tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-58729949347165108022024-02-21T20:14:14.203-08:00From the IslandPaul Reeshttp://www.blogger.com/profile/17802572793315969562noreply@blogger.comBlogger19125tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-5872994934716510802.post-91982575721338891192019-05-09T10:19:00.000-07:002019-05-09T10:19:48.868-07:00In Bloom<div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;">
<a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjXxMYGvMznE-A8wbxwOx1qcfX59hu3yJu7RsG5SLV1up-B80PpvKn87i4JECIVWwqGb9uHKhx9WqCMLRA-CaQMHo4fb37v3jOESOKq9wWobJpswVCELypz7aQvaHiVI55wInmCfqu4MB-x/s1600/20190429_193957790_iOS.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" data-original-height="553" data-original-width="1600" height="220" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjXxMYGvMznE-A8wbxwOx1qcfX59hu3yJu7RsG5SLV1up-B80PpvKn87i4JECIVWwqGb9uHKhx9WqCMLRA-CaQMHo4fb37v3jOESOKq9wWobJpswVCELypz7aQvaHiVI55wInmCfqu4MB-x/s640/20190429_193957790_iOS.jpg" width="640" /></a></div>
<br />
Sorry, six months appear to have slipped by in a blink. During which time, I was otherwise occupied with writing a book. Since that process has so far never once failed to have the knock-on effect of sending me - even further - round the bend for a protracted period, exaggerating such winning personal qualities as self-obsessiveness, obsessive compulsiveness and whatever other obsessives you've got, I treasure like gold the mere act of being able to open the door, breathe fresh air and drink in a variation of the scene captured above.<br />
<br />
In that span of time, winter came and went. This one, our third on the island, and no doubt because of my being hunkered down, hour upon hour, with no-one but the most tiresome version of me for company, seemed arduous, testing, unforgiving. Long, dark days of rain, wind and of sullen, disagreeable skies. The landscape drawn down in shades of grey and brown, dirt-coloured and drab. God knows, this year spring has arrived like a blessing. The plot has burst into a panoply of brilliant greens, blues and yellows, of buttercups, daisies, bluebells and more. Sunrises have dazzled, sunsets soothed and chirp-some birdsong fills the air; the high, liquid notes of Robin, Skylark, Siskin, Song Thrush and Redpoll. Why, just now even the brazen, mocking call of the Cuckoo sounds like a serenade.<br />
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The deep, welcome sense of well-being that this all engenders does also, though, bring along with it an attendant peril. So far, on any given one of these bountiful days of May, I have been brought <i>this </i>close to an out-of-character eruption of unfettered joy. Metaphorically, to want to launch into a chorus of 'Zip-a-Dee-Doo-Dah', and whilst skipping gaily off down our hill, smiling beatifically at the world all about. Indeed, all that has yet held me back is the stone, cold fact that I loathe that wretched song, and that I would doubtless make even more of an arse of myself than usual.<br />
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Instead, and more invigorating by far, we have gone off walking, and to parts of the island that were undiscovered to us. We have to thank for that a splendid little book, <i>Trig Point Walks on the Isle of Skye and Raasay</i>, by two local authors, Ian Stewart and Alistair Christie. The title's a give-away, since this pocket-sized gem maps out routes up to the fifty-six trig points that dot our island and its near-neighbour. And here's the thing. A trek up - and, of course, it's always up - to any one of these points, be it one mile or five distant, brings with it the reward of not just a vista to scramble and excite the senses, but also a fresh, jaw-dropping perspective on where it is that we actually live.<br />
<br />
At ground level, it is very possible to forget, or else take for granted that we're on an island. A thousand-feet-plus above sea level, as we got to last Sunday and by plodding up and over viscous moorland to reach the high point of Dunvegan Head, a north-western fingertip of Skye, it's right there, in your face. Sheer, jagged, black-rock cliffs plummeting to the sea below. Off to the east, another exposed headland, Waternish Point. To the west, the cleaver-shaped buttress of land that hides and shelters the lighthouse at Neist Point. Out ahead, the hazy, silhouette-outlines of the Western Isles, ranged along the horizon, and beyond those, the immense, unfathomable expanse of the Atlantic Ocean, black-blue, white-tipped, wind-whipped, awesome to behold.<br />
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Same deal hiking to the summit of Ben Tianavaig, the big, hump-backed hill that overlooks Portree harbour from Braes. Or from Ben Geary, a wind-scorched prominence that rises up at the neck of the aforementioned Waternish Point. And, I'm betting, from any of the other fifty-three routes we still have to navigate and which, given the time it takes to persuade, cajole and ultimately bully our boys outdoors, will occupy me until I'm being fed with a spoon. All absolutely worth the effort: to be able to have these experiences, which on each occasion are essentially the same, but then again, different.<br />
<br />
<a href="https://i.ebayimg.com/images/g/yxYAAOSwS3lcTapp/s-l1600.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="clear: left; float: left; margin-bottom: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img alt="" border="0" clk="" height="320" id="viEnlargeImgLayer_img_ctr" src="https://i.ebayimg.com/images/g/yxYAAOSwS3lcTapp/s-l1600.jpg" style="background-color: black; border: 0px; color: #333333; font-family: "Helvetica neue", Helvetica, Arial, sans-serif; font-size: 14px; height: 625px; margin-top: 0px; padding: 0px; text-align: center; width: 435.035px;" width="222" /></a>Once, in another time, another life, I was tasked with creating other moments, or happenings, one after the other, that pulled off that exact same effect, and which is to say that they be extraordinary, but also of a kind. This was all but impossible, but that never stopped from making a rod for my own back. For example, in the early days of my tenure editing <i>Q</i>, I took a call from David Bowie's PR, offering up rock's great chameleon for an interview, in return for the cover of the magazine. Now, this was 2003, before Bowie had been reclaimed as a pop-culture icon. Back then, he was regarded as being well past his best, a bust flush, and in terms of selling a magazine, a curse, a plague. Bowie's two most recent <i>Q </i>covers, both done before my time, had been nailed to the nation's magazine racks, unwanted and unloved.<br />
<br />
This in mind, I posited that we would only grant Bowie another cover in exceptional circumstances. Such as, persuading another international, but still zeitgeist-surfing and preferably unutterably glamorous celebrity to interview him for us. After a round of office brainstorming, some hook and a little crook, this ended up being Kate Moss. We arranged to have the two of them meet up in Manhattan, across the street from Bowie's apartment. They were photographed together by the great Ellen Von Unwerth and in the style of Michelangelo Antonioni's seminal 1966 movie, <i>Blowup</i> (and for which I claim no credit whatsoever; that much was the brainchild of our hugely talented then-Art Director, Warren Jackson). Altogether, they looked fabulous and that issue of the magazine sold like hot-cakes. Ever after, a succession of publishers, managing directors and other 'suits' would in meetings make a point of asking me: "So, what's your next Bowie/Moss?" As if such a thing was always just a phone call away, and the plain, dogged Kaiser Chiefs simply weren't good enough.<br />
<br />
Fast forward four years and to the <i>Q</i> Awards ceremony of 2007. That year, Sir Elton John was our guest of honour and there to pick up the Classic Songwriter award. Prior to accepting his award and having learnt that I was a West Brom supporter, the erstwhile Chairman of Watford FC made a point of regaling me with his abiding memory of attending a game at the Baggies' hallowed stadium, the Hawthorns, in the 1980s. "Ah, I can remember it now," said Elton, eyes moistening, or I may have imagined that particular detail. "Twenty thousand Black Country voices singing the same song all afternoon long: 'Sit down! Sit down! Elton wants your arse!'"<br />
<br />
Upon accepting his award from Elvis Costello, Elton used his speech that day to make a point about one of his fellow nominees. "Madonna?" he mugged to the assembled great, good and not-so-good of the music business. "Best fucking Live Act? Fuck off! Sorry about that, but I think everyone who lip-syncs in public should be shot." [Exhibit A: <a href="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hexgsXeSIhs">https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hexgsXeSIhs</a>] After which, he bounded off the stage and right over to where I was stood. "There you go," he told me jauntily, "that's sorted out your publicity for you."<br />
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About that Sir Elt was proven entirely correct. A couple of hours later, his speech was being replayed on both the BBC News channel and on CNN. Next morning, it was splashed all over the newspapers. All the years following that I was on <i>Q</i>, those self-same publishers, managing directors and suits would want to know: "How, Paul, you plan on replicating the Elton John publicity stunt?" Short of setting Bono on fire - and though that might have gone over even better in some quarters - I was always at a complete loss for a reply. Obviously, I was. Hare-brained, out-there goings-on such as these can't be re-done, or re-made. They just are, and then they're gone.<br />
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Except, that is, through that open door, up one hill or the next, looking off out to sea and with every breath of fresh, virgin air. Out there, out here, it still is possible to be held rapt, struck dumb, but with awe and wonder at a near-miracle, and at any moment. The preciousness of that is immeasurable, incalculable. Patently, evidently, the need for it to be protected and preserved is growing more urgent, more incumbent on us all. And you just can't say any of that about miming old Madge.<br />
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<span style="font-family: "times" , "times new roman" , serif;">This Week I Have Mostly Been Listening To:</span></h3>
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<a href="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=v9al4VCGZ-A">https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=v9al4VCGZ-A</a></div>
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<span style="font-family: "times" , "times new roman" , serif;"><br /></span><span style="font-family: "times" , "times new roman" , serif;">Pete Yorn - Just Another Girl</span></div>
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Because any moment of unexpected magic is always worth revisiting.</div>
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Paul Reeshttp://www.blogger.com/profile/17802572793315969562noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-5872994934716510802.post-23495472013128565232018-11-25T10:29:00.000-08:002018-11-25T10:29:56.615-08:00Across the Great Divide<div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;">
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<br />
I might have mentioned it before, but a persistent rejoinder to incomers to the island is this: "Right enough, but have you gone through a winter yet?" Often as not, this is spoken slow and in a dolorous tone, so as to accentuate a proper sense of foreboding. Fair dos, there <i>is</i> something fearful about the sound of a storm wind roaring in from the ocean, or the spectacle of shroud-black clouds massing over the hills; as if the Rapture had come upon us and the end was nigh. Or at the very least your rubbish bin is about to get scooped up for the umpteenth time that week and sent crazily off, gambolling down hill, at each turn regurgitating litter from out of its great, flapping plastic mouth.<br />
<br />
That being said, we are at the teeth of our third winter up here and much more so than before, it seems to me now a season of wonder, intoxicating <i>because</i> of its very wildness. Admittedly, to this point the wintry elements have been relatively kind to us: there have been a couple of chastening Atlantic storms and last year a brace of significant snowfalls. But not yet a long, slogging spell where for weeks at a time the daytime skies are a singular, dead-flesh grey, the down-pouring rain relentless, the wind-chill vicious.<br />
<br />
We have instead experienced many moments of being, well, awed. A few days ago, for example, on a crisp, clear night and under a luminous half-moon, I sat out on our decking and gazed up in a kind of trance at a vivid panoply of stars, planets, nebulae, far, far-off solar systems and other such celestial wonders, soothed by the background whoosh and hum of the sea waves and the melancholy hooting of an owl. On another evening and bid by an excited shout from young Charlie, I dashed out to watch the sun set behind the hills at back of the house. Quite magically, it went down slashing blood-red streaks across a billowing, charcoal-shaded canvas.<br />
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Ah, but the onset of this latest winter has jolted us. For a fortnight in October, we took a family road trip around California; the last week of which was spent traversing the scorched expanses of Death Valley and the Mojave Desert. From furnace-heat in Joshua Tree one day, to a frigid Glen Shiel blizzard the next was quite the shock. Though even that stark contrast was not nearly so jarringly incomprehensible to me as setting down in Los Angeles near enough direct from Skye. I could only imagine that to be like beaming down from the Starship Enterprise to the surface of an infinitely distant planet that teemed with a mad sort of alien life.<br />
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As dear, pointy-eared Spock would surely have appraised it, Hollywood Boulevard, with its cavalcade of gawking tourists and sharking shysters, was especially illogical. Not so much a thoroughfare, as a petri dish into which all manner of counter-clashing elements have been stirred, then left to co-habit in an indelicate, counter-clashing balance. Though on the slightest reflection, I have long thought that way about the place and its various tribes, and even from the perspective of my old - and ever so vaguely - rock-and-roll life. During those years, I had occasional encounters with what one might call, entirely accurately, 'Hollywood types', which means to say movie stars and the odd, in both senses of the word, film director.<br />
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Once, over a long, liquid-heavy lunch, I met the British head of a Tinsletown film studio. With each vat of wine that he consumed, he became exponentially more indiscreet. Among other things - and on all available evidence, ever-so-slightly hypocritically - he told me of one superstar American actor who had to have all of his promotional duties scheduled before midday, lest he be too inebriated to form a coherent sentence. Also of a well-known actress whose particular quirk was to demand to be spoken to, and furthermore pampered as if she were a toddler. He made mention of how she would serially sit, corkscrewing her own hair and ask a minion to fetch for her "lunchy-wunchy."<br />
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Clearly, these were extreme cases. Yet even in other, more normal-seeming circumstances, I could not shake the feeling of having entered into another dimension. As when Tim Burton, visionary creator of such distinctive movies as 'Beetlejuice', 'Sleepy Hollow' and 'Edward Scissorhands', turned up at the annual Q Awards ceremony to present an award to the Killers (he was a fan). As Editor of Q, I felt duty-bound to welcome him, and so was at the door when he was led into the ballroom of the swanky London hotel at which the ceremony was held.<br />
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Things from there did not go quite as I had planned. To the best of my knowledge, I don't come across as being especially menacing. Point of fact, there are paper bags I would struggle to punch my way out of. Even so, as I approached Burton, hand held out, he reeled back as if I were thrusting at him a chainsaw. "Hello Tim, I'm Paul, the Editor of Q," I pressed on. "Thank-you for coming today and if there is anything at all I can do..." By the horrified look on his face, what Tim Burton actually heard me say was: "I'm going to spill your intestines over the carpet and make you eat them with a nice Chianti." He blinked once, twice, mumbled, "Um, OK," and then shuffled off to a corner of the room, away from me and most everyone else. We didn't speak again.<br />
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The next year, Tim Robbins, of 'Shawshank Redemption' fame, was embarking on a not-at-all bad, but to date short-lived side-career as an alt-country-themed troubadour. He had been booked as opening act for Paolo Nutini at a Q-sponsored gig held at the two-thousand capacity Kentish Town Forum in north London. After Robbins had played a politely received set, his formidable PR scurried me backstage to meet him. He emerged from his dressing room hunched up, crumpled-looking and sweet-natured as a kindly uncle.<br />
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We small-talked for a bit. After which, seeking to prolong the conversation, I asked Robbins if his long-time partner and fellow thesp, Susan Sarandon, had also made the trek over to London. In a beat, his face sagged, a world of hurt flashing across his deep, watery eyes. At the same time, his PR prodded me sharply in the ribs with her elbow and whispered urgently in my right ear, "She's left him! She's left him!" Robbins made his apologies immediately thereafter, stepping back into his dressing room and closing the door behind him, firmly and definitively. Perhaps it was right there and then that he decided to run like the wind away from the music business.<br />
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My spring 2000 meeting with Tom Cruise was more surreal by multiples of ten-to-one, but only on account of it being<i> my</i> meeting with Tom Cruise. The background to this bringing together of global superstar and bumbling hack is a tale too convoluted, and frankly dull to tell here. Suffice to say, it happened in a big top tent erected in sight of Tower Bridge on the Thames and scene of the 'Mission Impossible II' UK premiere party. I was along as plus-one to a 'Smash Hits' writer and a surreal affair it was, too. In the middle of this vast venue, a cascade of water fell floor to ceiling, into which disjointed scenes from the film were beamed. The movie having been shot in large part in Australia, the many guests were plied with silver platters piled high with fried crocodile and kangeroo kebabs.<br />
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Cruise's two support players, rugged Dougray Scott and gorgeous Thandie Newton, rubbed shoulders with lower wattage types like all five members of Boyzone, who for some unfathomable reason were tailed by a retinue of bodyguards. An hour into the bash, popping flashbulbs and a scrum of bodies at the entrance flap signaled the Cruise-ster himself's arrival. At a brisk clip, he was led through the throng by a pack of stone-faced PR ladies. As Cruise was hurried in our direction, I jokingly suggested to my 'date' that she introduce him to me.<br />
