RosieBell

I'm having a quiet one

I asked a young personable colleague, the only other person in the office today, what he was doing for New Year, or Hogmanay as we call it up here, also known as a further tourist opportunity in the darkest days of a Scottish winter.

"We're having a quiet one," he said and went on to echo my thoughts about the general awfulness of New Year – the forced jollity and celebration, the crowds in the streets getting pissed, pubs charging you to enter, the general nastiness of it.

I really enjoy Christmas.  It has traditions, it has good food, it has great music, it has lights and colour and behind it a pagan idea of new birth in the bleakest of seasons.  But is there one decent song for New Year?  It's a date on the calendar, that's all.  The Chinese make more of a thing of it, and seem to celebrate it with some style, but here it's just another excuse for a piss-up. And in Britain, we need no such excuses.

(Re Christmas music - Here's  a picture I took with my phone of what ice can do to a fence on a hilltop in the Pentlands last Sunday.  On our way down we started singing Good King Wenceslas. A teenaged girl walking uphill with her dad joined in:- "Gathering Winter Fu-u-el." )

Christmas was not a public holiday in Scotland until 1958. The overtones of Catholicism made it uncomfortable for Presbyterians and so they celebrated New Year instead, with drinking and dancing.  And in some country parts it is still celebrated with first footing and as a celebration in a community that works.  A friend of mine who lived in a little Highland town said he would spend Hogmanay on the move, whisky bottle in hand, walking past his own flat but never entering it for four days together. In each house they visited they were revived with soup.

Nowadays the Scots celebrate Christmas like everyone else, but still have those two days off at New Year.  When younger I remember the pubs being too crowded for a drink and then shutting early and we'd traipse round the streets waiting for something, anything to happen.  But in Tron Square, where we gathered, the bells didn't even ring at midnight. So we hung around, then some ripple in the crowd – perhaps someone had a radio – told us it was new year, and random people kissed you – and by the look of them, and the smell of them, that was the one close bodily contact they were going to get all year.

So the Edinburgh Council, always stalking the tourist pound. thought to organise actual celebrations since people arrived in Edinburgh for Hogmanay anyway, no matter that nothing happened. Now they have torch-light processions and concerts i.e. outdoor activities at a time of the year when it rains, snows, blows or the temperature drops below zero.  If someone told me – go out in winter with minimum public transport to be snogged by drunken strangers I'd say no thanks.  It makes no difference that it's 31 December.

Once a colleague passed me on some tickets that she couldn't use for the concert in Princes Street Gardens.  They had cost her £35 each and I asked a friend to come.  We were sitting in the pub while the wind howled and screamed and were getting ready, with utmost reluctance to go out in it, so as not to waste the £35.  And the relief when we were told the concert was cancelled, so we could honourably slump back in our chairs and my colleague could get a refund.  We had no desire to go to an outdoor concert in winter – no sane person would. Still, there it is, forced celebration.

So I wish everyone a prosperous New Year with drinks and celebration, if that's your style.  As for me, I'm having a quiet one.

Black ice Not nice Did harm Broke arm

Black ice
Not nice
Did harm
Broke arm

Which happened to me Saturday 11 January, a bright cold day.  I went out on my cycle intending to take the cycle path to Inverleith Row, felt that the air  was cold, but saw that the puddles in my street were liquid, turned down a side street, turned down another and then fell sideways onto my right shoulder.  The surface was a thin coat of ice.  I got up and tried to push the cycle to the pavement.  The street was frighteningly slippery.  Then a foreign bloke spoke to me, and helped to the pavement.  After a few yards he wandered off again but the pavement had dry strips and I pushed the cycle home.

Then I lay down to get over the shock, took a couple of pain killers and told myself my arm was only badly bruised.  But it did hurt rather a lot and remembering a broken wrist a few years ago, thought I'd better head to A&E.  It was Saturday morning so shouldn't be filled with violent drunks.

