The Tyre and The Windblown Trees of Aberlady Bay

Everything was in alignment. The Gods had spoken. I had no choice in the matter: it was Fate.

On Tuesday, I looked at my calendar and saw that there was to be be a full moon on Thursday. I checked the weather and it was predicted to be completely clearing up on Wednesday evening. I checked the sunset time: 8.05pm. The moonrise: 7.05pm. Perfect! I must go to my favourite spot on the coast for photographs after work. I would not have to worry about getting back from the sea to the road - an hour's walk - before the last light of dusk faded, because I would have the moon to guide me. I walked the route in late twilight with no moon a few months ago, and I wouldn't knowingly repeat the experience. It's a wide open place with a disorientating topography, no dramatic features, several identical-looking paths leading off in different directions, and many bogs. But with the moonlight, I'd have no trouble. I couldn't miss the chance so I finished work early yesterday and found my way by bus to Aberlady Bay nature reserve, a windswept estuary and stretch of coast in East Lothian, with golden beaches, sand dunes, salt marshes, grassy plains, mud flats and the wrecks of a couple of midget submarines.




I got there at about 6.45pm, and already I had the feeling that I didn't have much time. The light was glorious, so I could hardly just rush past everything on my way to the rocks at Gullane Point. Because I got my camera out long before reaching the sea, I didn't in fact reach it until a few minutes before sunset. Right from the start I had felt rushed and desperate, and I hadn't been taking time over shots. This annoyed me, because I knew that I should just make a firm decision to do one thing or the other, instead of trying to cover everything, running and stumbling about in what must have looked a comic fashion (fortunately there was nobody about, except a group of deer, who didn't notice me until I was almost upon them.) If I have the camera out, I should take my time, I told myself. And it was no way to be acting on such a lovely evening.

So when I got to the beach I decided just to stay there and make the most of it, rather than walking the additional half-mile to get to the rocky points and headlands, even though they had been my original destination. Well, the one thing I hadn't checked was the tide. It was out. In many places a long, long way out.




But then I came across the resident tyre of Aberlady beach and I was happy for a good while.

High dunes separate the beach from the plains and marshes, so I couldn't see the moon that was shining over them. I was looking forward to stepping up to the crest of the path over the dunes and looking out over the spectacular moonlit landscape.

And so it turned out to be. The only visible electric lights were far away across the bay, and the sky was still rose and russet and gold. The crossing vapour trails that had been in the north an hour before lay glowing across the moon, now shapeless and thin like teased out cotton wool.

At this point I hadn't expected to be in a hurry, but I really didn't have much time. This was on account of public transport timetables, not of the darkness. The full moon shone blindingly and lit my way just fine. It was an unforgettable experience, walking across open country on a spring evening with only moonlight and starlight to guide me. Sometimes I could hear the muted, odd night-calls of odd night-birds, and the general quiet was pierced every so often by the shriek of an owl. As the residual sunlight faded, the stark beauty and drama of the moonlit landscape became much clearer, every tree and blade of grass delineated sharply, everything casting long, unfamiliar shadows.

I don't remember ever having been out in the country under a full moon on a clear night. I recommend it.




You might think that in these conditions I'd want to take a few photos. Well I only took one, and it wasn't good. I packed everything away and decided not to try again. And then I said to myself: "How can I walk through all of this majesty without at least trying?" The answer was "I just want to get back home." And then: "Is that what life is all about? 'Getting back home?'" And still I marched onwards, and eventually came to a much less self-reproachful view of the matter. Apart from anything else, although the moon illuminated my way, it was still pretty dark. It's almost impossible to execute the kind of shots I wanted when neither your eyes nor your auto-focus can find anything to focus on, and you didn't bring a torch.




I thought about attempting a drawing of one particular scene, one of many that I passed by. A relatively tall tree, windblown and leaning like all of the other trees around Aberlady Bay; a silhouette like a monstrous hand reaching up to clasp the moon.

