Bryan Islip's Blog, page 32
July 15, 2012
July 12, 2012
Memories
Meet Mati (left) and Sorosh (right) Hungarian Vizslas, both deceased these past three years.
We have their pictures on our refrigerator door. Barely a day goes by without us thinking or talking about them - and the big question, should we get more dogs? Dogs, plural, for we believe that a dog is by nature a pack animal and is happiest in company with others of its kind. Yes, we humans can form part of a pack in the mind of a single dog, but still ...
Trouble is that our lives are more crowded these days. Vizslas need hours daily walking outside and off the lead and we have Pictures and Poems to run. Also our home is more crowded now we're running a B&B. Not all our guests are dog lovers and some are even allergic to dogs. And so we will carry on considering ... meanwhile this is the little verse I wrote for the two in the picture - and for us.
Mati and Sorosh
'Only two dogs' you may say, though
not to the few
who knew, those with the gift to understand
who,
meeting, seeing the life of them,
filled to the brim
with all the magic of the things
they saw them do
witnessed such grace, yes, as their
lights grew dim.
You reached to touch them when they
looked at you
watched them run, leap, move soft
through undergrowth
and stop to point a bird or greet a
dog they knew.
When called by kindly death they
were not loathe
to come, and did you feel that goodness,
too?
Our old progenitors along the
sacred Nile
might better understand than we who
have lost touch
with what is now well-hid behind Man’s
works so vile
perhaps would know why they were loved,
so much,
so much a part of all that lives,
that makes life smile.
Mati, Sorosh, still you are …
In a soft night-breeze through
moonlit trees
in the red-gold flicker of our
Winter fire
(reflecting in your watchful and contented
eyes,)
in the green-burst rush of a new
summer’s lease
in the light, in the land, in a world
at peace.
No goodbyes, you two. Memories will
not ever dull
nor nothing mean - will never come
to nought.
Sleep you the ages through; death in
time annuls
all life. Just thanks for what to
us you brought
now in the rising of the sun, in
the crying of the gulls.
July 6, 2012
If at first you don't succeed
A year ago I agreed a partnership deal with Eoghain Maclean on a combined 2013 Pictures and Poems calendar: Eoghain's marvellous wildlife photographs, my own pastel landscapes and the narratives to go with all
24 of them. (one of his and one of mine each month through the year.) In November 2011 I finished the design and we sent the files off to our Edinburgh printers. (Note: not China, India, Beckswanaland or even Holland: I mean to a real life high quality printer right here in Bonny Scotland. Yes, they do still exist.
Thinking to strike whilst the iron was hot, hoping to be the early bird that catches the worm, aiming for the stars when one can only reach the clouds and all those other tritenesses I quickly made my initial approaches to 'The Big Boys'. i.e. W H Smith, The Calendar Club, National Trust for Scotland and VisitScotland. Between them these guys buy and sell hundreds of thousands of calendars yearly.
As a one trick pony up against the big design and print houses with their dozens and dozens of differently themed photographic offerings and their longstanding supplier relaitionships I knew we would struggle to break through. And of course our costs were always going to be, gram for gram of printed material, a whole lot higher than those of our giant competition. But if you have a good enough stone and slingshot you, David, can prevail over all those Goliaths, can't you?
Well, not necessarily. For month after month my approaches got an interested but in the end the old cold or apathetic shoulder. However by March we were selling our 'Unique 3-in-1 Picturebook Calendar' all around the markets, shops and cafes right here in the Highlands so it didn't seem to hurt so much. Furthermore, end customer reaction proved to be very good indeed. Startlingly good, especially in these hard times. In fact sales out of markets and shops were and still are much stronger than for my own, less expensive calendars of previous years. We knew we were in for a re-print run if we were not to be in an out of stock position long before the main 2013 calendar buying season begins in September.
And two days ago we had our initial order - large by our standards - from one of the aforementioned Big Boys. I'm not going to say here which one but I don't mind summarising ...
One has awarded us this large initial order
One said it was too fussy, not for them
One said they would be buying but has not yet and may not
One said they already had enough Scottish themed calendars
Here's another triteness ... if at first you don't succeed, try, try again. And if they like it those who buy will buy, buy again.
June 30, 2012
On Wester-Ross
In 2007 I wrote and self-published a full colour booklet entitled, 'An Incomer's Views ON WESTER-ROSS In 24 Paintings, Poems and Narratives'. (What a mouthful) Yes, it is / was what it said on the cover!
I have just sold to The Mountain Coffee Company the last forty of the four thousand copies I had printed. In recognition of this, Hillbilly's Bookshop (twinned with The Mountain Coffee Company) in Gairloch invited me to sign the booklets and have a photo published on their Facebook. So here it is ...
I would certainly be reprinting this were it not that I am currently designing / writing a completely new and much enhanced version, so watch this space. Should be out by the year's end.