<br />
At which point and with a kind of preternatural self-confidence possessed only by hardened SAS commandos and teen-pop writers, she stepped out right in front of Cruise's path, hooked a hand under his arm and propelled him over to me, all before any of his minders could react. "This is Paul," she said to him gaily. "I know that you're a big music fan, Tom, and so is he." 'Tom' didn't so much as blink, but rather slipped straight into a rap about how he had got Metallica to contribute to the 'Mission Impossible II' soundtrack. And we were off.<br />
<br />
The two of us went on chatting away - the actual details are a little fuzzy - for the next five minutes or so. He never once broke eye contact, which was impressive but also somewhat unnerving. I remember his teeth being a dazzling white and that we stood the exact same height (best described as 'compact', as opposed to 'short', obviously). He looked so precisely as he did on screen that it wasn't at all like being in the presence of a real flesh and blood person, but more of an out-of-body experience. "Good talking to you," he said at last. And with a radiant smile and a firm, clenching handshake, he was gone, bound for the uncharted other-world that he exists upon.<br />
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Then there was Rhys Ifans, who was not at all bewitching, but was quite spectacularly drunk. Back in 2008, the gangly Welshman had swapped character roles in 'Notting Hill' and the 'Harry Potter' franchise for fronting a humdrum indie-rock band called The Peth. Attempting to drum up interest in their unremarkable debut album, he appeared as a guest on the Q Radio show I presented. We pre-recorded this installment at a lunchtime, by when Ifans had evidently been going full steam ahead for a good couple of hours. He lurched into the studio, collapsed into a chair placed next to mine, hair and shirt askew, breath toxic, and without any form of greeting or acknowledgment whatsoever.<br />
<br />
Besides one indeterminate grunt and a non-committal shrug at the producer's offer of coffee, he made not a sound until we began recording. When it was that he started to emit a phlegm-rattling gargle, necessitating us stopping and starting all over again. As I made the on-air introductions for a second time, Ifans sat gazing off into space, his glazed eyes rolling around in their sockets like marbles. "So Rhys," I said, turning to him, "Why The Peth and why now?" There is no possible adequate translation for his reply, but it went something like this: "Shhhllll-a-<i>noooo</i>-ach-shhh-lach-an-so-<i>achhhhh</i>," and after which he slumped forward over the desk.<br />
<br />
For a split-second, I was utterly unsure of what to say. However, after a beat or two of uncomfortable radio silence, I shot back at Ifans's now-inert form: "Well, that's easy for to you say." This did at least have the effect of rousing him from his slumber. Uncoiling slowly back up, he blinked over at me, the fog clearing from his eyes. When then his face creased into a lop-sided grin, I relaxed. All too soon, this proved to be in error. The grin vanished, Ifans went puce in the face and started to furiously wag an admonishing finger at me. "Well, well, well," he said murderously. "Now aren't you the cheeky c**t." With that, and on the epee-sharp tip of one of his winkle-picker shoes, he kicked me, hard, fast and painfully in the shin. The resulting fifty-pence piece-sized bruise flared for weeks.<br />
<br />
I thought back to this chastening, sozzled incident just last weekend. Doing so was nothing if not discombobulating, since at the time I was looking out over the lapping waters of Loch Bracadale. I had trooped down to the shoreline from the house, through fern, heather, scrub and copse and at the gloaming. A pale, iridescent moon was flickering in the sky, shadows lengthening over the water.<br />
<br />
At the time, I was watching a Diver, Red- or Black-Throated I couldn't tell, bobbing for food yards out to sea. When, from out of my peripheral vision, I spied a bigger bird gliding in low over the water. It was a Sea Eagle; a large female, barn-door wing-span, pure white head, ominous yellow beak, altogether magnificent. She was there and gone in mere seconds, but long enough to bring me back to the present and my saner, better reality.<br />
<h3>
<span style="font-family: "times" , "times new roman" , serif;">This Week I Have Mostly Been Listening To:</span></h3>
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<a href="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7TW_OThd2lM">https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7TW_OThd2lM</a></div>
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<span style="font-family: "times" , "times new roman" , serif;"><br /></span>
<span style="font-family: "times" , "times new roman" , serif;">Kurt Vile - I'm An Outlaw</span></div>
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Launch point for a California desert playlist. Just as evocative against a wintry Highlands backdrop.</div>
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Paul Reeshttp://www.blogger.com/profile/17802572793315969562noreply@blogger.com1tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-5872994934716510802.post-16938253254839550412018-09-07T11:22:00.000-07:002018-09-07T11:22:55.861-07:00How to Disappear Completely<br />
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<br />
Midsummer began with one of those perplexing little domino effects that are habitually sent careering off through the British media, unchecked by trivialities such as common sense or the facts. One after another, the travel sections of various newspapers, magazines and online portals put it out there that Skye is all but overrun with rampaging tourist hoards. That tracts of landscape are near-spoiled and despairing locals on the point of barricading off the road bridge connecting the island to the mainland at Lochalsh. Or at least something nearly so hysterical.<br />
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No doubt that up here complexities, controversies and different extremes of opinion have been brought about by the island becoming the second most-visited spot in Scotland after the capital, Edinburgh, and since this seasonal influx shows no sign of abating any time soon. Why, though, wouldn't lots of people want to come here? Skye is very beautiful, after all.<br />
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Generally, so much for the better I would say were anyone to ask me, which they haven't. There are the obvious economic benefits (and pontificating here as an in-no-way-Fawlty-esque B&B proprietor, two thumbs up for that). Being so enthusiastically visited also equals to me a commensurate sense of living somewhere that is alive and vibrant and in the moment, and as such is a precious commodity not to be discouraged. Hence the photograph at the top of the page, taken to support a local initiative aimed at correcting any lingering impression Skye has battened down the hatches (see here for more: <a href="http://www.theskyetimes.co.uk/index.php/3489-wish-you-were-here-video-welcome-visitors-to-skye">http://www.theskyetimes.co.uk/index.php/3489-wish-you-were-here-video-welcome-visitors-to-skye</a>) - and which features cherubic young Charlie as an infinitely more welcoming alternative to old potato-headed me.<br />
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In just the last three or four weeks, we have welcomed to The Passing Place guests from Australia, the Netherlands, Russia, Denmark and Germany. Listening to all of their combined rhapsodies to our island home has been nothing but joyful and life-enhancing. And I am by nature a sour-faced grump who would hitherto rather have eaten his own feet than make small talk.<br />
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Besides all of which... The idea perpetrated that Skye is now irreparably teeming and chaotic is by and large utter nonsense. Certainly, there can be unsightly congestion at some of the more gushingly guide book-listed spots such as the Old Man of Storr, the Fairy Pools or Neist Point, but we are able to revel in these during the 'other' six months of the year. Then again, at six hundred and thirty-nine square miles, there is still a lot more of the island to go round.<br />
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Two examples to illustrate this last point. Couple of weeks ago, we joined a group of friends for a seaside hike on the north-eastern fringe of Skye. We began by squelching across a peat bog; bundled down a knotted length of rope left hanging by a good-neighbourly climber and to help with traversing a short, sharp slab of glassy-surfaced, gnarly-tree-peppered rock; and popped out on an expanse of stone-pebbled beach. The beach is half-encircled by hulking black-grey cliffs, looks out to the ocean and further to the Mordor-esque Torridon range on the even more northern extremities of the mainland. As well there were a vaulting sea cave, a rushing waterfall, and clearly visible underfoot, scores of fossils vividly preserved in the shoreline rocks.<br />
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Quite a spot, and the more so for it being an overcast, milk-sun day that altogether gave the sea the look of gently bubbling liquid silver. We spent a good three hours there and encountered a grand total of two other people in all that time, both of them locals.<br />
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Then the other Saturday night, I determined to walk the five-plus, mostly uphill miles home from our nearest pub, the splendid Old Inn in Carbost. By 'I determined', what I actually mean to say is that the local taxi service wasn't running (the sole designated driver was also enjoying himself in the Inn instead). A half-moon was up in the sky, but all along the route it was otherwise a pitch, inky-black. It is a winding, climbing single-track road, the shadows of craggy hilltops off to one side, the spectral glimmer of Loch Harport a couple of hundred feet and more below.<br />
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Once I had overcome the potentially bowel-vacating fear that a great, snorting Highland Bull might lurk around the next all-but invisible corner, I began to stop at regular intervals, the better to take in the silence and the stillness, each like a physical manifestation. At the crest of the hill that heads out from our next-door township of Fernilea, I was stopped dead in my tracks. Up above, the aurora was in glorious effect in the sky, its green, luminescent shimmer dancing between billowing clouds the colour of soot.<br />
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Now of course, nobody, but nobody else was stupid enough to be lurching home along this same path at two in the morning. But then, at any given time of day, I would have encountered almost no-one but for the scattering of islanders living along the way. We have it to ourselves and for that we are blessed. As I may have attempted to wax lyrical to Denise and the boys when I finally surfaced the next midday, believing it would add a frisson of questing romance to my nocturnal wanderings and spare me pitying looks. In this, as in so many other regards, I was wholly wrong.<br />
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This week, I have also been cast back to my previous life and as a result of a newspaper commission to review Gary Barlow's forthcoming memoir. Eight years ago almost to the day, I conducted the first press interview given by the reunited-with-Robbie-Williams Take That. We met, the five of them, a fleet of stylists and hairdressers, a couple of managers, several burly bodyguards and me at Bryan Adams's photo studio in Chelsea. Yes, <i>that</i> Bryan Adams. Singer, Canadian, bloke who will be eternally culpable for the wretched 'Robin Hood song'. Bry, as he didn't seem to mind being called, had established a side-line for himself as a rather capable portrait photographer and the idea of pairing him with the once-again all-conquering behemoths of Brit-pop seemed to me all to good to pass up.<br />
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<a href="https://media1.popsugar-assets.com/files/thumbor/Re-tM9PW3-3ZS8wKVzBQWa_2fwc/fit-in/1024x1024/filters:format_auto-!!-:strip_icc-!!-/2010/10/42/5/258/2589278/f250d380746bed44_take-that-q-cover/i/Pictures-Take-December-2010-Q-Magazine.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="clear: right; float: right; margin-bottom: 1em; margin-left: 1em; text-align: center;"><img border="0" class="slide" height="200" src="https://media1.popsugar-assets.com/files/thumbor/Re-tM9PW3-3ZS8wKVzBQWa_2fwc/fit-in/1024x1024/filters:format_auto-!!-:strip_icc-!!-/2010/10/42/5/258/2589278/f250d380746bed44_take-that-q-cover/i/Pictures-Take-December-2010-Q-Magazine.jpg" style="background-color: white; border: 0px; box-sizing: inherit; color: #2f3846; font-size: 18px; height: auto; margin-top: 0px; max-height: 60vh; max-width: 100%; vertical-align: middle; width: auto;" width="153" /></a>Anyway, Bry was very nice and so too were Take That - straightforward, businesslike Gary; Artful Dodger-ish Mark; softly-spoken Howard; wry, knowing Jason; and dear bonkers Robbie. Aside from the fact they had about them a flapping, fussing entourage, four-fifths of the group seemed to me wholly down to earth and well-adjusted, and one appeared anything of the sort, though all but impossible to dislike. At one point, Barlow announced in his best professional Northerner voice: "Ey up, it's chocolate o'clock!" - occasioning an assistant to spirit into the room a tray laden with mugs of steaming builder's teas and many, different-flavoured bars of Green & Blacks.<br />
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The big question was why the Other Four had so readily welcomed back their erstwhile clown prince. By then, their Take That reunion had yielded two monster hit albums and the most profitable UK tour ever, while his once-stellar solo career had somewhat hit the skids following a couple of half-baked albums and a raft of very public 'personal issues'. The answer revealed itself just as soon as He arrived, a few steps behind the others. Precisely as I wrote it at the time, w<span style="font-family: "times" , serif; font-size: 12pt;">hatever strange combination of chemicals it is that allows certain famous people to change the temperature of a room whenever they enter it, Williams had it - and doubtless still has it - in spades. The others knew it too. Unbidden, when Bry asked them to line up for his first photo, Barlow and Owen, Orange and Donald split on two sides, so as to allow Williams to stand in the middle of them.</span><br />
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<span style="font-family: "times" , serif;">Later, Bry coaxed them outdoors to look over the vintage moped he kept in his yard. Williams it was who bestrode it. Upon sighting the rush-hour traffic crawling along the main road a stone's throw from the premises, he next set off towards it at a march, the others trailing in his wake. Crossing the road between a red, double-decker London bus and a black cab, he proceeded to hop up onto the wall that ran along the other side, the Thames now as his backdrop and where he was soon joined by his beaming band-mates. The five of them caused quite a stir: horns honked, people pointed and shouted from the top deck of the bus, the cab mounted the opposite kerb, its solitary woman passenger hanging out the rear window, the better to take pictures with her iPhone. Never for a beat was Williams not on display, the cockiest of peacocks.</span><br />
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<span style="font-family: "times" , serif;">Back inside Bry's, I got to view him at close quarters in the room set aside for our one-on-one interview. Strangely, it was furnished with nothing but for a pair of stools of Nordic design and a king-size bed draped in crisp white linen. "Ooh," he gasped devilishly as he entered, "this is a setting I'm used to!" We sat together for an hour, though he was never still; alternately leaning back with both hands clasped behind his head, or else crouching forward like a boxer at the bell, one or other leg </span><span style="font-family: "times" , serif;">furiously </span><span style="font-family: "times" , serif;">bobbing away. </span><br />
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<span style="font-family: "times" , serif;">He didn't do eye contact very much, knew his lower league football, the plight of his hometown club Port Vale in particular, and fair oozed charisma. All at once, he came off like the hyperactive lad from down the street and an alien being from Planet Pop. At one point, I asked him the main difference between Barlow and himself. "He's a well-rounded grown-up," he shot straight back. "Meat and two veg. Me? I'm meat and two veg, a Mars bar and maybe a cake, all on the same plate."</span><br />
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<span style="font-family: "times" , serif;">Ah, but that was then and this is now... As I write, it's mid-afternoon. The sky is one half pale blue with a smattering of lamb-fluffy white clouds, the other a uniform shade of days-old cigarette ash. The air is fresh from a recent downpour and so hushed that, stepping out onto our decking, I can hear the lapping of the sea from a mile downhill. The exact scene, and at the precise moment as in the picture posted right below. And why ever would you not want to share it?</span><br />
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<span style="font-family: "times" , "times new roman" , serif;">This Week I Have Mostly Been Listening To:</span></h3>
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<a href="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8rmEo5CjcNg">https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8rmEo5CjcNg</a></div>
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<span style="font-family: "times" , "times new roman" , serif;"><br /></span><span style="font-family: "times" , "times new roman" , serif;">John Mellencamp - Longest Days</span></div>
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That long, deep breath at the start and end of the day put to music...</div>
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<br />Paul Reeshttp://www.blogger.com/profile/17802572793315969562noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-5872994934716510802.post-33474197138303544142018-07-09T11:58:00.002-07:002018-07-09T11:58:34.746-07:00Hot Fun in the Summertime<div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;">
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There is obviously no great shakes in me noting that time speeds on, and all the quicker the older, or as I prefer it, more interestingly grizzled one gets. Yet here on the island, as spring has rushed headlong into summer, and apparently with barely an intake of breath between flowers bursting to bloom and the comings and goings of squadrons of marauding cuckoos, there have been a couple of properly jarring occurrences, one elemental and the other more personal.<br />
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In the first instance, the sun did not only sit high in the sky for most of May, but was still present to greet June and has barely been absent during daytime hours ever since. Or for a healthy chunk of night-time too for that matter, since our sunsets have consistently extended to eleven o'clock and sometimes later on these long and lovely evenings. In my experience at least, this is not the usual state of affairs up here. A couple of balmy weeks if you're lucky, yes. Anything even approaching an unbroken wave of fine weather, no, no, and furthermore, no.<br />