How I Began Hillwalking

My brother and I have not been up many mountains in the past couple of years, so it feels like a good time to take stock of this aspect of my life, and who knows, it might help me make an effort to get things going again.

When I was a pale skinny ghost of a youth, still aimlessly haunting my hometown of Largs in Ayrshire, an Australian appeared amongst our group of friends for a short time. The town was a stop-off in his travelling, and I have forgotten his name, but something he said has stayed with me ever since. He was talking to me about all the places in Scotland he had been to, and asking me about all the places he still wanted to go to. I hadn't heard of half of them, and the other half were names that meant little to me. I had certainly not actually been to more than one or two of them. I felt ashamed as he responded to my confessions of ignorance with awkward and polite disbelief.

But I didn't do anything about it for a long time and went off to England to begin a career. Then, after moving to Edinburgh I began to get excited about the Scottish landscape, and during a long weekend in the west highlands I saw Glencoe for the first time. I got out of the car and ran down into the glen towards the river Coe, and then looked behind me. It was a slightly unsettled day, overcast, with fingers of cloud stroking the high peaks, obscuring the tops themselves. It had been raining heavily, and white cascades of water fell from out of the mysterious heights over ledges and parapets of black rock. I now know that this was the great Aonach Eagach ridge. I turned to look up at the other side of the glen and stumbled with dizziness, so overwhelming was the topography. Here were the Three Sisters, which I now know are but the limbs of the huge mountain called Bidean Nam Bian.

A while later I conveyed my awe on discovering this place to a friend, who casually said that he'd been at the top of one of those mountains just a few weeks before. This comment, and the memory of my shaming by the Australian, became two ingredients in a mental mixture that finally cohered into the idea: why don't we, my brother and I, start hillwalking in the highlands?

More to follow.

Vegan Baking

"...we're constantly impressed with the leaps and bounds being made in the world of vegan baking." [1]

I happened upon this somewhere on the web today, and it caught my attention. But why? I'm not vegan or vegetarian, and would probably never consider becoming either. I do have a good friend who is vegan, but I've never considered baking for her, and I still don't intend to (sorry Mads). I don't even like cakes very much.

One can find things on the web that are far more absurd, amusing and stupid, but something about the bland affectedness of this phrase really grabbed me. "We're constantly impressed." Really? What do you mean? The extent to which you are impressed never changes? Every time you hear about the latest leap or bound in vegan baking, you are impressed, just like you were last time, and to the same level? So are you saying that each leap and bound is exactly as impressive as the last? Anyway, it's obvious that if you've described something as advancing by leaps and bounds then you're going to be impressed by it. And what the hell can "leaps and bounds" refer to in vegan baking? Are you talking about new recipes? If so, why not just say it? Along with "the world of vegan baking," perhaps it's because it makes it sound more grand if you present the whole thing as a united front of advancing troops, marching proudly into a future dawn of Universal Veganism? Or maybe you want to present it as something akin to scientific progress, when in fact it is - let's face it - just a bunch of people baking cakes and stuff, without butter and eggs.

So breaking it down, maybe it goes something like this:

Every time we hear about an impressive advance in the onward march of the People's Progessive Vegan Baking Front we are impressed, but in particular we are impressed to an unvarying degree from the previous episodes when we were impressed by similarly impressive advances. As it's impossible for each advance to be equally important or radical, you might expect us to be impressed in proportion to that, but no: we are constantly impressed.

Before anyone calls me a captious, pedantic and mean-spirited asshole, I'd just like to say that you could easily do the same thing with any number of quotes from my own writings. I'm all for puncturing pomposity, and that includes my own.

[1] http://www.cakespy.com/2008/09/batter-chatter-interview-with-melisser.html

In Praise of Argument

I'm argumentative, it's true. Is that bad? I can't resist taking a stand, taking sides and making a case. So, in that tradition, in this post I'm going to make a case for argument itself, because I feel it's under threat. Actually, I feel a rant coming on, rather than a reasoned argument. So be it...

