Bryan Islip's Blog, page 55

Nightfall from Kirkhill

This is my latest pastel painting. Titled 'Nightfall from Kirkhill' it is the view from our front of house porch looking west northwest up Loch Ewe over the Pier Road promontory.

Some will find it difficult to accept such sunset coloration but not those who live here. All kinds of the most vivid effects happen, especially as the longer nights set in at this time of the year. This sky is an exercise in pure abstraction; a veritable maelstrom of cloud. Blues into pinks, orange, yellows and brilliant white. Marvellous.

The red deer hind looking from our garden over the loch is also a reality. She and her baby and her friends sometimes come down off the hill and leap the wire fence on to our back lawn then wander over to munch away on the hostas. We don't mind. When the really hard weather arrives so will her mate, a hugely antlered stag. But he only deigns to visit us in the middle of the night.

Talking of the middle of the night, we missed a rare treat last week. Cold snaps with clear autumnal skies equals a strong possibility of the famous Northern Lights. Unfortunately we were fast asleep by the time some locals spotted them and went outside to stand in awe as sheets and tongues and explosions of incredible colour rolled and unrolled across the firmament.

Old Man's New Stories in Prose and Verse

It says on the cover; 'yes TWENTY stories: and BITES because they do'. At 76 years of age, guess I can call myself 'old'. My third published fiction, Twenty Bites, follows the full length novels More Deaths Than One and Going with Gabriel. These new stories are the product of many years of writing and many more years of experience. As it also says on the cover: 'Life is hardly ever just a bowl of cherries, is it?'

Twenty Bites is power-packed throughout with widely differing tales of life, love, adventure and misadventure. Eighteen of the stories are written in high quality, high impact prose and the other two in narrative verse.

Good short fiction, written hard and sparingly through the mind and the actions of a single viewpoint character is exactly in tune with our digital age and with today's episodic, fast moving way of life. Short fiction in prose demands a disciplined distillation of thoughts and actions into a concentration of words that will resonate within a reader's consciousness, indeed within his or her own life. And narrative verse in the tradition of the Celtic bards is the ultimate, the most satisfying 'reduction' from that. Verse is, at least in my opinion, the most difficult, most powerful and potentially most reader satisfying of all the ways in which a story may be told.

Twenty Bites's publication date is 11th November 2010. ISBN 978-0-9555193-3-8
It is a 232 page 5"x 8" (12.7 x 20.2 cm) paperback, soon RRP £7.99 through Amazon et al. But you can get it from me for £7.00 post paid.

Contact:
Bryan Islip
Kirkhill House,
Aultbea,
Ross-shire, IV22 2HU

T: 01445 731322
E: bryan@bryanislip.com

2011

This time of the year is when we look at our pile of unsold calendars and work out a cunning plan to sell them all before 2011 arrives and folk are all calendared-up.

This plan is simple: send me a fiver and I'll send you one of these! Better still, send me a tenner and I'll send you two of these plus one or two (you choose)stiff backed envelopes.

All the Welcome Breaks.

If my blogs have been a little thin on the ground these past few months I'll blame our Bed and Breakfast micro business. Yes, our new venture has kept us very busy(I say our but really it's Dee's, with me as general helper, as and when,) but it has also been a whole lot of fun. Most of our guests have come in off the road and most of them have been continentals and most of them, Germans. We've made a lot of new friends. Nobody is allowed out without leaving at least a trace autobigraphy (swap) behind them.

My personal favourite guest story began one late summer afternoon, when out of the horizontal rain and wind arrived a young couple on push bikes. They'd braved the steep, steep hills and the abominable weather all the way from Ullapool - about an hour by car, goodness only knows how long by pedal power. In answer to our question, 'We are from Lucerne,' they said. 'You flew to the UK with your bikes?' I asked. 'Oh, no.' came the reply. 'We cycled across the Alps and up France and the Low Countries and then took the Calais / Dover ferry boat, then north up England via Cornwall and north up Scotland.'

The following day they went on their way in similarly horrible weather. It was a Sunday. We always visit Poolewe, about six miles away, on a Sunday morning to buy our newspaper and enjoy a scone and coffee at Mike and Connie's Bridge Cafe. As we sat there we saw the two of them, whippet thin and heads down into the wind, resolutely pushing pedals on their return journey south. Wonderful.

No right to life.

Autumnwatch last evening: brilliant TV but how I wished I had a camcorder the other day - I could have contributed tot he program.

Dee called me upstairs, looking out over the lawn and surrounding shrubbery. In the centre of the lawn was a rabbit, stock still, peering fixedly with ears cocked into the bushes. Soon enough we could see why. A red-brown pencil of an animal, white chested, appeared to have gone crazy. Mr (or Mrs) Weasel flashed in and out of the shrubbery, wheeling and tumbling, sometimes momentarily standing on its hind legs like a meercat.

We agreed with some certainty that this peculiar weasel dance must have been intended to hypnotise his ten times larger prey, and if so it definitely succeeded. Last seen the rabbit shook its head, hopped off to the bushes and presumably to certain death. Dee was all in favour of rushing out to try to scare off both hunter and hunted. Me? Whatever will be will be. Nothing living has a right to life, contrary to human pronouncement. Or to anything else.

Ourselves as others see us

The following review / critique (on Going with Gabriel )appeared this morning on Amazon ... thought I'd share it with you ...

Remember how Tarantino's "From Dusk Till Dawn" turned from a baddie film into a vampire movie?

Well, this book switches from a thrilling page-turner into a vision. The vision of Farland, but a vision of heaven or hell? Farland is a fusion of the Nazis' Lebensborn project and a kibbutz. A mixture of an Amish community and the village in the cult TV series The Prisoner...

Fame at one remove

A funny thing happened to us as we ate our breakfast this morning. To catch up with the news we had the TV tuned into the BBC's Breakfast Show. After the news the presenters went straight into a pretty lightweight piece about queueing. Yes, that's right, standing in line: how we all suffer it in silence or hate and avoid it, or - unbelievably enough in the case of one lady, (one has to assume a very lonely lady) - actually liked to queue. The presenters were interviewing a retail 'expert' and...

In sight of Nature

At the markets where we sell our Pictures and Poems products we are often asked why we chose to live in this place so far removed ... etc. Amongst other reasons to do with people (or their scarcity), and the way here that you only have to lift your eyes to lift your mind, since coming to live in Wester-Ross we've seen many, many to us wondrous natural things; none of which may shake the world but all of which we shall remember...

High on the hill we've often sat upon a certain rock around whic...

Seeing is asking

Yesterday Dee had her eyesight refurbished!

Yes, an 80 miles drive across the Highlands to Raigmore Hospital followed by a 20 minute operation to remove a left eye cataract / install a new left eye lens, then Tesco and home again. This morning there's a little residual irritation and some experimentation with her old varifocal spectacles (better on or off, pro tem?) but the chances are that after fifteen years of wearing glasses she will only need them in future for reading, if at all.

So I'm ...

A Day Away

We spent a couple of days with our friends near Glasgow: just back. One afternoon we did what we haven't done in a long while - just ambled around, aimlessly looking in on some shops, including the odd art gallery, sitting on benches in the wide, traffic free city centre streets listening to the street musicians (shades of my novel, Going with Gabriel), leisurely lunch in a very good, very inexpensive Italian restaurant. You get the picture. Wonderful.

If you ever read McArthur's epic master-...