Spring blues

And yellows:

And Easter holiday fun on Jedburgh Cauld:

And finally:

Remember that 118 247 ad “Can I have a quote on a people-carrier.”?

I am probably going to regret this….

Today I ordered 10 metres of workwear twill in ‘cypress green’ to recover some chairs for the less-formal breakfast/dining room on the ground floor of the hotel. The plan is to lift the carpet, paint the floorboards, and offer it as a place for families to eat where there won’t be constant tutting from guests who object to children enjoying their food. Washable floor, washable tables….

Well, I hope it’ll work.

Anyway, this evening saw me having a fairly frank (yes, that’s a polite way of describing it) discussion with a much-loved male family- member (no, not the husband!) around the idea of gender and gender identity.

His argument was based on the biblical/religious masculine/feminine divide which basically precludes a woman from ever having any position of power or leadership over a man, because ‘it just doesn’t work.’  Men, by contrast, are apparently naturally embued with all the qualities of a good leader – particularly over women.

As you can imagine, this didn’t go down terribly well.  On most of the personality tests I’m so far down the masculine side that it’s really not funny.  I’ve been told that I ‘think like a boy’ (Maths teacher at secondary school), that I’m ‘a martinet, cold, scary…’ (assorted hangers-on), that I really ought to grow my hair and so on and so on.  Fortunately for me, being a thinking-type woman is a lot less problematic than being a feeling-type man in our society.

Generally, my experience can be summed up by this blog posting. She puts it a lot more clearly than I ever could – and infinitely more clearly than I can do at this time of night!

Grumpy sod

That we me yesterday, so I was unceremoniously kicked out and told to have a day off.

I went to Melrose, and found some lovely quilting cottons in a more-than-half-price sale at The Fabric Shop as well as lemon cake and tea at Papa Jacks.  I had lunch at a place which will remain nameless: perfectly nice, but definitely in a hurry to get the table back….  Back home to prewash the cottons, and dream about having time to sew.

My apologies for the radio silence over the past fortnight or so – very little to show for my time except lots of clean laundry, happy customers, and more clean laundry….

On a grey day

It’s lovely to find a post full of spring.

Unexpected consequences

The course I’m studying is supposed to enable me to return to the world of paid employment in Science.  What it’s actually doing is making me think very hard about the position of women in society, and the whole feminist idea.  Like many my age, I suspect, I had thought that feminism had fought and won all the major battles in the 60’s.

I’ve bumped into a blog posting which is making me think a lot – and I would appreciate input from anyone who knows more about it.

Jed in the spring

Well, almost.  I went for a walk along the riverside on Sunday afternoon in between the rain showers and took my camera with me for company.

The trees are still bare on the skyline above the Headrig:

but the crocus carpet around a boarded up house on the Bongate is stunning!

On my way down the river I spotted a trio of Goosanders (Mergus merganser) which I’ve seen off-and-on this winter.  They are diving ducks and eat fish, so that’s a good sign in terms of the health of the river.

And on the way back I got a lovely view of sunshine on the cauld.

I also spotted some old winding gear on the bank above the cauld – I’ll need to do some asking around to find out what used to be there.

Today the Jed is bank full, brown, and there isn’t a bird in sight. Sensible creatures. The duck I saw walking up the cauld yesterday would have been half-way down the river if it had tried that trick today! The river must have risen a good 30 cm overnight – unsurprising as it’s one of Scotland’s fastest-rising rivers.

Committed

According to the UK govt., that’s what they are about basic science and research:

The Government’s long term vision, set out in the Ten Year Science & Innovation Investment Framework, is to make Britain one of the best places in the world for science, research and innovation – the successful exploitation of new ideas incorporating new technologies, design and best practice. Our challenges to achieve that vision include sustaining and developing the UK’s world-class research base, strengthening its links with business and other users, enabling knowledge transfer, and promoting innovation in products, services and processes.

http://www.dti.gov.uk/science/

According to me, that’s what should be done to the numpty at the DTI who’s decided to nick back £68 million from our research councils to cover the fact that they tried to shore up a failing car company for far too long (privately owned, might I add) and completely miscalculated the associated costs of our nuclear energy program (also private, I believe!).

A little light reading

Courtesy of Carol, a link to the Bulwer-Lytton Fiction Contest winners for 2006 which looks for the opening sentence for the worst ever imaginary novel.

You can see Carol’s favourite in her post here.

Barefaced

Cheek!

It seems that even the lofty heights of classical music are subject to plagiarism and fraud.

If you own any piano music recordings by Joyce Hatto which were made from 1989 onwards, it seems they aren’t by her at all.

Denis Dutton writes in the International Herald Tribune:

Responding to a tip from a reader, a critic with the British Gramophone magazine, Jeremy Distler, slid Joyce Hatto’s CD of Liszt’s Transcendental Etudes into his computer. His iTunes library, linked to a catalogue of about four million CDs, immediately identified it as a recording by the Hungarian virtuoso Laszlo Simon.

Since then, further analysis by both professional sound engineers and piano recording enthusiasts across the globe has pushed toward the same conclusion: the entire Joyce Hatto oeuvre recorded from 1989 on appears to be stolen from the CDs of other pianists. The experts have yet to discover a single original CD in the set. It is a scandal unparalleled in the annals of classical music.

The music was as good as the critics said, but none of it was played by Joyce. She and her recording-engineer husband, William Barrington-Coupe, systematically stole the output of other pianists and orchestras and passed it off as hers, releasing it on their tiny independent label “Concert Artist”.

Gramophone has covered the same story in brief, with a promise of more detailed coverage in the April issue and a link to a website where the soundwaves of a few recordings have been compared to the Hatto versions.

As the International Herald Tribune article puts it:

Hatto usually targeted artists who were not household names, though on the basis of the reviews she received, they richly deserve to be.

I don’t think we own any of her recordings, but I look forward to hearing more about the artists who have been plagiarised and to buying more of their output.

Fun and games

I’m willing to be that most of you thought that the Aran Islands were famous only for a particular type of intricately-cabled sweater.

 Think again!

Both Inis More and Inis Oirr claim to be the real Craggy Island, home of the channel 4 series Father Ted.  All other avenues having been exhausted, the argument is to be settled by a five-a-side football match as part of the inaugural Father Ted Festival.

Wish I could go!