I've got into trouble for my argumentative reactions to the statements of others. I might say "nonsense!" or "no, that's not the way things are at all," and I am then criticized for my arrogance. Apparently I should have said "my humble opinion is - and you don't have to believe it, because it's just my humble opinion, I mean, what do I know really? and I don't really like disagreeing with people, but I just want to say - and remember, I'm really not trying to force my opinions down your throat...etc" followed by concluding remarks such as "but that's just my opinion, nobody is right or wrong here, it's all just opinions, there's no such thing as truth, I'm probably talking rubbish..."

In my more unguarded, undignified moments I might be tempted to say that I've fucking had it up to here with this shite. There is a timid fear of offending others, as if people are nothing but fragile victims of unwelcome outside influences with no power to fight back. That, to me, is disrespectful. There's also a presumption that if I attack an idea you subscribe to, I am also attacking you. In response, I often say that if I didn't respect your opinions and find you interesting, I wouldn't bother arguing.

And since when did we stop being rational beings who could make a case for something and try to defend it, without taking disagreement personally? I am partly made up of my ideas, but they are always open to change, so they do not define me.

It is superfluous to say "I think..." or "I believe..." or "In my personal opinion..." or "IMHO" instead of just coming out with "this is how it is," because when someone claims something to be true they are stating a personal opinion anyway, whether they say they are or not. We know that's what they're doing, so why should we have to hear them saying so explicitly? Is it because there is a growing suspicion of strong opinions, and an automatic accusation of arrogance? If so - and if this is a widespread reaction to argument - then it threatens the idea that human beings can know the truth. If you state something and you're not lying, it means that you believe it to be true. The idea so prevalent now, that there is no such thing as truth, or that we cannot know it, must lead to a refusal to state opinions or argue against those of others.

There's an important point here, one that this timid culture seems to find unpalatable. It is that if you have an opinion, and therefore believe in the truth of a particular assertion, it means that you assume that you have seen the light of the truth, and that all those who hold contrary opinions remain in darkness. In a world in which we can't say anything is better than anything else, this kind of thing makes people uncomfortable.

But it's also important to remember that you can hold strong opinions, really believing that everyone else is wrong, and yet not wish to somehow impose those opinions on anyone, because there is always the chance that you may be wrong. It is only absolute certainty, which I never claim to have, that leads to arrogance.

But, then again, how does one impose an opinion on somebody? Of course, ideas are imposed on people by means of oppression, imperialism, authoritarian rule, violence and so on. The truly arrogant feel no need to justify their ideas with an argument: they force you to submit to them. But that's not what this is about. Often the charge of imposing beliefs on others is levelled at people who just happen to be good at arguing, who can dominate a debate. But this is obviously just the last strike of the bad loser.

A world in which people stop standing up for what they believe in is not one I want to live in, so I for one am happy to go on making people uncomfortable.

Given the Preponderance of...

For the past few months I've had this thing - not an earworm, which is the catchy song that you can't get out of your head (which I've written about before in this blog), but what you might call a language worm. Every so often this phrase pops into my head: "Given the preponderance of..."

I'm not sure why this happens, but it's not exactly unconscious or subconscious. It's my mind's attempt to imitate a man with a pompous and wordy manner of speech, maybe as a kind of self-mockery. So if I find myself being too arrogant or condescending, or if I want to affect those qualities for humour, up it pops into my conscious mind.

But I don't know how to finish it, and it just hangs there limp and stupid. Given the preponderance of musical and pictorial mental content, I'm quite surprised that there's an equivalent with language, and I do worry that I'm going crazy; that the next step will be hearing voices, or that I'll suddenly go crouch in a dark corner hugging my knees, endlessly mumbling "given the preponderance of...given the preponderance of...given the preponderance of..." as I rock back and forth.

All in all I prefer the earworms, especially Copacabana (ah, there it goes!)