast, and that they would brook no dissent. This time they had been much more professional and efficient. Nothing had been burned like in the last wave of evictions but long lines of workers had worked hard to carry everything out.  They barked at me to put a mask on, and to show them my documents, and said that no-one was allowed here while they were clearing up, so I'd better clear off.  I told them untruthfully that I had not lived here; had only spent time here occasionally.  Something in the way I eyed the cave painting - exposed to full daylight for the first time - made them ask me if I had painted this.  I assented and they asked aggressively, "what if we were to come to your country and paint the rocks there?"  I imagined for a moment the Salisbury Crags covered with colours and thought that it might not be that bad, but yes, objections could be raised, and hmmm, yes, in retrospect it would have been better to have left the rocks unpainted.  The irony is that the greatest part of the south coast of Tenerife has been disfigured by indiscriminate hotel building, holiday apartments, golf courses, commercial centres, etc, and elsewhere covered by blanket banana plantations, leaving very little room for any natural environment, compounded by the discarded detritus from construction projects lying all around, and other accumulations of all types of rubbish from careless, throw-away society.  I can appreciate the official stance that, amid such run-away construction, it is worth putting aside one area to be preserved as unbuiltupon land, but why not treat all land as having its own intrinsic worth, to care where possible for its elements of natural beauty, instead of saying:  here we can defile.  here and here and here is all okay to defile, but not over there.   Later I found the window and the door, still intact, on a skip at the top of the hill, and came back to salvage them.  I took them to a strip of land which Jenny had bought above a little village called Tierra del Trigo in the north of the island.  A lot of the plants which I had tended over the years had been squashed by the rubble; I dug them up and took them to the land too.  Mostly the agaves, which can endure much hardship, and a few choice cacti.  I had found one broken off cactus limb lying by a layby, who suddenly blossomed not long ago after I planted him outside the cave, encouraging him with sparing little drinks of water.  I think he was a queen of the night, because of the brevity of his bloom.  I came down to the cave one night and was gradually overcome by the most enchanting perfume filling the air.  It took me a while to realise where it was coming from; in no time this once discarded limb had rooted and drank and had now pushed out the most beautiful scented single white flower, making me feel touched and thanked. At first light next day I took some photos, and the next day the flower had already begun withering.  I found him buried and bruised under the rubble, and have carried him now to the land, where I am sure he will get on fine.  All the aloes I left at the cave; they didn't seem to need much water to grow healthy and strong.

Back in March - just before lockdown - we were delighted to be able to celebrate Gabriela's first birthday at the cave.  Gabriela was radiant and relaxed.  We had invited a discreet group of friends, and had a barbeque and some beers.  

Everyone in la Caleta said that it was the best lockdown they had ever had, which I found a funny thing to say, given that there hadn't been any precedents.  It is true that the caleteros lived it up largely, with no tourists or excursionists to intrude on their idyllic stretch of sun-drenched coast, gathering and playing music on the beach at night, with very little regard for maintaining social distancing, I imagine.  One young German went out fishing with his mate on a canoe and proudly posted a video of it online.  This could have contributed to the triggering of the ruthlessly efficient clearing out that summer, when lockdown had loosened.  Apart from the question of keeping the natural environment untouched, there was a social aspect to it, where local residents resented that their coastline had been usurped by largely socially misfitted foreigners.  Already viewed with suspicion due to their unconventional ways, publicly flaunting lockdown restrictions when all other citizens were kept imprisoned in their homes was taking just too many liberties.  After the evictions the beach in the summer swarmed with canarian families, visibly very happy to have their beach back.  Looking back now, what is surprising is not that they eventually kicked us thoroughly out, but that such free living was tolerated there at all and for so long.  "one of the truest anarchist communities I have came across," Dante said to me recently.  this had its undoubted perks, but its drawbacks too.  Dante wanted to be able to play guitar and sing from full lungs at 4 in the morning, so having no rules was just right for him.  Once Jenny and Gaby were trying to sleep while they were blasting out music from huge loudspeakers powered by a generator above the beach - about half a mile away, but big bass booming right into the cave.  2 or 3 in the morning. I ran round and said to a few people: hey, the baby is trying to sleep, do you mind turning the volume down a bit?  all they did was grin with their party grins and say: "tell them to come and dance with us"  to be fair a fairly well functioning communal space was created above the beach: seating area, shade from sun, fire pit, clay oven, pizza nights, meals made, wood collected, water collected, refuse disposed of.  there were always those who wanted a little more organisation, more participation, not always the same people doing the same tasks.  there was a great range of experiences and stories and motives behind the people who spent time in la caleta.  it can't be denied that the place exerted a powerful influence on certain people; it was a deeply appealing place to be.  many people would initially be passing through, and would end up lingering until in the end they somehow could not leave.  quite a few people went crazy.  jenny used to talk about decorating little bottles and labelling them as the lost souls of hippies, and selling them to the tourists.  it is possible to smirk at jenny's macabre sense of humour here, but thinking about it now, i feel aghast at the mere phenomenon of a lost soul.

my cherry picked Colin Wilson

Browsing around Glasgow's Mitchell library the other day, my eye was caught by a thick book entitled 'The Ultimate Colin Wilson.  Writings on Mysticism, Consciousness and Existentialism'

Flicking through the pages, it didn't take me long to take the book out on loan and become thoroughly engrossed in its reading.  I sort of literally could not put it down.  I closed its pages only shortly before closing my eyes at night, and opened them again shortly after I had opened them again in the morning.  The bullet points below are citations or phrases or fragments of ideas that struck me.  I paraphrased some of them to suit my understanding and so I can't say that these selected snippets are fully faithful transcriptions of Wilson's words, but most of them are more or less so, to my understanding.  Wilson himself is fond of rephrasing.  Of the hundreds of books which I have subsequently learned that he has written, he admits to having centred on essentially the same main ideas, which he approaches from different angles or decorates with diverse references to philosophy, literature and tales from everyday experience. 

