spin this limpid web

So much has changed!
It's a long time since I posted anything. I wonder why?
Here I am now, sitting by my own window looking out over the sunny hills, mid afternoon - just after three - and in a kind of lacuna, a gap in my life.
A big darkwood kitchen table.

Out of one role, looking for another. And beginning to create a new life, new work, new ways.
Will I be ok? Will it work out?

Am I brave enough to take the leap, and am I lucky enough to get the breaks!

Treparriscos!

Just spent a week birding in Luguero, near Leon and Asturias in northern Spain. What a fine way to mark the end of summer and to look forward to the onset of autumn! Didn't see wallcreeper, although we were surrounded by high, sunny cliffs and even spent a morning out looking for them in the likeliest of likely spots. Maybe just the wrong week...

Did see great bustards and black storks, Egyptian vultures and short-toed eagles, purple herons and rock buntings. Every one of the thousand or so pied flycatchers we saw were brown - all females and juveniles? All? Apparently not, since the black and white males moult into this plumage in autumn! I never had any inkling of this before - of course in Britain we only have pied flys between May and August when they head south for the winter. Offhand I can't think of another bird that does this.

Feels like a bit of a Gilbert White moment. We assumed we were looking at females and juvies and that all the males had gone early en masse. Just like the swallows all descend into the mud at the bottom of the ponds and lie torpid underwater for the winter!!

And thousands of mistle thrushes all week, pouring in here and there, at all altitudes and in every habitat. And the jays - pouncing like shrikes on the lizards among the rocks on the foothills.

The sight of a hobby over our chalets, flying high, then stooping and swerving among our house and crag martins before disappearing into the orange sunset. A sparrowhawk which tried to harrass them the evening before had been tempted too close and too fast towards the chalet windows where she hit the glass and killed herself. She was still warm when we returned to find her on the balcony, but the martins were unperturbed by the sight of their fatal bellman stretched still on the ground.

Celtic v Rangers

Celtic reminding Rangers that they have an appointment with the Grim Reaper.

Celtic won 3-0 on Sunday, and the SPL flag is already home at Paradise, but they also got the black flags out for Rangers who may slide into liquidation. No mercy was shown the defeated enemy. A black coffin was passed around the green end, in scenes reminiscent of the Ayatollah Khomeini's undignified end, and the tombstones were out too, some marked with the number of the beast.

Celtic fans demonstrate their lack of faith in the latest bids to lift their Ibrox counterparts out of administration.

The Four Horsemen of the Apocalypse were unfurled - Neil Lennon, Death, Craig Whyte -"The Celtic Legend" - and Hector the Taxman. For the Rangers fans brave enough to attend, to take it in the face, and even to cheer their defiant support for their troubled club, it must have felt like hell or the end of the world. In truth, they have been betrayed by their owners who have mismanaged their club and brought it to administration and even to the verge of extinction.

Solidarity, Glesca style!

True Celtic fans will of course enjoy the football, the victory, and the celebrations. There will certainly be a satisfying shudder of schadenfreude as their racial, tribal, cultural and political opponents slide further down the wall which recently wrecked them. But there is no denying the inter-dependence of this Old Firm. They are not two sides of the same coin, nor peas in a pod, but they need each other nevertheless. The huge gates and the manic fervour when they play each other is one thing, but the fact they provide the lifeblood of the game in Scotland is undeniable.

For the life of me I see no sense or justice in punishing the football club for the misdemeanours of the businessmen who bought and sold the company. Two individuals are primarily the cause of this disaster, and neither is facing justice. The punishments are meted out to the players, the manager, the fans and the employees of the team.

It is amazing to me that the Crown has come for Rangers, that the royal Blues are having the screws turned on them by Her Majesty's Revenue and Customs, and that the Scottish football authorities are choosing to hammer this great British Institution, one of the last bastions of Protestant supremacy in these isles.

Surely there can be no more paranoia from the Irish Catholic camp across the city; surely they can no longer justify their well-shored up inferiority complex, their embattled victimhood, when they see the officers of the Crown and the high heid yins of Scottish freemasonry lining up to take a kick at the half-dead Ibrox club. Truly all former notions have turned to dust, or God, in his wisdom, is indeed a Teague.

Unless of course, it's our turn next. In the meantime...

Are trends eclectic?

