I was kissed by the Queen of Libya

The inside of the car is stifling, the windows wound up against the dust which occupies the air, light as flour, blown from the Sahara on the ‘ghibli’ wind which shifts the Libyan desert northwards over several weeks each year.

Three children fight for space, sandy legs scratching against the hot seats, and sticking to the large inflatable plastic animals bought for a few piastres from an isolated stall on an empty coastal road near Benghazi. I sit on the right, and have the sea on the way home.

Twisting round, I am occasionally rewarded by the sight of jackals launching into a chase of the Austin Cambridge. Car sick and desperate for the loo, the hot journey lasts forever, lightened only by communal singing of songs from the musicals and the World Service; "How do you solve a problem like Maria", and “If I had a hammer” by Trini Lopez.

On longer trips, the desert gives way to scrubby hills and the car inches across high bridges made of planks, and freewheels silently down mountain roads to save petrol. At a bar on a steep hillside terrace, bottles of cold Coca Cola wash down pistachio nuts and bowls of hummus, “Forget Domani” plays in the background, and the paradise that is Cyrene sinks into fragrant Mediterranean night.

The Citta di Livorno limps across from Naples each week on Thursday, always listing to one side, and bringing the Beano and marmite, which seem no more part of Britain than does the weekly gathering of the 3rd Benghazi Brownies, in which I become an elf. There is a toadstool to gather round, some tying of knots, and singing including Libyan national songs in Arabic.

It is 1967 and King Idris is on the throne, the only king Libya has ever had, and who I firmly believe to have given his name to the orange squash.

Within a few months Benghazi erupts unexpectedly in the 6 day Arab Israeli war, and Brownies is suspended as the small British contingent take refuge in an army base where we live on fish fingers and semolina, and I find and distribute wild tortoises amongst my friends.

When we are finally allowed home, we drive past the burned out British Consulate, wreckages of cars, looted buildings. Life resumes in the small school where my mother teaches us everything from maths to Arabic, staying one page ahead, but Libya feels unstable beneath our feet, even to an 8 year old.

Soon we move to Tripoli, and a school bus wallows and pitches through unmade back roads to Tripoli College, where the cosmopolitan capital gives me few English speaking classmates, and best friends from Spain and Yugoslavia.

Brownies switches to the 1st Tripoli troop, and I jump ship to become sixer of the Sprites. I gain a long service bar, and finally achieve my first badge for swimming, which is all there is to do in the immense heat.

For some reason the 1st Tripoli Brownies are suddenly thrust to prominence. Tunics are ironed, training in flag-holding is dispensed, and a parade takes place in which I play a totally forgotten role. At the end of it a bosomy, elegant and wonderfully perfumed woman gives me the painful Italian cheek pinch, and kisses me with much patting and smiling. “That was the Queen of Libya” my mother later tells me.

I leave Libya for boarding school in cold grey England in 1969, and a month later Colonel Ghadafi deposes King Idris and his downy, pillowy Queen. How sad.

Rain

It is sometimes an unfathomable pleasure to have rain trickling down your neck. The fathomlessness of this pleasure came to me as I walked through a warm monsoon this evening, the air so full of moisture that it trapped fragments of light, refracting into a milky glow that was light enough to see by despite it being well past nightfall.
Two nights ago it was another kind of loveliness, and I walked into the dusk across the hills as they rise above the western sea, warm air on bare arms, the air breathy and humid around the setting sun. It is all lovely, this intensity of the atmosphere on the edge of a heatwave. 
The joy of rain this evening was no less than that of balmy air. The smell of the earth and air was more powerful for being released by moisture, and rain tastes wonderful; the cleanest purest water in the world.
But why is it sometimes so good to be soaked, to feel the rain inside your collar, to dispense with the hood, to let the rain turn your hair to rats-tails and drip off your nose? Well, warm rain helps, but it is more than that, and I stood for a while in the dark monsoon allowing the experience and the reasoning behind it to unravel.
It is, I think, really quite simple. We just don't do this any more. And at the same time as not doing it, we have only negative associations with rain: it is something to be avoided, barriered off with Goretex, sheltered from inside our homes, skipped briskly through in cars.
We have become a society which doesn't celebrate rain, which shows how far we have travelled from our relationship with the earth, and fast we have forgotten its needs. There are societies where people run out of their houses to greet the rain, and others which invoke its coming. We complain about it, but demand its product endlessly.
Standing passively in pouring rain and feeling it engulf the senses is also an exercise in what I think is known as mindfulness. Mindfulness is, I believe, about concentrating on the here and now, feeling the immediate feelings, and not chasing them away with anxiety over the future or the past. As a therapy, warm rain doesn't get much better.
It is undeniably possible to have too much of a good thing (living in Argyll poses this possibility), but next time it is raining, put on a jacket and wellies and deliberately go for a walk. Smell it, feel it, taste it, allow it to trickle down your skin. Experience, enjoy, and just let it be.