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So, it's been something of a shock to be woken daily at four-thirty am by the burst of a brilliant sunrise and with the land about bathed in many golden hues, the sea below utterly still, but full of latent drama and evocative as an oil painting, and the heavens above piercing blue and cloudless. One morning we watched rapt for four, five minutes as three Sea Eagles, parents and chick, soared in ever-widening, ovoid patterns high up over the local sea-loch, and along which neighbours of ours have recently spotted the passing of pods of porpoise and dolphin and three Minke Whale.<br />
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On another luminous day, a pair of Roe Deer skipped down our drive and across our plot which in a matter of weeks has erupted into a seductive tangle of vivid green, yellow and purple grasses and wildflowers. Altogether, it is almost perfectly blissful and especially with the air so becalmed that the ever-present chatter of birdsong is accompanied now by yet more sonorous background notes - and these the sounds of the sea lapping on the rock-dashed shoreline of Ficavaig Bay. <i>Almost</i>, and but for a brace of scourges, both of them species of insect.<br />
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In the blue corner, we have the monumentally irritating Scottish Midge. In the red, the even more repulsive, blood-sucking Common Tick. The former are present in their millions from early June through August, most notably on still, humid days and so incessant in their buzzing-biting persecutions they would have made a raging, swearing madman of, say, St Francis of Assisi. The latter are simply disgusting, burrowing into exposed skin to find a vein and from where they gorge themselves to bursting point.<br />
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As everyone hereabouts knows, the trick upon discovering protruding from oneself the bloated miniature rear-end of a Tick - and after resisting the urge to projectile vomit, or else pass out - is to extract it with the utmost care. This is done by prising it gently between thumb and forefinger out from its feasting and so that no part of it breaks off and is left embedded in your flesh. Since: a/ Tick's in rare instances can carry Lime Disease which is relentlessly unpleasant; and b/ No-one, but <i>no-one</i> in any case wants a vampiric parasite stuck in them for any longer than absolutely necessary.<br />
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This being the case and having found one of the little beasts feeding in my right thigh during an otherwise happy afternoon playing football with the boys in the Carbost play-park, it would have been an act of utter lunacy to allow my youngest to try out his until-then nascent Tick-removal skills. Except that is just what I did. And with the inevitable result that I was left with a decapitated Tick's head inside of me. In no way was this the unfortunate Charlie's fault and nor did he merit being on the wrong end of the barrage of expletives I inadvertently shrieked out, but then my ever-fertile imagination had conjured up a stomach-churning, bowel-evacuating image of the body-less horror as it carried on gnashing away at me like a rabid Pac Man.<br />
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Charlie took this in his stride, bless him. Whereas I went right ahead piling on the shame. For what it's worth, a few, and perhaps unnecessary words of advice for any fellow male readers who may in the future find themselves similarly blighted. Yes, you will have to endure a degree of discomfort in such circumstances and when a loved one is minded to dig the offending bit out of you with a sewing needle. But however long this process takes and no matter the depth of your pain threshold, trust me in this one thing... It will be manifestly for the better that you refrain from hysterically informing someone who has birthed children that, and tragically I quote here: "You have absolutely no idea how much this hurts!"<br />
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The other unexpected aspect of recent months has come with the regular influx of guests to our B&B annex room. Speaking as someone predisposed to take a dim, cynical and some would say thoroughly miserable view of the human race, I have been knocked sideways by the sheer friendliness, niceness and many kindnesses of folk in general. Most particularly when confronted first thing in the morning by a red-eyed, unshaven grouch brandishing a basket of food prepared for them by someone much more appealing. For sure, this much has done, and will continue to do my soul nothing but good.<br />
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In respect of me providing any kind of public service, I am operating here veritable continents outside of my comfort zone. Though having worked for more than twenty years on the fringes of the madhouse they call the music industry, it is a feeling I am well used to. An example to illustrate the point. Soon after Lady Gaga ascended to becoming a cast-iron all-singing, all-dancing phenomenon, we determined to put her on the cover of <i>Q</i>. In double-quick time an interview and photo session were arranged through her 'people' and from there things proceeded like clock-work right up to the very moment the former Stefani Germanotta arrived at the appointed location.<br />
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The Lady, you see, had come armed with a plan. She had with her a large cardboard box. Opening it with a flourish, she extracted from this box what can only be described as a strap-on dildo the size, and shape of a baseball bat, since that's precisely what it was. "You are going to put me on your cover in <i>this</i>," Gaga announced, or at least words to that effect. Furthermore, she stated, and but for the aforesaid dildo, she meant to be photographed naked from the waist down.<br />
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It had doubtless occurred to her that Britain's magazine retail collective might take a dim view of parading before their shoppers a bottomless woman, who also happened to be thrusting out at them a great big sex aid. All the more so since the issue in question would be going on sale smack bang in the middle of a school holiday. About that she did not care one jot, since she was a pop star and not at home to such trifles as the innate conservatism of Tesco, WH Smith <i>et al. </i>Very much unlike me, she would not be on the wrong end of a P45 should they deem not to stock the offending organ.<br />
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Since Gaga wasn't for getting her perfectly manicured hands dirty and I had stayed put at the <i>Q</i> office, there ensued a drawn-out battle of wills waged by phone and email between a handful of Gaga's minions (and yea Gods, an 'image consultant' was among them) and me. One after a-tiresome other, they relayed to me the fact that 'The Star' was not for diluting her art, or something equally ludicrous. Whilst I attempted to negotiate a compromise and not tear what was left of my hair out from my skull by the roots.<br />
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In the end, Gaga was cajoled into believing that secreting the dildo down a pair of leather trousers would be an even more subversive act and we got our shot. And it was quite literally just the one picture. For no sooner had <i>Q</i>'s photographer snapped his camera than Gaga took a phone call that left her shaking and on the verge of tears. We never did find out who was on the other end of the line, much less what ill tidings they imparted to her. But upon hanging up, she scooped up her things, dildo among them, and flounced out of the room without so much as a goodbye or by your leave, and never to return.<br />
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Now, I'm not really anticipating that anyone will turn up at The Passing Place brandishing an enormous phallus. But should they ever, I will be ready.<br />
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<span style="font-family: "times" , "times new roman" , serif;">This Week I Have Mostly Been Listening To:</span></h3>
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<a href="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=yP7XtCe7dkQ">https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=yP7XtCe7dkQ</a></div>
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<span style="font-family: "times" , "times new roman" , serif;"><br /></span><span style="font-family: "times" , "times new roman" , serif;">The Elephant Sessions - Summer</span></div>
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Based just across the country in the Black Isle and currently on repeat play, this band's all-round wonderful second album <i>All We Have Is Now</i> might have been made just for days such as these.</div>
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Paul Reeshttp://www.blogger.com/profile/17802572793315969562noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-5872994934716510802.post-64569440905777737462018-04-27T11:31:00.000-07:002018-04-27T11:31:41.330-07:00AKA... What a Life!<div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;">
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Since the turn of the year I have generally been wrapped up in the always half-expectant, half-tremulous act of setting out on a new book. Hence the lack of anything new here. The blessed thing is that, however many hours I can vanish away on the computer or poring over reference material, I am also able to make it seem as if time has paused from ticking inexorably on. And simply by opening our back door and walking out into the land about us.<br />
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Randomly, these are three relatively recent snapshots of this other side of things...<br />
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One clear, crisp Sunday afternoon back in March, Denise, the boys, a couple of their young pals and I trooped to the end of Ardtreck Point, a finger of land jabbing out into Loch Bracadale. In basic terms, the path, such as it is, takes you across a rough, invariably boggy expanse of moorland and up to the punctuation point of the peninsula, a squat, altogether inglorious box-lighthouse. However, the journey is rich with other details and most particularly the panoramic aspects it affords. Back at first to the Black Cuillin, still snow-capped at this time of year, and then over to the course of the Loch as it flows into the North Atlantic. The spectral-seeming peaks of Uist stretch along this horizon. As the accompanying photograph is intended to show, under a blue sky and a serene early-spring sun it is a spot that all at once brings about a kind of sensory overload and also a sense of being utterly at peace.<br />
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A few weeks later, we welcomed old friends to the island. Since it was their first visit to Skye, we took advantage of the bout of glorious weather we were having to 'do' one of the big draws - the Old Man of Storr. The path that winds steeply up to this impressive rock pinnacle is trod by thousands of feet each year, to the point of being overcrowded in summer. As a family, we have traipsed it any number of times and so that it is possible to become numbed to the sheer jaw-dropping, ages-old wonder of its vantage. The quickest counter to this is to see it as if through another's eyes.<br />
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On this particular day, the sun was again high in a cloudless sky and yet we trekked up into the snowline and where the air was cold and sharp as crushed ice. From the very base of the Old Man, we looked out along the spread of the Trotternish Ridge, its arrow-point rocky outcroppings as ancient as the Earth itself. Ahead, the land rose, fell and soared up again to the peaks of the Red and Black Cuillin some thirty miles distant. Off out to the east and over a deep blue sea which was as still and reflective as a mirror, Skye's smaller sibling isle Raasay, its contours a symphony of greens and greys, and beyond that the foreboding mass of the Torridon Hills on the mainland. Late in the afternoon, we spotted a Golden Eagle high up on the thermals.<br />
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Then just last week, I was driving home from my regular Thursday night game of five-a-side football in Portree. The game is a precarious, often as not fruitless exercise in pretending that I am not quite as old as I am, the drive not nearly so chastening. It was some time after 9pm, but not yet dark, the nature of the light bruised and brooding. From the turn off the main road at the Sligachan Hotel, my journey home is made between two flanks of craggy highland and from there alongside and up above the ribbon run of Loch Harport. It's around thirteen miles in total, but altogether magnificent. In the space of ten, fifteen minutes that night I spotted a fox stalking by the roadside, a Red Grouse, a hare, a Roe Deer, many flitting bats and at the crest of our driveway the ghosting shadow of a Tawny Owl.<br />
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The older I get, the more I find myself pondering the meaning of, well... life. What it is I am supposed to extract from our universal blink and good-God-it's-gone passage through the whole messy shebang and beyond the fact of my simply being. For all that it's worth and in the absence of any concrete evidence that I'm bound for a heavenly eternity, or otherwise, the conviction I have come to hold onto is that ultimately it all falls to precious, magical moments such as those I have just mentioned. To the states of grace that they engender and with it the vivid sensation of being alive and of being a microcosmic part of something so much greater.<br />
<br />
All that being said, let me put down what I've been smoking and hurry off into the creaking segue that it was meant to set up. And which is how even rarer it is to experience a state of grace through one's work and the everyday. In my previous life, I did, quite possibly, feel myself being transported by the way a photograph appeared on the page, or a set of type sat on a cover, or with other similarly aesthetic and entirely fleeting things. Interviewing certain people too, a McCartney, a Springsteen, full-force Adele or mad-as-a-badger Ozzy, there would moments of feeling rapt, suspended and as if in a completely different reality.<br />
<br />
Just once that was extended over an entire evening. The occasion was a dank Tuesday night in late-February or early-March of 2009, I forget which, and in the company of a certain Noel Gallagher. It was for the purpose of a cover story for <i>Q</i>, a profile piece. Noel elected to have this conducted over dinner in a favourite restaurant of his in posh Primrose Hill, north London. Noel being Noel, we had an upstairs room cleared for the two of us and an especially attentive waiter. It was then no more than a matter of months before Noel walked out on Oasis and he was in reflective, but expansive mood.<br />
<br />
"Do you know anything about wine?" Noel asked gruffly, perusing a wine list as involved and complex-seeming to me as an astrophysics text rendered in Mandarin. I told him as much and he barked back, "Well, it's a good fookin' job I do, isn't it?" Adding with a flourish: "Let's have a nice, full red, shall we?" When our waiter returned within a heartbeat cradling what was very evidently a white wine, Noel's face crumpled up in what was now that familiar way of his, which is to say like a cushion being sat on, and he let out a snickering laugh. At himself. Which rock stars almost never do and is one of the reasons why I liked him so much.<br />
<br />
We had met in passing a couple of times before this encounter. Witty as a stand-up comic, street-smart, self-assured, undoubtedly charismatic, but with the suggestion of a soft centre, he had struck me as an impressive figure indeed. That impression was re-enforced over the next several hours we spent together fine-dining, and as Noel picked back over the bare bones of the Oasis story. I don't remember ever laughing so much when interviewing anybody else, or feeling quite so certain that I could ask anything and it would get a full, reasoned answer that was also ever likely to spiral off into an only vaguely connected series of anecdotes.<br />
<br />
In short, he was brilliant company. Inevitably, the conversation kept coming back to his younger brother and the pair's notoriously fractious relationship. At one point, he told me about the most recent fight they'd had. The pair of them had gone drinking with mutual friends over Christmas and a debate had sprung up about the best Christmas single. Noel nominated Slade's <i>Merry Xmas Everybody</i>. Volubly, Liam had disagreed and gone instead for Lennon's <i>Happy Xmas (War is Over)</i>.<br />
<br />
"And from that starting point," Noel embellished, voice rising, "the two of us ended up out in the car-park of the pub, trading punches with each other. I'm in my forties, man. I can't be getting into fist-fights over Christmas songs."<br />
<br />
At another juncture and more shockingly, Noel revealed to me that he wouldn't allow Liam in his house and as such that he had not so much as set eyes on his nephew, two-year-old Donovan, Noel's first-born son with partner Sara MacDonald. "I don't know you well enough to tell you why, but I have my reasons," he said, darkly and before lightening again with a crack about Liam's fixation with his own hair or some such.<br />
<br />
Finally, he got around to summing Liam up and with a single, off-the-cuff line that has lingered with me longer and more memorably than any other that he uttered that night. "Liam is a really angry person," he began, leaning across the table, face deadpan and as he alighted upon his punchline. "He's like a man with a fork in a world of soup."<br />
<br />
<h3>
<span style="font-family: "times" , "times new roman" , serif;">This Week I Have Mostly Been Listening To:</span></h3>
<div>
<a href="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=iAzmsy4tfqo">https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=iAzmsy4tfqo</a></div>
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<span style="font-family: "times" , "times new roman" , serif;"><br /></span><span style="font-family: "times" , "times new roman" , serif;">The Little Unsaid - Day is Golden</span></div>
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<br />
Excellent new band from Oxford, also make it seem as if the clocks have stopped.</div>
</div>
Paul Reeshttp://www.blogger.com/profile/17802572793315969562noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-5872994934716510802.post-17037631100210886712018-02-07T11:44:00.001-08:002018-02-07T11:44:04.690-08:00Astral Weeks<div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;">
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<br />
<br />
