many a beautiful theory was killed by an ugly fact

Strawberries
There were never strawberries
like the ones we had
that sultry afternoon
sitting on the step
of the open french window
facing each other
your knees held in mine
the blue plates in our laps
the strawberries glistening
in the hot sunlight
we dipped them in sugar
looking at each other
not hurrying the feast
for one to come
the empty plates
laid on the stone together
with the two forks crossed
and I bent towards you
sweet in that air
in my arms
abandoned like a child
from your eager mouth
the taste of strawberries
in my memory
lean back again
let me love you

let the sun beat
on our forgetfulness
one hour of all
the heat intense
and summer lightning
on the Kilpatrick hills

let the storm wash the plates

Edwin Morgan, again

Windows in the West



Turn the kaleidoscope and the seventy-eyed creature
Stretches, yawns, shakes the roof snow
Off its back in clumsy dollops, gets a glow
Going, cries of ‘It’s freezing!’ (not really, just a feature
Of tenement winter), puts some coffee on, come on -
How can a single one be a multiple seventy -
I don’t know, but I know I like the mystery -
Breathe out, breathe in, never in unison -
‘When did you get in last night?’ - ‘Where the hell
Did you put my razor?’ - ‘Dog has started
To chew things up again’ - ‘Well well,
You were going to give it a bone, that’s your department’ -
‘That was never what art meant,
Pictures falling off the wall, everyone has a -’
‘Don’t throw it away. I might need it’ -
‘You’ll never write a line if you don’t heed it
When I tell you there’s enough life,
Enough strife
In this old sandstone block
To turn Anna Karenina and The Great Gatsby
Into one noble undefeated cry
Which is the single tenement sigh
Any time, anywhere.
Turn up the heat,
A new day’s always sweet.’
‘Coffee up.’
‘My god another cracked cup.’

Edwin Morgan

Today I made onion soup. Is there any cheaper, more comforting, more delicious food? Even leek and potato has nothing on the delicious frugality of onion soup.

I can't hear the phrase 'onion soup' without thinking of my granny, because she can't hear the phrase 'onion soup' without thinking of Madame. It's always a little unsettling, I imagine, for people who don't know her, when she begins to reminisce about 'my Madame'. One might think that she is looking back on her golden days as a call-girl. But no...as far as I'm aware. Madame is a character in my mind almost as much as in my granny's, now, because I'm sure that she's told me the stories so many times that they've been wholesale copied from her brain to mine.

When my granny was a young girl, she worked as a milliner's assistant. These were the days when no women would think to leave the house without a hat on. You simply weren't dressed if you didn't have your hat! And Madame, the most parisienne of parisiennes, was the lady in charge. Granny goes into raptures talking about her.

She wore not one, but two corsets. She wore nothing but black, ever, with the reddest of red lips painted onto her face. Her hands were always immaculately manicured, and round her neck was draped a fox-fur, with a head on each end, their beady eyes watching over all the girls as they worked. With one deft movement of her hands and a few carefully placed pins, she could shape a swatch of fabric in the most elegant hats imaginable. For me she has become a kind of 1940s Anna Wintour/Carine Roitfeld hybrid...

She worked the girls hard, but she cared about them. "Violetta! To the stock room! Violetta! Do this! Do that!" she would cry. Or rather, my granny cries out, grinning, as she remembers. And when the stock room had been tidied, and this and that had been done, it would be time for lunch. Out would come a flask of beautiful home-made onion soup, and everyone would get a little taste. Apparently there was nothing like it in the world.

I've started a new blog over at Wordpress - not to replace this one, whatever this one does, but to address more weighty topics in a rather different style. If you have time to spare and fancy a read, you can find it at differentfromadoormat.wordpress.com

Can we ever reconcile the two?

Whoever said money can't buy happiness didn't know where to shop - Gertrude Stein

I only know that people call me a feminist whenever I express sentiments that differentiate me from a doormat or a prostitute. - Rebecca West

It was another Little League last night. The night begun as it was to go on, with an Arnaud martini (gin + dry vermouth + crème de cassis) as an apéritif, followed by dinner and a cab over to the South Side, to Queen's Park and its lovely bowling and lawn tennis club, in the clubhouse of which the Little League is now held. The Queen's portrait looks over the bar, the club president was helping to wash the glasses, and Glasgow's indie types were out in force once more.

As well as the charming, genteel atmosphere and the perfectly trimmed lawns, one of the biggest advantages of the venue is the double-take-worthy drinks prices: they are super-low. As R said, "I ordered a pint and it was so cheap, I felt terrible. I couldn't give them just £1.80! So I had to order a whisky, too."

Such low prices meant a quite extraordinary amount of gin was consumed on my part, and goodness knows what on the part of everybody else.

After a slow start, things got increasingly enthusiastic.

The downside of the bowling clubhouse is that they won't let us keep dancing past midnight. So when the lights went up - what was the last song?* it's all a blur, by this point - we wanted to go on. Five of us piled into a cab and and after much giggling decided to head to a party, the other side of the park from where we're based. Down Kelvin Way, with its grand ornamental chandeliers, through the tunnel of leaves, under the spires of the University and the Museum, and onto a street of grand old Glasgow tenements.



I don't know whether it was just the alcohol in my bloodstream, but this flat was really something, even in the extraordinary context of Glasgow flats. It was built on a scale which seemed to have had giant tenants in mind. The close (the name for tenement stairwells), the ceilings, the rooms, everything was vast. I felt like I was floating in some great, white void.