One recurring theme running throughout Wilson's writing is the 'peak experience' - when one is overcome by a feeling of immense well-being: joy, ecstasy, elation, wonder and awe, as if one had received (in the words of G.K. Chesterton) "absurd good news."  Maslow first coined the phrase 'peak experience' in describing religious/spiritual experiences where ego consciousness disappears and is replaced by a blissful awareness of the underlying oneness of All.  Discussing this later with Wilson, Maslow reported that, although such experiences could occur among all types of people, certain very healthy individuals were most prone to them and that, in the process of describing and dwelling upon their experiences, they were found to recur with an ever greater frequency. 

• 'We started on one of those clear dawns that wake up the senses with the sun, while the intellect, tired of the thinking of the night, was yet abed.  For an hour or two, on such a morning, the sounds, scents and colours of the world struck man individually and directly, not filtered through or made typical by thought; they seemed to exist sufficiently by themselves, and the lack of design, or carefreeness in creation no longer irritated.'        T.E. Lawrence in Seven Pillars of Wisdom
• 'Why did I suddenly feel so happy, hanging there like a fly, looking down at the lights thousands of feet below in the valley?  So many are lying there comfortably in their beds, not particularly happy because they take their beds for granted.  All suffering from what you could call false fatigue - a mistaken feeling that life is not really worth living.  Suddenly the absurdity struck me: we have climbed this mountain to remind ourselves of something we ought to know anyway - that life is only worth living when the will is concentrated.
• What we call waking consciousness is not usually much better than sleep.  We are still wrapped in a passive, sluggish day-dream.  This is not due to some natural limit to consciousness, but only because we remain unaware that it can be stretched.  We are like dogs who think they are on a chain, when in fact they are free.
• 'peak experiences' remind us that everyday consciousness is a kind of tunnel and that we only have to remove the telescope fixed on the one cloud on the horizon to realise how unlimited the big blue sky is.
• the 'ordinary consciousness', which we have taken for granted as the only kind of consciousness, is a poor substitute for the real thing.  Mystics have always experienced this insight, and found it hard to put into words simply because all our language is based upon the premise that ordinary consciousness is the real thing.
• The Outsider is the heroic figure of our time.  He feels alone in the crowd of the second rate.  He could be a saint or visionary, caring for nothing but one moment where he understands the world or sees into the heart of nature and God.  He is a symptom of our time, a rebel against the lack of spiritual tension in a materially prosperous age.
• 'If I had to stand on a narrow ledge for ever and ever, in eternal darkness and tempest, I'd still rather do that than die at once'    Rashkolnikov, in Crime and Punishment
• 'Art, that makes life seem like a game, and withdraws us from the common fate'  Wagner

• 'Vanity of vanities, all is vanity.'     Ecclesiastes
• 'There is nothing new under the sun.'   this gloomy feeling haunts so many outsiders - those looking for those magical wow moments.
• 'The Ecclesiastes Effect' is expressed with gloomy power in the philosophy of Schopenhauer.
• Dostoevsky, Nietzsche and Van Gogh were perceivers of other realities which brought about a dissatisfaction with ordinary consciousness and its emphasis on the immediate and trivial.
• Mental illness is basically caused by the collapse of the will.  When you make an effort, your will recharges your vital powers as a car recharges a battery when you drive it.  If you cease to will, the battery goes flat, and life appears to be futile and absurd.  To emerge from this state, all that is necessary is to maintain any kind of purposeful activity - even without much conviction - and the batteries will slowly become recharged.
• 'I felt the need to test the power that had entered me, and I began to dig in the fierce afternoon heat for more than an hour at a rate that I ordinarily could not sustain for two minutes.  I felt no fatigue, and no sense of effort.  Moreover, I felt a clarity of thought that I had only known involuntarily and at rare moments, but which was now at my command.  The phrase 'in my mind's eye' took on new meaning as I 'saw' the eternal pattern of each thing I looked at: the trees, the plants, the water flowing in the canal.  I remember saying aloud: 'now I see why God hid himself from us' but even now I cannot recall the intuition behind this exclamation.'    [here Wilson is quoting an author whose name I did not note]
• If some benevolent deity gave every person the equivalent of a million pounds, not much more happiness would be produced; most people would soon find reasons to feel dissatisfied.
• This is the paradox of human existence: man knows what he doesn't want far more clearly than he knows what he does want.
• As Fichte says: to be free is nothing; to become free is heaven.
• 'Dante's inferno is a picture of human society in a state of sin and corruption, like our own, racked by futility, lack of living faith, drift into loose morality, greedy consumption, financial irresponsibility, self-opinionated and obstinate individualism, violence.'     Schumacher
• Authenticity is driven by a deep sense of purpose.  Such a sense of purpose cannot exist unless we first assume that our sense of contingency is a liar, and that there is a standard of value external to everyday human consciousness  [mystical consciousness.]
• The metaphysics of religion [and not its dogmas] affirm the existence of an external value system [which Wilson would like to call 'new' existentialism]
• [which Wilson contrasts to the 'old' existentialism, which espouses materialism, where there is a 'total contingency' (non-necessity of being so)]
• Man's evolution depends on a renewal of his sense of overall purpose.  For biological reasons we are blinkered, like horses in the traffic.  We are capable of altering our immediate responses and values in favour of a more embracing value system.  Every moment of our conscious lives depends on the value systems we adopt.