I have just sold to The Mountain Coffee Company the last forty of the four thousand copies I had printed. In recognition of this, Hillbilly's Bookshop (twinned with The Mountain Coffee Company) in Gairloch invited me to sign the booklets and have a photo published on their Facebook. So here it is ...
I would certainly be reprinting this were it not that I am currently designing / writing a completely new and much enhanced version, so watch this space. Should be out by the year's end.
June 29, 2012
Life in the old Loch yet
When we first came up from the south of England on holiday the sea lochs of Wester-Ross were literally teeming with fishlife. In fact that's what attracted us to drive the 700 miles in the first place. We towed a seventeen foot clinker built traditional lug-sailed boat, inside it all our tenting equipment, fishing gear and etc.
Regrettably, within a very few years the bottom of Gairloch and Loch Ewe was a desert, a wasteland created by suction dredging and trawl netting fishermen. People of such a combination of greed, ignorance and lawlessness as to cut off the branch of a tree on which they themselves were sitting. So very sad but of course out of sight is out of mind for most of us, therefore so what?
Then today we looked out of our window to the low tide scene in my photo. Nothing unusual in that, you may think. But oh yes there is. That cloud of diving terns, black headed gulls and common gulls are not there by accident. For some days there has been this evidence of new life - millions, probably billions of herring or mackerel fry being driven into the shallow edges outside Kirkhill House by the large, predatory fish below. Once there in the shallows the birds can also get at them.
Poor fish you may thing, but there's the old saying, safety in numbers. Many will survive and some will grow to maturity then will breed in turn. The cycle will once more be started. And once more the predators in oilskin trousers will move in. Unless, that is, Loch Ewe becomes a Marine Park under the incoming Hollyrood legislation. And of course provided, this time, there is suffiicient enforcement of the Law.
Bed breakfast and banter
When we decided to run a Bed and Breakfast micro business from our home in Kirkhill House we had no ideas other than 'what would make us, ourselves, look for and enjoy in a few nights' stay at a seaside Wester-Ross locale such as this?' Comfort and cleanliness yes, quality breakfast of course, warmth of welcome definitely, (although that has not always been our experience elsewhere). So these things are what we set out to put on offer.
What we did not reckon on was the effect of our early mentions on Googlemaps and then TripAdvisor and finally our website www.aultbeabedandbreakfast.co.uk . From the beginning we have enjoyed all the business we could really handle. Of course the workload has proven correspondingly heavy. How often have we wished - well, Dee wished, for it is she who takes ninety percent of the strain - that we had cottoned on to this many years earlier. Young and fit is what your really need to be to run a B&B!
We have enjoyed visits from people of almost all the European countries plus Brazil, China, Japan, Cnada and probably others that I cannot right now bring to mind. Oh, and about a quarter of them have been UK. Almost all have been interesting to the point where you would be pleased to come across them and chat in a pub or someone else's party. They have added a real dimension of pleasure to our daily lives. Last week a couple of Austrian ladies stayed here and have now sent up this photograph. The shot on which they insisted so that even camera shy Dee had to conform!
What we did not reckon on was the effect of our early mentions on Googlemaps and then TripAdvisor and finally our website www.aultbeabedandbreakfast.co.uk . From the beginning we have enjoyed all the business we could really handle. Of course the workload has proven correspondingly heavy. How often have we wished - well, Dee wished, for it is she who takes ninety percent of the strain - that we had cottoned on to this many years earlier. Young and fit is what your really need to be to run a B&B!
We have enjoyed visits from people of almost all the European countries plus Brazil, China, Japan, Cnada and probably others that I cannot right now bring to mind. Oh, and about a quarter of them have been UK. Almost all have been interesting to the point where you would be pleased to come across them and chat in a pub or someone else's party. They have added a real dimension of pleasure to our daily lives. Last week a couple of Austrian ladies stayed here and have now sent up this photograph. The shot on which they insisted so that even camera shy Dee had to conform!
Be, breakfast and banter
When we decided to run a Bed and Breakfast micro business from our home in Kirkhill House we had no ideas other than 'what would make us, ourselves, look for and enjoy in a few nights' stay at a seaside Wester-Ross locale such as this?' Comfort and cleanliness yes, quality breakfast of course, warmth of welcome definitely, (although that has not always been our experience elsewhere). So these things are what we set out to put on offer.
What we did not reckon on was the effect of our early mentions on Googlemaps and then TripAdvisor and finally our website www.aultbeabedandbreakfast.co.uk . From the beginning we have enjoyed all the business we could really handle. Of course the workload has proven correspondingly heavy. How often have we wished - well, Dee wished, for it is she who takes ninety percent of the strain - that we had cottoned on to this many years earlier. Young and fit is what your really need to be to run a B&B!