Amigos

I have a deep and unnatural fear of the mundane, a horror of being bored in a colourless and repetetive life. And so it was a good day yesterday all round: one to be remembered.

If the engine fails to fire in a sleek modern car it is the occasion for cursing, but when the tiny key elicited only a dull click under the bonnet of our gorgeous 1968 Morris Minor, my daughter and I were calmly philosophical.

Not so four large Oban men who without consultation launched us joyously onto the main, fast, accident-ridden road into the town. The window between oncoming cars was small, and in second gear with the ignition switched on we went with the flow: something of a"we are all going to die" moment...

The Moggy bounced into life immediately (hooray), and shot away from the four amigos with much waving of muscular tee-shirted arms (hmm nice). They receded like an old film shot in the upside-down smile of a rear window, fragmented in the little round bonnet mirrors as we juddered and roared into town.

We cut out again halfway up Pulpit Hill. But no matter, a man wearing costume and with a pigtail down to his waist appeared with jump leads and within minutes we were roaring again. 

It would add to the story if this were a random encounter, but actually we were on our way home from open air theatre by The Walking Theatre Company at Bonawe Iron Furnace (it was fab), and this actor had won home ahead of us.

With the wee house serving as digs for the night for the parcel of rogues who made up the cast, raspberry cocktails and wine propelled the evening onwards into a gathering ceilidh session. Songs were sung, guitars came out, followed by bodhran, ukelele and fiddle. We found our way to Highland tunes and then we were away.  Life stories were swapped and the world set to rights before two of the party went out on the lash and the rest settled in for tea and musing till the small hours.

So yesterday was grand, and today has been fine too. Breakfast with the thespians (porridge and Talisker!) was followed by another turn round the Highland tunes (it is so hard to stop once you've started), and the morning ran into an afternoon curled up with cake, crosswords, dogs  and good friends listening to old and lovely tunes by Fairport Convention.

Tomorrow will be the usual cornucopia of works on medieval castle and historic house, a new tartan and silver jewellery range, planning for a fabulous arts event next year, and more thinking about Gaelic.

Why do I waste time even thinking about the dangers of boredom? Not looking likely.

Razor blades and barbed wire

Hallo blog. We have been strangers for six eventful months.As I rest beneath the Tum Tum tree I am surrounded by a wunderkammer of objects from the maelstrom; a veritable cabinet of curiosities which I am gradually curating in line with Spectrum standards (of course! Nothing less!).

The objects are being submitted to a documentation process, and variously being disposed of, wrapped in acid free tissue and stored, or displayed alongside the other objects gathered along the way of life.

Having a good disposal policy is a plan, and is the museum equivalent of Room 101. Every home should have one, and into it (along with people who disconnect from the world by wearing headphones in the street) should go the silly things we do. Moments of anger, unthinking remarks, missed opportunities among them. But should they be thrown away? I think they probably should. The alternative is putting them into temperature controlled storage with a carefully logged ID number, and then tending them, as one should with all good museum stores.

But are these wrong moments/objects important? Will they ever be displayed again? Do they deserve nurture? Well, they are important in the sense that you can learn from them, but as to whether they should be revisited...?  They will always exist in the form of being part of the documentation paper trail - logged, chewed over, and disposed of, but with the exception of the truly monstrous (Mladic), we should allow them to go.

At the moment I am creating work for the disposals team at the Tum Tum Museum. I have a collection of dodgy objects, and like all museum objects, they are nothing in themselves but only exist in the perception of ourselves and others.

