NOTHING TO GROUSE ABOUT

MIDWINTER

This birdbloke has been marching around the garden for about three years now, looking very pleased with himself;  

 

 he is lucky that  he is not in the grounds of some of my fellow ex-pats, where  he would have been blasted to inedibility  - why do all the nutters have shotgun certificates? - hung up for a week or so, nonetheless, and his hard, bluey flesh roasted and  rhapsodised over; it really is fucking awful, grouse, better off having some of poultry's  lips, eyes  and gizzards, recycled so successfully  McDonalds.

I'm always pleased to see this chap, strutting, his redbrest stuck out,  but he's some way away from the house and I have never managed to snap him, if, indeed, it is the same him.  He may live in the garden somewhere, he may fly over the wall, although he doesnt look as though he does much flying. When I first spotted him I bought a camera tripod, thought I'd set it up, zoomed-in and ready but it just gathered  dust and I can't, therefore,  tell people Oh, and I keep grouse on my land, well, I can't show them a photo, at least I couldn't.  But I can, now.

 

 

Harris, on his first meeting with mr grouse, treed him, 

like a good boy does and would have killed him if possible;  he now knows that he has  a grouse or two at the back of the house, as well as rabbits, hares and hedgehogs and a fluctuating population of cats at the front,  to keep him on his toes.

We were lucky, he is a very good boy,  the most obedient Yorkie we have had, a firm word is all he usually needs,  he has been  trained to start  sort-of whirling when he needs to go out, or drawing attention to his lead and  he has learned several new words, he is a quick study;  he is very affectionate, very boisterous, bright-eyed and  mischievous.  He obviously comes from a good home, his luggage was full of good quality dogbloke stuff, leads and harnesses -  that he had a shoulder harness was good, in itself  - the best that money could buy, his bowls and blankets the same. He is easy to feed, scoffing three or four sachets a day of Caesar. Oh, and a salad sandwich, some Scotch Broth and he is particularly fond of trifle, which he is not allowed, much.  The vetbastard says he's fine, although you can see that by looking at him, and keepng the fifty quid. He just comes and flops firmly beside one's thigh, drops his head in one's lap, sighs and goes to sleep.  Can't want more from a warrior lapdog.

Even so, tree-ing the grouse was the first blog-worthy thing he had done;  he can't get in here just because he's a dog,  a bit more to it than that, if he wants to be the hereditary blogdog. Can't just walk into the job, he's not the Prince of Wales, now, is he?

With Harris's coming we are seeing a bit more of the garden than is usual in Winter. Here, in the land of the Midnight Sun, the seasons are more pronounced than down South, well, Winter and Summer are, not quite endless days in June and not quite endless nights in December.  They are not exact opposites,  there is an hour or two, in summer's wee,  small hours  of twilightish gloom, between 2.00 am and 4.00  but since one is normally asleep between those hours and unaware of them, the daylight seems  endless.  In even the depth of winter it is light between 9.00 am and 3.00 pm,  you can get out and about in the light, if you're quick about it; it can be strange, though,  often the low, wintry Sun is  harsh and electric, almost drawing a pencil line around things.  

In summer we cannot see through these branches to the Sound, beyond.

  

This avenue of whitebeam, too,
 normally completely  obscures the house.   

    

And beyond here, come Spring,
 will be a thousand new daffodils, I keep saying to mrs i,
 shoulda been two thousand, five thousand.

 There are masses of evergreens but not on the visual borders 

and in winter it's as though we are stripped bare.

I am not bothered about people being able to see in, 

there aren't any.

 It's being able to so easily see out that unsettles me.

In less than a fortnight, however, Earth will tilt again and we will hurtle into Summer;  nothing MediaMinster can do about that.

'ROUND, 'ROUND, GET AROUND, I GET AROUND

Unlike so many here, I'm not much of a traveller;  bit of Europe, bit of North America, that's about it.  I was, however, infected with that restless, hungry feeling at a very early age -  I attended five different primary schools,  then two grammars, two colleges and much later, one university.

The five primary schools were crucial;  the first was Ulsterville Primary, in Belfast - I'm not kidding, Ulster-ville; all my people, save my Dad, were raving mad Orangemen and women, 


My name is Ishmael and this is my tribe.

pre-Paisley-ite Presbyterian bigots;  Michael Stone, 


the grenade-lobbing,  funeral-bomber  and parliament-stormer
 
 is my never-laid-eyes-on-him cousin; 

another cousin was William Moore, one of the '70s Shankill Butchers, tied people in chairs and hacked them to slow, painful,  shredded  death;  a ringleader, he admitted eleven of nineteen  sadistic murders

The judge said, well, you can imagine what he said;  notwithstanding, our Wully was released under the Good Friday agreement.  Don't know if Mo Mowlam had a snog for him, wouldn't be surprised. Dead, now.