• The narrator in Powys' novels wants to see events from some universal point of view in which the algae in a stagnant pond and the grubs in a rotten tree are as important as the human characters.
• Powys: 'I became aware, more vividly aware than I had ever been, that the secret of life consists in sharing the madness of God; the power of rousing a peculiar exultation in yourself as you confront the inanimate, an exultation which is really a cosmic eroticism.
• Healthy optimistic minds repel ordinary misfortune, whereas accident-proneness and general bad luck are the result of a psyche made vulnerable by defeat or stagnation.
• We say something and mean it only when Faculty X [Wilson's term for a higher state of awareness] is awake.
• Faculty X is the key to all mystic and poetic experience; it is the sheer affirmation experienced by Wordsworth and Shelly and Blake.
• When Faculty X is awoken life suddenly takes on a new, poignant quality.
• Faust is about to commit suicide when the Easter bell rings, bringing him back to childhood; suddenly faculty X is awake and he knows suicide to be the ultimate laughable absurdity.
• In Proust's novel, the narrator dips a madeleine into his tea and is suddenly thrust back to childhood: 'an exquisite pleasure had invaded my senses.  At once the vicissitudes of life had become indifferent to me, its disasters innocuous, its brevity illusory - I had now ceased to feel mediocre, accidental, mortal.'
• Faculty X is a sense of reality, the reality of other places and other times, above and beyond my ordinary senses that tell me that here and now is all that is real.
• What is consciousness for? When you are deeply asleep, you have no consciousness.  When you are very tired, consciousness is like a dim light that hardly illuminates anything.  When you are wide awake and excited, consciousness seems to increase in sheer candle power.  Its purpose is to illuminate reality, to reach out into its recesses and thus to enable us to act upon it and transform it.  When it is low, reality becomes 'unreal'; as it becomes stronger, reality becomes 'realer': faculty X.

• The birds are creatures of the air, fish are creatures of the water; man is a creature of the mind.     H.G. Wells
• An animal cannot disobey its instincts; humans disobey theirs a hundred times a day.
• 'Our inner robot' is the unconscious servant who performs all automatic tasks of everyday life.  When I am energetic and cheerful, the robot stays in the background and I walk around with my senses wide awake.  As I get tired, the robot takes over more and more of my functions and the reality around me becomes less and less real.
• With the senses closed, one suffers from 'meaning starvation.'  Human beings accept the lack of meaning with stolid fatalism, as an animal accepts illness and pain.
• If I want more meaning, then I must force my senses wide-open by an increased effort of will. Meaning is proportional to the intensity of will.
• Gurdjieff's tremendous vitality impressed everyone who met him.  His method depends on forcing people to make unusual efforts to release their vital reserve.
• concentration - intensity - intention -  volition - purpose - appetite for life

• To put it crudely, you could say it is as if you had Bertrand Russell in one side of your head and D.H. Lawrence (or Walt Whitman) in the other; the result is non-stop hostility.
• The left-brain hemisphere adopts a worm's eye view of reality and is concerned with analytically apprehending surface facts; the right-brain hemisphere adopts a bird's eye view of reality, seeing the 'big picture', perceiving deeper meanings and underlying connections.
• Under hypnosis one is able perform extraordinary feats - when the conscious left-brain is shut down and replaced by the authoritative voice of the hypnotist.  One cannot perform such feats in a conscious state, when the left-brain is in control, simply because one does not believe that one can.
• D.H. Lawrence and Henry Miller tell us that 'head consciousness' is dangerous and stupid and that we ought to trust the 'solar plexus' [instincts.]  However, the main problem is not that 'head consciousness' is overconfident and conceited, but that it is far too weak and diffident.
• The left-brain/right-brain view of the human entity gives altogether firmer grounds for optimism about man's future.  Our real trouble is not that we are at the mercy of sinister dark forces, but that we are enfeebled by an unjustified lack of self-confidence.  My problem lies in my attitude to myself, my tendency to premature defeat, my failure to grasp that I am, in fact, in control. 
• I could be compared to an excellent army with incompetent and inexperienced officers.  This is a far better situation than an army with good officers and hopeless soldiers.  The thought of inexperienced officers [the left-brain function] makes us aware that human beings are young and inexperienced in an evolutionary sense and therefore these problems are little more than teething pains.
• A deliberate and conscious effort of control, based upon a change of attitude, ought to bring about an immediate change in the quality of one's consciousness.
• Jung's method of active imagination through letting go - lying totally relaxed, but in a state of wide-awake vigilance - could be regarded as the simplest, and most effective, of mental therapies.
• Once the real existence of our 'other self' [our 'hidden ally'] has been recognised, the next question is to tease it into expressing itself.  Many people experience it in the form of auditory and visual hallucinations - Jung's projections.
• Jungian Barbara Hannah postulates that ancient man's encounters with God are instances of active imagination.
• Ancient man was perhaps unicameral [one-brained]; in a relaxed, instinctive state of oneness with nature, like a cow.  Being in Tao and in himself.
• Jung's individuation: being dominated by the left-brain which, unaware of the 'hidden ally', is inclined to over-react to problems.
• Active imagination is not Rimbaud's 'reasoned derangement of the senses', directed by the ego.  It is an inner harmony based on the recognition of the hidden ally, leading to a process of cooperation between the two selves.
• The right and left brains can eventually achieve the same relationship as a great conductor with his orchestra, which has come to respond to his most delicate gesture.  Such a state of harmony depends on the initial recognition that I am the conductor.
• 'Consciousness is the supreme arbiter.'    Jung
• Once man has made the discovery - that when a wild horse ceases to be wild it becomes an invaluable servant - he looks around for new fields to conquer.  All games are designed to create stress and then give us the pleasure of controlling it.  Hence: the battle of Waterloo was won on the playing fields of Eton.