By and large I am thoroughly enjoying our second full winter on the island. Last year's vintage, a couple of Atlantic storms aside, was pretty benign. This one has been a proper winter, and as such more uncertain, variable and interesting. For a start, there have been three significant snowfalls, each transforming the landscape into a wondrous vision of white peppered with black ravaged rock - and as well causing sundry vehicles to jack-knife off our hill road (although with no injuries to report, thankfully). A brace of mighty gales have also come roaring through these parts. Both times, I was woken in the dead of night by a sound like an angry express train, as a mighty gust worked up a head steam rushing down from the hills. Rain, sleet and hail there have been in abundance, and days when all has been becalmed, the sun low in a milk-blue sky and spring whispering ahead of its arrival.<br />
<br />
Sometimes different combinations, or even all of the above can occur within a span of hours and as was the case yesterday. Walking a three-mile circuit around Fiscavaig Bay, Denise and I were at first struck by how unseasonably warm it was and then assailed by a raw, frigid wind. Out came the sun once more, but with the caution of a bank of dark, pregnant cloud blowing in from out at sea. This loomed threateningly over the Western Isles, beyond which the next landfall is Greenland. Soon enough, all about had been turned a shade of burnt ash and snow began to fall like many frozen balls of cotton.<br />
<br />
Such schizophrenic unpredictability I find bracing and exciting, except that is when I happen to be on the wrong end of it. In respect of the latter, I think back to another eruptive afternoon last week and when we returned home to find both of our bins hurled a couple of hundred yards down the hill, and having scattered litter like confetti. That same morning, conditions in the village, just twenty miles distant, had been bright, twinkling and with barely a breeze. And trust me, there are few things quite so lacking in grace as the sight of a late-middle-aged man in sunglasses huffing, stumbling and sweating up a mud bank, and whilst attempting to chase down wind-flown yogurt pots and toilet roll.<br />
<br />
In fact, inclement weather and I generally don't do well together. Last weekend and once again in conditions that locals up here are wont to describe as 'blowy' (for which read: just a wisp off hurricane-force), I set off up our driveway, bent double and bound for the small industrial container that acts as our shed, several tonnes of metal being so much less susceptible than wood to getting blown to infinity. I meant to fetch the stepladders, but ended up being nearly decapitated by the container door, which got flung open as if it were made of paper and at the speed of a bullet.<br />
<br />
Reeling backwards and perhaps screaming, though the shriek I made was so high-pitched only dogs would have heard it, I fell back into a viscous puddle of mud, slush and rainwater. To anyone who saw me on my return trip, trudging gloomily towards the house, it must have appeared as though I had soiled myself and through the portal of a water cannon.<br />
<br />
The sad thing is that I had many years training, and experience of dealing with wild, mad and wholly unreasonable elements. Or rock and pop stars as they are otherwise known. There was, for instance, the occasion of <i>Q </i>magazine's 200th issue and for which we produced twenty different covers, each featuring a rock or pop deity such as David Bowie, Madonna, Kate Bush, Keith Richards... and, oh well yes, Johnny Borrell of Razorlight. In a last-minute moment that hindsight now tells me was madness, I decided to add one Britney Spears to this list.<br />
<br />
La Spears was at that precise point in time just out the other side of her gone-bonkers-and-shaved-all-her-hair-off nadir, but also several months pregnant. I told Britney's American publicist, a woman entirely devoid of humour and likely any trace of empathy or pity too, that we meant to shoot a head-and-shoulders portrait of her client, which indeed we did. However, Britney herself had other ideas. Arriving unaccompanied on the day of our New York session, she proceeded to strip down to a bikini and instructed our photographer to "shoot the bump." Naturally, he obliged and that being the single most striking shot of the day, I duly decided to put it on one of our covers. Which was when all hell broke loose.<br />
<br />
It transpired that Team Britney had also arranged for her to do a glamour shoot with an American women's glossy just as soon as she gave birth, and presumably had been lipo-suctioned back into pop goddess shape. The better to mask the fact that the teenager who first minx-ed into the global consciousness as a schoolgirl Lolita was now a mother of two with a propensity for calamity. Since our cover was an unexpected, unwanted impediment to this grand illusion, war was immediately declared to try and stop it from ever seeing the light of day and with me in the firing line.<br />
<br />
In the first instance, the aforesaid publicist sent an indignant email, threatening me with the full force of the law and sundry other forms of damnation should I attempt to press ahead with publication, and in spite of her having no legal ground whatsoever to stand upon. I ignored her, and so next she phoned me at the office and shouted at me for what seemed like most of a day.<br />
<br />
At one point, she brayed, "Are you even, like, <i>aware</i> of how much damage you are going to do to the Britney brand here?" Gently as I could, I pointed out that Britney had very recently been photographed driving away from a beauty salon and having neglected to remove her baby-in-a-carry-cot from the roof of her car. It was questionable, I suggested, whether it would be at all possible for anyone, or anything to visit further harm upon Spears Inc. She did not see the funny side. Rather, she went off and enlisted the services of a fellow, but even more ice-blooded publicist well-known for helping A-list Hollywood actors trouble-shoot their way out of self-inflicted tight spots.<br />
<br />
This borderline maniac, let us call her Kathleen, since that is her name, phoned me over the ensuing weekend and with the solitary tactic of shouting at me for longer, louder and with even greater menace than her colleague. As I was at that very moment pushing a shopping trolley around a Waitrose and more concerned with having to choose between the many varieties of canned chickpeas on offer, the effect of her ravings was somewhat lost on me. Inevitably and like our storms up here, the whole affair eventually blew itself out. Britney and bump went on and graced our cover and I never again heard from my two new friends.<br />
<br />
Inadvertently crossing Chris Martin left me with a rather more lasting impression. This happened at the <i>Q </i>Awards of 2010. Coldplay had scooped up a handful of golden <i>Q</i>s, the ceremony itself had zipped by like a well-oiled machine, and there we all were in the plush ante-room of a posh West End hotel doubled up for the day as our photo studio. Martin, the consummate politician, was gaily pressing the flesh of well-wishers and assorted other music biz folk, and at the same time as having his picture taken for the magazine and holding a conversation with me.<br />
<br />
Earlier that afternoon and during one of his acceptance speeches, he had brazenly come on to Kylie Minogue, also in attendance. In the joshing spirit of the day, I chided him about this, pointing out that as his words had been dutifully recorded for our website, his then-wife Gwyneth (this was pre- their 'conscious uncoupling') was bound to find out about his transgression.<br />
<br />
"Ah, we have an agreement," he replied airily. "I get a pass for Kylie."<br />
<br />
In retrospect, it would have been much better for me to have let this go. I was, though, giddy from the success of the event and fortified by a lunchtime beer or three. So, I offered the rejoinder that I hoped he had made much the same concession to the fragrant Gwynnie and mentally scrambled for an appropriate figure of male perfection to offer up by way of example. To that end, there were scores of celebrity beefcakes and/or brain-boxes I could have alighted upon, your Clooneys and your Goslings and <i>anyone </i>else who had not at one time been engaged-to-marry Gwyneth Paltrow.<br />
<br />
But no, the name that I spoke was Brad Pitt's, Mr Paltrow to-be before love's light dimmed for the couple and Martin entered the picture. I didn't meant to. To make matters still worse, I realised the enormity of my error even before I had finished speaking and so trailed off, guiltily and like a headlong car crash taking place in slow-motion: "Brad Pi...<i>iiittttt</i>." Before that last muffled 't' was out, Martin's face had darkened, his eyes narrowing to slits. Momentarily, and in spite of myself, I marveled at how the man who warbled <i>Yellow</i> with all the oomph of a trainee geography teacher had made himself appear so threatening. "You complete and utter... fucker," he exhaled, perhaps not unreasonably. And then he hit me. It was a quick, jabbing blow to the solar plexus and carried with it a surprising deadening effect. Enough anyway to make me audibly gasp.<br />
<br />
With that, he recovered himself, returning to his default unruffled state, smiling again and able to pass the whole thing off as a bit of lighthearted fun between international rock star and blundering oaf. Nevertheless, I rather suspect he would have enjoyed the spectacle of me falling on my arse in a puddle, seeing it as a kind of karmic intervention or some such and who could blame him? Doubtless, I am at times a very foolish man.<br />
<br />
That much will assuredly be made clear to me time and again over the days that remain of this second Skye winter, and as I am being made snow-blind, wind-blasted or otherwise inconvenienced by the ruthlessness of our weather. The trade-off will be in beholding the wild wonder of it all; the might of the forces unleashed and the soothing lulls that follow. A brilliant morning sunset streaking the sky pink, or the moon rising in a clear night sky of starry translucence. Seeing the aurora shimmer on a pre-dawn horizon, and as one might imagine magic caught in a bottle to look. Or the marvel of sensing one season passing into another and of the wounded land beginning to heal and rejuvenate.<br />
<br />
The glories of all that are surely worth a punch off Chris Martin, or anyone else for that matter.<br />
<br />
<h3>
<span style="font-family: "times" , "times new roman" , serif;">This Week I Have Mostly Been Listening To:</span></h3>
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<span style="font-family: "times" , "times new roman" , serif;">https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=12rUOLtbQDk</span></div>
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<span style="font-family: "times" , "times new roman" , serif;"><br /></span><span style="font-family: "times" , "times new roman" , serif;">Bob Dylan - Shelter from the Storm</span></div>
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<br />
Brilliantly ravaged and windswept, you say...</div>
</div>
Paul Reeshttp://www.blogger.com/profile/17802572793315969562noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-5872994934716510802.post-84981247164967975002017-12-23T08:33:00.000-08:002017-12-23T08:33:58.187-08:00I Won't Back Down<div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;">
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<br />
Yes, yes - I know I said after the last one that I wouldn't be doing any more of these. So easily am I swayed when it comes to such things, it took just a couple of people to say, 'Actually, I was quite enjoying reading the blog,' both deeply appreciated nevertheless, and a few additional views for the supposed parting shot, for me to be convinced to carry on, carrying on.<br />
<br />
In other respects I am nothing like as susceptible to turning, and not necessarily for the better. This much was made glaringly apparent to me last weekend. It was the occasion of Skye's second annual Santa Fun Run and also marked the almost-end of our first full year on the island. The former event sends a couple of hundred-plus souls dashing - or alternately huffing and puffing - up and down a two-mile course around our capital village in Santa outfits for a good charitable cause and imbued with both festive and community spirit. It is hugely enjoyable and the clue of it is in the title - 'Fun Run'.<br />
<br />
That last bit escaped me altogether at 2016's inaugural running. As most people trotted gaily together in loose groups of families and friends, I charged, red-faced, to the near-front of the field, mentally at least face-palming several young children and a pensioner out of my path. Whilst others were exchanging banter about their Christmas plans, the weather and, quite conceivably, who the fearful berk was who had just sprinted by, I was, well, being a fearful berk. I came in eighth and felt shamefully triumphant about it, even in spite of the fact a nine-year-old boy had comfortably, even disdainfully held off my crazed lunge for the finishing line.<br />
<br />
This year, I resolved, would be different. For one thing, we know more far people about the place now, which I reasoned would mean that I too could this time gab the Santa Run away and not be compelled to go off like a lone twerp. For another, immediately after my 2017 'triumph', I could have sworn I was the recipient of several disapproving looks in the local Co-Op and one of which was from a man of the cloth. I supposed that it may just be God's will that I suppress my near-psychotic competitive edge, at least when in Yuletide costume.<br />
<br />
Unfortunately, things started to go very wrong for me from the moment the Skye Pipe Band struck up a typically rousing tune with which to march we two-hundred and forty-six runners to the start line in Portree's Somerled Square. I'll get my excuse in early. Our eldest, Tom, challenged me to a race. More accurately, he had, in so many words, suggested that I was a near-decrepit has-been. A more rational, less neurotic and, well, better parent would have smiled this taunting off and let the wee scamp/mouthy git scurry off into the far distance, secure in the knowledge that a generational baton had been passed on to him. I, though, am not that parent.<br />
<br />
Oh, I didn't mean to beat Tom (and tragically, I had no doubt that beat him I would). No, I schemed to run the race tight on his shoulder, give him the sense of being in the heat of a battle, and than at the crucial last moment, the sprint for the line, let him nose ahead - only just, mind you - and claim victory. Not once did it occur to me that in the process of carrying out this - as-it-turned-out - delusional plan, I might again appear to others as someone taking the whole thing all too seriously.<br />
<br />
Especially so since sticking to Tom like glue required me to be right with him from the start line, and he took up station at the very front of the pack. I must tell you now, there is no dignity to be had from pushing by, or else shoving to one side many packs of small children to get to the head of the queue in a Santa Fun Run. Even worse, pictorial evidence of my ultimate progress exists in cold, harsh print. This Thursday gone and prominently, the local paper, the <i>West Highland Free Press</i>, ran a photo of all of us Santa's readying for the off. Among lines of beaming cherubs, there was I, a solitary, overgrown fool with a beard and a half-mad glint in his eye.<br />
<br />
I was not even pulled up by having an actual Santa, fat, jolly, fully bearded and clanging a bell, summon us to our marks and fire us on our way. Not at all, since I streaked from out of the blocks, audibly tutting at a toddler who had the temerity to get under my feet, and up the steep-ish climb that begins the race. In my own mind I was proceeding like a projectile fired from a cannon. In reality, I was soon wheezing and sweating. In my worryingly blurry vision, there was Tom, dancing ahead of me and growing steadily more distant.<br />
<br />
As it happened, there he stayed, many yards beyond me and maintaining a quick, even pace without visible effort, whilst I reared unsteadily on like a rabid pit-pony and always in his arrears. Worse, it was only at the halfway point and as I was able to look back down on the rest of the field, that it occurred to me that I was the one adult who was making anything like such an effort. I would like to say that it was then that I came to my senses and eased off, having been granted the merest soupcon of wisdom, but instead I set off again downhill as if someone were cattle-prodding me along.<br />
<br />
The personal nadir of the whole experience came some time later and after the run, as everyone was gathered about the square, drinking hot chocolate and eating mince pies. Loudly, an amplified voice hailed: "Will Paul Rees report to the Christmas tree to collect his prize." Right then, I would have preferred to be anywhere and doing anything else.<br />
<br />
Almost as penance, and well, tugged along by young Charlie and his friend (both of them grinning maliciously), I was transported to the aforesaid tree, whereupon it was announced to all and sundry that I had 'won' the adult race (there was no rejoinder about there being precisely no competition for this prize, or even that several lads yet to reach teenager-dom had given me a good spanking in the overall scheme of things). Rather, I was handed a big box of chocolates - Heroes, entirely inaptly - and made to stand for a photograph with the two of my fellow victors who had also bothered to show for the ceremony - the seven-year-old winner of the girls' race and a stout, elderly gentleman who had walked the course for Cancer Research.<br />
<br />
The winners of the boys' and women's races had already gone home by then, possibly not wanting to have any further association with me and for fear it would somehow contaminate them socially. At all events, doubtless not a scrap of the smattering of applause that accompanied the prize-giving was directed at me. At least not judging from the battery of scornful stares being aimed at me from among those watching on, and that's just to mention my wife, children and a couple of others who until the events of that morning had been friends of mine. Wishfully, I am now again imagining that next year will be different, and while as well knowing not-so deep down that it won't. If a half-century of being me has taught me anything it is that I am a man of rigid, eternal habit.<br />
<br />
Another Christmas still stands out for me. This was in 1994 and when I was invited to have Christmas dinner round at Ozzy Osbourne's house. <span style="font-family: inherit;">Rock’s enduring wild man was just then emerging from self-imposed
retirement and his return to action had been marked in America by the launch of
his official website. At that time this was still a new-fangled concept and Ozzy’s wife
and manager, Sharon, had arranged for the first twenty American fans to log onto the site to be transported across the Atlantic and whisked to rural Berkshire to meet with their hero at the couple’s
rambling estate.</span><br />
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<span style="font-family: inherit;"><br /></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: inherit;">The formidable Sharon had hired a fleet
of caterers to serve turkey and trimmings in a candle-lit dining room otherwise
adorned with a towering Christmas tree. I was dispatched by <i>Kerrang!</i> magazine to document the
festive tidings, but arrived to find Ozzy in mutinous mood. I had met Ozzy on
several previous occasions and was re-introduced to him now by Sharon, once he
had stopped rampaging up and down their baronial staircase like a caged animal.