and after a few months, maybe just  a few weeks of loyalist, Mick-hating Ulsterville, Belfast was in my soon-forgotten  past and I was at Nazeby Road Infants School in Lozells, I think - maybe it was  Alum Rock, maybe I rubbed tiny shoulders with the unfortunately mutant Mr  Ozzie Osborne - in Birmingham. After Nazeby Road it was a school  in which I stayed so briefly I cannot remember it,  then it was Tindall Street Primary School, Balsall Heath, for a couple of years and finally, in primary terms,  Grendon Road County Primary School at the city's-edge, Maypole area until eleven-plus and King Edwards Grammar School, Camp Hill. 

Another upshift took me to Bangor Grammar School, County Down, took me back among the crazed, homicidal, torturing, neanderthal meatheads - David Trimble, his Lordship of Bigotry,


 was a few years above me.  

 
Trimble with his friends, marching for intolerance and hatred.

Trimble of course, was Blair's patsy in the whole Ulster Carve-Up, too stupid to read even the runes of his own demise, too stupid to breathe;  I always said it was a poor school, Trimble's the proof.

In his autobiography, from the safety of the House of Lords,  Trimbs rants and raves - now - about our then headmaster, Randall Clarke, how he hated  him, what a cunt he was;  at fourteen, I told Clarke  to his know-it-all, inveterate spanker's  face, told him he was a cunt.   I also told him that Hell would freeze over before he raised his cane to me,  unless he wanted a broken jaw. I don't think anyone had ever fucked him off before, certainly not a putative victim of his perversion.  Needless to say I was moved on again to  a couple of other, undistinguished institutions in Belfast and my education just petered-out;  university was much later.

It amazes me, today, that people still call for the return of child-beating;  it can only debase further the beater and if the victim is compliant - takes it like a man -  then one can only fear for his or her future never-did-me-any-harm personal development.  One of the great disappointments of my life is that I never had an adult encounter with Mr Jack Watson, maths and science teacher at King Edwards, he never used them on me but he fashioned, exquisitely, little cats-of-nine-tails  from bunsen burner tubing and included in his sadisdic arsenal one of those big, sinister ebony rulers.  Oxbridge, you see, turns out great men, freaks like Watson.  Given the opportunity I would've beaten him half to death. No, really, I would.

I call the move back to Belfast an upshift but it was really my father's second attempt at self-renewal, at escape from Authority.  Don't know to this day, never will, why,  in the first place,  in the middle of a nineteen fifty-five night my family, at a moment's notice,  fled Belfast for Birmingham.  I do know, however, that in 'sixty-three,  my father drank-drove away his PSV driving license 

he drove one of these, an earlier one, 
without suffixed year letters but much the same. 


 - everybody did it, then, well, anyone who drank and drove did both together - was banned for a year and so we were On the Road Again, back to a place where, pre-computer, pre-DVLA, he could drive unnoticed.  Trouble was that my mother died a few weeks after the return to Northern Ireland.  And so, effectively, did he. Motherless children, let me tell you, do have a hard road, but shit, I could be here for weeks, with this travelogue of the Isles of Complaint. And in any event, I'm not complaining; why would I complain about who I am?

She only lived to forty-eight, he stumbled on until sixty-two, disappointed by life, disappointed by his three children;  he and I  had bouts of closeness and bouts of estrangement, I hadn't seen him for a few years when he died. If there's any blame it's his.  He was the grown-up. But I don't suppose there is. People do what they do, mostly believing they're doing their best, it's only later that they repent.

Anyway, when you go to lots of different schools you learn lots of different stuff; as well as all the taught syllabus, there is the auto-didacticism of quick-study survival - who are the important kids; what are the games; where are the hang-outs; what's the pecking order among the teachers but the most important thing is, Which language do they speak, you gotta blend-in, don't you;  six-year old, inner-city Brummies  don't wanna play marbles with someone who speaks OrangePaddy, and six year-olds, ten year-olds, any year-old kids can be and usually  are repellingly, remorselessly cruel, even when, as now, their monster parents Luv'EmToBits, DoAnyfin4'Em.  I was bilingual by the age of five-and-a-half, speaking Brummie outside the house, Lisburn Road Belfast within, so I was.