• Kant's attitude to knowledge was passive, whereas to really grasp reality it should be active.
• 'I seem to be a verb'      Buckminster
• Fichte's insight: a part of our minds creates the world 'behind our backs.'
• To know something with the mind is hardly to know it at all.  Our whole being is involved in true knowing.
• Husserl: perception is intentional.  When we see something, we fire our attention on it like an arrow.  But if there is an intentional arrow, there must also be an archer to shoot it.  It is active, not passive ... like a hand reaching out and grabbing things, not just a searchlight.
• Bertrand Russell is a sad example of staying in the 'Cartesian' mode for too long; always (passively) asking 'what can I know for certain?', without ever finding an answer.
• Paul Ricoeur: the very seeing itself is a doing, a producing, a creating.  
• Husserl's intentionality culminates in seeing recognised to be a creative vision.
• Sartre recognised that we are free, but because he failed to see the creative role that we play in constructing our reality, he ultimately saw no way out of the morass of being in a meaningless world.
• It is as impossible to exercise freedom in a meaningless world as it is to jump while you are falling.
• There are only two pockets in the billiard table of philosophy: materialism and idealism; no matter how 'original' a philosopher, he is bound to end up in one or the other.
• Wittgenstein's demonstrably inadequate philosophy sets out to impose limits on the world and its meaning.  It reduces meaning to the narrow and commonplace, saying 'if we want more than that then we are suffering from delusions.'  He is trapped in Heidegger's 'triviality of everydayness.'
• For Derrida words have no innate meanings; words vary freely in different contexts.  For Derrida philosophy is a kind of spume on the surface of the sea of language.

• We tend to climb towards higher states of self-awareness by means of a series of self-images; we create a certain image of the sort of person we would like to be, then try to live up to the image.
• 'The great man is the play-actor of his ideals'    Nietzsche
• 'Even war cannot frighten us enough'     Auden
• In a Universe infinite yet bounded within its framework of endless repetition, anything can be done.
• In Zarathustra, the Eternal Recurrence is recognised as the foundation of an essentially optimistic philosophy.
• Left to ourselves, the prospects for humanity seem dark.  I do not believe we are left entirely to ourselves, but neither can we forget the problem and leave it to some anthropic principle to steer us through to a solution.  God helps those who help themselves.

crab for breakfast this morning?

I awoke this morning thinking that it was my 35th birthday. I reflected that I was now half way to being 70, and who would dispute that 70 years is a decent timespan for a life to live out its lot? I had reached a middle age - no longer a young adult and not yet an old one. I considered whether there might be a crisis looming. Am I happy living my life the way I am living it? Am I really on the right path? What's it all about? Whereto and wherefore? Then I became informed that in fact only 34 full years had passed since I was born, and was overcome by the strange delicious feeling that I had gained a year. By dint of having thought that I would turn 34, I thought that I was in fact already 34, ready to turn 35.

The first thing I saw was a crowd of crabs on the rock in the early morning sun. The bold rescue crab was clamboring up, trying to drag with him a spool of tangled fishing wire - a task which he abandoned as I approached.  I, still rather bleary-eyed from the early morning, joined the rescue operation.  After some careful tugging at the line, which - my care notwithstanding - made the crab with his legs caught pull and dance and finally hang listlessly, I realised that, rather than rescue that crab, I wanted to eat him.

I felt later in a way bad. I felt that the crabs would probably think that it was me who intentionally devised and set the trap, whereby I know that it was (unintentionally) Andrea - I saw him yesterday on the rocks with the reel, swigging at his beer. I had been cultivating a friendliness towards those crabs because at night they scuttle around the tideline when I am barefooted. Lately I have found some of them sitting at the bottom of the rock pool during the day when I have come to bathe the baby, have greeted them and left them alone. Initially I thought I would gain kudos from the crab community for rescuing one of their members, then I saw that it would be more difficult for me to help disentangle the crab than it would be to lower him into a pot of boiling seawater and eat him.

The water wasn't boiling when I lowered him. It was cold. I thought that he might not notice the gradual increase in temperature, but as the water got hotter his scuttling became more and more frantic until he scuttled no more.  Now I wonder if it would have been more humane to have plunged him directly into boiling water, rather than teasing him slowly into his boiling suffering.  I have never personally killed a pig or a cow, and it is sobering to consider that I would not want to either, despite the fact that I am generally happy to eat their flesh once slaughtered by someone else.

The crab I killed was old and venerable, evinced by a film of green algae on his incandescent orange shell. His tasty flesh would have filled a decent sized tin plucked from a supermarket shelf. The crabs are there on the rocks for the taking, but the one who buys the tin is paying not to consume their time in hunting, cooking and removing the shell. Also removed is the question of moral compunction when considering the alert eyes when they are still alive.

Later I spotted another venerable old crab squatting atop the rescue rock, surveying the scene. I wonder if these crabs consider me now to be their enemy. What do their beady eyes see, and is friendliness between species for them at all an option? What is friendliness, is it a survival technique, or does it pertain only to the domain of morality (in itself perhaps a mere means of survival)? Maybe crabs will fight like crabs for their survival, and only at the moment of surrender do they lay down their arms and say (in the manner of a chivalrous cowboy who, clutching his breast, rasps) "you got me partner", before plunging back into the soup of unformed souls. This living game is deadly serious until the moment comes to remove one's mask.

i left my heart on islay

When I told William Corson that I was from Buckie, he told us a tale about a Buckie man he once knew.  They were building a building, and when it came to fixing on the roof, the Buckie man - perched upon the trusses - dangled a string through a hole in one of the roofing sheets, then instructed someone below to tie a screw to the end of the string, after which he pulled the string up and - hey presto! - the screw was in place.  Amid the astonishment of those present, the Buckie man pronounced the words, "the hard road for old dogs, the pavement for puppies."  William Corson told his tale slowly, and with relish, as he drove Colin and I slowly along the wee road that wound through a tunnel of moss-covered old oaks that would take us to where we would walk into the bothy.  With relish William Corson told his tale, and with a twinkle in his eye which gave me the impression that perhaps he always saw the humor that lay beneath all things.