Though within ten minutes he had convinced himself I was a cocktail waiter and loudly
demanded that I be put to work. “Ignore him,” Sharon soothed me, adding as if
to explain all of her husband’s actions: “He’s a daft old sod.”<o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: inherit;"><br /></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: inherit;">A series of comical episodes ensued just
as soon as the over-enthusiastic Americans pitched up, gaggles of them roaming
the house in search of souvenirs and Ozzy stomping off after them. “<i>Sharon!</i>” his Brummie-accented voice boomed
from a far-flung wing of the house at one point. “Someone’s nicked the bog roll.” </span></div>
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<span style="font-family: inherit;"><br /></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: inherit;">Dinner
itself passed without undue incident, and once Sharon had shepherded her light-fingered
guests off the premises, I joined Ozzy in the library for our agreed interview. </span><span style="font-family: inherit;">Skittish at the best of times, Ozzy set
off at once on a rambling and wholly libelous discourse intending to ‘out’ a score
of his fellow rock stars as gay. I asked him instead what he did for a hobby. At
this his eyes widened and he leaped from the sofa. “A fan of mine is a Colonel
in the US Marines,” Ozzy enthused and with added expletives, throwing open a cupboard, “and he gave me </span><i style="font-family: inherit;">these</i><span style="font-family: inherit;">.” These being two pairs of
infra-red, night-vision goggles.</span></div>
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<span style="font-family: inherit;"><br /></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: inherit;">And so it came to pass that on a frigid
December’s midnight, Ozzy and I embarked upon a stroll around the verdant hills
and woodland encircling his home, he wearing nothing but a T-shirt and jogging
bottoms and me tramping and stumbling in his wake. In the inky blackness, we viewed each other in a luminous green glow.
A downpour had turned the ground underfoot into thick, viscous bog and I suggested
we might incur Sharon’s wrath by trailing mud across her carpets. “Bollocks to
that,” Ozzy trumpeted for he had a mission in mind. He meant for us to seek out and count his recently acquired herd of Fallow Deer.</span></div>
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<span style="font-family: inherit;"><br /></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: normal;">
<span style="font-family: inherit;">The deer remained entirely elusive for the hour that we
fumbled about in the dark. </span><span style="font-family: inherit;">Eventually, Ozzy shrugged and concluded in a
baleful voice: “Fuck ‘em, let’s go home.” He, at least, knew when he was beaten.</span></div>
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This Week I Have Mostly Been Listening To:</h3>
<div>
<span style="font-family: "times" , "times new roman" , serif;"><a href="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=MVTSAUZYRz8">https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=MVTSAUZYRz8</a></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: "times" , "times new roman" , serif;"><br /></span><span style="font-family: "times" , "times new roman" , serif;">Brian Fallon - If Your Prayers Don't Get to Heaven</span></div>
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<br />
If Bruce Springsteen were thirty years younger and heavily tattooed...</div>
</div>
Paul Reeshttp://www.blogger.com/profile/17802572793315969562noreply@blogger.com4tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-5872994934716510802.post-33816625852599325192017-11-16T10:00:00.000-08:002017-11-16T10:00:29.430-08:00Thinking of a Place<div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;">
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<br />
This week I entered my fifties. I would like to say that I did so with grace, dignity and in the grip of a boundless sense of optimism, born of the belief that age is but a number. Except in reality I began the day attempting to run seven-and-a-half miles into a gale whilst wearing Lycra, next listened to some Therapy? (very apt that), drank half a bottle of wine, and afterwards sunk into a kind of maudlin trance during which the only words I seemed able to speak were 'all', 'go', 'where', 'did' and 'it', often as not in that precise order. The members of my family may well have been temporarily concerned for my mental well-being - but if so they each of them hid it well by either taking care of the rest of that bottle (one party), or else scoffing great slabs of my birthday cake (the other two), and then running about the house shrieking "Old Smurf" and laughing hysterically (all three).<br />
<br />
Determining that Adam Ant was spouting a load of old bollocks when he maintained "ridicule is nothing to be scared of," I shuffled outside to escape this torment and skulked into the night. The intense blackness that is usual up here at this time of year suited me very well. However, it was my blessing that it was as well a frigidly cold evening and so the sky was entirely clear of cloud.<br />
<br />
This being a 'dark sky' area, when I looked upwards I was able to regard a dazzling spectacle of stars and other celestial bodies (Jupiter, Venus, Saturn and Mars were all distinguishable even to my untrained eye). The entrancing opaqueness of the Milky Way was clearly apparent. Out of the murk and under the starlight, I could also make out the sheerness of the hills and mountains round about, a slightly inkier shade of black. Altogether it was magical and enough by far to stop this self-pitying grump in his tracks, metaphorically shake him by the collar and sonorously intone something along the lines of: 'Good Lord man, behold your world!' Though that might have been as a result of the wine.<br />
<br />
At all events, I'm over turning fifty and ostensibly because I'll soon enough be over full stop, so better by far to revel in the act of simply being. And more particularly being here, up on 'our' hill, overlooking 'our' loch, on 'our' island and in our home. To appreciate the grand wonders: the first dusting of snow on the Cuillins' peaks; the snake-shapes the sea water is made into by a strong wind; dawn's light dancing down to us from over the hillside; our daily visits by deer, fox, eagle, owl, and a female Hen Harrier that swoops by the front of the house as if on display. All such moments make the heart and soul skip and sing.<br />
<br />
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<br />
<br />
Equally so the smaller wonders: the trickle of people who until that precise moment were complete strangers and that have knocked on our door and welcomed us to the area; the fact that we never bother to lock up the house, or car anymore, because there is no need for us to do so; the boundless cheer with which our postman bursts through that same door each afternoon; and, since that's quite enough door action, the so-far inexhaustible sense of disbelief that comes with driving down the track that leads to the house and, at the bend, gasping at the fact that the building is even there at all.<br />
<br />
All that being the case and after more than a year of sending out these scattershot missives from the island, now is as good a time as any for me to stop waffling on about our place and simply <i>be </i>in it. This then is the last of these reveries and as such I don't feel obliged to find an excuse for segueing into an otherwise shameless bout of name-dropping...<br />
<br />
Truly, though, I did find myself the other day attempting to match up experiences from my old life to that of walking down to our local beach, carefully prising razor clams from out of the sand, and cooking and eating them that very afternoon, as we did just the other Sunday. Two especially sprung to mind and since both entailed me meeting... 'heroes' is the wrong word; 'artists I hold in the very highest esteem' perhaps more accurate, but a crap way of expressing as much... Anyway...<br />
<br />
The first encounter was with the essential two-fifths of the Rolling Stones. The occasion was a photo shoot for an anniversary issue of <i>Q</i> and the venue an opulent suite at London's swish Mandarin Oriental Hotel off Hyde Park. The subject was Keith Richards. I went along purely to be able to be in the same room as Mr Rock-and-Roll incarnate. Brilliantly and completely unexpectedly, Keef brought along with him for company one Charlie Watts.<br />
<br />
What an afternoon that was. Keef, as one would have hoped, arrived looking like he had stepped from off the deck of a pirate ship; his hair made to rattle by all the metal trinkets he had bound up in it, eyes a-twinkle, a laugh like a wheezing gas pipe. He proceeded to drink most of a bottle of vodka from a pint glass. He did apply a measure of pineapple juice, but barely enough to merit a mention. When he was done with the magazine's business, I had my picture taken with him. He threw an arm around my shoulder, cackled something in my ear that sounded like it might have been hilarious, and for sure doubled Keef up, but alas was completely unintelligible to me. And then he was gone from the room, like an apparition, off to wreak his very Keef-ness on some other fortunate.<br />
<br />
Charlie was even better. Immaculately groomed and the perfect gentleman, he took himself off to an armchair in a corner of the room, and there sat cross-legged, quietly regarding his band-mate of many, many years with a kind of affectionate amusement. I went and sat with him for an hour or so and he couldn't have been more attentive. He spoke of his love of jazz and the horses he kept, but also asked me about my life - where I lived, did I have children? - and actually appeared to be interested in my answers, to which I was utterly unaccustomed after by then twenty-plus years of interacting with rock stars.<br />
<br />
Even still, right up to the moment Richards' manager Jane Rose arrived on the scene and as the afternoon was drawing to a close, I assumed he was merely being professionally courteous. "You've introduced yourself to the magazine's editor I see," Rose chided Charlie as she came over to join us, and at which his eyes widened and he spasmodically uncrossed his legs. "I'm dreadfully sorry," Charlie gasped, thrusting out a hand for me to shake. "I just assumed they had sent you up from downstairs to empty the ashtrays and clean the room."<br />
<br />
For my part, I wasn't at all taken aback. I had long ago accepted as fact that I wasn't built or able to sweep through the Corridors of Rock as if I belonged. A decade earlier and on my first encounter with U2, I had been bid by their PR to troop unaccompanied into their Dublin studio and introduce myself to Bono and the Edge, the pair of them still overdubbing onto tracks meant for their <i>How to Dismantle an Atomic Bomb </i>album. Gingerly, I poked my head round the door and to find the two of them sprawled on an old leather couch, Edge strumming a guitar, Bono singing into a hand-held mic. Bono looked up and motioned for me to come sit beside him.<br />
<br />
There I tried - and surely failed - to casually recline for the next twenty minutes and all the while the pair of them sang and played. When Bono at last spoke to me, he said this: "Did you leave them upstairs?" "The others?" I replied, somewhat flustered. "Yes. Yes, I did." "No," he pressed on patiently. "I meant the pizzas." Oh yes indeed, he had mistaken me for the lad from the Domino's round the corner and there ensued much merriment at my expense.<br />
<br />
The second meeting I have so recently recalled was with Bruce Springsteen and occurred in 2009, just a few weeks before he headlined the Glastonbury Festival. I had spent a significant portion of my seven-year editorship of <i>Q </i>to that point attempting to coax the Boss into speaking to the magazine, a task that required dogged persistence since he didn't do sit-down print interviews all that often and only with a select few publications. Over that period and on this quest, I had trailed him, and his gate-keepers from London to Frankfurt to Milan. Not that this was a remotely selfless act. Fact was, I just wanted to interview Springsteen for myself and more than I did anyone else.<br />
<br />
Eventually, all that buttering up paid off and I was flown to Houston, Texas to witness Springsteen and the E Street Band tear up the local arena. The plan was for me to then take a commercial flight up to Denver, where I would see the next barnstorming show on the tour and before which I was promised a half-hour interview with Springsteen in his dressing room. Like all such best-laid's, things didn't quite work out that way and much for the better.<br />
<br />
What actually happened was that Springsteen invited <i>Q</i>'s photographer and me to join him and his band on the private jet piloting them up to Colorado. In and of itself, that journey was for me pinch-yourself-remarkable. As we flew over the great expanse of the American heartland, various members of the E Street Band dropped by our table (made of chestnut since you ask, and surrounded by plunge-pool-deep leather seats) to bid us welcome. First, the Big Man, Clarence Clemons, suitably larger than life, and next 'Little' Steven Van Zandt, as funny and foul-mouthed as Silvio Dante, the strip club-owning mobster character he played so expertly in <i>The Sorpranos</i>. Finally, Springsteen himself sauntered up the aisle and to regale us with tales from the earliest days of the E Street Band and when they would travel America by rickety old bus.<br />
<br />
I did grab thirty minutes with him in his dressing room that evening and he couldn't have been more gracious. When we were done, Barbara Carr from his management company pulled me to one side. "Bruce doesn't feel that he's been able to give you enough time," she told me solemnly. "Right after the show, he and Patti are flying home to New Jersey for the Easter holiday while the band are going on to LA. Bruce is taking the jet. If it's OK with you, he would like for you to join him and he can talk some more with you on the flight." I didn't even attempt to suggest that I might have give this offer some consideration. I may even have let out an audible squeak.<br />
<br />
So there we went again, Bruce and I (and apart from his wife, his personal assistant and two or three others, it really was just Bruce and I), flying private class into the boundless dark of an American night, as Springsteen himself might have put it. We talked some more, sat side by side in the middle of the plane, and about which I can't much remember. Later, when he had returned to sit with Patti and I assumed gone off to sleep, since it was two in the morning, and as I was looking down on the lights of Chicago thousands of feet below, I felt a bump in the seat next to me. I turned to find him beaming at me, a pair of reading glasses perched on the end of his nose.<br />
<br />
"Thought you might like to see what I have on my iPod," he said. He spent the next hour or so flicking me through the machine's contents, which he had arranged by musical genre. As one would anticipate, he had a library of American singer-songwriters that ran from Woody Guthrie to Bob Dylan and up to Ryan Adams, but also a vast selection of 'punk rock' (as he filed it). He told me that his youngest son took him out to club shows in New Jersey and how he would stand at the back of the room watching Gaslight Anthem, Bad Religion and sundry others do their thing. Admirably, he had remained a fan heart and just as it was with Keef and Charlie, I couldn't imagine I would ever again feel more like I had been whisked off and deposited in a kind of dreamland.<br />
<br />
Until now. Now, I feel that way every morning that I am lucky enough to wake; every time that I look out of the window; and every night that I'm lying in the dark and listening to the deafening silence.<br />
<br />
And so, with heartfelt thanks and much appreciation to all of you who have read and troubled to respond to these half-cocked waxings of mine over the last year or so, I will here take your leave and head on back to living in this moment and the ones to come...<br />
<br />
<br />
<h3>
<span style="font-family: "times" , "times new roman" , serif;">This Week I Have Mostly Been Listening To:</span></h3>
<div>
<span style="font-family: "times" , "times new roman" , serif;">https://joshuajamesmusic.bandcamp.com/track/broken-tongue</span></div>
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<span style="font-family: "times" , "times new roman" , serif;"><br /></span>
<span style="font-family: "times" , "times new roman" , serif;">Joshua James - Broken Tongue</span></div>
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<br />
The song currently sound-tracking our mornings, and he lives up a remote hillside too.</div>
</div>
Paul Reeshttp://www.blogger.com/profile/17802572793315969562noreply@blogger.com2tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-5872994934716510802.post-64625971404441759832017-10-01T01:38:00.000-07:002017-10-01T01:38:00.147-07:00A Sort of Homecoming<div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;">
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<br />
It is a mid-Saturday afternoon on Skye as I write. The wind is chasing a bank of white clouds across a watery blue sky and the shades of green and grey radiating from the craggy peaks in the near-distance are vivid beneath a lemon coloured sun. Such is the view from my new office window. A short walk down the corridor and turn right, and there is a still more dramatic vista through the expanse of glass that fronts our open-plan living room and this one of rugged heath, deep blue sea and way over yonder the mighty elevations of the Trotternish Ridge. An occasional car labours up the single-track ribbon road that we look down upon, but we are just as likely to see plunging gannets, a soaring sea eagle or an inquisitive red deer, such as the young doe that crossed our car's path yesterday morning.<br />
<br />
Exactly one week ago, we moved at last into our island home. Altogether, it took us a month over four years to complete our journey from chocolate box English village to here. Try as I might, I still haven't found the words to adequately convey the overwhelming force of emotions that last weekend brought about. Among this battery, though, there was what I can only describe as a kind of euphoric disbelief. Not only that we had reached a point I had hardly even dared to dream of, but that a fully-formed house - a home - was now perched on the hilltop plot that until two months ago had been a half-acre of scrub, dirt and rock.<br />
<br />
The depth of that feeling has gone on growing all through this week. As I've woken to roaring winds and with the sunrise, the dawn sky over the ocean pinkish and pregnant. And then again enjoyed long, lazy evenings listening to music and being struck time and again by how the ever-changing light here constantly reveals wonders and secrets over the land, and so that no scene ever looks precisely the same from one hour to the next. This much is endlessly transfixing, magical seeming, and even more so now that every last box is unpacked and there is no piece of tat left for me to haul up into the loft.<br />