A chunk of yellow metal is nothing more than that until you know it is gold; only a shapeless lump until you can relate the carving to your own knowledge and experience; only a disconnected object until you know the story. All museum objects are just the tips of pyramids; the triggers which prompt questions and cascading stories. Behind every object is a wide base of compressed people, lives, religion, experience, struggle (often struggle), and yearning for beauty which makes people add their design to the most functional of objects. The pyramid narrows to the point at the top, on which sits this object. In this way museums house the story of the world.

The objects currently going through disposal at the Tum Tum Museum have sharp edges and therefore present a health and safety risk for further display, and certainly should not be transferred to the handling collection.

My poor colleagues, my poor friends. I am wearing a coat with razor blades for buttons; my scarf is knitted from barbed wire; my hat is crowned with a spike. Very fetish, some would say; not out of place on the Barnerstrasse in Hamburg, but not great here.

My lethal costume, which I am so liberally swinging about, represents the top of my pyramid. Its base is very wide, and the compressed story leading up to its tip is quite simply far, far too busy.

I am sorry everyone. Please accept my apology (and the next ones I am forced to offer). If it is any consolation, the scary costume is being assessed daily by the disposals committee and God willing, and with a fair wind, will in time be nothing more than an entry in the data log.

To be learnt from, but not kept.

Ebbs, flows and eddies

The dichotomy of happiness and yearning is something that one grows used to in age, but is, I believe, one of the trickier swamps to be encountered by the young as they attempt to come alongside the business of adult life. Like all the growing-up swamps, this one is of indeterminate size and shape, and can take a long time to cross.

It begins when you find yourself to be suddenly happy where you are - it might be the circle of friends, the place, the job, or all three (lucky!), and this is usually a sign that you have left school and entered the second block of your life (see last blog). 

It is akin to making it to a traffic island in the middle of a busy road in the middle of a busy town; it is satisfying and safe, and for a while it is the right thing to do to stay there. However, the traffic island is not such a secure place to be, as the danger lies in the difficulty of deciding when, why and how to leave it. 

All the time that you are happy on the island, you are also yearning to be out in the traffic, risking the ride and making a beeline for nearer or further destinations, with all the bewildering range of routes available to the 21st century young. And so back to danger - this time the danger of not leaving the island, mistakenly seeing the happiness as something that can be secured, held, atrophied in time. There is also the fear of not being able to hold it, and this is the reality of change.

You may have reached the island, but the traffic is still moving: you may be happy in your immediate orbit, but the orbit will change around you, friends will move on, jobs come and go, places subtly shift on their axis. Suddenly the island is in a different stream, it might even be in a stream you don't like, and none of it was your making. Change is the one inevitability in all this - no matter how good or bad things are, they will change whether you like it or not.

Young people torment themselves with the problem of change, which is the faultline which underlies and threatens to destabilize happiness throughout life, but can be terrifying to the young who have usually been sheltered from the worst of it thus far. Inertia is common; determinedly standing stock-still while life flows and eddies round the ankles, and eventually some of the things that were held so dear ebb away towards their new destinations. And so it is easy to be left behind, fiercely protecting an illusion of happiness which is suddenly not there at all.

Then there is the business of yearning, which is the 'feel the fear but do it anyway' mode; the risk-taking roller-coaster which demands that you jump off the island before you get left behind, sacrificing a chunk of happiness time in order to maintain the potential of other happinesses. The potential for rewards is great; the potential for mistakes is similar; witness the statistics on the number of young people who drop out of college or uni in the first year.

It is also scary - and not scary in the sense of practicalities, but deeply scary in terms of the inner rucksack of self that now has to be packed and carried. Parents cannot pack it or shoulder it, and quite rightly young people fiercely don't want them too. Many of the parent/adolescent arguments come down to the rucksack of self. And of course we are all still carrying the rucksacks we started packing at that time.

So there it is: the happiness of being and the yearning for change. Stay and resist and watch it happen, or go and be bold and embrace the random happinesses which make up the mixed bag of life. In the end there is no real choice, is there?

Overlapping orbits

It is a beautiful cold calm day in Argyll, and to boot I have just unexpectedly stepped into the clear glade of the final section of an application form to the Heritage Lottery Fund. From wrestling with bogus projections of volunteer hours I suddenly fell into the pc nonsense of trying to work out the ethnicity of the audience. I clicked 'all', made myself a cup of tea, and decided to treat myself to a 10 minute blog break.

