Tag: Auld Reekie
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52and40/6 When They Go Low
Everyone’s a tourist, up Calton Hill. You can see in all directions and take in the various curiosities providing perfect photography props. You can grab coffee and cake then wander through art. I was reminded of Berlin, up Calton Hill. Different accents, space for everyone; no tension between worker bees and butterflies. The National Monument, our memorial to…
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52and40/3 California Dreaming
In Scotland, another place is never far away if you need a change from where you are. When we first moved from Deeside and started exploring Edinburgh and surrounds my kids nicknamed East Lothian ‘California’. East Lothian was how they imagined life on the western US coastline to be – sunshine, beaches, big skies, ice creams…
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52and40/2 Karma Chameleon
When I’m actively writing I immerse myself in whatever art and humanity I can find. I talk lots. I fill up with music to wallop my right hemisphere. Notably, for mid-project fuel, I rarely read. I do a thing with accents and writing; I unconsciously temporarily meld with whoever’s engaging me. It’s a chameleon-like habit since childhood –…
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52and39/52 To Our Health
2015 has been the year for highly serendipitous experiences. No sooner have I thought one thing then related things have happened, leading my thoughts to necessary places or confirming hunches that what I was thinking was right or wrong after all. This last fortnight I’m hit repeatedly by thoughts of mismatched perspectives. Two people can experience the…
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52and39/48 Your People
Strangers are stranger, in someone else’s city. The smokey stains that gather on stonework seem darker and the chewing gum stuck to the pavement seems stickier and more defiant, in someone else’s city. The dirt that collects in dried tide on walls, windows, bus stops and doors seems dingier. People seem colder, ruder, less helpful, too forward…
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52and39/47 Sky Takes The Soul
We chased the light yesterday, finding it first in Helena Emman’s incredible work from Skye in The Line Gallery at Linlithgow, then leaving it at the Forth. We stood at Port Edgar, freezing, looking up and out at a world of massive Lego sets, listening to the ba-doom, ba-doom of traffic crossing the joints on the road…
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52and39/39 Rise, Fall and Wonder
We watched the chimneys at the decommissioned Cockenzie Power Station being demolished on Saturday. They touched, then fell together. Years ago, a friend had two huge pieces of art in transit. Each was on chunky canvas, about two metres square. I loved them before I even knew what I was looking at. One featured a…
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52and39/36 Home Again, Home Again, Jiggety Jig
Ubuntu means two things, as far as I know. I first knew it as the name of a free operating system on a PC my husband built to prove to himself that no matter how hard Apple and Microsoft tried, they couldn’t catch his maverick ass. Ubuntu’s also something pre-dating computers and globalisation. It’s…
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52and39/34 Show Me The Monday
I’ve been trying out listening to classical music after enjoying the dancing fingers of piano playing guests this summer. I wondered out loud what it was about classical music that makes it so relaxing. ‘It’s the lack of beat’, answered my husband, ‘it’s arrhythmic’. I think there’s a surrender and engagement with classical music when…
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52and39/33 Shut Up and Let Me Go
I’ve come to acknowledge I have an unhealthy relationship with competitiveness. It lives inside of me, waiting to jump out of my shoulder and be hideous to people or show off and maraud around like an ape on steroids. I’ve become the patient, hippyish parent of this hyper, pulsing alter-ego. My body is its Steiner School. It’s treated with…
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