<br />
Also, it must be said that the last few weeks for the four of us, and as a net result of all of the above, have been very strange indeed. Now, I can do common or garden surreal. Indeed, for the longest time it was my business to be and operate in such a state. Why, and in no particular order of outright oddness, I have at one time or other done all of the following:<br />
<br />
1/ Paraded on stage before several thousand young Japanese dressed up as a pink teapot. This was the doing of the all-too-briefly pop-tastic Mika. Touring the Far East in what now appears to be the final flush of his fame, young Mika put on a splendidly camp show that was one part acid trip to two parts Mad Hatter's tea party, and which incorporated the intermittent appearance of various costumed extras who got to cavort around a stage-set done up to be like a giant doll's house.<br />
<br />
For a handful of diverting days, I trailed this merry spectacle from Hong Kong to Seoul and finally to Tokyo, where it was that Mika, scamp that he was, determined that I should join in the fun. So it was that at a certain point in the show, I was hauled off to the wings, had the papier-mache teapot pulled down over my head, shoulders and to my knees and was shoved out into the spotlight. Whereupon I immediately knocked over a keyboard stand and nearly impaled a shocked female backing singer on my spout. In my defence, one could barely see out of any of the costumes, though no-one else wreaked quite so much havoc as I.<br />
<br />
2/ Undertaken an epic, sphincter-tightening fourteen-hour flight from the South of France to somewhere nearby Luton through a howling storm and in a six-seater light aircraft piloted by none other than Iron Maiden singer Bruce Dickinson. The self-proclaimed 'Air Raid Siren' has long fancied himself a bit of a boys' own adventurer in the guise of a heavy metal Biggles, so relished the idea of taking off his eggshell-fragile aircraft into the teeth of a furious gale and the dead of night. I, on the other hand, have a pronounced fear of flying that renders me a gibbering wreck and would rather have been anywhere, doing anything but putting my life in the especially hairy one's hands. But then, I had next to no choice in the matter.<br />
<br />
"If you want a bloody interview with him, you'll have to go with him on his bloody plane," Dickinson's manager Rod Smallwood, a formidable Yorkshireman, had told me hours earlier, and back when I was still watching a solo Dickinson attempt to entertain several thousand bikers at a festival staged at an ugly race-track a few miles outside of Marseilles. The measure of his success in this matter was that at the midpoint of his set, the crowd parted so as to let through a hulking, bearded gentleman with a hessian sack slung over his shoulder and who was intent on marching up to the very front of the stage. It soon transpired that the sack was filled with potatoes and our fearsome-looking friend proceeded to throw them, one after another and with unerring accuracy, at Dickinson once he had reached his preferred vantage point and for the next thirty minutes or so.<br />
<br />
Smallwood serenaded me onto Dickinson's Cessna with a verse or two of Buddy Holly's <i>That'll Be the Day</i>, a malicious glint in his eyes, as well he might since he was catching a British Airways charter home. Whereas we, which is to say Dickinson, his co-pilot, a photographer from the <i>News of the World</i> so inebriated that he could have cared less and I, spent far too long in each other's company being bucked and buffeted like a barrel in a white water rapid. "If you happen to see ice forming on either of the wings or spot a bigger plane coming our way, don't assume I've noticed and do shout," Dickinson advised me as we reared over the Channel. I was so traumatised by then that I could only squeak a reply. Eventually, gloriously, we landed at a small airfield in rural Hertfordshire and with all the grace of a fridge being tipped off a cliff, and after which I had to listen to Dickinson ramble on about his hopelessly unfunny Lord Iffy Boatrace 'comic' novels for what seemed like several weeks.<br />
<br />
And 3/ During the course of twenty entirely memorable minutes had Britt Ekland swear at me and my testicles crushed as if in a vice by Marilyn Manson. The occasion for this unique two-hander was the annual <i>Kerrang!</i> magazine awards, which were typically the scene of decadence and depravity (for just one tawdry example, at the event the year before this one I - and a few hundred others - watched the three members of Green Day lasciviously pass between them a female dwarf).<br />
<br />
That year, we had enlisted the erstwhile Swedish sex kitten as our surprise guest of honour and for the purpose of presenting Manson, then styling himself the 'God of Fuck', with the evening's principal trophy. Things didn't quite go according to plan, but then they never did. As <i>La </i>Ekland tottered stage-wards in skyscraper heels, she slipped on off all things a carelessly discarded slice of lemon and tumbled to the floor in an undignified heap. Several pierced and tattooed gentlemen rushed to her aid, and she was carried up on to the stage like an injured queen.<br />
<br />
As magazine Editor, it fell to me to meet her there. I had procured for her a chair, and as she was sat in it, I leaned over and, gallantly I thought, asked her how she was feeling and whether or not there was anything else I could do to help. I wasn't to know that the mishap had, in fact, resulted in a broken ankle. For a beat, the one-time Bond girl gazed up at me with the blinking eyes of a wounded rabbit. Then a sneer curled at her unnaturally big lips and she snarled back at me: "Oh, fuck off."<br />
<br />
Britt recovered her poise enough to hand Manson his gong, a golden 'K', but since she was by then weeping with pain, I was detailed to accompany him to the media room and to pose with him before a scrum of photographers. The two of us lined up shoulder to shoulder before this mob and Manson whispered to me, "Say cheese, motherfucker." At which point, he reached a bony arm down between my legs, sunk the long, sharpened-to-a-point fingernails of one hand into my scrotum and squeezed so tight my eyes watered like a burst dam. No-one laughed more than I when his next album flopped.<br />
<br />
Yet for all that, nothing has made me reel inside quite so much as sitting down to watch our house go up in one day for a second time and on prime-time ITV1. Not that in total 'our' episode of <i>Robson Green's Coastal Lives</i> didn't make Skye look ravishing, or living here seem such a boundless adventure and with a plethora of fascinating, funny and wholly inspiring folk to happen across, but good Lord, it's discombobulating to see precisely how it is that you look and act at the very moment that the biggest thing you have imagined becomes reality.<br />
<br />
In the case of the rest of the family, this was with a level of delight that was entirely appropriate, but not embarrassing. However, I didn't so much cross over that line, as bound beyond it at full pelt and with a stupid, slack-jawed expression on my face. For who knows what reason, I greeted the raising of the house walls with a ridiculous, fit-like dance, hopping from one foot to the other in rapid succession and as if I were being subjected to a series of violent electric shocks.<br />
<br />
This whole routine lasted only a split second, but enough to make me recoil into the sofa in abject horror, accentuated by my untamed onscreen appearance which made me think of nothing quite so much as Santa Claus on hunger strike. Truly, it was awful to behold, and what's more the show's producers elected to repeat this same shot no less than three times throughout the course of the programme. Doubtless, they thought they had captured us in our most natural states and likely they had, but if only mine were not that of a berk.<br />
<br />
All of this I shall very probably continue to ponder over the days and weeks ahead, and perhaps before too long will feel returned to a more normal state. For now, here in this incredible-seeming new home of ours, even time itself seems made of elastic, moments stretching out, the beat of the days appearing to me to be longer, the simplest of things - rain on the window, mist over open ground, dew on the grass - otherworldly and miraculous.<br />
<br />
It is as if I, and we are seeing such things for the first time and with fresh eyes, or even beginning again, which I guess was the point all along.<br />
<h3>
<span style="font-family: "times" , "times new roman" , serif;">This Week I Have Mostly Been Listening To:</span></h3>
<div>
<span style="font-family: "times" , "times new roman" , serif;">https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=PejBkU4-1fk</span><br />
<span style="font-family: "times" , "times new roman" , serif;"><br /></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: "times" , "times new roman" , serif;">Tom Waits - Ol' 55</span></div>
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The first song played in the new house and never sounded better or more evocative.</div>
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Paul Reeshttp://www.blogger.com/profile/17802572793315969562noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-5872994934716510802.post-54225136666357158532017-08-01T10:06:00.002-07:002017-08-01T10:06:40.360-07:00Strange Days<div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;">
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<br />
Over the last four years there were a number of things I had anticipated happening on the day that our house finally went up. In the event, two proved to be spot on. These being that it would pour with rain. And that seeing the frame of our virgin home being driven onto its plot on the back of a lorry, unloaded by crane and erected in just twelve hours by a handful of willing and very able hands would be an overwhelming experience. However, at precisely no point in all of that time did I envisage that also present on site would be a nine-strong TV crew and Robson Green, but there they were with the rest of us, wet, cold and very much in the flesh.<br />
<br />
Indeed, Robson Green's was the first face we saw as we turned into our soon-to-be new driveway at eight am on the morning of Saturday 15 July. The man well-known for acting in such dramatic fare as <i>Wire in the Blood</i>,<i> </i>hosting the piscine orgy that is his <i>Extreme Fishing</i> show and singing a smattering of best-not-remembered '90s pop hits alongside his somewhat less adaptable <i>Soldier, Soldier </i>sparring partner, the lolloping Jerome Flynn, emerged at a gallop through the spray and mist thrown up by a Biblical deluge. Already sodden and windswept, he all but flung himself into the back seat of our car, squeezing in alongside Tom and Charlie. Whereupon he shouted out, "Are you insane?" and introduced himself as if to old friends. Clearly, this one was going to be a very strange day indeed.<br />
<br />
Some context might be in order. Several weeks beforehand, our architects had called to tell us of an approach made to them by the producers of <i>Robson's Green's Coastal Lives</i>. They were planning an episode devoted to Skye for the second series of the ITV1 show and to participate wanted a family that had moved up to the island from across the border and were having their own house built. I think the exact words used were 'young family', but in the case of me at least someone was evidently prepared to make an exception. At all events, we were asked if we would be interested. I would like to say that I spent restless hours ruminating over the offer, carefully weighing up the preciousness of our privacy and the possible pitfalls of subjecting the boys to such scrutiny, versus the benefits that might accrue for our future B&B business. But I didn't. In fact, I instantly shrieked, "Yes!" and at such a high pitch that it pricked up the ears of several dogs around the neighborhood. In fact, so enthusiastic did I sound that Denise mistakenly assumed I was having an out of body experience.<br />
<br />
The thing is, in my previous life I got asked to appear on TV quite a bit and never failed to acquiesce or enjoy it. Invariably, and as those who suffer with insomnia and have found themselves at some ungodly hour watching repeats on Channel Five will testify, I appeared as a talking head on shows with titles that included the words 'One Hundred,' 'Worst' and/or 'Most Shocking'. Doubtless, I would pop up for mere seconds at a time, but enough for one or other acquaintance of ours to have seen me and be left wondering at the ridiculousness of the world. I say 'doubtless', because whenever it was that these shows aired, I could never bring myself to watch <i>me</i> on the telly.<br />
<br />
That would have been all too much of a horror, since I imagine I always looked like nothing so much as a disgruntled potato. What's more, I was meant to be informed but pithy, but fear that the act of sound recording would have stretched my Black Country vowels like elastic and so that instead I came across as a man still mastering the art of speech.<br />
<br />
As such, I think I can get away with dismissing rampant ego for my seemingly boundless willing to 'do telly'. Rather, I much prefer to subscribe as much to my being inquisitive and eager for new and different experiences. In this regard I am very likely delusional, but for sure TV has served me with some enduring memories. For instance: appearing live on CNN to explain how, and furthermore why Elton John had accused Madonna of lip-syncing at the <i>Q</i> Awards on that very same October day in 2004. Or having an almost comically plummy-voiced BBC reporter venture to me the opinion that Radiohead's Thom Yorke was, and I quote, "a terrible c**t."<br />
<br />
Most indelible of all was a short-lived appearance I made on <i>The Weakest Link</i>. Back when I was editing <i>Kerrang!</i>, I was invited to appear on a one-off, music-themed edition of the Beeb's light-entertainment behemoth. Ludicrously given my involvement, this was billed as a 'celebrity music special.' Someone within closer grasping distance of musical stardom, a local church organist perhaps, had evidently pulled out at the last minute. The in-a-pickle producers had spotted a broadsheet newspaper piece on the glories of heavy metal that I had just then written, panicked and before I knew it, I was being whisked off to BBC Elstree Studios on a springtime Tuesday afternoon in the back of a chauffeur-driven car.<br />
<br />
Among my fellow guests on this ill-starred .<i>..Link</i> were glam-rock vixen Suzi Quatro, middle-England's one-time soprano of choice Leslie Garrett, unreconstructed DJ Dave Lee Travis, Carol Decker from '80s one-hit wonders T'Pau, and the Bard of Barking himself, Billy Bragg, who seemed even more surprised than I to be in the midst of this decidedly odd company. Each of us was granted our own dressing room and with a glittering star stuck to the door. 'Paul Reeves' read the name tag pinned to mine, instantly dispelling any inflated sense of self-worth that I might otherwise have felt.<br />
<br />
Cementing my place in the day's pecking order, I was the first of the 'celebs' to arrive by at least an hour. Not long afterwards, and whilst helping myself to a pot of tea and fruit plate in my misspelled sanctuary, I heard a door handle being furiously rattled in the corridor outside and then an expulsion of expletives. Gingerly opening my own door, I found the show's acid-tongued dominatrix, Anne Robinson, looking all at once forlorn and furious. Spotting me, her expression softened. "My dressing room is locked," she pleaded.<br />
<br />
In advance of the day, I had been told I should make no attempt whatsoever to fraternise with La Robinson, since her tyrannical act was dependent on her being able to convincingly convey utter contempt for me and also my fellow contestants. However, it seemed unduly harsh to leave her stood out there in a corridor, so I invited her in for tea. She accepted and we proceeded for the next half-hour or so to have a most diverting chinwag. I can't actually for the life of me recall most anything that we talked about, though I seem to remember trying to explain death metal to her at one point.<br />
<br />
From there on, it was downhill all the way for me. Everyone else turned up in the nick of time: Quatro charming; Garrett effusive; Decker scary; Bragg nonplussed; and Lee Travis just like you would expect a man who nicknamed himself 'The Hairy Cornflake' to be. We were all of us made to line up behind a thick, black curtain drawn across the at-that-point-all-too-familiar <i>...Link</i> set. And so that an over-jolly compere could introduce us, one at a time, to the audience of blue-rinsed ladies and perhaps mentally ill and/or long-term unemployed single men.<br />
<br />
Each of the others got a loud cheer, even Lee Travis, but for Billy Bragg and even he was afforded polite applause. Yet when I was announced it would have been possible to hear a pin drop from several miles away. I walked out to utter silence. As I mounted my podium, one old dear loudly inquired of another, "I know the others, but who's <i>he</i>?" Angry-looking Anne stalked onto the set right behind me (cue the most effusive cheer of all) and the quiz-show antics began. I thought I did OK in the first round, answering my three allotted questions correctly. Nevertheless, and to my consternation, and how shameful that is to me now, I received two nominations to be ousted. I was only saved from an embarrassingly premature exit by hoofing soul belter Shola Ama, who recorded a one-hundred percent rate of failure and got yanked instead.<br />
<br />
Directly afterwards, I had an even greater shock. As a fleet of technicians and clipboard-armed assistants rushed onto to the set during the break in filming that followed each round, Leslie Garrett sneaked up and pinched me on the bum. Next, she whispered in my ear: "Sorry about voting you off, darling, but no-one knows who you are." Aghast, I somehow flustered through the second round, but slipped into a blind panic in the third, breaking out in a cold sweat and wrongly answering a succession of questions barked at me by my erstwhile tea-time companion. "You are the weakest link," Anne Robinson eventually told me, bringing my torture to a merciful end and leaving the way clear for someone not entirely anonymous to win (Mr Bragg as it happened).<br />
<br />
Aspects of our <i>...Coastal Lives</i> adventure were nearly so surreal, though nothing like as barbed. Robson Green was a consummate pro, as relaxed and down-to-earth seeming as his jobbing persona. His crew could not have been more patient or attentive towards putting us at our ease. Even still, it was impossible to escape the sheer bonkers-ness of being stood out there on an exposed hillside, watching our house being built before our very eyes, and all the while the bloke who once co-crooned the Righteous Brothers' <i>Unchained Melody</i> to the UK Number One spot was asking Denise and I what had brought us to this point and how it felt now that we were here.<br />