At that point it was only our second day on Islay, but already the slower-paced, friendlier demeanor of the islanders was palpable.  Having grown up, and spent most of my time on the east coast of Scotland, I find that the people from the west coast (in general) and the islands (in particular) have a different quality of character which is difficult to place exactly but which is unmistakable.  They have something softer about them, something gentler, something quieter while still self-assured, a twinkle in the eye, a charm perhaps . . .  perhaps an awareness of the charm that lies behind all things. 

It had become palpable to us not long after getting off the ferry on the Friday evening.  Darkness had already descended - and with it the rain - as we stood trying to thumb a lift from the cars coming off the ferry.  Nobody stopped.  After a while no cars went past any more.  We looked at each other through the rain with grim grins of reluctant acceptance.  We had booked tickets for an Islay Jazz Festival gig that would start in an hour.  I had blithely assured Colin "We'll have no problem hitchhiking on Islay.  Everyone stops for you on Islay"  Then a police car stopped.  Lynn, one of the island policewoman, took us a few miles beyond her destination to Bruachladdaich village hall where our gig was to be.  It was a timely display of island friendliness, which with time became only more palpable, and confirmedly charming.

At the time we had laughed easily along with William Corson, "the hard road for old dogs, the pavement for puppies" - ha, of course! - but later, as we were walking into the bothy, we puzzled over exactly what this saying was supposed to drive at.

I was sure that I had been to An Cladach bothy before, but it was only as we got close to it, trying to pin point its exact location, that I realised I had never been there before.  I had it confused with another bothy - similarly located on the coast - but on the island of Rhum.  An Cladach was built at the end of 1999 from ruins which had lain empty for a hundred years.  Few bothies have been built with the care and loving attention which was given to An Cladach.  A small plantation of young trees - oaks, birch, sycamore, pine, and a little holly - have even been planted behind the bothy, next to one tall old solitary rowan, which stands alone on a pretty treeless stretch of coast.  It is exciting to think how big they will grow in the years to come.  I climbed over the fence one day to take a look around.  When I saw a bright red apple lying on the ground my first thought was that it was a discarded item from somebody's picnic, but closer inspection revealed that it had fallen from a little apple tree.  It had a little hole where someone had already begun nibbling, but was otherwise firm, crisp, sweet and delicious chopped into yoghurt and muesli for breakfast.  There were a further three apples still attached to the tree.  I felt a little bad about taking them from the birds, who, as local residents, arguably had the better claim over the tasty local produce, but hey-ho.

That first night was pretty stormy.  The bothy was already occupied by a team of six young RSPB workers, two of whom were unpaid volunteers (this they pointed out to us in a tone of good cheer.)  When they turned in for the night Colin and I were still in no mood to sleep.  With rain and howling gusts of wind and darkness all around us, we instigated a party mood under the scant shelter of a corrugated roof outside, finishing off a bottle of whisky we had brought for the trip, and dancing to tunes Colin played on his phone.  At a certain point in the night, we elected to make a camembert fondu, made ingeniously over Colin's gas stove by sort of steaming-melting the camembert, which we wrapped in aluminium foil, and kept above the boiling water by a bed of little round pebbles from the beach.

The next day colin left to get the ferry back to Glasgow, and left me for what would turn into more than a week's wonderful solitary retreat.  (if I didnt know it already) I realised that I am the eternal bothy bum, that I was born a bothy bum and that I will remain one to my last days.  bothy bum is a term my brother Kevin coined, and we understand thereby one who loves being in the bothy per se (a love of simple living in a remote shelter in a wild and lonely place), someone who enjoys just hanging around the bothy (the bothy seen as more than a mere utilitarian means of overnighting in between ticking off munros)

I didn't initially intend to stay so long, but the stormy weather did not abate for days, and the bothy had been furnished with a shelf of good books, many of which demanded at least being dipped into - if not being read from beginning to end.  There was an anthology of Neil Munro's writings.  Somebody wrote about him:

"Few writers have caught more truly the spirit of the Highlands, its romanticism, its mysticism, the spell and wonder of the mountains, the glens and the lochs, enveloped in the deep mists that scatter so quickly before the sun."  

His ten-page story The Lost Pibroch is a little masterpiece about two wanderers who are pipers who stumble upon a mythical village, where they begin an all-night piping session with the local old piper who eventually agrees to play the lost tune, a tune which "makes them crave for something they cannot have.  Its the tune that puts men on the open road.  They had forgotten that the world is wide beyond the fir trees"  The story begins thus:  

"You may rove for a thousand years on league-long brogues or hurry on fairy wings from isle to isle and deep to deep, and find no equal to that same Half Town.  It is not the splendor of it, nor the riches of its folk, but the scented winds of it, and the comfort of the pine trees round about it"

Writing at the beginning of last century, Munro noted that:

"The English of modern life and modern letters often appalls you by its flatness and insincerity; it is a mosaic of phrases ready-made, and as the phrase comes to the writer's mind before the thought, it is consequently a mosaic of worn-out thoughts."

In one of his short stories Munro imaginatively portrays the life of a fiery young Robert Burns, including this passage:

Burns held him for a moment with his hand upon his sleeve.  "Tell me this, Will," he demanded, "Are ye a contented man?  Do ye sleep sound at nicht?  Do ye mind auld things?  Do ye ever think ye micht be better?  Do ye see yersel' the actual man ye are?  Do ye meet wi' mony folk that understand ye?  Have ye ever had but a glimpse o' a' the possible joys o' life, and seen them gaun by ye like Nith, down there, wi' ye stuck helpless on the bank?"

"O, I'm no complainin'," said the ploughman, whose mind had grasped but little of this fierce, bewildering catechism.  "I'm no complainin', I tak' my meat, and sleep like a peerie."

