I wonder if I can post from my mobile phone…?

Pretty, isn’t it?

Alright, well, it’s perhaps a touch overstated at the moment but it’s just a start. I’m not very up on Wordpress so we’ll have to see how it goes. I’ve also got rid of internet access at home, largely because it means paying a subscription fee to waste time.

Yesterday I spent four hours in hospital having ECGs and blood tests and all manner of prodding and pokery. End result was they concluded that I was stressed. I could have **£&$^ told them that.

If anyone’s got any idea why I bother, I’d be grateful to hear.

Thomas Merton on renunciation, in Seeds of Contemplation:

Fickleness and indecision are signs of self-love.
If you can never make up your mind what God wills for you, but are always veering from one opinion to another, from one practice to another, from one method to another, it may be an indication that you are trying to get around God’s will and do your own with a quiet conscience.
As soon as God gets you in one monastery you want to be in another.
As soon as you taste one way of prayer, you want to try another. You are always making resolutions and breaking them by counter-resolutions. You ask your confessor and do not remember the answers. Before you finish one book you begin another, and with every book you read you change the whole plan of your interior life.
Soon you will have no interior life at all. Your whole existence will be a patchwork of confused desires and daydreams and velleities in which you do nothing except defeat the work of grace: for all this is an elaborate subconscious device of your nature to resist God, whose work in your soul demands the sacrifice of all that you desire and delight in, and, indeed, of all that you are.
So keep still, and let Him do some work.
This is what it means to renounce not only pleasures and possessions, but even your own self.

You must understand that my family is perfect. You understand that, right? We never interrupt one another, never get cross, never fail to pursue intelligent, constructive solutions for everything. Both children were born toilet-trained, too.

Well, maybe not, but I am glad to have them. They make life nice. I am also surprised to find that I sort of like where we’re living. Our street tends to be the venue for the local debating forum, which usually gets going at about 3am. Last week’s point of contention was “Did Amanda leave the keys on the table, and if so, why did she leave the keys on the fucking table when she fucking knows perfectly fucking well that Davey couldnae get in the fuckin hoose if he didnae have his fucking keys”. The point is argued by the two principles and then the floor is opened to the rest of the street, who often like to engage in unusual and colourful ways. A spirited discussion of whether or not Malky was a wanker, a couple of months ago, was into its second hour when a new, bellowing voice interrupted from further up the street. Malky was this guy’s pal, apparently, and he wasn’t having a word said against Malky. It took another five minutes of misunderstandings and confusion before it was established that he had got the wrong Malky, and he bowed out graciously enough The discussion closed at nearly 5am with
“Ye’ve just got tae leave her out it.”
“Well why’s she no leaving ME out it?”
“Just ignore her.”
“Why’s she hinging out her windae screaming at me all night then?”
“Because she’s a big screamy windae-hinger, that’s just what she does. Ignore her.”

Which I thought was pretty well-reasoned. Of course there are times when it’s Not Safe To Go Outside. Those are generally to do with football, but it’s never been about the local team, just about who’s visiting. And it’s not all that safe to walk down the street in the dark, but that’s true in lots of places. During the day, when nobody’s drunk and the sun shines, the difference between this place and others I have lived in is that there is, in fact, a community here. It is a deeply dysfunctional community, no question, but it is still a community, and after years in the cold, net-curtained hells of moneyed suburbia, I’m grateful for it. You feel like you’re a person. People know who you are.

Of course it helps having the world’s friendliest wife. She can’t help it. It’s nice going into a cafe and finding people know my name, even if I do have to calculate a new route home to avoid the burning car. It’s also nice living in a street where, for once, we are not the most disruptive element present.

Learning Gaelic is a far more powerful experience than I had expected. It’s not a language, it’s a whole culture - and a community. We sent our daughter to the city’s one Gaelic school, which raised a number of eyebrows among our friends. Most of my initial reasoning was vague: kids who grow up bilingual get smarter. But what brought us back, later, was the warmth and the joy of it. It’s weird but, really, it’s the only school I’ve ever gone into and suddenly felt welcome. Everybody’s happy. This term the funding’s being cut and they’re all happy!

This video shows the opening of the launch night of the new Gaelic tv station, BBC Alba. (”Alba” being Gaelic for “Scotland”). As you’d expect it opens with song.

I came to the launch night of BBC Alba in a state of total confusion. I tried to engage my customary degree of cynicism, but also, I badly wanted it to be useful for us as learners. More, in fact - many Scots find it impossible to be kind about Gaelic. My confidence has taken a bit of a kicking from that, and I’m not used to feeling like part of something. It’s entirely cultural. We’re hardly the only country on earth which believes, deep down, that the voice of authority has an English accent.