<br />
We were all brought back together again the week following, and thanks to the vagaries of TV to film what will be seen on screen as our first meeting with the Green machine. This took place harbour-side in Portree, Skye's capital and under blue skies and a milky sun, and before a gaggle of curious onlookers, tourists from overseas most of them and so doubly bemused. Once this scene-establishing footage had been shot, the boys and I were shepherded aboard a boat and sent off on a fishing trip with our rod-bearing host. Now, I'm not going to make any pretense toward dispassionate coolness here: it was fantastic. All the more so since young Charlie has, for reasons still mysterious to me, been an obsessive-compulsive consumer of <i>Extreme Fishing</i> since toddler-hood and Tom fetched an enormous eight-pound Pollock out of the sea with almost his first ever cast.<br />
<br />
All things being equal, we will be both in our new home and 'on' ITV1 some time in September. Some semblance of normality ought to have returned to our (coastal) lives by then. For now, though, Denise and - to a lesser and more ineffectual extent - I are caught up in a mad dash to ensure that a kitchen, two bathrooms, a wood burner and much else besides are delivered to us in correct order and good time, and fretting about countless other details big and small. For me, there is also the looming and more chastening concern of once again appearing before a not insignificant portion of the nation as a babbling root vegetable. Then again, no-one ever said this self-building lark would be easy...<br />
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<span style="font-family: "times" , "times new roman" , serif;">This Week I Have Mostly Been Listening To:</span></h3>
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<span style="font-family: "times" , "times new roman" , serif;">https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=R3OpXan8CD0</span><br />
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<span style="font-family: "times" , "times new roman" , serif;">The View - Grace</span></div>
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Because at times such as these, it's good to be made to feel wide-eyed and exuberant all over again.</div>
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Paul Reeshttp://www.blogger.com/profile/17802572793315969562noreply@blogger.com6tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-5872994934716510802.post-64302708515438355792017-06-18T11:02:00.003-07:002017-06-18T11:02:30.211-07:00Running to Stand Still<br />
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A solitary lucid thought raced through my mind as I crossed the finishing line of the Skye Half-Marathon the Saturday before last. At that precise point, seven minutes under two hours after I had set off running from almost the exact same spot outside of Portree High School, it was the only part of me that was able to speed. Nor was it anything specifically to do with the torture that I had just inflicted upon myself. Not, 'When will any sense of feeling return below my knees, and how much is that going to hurt?' Or, 'What is the correct spelling of defibrillator, and where might I find one?' Rather, in that flash I determined that this was the very week that we had truly arrived upon Skye, and in the sense of putting down roots, both real and symbolic.<br />
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The half-marathon had for me been a totemic event, something that I had challenged myself to do but only once we were actually domiciled here. Four years had passed between me formulating this conviction and joining one-thousand other souls on the start line, and ten months since we had moved up here from England. What's more, that very same week, ground was also broken on our plot in Fiscavaig and meaning that our house-build has begun in earnest. The picture above is how the site looks just over one week later and having been levelled, the foundations dug down, and with what those of us - very tenuously - connected to the trade refer to as 'Big-Bastard Bricks' being delivered.<br />
<br />
In truth, I don't actually know what the 'B-BBs' are specifically meant for, but then neither have I quite yet got to grips with any aspect of how things have, or will continue to progress, and because no-one connected to the build has told me. In fact, in the best case scenario a collective decision appears to have been taken among these various parties that Denise is our person in charge and as such that just she should be admitted into their circle of trust. Denise knows everything from the angle to the sea at which the house will be sited, right down to the cubic volume of our septic tank. I don't get these memos. This much I can understand and even appreciate, since whenever it is has been in my adult life that conversation has turned to matters practical or DIY-related, I have never failed to drift off and think of something else instead. The B-side of Motorhead's first single for just one example. I don't 'do' jobs requiring manual dexterity and craft, and as anyone proficient in the same can tell from the merest study of the vacant and/or clueless look on my face.<br />
<br />
The worst case scenario is more troubling to me. This is that they haven't even realised, or troubled that I am part of our family and much less the house that we will eventually live in. Unfortunately, two developments have made this option seem all the more likely. Firstly, in all correspondence that Denise now receives from the amorphous mass that is 'them', I am referred to, if at all, as 'Mr Jeffrey'. Clearly, this is not my name. It is instead Denise's maiden name, and the one that she has retained, but the use of it in this context means that I may as well not exist. I am Denise's someone else, otherwise invisible and wholly unimportant.<br />
<br />
In the second instance, just last week Denise and I took two friends with us up to the see the plot. The two men working on site that day greeted Denise warmly and as a pleasantly familiar face. Our one friend is also a builder and so was soon talking shop, whilst his wife, who is unarguably more attractive than me, was at the same instant on nodding and smiling terms. I may as well have not been there. Indeed, after fifteen-minutes of small talk had passed between the five of them, everyone looked surprised that I still was and when I happened to sneeze. The builders especially regarded me as if I had appeared out of thin air, and like a remedial sprite.<br />
<br />
All that being the case, the pace of on-site developments has taken both of Denise and I by surprise. There we were one minute prevaricating over whether or not to have an IKEA kitchen and a concrete or wood floor, and the next these decisions have to be made now, this instant. Along with the precise amount and position of plug sockets, lighting tracks and OSB-walling that we want, and the confirmed size of our hallway recess cupboard, window sills and toilet. In short, there is all of a sudden so much to do and in what seems to me like double-quick time.<br />
<br />
I happen to do better and happier at a steadier, more considered pace. That much was also demonstrated by the half-marathon. For the first six miles of the race, vaulting hills and all, I was going along at a decent, if unspectacular clip. Then the local pipe band appeared on the scene, as they are ever wont to do. I love a pipe band in all the ways that I don't the English variation of a trad-folk grouping, Morris Dancers. And which is to say that I have never yet wanted to do the members of a pipe band serious physical harm. The combination of pipes and drums, I find, stirs the soul and quickens the heart. Mostly this is a very good thing, but not in the middle of a long-distance test of endurance and when they are belting out something bracing. Up till then I was, in proper athlete speak, 'managing my run'. Straight afterwards, and in perfect time to the whir of the pipes and tattooing drums, I lengthened my stride, lifted my knees and was off up a steep incline like a man possessed. I sustained being out of my comfort zone for as long as it took their sounds to fade into the wind, and by when I was left so depleted that I lumbered the rest of the way home with all the assurance of a one-legged man in an arse-kicking context.<br />
<br />
This, I am now afraid, will go on to become a metaphor for the next three-to-five-to-who-really-knows-how-many months that I am to spend as our build's spare part. Inevitably, I will try to carefully consider each option and decision that is thrust upon me, only to get overwhelmed, panic and require Denise to act as our energy gel and get us over the line. It really should not be this way and I know that. In the days when I went out to work, I did educate myself to multi-task and to manage such things as deadlines, budgets and teams of people. I may even at one time have been mistaken for someone diligent, organised and capable. What's more, what passes for the professional me can still pull off the same act of transformation whenever required.<br />
<br />
I have someone to thank for this being the case, and that is Madonna. Yes, <i>that </i>Madonna. I had been Editor of <i>Q</i> for not more than three months when Madge, as we never once failed to refer to her, wheeled what was to be her ninth album, <i>American Life </i>onto the launch pad. Part of the promotional campaign scheduled to lift it off was a <i>Q</i> cover interview, and which Madge herself stipulated be conducted by whoever, or even whatever was then Editor of the magazine. Our meeting was scheduled to take place in Los Angeles and fatally, in advance of it I listened all too keenly to office gossip pertaining to grilling the erstwhile Queen of Pop.<br />
<br />
One particular tidbit stood out as news to me. This was the revelation that Madge would have her personal assistant on standby and close at hand whenever it was that she did an interview. This doubtless cossetted and over-praised individual would be instructed by her boss to enter the scene after it had been running for precisely thirty minutes. If Madge was finding the exchange ordinarily tiresome, she would instruct her minion to bring it to a close in another ten minutes and not more. If, on the other hand, she had found herself taking against her inquisitor, Madge would up and leave right there and then. A predecessor of mine had fared so badly with Madge that she had actually shouted out for her PA after just fifteen minutes of being sat with him.<br />
<br />
Off I went to LA and consumed with thinking how this odd little dance would play out. Madge and I were due to meet in the restaurant of the Beverley Hills Hotel at 4pm on an atypically wet California afternoon. I got there ten minutes early and was shown by a liveried waiter to a table and chairs at the very far end of a room roughly the size of a football pitch. It could seat hundreds and would normally have been heaving with Hollywood's movers, shakers and poker brokers, but Madonna had got it emptied for her personal use. She arrived twenty minutes late.<br />
<br />
The fabled PA, a young, officious looking woman in a business suit. accompanied her to the door and was then dismissed. Madge was still at that time married to Guy Ritchie and affecting to be an English Lady right out from the pages of <i>Country Life</i>. As such, she was wearing a tweed jacket, jodhpurs, riding boots and of all things a flat cap. She walked the hundred yards from entrance to me at a slow, deliberate pace and ramrod straight, her boot heels clicking on the tiled floor like gunshots. When she reached our table she stuck out a hand and said, 'Hello, I'm Madonna'. I refrained from saying, 'Of course you are.'<br />
<br />
Like all exceptionally famous people, in the flesh Madge looked just like herself, only more so. She was softer featured than I had anticipated, prettier too. Her eyes were unwavering and as dark and unfathomable as plunge pools. When she spoke, it was in an accent that veered, all in the same sentence from LA Valley Girl to New York hipster to Sloane Ranger, and back again. She didn't even bother to make small talk, but got straight down to business, instructing me, 'Shoot.'<br />
<br />
There was so much that I could, and had intended to fire at her. For example, just then a new generation of pneumatic divas had emerged to challenge Madge for pop-tastic dominance, the Britneys, Christinas and Pinks, and for perhaps the first time she was in real peril of being made to look out of touch and grasping. <i>American Life </i>wouldn't help her on that account either, since it was one of her weaker efforts and on it she had made a risible, cack-handed attempt at rapping. Then there was her stuttering acting career and recent adoption of the ancient Jewish religious teaching, Kabbalah, and this after she had outraged the members of the religion that she was born into, Catholicism, by boffing Jesus in the video to <i>Like a Prayer</i>. And also <i>that</i> accent, her horsey garb and the fact that her movie director husband was widely perceived of as being a one-trick posh-o who had lucked out.<br />
<br />
About all of which I proceeded to ask her precisely nothing. I froze, stunned by being in such close proximity to her sheer Madonna-ness, and instead allowed her to waffle on unchallenged about such things as yoga, reincarnation, karma, English beer, her horse and much else that was bollocks. I was so fearful too that she would prematurely summon her power-dressed foot soldier that I sat largely mute. Right on cue, the PA did indeed appear, but Madge waved her airily away. Of course she did, she was enjoying an uninterrupted conversation with herself and about herself. Eventually, she filled up more than an hour of tape. Barely one word of what she said would have interested anybody but for Madonna and the fault for that was all mine, so badly had I failed to run the interview.<br />
<br />
Even then, I somehow conspired to make her not like me. Attempting to fashion a silk purse out of my sow's ear of a piece, I resorted to observational detail and recalled how Madge had turned up that day with a sniffle. At one point, she pulled a tatty looking tissue out of her jacket pocket and into it blew her nose. I had made a mental note of the fact that Madge, like all of us, took a quick glance at what she had expunged before returning the tissue from whence it came, and committed that to print. Soon after the interview was published, Madge was an afternoon guest on Chris Moyles' Radio 1 show. Moyles raised with her the tissue incident and as I had reported it. She groaned and sighed audibly, and then in that see-saw accent of her's snapped: 'Not true. That guy was an asshole.'<br />
<br />
Since when I have made sure never to go into an interview unprepared, and as far as is possible to dictate the direction that it takes. Such was the genesis of the better me. However, outside of actual or virtual office hours, the other me, hapless and intermittently hopless, has remained the dominant force. Of late, I have liked to think that our builders, architects and project manager have somehow detected the more assured, ballsier me, and assumed that I am able to take a back seat and delegate duties to others. Far closer to the truth, of course, is that they actually have appraised me drifting off at the mere mention of 'self-levelling concrete', 'untreated Larch panels' and the like and a solitary lucid thought has also occurred to each of them, and that being just the one word: 'Eejit.'<br />
<h3>
<span style="font-family: "times" , "times new roman" , serif;"><br /></span></h3>
<h3>
<span style="font-family: "times" , "times new roman" , serif;">This Week I Have Mostly Been Listening To:</span></h3>
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<span style="font-family: "times" , "times new roman" , serif;">https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2O6duDDkhis</span></div>
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<span style="font-family: "times" , "times new roman" , serif;"><br /></span>
<span style="font-family: "times" , "times new roman" , serif;">The National - The System Only Dreams in Total Darkness</span></div>
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Terrific return and the video also features what I like to think of as a completed wooden house, built to budget and without undue stresses having been brought to bear on its owners...</div>
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<br />Paul Reeshttp://www.blogger.com/profile/17802572793315969562noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-5872994934716510802.post-84000450173917996852017-04-30T12:02:00.000-07:002017-04-30T12:02:37.555-07:00Band on the Run<div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;">
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This week we received a cursory note from our architect to tell us that the decisive Building Warrant for our new house had been granted and as such work would begin on it imminently. Those few lines of email were to me at least all at once thrilling, greatly symbolic and laced with elements of foreboding. Altogether, reading it, over and again was to feel as if I were on a small boat that had slipped its moorings and was being cast out towards a distant, wholly entrancing but also ever-unpredictable horizon. In the first instance, there is the entirely obvious anticipation for seeing what is now a scrub of rough heath transformed into one's home and everything else that will entail. In the second, and following on from our initial move up to Skye last summer, this is the next leaping off point in a journey that began for us the better part of three years ago now.<br />
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The foreboding bit? Well, that can be broadly categorised as 'The <i>Grand Designs</i> Effect'. Way back in the dim mists of time, or whenever it was that I was safely employable in an office environment, Denise and I would watch Kevin McCloud's do-it-yourself behemoth, with its seemingly infinite number of repeats, all too often. Denise as if it were made of chocolate and me with a sick feeling of dread. For having seen in every episode otherwise salient-appearing couples driven to the edges of madness and bankruptcy, Denise would inevitably announce to the final credits: 'Wouldn't you love to do that?' To which the only sane answer would be, 'Are you fucking kidding me?' Though the more prudent one always was: 'Um, possibly. Would you like a cup of tea?' Back then, the prospect to me of having any part in a house build, much less my own was about as appealing as the administration of boiling oil by hosepipe enema.<br />
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Quite why I subsequently performed such an extreme about-face is still a matter of some personal reflection, but doubtless much to do with the fact that I no longer troop into a fixed place of work. And also that my wife would very likely be able to cajole me, using gentle, but inexhaustible degrees of encouragement and enthusiasm, to flush molten liquid up my bum. Anyway... so it is that for the next several months there will be room for nothing in my thoughts but for the specifics of a fitted kitchen and bathrooms, the choice between wood or concrete flooring, what precisely an air-reclamation-or-something heating system is and the like.<br />