And then I realised how tired I was, how drunk I was, and how much I would regret it the next day if I stayed much longer. So we set off back across the park to our neck of the woods. Only, you'd never walk through it at night. It's a great black void of sinister rumours, mostly exaggerated, but still.

So we went a long way round, up crumbling classical staircases and terraces of gabled sandstone houses, past lanes of old stable blocks, and down the other side of the hill back home.



I was wearing 4" heels that I can normally barely walk to the pub in, but I made it all the way home, sozzled, without falling over once.

This morning, upon reflection, I was very impressed with myself.

*I remember now...it was Another Girl, Another Planet by The Only Ones

<< Anything which can be deemed "religious" is no longer allowed to be a subject of discussion at the UN – and almost everything is deemed religious. Roy Brown of the International Humanist and Ethical Union has tried to raise topics like the stoning of women accused of adultery or child marriage. The Egyptian delegate stood up to announce discussion of shariah "will not happen" and "Islam will not be crucified in this council" – and Brown was ordered to be silent. Of course, the first victims of locking down free speech about Islam with the imprimatur of the UN are ordinary Muslims.

Here is a random smattering of events that have taken place in the past week in countries that demanded this change. In Nigeria, divorced women are routinely thrown out of their homes and left destitute, unable to see their children, so a large group of them wanted to stage a protest – but the Shariah police declared it was "un-Islamic" and the marchers would be beaten and whipped. In Saudi Arabia, the country's most senior government-approved cleric said it was perfectly acceptable for old men to marry 10-year-old girls, and those who disagree should be silenced. In Egypt, a 27-year-old Muslim blogger Abdel Rahman was seized, jailed and tortured for arguing for a reformed Islam that does not enforce shariah.

To the people who demand respect for Muslim culture, I ask: which Muslim culture? Those women's, those children's, this blogger's – or their oppressors'?

As the secular campaigner Austin Darcy puts it: "The ultimate aim of this effort is not to protect the feelings of Muslims, but to protect illiberal Islamic states from charges of human rights abuse, and to silence the voices of internal dissidents calling for more secular government and freedom."

Those of us who passionately support the UN should be the most outraged by this.

Underpinning these "reforms" is a notion seeping even into democratic societies – that atheism and doubt are akin to racism. Today, whenever a religious belief is criticised, its adherents immediately claim they are the victims of "prejudice" – and their outrage is increasingly being backed by laws.

All people deserve respect, but not all ideas do. I don't respect the idea that a man was born of a virgin, walked on water and rose from the dead. I don't respect the idea that we should follow a "Prophet" who at the age of 53 had sex with a nine-year old girl, and ordered the murder of whole villages of Jews because they wouldn't follow him.

I don't respect the idea that the West Bank was handed to Jews by God and the Palestinians should be bombed or bullied into surrendering it. I don't respect the idea that we may have lived before as goats, and could live again as woodlice. This is not because of "prejudice" or "ignorance", but because there is no evidence for these claims. They belong to the childhood of our species, and will in time look as preposterous as believing in Zeus or Thor or Baal.

When you demand "respect", you are demanding we lie to you. I have too much real respect for you as a human being to engage in that charade.

But why are religious sensitivities so much more likely to provoke demands for censorship than, say, political sensitivities? The answer lies in the nature of faith. If my views are challenged I can, in the end, check them against reality. If you deregulate markets, will they collapse? If you increase carbon dioxide emissions, does the climate become destabilised? If my views are wrong, I can correct them; if they are right, I am soothed.

But when the religious are challenged, there is no evidence for them to consult. By definition, if you have faith, you are choosing to believe in the absence of evidence. Nobody has "faith" that fire hurts, or Australia exists; they know it, based on proof. But it is psychologically painful to be confronted with the fact that your core beliefs are based on thin air, or on the empty shells of revelation or contorted parodies of reason. It's easier to demand the source of the pesky doubt be silenced. >>

I have to say, 5 of us did it. It was bloody brilliant, especially in such a small group, and I held Sean's hand the whole time. There's an especially brilliant twist, but in case you go, I won't spoil it for you...

(You also get to hear some particularly delightful versions of the local accent here.)

( And brunch with Allen )

...the term [realism] is useful in distinguishing between those forms which tend to efface their own textuality, their existence as discourse, and those which explicitly draw attention to it. Realism offers itself as transparent.
Catherine Belsey, Critical Practice

There is no natural way to dress, no neutral, opting-out way to decide what to wear.
Fashion is a discourse, composed of signs, just as language is, and it's one we all participate in, whether we embrace that fact and revel in it, or try to ignore it and claim not to care about fashion.

Those who claim not to care, to just put on any old thing - this is to make as much of a statement as the teenage goths that hang around the doors of the local shopping centre.

We understand and interpret people's appearances based on the semiotic system we are immersed in from our earliest days. A proclaimed 'disregard' for one's appearance is impossible. It is using the system while claiming to step outside of the system; it means electing to appear within it in a certain way, rather than to not appear in a it at all, as, unless you are invisible - transparent - you are observed, and you are playing a part in the game. You may claim that you are 'effacing' any regard for your appearance, but you are not.

And that's why, rather than being élitist, time-wasting, pointless or pretentious, people who recognise this, seize it with both hands and run riot with it have my full admiration. Carefully crafted, studied 'looks' are no more pretentious or dishonest - perhaps even less so - than people who say they just throw on any old thing.

To claim that what you're doing is neutral when it is in fact simply one of many possible stances within a system is not only naïve, but dangerous. There is no such thing as common sense, no such thing as opting out. Every stance is ideological; it might as well look good.