I’m glad we’re learning what we’re learning, and I’m proud to be feeling hopeful. Change is scary but there’s a lot of it about the world at the moment. It’s nice being Scottish.

Postscript 1:
The rest of the launch night included the ubiquitous ceilidh and a documentary about serial killers. Somebody had a sense of humour, eh?

Postcript 2:
I’m told a “Sassenach” is someone who speaks English. Anyone. A Scotsman who speaks English is a Sassenach. Maybe that was what gave the word its bite. I wonder if there’s an opposite word to that for insufferable lowlanders who start trying to learn Gaelic - because it’s an increasing phenomenon, believe me. How they must cringe on the islands when we pour over there for our holidays. No wonder it’s £400 for a cup of tea.

On Wednesday, they’re turning on the Large Hadron Collider between France and Switzerland. This is an enormous contraption for discovering very small important things (explained much more helpfully here), and there is a small but definite chance that it might destroy the whole entire universe.

How do you react to that? Most people seem to hold that it’s A Bad Thing. Can I really be the only one who, on hearing the universe might end, kind of sort of hopes it does?

I don’t mean that in a big depressing way. It’s not a massive, pressing desire. Just a guilty little secret hope. I’m just looking forward to it in the way one might look forward to a particularly well-publicised episode of The Bill. Look, it’s a statistically proven fact that suicide rates drop steeply in wartime. Because there’s something happening! Something to do! Alright, the main thing to do is get killed, I’m not actually saying war should be available free on the NHS as a cure for depression, but my main point still holds: I guarantee that between now and Wednesday the suicide rate will drop because people want to see what’s going to happen. That’s how I get through life, anyway. I have to have a series of little islands charted out ahead of me, little things to look forward to. Oh, Tuesday, I’ll go to the pictures. Wednesday the universe might get destroyed, that’ll be nice, I might get up. Thursday, that episode of The Good Life is on where Margo falls over, that’s brilliant… etc…

I appreciate some of you might have very small children and want them to grow up, but trust me, that’s a temporary state of insanity. And a quick glance outside the window at the teenagers currently kicking your car’s windscreen in will remind you that kids don’t actually get cuter as they grow. And anyway it’s not like they’ll be dead, is it? There won’t be any dead to be. There won’t be anything, there won’t even be any time. You’ll never have been born in th’first place. You’ll not even never have been born, you’ll never have ever had of been born. Ever. There’ll just be “ .” Loads and loads of it.

I say bring it on. We’re bound to end up destroying the universe one way or another anyway. This is the quickest, cheapest and most efficient option, and it’ll make taxes a hell of a lot more straightforward, too. Well done Science! Hurrah!

My daughter insists on playing chess in an American accent. While I’m delighted she’s taken up the game - you know, I prefer it to Smash the Barbies - I’m a little rattled by the elaborate relationships she projects onto the pieces. Today she refused to move her rook because she said he was still sulking. Apparently the pawn I’d captured had been his best friend, not to mention his cousin. It all made sense then - well, you wouldn’t want to keep playing, would you, not if your pal had been sent off in the opening minutes. I suggested that he could go and visit his friend in prison, so they could still chat, and perhaps watch the rest of the game together, egging their side on. Or take a side each to add to the sense of fun. But she said the pawn was dead. They’re like that, aren’t they, the young folk today. Very dark. I blame Pingu.

THING ONE

possible reasons for me getting lots of silent phone calls

1. am being stalked by serial killer
2. am being stalked by random idiot
3. am being stalked by random idiot serial killer
4. am being dialled by robot selling computer (which makes breathing sounds)
5. am calling self from the future to warn of impending catastrophe, but repeatedly thinking better of it, proving I don’t change much in the future
6. POLTERGEISTS
7. Skynet has become self-aware, but is markedly less evil than expected

THING TWO

Quite soon I am going to push Paul McCartney’s face into a food mixer. The soonness of this event increases in direct proportion to the number of times the joker in the flat over the road plays “Mull Of Kintyre” much, much too loud. Earlier today Mr McCartney’s face was out of danger entirely, because Billy Joel was instead singing “Uptown Girl” incredibly loudly out of the same window. At the time, Mr Joel’s face was expected to receive the same treatment. However “Mull Of Kintyre” has since returned to the top spot.

The Keirsey Temperament Sorter II says I’m an Idealist Healer. It’s on the internet so it must be true.