September gone already. Time to seek out ‘The Great Pumpkin’ and snaffle all the orange creams from the Hallowe’en Quality Street. But first, a review of the various experiments. This last month, since stopping reading the news, and semi-stopping scrolling, and because those tormentors, AppleTV, are only drip-feeding one episode a week of ‘Slow Horses’, have read several books. None of them coursework. Alice Hoffman’s latest, ‘The Witches of...

Integration and Differentiation Differentiation and Tangent Slope dy/dx Straight line and slope m Area and Integral of f

Wisdom of my years: When in doubt. Cop out. Get your game-head on*. Resolved the MFA issue myself. Still got it, baby! (Scottish people can’t get away with using ‘baby’ in any sentence not about actual babies). Changed daily updates from the noticeboards to weekly. Realised was bedazzled by Oxford’s thrall; that am not doing this course to belong, nor to waste time on the unedifying ramblings of others, especially those with terminal insecurity...

First online ’tute’ for the Oxford course was last week. Coursework started the week before. Had bamboozled myself so much going down rabbit holes by day two, had to play hooky on day three, and go to the cinema to calm down. Saw ‘The Death of Robin Hood’, which is brilliant. Now wondering if the main reason for booking some online study was in order to re-experience that sublime state of being, absent in retirement; ‘playing hooky’. There are...

‘Entress’ is an old Scots word meaning ‘an entrance, or the right to enter a place’. It’s also a sublime new ballet from The Scottish Ballet Company. The lead performance in the advertising is ‘Embrace’; the hive mind with, amongst other things, the most impressive ‘ en pointe’ routines I’ve ever witnessed. Kudos to those ballerinas; they took several curtain calls, even in Aberdeen. The place where someone once told Ricki Fulton, about his...

Some time ago I was reading a Dutch literary website which ran a sort of competition. Readers were invited to report on books which they had started, but never finished. The winner with the most votes (if you can call it that) was Donna Tartt's The Little Friend . So I thought it would be interesting to ask the ABC folk to submit their entries, and see if there are any regular offenders. It would have to be a book which you started, and never...

The less I eat biscuits (10? weeks now), the more freely I express anger. How many years have I crunched down carbohydrates, seething, instead of expressing anger in the moment? Until recently, quite a lot. While this is not how I want to feel or behave, hope that the realisation of this livid symbiosis, signifies that it’s in the process of being healed. Can think of only once when I totally (and satisfyingly) lost it in the moment. 1997, went...

There’s a public consultation regarding proposed site of the HVDC cabling landfall near where I live. SSEN have made their way along the Moray and Banffshire coastline, discounted ten of the twelve sites proposed. I don’t believe they ever had any notion of landfall anywhere else but here. The wildlife, the farmland, the geology is the same all along this coastline. They have now come to us for their ‘last two options’ for ‘landfall’. I hate...

Colin Walsh’s Kala is hell of a debut novel, an international bestseller. It’s rarely I’m blindsided by whodunnit as I was here. But Kala is more than a murder-mystery set in the small fictional town of Kinlough . It’s a propping up and tearing down of what it is to by young and full of love and teenage sparring and bullshit in the endless summer of 2003, when everything is up for grabs and Kala Lanann couldn’t be more perfect, and she’s the...

My wall-bashing moment at the cinema, and eye-boggling drive home in the 8pm ever-darkening twilight, brought home the fact; old age doesn’t come alone. Realise, it probably only took fifteen seconds for my eyes to adjust to the dark, just seemed longer due to mortification factors. Nevertheless, it’s an issue and it’s here. Wouldn’t say I was totally night-blind, but even with the yellow-night-driving clip-on specs, am no longer happy driving...