I Never Was Very Good At Physics

EXT. INVERNESS AIRPORT - DAY

PATROCLUS, MR BC and the BLUE KITTEN are disembarking from Easyjet flight EZ393 from Bristol.

ME: Well, that went well. I'm glad Sylvia advised me to feed the Kitten on the ascent and descent, she didn't seem to get earache at all.

MR BC: No. And you coped with the breastfeeding in public thing very well.

ME: Only because I was sitting by the window, and you could hide me with the Guardian.

MR BC: Yes.

Shortly:

ME: Of course if we do the same on the way back, we'll have to sit on the other side of the aisle.

MR BC: Why's that?

ME: Because we'll be travelling the other way.

There is a moment's silence, during which I reflect on what I've just said, and the Nobel committee hastily revise the shortlist for this year's Prize for Stupidity.

Eventually:

MR BC: I think you'll find it doesn't actually matter what side of the plane we sit on.

ME: No.

A Long Post About The Picts, With Pictures

Those of you who have been following this blog from the bitter beginning may remember that I used to bang on quite a lot about the Picts (an enigmatic race of Celtic people who apparently populated the north and east of Scotland during the Dark Ages, and then mysteriously disappeared almost overnight).

More specifically, I used to go on about how I was going to resurrect the lost Pictish language by being the first to decipher the mysterious inscriptions carved on the monumental stones that the Picts erected in various places for purposes now unknown.

(You can read the full list of mysterious inscriptions in this post.)

In doing so, I would follow in the illustrious footsteps of Jean-François Champollion, who deciphered the Egyptian hieroglyphs, and Michael Ventris, who deciphered the Linear B inscriptions in his time off from being a Modernist architect. I would probably get my picture on the front cover of Archaeology Today and the National Geographic and I would never have to write brochures about human resources management software ever again.

But then along came a chap called Dr Richard Cox, who ruined the whole endeavour by suggesting - fairly convincingly - that the Pictish stones were not in fact set up by Picts but by the descendants of Viking settlers, and that the inscriptions weren't in some lost Pictish language but in Old Norse, and that what's more the Picts most likely never even existed, and neither did their language. Oh, and the stones weren't put up in the Dark Ages at all, but in the 13th century.

Spoilsport.

But all is not totally lost, because Dr Richard Cox's thesis has some bloody great holes in it. For a start, he only looks at the 'easy' inscriptions, and ignores the ones that don't make any sense whatsoever. He also takes some enormous liberties in some of his supposed 'decipherments', occasionally reading inscriptions from back to front in order to make them make more sense, and randomly filling in 'missing' letters in some of the very short inscriptions.

One of the inscribed stones that Dr Cox includes in his study is the Rodney Stone at Brodie, in the county of Moray. It so happened that I was in the vicinity of this stone at the weekend, and made a special trip to photograph it:


You probably can't see an inscription on this stone, because it's almost worn away. It *was* there, carved in Ogham script around the edge of the stone, but the harsh Scottish weather has had away with it. (I'm sure there used to be a little wooden roof to protect the stone from the worst of the elements, but that's now gone.)

All that's left of the inscription now is the word (or words) EDDARRNON. Dr Cox takes this word to be derived from Old Norse ettermun, meaning 'memory', or possibly etter, meaning 'in memory of'. He could be right, he could be wrong. Too bad we'll never know now what the rest of it said.

What you *can* still see on this stone is a couple of the mysterious symbols that appear over and over again on the Pictish stones. This one has a sort of dolphin figure (in the middle) and a double-disc and Z-rod (at the bottom). No one knows what these symbols mean, and no one has yet put forward any kind of convincing theory. A certain W. A. Cummins once tried to suggest that they symbolise names of Pictish kings and aristocrats, but that's really just speculation.

Here's the full lexicon of Pictish symbols for anyone who's interested:


(Image courtesy of Aberdeen City Council)

As far as I know, no one has ever made a proper study comparing the Ogham inscriptions on each stone with the symbols that appear on it. Maybe I'll make that my new project.

Scotland Revisited

I must have spent too much time in London, because I couldn't get over how green everything was in Scotland this weekend.