Ultravox! led by the wily John Foxx inspired the young fan Gary Numan to experiment with synths, and Human League and Orchestral Manoeuvres in the Dark were already playing with machines up north, but Gazza eclipsed them all with Are "Friends" Electric? as Tubeway Army in 1979.

John Foxx went solo, smelling the direction of the wind, and released "Underpass" (a bit like "tubeway"?) and the album Metamatic (a bit like "Metal" on The Pleasure Principle album?), but the visual element and the dark undertow were missing, and these were metallic pop where Numan was disturbing and quasi-industrial, even then.

"No-one Driving" and "Burning Car" followed Numan's "Cars" but went off the road and into the abyss.

Even so, I bought these discs all one after the other and was only parted from them when our student flat in Holyrood Crescent in Glasgow got ransacked.

Even though the doors were kicked off their hinges to the street, and the stars could be seen through the ceiling and the roof, I slept there one night alone with only This Wreckage turning on the turntable all night for company.

What could these two possibly be talking about?

Gazza's like : "Nah, Freddie, I've already got Simple Minds doing handclaps on TELEKON".
Freddie's like : "Come on Gaz, give us a break!"

unsynthesized fragments, mainly

Simple Minds, John Webb and James Freud provided handclaps on Gary Numan's TELEKON album of 1980.

How strange.

Jim Kerr of the Minds supported Celtic, John Webb was Gary's adopted brother, and James Freud was in the Models and hanged himself.

In the CARS video, you can see Gary doing his own handclaps. So what gives?

Someone commenting on the CARS video on youtube thinks Numan and his cohorts in black look like the Illuminati.

These all appear to be broken connections.

But looking at Kristen Harris' beautiful works of Numanoid art, it doesn't seem to matter that some fragments may never be synthesized.

the hoar-frost of the soul

I'm beginning to feel that chill - the sense of waste, that I'm not living to my potential.

It returns to me every so often, at a space of some years, and it always presages a major change.

I've been enjoying my time out, so much that it has stretched to four years now. I think it's time to start my own practice as a trainer, coach, and counsellor.

I've been allowed to develop these parts of myself recently as a manager, but the opportunity to put them to good use is limited, and so I have to create my own opportunities. I know I will want to work in collaboration with colleagues and friends from London who were always in the same field as me.

The first time I recall feeling this mildly disturbing hoar-frost of the soul was in London when I ended up on a five-year psychotherapy training course which contributed to the end of my marriage. It was a sense that my talents and gifts were rotting in a cupboard in an empty house like so much fruit that took me into these uncharted waters.

In the end, I left with nothing. But the experiences changed me, and I took psychosynthesis into my work with children, families, teachers and social workers. At its best, it was healing work, but in the everyday richness  and busyness of life at the coalface it often felt like firefighting. Hopefully a little was given and gained everyday.

Now I want to bring together some of my angels and demons and have a conference about where I go from here! I would like to be a trainer, coach, and counsellor again, but I wonder if I have the energy and the will.

And what are my options?

Back to my diary, where I reflect in solitude...

end before you begin

Finish each day and be done with it.
You have done what you could.
Some blunders and absurdities no doubt crept in; forget them as soon as you can.
Tomorrow is a new day;
begin it well and serenely and with too high a spirit to be encumbered with your old nonsense.

Ralph Waldo Emerson.

This reminds me never to let the sun go down on my anger - never end the day with an argument unresolved. Like leaving your offering at the altar in order to settle your dispute with your brother first. Like saying an "act of contrition" before taking holy communion!

I wouldn't always forget the absurdities and blunders of the day - but I would hope to forgive myself before the end of the day - or to ask forgiveness.

How do you start the day with too high a spirit as Emerson advises? I've started taking a moment or two to pause on the front door step before setting off down the path to the car. It's moment to see what's around your house, the jackdaws breaking into the eaves where the starlings used to nest, the sparrows fending off a grey squirrel under the roof, or the sparrowhawk gliding over the hedges.

I will always turn along the Bannoch Road and pause here and there along its length, windows down; you can sometimes see the isle of Arran, its snowy peaks through the clouds, and old Kilwinning Abbey tower and ruins. You can hear yellowhammers and whitethroats at the bend where the bridge is. That's where I saw the only jay I've ever seen in the county, last winter. Then you can hit the main roads and drive through north Ayrshire to work, wherever that might be.

That's always a good start!