So I got a taxi to the Royal Infirmary and sat among the crowd at A&E.  A couple had white-haired and bloody heads but most were holding limbs out at stiff angles and one fellow came in hopping.  The young bloke next to me had a swollen hand.  He too had come off his cycle, down a hill he said, and people had helped him into an ambulance.  Another guy was with his wife, and someone had skidded into their car, writing it off.  There had been four accidents on that stretch,  the polis had told him, he said.  It hadn't been gritted.

It's been a mild winter after several very cold snowy ones and evidently the Council had got out of the habit of gritting.

I was seen after forty minutes, and told to wait until I could have an X-Ray - another forty minutes or so. I returned to the A&E waiting room, and most people there seemed to have physical injuries rather than sickness.  I was getting hungry but the vending machine held nothing but chocolate bars of the Snickers kind and crisps.  I thought they could have risen to an oat bar at least.  It was also cold, also filling up fast.  After about two hours the nurse practitioner announced that people would not be seen for hours and some should go to the Western General or wait to see their doctor.  There was groaning and heckling.  

I was not in great pain and thought perhaps I should leave.  I was ringing for a taxi when my name was called and I was sent to X-ray.

A guy in football gear, patched with mud, was sitting in a wheelchair.  He was telling another fellow about the football match he (from Niddrie) had had with another team (from Craigmillar).  It was organised by the church and had had to be abandoned.  The other fellow asked if there had been any history between the two. "Nae feuds, nae vendettas," he said.  "But they had nae discipline."

I was X-rayed, and then after another, shorter wait, was shown the break in my humerus, at the top, along the ball that goes into the shoulder socket.  I groaned at this, as it means six weeks before it's mended.  The nurse gave me a nylon mobius strip velcroed at the ends  and sent me off home.

The mobius strip is simple and very effective - better than a more elaborate sling which has a cradle for your arm, a loop for your thumb and straps to hold it to your body.  It keeps the arm braced and you quite naturally hold it to your trunk.  When I take it off for washing or dressing I don't feel safe until it's holding my arm in again, like an animal in its lair.

I went to the out-patients last week, and was told it was healing straight, and there's certainly more play in it.  I can say that a simple break in a humerus is better than a complex break in a wrist.  It's not so disabling - I can still use a knife, for instance.  There's more play in my arm as it heals.  I'll know it's right when I can reach to my mid-back to unhook my bra - instead of using one hand, like a practised seducer.

However it is uncomfortable. It's not painful, but it throws the rest of your body out of kilter, so walking brings on back ache.  Sleeping was at first difficult as I'd have to stay in one position so would wake seized up and rusty.

Also it's hard to write, not just in the obvious sense that after a while hitting keys starts to hurt, but because the whole attitude of writing is somehow bound to my thinking.  I have an idea for a blog post, I hold my hands at their usual angle, and then I'm pulled back like a tethered dog.  And the thought, whatever it's worth, seems to stop as well.  It's not like having an idea, a line, and being deprived of a means to record it eg not having a pen and paper.  It's more like suddenly losing vocabulary or the rudiments of grammar.  

I have heard of how some writers of discursive prose- Henry James, Mark Twain - turned to dictation.  They must have had to learn a totally new skill.  Mark Twain got fiercely frustrated and so went back scribbling with his rheumatic right arm. 

The Spews and the Scum

 

Pisses all over the culture, and then complains of the stench.

Nicked from Impossible Songs.

I Fisk You a Merry Christmas

This is fisking for dummies, but it’s Christmas after all:-

Let's just hope God is merciful, Chris
By George Galloway

WELL, he kens noo. I hope that the deceased, unbelieving English man of letters Christopher Hitchens has discovered that God is not only great but merciful too.

[Now, when Christians say that kind of thing in pious tones, you know they are lying.   May all my enemies go to hell, Noel, Noel, Noel, Noel]

I had taken a self-denying ordinance over his demise at the weekend from osophageal cancer on the grounds that one should not speak ill of the recently dead and there would be nothing good to say about him considering the circumstances.

Two things forced me to shorten my purdah. The first was the way in which almost every one of the eulogies and profiles, in which I had declined to be represented on grounds of taste, nonetheless managed to attack me in the process of praising him.