Browsing a book lovers' bookshelf is a good way of gleaning reading recommendations.  I am grateful to the book lover(s) who donated material to the bothy bookshelf.  George Bernard Shaw, Robert Frost, Ian McEwan . . . and I discovered Angela Carter's earthy sparkling prose.  One of the short stories of her Black Venus collection begins thus:

Every city has its own internal logic.  Imagine a city drawn in straightforward, geometric shapes with crayons from a child's colouring box, in ochre, in white, in pale terracotta.  Low, blonde terraces of houses seem to rise out of the whitish, pinkish earth as if born from it, not built out of it.  There is a faint, gritty dust over everything, like the dust those pastel crayons leave on your fingers.

Against these bleached pallors, the irridescent crusts of ceramic tiles that cover the ancient mausoleums ensorcelate the eye [...] We are visiting an authentically fabulous city.  We are in Samarakand.



I saw fit to copy out this passage from Ian McEwan's psychological novel Enduring Love:

"I felt a familiar disappointment.  No-one could agree on anything. We lived in a mist of half-shared, unreliable perception, and our sense data came warped by a prism of desire and belief, which tilted our memories too.  We saw and remembered in our own favor.  And we persuaded ourselves along the way.  Pitiless objectivity, especially about ourselves, was always a doomed social strategy.  We're descended from the indignant, passionate tellers of half-truths, who, in order to convince others, simultaneously convinced themselves.  Over generations, success had winnowed us out, and with success came our defect, carved deep in the genes like ruts in a cart track: when it didn't suit us, we couldn't agree to believe on what was in front of us. Believing is seeing."



As soon as I read these words in the preface of Erica Jong's Learning to Fly I told myself: I have to read this book, immediately.

Every writer has a myth buried in the unconscious - accessible only through the telling of a tale.  My myth is picaresque.  A heroine in trouble takes a journey which unlocks the rest of her life and confirms her as a heroine.  The voyage taken is both inner and outer; it changes forever what she thinks of herself and of her life.

This pretty much describes Fear of Flying [and other books] . . . what these books have in common is the journey taken by a perplexed protagonist to solve a dilemma and get on with life. 


However, in the course of the book I realised that a well-written preface is no guarantee of a well-written book.  Every novel written, one could generously say, represents a slice of reality and its way of being seen, and has the potential to engage the attention of a potential reader.  While I wouldn't want to dispute the inclusion of Fear of Flying on anyone else's bookshelf, for my own part, I must say, I felt the limitations of the uncensored outpourings of this liberated young American woman in sustaining my interest.  It is a reminder to me that writing just whatever comes into one's head doesn't necessarily produce an enjoyable reading experience for anyone else.  



I saw that many wildlife enthusiasts had been attracted to the bothy and had recorded in the bothy book sightings of different bird species, as well as sea creatures - seals, porpoises, dolphins, swans, and otters, who had been seen feeding on crabs on the rocks.  The coast has become known to be home to otter families which have increased in number in recent years.  It took me a few days before I noticed anything - before I could tear my eyes away from words printed on a page.  Early one morning I got to spot an otter out of the corner of my eye, who quickly slipped with a little splash into the sea.  A few times I saw a pair of swans bobbing near the shore, always together, gliding imperiously through the water like pristine noble courageous miniature viking vessels.  The first time I saw the seals they were basking in the sun and paid me no attention, but subsequently they seemed pretty curious, following me as I walked along the coast, and surfacing regularly to watch what I was doing.  They barked to me with their plaintive sea doggy whines, and I called back to them a few times - just asking them how it was going, what they were up to - just to show them that also I was curious about them.  Somebody had left really good guide to the coastal ecosystem at the bothy.  I can't remember the name of the author.  His enthusiasm for the geology and the unique plant and animal communities to be found at the interface of land and sea was infectious - his writing directly transmitted his unbounded passion - even to the point of awakening a fascination for the different types of seaweed and lichen, which adhere strictly to certain zones above, below or within the ebb and flow of the tide.  


For a while now I have been going around without a camera, and not missing one either - thinking that capturing the world on film only gets in the way of the pure unmediated visual pleasure of the moment, which is true in a way, but being interested in photography also makes one pay full attention to the elements of beauty in a scene, and, in this sense, increases one's appreciation of it.  One morning, walking along the coast, I became engrossed by the task of capturing the play of light and shadow on the Paps of Jura across the sound.  Another morning I regretted not having my camera with me as the sun came out after a spot of rain and made the oval stones on the beach gleam with bright insistence.  It was just a moment which came and went.  Just a unique, unrepeatable, everyday, fleeting moment, which came and went as the light shifts and fleets.  Taking photos, and especially under Scotland's ever changing cloudscape, turns you into a carpe diem fiend - or a carpe momentum one - having to have your camera ever at the ready, ready to whip it out and seize the fleeting scene.

a few jumbled Richard Holloway quotes

jumbled is the right word.  I know that taking words out of their context, paraphrasing here and there - having scribbled down the snippets that most appealed to my attention at the time - to now jumble them all together does not do much justice to Richard Holloway's autobiography Leaving Alexandria, but I wanted to share these snippets anyway, to give a flavour, and a reading recommendation.

Holloway writes eloquently, honestly, with clarity and ease, with intellect and insight yet without guile.  He writes really well.  Holloway may be of interest to those of a religious persuasion because he comes from their camp yet recognises the importance of doubting.  He may be of interest to non religious types in that, alongside his scepticism and doubts, he looks at religion tenderly.  He carefully considers the question and concludes, ''I cannot say whether God exists'' but this does not make him dismissive of the church.  He values the consolation that religion may offer the faithful, or the poor in spirit.  He recognises the role of religion as a comforting psychological blanket ''that protects us against the chilly winds of an empty universe''  Holloway's heartstrings chime along with Jesus': he reviews our human scene - our worries, our struggles, our stumbling misapprehensions - with tenderness, and compassion.

