Bryan Islip's Blog, page 38

The Highlands. Life in a remote place.

Friends to the south often ask us what it's like - that little place we've no idea where it actually is called Aultbea? And what's life like, living there?

Well, it isn't Utopia. It rains a lot and big winds brew up in the Atlantic, hurtle in at us over the Islands, so if you're particularly weather sensitive ... And in the summer, when there isn't any wind, everywhere with heather or grass underfoot is patrolled by whole airforces of semi-invisible midges that make outdoors life difficult to impossible. You definitely won't like those little devils. Next to nothing's open on a Sunday except the many houses of God (and the little Bridge Cafe and Gallery in Poolewe where we gather for our coffee, scones and newspapers). What else? Oh yes, it's eighty miles to the nearest hospital and fifty to the nearest mini Tesco and on the way there are very few signs of human habitation and some big hills to cross ... so if it's been snowing ...

So why are we here - why, in fact, do we love being here? Have a look at a couple of my pastel paintings...


But it's not just a matter of looking out from your windows at the world as it was made. Not just the space and the right ambience for my painting and writing (www.picturesandpoems.co.uk and www.bryanislipauthor.com respectively). Or even the nice people from all over the world we meet when they stay with us for Dee's increasingly famous B&B. (www.aultbeabedandbreakfast.co.uk )

For us there's a five minute stroll to the general store or the health centre or the post office or the excellent local garage and a three minute stroll to either of two small hotels. The once a day bus to Inverness stops right outside our (Kirkhill) house. Leaves 8.30 am, gets us back 7.30 pm. We are served by two mobile banks, a mobile library, a mobile butcher and a mobile fishmonger. Folk in passing cars (we know most and most know us) generally favour you with a wave and a smile and if on foot there's all the semi-obligatory chat - the craic as it's called up here.

Of course if you're fit, more or less, you can walk for miles and miles and miles and you won't see another soul. You'll see only the lochs and the little lochans, the heather and the hill. You'll see eagles and other birds, some very rare, and red deer in the distance and you'll watch your boots for smaller, furrier things and shiny amphibians. You'll smell the bog myrtle and the sea, always the sea. And high, high overhead you'll see the vapour trails and think of those less lucky folk on their way from where to where and why? You'll ask yourself those questions. And you'll hear only the sounds that you make yourself.

There's no crime to speak of, here, by the way. No lights to block out the sky at night. No continuous background bellow of traffic, sirens, Saturday night shouts and screams.

Where we live our lives there are those who for generations have been born and bred to this Aultbea and those incomers like us who have been absorbed but it, adopted by it; willingly enwrapped in it.

2013 ???

Very soon I'll be on my rounds of Wester-Ross shops, hopefully to stock them up with our 'Pictures and Poems' greetings cards, prints and of course the calendar which is this year (that is, selling 2012 a calendar for 2013) a joint effort with my pastel landscapes and Eoghain Maclean's beautiful wildlife photographs
I'm looking forward to meeting once again with our friends in the gift shops, galleries, camp and caravan sites, general stores etc up and down this rugged, ragged, sparsely populated coastline. It's as if the area is coming out of hibernation, stretching itself for another busy season of incoming tourists. Many of these come back here year after year, as we did ourselves before we decided to migrate north, so it will be good to see them as well.

I'm handling the retail shops here in the west Highlands and Eoghain is breaking new ground with those over in the east, plus many direct to the public markets. In addition I've presented this 'Unique Three-in-one Picturebook Calendar' (paintings, photos and narratives) to some of the UK'sbiggest retail chains. You never know, Don Quixote might topple the windmill. He will never know if he doesn't try.

Must remember to take the 2012 calendar off our Pictures and Poems website and substitute this 3013 effort.

The script, the script, the script

I started to watch the BBC's much vaunted 'Kidnap and Ransom' the other evening. I say 'started' because after half an hour of hoping it might get better I switched off. This is obviously a personal view - and one not necessarily shared in our home - but I can't believe I was the only switcher-off.

Why? The Beeb had clearly spent a lot of money - our money - on this production. It was set in downtown India and featured several top rated 'stars' including Trevor Eves who was his usual mouth-open in astonishment, over expressive, urbanely hair-do'd Trevor Eves whether in a forensic science lab or a Delhi backstreet.

But it wasn't the acting / overacting that put me off. It wasn't even the mean streets, vehicles, or people. It was the utter unbelievability of the developing story and the crazy backwards and forwards staccato of the story's presentation.

'You can't write a song if you ain't got nothin' to say', sang Willie Nelson. This story had little to say and was saying it very badly. It was supposed to be thrilling. I would have found it laughable but for the ridiculous waste of, well, everything.

Alfred Hitchcock once was asked what were the most important elements of a good film. His response: 'The script, the script, the script.'

Who the hell at the Beeb (and even more at ITV) is selecting and funding these TV monstrosities? I cannot believe they've ever read a good book in their lives. There are literally millions of good stories out there. All TV (and film) has to do is tell it like it damn well is! No tricks.