We have enjoyed visits from people of almost all the European countries plus Brazil, China, Japan, Cnada and probably others that I cannot right now bring to mind. Oh, and about a quarter of them have been UK. Almost all have been interesting to the point where you would be pleased to come across them and chat in a pub or someone else's party. They have added a real dimension of pleasure to our daily lives. Last week a couple of Austrian ladies stayed here and have now sent up this photograph. The shot on which they insisted so that even camera shy Dee had to conform!
What we did not reckon on was the effect of our early mentions on Googlemaps and then TripAdvisor and finally our website www.aultbeabedandbreakfast.co.uk . From the beginning we have enjoyed all the business we could really handle. Of course the workload has proven correspondingly heavy. How often have we wished - well, Dee wished, for it is she who takes ninety percent of the strain - that we had cottoned on to this many years earlier. Young and fit is what your really need to be to run a B&B!
We have enjoyed visits from people of almost all the European countries plus Brazil, China, Japan, Cnada and probably others that I cannot right now bring to mind. Oh, and about a quarter of them have been UK. Almost all have been interesting to the point where you would be pleased to come across them and chat in a pub or someone else's party. They have added a real dimension of pleasure to our daily lives. Last week a couple of Austrian ladies stayed here and have now sent up this photograph. The shot on which they insisted so that even camera shy Dee had to conform!
June 25, 2012
Books Uncaged
Michelle Frost invited me to write up a guest piece on her Books Uncaged site. It turned into a bit of a potted bio. Here's paragraph one ... I wrote my first short story in 1955. My sister Shirley
still has it. I wrote my second one in 2002. If I should ever gain worldwide fame
and fathomless wealth through sales of serious numbers of the two novels and
two anthologies of short fiction I’ve written since 2002 I’ll probably wish Shirley
had burned ‘The Pigeon Shoot’. ... Anyway it leads into our current adventure, the month by month publishing via www.bryanislipauthor.com of my novel in progress - 'The Book' .
still has it. I wrote my second one in 2002. If I should ever gain worldwide fame
and fathomless wealth through sales of serious numbers of the two novels and
two anthologies of short fiction I’ve written since 2002 I’ll probably wish Shirley
had burned ‘The Pigeon Shoot’. ... Anyway it leads into our current adventure, the month by month publishing via www.bryanislipauthor.com of my novel in progress - 'The Book' .
June 22, 2012
What is this thing called Love?
'If music be the food of love play on, give me excess of it ... ' and so on, says Orsino in Shakespeare's Twelth Night. Of course he's actually wanting a lot of music and so much love that it 'sickens and so dies' - until finally he's rid of the pesky nuisance.Actually there's no evidence that you can have too much of a such a good thing as love - or as music for that matter.'
But what is love, actually? I was once asked this question by a young lady suffering the pangs of love unrequited - I hasten to add that I was asked this in the presence of her parents, although I don't know why I should hasten to add that, having been at the time her senior by some forty odd years. But I thought about her question a lot and, whilst driving back to Riyadh from Al Khobar I composed the bones of the following ... which, when finished I sent to said parents and they to said daughter who was serving in the US Army... I hope it helped, but doubt it.
One
Question
“I
want to know what love it,” starts the song
And then goes on, “I want you to tell me,”
But the answer has been lost, this century,
Leaving the echo of the question so some
Feel cold the vacuum when replies don’t come
“Come
live with me and be my love,” he
wrote
Went on; “And
we shall all the pleasures prove:”
Four centuries back you had no need to look above
To find the answer, and Marlowe knew it;
Most folk did then, needed not no poet.
But there are many kinds of love; “Ask not,”
Said JK, “What
for me my country does: Just
Ask,
my country that I love what I must
Do for
thee?” Golden words burn still so hot -
What greater love than for love, die, die, rot?
“I
love (whatever,)” so some car windows say
Thus taking a thing of brightest human light
Down value it, lose it, make it seem so trite:
Without true love can we the pain defray
Of nothing left beyond the dying of the day?
And He
so loved the world...” It tells
of blood,
That Book; and of the life that’s here on earth
For only we are blessed to know from birth
A love so fearful, tender, altogether good
Thus reaching out to touch the face of God.
“I
want to know what love is,” still you ask:
Cindy, it could be all that you can feel
Or need to feel or all of life that’s real
Or all of time or once just now and gone -
Or yours to have and hold from this day on.
Find out.
Bryan Islip
November 96
£For Cindy Sperry,
who had the courage that it takes
to ask the question, out aloud,
late on in the twentieth century.)
I would just add now that I might not know, still, any precise definition for the word love, but I do know what it's for. It's for procreation and I know there's too much of that right now for the goood of this planet and all who sail in her. So maybe Orsino was right. A little sickening and so dying may not go amiss.