[Oooh George – I've read loads of these, and y'know, you're not mentioned THAT much.  The American ones don't mention you at all.  But of course if your google alert says "George Galloway" – and I'm sure it does, not out of mere vanity though yours should never be underestimated, but for litigation opportunities - that's how it must seem to you.]

The second was the sight of his friend Tony Blair, his voice catching with emotion in the "death of Diana way", telling us what a great man he was.

This canonisation of the departed by some of the worst hypocrites operating in the English language must be halted before it slithers any further.

[Weel, I'd be very careful of the "h" word if I were you.]

Hitchens was the only-known case of a butterfly changing back into a slug.

He wrote like an angel but placed himself in the service of the devils.

He was a drink-soaked former Trotskyite popinjay, the Englishman in New York who discovered there were large bundles of right-wing dollars available for apostates like him. If they were prepared to betray their friends, their principles and sell the soul he didn't believe he had in the first place.

[And I'm sure your work for Iran's Press TV is done for a small pittance, barely enough to keep you in cigars.  Also the "popinjay" – which one is the dapper little chap and which one the untidy handsome guy out of you two?  And though it's the season for recycling, couldn't you have at least come up with some new insults?]

Easy. As Groucho Marx once put it: "These are my principles. If you don't like them, I have others."

Thus, the man who once praised Saddam Hussein in adoration and opposed the first Gulf War when the Iraqi tyrant was still occupying Kuwait, was transformed into the main literary cheerleader for the second war.

[Ah, well you would know about "adoration" of Saddam Hussein, not to mention his rapist offspring.]

And he was still blowing the weapons of mass destruction trumpet long after its tinny notes were discredited.

The man who once championed the Palestinian cause became a little echo for Benjamin Netanyahu, denouncing the 10 Turkish dead on the ship Mavi Marmara as "Hamas-sympathisers" who got what they asked for.

[Do you mean that they DIDN'T sympathise with Hamas?  I'm shocked.  And – get your little head around this – it's possible to champion the Palestinian cause and not become a pimp for what Hitchens would call "gaunt fascists with an Islamic face".]

Sure his ditties were witty, his parsing precise and, if you like your men drunk, slurred and slobbering, he could be charming no doubt.

[You really know you were outclassed on all fronts – "ditties were witty", "parsing precise" – is that your way of showing you can do that writing thing as well?]

But when you're slobbering in support of the re-election of George W Bush for his catastrophic second term, or backing Bush's handling of the clean-up operation after Hurricane Katrina (where he was the only man in the country other than Bush who thought the Federal Emergency Agency was doing a "heck of a job") and you have written the script for the most disastrous massacre since Vietnam, I'm afraid literary pretence must be put in its proper place. Down the lavatory.

Hitchens and I shared the ring in an epic "Grapple in the Apple" back in 2005 in Manhattan.

Thousands of people queued around the block for ringside seats paying top dollar for the privilege. You can watch it on YouTube or wait for the DVD, with commentary and my updates, which I will produce shortly.

[My dear, plug your work in the visual media as you will, your most popular appearance on YouTube will continue to be pretending to be a cat in a red leotard.]

Ultimately, the real reason for the ­tear-stained eulogies from the British media commentariat for the late Mr Hitchens is that, by and large, the writers and editors are weeping for themselves.

They share his guilt over the Iraq War and deep inside they know it.

But all the salty tears in the world will not out that damned spot. The next reason is class.

Hitchens was a toff, a Lord. And the English-speaking world, it seems, still likes to love a Lord.

[Admiration undeservedly won, nothing to do with talent of course.  And congratulations for about the best example of resentful envy and self-promotion incompetently disguising itself as principled opposition I've seen in a long while.]

The Great God Thaw

A silence here because on Boxing Day the pipes in the upstairs flat burst, and as well as trashing my bedroom, bathroom and hallway, destroyed my modem.   So I have no internet access, and have been busy waiting for insurance companies to answer my phone calls (it took me five days to speak to someone) and sorting out my goods.    Today a bloke came round and waved a wetness detecting meter over my wall.

I only keep a few books in my bedroom, so there were not many damaged, but the first one I saw on the window sill was Primo Levi’s The Drowned and the Saved.