Please. Please.

Writing fiction

There are two reasons for such a massive deluge of new writers and first novels today compared with, say, thirty years ago ... (1) The personal computer and Microsoft's Word and (2) Wikipedia.

I'm of an age to remember pounding out typewritten pages, piles of screwed up sheets overflowing the waste basket, hours and hours spent poring over learned tomes in the public library in research.

I'm not of an age to remember handwriting and re-writing my work. That came before typewriters. How on earth did William Shakespeare do it - and with a goose quill pen to boot? He was said to have written Much Ado About Nothing for Her Majesty Queen Elizabeth 1's command performance - in eight days time! And I've actually been inside that tiny upstairs room in a cottage in Chawton, Hampshire, where Miss Jane Austen hand-wrote her immaculate novels in total secrecy.

So now we can cut and paste and change everything again and again at will and if we need to know about what happens for instance when you break your back (as I needed to know for chapter two of The Book - see http://www.bryanislipauthor.com) it's just a click on a key and an hour's study.

Whatever could WS and JA and all the other literary greats of history have achieved if they had the tools available to me? The mind does indeed boggle.

Why?

Questions:

What level of interest and what level of mental pain have I, if I see on TV that a mudslide in Chile has killed 17?
What level of interest and what level of mental pain have I if it happens half a mile from where I live?
What level of interest and what level of mental pain have I if one of the dead is my son/daughter/wife/mother?

Would I be happier if the only news reaching me was that with a direct meaning to and bearing on my own life and my own self-chosen interests; if all else going on in the world did not reach me? Am I only interested in the latter for the assuagement of my personal curiosity? And, by the by, the enrichment of the Rupert Murdochs and the employment of the massed battalions of the BBC, advertising industries etc?

Funny, the things you think of and the questions you ask yourself when you're writing a novel like The Book. Not so funny when you realise that these questions are the ones that, from the day we are born, we have been taught NOT to ask

'Ours not to reason why ...'

Difference is all, difference in all

We're now some 8,000 words into my novel in progress, provisionally entitled The Book.
I'm writing the story through the mind and all the senses of Marie Mortlock, wife of redundant, accident prone Ben and mother of gifted, disabled Jamie. Oh, and daughter Zara who is away at University. She will not loom large until in the later chapters.
But the boy Jamie is about to come into full focus. It's not easy to endow him - believably - with all the characteristics I have in mind. Much more research to do. But I enjoy the creation of characters as much as anything else in the writing of fiction.
It's just brilliant when the characters stop being characters and start being living, breathing, warts and all people. Just like you and me? 
No. We're all different, just as no two human fingerprints are the same, just as no two snowflakes are the same, just as no two bodies of the billion trillion in our universe are the same. That's the way we and all things were created. That's the wonder of it.

An otter pottering

Yesterday we watched an otter pottering about not three metres from where we sat eating our picnic lunch. Regular readers will know we often sit on the broken concrete remnants of the WW2 observation post up near what is today the NATO pier on Loch Ewe.

Up until then the day had not been perfect. You know how it is when a string of little things go awry and nothing you do turns out to be as straighforward as you had every right to expect. Anyway as we sat mostly in silence amongst the boulders and concrete Dee nudged me and I looked up and there she was. A real white chinned beauty, supposedly a female to judge by her size in comparison to other otters we have observed close up.

She was in no hurry. All the beach stones on her route received special attention. Her fur glistened brown umber in the winter sunshine, a perfect match with the half tide seaweed littered shore. We watched her as she went away from us towards Aultbea. Perambulating is the best word for it. Sometimes rolling on to her back. Gradually disappearing with distance until she was there no more. We guessed she had returned to the loch to search for crabs and little fishes.

And suddenly our day was perfect.

The Nuclear Genie and Omar Khyamm

Nothing and nobody is able to put the nuclear genie back into its bottle.

Nuclear fission is a fact, and whether you worry about who has 'the bomb' and what they might be planning to do with it or about the disposal of waste fuels from nuclear power stations, it is here to stay. Just one more force of nature in the hands of imperfect Man; the loaded gun in the playful hands of an idiot child.

So today go on and sign your nuclear power development deal with France, Mr Cameron. It might heal your fractured relationship with M Sarkozy and preserve your cosy relationship with the UK banking fraternity even if it does condemn your grandchildren to untold, unknowable misery.

The question of future power sourcing should start not with the satisfying of escalating demand but with the controlled descalation of demand. That, Mr Cameron, is called change by leadership vision and persuasion.

Fly over the UK, especially the south of it at night. What in hell are we doing with all those street lights? Have a glance at those infr-red pics of mother earth from space. Do we really want and need all of that massive efflux if heat from our over-warmed cities and buildings generally? Of course we do not.

Almost exactly one thousand years ago a Persian by the name of Omar Khayamwrote ...