Everything seemed massively verdant and fecund and abundant, from the rockpools on Nairn beach:


...to the tiny village beneath the Iron Age hill fort, where I lived till I was 10 (in the house with the dormer windows, not the fort):



...to the garden of my Granny's house:



...and the driveway to the hotel:



If you've ever thought of the far north of Scotland as being all heathery and barren and that, I would encourage you to visit Nairnshire in early summer. It gives England's green and pleasant land a very good run for its money.

Infant Diary

One of the things that we brought back from France after my mum died was a collection of my primary school exercise books.

I spent a very happy hour last night reading my diary entries from when I was five and six years old. Even in my most formative years I was evidently completely devoid of creative imagination, preferring instead to make precise, economical and factual statements.

My favourite entry simply says 'I have two felt pens.'

Assiduous Quinquireme readers would be justified in thinking that not much has changed.

Albums I Forgot I Owned, Part 2

The The - Infected

As I've mentioned before, I grew up in the far North of Scotland. Throughout the 80s, my Mum, Dad, brother and I lived in an isolated farmhouse in the middle of a flat expanse of barley fields. For me as a teenager, it seemed to be as miserably far away from civilisation as it was possible to get*.

But even though the nearest Top Shop was 80 miles away in Aberdeen, we did in fact live at the centre of something: the global geo-political situation. Inasmuch as there ever was one, we lived right on the front line of the Cold War.

Our house sat at the end of the runway of the local RAF base, from which Nimrod aircraft would take off at 30-minute intervals to go scouting the North Sea for Soviet nuclear submarines**. Most days we would pass the main gate of the base, where there would always be a sign indicating the level of general military alert. Usually it was green, but occasionally it would escalate to orange or red.

I never paid much attention to this (after all, I had Nik Kershaw to think about), but looking back I like the fact that the expression of complex events on the global stage could be reduced to a choice of three colours on a rickety metal sign outside a military base in the middle of nowhere.

That's not to say I wasn't conscious of the Cold War. The nuclear threat terrified me most of the way through the 80s. We were well aware of the legendary four-minute warning, and I don't think there's been anything before or since that's frightened me so much. I was vaguely comforted by the fact that living next to an air force base meant there was a greater likelihood of our being killed outright in the event of a nuclear attack. I'd seen Threads, and the prospect of surviving into the nuclear winter was unimaginably terrible.

The The's "Infected" album is one of several from the 80s that deal with Cold War politics, and my brother and I used to listen to it a lot when it came out. I've owned it on and off ever since, but my current copy of it had been sitting around untouched in my CD collection for a few years. I got it out again recently because some of Barry Adamson's songs reminded me of it, and wow, it's still pretty great.

Matt Johnson was at his top lyrical best when singing about politics, and at his absolute lyrical worst when singing about relationships, so it's the political songs that stand out. "Heartland" is a fabulously bleak picture of Thatcher's Britain***, while my favourite, "Angels of Deception", has Johnson as a poor helpless individual crushed by the mighty forces of the US "occupation" of Britain (think Greenham Common), War and Religion.

The thing that strikes me about it now is that while everyone else (from Frankie Goes To Hollywood to, er, Sting) was singing about the Soviet Union, and Red Army chic**** was at an all-time high, Matt Johnson chose to write portentous agit-pop songs about the tensions between the US, Britain and the Middle East. Which is why, even though this album is 20 years old this year, it still sounds spookily relevant.

Also, they're currently selling it for a fiver in Fopp. Go to it, I say.

Sorry, that was all a bit long, wasn't it?


* Although the crushing loneliness never reduced me to eating flowers, cardboard or cleaning agents, unlike some.

** And lost climbers in the Cairngorms, but that doesn't really fit with the story.

*** Although let's not forget that for every miners' strike, Falklands Conflict, three million-plus unemployment, Chernobyl disaster and collapsed car industry, there was a member of Duran Duran. So the 80s weren't all bad.

**** As recently modelled by LC here...

Hats I Have Worn, Part 1

June 1988: The day I left school, my Dad drove me to John O'Groats. I don't know why; perhaps by taking me to the northernmost point of mainland Britain he intended for me to contemplate the finite nature of existence. Or maybe it was meant to mark the passing of a specific phase of my life. Or perhaps it was just a day out. In any case, he took a photo of me sitting at the end of the jetty, wearing his hat, which was some kind of jaunty, nautical peaked-cap affair.