An easy facility with shape-shifting and mimicry came to me, then, of necessity, almost from  infancy, as did a kind of sang-froid about relationships and friendships -  they just flowered and as easily withered with each change of school. I was popular with the teachers, they all said to me - at nine and ten - Ishmael, you must be a writer.  I was always top or second of whichever class I was in and even so I was popular with the kids, too;  it was easy and meaningless, perhaps not meaningless, perhaps just a precocious awareness of sic transit gloria mundi - so passeth the glories of the world or more prosaically, Everything is shit;  all I was doing was what, by then, had become a secondary yet undeniable part of my nature. maybe it was the entirity of my nature, fakery. Deformed by successive, massive insecurities, internally twisted into a guilty figure of eight - my Mum didn't know that I had abandoned her beloved, Ulster-Scots, tut-tutting, nasal street twang in favour of whining, indignant Brummie and when she found out she was heartbroken but most of the time I managed to fool all parties, just;  my surface cool was a veneer, glued-on by desperation, pinned and edged with terror.  Still is. And   each change of school stemmed from a move to a generally more desirable neighbourhood and meant that I had to learn another set of  extra-school rules, hierarchies, locales, churches, shops  and characters. 

Some, people like Roger Waters of Pink Floyd, 

Remember? When you were young?
Course I do, mate, 'smy life's work.
No business, I always say, like showbusiness.

have managed to make lucrative artistic careers from childhood and adolescent tumult and upheaval;  trouble is that in Waters' case the icy precision of his music and its endless, endless  rehashing is eventually revealed not as art or insight  but just as a showbusiness drum to beat.  I don't know how they do that, those people, pull-out  their rhyming innards  for their audience's delectation.  Once or twice, maybe, it might be cathartic but touring your childhood round the world, decade after decade,  with a cast of thousands, Oh fuck that,  there's not enough money in the world, is there?  I must say, in fairness, that I saw a Pink Floyd concert in the late 'seventies, at Knebworth, - I had only gone to see Captain Beefheart

 - and it was amazing, Dark Side of the Moon, live, with real, low-flying Spitfires. Or Hurricanes.  


 But I wouldn't ever want to see another one.

 In our tramelled and regularised culture, a childhood  of constant change and interruption does not and in my case has not led to the Rewards of Obedience, not even in the sense of Twenty Years Of Schooling And They Put You On The Day Shift rewards.  It came to pass, you see, that after a childhood spent adapting, shape-shifting to fit-in everywhere I eventually didn't fit-in anywhere.   And certainly not in mid-sixties Belfast, where they painted the kerbstones red-white-and-blue and the B-Specials auxiliary police force kicked the shit out of anyone who even looked like a Fenian.  I was there just as the civil rights movement was kicking-off and by God it was an awful fucking place;  lacking affiliation to any hubble-bubble in it's reeking,  hate-filled cauldron, I split. Again. I don't know if anybody does it anymore, running away to sea;  there are probably health and safety regulations against it, although  I found the SS Ramore Head a much safer, more agreeable place to be than grammar school. It was as far around the world as I ever went and after that experience, package tours just didn't mean anything to me,  I have largely stayed in the British Isles.

 It was a strange, unsettling childhood, mine but  none of these  developmental aberrations matter a fuck when we think, if we do at all, of brown kids walking miles to drink a mouthful of shitty water, of brown kids drone-dismembered for democracy or of brown and yellow kids machine-gunned in their refugee boats by Aussie convict riff-raff, anxious that  no more nignogs pollute the land which they themselves stole from Abo.  I don't wish to offend mr mike, who has made the place his home but I never met an Aussie, male or female, who I didn't immediately want to punch in the gob, repeatedly.

Travelling and its fabled broadening of the mind doesn't compare  with the refining fire of constantly being the NewBoy; by the age of eleven  I had long completed   Emotion's Grand Tour,  stood fretfully under her leaning towers, lunged and parried on her battlements, been torn apart in her amphitheatres, faced her indifferent firing squads. Enough sightseeing for a lifetime.

Maybe that's why rather than foreign travel I have preferred  bombing around the British Isles in cars, only in cars, not on 'buses or trains or in any vehicle or conveyance which brings me into contact with others; I tried motor-cycling but it broke my neck, a considerable number of other bones, too, mainly in the head department.  My excursions have  been  a life-long series of road movies, restless and hungry for sure but not global, not even continental, just private, intense and focused.

Living in the Vale of Evesham, I used to think that Northumberland was a long way away, Cornwall, too.  Who was that bloke, Governor General of Canada or something, wrote the Richard Hannay books, John Buchan,  that's him, see, I unWiki-remembered him in the end, all on my own.  John Buchan, he wrote, in a couple of my childhood books,  about men of derring-do, charging up the Great North Road at Oh, fifty miles an hour, bent on some mission which would keep the Empire safe from Jews and foreigners.  

Belting up the A1M, in the 'nineties, in an unbreakable  three-litre Volvo was, for me, childhood fantasy made real. This was a huge, important journey, up the Great North Road.   It was only when I moved up here, to the top of the world, that I realised that Bamburgh Castle is only a hop, skip and a jump from Worcester. And that what was once the Far North is now the Deep South, bonny lad.