The Moving Finger writes; and, having writ,
  Moves on: nor all thy Piety nor Wit,
Shall lure it back to cancel half a Line,
  Nor all thy Tears wash out a Word of it.But helpless pieces in the game He plays,
  Upon this chequer-board of Nights and Days,
He hither and thither moves, and checks ... and slays,
  Then one by one, back in the Closet lays.And, as the Cock crew, those who stood before
  The Tavern shouted - "Open then the Door!
You know how little time we have to stay,
  And once departed, may return no more."A Book of Verses underneath the Bough,
  A Jug of Wine, a Loaf of Bread --and Thou,
Beside me singing in the Wilderness,
  And oh, Wilderness is Paradise enow.If chance supplied a loaf of white bread,
  Two casks of wine and a leg of mutton,
In the corner of a garden with a tulip-cheeked girl,
  There'd be enjoyment no Sultan could outdo.Myself when young did eagerly frequent
  Doctor and Saint, and heard great Argument
About it and about: but evermore
  Came out of the same Door as in I went.With them the Seed of Wisdom did I sow,
  And with my own hand labour'd it to grow:
And this was all the Harvest that I reap'd -
  "I came like Water, and like Wind I go."Into this Universe, and why not knowing,
  Nor whence, like Water willy-nilly flowing:
And out of it, as Wind along the Waste,
  I know not whither, willy-nilly blowing.And that inverted Bowl we call The Sky,
  Whereunder crawling coop't we live and die,
Lift not thy hands to It for help - for It
  Rolls impotently on as Thou or I.
Sometimes I have to wonder quite what our species has actually achieved during these past thousand years. Shakespeare and his contempories believed fervently that Man had reached his apogee fifteen hundred years before, and was already into his inevitable decline and fall. I do hope not, but is there anyone today capable of creating something with as much force and prescience as those words of Mr Khayyam?

A message for David Cameron.

A message for yet another London P.M. with a Scottish ancestry ... I am English by birth and Scottish by adoption so I can see the picture better than most.

An independent Scotland would re-industrialise itself. Make no mistake, the future world-wide is in local production. The days when we all send and bring the goods we need to and from far and wide are over. Scotland and its people have the energy, (both physical and cultural), the creativity and the opportunity to re-industrialise. Size of population means nothing or, if overlarge, even worse than nothing. It's brains, imagination, courage and character that will count in future. Not the smoke and mirrors of your precious self-seeking so-called financiers.

World standing? Scotland even today has a higher 'respect and popularity' rating world-wide than an England riven by years of City corruption, (yes that does include London based RBS and HBOS), spurious multi-culturalism, systemic wear and tear and a hugely destructive bias towards the south and London over everywhere else.

The defence argument is plain nonsense, David. Strong, moral societies should not fear the enemy within, they absorb and convert them, so do not need secret services expensively leaching away everyone's right to privacy. And such sociteies will never need to attempt to subjugate foreign peoples, to try to change the ways in which other people choose to live.

Above all, Scotland, David cameron, is historically A NATION, with characteristics and a worth all of its own and different to those of its neighbour. True? Ask the Irish. Read some Robert Burns. And do remember, Scotland was only unionised by England through the back door in the first place.

A novel called The Book goes well

I'm thinking The Book goes well. I'm in sight of the end of chapter two now, ready for on line 'publication' on 29th February to FOC subscribers through www.bryanislipauthor.com .

For me, writing is very much like painting pictures. However many times you re-visit the work you can always see ways to improve it. The editing and general titivation, right back to line one page one, goes un without end until one day you just say for better or worse that's enough. Of course by then you could have spoiled the thing by over-writing or over-painting as the case may be. Hope not. I have high hopes for The Book (provisional title)

It's early days yet, but my central viewpoint character Mrs Marie Mortlock is all the time emerging larger and more solid from the shadows of my imagination. I would never take the reader through that dreadful writerly thing of describing the lady's physical appearance in one paragraph, preferring instead to let the reader form his/her own mind picture from the clues emerging naturally, over time, through her behaviour and the story.

Nevertheless I can here tell those who are interested that in my mind the lady is in her late thirties, quite but not overly pretty, petite figure, dark hair and blue eyes. She's assertive, clever and resourceful. She's the wife of a strong, good looking husband called Ben who likes being led from behind (by her) and is the mother of Zara, now away at university, and the 13 year old, gifted, disabled Jamie. I'm thinking that her relationship with Jamie and his with the world at large will become one of the the main focuses (focii?) of my novel. Of course there is and will be a full cast of other characters in The Book as the family Mortlock settles into an anything but ordinary life in the Highlands.


A Land Unspoiled
Our day slows down as last light paints the skyand you can feel the movement of the globe,hear gentle surf, the wheeling seagull's cry,watch land and sea in pastel colours robethis Wester-Ross where calming nature seemsa place of magic that itself redeems,inspires an artist and a poet's dreams.
You think perhaps Blake's feet in ancient timeswould want to tread a land unspoiled as this.There's little discord here where most things rhyme,and all is sensate to an evening's kiss,when no-one's going far and peace is soughtand found; for what this is cannot be bought,and things material count for little, less or nought.
Bryan Islip