This does for today

Holding Back The Years by Simply Red

This song went to Number 1 in the USA on this day in 1985, apparently. I was living in my Grassmarket flat when the single came out in the UK; barely three months out of hospital after ten months rehab following my accident. Even at that stage I knew the world needed changing. Thirty-something years later there is still work needs doing.

I bought the CD, of course. I still have it somewhere. 

This'll do for today. It fits, not that one knows why.

Late-season sun

It feels slightly strange today to be sitting here in our suburban garden in south Canberra. I have retreated to some shade to escape the fierce intensity of the late season sun of this Indian summer. But although it's uncharacteristically hot we seem to be languishing in a spell that's neither one season nor another. I shelter from the heat. Somewhere in the vicinity of our drowsing cat a cricket chirps forlornly, it seems, for there is no response from any other lonely cricket. Perhaps ours is the last cricket to sing this year. Elsewhere the signs are telling us that summer is over, the fall awaits.

The garden's earth is hard and unforgiving. It has been weeks since the last heavy rains soaked the ground to feed the plants, many of which look tired and in need of a good long drink. Some, it's clear, have already shut down for the year. We will not see their brightly coloured flowers, vibrant green leaves or new growth for months now. The lower branches of the majestic pin oak at the end of the garden also display the early signs of season's change. Here and there brown leaves disrupt the coat of green. Every now and then, when the breeze picks up, a leaf or two tumbles to the ground.

We are in between the seasons (we have them in Canberra, unlike most of the rest of Australia). But whatever name we might given to this liminal space it's neither summer nor autumn, neither one time nor the other.

Do I pick up on (read too much into) this not-season, these days of this as well as that, neither one nor the other because it fits my own sense of displacement? Sundays always heighten my feelings of being from somewhere else, not fully belonging either to this new home of mine (after more than fourteen years it still feels new) nor, self-evidently, to the home I left behind; the place and its people.

Why Sundays particularly? 

It's easy enough to see. First act here is to check the football scores back there because for reasons I cannot begin to explain it matters to me how well or (as is more likely) how badly the team I have followed since I was ten or eleven performed. Yesterday, against the odds, we won. Next, one of the great rituals of a Scottish - British - Sunday; a long, luxurious read of the Sunday papers accompanied by tea, toast, a breakfast one can browse through just like the stories. I am infinitely more interested in the news, the sport, the cultural life and - especially - the politics of my homeland than the petty circus here with its unappealing set of clowns and comic singers. I wonder how my friends back there spent their Saturday nights and what stories they will tell to one another over Sunday lunch in a favourite pub. But if or when they meet I will be absent as I've been for many years now. Emigrated but far from integrated. Neither here nor there but somewhere in between. Not one thing or another.  A bit like this unseasonable weather.

You lost what ...?

I'm in the middle of writing a letter to my good friend Martin Currie in Edinburgh, whose birthday it is next Monday.  I hope the missive reaches him in time. I have a tendency to ramble.  

I don't propely know what prompted the recollection below but these things do happen when you're around Martin.  Except maybe he wasn't even there.  It's simply the sort of bizarre occurence that you stumble across in any city from time to time.  So I wrote this to my mate Martin who I love dearly and miss a great deal ...

South Clerk Street, Edinburgh

Here’s a thing about South Clerk Street while I’m on the subject.  Maybe you were with me when this happened because I can’t think of any other reason to go into a pub on South Clerk Street – it was across the road from where the ABC Cinema used to be or was it the Odeon?

There was time to kill because the movie wasn’t starting for a while.  Whoever it was, we went for a drink in the pub.  Shortly after we got settled at our tables a moderately anxious looking man entered the rather deserted pub and started hunting – not quite frantically – for something he had lost.  He checked every chair, table and down the back of the red PVC (I doubt it was leather) benches running along the walls.  He clearly had no success. Running out of options he approached our little group then spoke in a quiet, secretive voice; as if was looking to buy or sell Class A drugs.

"Sorry to bother you”, he said.  “You haven’t seen a snake anywhere, have you?”

One of us said “a snake?” feigning composure, as if it was the most natural question in the world.

Another asked, “What kind was it?”

I like to dwell on the underlying assumptions of that question; as if maybe we had indeed seen a snake wandering around the pub or enjoying half a pint and a cigarette quietly in a corner, disturbing no one and we wanted to be sure the guy searching for his lost snake was genuinely connected to and could correctly identify the particular snake with which we’d been discussing the weekend’s football not half an hour before.  Or maybe we thought there might have been more than one snake in the pub – different types - and we wanted to make sure we returned the correct species to its owner.

Anyway, he said it was a” wee python”.

I’m sure he said it was a python and that it must have slipped out the carrier bag he’d brought with him into the pub.  He held up the empty pollie bag to show us.  In his mind it may have been some kind of proof.  Then he said “it must be somewhere” before heading back out the door.  I think we looked nervously around the pub, sipped our drinks casually – maybe a wee bit too casually in case any one of us thought the others suspected we were more than mildly hesitant about sitting in a pub that might have pythons of any size slithering around the furniture – then we decided it was time to drink up and make our way – early or not - to the cinema.