For Holloway, the good Samaritan is one of Jesus' flagship stories, showing that laws and religious conventions are not there to be slavishly followed, but should be overridden when a compassionate heart dictates otherwise.

For some reason, Holloway begins his book by quoting from Paul's second letter to Timothy:

''Demas hath forsaken me, having loved this present world''  

My first thought was: good for Demas, at least he loved something.  But I suppose that, in Paul's theology, this present world is a byword for material things, perhaps pleasures of the senses (as opposed to aiming for the treasures of heaven).  I say 'for some reason', but Holloway obviously identifies with Demas.  Throughout his book he writes about feeling disappointed with himself, a feeling that he has let God down.

A subtle shade of melancholia combined with unsentimental intellectual objectivity, pervaded by a Glaswegian sense of irony, compounded by his love of poetry, topped off with a yearning for transcendence all come together in Holloway to strike a rich and unique tone.  I like the modesty of his self-presentation.  He guides the reader guilelessly into his world of open-minded religious contemplation, peppering the retelling of everyday scenes with some carefully nuanced psychological commentary.  The whole thing is written with his poetic ear for a dapper turn of phrase.




The opposite of faith is not doubt, it is certainty.  Where you have certainty, you don't need faith. . . What do you do if you can no longer live with the doubt that is co-active with faith?  You try to cure yourself.  And the best cure for doubt is over-conviction.

Terry Eagleton puts it like this: ''God, if he does turn out to exist has absolutely no reason for doing so.  He is his own reason for being.''

 . . . a sense of presence at once given and denied . . . 

It is not that the presence is sometimes experienced and sometimes withdrawn: it is both at the same time, like a piece of music that consoles and makes us grieve in equal measure.

In the hills i was experiencing latency, the sense of something hidden behind what is seen. . . 

I was in a place that suggested elsewhere. I had not realised what a lovely word that was, elsewhere.

Yet there is also the mystery of latency, the sense of something just out of reach, something unseen that listens!  From that invisible listener a colossal demand has exerted itself upon some men and women, who gave themselves utterly away to it.  Jesus called it Father and offered himself to it without condition.  Since his death on his behalf countless others have followed his example.  Always a minority, they provoke discomfort, even among believers, because most people acquire only a mild version of faith and are made anxious by those who catch it badly.

Constancy is an endowment of the self that marks the good off from the rest of fitful, flitting humanity. I wanted to be good, but knew I wasn't. [. . .] Since heroically good people are rare, it is hardly surprising that they provoke envy in the rest of us.  Envy has been described as 'sorry at another's good', which is why it is the saddest sin in the book.  Because it is such a mean affair, we rarely admit to it.  We may confess other, more positive sins with relish, but we are rarely prepared to admit that another's grace has made us sad.  We find corrosive envy expressed in other spheres, such as the critic, perhaps an unsuccessful writer, who is caustic of a better writer who has won acclaim.  But the saddest manifestation of this human fault has to be envy of the good for being good.  It is really a sorrow for ourselves that life has dealt us a less attractive hand to play.  Moral goodness is not unlike those other accidents of the genetic and social lottery, good looks.  Rather than rejoicing that the good and the beautiful exist at all, it is all too human to fall into sadness because we ourselves have not been so endowed - understandable, but unattractive.  Indeed, envy at the endowments of others has ugly physical manifestations: a tightening of the features, as the face constricts into a sneer; behind the eyes a lurking sorrow and from the mouth an ugly contempt.  I remember a friend responding to another's justified reputation for goodness, 'And I suppose he shits custard'.

Tragic as it may appear, even unfair, there are good people, not so good people, and bad people.  And the big discovery we make in life is the person we have been revealed to be.  We don't have that knowledge when we start out.  We imagine there's a list of characteristics we can acquire if we fancy them, whereas the main lines of our personality were cast before we knew it.  This does not mean that we have no control over our decisions and choices.  It does mean that we will have little control over them till we acknowledge who we are and accept the reality of the hand we have been dealt to play.

My wrestling with my own compulsions, as well as my experience of the tragedies of others did not demonstrate any discernible improvement in the human condition as a result of the death of Jesus - allegedly decreed by God for our salvation.

I feared and longed for [in the words of T.S. Eliot] 'the loneliness of the night of God, the surrender required, the deprivation inflicted.'

Paul Tillich understood inner duality and the anguish of longing for a state of being he was incapable of achieving.

On my last evening I made my confession to him in the convent chapel.  As I expected, he was gentle.  He knew whereof I was made, remembered I was but dust.  And as Father Stanton used to say to the poor of 19th century London, 'You can't always expect dust to be up to the mark.'

[the drinkers in Edinburgh. . .] there was something almost holy in their dereliction, their lives stripped away to nothing
[in the soup kitchen Holloway's church opened, which turned into a homeless social hub . . .] out would come the grubby photographs, reminders of the now of then that they were powerless to bring back again.  

''sink without another care to that dread level of life itself''  . . . MacDiarmid went on to describe it as the capacity for 'mere being', and he thought it was more common in women than in men.  It is the ability to wait behind someone when the waiting is all that can be done.

the power of the church in Boston lay in withholding nothing, whereas the power of St Paul's in Edinburgh lay in withholding so much.           [my paraphrase, my emboldening]

Churches that stay open enclose themselves to the sorrows of humanity.  

Churches do not speak; they listen.  They understand helplessness and the weariness of failure, and have for centuries absorbed them into the mercy of their silence.

Apart from lurking round cathedrals, what do bishops do? [ . . . ] even the ability to act the fool can be useful.  I learned that from Desmond Tutu, who can't leave a church after the service without dancing down the aisle, especially if there's a good lively hymn to do it to.  It wasn't everywhere I got away with that, but there were one or two places in the diocese that liked the service to rock a bit, and I was always game for a bit of jiving down the nave.