Moving here, to Scotland, the best part of England, twisting  up and down the A9, I soon got used to proper distance driving and would,  a decade ago, drive, alone,  from John of Groats to Worcester in ten or eleven hours; white knuckle, high-speed, stopping only for petrol and for the dogblokes to take a pee.  Roaring through the Highlands one night at a hundred miles an hour, I instinctively, fortuitously slowed just in time to avoid a deer, big as a fucking elephant, marching down the road like he owned it, with a half-a-dozen lesser deer in his wake, maybe they were his bitches.  I was soon, nevertheless, back at a hundred miles an hour, rolling, one-handed cigarettes and drinking warm, flask  coffee.  Getting out at the other end was like climbing from the grave and when I went to bed, the room spun a seasick spin and all that my closed eyes could see was an endless white line, rushing towards me, passing beneath me, on the wrong side.  It was a form of mania,  the I-Can-Do-This,  I-Can-Do-Anything kind.  I guess those days are gone, although I live in hope of having a male  argument with someone and saying, Alright, then, here's five-grand says I can beat you to Land's End, in any car you want to drive.  

There's not too many people do that - drive six-hundred miles, straight-off, non-stop, alone.  Jerry Clarkson,

of course, does it all the time, with a little unseen help. It is, though,  the Clarkson Rally, consistent with Monty Don's bland erasure of any other labourers in his vineyard, as though it is he and he alone who so perfectly plans and manages, weeds, digs and mulches his vast garden, as though his really is a horticultural labour of love and not a teevee show with limitless funds, with scores, if not hundreds of production assistants doing the work, off-camera, shredding license-payers' fifty-pound notes into compost.  Consumerism's deceitful oddjob man, is Monty.

 

Posing, of course I'm not posing, I'm being earnest.

Doing his solo, marathon drives, Gerry Clarkson will have a huge convoy in train, just out of shot, his every fatigue soothed, his every risk atomised and minimised;  he will have lawyers and doctors on stand-by;  his million pound motors will be maintained to billionaire standards of excellence; Clarkson will have motorised deerstalkers driving ahead of him, licensed to kill, just in case anything happens to Mrs Clarkson's wee fat bald old  boy. 

By now, you would think that Mrs Ishmael and I are old enough to know better than to  hurtle along the nation's highways, Hell for leather, she ought to be,  anyway;  I think she's about fourteen, and bossy, whilst I am just twelve or so, maybe eleven, but even so last Friday we set off an another demondrive.  It is one of marriage's oddities that I feel that I am the car driver, even though currently I'm not. Doesn't matter,  I am at the collective motoring helm.  I had some major surgery on my foot in June and await, shortly, a plastic surgeon's reconstruction;  it's only a small one, on the edge of my heel but it's crucial and  I have been off my feet for months and unable to drive;  hopping, limping and wheelchairing;  that I-Can-Do-Anything madness afflicts me still, regardless of the fact that I can presently  do fuck all and in the middle of a gale we took the Midnight Ferry for Aberdeen to make, next morning, an onward journey to Kilmarnock in order to  collect Harris, the dog and then sprint hundreds of miles across Scotland and up the A9 to the short sea crossing, homeward bound.

I've travelled on a lot of night ferries and they're all shit;  sickly drunks passsed-out on the floor or students camped determinedly, feet-up on the couches but the Aberdeen boat, 



coming down from Shetland, carries live animals on the car deck, so as well as the sounds and smells of stir-fevered, drunken, imbecile oil riggers going ashore for a spot of wife-battering - Christ, what a segment of humanity they are,  they make the foul, brawling  gits from Big Fat Gipsy Wedding look  genteel- as well as the skriking and misbehaviour of vastly over-indulged Islands bairns; as well as the sneering, lazy inefficiency and conceit ot the largely Belfast-born stewards  - or staff as they are now called -  there is the overwhelmingly  nauseating reek of sheep piss;  crawling, in the morning from the coffin-like cabin - you have to have a cabin's privacy or you'd be up on several murder charges - you are met by the smells of cheap bacon,  the kind cooked hours before and self-coated with salty, slimy, white exudate; of drunkards' vomit and of terrified animals.  It's no way to travel but we couldn't have covered the distance any other way, not in a day. 

The rest of the journey was easy, it was just hard going. Not all bad, though, on the way home we saw  foresty Perthshire' brilliant late autumn colours 

 and we saw the first snow on the Highland peaks. We did the journey, home to home, anyway, in  22 hours, about 550 road miles and 150 by sea.  When I told Nurse she looked at me as though I was mad.  Healthy people wouldn't even do that, she said, missing the point, I felt,  entirely. 'Snothing, I calmed her, you shoulda known me when I was younger,  I used to really get around.

  And besides, this bloke needed a home.
In a hurry.