It is the only clear glade at present, and my desk reflects my job; a sea of overlapping paper bearing nice tasks and nasty tasks, but always interesting tasks, thanks to the wonder that is Dunollie.

My personal life is like my desk, and just as we are running towards major changes at Dunollie next year, so I too have suddenly stumbled into a new phase of life. It is not as if I didn't see it coming (hell, a year at university was enough of a wake-up call), but it is now truly here. My youngest leaves home in 6 weeks, and is doing it big time, with a 9 hour flight between us. At the same time the next generation is starting to need support. It is the age-old pattern, and biologically it works with great synchronicity. Barring disasters, our span is timed to allow for the very long dependency of our offspring (us and orang utan both) coming to a close just as the older generation really start to get older.

I sit squarely in the middle of the young and the old, and at times barely recognise myself and the place I now inhabit. It never occurred to me before that we live our lives in blocks. In times past we would have hit the ground running with childbirth at a much younger age, and on that basis it evens out in about 20 year chunks: childhood and adolescence / parenthood / solitariness (in a couple or alone) and caring for the elderly / becoming the older generation. That makes 3 score years and 20, which is a fair enough bet these days.

The neatness of that equation, however, bears no relation to the chaos of actually doing the deed of being in stage 3 of the 4 blocks. It also does not describe the change of temperament which is partly the onset (earlier in some than others) of grumpy-old-man/woman-itis, and also a new determination not to compromise. It is a strange new land, after 20 years of compromising for our children, but the the leafy glade that is 'hang on a minute, what about me' is rather a refreshing place.

This is a stage in life which used to be called 'the prime'. Barely anyone uses this term anymore, but suddenly I recognise it fully, and know myself to be in it. 'A woman in her prime', as described in a Thackeray-type novel always seems to stand tall, and straight;  be strong, capable, and forthright; and of course be 'still handsome for her years'. I don't claim to have the full package, or even much of it, but I am loving being a woman in her prime.

The overlapping orbits are the chaotic desks, relationships, and schedules that swirl about my ankles (as I stand straight and handsome and forthright - note I left out tall). Many of the players are also in their respective primes, and that is both fun and complicated; so much change, so many visions to the past and the future. We gaze wistfully at the thinner younger version of ourselves, while fretting about the age to come, and continuing to make some fabulously dodgy decisions.

I have decided not to regret the past or the future, and of course to try and curb the bad decisions (that is the one continuing longterm goal). Enjoyment of 'prime' is where I want to be. I feel the need to celebrate the moment with something permanent...I was thinking of a little tattoo. Or would that be a woman in her prime behaving badly?

All plaided and plumed...

...in their tartan array! So spake Sir Walter Scott, and so it was in Oban today when the great and the good from the aristocracy of Argyll marched ahead of the pipe band to the annual Games.

There is a ton of prejudice and inverted snobbery larded on when it comes to the Oban Games, which is, quite genuinely, a date in the high society calender for the whole of the UK, and does indeed bring some very beautiful, wealthy and wonderfully dressed people to the town. Right now, this minute, they are stripping-the-willow in ball gowns, filling out dance cards (yes! Dance cards!) and moving towards the famous breakfast tomorrow morning at the Gathering Ball.

The Games are run and supported financially by the Argyll county set, and they put on a fantastic show. Lots of local people either can't go because it is a weekday, or won't go because they object to the toffs. I love the toffs. They are really nice folk who keep some splendid traditions going, strutting about all day with bog myrtle in their bonnets and leaning on their cromachs.

We had great fun in the heritage tent, met loads of new folk and old friends, avoided  the regular bores, were treated to free whisky, and all in all I can't see the harm in it. You are not supposed to go into the members enclosure, where the voices are suddenly conspicuously loud and rather yaa, but I wandered through to find one of the Games Stewards and no-one threw me out.

People need to chill about toffs. They can no more help the way they speak, move, stand, dress, shake hands with their peers and say "hallay niyce to meechaw" despite only being aged 14, than I can help doing it the way I do. We are all accidents of birth however it turns out.

Apart from anything else, I bought a splendid hat today in Lochaber tartan with bobbing feathers, and refused to take it off for the rest of the afternoon. I even wore it ...well, not quite home, but as far as the traffic lights by the High School where I got such odd looks I took it off. Mainly for the sake of my daughter who also has to live in this town.