What a start!

Captain's view from the stern

We had a full boat for the start of Water Story 2019, and a sunny day to sail the canal though we did plough into some ice at Maryhill; surprisingly thick! At one point I cut the revs and looked down into the boat and found the gathered crew scribbling away diligently - enough to make this captain's heart sing.

Sunlight and reflection - perfect backdrop to our day talking of memory

Our theme "Albums" led us through an exploration of how we remember, and what an extraordinary collection of writing came out of the day. Even more exciting was the catch up on our writers' recent successes: Angie got second place in the Scottish Poetry Slam finals this month; Peter's docudrama (Brexit: the uncivil war - with Cumberbatch) has proved a powerful talking point; Aileen, Pat and Helen have all had pieces published this year and Sandra is discovering her devastating prowess as a standup/speaker - roll on Burns night! 

Grey Heron looking for fish in our wake

There was a hearty embrace of Gore Vidal's quote "Every time a friend succeeds, I die a little." and I confess that the facilitation of this group becomes ever more a marvel than a job to do. Thank goodness I have a boat to skipper, a valid contribution, and an opportunity to shake my head into a cool Glasgow sky as it swims with gratitude for the sharing and the power of these words.

Come on gang, submissions for the blog please! This was my piece to start us off:

Four-cornered

Sometimes to honour our youthful spirit we ease that old album from the shelf and smile softly back at our innovative young selves, taking on the world as no one had before. We politely turn the four-cornered pages of four-cornered album full of four-cornered  photographs. Part way through we lovingly close it, thinking how well we know these pictures and how impossible it is for them to describe the roundness of our days, the full spinning sphere that our life has been.

Our lives whisk by in a pictorial wind of events and faces, anniversaries and achievements, emotions and pets. We gather loved ones and vocations like armfuls of fruit till we stagger out of our prime, then, one by one, put them down… some gently, some less so. Occasionally the fruits of our labour might pick us up, carry us along, but gradually we all calm down and take a gentle stroll towards a setting sun, no longer compelled to paint a picture, tell it, or capture it for future memory. Here it is, now, its light dimming in our seeing eyes, its warmth receding on our smiling cheeks, our gentle anticipation of quiet night.

Bev Schofield Jan19

Wakey wakey! 2019!

Highland Cinema ~ March 2017 post

by Sheila Buchanan

As the blog lengthens some of these gems are consigned to "Older posts"; I'm going to start cycling the content back to the beginning for another read. The pieces are well worth it - like this transportive account of cinema experience of old by Sheila...

Back in the day Glasgow was known as cinema city and indeed cinema going was a mass phenomenon.  By 1939 there were 114 cinemas in the city.  The Enchineer being the font of all knowledge and experience remembered that within a mile of where he stayed there were at least 10 cinemas.  He corroborated the tale that you took jam jars to the ticket booth and in exchange got entrance to a world apart and the silver screen.  His father would give him 2 shillings and that was enough to get him and his sister a bag of sweets and entrance to the cinema with still enough left over to buy his siblings back home a share of  penny caramels which would be divided up so no one missed out.

Listening to the Enchineer’s stories led me  to think about some rare archive footage of the Highlands and Islands Mobile cinema I had seen recently.  The footage which had only recently been catalogued showed the cinema van which would do its rounds to all the rural villages and islands.  The size of the community was no barrier to a visit.  The whole village would go out and walk in their “good clothes” to the local hall enfamille. Young and old and older were there washed and dressed and ready for their evening. The footage shows the farmer often finishing his work in the field with the ancient agricultural machinery which required vast amounts of manual work unlie the sophisticated machinery of today.  He would then join the family and villagers at the hall to see the latest offering at the “cinema”

The man in the van would arrive early at the venue and carry in all the crates of films in their large tin cans and the hefty large projector.  He rarely had a helper so he was

The man wi’ the van

Bringing in the tin can

The power to run the projector was often taken from a link up to the alternator and battery of the van.  To get the height required to show the films the projector height was fashioned from a number of boxes arranged with the wooden step ladder on top.  This makeshift edifice would have the projector sitting on the wooden platform of the step ladder and be of sufficient height to show the film on a wall or screen so that all could view.

The size of the communites varied from 100 in Kilchrenan to the mighty tally of 300 or more in the bigger villages.  The program consisted of small shorts, kids programs and the main feature.  Sometimes the older children would be allowed to see the main film which was a treat for them.  The adults would get wooden gym benches to sit on and the children the floor.  On Skye there was a bus that collected the audience to take them to Portree to the bigger cinema.  As there were no pubs in the rural areas it was a wheeze to get the bus to Portree where there were pubs and so the bus back was rowdy and fun…..memories made no mention of the film.  It was also a match making dating agency.

Film makers of all shades made films.  They would capture life with no CGI effects available to them but these will last longer in the archive memories and provide deep insight and vision for ourselves getting a glimpse into the past and celluloid tales.

I myself experienced this mobile cinema in Arran in the late 50’s in Brodick community hall.  The hall would be filled with folding chairs that appeared to feel soft at the start but ended up being fidgety and hard but this still did not spoil the excitement. I saw King Kong which was an early film version compared with the recent release and had none of the sophisticated effects of today but was none the less full of terror and suspense despite the crackly effects.  I can still remember the sounds of the film reel flapping as it came to the end of the first reel and needing changed to allow the film to continue.  The lights would come on and an enforced interval would take place while the next reel was fitted.  The sounds of the running machine and the light casting a beam of dancing dust particles in the darkness are strong memories for the senses.  There was no separate projection room then.

The images of these times have filtered into my brain and cast interest and inspired my own memories.  We live in an era of rapid change so rapid that we do not notice the changes.  It is a privilege to be allowed to look back at these films which have now been digitised and preserved for us.  For further enlightened reflection of these times there is open access to the National library of Scotland which has opened a brand new venue in the Kelvin hall. It has a vast and catalogued collection of images which are freely available to anyone to view in comfortable and stimulating surroundings….

