Euan Semple's Blog, page 44

I must go up to the hills again…

… to the lonely hills and the… oh, hang on, that’s not right.

Anyway, I love this photo that I took in Glen Coe on my winter mountaineering course many moons ago.

Nine years

I watched a documentary about David Bowie’s time as Ziggy Stardust and the words from the song Five Years have been running through my head ever since – except I’ve been singing it as nine, not five. Maybe a Freudian slip.

Nine years would take me up to three score years and ten, my conventionally allotted time on this planet. But with a ninety one year old dad and a mum who made it to eighty seven – who knows.

But time has got very slippery these days. Days, weeks, months and years merge into one another. Images will pop up of work trips to the US, or Australia in the Photos widget on my phone and not only will I struggle to remember when the trip happened, the very fact that it did is becoming increasingly unreal.

All I know with any certainty is that I get up, stuff happens, and I go to sleep, over and over again. The past is a dream that I have here and now, the future a fantasy that likewise is a figment of my imagination that I experience here and now.

My very last moment will be just the same and it may happen tomorrow, in nine years, or thirty. I will wake up, stuff will happen, then I will go to sleep…

It’s a hard life

Shouty people

It’s always fun watching other people exercise. If you watch to the end you will hear the shouty person that every boat appears to need on the bank.

Sitting in judgement

It is such a shame that the prevailing assumption seems to be that management are there to judge whether people have done their jobs well enough or not. In fact it is worse than that. It often creeps into the both parties feeling as if the judgement is not just that they have made a mistake but that they themselves are somehow intrinsically not good enough.

We are trained into this in school. We take for granted the idea that if you don’t get good enough grades in your exams you have failed but this slips unnoticed into you not being good enough as a person and also that someone else is in a position to judge this to be the case.

But failing at things is how we learn. We never get anything right first time. By pretending otherwise we deprive ourselves of the opportunity to learn. We then stop taking chances and stop growing just in case we are judged a failure.

We know when we have made a mistake, and more often than not we know where we went wrong. We don’t need someone else to tell us that. But we often end up giving in to the prevailing culture, not taking responsibility for our actions, and wait for someone else to do it for us.

We all fail at things all the time but none of it is any indication of our intrinsic worth as a person. Giving in and letting others take responsibility is!

Normal

I’ve been thinking again about the pernicious power of the word normal. The idea that there is some acceptable way that we should be in the world, or that other people should, is the source of so much misery.

How many teenagers have killed themselves because they didn’t fit in to other people’s idea of how they could be? How many genocides have been committed because other people have not been “normal” like us?

And yet it is all made up. There is no such thing as normal. We are all different and we all see the world differently. The sooner we realise that the happier we will all be.

Déjà Vu

Often when I start to write a post I am aware that I have almost certainly written a similar post before. But I have learned over the years not to worry about it. My thoughts on the topic may have changed, those reading it will have changed, the current context will have changed, and even if nothing has changed we all think the same thoughts over and over again and that in itself is interesting.

The photo above is of a tree that I must have walked past thousands of times in the 30 years we have lived here. But every time I walk my local route the tree has changed, the weather has changed, I have changed, and even if it looks like nothing has changed the tree is still beautiful.

Ongoing attempts to persuade Alby to come away in the van.

I love Queer Eye

If you haven’t seen Queer Eye, it is a reality TV show where five experts go in to help someone adjust their life to overcome challenges they face.

The choice of the five experts is perfect and they help the subject of show with tact and sensitivity. Antoni (food), Tan (fashion), Karamo (relationships), and Bobby (design) are all gay and Jonathan (personal grooming) is just Jonathan!

The people they help are usually those considered outsiders by society in some way and you almost always start the show very aware of the differences and the unhappiness they cause. By the end though you always come back to the shared humanity that has been hidden by prejudice and judgement.

As I get older I am increasingly convinced that the idea of “normal” is one of the most widespread, pernicious, and damaging of our shared cultural inheritance. I love that the show blows the idea apart.

A couple if days ago we started watching the new series and the second one, about a trans woman called Angel, had me in floods of tears. She was so smart, so pretty and so happy as a woman but her dad had never come to terms with her decision to transition from the sporty boy he had thought he was bringing up. The moment when they were reconciled and hugged each other sobbing was what got me and tipped me over the edge.

Culture burdens us with rules about how we should be in the world and it takes real courage to step away from them. Often we don’t even know who we really are outside of this inherited baggage of ideas.

Seeing two people who really loved each other having the courage to let those rules fall away to reveal their shared humanity was so powerful and moving.

Like I said, I love Queer Eye.

Connie the Campercar

My overnight stop at Bridge Of Orchy.

One of this blog’s readers asked if I could go into more detail about our campervan and, while I promise all my posts from now on won’t be about our van, here we go.

We’d been tempted to get a motorhome of some sort for years and in fact rented a four berth one a couple of years ago and took it to the south of France. But it was too big. Too big to park anywhere we wanted, too big to go up all the roads we wanted to, and too big to park on our front drive. So we started looking at campervans, modifications of commercial vans with a pop up top. The most iconic of these is the VW California and we were initially seduced by the branding and image. They are very expensive and buying one was going to really stretch our finances but we decided to go ahead. The night before we were about to commit I realised that I hadn’t actually sat in the front of one with the top down. It’s just as well, because at the eleventh hour, when I turned up at the dealers for this final check, I discovered that I don’t fit! My height is in my back and there is no way I can sit in the front seat of a VW California!

So, this took us down the route of looking at other campervan conversions and led us to Sussex Campervans and the Nissan NV200 which we now proudly own. It is very small, smaller than many SUVs, and Sussex call it a “camper car”. This means that we can park it anywhere we like, even a multi story car parks, we can drive it down the smallest of lanes, and it fits easily on our front drive. As Nissan no longer import the diesel manual NV200 on which the conversion was originally based ours is a petrol automatic imported directly from Japan with about 4000 miles on the clock. Sussex Campervans have been doing the conversions for about nine years and have got it down to a fine art.

Getting ready for a modest “car warming” party for some neighbours.

The van has a rotatable passenger front seat and a rear seat with two seatbelts which really quickly and easily converts into a comfortable double bed. There is also a 50l fridge, a cooker with two gas hobs, a sink, more cupboard space than we know what to do with, and a pop-up roof where we could sleep another couple of people at a push. There is a plumbed LPG gas tank which fuels the cooker and a very effective climate controlled heater. There is also a large leisure battery and a solar panel on the roof so we can apparently survive “off grid” and without moving (which would normally charge both batteries) for up to three days.

Me drying out my walking gear after a wet and windy day in the highlands.

What the van gives us is complete flexibility. We can use it as the family car with an option to stop wherever and whenever we choose, but it is also easily up to the job of longer trips. I’ve already used it for a week in Scotland and a weekend in Wales and Penny and I have had overnight stays in The New Forest and Dorset. Even in winter with cold wet weather it has been really comfortable. Once the weather gets warmer, if COVID regulations allow, I’ll head south with it, park it somewhere nice, in The South of France, or Spain, or maybe Italy and Croatia, and Penny can fly down and join me for a long weekend or longer holiday.

The fit and finish of the van is superb (a friend who recently rented a VW says ours was much better fitted out) and Sussex Campervans have been a delight to deal with. Despite COVID restrictions, the van getting stuck on a boat in The Suez Canal, and Brexit changes slowing down the supply of parts, they bust a gut to get the van to us with as little delay as possible and have been incredibly supportive and helpful as we discover the joys of this new toy.

You can see the company owner Daniel explaining how the van works in this video and you might enjoy the various useful posts on their web site.