I loathed the resulting photo, since it provided unwelcome and incontrovertible evidence of the fact that I look nothing like Kate Moss. My Granny, however, was determined that this photo should be on the cover of Vogue. Fortunately - for me and for Vogue - this never transpired.

To this day, my brother, my two cousins and I continue to disappoint Granny by completely failing to live up to her expectations. Over the years she's learned to get around this inconvenience by simply making stuff up about us. There's a whole coterie of elderly ladies in the North of Scotland who believe that I am a multi-millionaire property magnate with an army of servants, my brother is the art editor of Country Life, and the Divine Ms P is a strategic adviser to the Filipino government.

All evidence to the contrary (which, as you might imagine, is extensive) is explained away as wilful eccentricity on our part. Luckily wilful eccentricity is also an admirable quality in Granny's eyes, as it indicates a profound, Bohemian intellect. It's my Bohemian streak, for example, that prompts me to go around in jeans and scruffy cardigans when I could easily afford to wear a different Chanel suit every day.

My cousin M's glittering career is harder to fabricate, since he lives next door to Granny and quite evidently works as a team leader in a warehouse belonging to a dotcom company that sells outdoor equipment, but she does her best. Last I heard, he'd been invited to join the Board of Directors and was on track to become the youngest CEO in the FTSE 100.

More hat stories soon!

Scotland

Going back to the north of Scotland is always a bit weird. When I was little we lived in a small stone cottage at the foot of a hill near the sea. On top of the hill was an old Iron Age fort. Nearby, hidden in trees and at the end of a long drive with a lodge at the bottom of it, was the Big House. The people in the big house were landowners and farmers. My Mum and Dad rented the cottage from them. They had four children, let's call them Martha, Ian, Sarah and Angus. Ian was the same age as me. We used to play together a bit.

One day I came in from the garden, it must have been in the autumn, and I must have been six or seven years old. My Mum was in the kitchen, and when I came in she said to me Ian is dead. I think I laughed, because I didn't really know what that meant. It turned out that Ian had been helping his Dad with the harvest, and he had fallen into one of those big silos where they store grain. By the time they got him out, he had drowned. They tried to revive him, but he was dead. After that, my parents always told us not to play anywhere near the big piles of grain there always were in the farm buildings at harvest time. We didn't take any notice.

Near the cottage where we grew up, underneath the hill with the Iron Age fort on top of it, there were three ponds that are now a trout fishery. In the winter, when we weren't more than seven and nine years old, my brother and I used to go up to the frozen ponds by ourselves and walk out on the ice. We weren't worried, even when we heard it cracking around us. Once, Mum told us we weren't to walk on the ice, ever. We didn't take any notice.

This week when we went back for my Granny's 95th birthday, my Dad and his girlfriend and I stayed in the Big House, which is now a guesthouse. The same people still live there. The hills that I thought were so huge when I was little now seem small enough to step over. The Iron Age fort is still there. My Granny is still there. Nothing has changed at all, except the size of the hills.

A Microscopic Cog In His Catastrophic Plan

When I was very small I attended a tiny primary school in a tiny (yet quite famous, thanks to W. Shakespeare) village in the Scottish Highlands. For writing practice we had to write a daily diary entry, documenting our innocent childhood pursuits and ambitions.

I was clearly always an optimistic - if somewhat naive - child, because every diary entry of mine ended with the same sentence: "It will be fun." No matter whether the event in question was Sarah-Jane's birthday party, the Sunday School picnic or a trip to the dentist, I was always firmly convinced that it was going to be a great laugh.

Whether any of these juvenile shenanigans actually *were* fun or not, I have no way of telling. Once they'd happened, I never mentioned them again. Reading back, you're left with the impression that something unspeakably awful - possibly in a sinister Twilight Zone-type way - happened at every single party, picnic and dentistry session I ever went to.

Twenty-eight years may have passed, but some things don't change. I've been banging on since May about how much fun last night's Nick Cave gig was going to be. Do I follow it up with a glowing review about how fantastic it all was? No. Since I was stuck at the back and couldn't see anything at all, except for 5,000 middle-aged ex-goths and the boy Cave's shadow cavorting on the wall, I felt mightily let down. So I'll refer you instead to this review from the Independent, and just add "what he said."

Still, looking on the bright side, I'm off to see Husky Rescue on the 8th at Bush Hall and, as coincidence would have it, also on the 10th on the Isle of Wight. It will be fun.