They argued and challenged with that assertive democratic ease that is the cultural hallmark of America

It is as if America suffers form an auto-immune deficiency disorder that attacks the antibodies of scepticism and irony, which are there to protect us from the toxins of social hysteria and group rage.

[in Ireland] I found that [ . . . ] chaos and helplessness are never far away from anyone, that they just take you as a strong wind takes a tree, and that their victims are to be commiserated with rather than scorned [as in the U.S.]

. . . not much of that relaxed Hibernian tolerance in the US, where you either swim or sink.  

I was already clear that there was no point in negotiating with fundamentalists.  By definition, they do not negotiate.  You had to accept them as an inevitable part of the dramatis personae of the human comedy.

Anger at new annunciations is the mark of the invincibly conservative mind; it is futile because we can no more stop history than we can hold back the sea.  

this last quote refers to a traditional christian reading of the bible which says: God has spoken. God has now stopped speaking.  i.e. there are no new annunciations.  The bible contains the entirety of God's message for humanity.  For years Holloway stood up for the ordination of woman priests and the right for gay couples to get married.  He realised that calling upon developments in our moral consciousness since the bible was written will get nowhere with people who believe that all our moral directives are to be found exclusively in the bible.

Francisco, ¨the dude with the donkey¨

francisco told me he had been on television; i have located this video showing a clip from a local canarian tv programme which looks at the lives of people who have chosen a simple life in the country.  it gives a nice portrayal of francisco, who made a considerable impression on me:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=t3sxfvIAMko

seeing online his donkey perrico makes me want to share an anecdote, for its comic appeal: after eating a bowl of lentils, francisco told me that if i was returning to my cave i could accompany perrico out to a good grazing place, and that if, upon my return, i should see perrico further out, i should bring him back.  it was a simple request, and a simple misunderstanding on my part.  i assumed that francisco wanted me to bring his donkey all the way back with me.  "of course," i told myself, "francisco is past sixty now, and is glad to have my helping hand - still strong and youthful - to bring his donkey back at the end of a day's grazing."

later it became clear to me that Francisco meant me to bring his donkey back "only if his grazing has taken him close to your cave."  At the time I was convinced that Francisco wanted me to bring his donkey all the way back wherever his donkey was to be found.  As I began chasing Perrico, I soon heard Francisco hollering and whistling to me from the other hillside with some insistence, and - so convinced as I was of the idea that he wanted me to bring his donkey back - I began to reproduce his hollers and whistles, assuming that he wanted to share with me the sounds that his donkey best responded to.  What he actually wanted to communicate to me was: "no, leave the donkey alone, leave him where he is, stop stop stop!"  however how was i to understand this only through his whistles?  Francisco grew up on nearby island of la gomera where they have the fame of having developed a way of communication across hillsides by whistling, and all i could assume was that i was being privy to a bit of old time whistling savoir faire.  Amid francisco's repeated hollers and whistles, I heard him at one point blowing on his conch shell, a stirring sound which reverberated around the hillside and which awakened noble feelings within me.  I was already fatigued, but still determined  to display some sort of (non-existent!) know-how with donkeys.  I presumed that perrico probably didn't get to eat an apple very often, and thought that having given him one the other day might have made him well disposed towards me.  nothing of the sort.  instead of this, he ran away from me, and had me running doggedly after him through prickly plants which scratched my lower legs while i tried to reproduce the insistent whistles and calls which francisco was still sending me.  it was ridiculous really.   only, heaving a successful sigh of relief, upon somehow getting the donkey back to francisco's place, did i learn that that was not at all what was desired of me.  "leave him grazing, if he is grazing peacefully! he needs to graze, everyday he needs to graze"  francisco was royally put out.  it took him about twenty minutes to regain his composure.  I felt like a wolly.  Francisco had invited me to eat meat grilled over a barbecue with him, and the meat had now gone cold through all his waylaid whistling and shell-blowing.  "if you don´t understand, then ask!" he implored  - generally a good tip as regards effective communication, but what happens when one person is convinced they have understood something one way when in reality something quite different was meant?

I felt like a right numpty.  "ok, it was a misunderstanding. ok, perrico has returned a bit early from his daily grazing, but, come on, everyone is still more or less happy . . .?" i responded in a suggestive tone.

it didn´t take fransicso long to return to his habitual good humour, and to pull out his aforementioned timple and to strum it with careful understanding, while raising his raw, almost raucous - but emotionally convincing - singing voice.   francisco had open a bottle of wine which his son had gifted to him and which he said had costed seventy euros.  i kind of hoped that he might offer me a little tipple - just a little taste to taste how it tasted - but the last cup was sitting there on the table.  over time two flies had drowned therein; after a while i flicked them out for him.  Francisco caught sight of me and said "flies, ey?" and poured the whole lot down the sink.

now i think about it, i can't say that francisco showed much interest in the details of my life story.  i don't think he ever learned in which country i had grown up in - not that it matters; he saw that i showed interest in what he had to say, and that allowed our encounter to drift through hours.  i think he clearly liked me.  in the evening he said: "you are going already? ah!" - it seemed to suddenly occur to him - "here i have a bottle of wine we can share" as he reached under his sink.  "come back tomorrow morning and we will visit a neighbour who has a little shack near here by the sea", - a suggestion which, as things happen, did not come to pass.   i recall francisco saying that he had befriended many wayfarers over the years and that sometimes he finds bottles of wine or what not left for him with a little note.  i said to him "perhaps i will come back with a bottle of wine one day" and i still intend to do so.  only now i am looking for cheap flights back to scotland, because mid-august my grandmother will complete ninety years and the close family will come together.  after "ninety years" i almost want to put ninety exclamation marks, one for each year!