But what is love, actually? I was once asked this question by a young lady suffering the pangs of love unrequited - I hasten to add that I was asked this in the presence of her parents, although I don't know why I should hasten to add that, having been at the time her senior by some forty odd years. But I thought about her question a lot and, whilst driving back to Riyadh from Al Khobar I composed the bones of the following ... which, when finished I sent to said parents and they to said daughter who was serving in the US Army... I hope it helped, but doubt it.
One
Question
“I
want to know what love it,” starts the song
And then goes on, “I want you to tell me,”
But the answer has been lost, this century,
Leaving the echo of the question so some
Feel cold the vacuum when replies don’t come
“Come
live with me and be my love,” he
wrote
Went on; “And
we shall all the pleasures prove:”
Four centuries back you had no need to look above
To find the answer, and Marlowe knew it;
Most folk did then, needed not no poet.
But there are many kinds of love; “Ask not,”
Said JK, “What
for me my country does: Just
Ask,
my country that I love what I must
Do for
thee?” Golden words burn still so hot -
What greater love than for love, die, die, rot?
“I
love (whatever,)” so some car windows say
Thus taking a thing of brightest human light
Down value it, lose it, make it seem so trite:
Without true love can we the pain defray
Of nothing left beyond the dying of the day?
And He
so loved the world...” It tells
of blood,
That Book; and of the life that’s here on earth
For only we are blessed to know from birth
A love so fearful, tender, altogether good
Thus reaching out to touch the face of God.
“I
want to know what love is,” still you ask:
Cindy, it could be all that you can feel
Or need to feel or all of life that’s real
Or all of time or once just now and gone -
Or yours to have and hold from this day on.
Find out.
Bryan Islip
November 96
£For Cindy Sperry,
who had the courage that it takes
to ask the question, out aloud,
late on in the twentieth century.)
I would just add now that I might not know, still, any precise definition for the word love, but I do know what it's for. It's for procreation and I know there's too much of that right now for the goood of this planet and all who sail in her. So maybe Orsino was right. A little sickening and so dying may not go amiss.
June 17, 2012
It's a beautiful world
Father's Day - messages coming in from all quarters including an e-mail from our son who is a driller on an oil rig off the West Coast of Africa. I just had to share it with you ...
'Also, saw a sight that i shall never forget.....
Basically we were being towed by two large tugs tethered to us by 2 x 4" steel
hawsers. On Friday morning at day break i was walking between the two anchor
points for the hawsers and happened to look over the side, and there, twenty
feet from the rig were two huge black marlin. One was about 700lb and the other
was that elusive
Hemingway monster,
'The Grander'..... A fish well over a 1000 lb! I stood and watched them in total
awe for about twenty minutes. Very strange, they're not normally associated with
this dolphins like behaviour, riding the sub-sea wave created by the wash. I have
a theory that they had been herded down the corridor created by 500m
long hawsers. Similar to the sweeps of a pair trawl,
whereas the fish, rather then go over or under the line / sweep / hawser will
choose to swim until exhausted and then fall back into the trawl.. Anyway, they
eventually shot off back up the corridor unharmed, hopefully never to be seen
again - Unless of course i happen to be fishing on some gin palace of the Seychelles!!!'
How wonderful is that! My response ...
hThat's fantastic, Stu. Very very few black chaps of that
size have ever been landed on rod and line. I shall now download Hem's 'The Old
Man And The Sea' on my new Kindle (fantastic machine). Re-aquaint myself with
the beautiful little yarn that won the Nobel Prize for Literature. Your e-mail took me right there.
'Also, saw a sight that i shall never forget.....
Basically we were being towed by two large tugs tethered to us by 2 x 4" steel
hawsers. On Friday morning at day break i was walking between the two anchor
points for the hawsers and happened to look over the side, and there, twenty
feet from the rig were two huge black marlin. One was about 700lb and the other
was that elusive
Hemingway monster,
'The Grander'..... A fish well over a 1000 lb! I stood and watched them in total
awe for about twenty minutes. Very strange, they're not normally associated with
this dolphins like behaviour, riding the sub-sea wave created by the wash. I have
a theory that they had been herded down the corridor created by 500m
long hawsers. Similar to the sweeps of a pair trawl,
whereas the fish, rather then go over or under the line / sweep / hawser will
choose to swim until exhausted and then fall back into the trawl.. Anyway, they
eventually shot off back up the corridor unharmed, hopefully never to be seen
again - Unless of course i happen to be fishing on some gin palace of the Seychelles!!!'
How wonderful is that! My response ...
hThat's fantastic, Stu. Very very few black chaps of that
size have ever been landed on rod and line. I shall now download Hem's 'The Old
Man And The Sea' on my new Kindle (fantastic machine). Re-aquaint myself with
the beautiful little yarn that won the Nobel Prize for Literature. Your e-mail took me right there.