Further resources about the cinemas in Glasgow can be found at

http://urbanglasgow.co.uk/archive/o_t__t_4455__start_100__index.html

This shows  pictures of where the cinemas were. You will be surprised at the size of the cinema buildings and reflect on what is there now.  As an example a cinema which existed close to my current home is now a car park and an Aldi store.!!

Perhaps

by Giovanna MacKenna

Perhaps the gaps in me
are strange unknowable
things, shimmering pools of
all my existences torn out by
this life’s relentless realities

Perhaps, where now I see those
dim dark spots of empty chilling
grey, I once was tailored whole into an
ocean of light and endless possibilities

Perhaps when I glance away from
the voids I fail to fill, but which
always follow, I’ll find an echo, an after
glow, a faint but shining gleam, a shadow
of my once roaring brilliance

Perhaps one dull and ordinary moment
I’ll find my hands filled with threads of
blazing scorching life - and I will slowly
stitch myself together once again

Boat search in Kelvingrove Gallery - 12th October 18

Ridiculous museum. You have singularly failed to play host to our writing day, our search for painted boats. 

We arrived to doors that were closed after putting pennies in parking meters set to the wrong time. Your maps enticed us to art-promised floors where we found bare wooden rails, obstructive screens and stern signs warning of slips, of threatening behaviours and others that simply demanded money donations.

At last I found a scattering of ill-lit paintings in the bowels of museum, a didactic storyboard of panels, after escaping screeching children among dinosaurs in glass-boxed artefacts from Kilmartin.

The Glasgow Boys, hurrah! Surely I’ll find a boat here, a boat in Scotland? But no. A punt on the Ouse and a shore in Devon, dammit where are the boats in Scotland? Even the Dutch Shipping Trade collection fails to display the magnificent harbour that we see in the advertising poster

Dali’s Christ on the cross is home. We stumble across it around a dark corner instead of at the end of a long corridor or gallery that would afford it an appropriate viewing. Christ himself look sadly down to the bottom of the painting where ho! There! On a dry shore leaning forlornly on its side, an empty little boat. “Thank you.” I breathe, feeling my despair acknowledged in this dearth of maritime magic.


I settle in front of JS Lowry’s seascape, disconsolate but grateful, taking refuge in this impossibly simple layering of green and white lattice that threatens to spill over its frame onto the gallery floor. No swell or curve, just still representation of light on water. I breathe in the sea air and give up my search.

Finally we meet in the tea room clutching pads and pens, ready to scribble our our gallery boat stories. Black and white clad young waiters, boys and girls, sail about silently inefficient and out of reach. We find a table at which we cannot sit, a menu from which we cannot order but finally secure coffee and take up our pens with a great shout of unassailable camaraderie - "Avast, Kelvingrove".

After being admonished for staying too long at our unwanted table without paying our, evidently top secret, bill, necks cricked from attempts to catch somebody's eye, we stumble laughing into the carpark deluge with poems in our nets. And nestling in Helen's bag?  The beginnings of this marvellous voyage that she says is a work in progress but is, to my eye, well ready to set sail:


Highways
by Helen Elsley

In the mud below the crannog, stirred centuries later,
coriander and peppercorns, seedspices
dropped through straw and flooring cracks
to sink through sepia peat-water,
settled into silt.
Now their traces, sifted out
tell tales of journeys.

From this empty loch, the Lords of the Isles
kept hold of their lands, from backwater Finlaggan,
where the grass grows uneven mounds 
over the rubble of their houses.
The marshy reedbeds that made their fortress
are traversed by duckboard paths, for access.
We wonder at the sound of stirred rushes, 
loud in the absence of traffic.

Octofad, Collebost and Scarista
declare their strangeness amongst the homespun
Tarbets and Mhors.
Craftsmen of Govan built a Viking ship 
of overlapping planks, for the Galleries.
Shipbuilding skills
washed up on our shores in such boats
sank down through the generations
to settle on Clydeside.

"This jet necklace
was left with a whetstone and a knife
In a cist burial in Monybachan, Argyll
with no bones to tell us if 
it belonged to a man or a woman."
But surely the question is – jet?
Carried from Whitby, most likely, to this glen,
made precious by the shine and rare distance.
Who fetched it so far?

When all the echoing empty places
with single track roads that take us across moors
to the middle of nowhere,
were forests that fuelled our fables,
and bordered in our homes on the landside,
remote islands and sealochs, were at the very hub,
butted up against the bustleof the sea highway.

Photo by Cap'n Bev taken from Easdale Island

Darkness/Light

Today's contribution is from Giovanna MacKenna (she sent me two wonderful pieces but I'm rationing you...) and the photograph is mine, from Pollok park. Love those silvering Holly trunks.

Darkness/Light

We chased the light as we travelled, not far
but to unknown spaces cloaked in peace
crisp fronds of frosted edges bright with
the silence only a lack of humans brings

We stopped and played and refuelled
ourselves on air thats sharpness cleared
a path through the clutter of our minds

Our fires brought light so wide and
searing we had to shield the flames
to see the blanket laid above, pierced
through with the embers of ancient worlds

Who am i

by John Young

I am the reflector, the director, the magnet, the connector the flame.

To be or not to be, the enigma... Me.

The burden carrier, the happy to take the blame guy, playing with the kids, doing everything the same. Life is mundane.

The open book, the talker, the listener, the keeper of secrets, Jack of all trades the master of none. Friend, confidant, inspiration, watcher.

The discipline the babble the small talker.

The positive the yin and yang.

The dad, captain, the fool the old guy who's not so cool