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At the very same time, for me there is another associated landmark that is looming ever nearer. Way back when the Big Move became a subject for serious debate between us, I also resolved to run the Skye Half-Marathon and what's more to do it in my fiftieth year of bumbling haphazardly through life. And smite me down, both beast of a run and what young Tom described to me recently as 'old-but-not-that-old' have subsequently rushed towards me like twin express trains from Hell.<br />
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I've been training for the former event for several months now. Taking into account that all my running for the previous ten years had been done around rural Lincolnshire and on terrain the consistency of an only slightly scrunched pancake, I have to say that I don't think it's gone badly. For sure, I have had mishaps involving free-ranging livestock and on one occasion, during a local running club race around a vertically-inclined forest track, damn near coughed up my diaphragm having missed a marker sign and as a result ran four miles more than the designated ten-mile distance. BUT... despite this I have grown used, if not remotely fond of the fact there is nowhere to run on Skye that doesn't involve putting oneself at the mercy of both the elements and big bastard hills.<br />
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To that end, I have coped to the extent that just before Easter I was able to run the full just-over-half-marathon-distance-and-really-quite-challenging course and not require the services of an air ambulance. Consequently, as race date, Saturday 10 June fast approaches I am very much looking forward to the whole thing. Much that the same could be said about my turning fifty. The explorer James Cook, Steve McQueen, Gianni Versace and the self-proclaimed King of Pop himself, Michael Jackson all got to be fifty and see what good it did them. No more moon-walking that's for sure. Why, just the other day I happened to be stood over an idle iPad screen and caught sight of my reflection. That's something I won't be doing again, since the features of my face appeared to me like runny clay or melting candle wax. In too many respects, I sag and droop where I really don't want to.<br />
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Worse, there's no bloody escaping 'fifty' in this of all years, marking as it does the anniversary of the Summer of Love, apogee of the Swinging Sixties, and the release of the Beatles' <i>Sgt. Pepper's...</i>masterpiece. These now seem to have come into another, and all but vanished world to the one we now inhabit and so I suppose must I. One of the last major interviews I conducted as Editor of <i>Q</i> was with Sir Paul McCartney. I can't remember now what occasioned it, but we had no less than David Bailey shoot the Fab One for our magazine cover and over the course of a month I was whisked down to Macca's bucolic Sussex recording studio, backstage at London's O2 Arena and to the Hollywood Bowl in order to meet and speak with the great man.<br />
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And in terms of presence, charisma and all round been-there-done-that-ness, 'great' really is the only word that can apply to James Paul McCartney of Speke, Liverpool. Sat across from him, one to one, I found it all but impossible not to be distracted by the very fact that he was, in fact, Him. As much has never happened with regard to anyone else that I've interviewed, but then he is a Beatle and as such different from most everyone else by simple dint of having changed the world. Altogether from stepping briefly into his world, I gleaned tidbits of information that I found stupidly fascinating... Among these that he collects vintage instruments; has every aspect of his day divided into half-hour segments [including chatting to me, lunch and meeting an old school-friend he hadn't then seen in twenty-odd years]; that he has - and uses - a set of Beatles fridge magnets; smells of nothing so much as clean, fresh air, dresses to the right, and can never fail to command your attention whenever it is that he begins a sentence with these words: 'That reminds me of when me and the lads...'<br />
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As well, I had in his company numerous giddy, time-has-stopped moments. He took me into the recording room at his studio and played piano for me and me alone. I watched him soundcheck <i>Get Back</i> and Wings' <i>Jet </i>to an otherwise empty Hollywood Bowl, sat front row and centre on a brilliant, Pacific blue California day. Spotting me in a backstage corridor afterwards, he rushed over and gave me a bear hug and didn't make it seem at all like an affectation. That night, I was sat next to Jack Nicholson as McCartney and his stellar band played a three-hour show that contained more extraordinary pop songs than any other single human being can lay claim to.<br />
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Ultimately, I also gained an absolute sense of how unreachable, and unattainable all of this had made him and in spite of him seeming such a Very Good Bloke. Since the piece was meant to be a life profile, I simply had to ask him about his ex-wife Heather Mills and although his 'people' had suggested to me in advance, and in the nicest possible way, that I didn't. That required the use of the oldest trick in the journalist's handbook, which is to say that as it was bound to be my most difficult question to him, it would be my last.<br />
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So there we sat, he and I, on an expanse of well-plumped cushions in his candlelit dressing room at the Bowl, an hour before show-time. I spent twenty-nine minutes bowling harmless Beatles and Wings-related deliveries for him to bat back, and then unleashed my bouncer. 'You've written some of the greatest love songs in popular music,' I said. 'But what was the last one and who was it for?'<br />
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At this McCartney sat back, frowned and furrowed his brow as if he were lost in thought and chewing over the specifics of an answer. Then after a few seconds of reposeful silence, he leaned back toward me, his eyes trained on mine, smiled genially and said, whilst at the same time patting me on the knee: 'Nice try.'<br />
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<h3>
<span style="font-family: "times" , "times new roman" , serif;">This Week I Have Mostly Been Listening To:</span></h3>
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<span style="font-family: "times" , "times new roman" , serif;">https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=MWrGSa-Asdk</span><br />
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<span style="font-family: "times" , "times new roman" , serif;">Paul McCartney & Wings - Maybe I'm Amazed</span></div>
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Who and what else?</div>
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<br />Paul Reeshttp://www.blogger.com/profile/17802572793315969562noreply@blogger.com4tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-5872994934716510802.post-40351500700252739632017-03-20T03:43:00.000-07:002017-03-20T03:43:11.313-07:00Gimme Shelter<div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;">
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Yesterday evening, Denise, Charlie and I went for a tea-time stroll just down the road from our house in Portree and around Scorrybreac headland. That once again we are able to get out and about at such a time is indicative of the fact that we have all but come through our first winter on Skye. Spring is nudging its way towards us. Just then it appeared to be right on the cusp of blooming with the sun sinking in a pale-blue sky and the sea calm and the colour of a fresh bruise. The clocks go forward this coming Sunday, of course and we will then be looking out for puffin, razorbill, guillemot and other open ocean birds to make land for the spring nesting season.<br />
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Aptly enough in this time of new beginnings, we are also expectant that next month our building contractors will begin to dig the foundations for our new home. Since we are at present deep into the process of getting the last building warrant signed off by the Highland Council, I have begun to feel as if my moorings are being unpicked and that I'm about to slip out from my comfort zone. Plenty of people who've already had houses built up here have tried to reassure me that I'll adapt in no time to the ebb and flow of the process. However, to date not one of them has seen me try - whilst swearing a lot - and then fail to change a plug or a washer on a tap.<br />
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Since we moved up here last August, Denise and I have also been told on several occasions that if remoteness is our thing then we simply must visit Sutherland. So last month we did. For those unfamiliar with the finer details of the geography of Scotland, Sutherland is located around 150-miles upwards from Skye and occupies the very north-western corner of the British mainland. By area, it is Scotland's fifth largest county but also its least populated. Indeed, per square mile there are fewer people in Sutherland than there are anywhere else in all of Western Europe. What there are in abundance instead are soaring mountain ranges [the county is home to the two most northerly Munros - Ben More Assynt and Conival, great slabs of limestone both], ranging lochs, vast swathes of russet-coloured moorland and squelching peat bog, and mile upon mile of dramatic coastline which is characterised by plunging clifftops and brilliant white-sand beaches.<br />
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It is very, very beautiful indeed. And utterly wild. We drove the five hours from Portree to Durness [at population 400 a veritable conurbation in these parts] up the A835 coastal road - just recently fabled as the North Coast 500 route. The further north we got, the more the wind howled and the rain lashed down. However, upon arriving in Durness, hunkered at the foot of rolling hills and facing out to an epic expense of battleship-grey sky and turbulent ocean, we parked up and set straight off on foot to investigate Faraid Head. One of the most exposed points of the British mainland, The Head, as I imagine ruddy-faced locals must call it, is a fingertip peninsula that pokes out into the roaring seas of Pentland Firth and wind-blasted year round.<br />
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The image above was captured on route, looking back towards Durness and gives some idea of what an ill-tempered day it was - though without the attendant sensation of having one's skin flayed off. Truly, local social services may yet still be fielding calls about the sadistic interlopers who dragged (quite literally) their young offspring out into the teeth of a ferocious gale. But what a walk. The photograph was taken at the mile-mark and from the far end of Balnakiel Beach, a picture-postcard crescent of sand that is one of the best spots for surfing in the British Isles. Not that anyone but us was intrepid/stupid enough to be out in the tempest.<br />
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From there, we proceeded on through a second mile of vaulting sand dunes, alien in their hulking aspect, headed across open moorland for still one more and finally reached an ominous clifftop that fell hundreds of feet to the rearing seas below. Crazily, we were stood closer there as the crow flies to Reykjavik than London and as if at the very end of the world.<br />
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By the time we battled back to Durness village (imagine if you will having to headbutt a passage through a brick wall and whilst wearing an ill-fitting bobble hat), a blue-painted lorry and trailer had turned up and filled the little public car-park right opposite our bunkhouse. This was the 'Screen Machine', a mobile cinema that throughout the year travels to the most out-of-the-way parts of the Highlands and Islands and brings these communities the twin delights of the Pearl & Dean theme tune and fold-down red-cushioned seats. At 8pm, I joined a fifth of the village in paying £7 to watch <i>La La Land</i> from inside a metal box. Outside the hoolie had got even more formidable and as we watched Ryan Gosling and Emma Stone cooing to each other, we were buffeted from side-to-side. I felt quite discombobulated by the end and nothing to do with the fact of the film being a musical.<br />
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In total, I found Durness and its surrounds both intoxicating and inspiring. We went and met Paul Maden, a jovial sort who had moved with his partner up from Edinburgh and on a whim started a gourmet chocolate company. As one does. Eleven years since it was founded, Cocoa Mountain exports its sinfully scrumptious creations around the world and to customers including American senators, Russian oligarchs, Arab sheiks and Yoko Ono.<br />
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They're based a mile down the beach road from Durness and within the Balnakiel Craft Village, a square of squat grey buildings built in the '50s by the MoD as a Cold War early warning station but moth-balled. Today, the Craft Village is in more charming use and also home to a couple of wee art galleries and a handful of other artisan businesses. I could have whiled away the day investigating them all, but it was chucking down and unlike the Cocoa Mountain cafe they didn't serve hot chocolate. Cocoa Mountain are tremendously proud of their hot chocolate and rightly so, since it is a rich, velvet-smooth elixir that tastes simply divine. Unfortunately, it also had the knock-on sugar-rush effect of cementing both our boys' teeth together and rendering them deranged. We had no option but to make our apologies and leave.<br />
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Next day we paid a visit to see Danish ceramic artist Lotte Glob at her 14-acre Sculpture Croft, five miles up the A835 from Durness and around the shores of Loch Eriboll. Perusing the loch apparently inspired JRR Tokien to create his Middle Earth and its easy to see why. Miles long and ringed by snow-dusted peaks, it is all at once imposing, immense and otherworldly. Now 72 but sharp and spry enough to pass for half that age, Lotte arrived in the Scottish north from her native Jutland in the early-'60s and with just £5 to her name. She also set up shop in the then all-but derelict Balnakiel Craft Village and from where she initially went into business as a potter.<br />
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Lotte bought her croft in 1999 and since when has transformed a once barren expanse of open heath into a veritable wonderland - planting thousands of trees and peppering the site with her dazzling works in rock. Pebbled pathways wind around the croft and down to the water's edge, but as yet another storm had blown in from off the North Atlantic, Lotte invited us instead to have coffee in her award-winning house. One of the first timber homes built in Scotland, this sleek and altogether striking structure rises from the ground on stilts and tapers out to the loch like the prow of an old sailing ship.<br />
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We spent a magical hour there being regaled by the magnificent Lotte. To this day, she hews rock from the hills round about, cooks it at volcanic temperatures in her kiln and then, by way of giving something back to the land, lugs one mighty sculpture after another up into the mountains and then leaves them there for others to enjoy. Lotte's works are dotted about all over Scotland's upper extremities and must be wonders indeed to happen across.<br />
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Our return journey to Skye was also made into the teeth of a beastly wind. Out on the moors and slopes, we counted up to 50 Red Deer along the route. Then a cloak of mist descended and we got battered some more by hail and sleet. I was moved yet again to ponder just how much my life has changed in such a relatively short span of time (and as well I was desperate for an excuse to shoe-horn a segue into this narrative). At all events, it was not so very long ago that the only forces of nature I encountered on a daily basis were human and almost exclusively rock or pop stars.<br />
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Adele being a case in point, though in nothing but good ways. In October 2010, I went to interview her at the South London flat she was then sharing with her mum and for Q's annual new year curtain-raiser issue. This was still four months before she unveiled her <i>21 </i>album to the wider world and hard to credit, but she was supposed to be at a career crossroads. One way lay the fulfillment of all the promise she had shown on her first record. The other the grim fate that was then known as 'doing a Duffy.' Not that such thoughts appeared to trouble Adele any.<br />
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She welcomed me at her door, dressed head to toe in black, hair scraped back, face unmade-up but porcelain-lovely and with a laugh that could crack cement. In the broadest Cockney, punctuation be damned and in a voice so loud she might have been heard in Watford, she bid me enter: "Cam' on in and 'ere I was going to bake you some chocolate muffins but see I'm on a diet and I'll be fucked if I'm going to sit and watch you stuffing your face ha-ha-ha-HAAAA!!!"<br />
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I liked her immediately and very much. Altogether she was loud, rude, warm, funny and disarmingly honest and as such vulnerable seeming. We spoke for what was on my part a tremendously enjoyable hour and then she offered to play me a couple of songs from off her iPod. We sat opposite each other at her dining room table and through a small, single speaker together listened to<i> Rolling in the Deep</i> and then <i>Someone Like You</i>.<br />
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No-one outside of her management, record company and closest confidantes had heard either of these tracks before then and I believe I absorbed each with a kind of jaw-flapping, goggle-eyed expression on my face. This being the one and only time I heard something that I knew was going to utterly transform the life of the person who had made it and who was before me right then. I was as sure as I've ever been about anything that very soon nothing for Adele was going to be the same again.<br />
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Four weeks later I flew to Madrid to see her play an intimate club gig and to interview her some more. This occasion is etched into my memory for a very different reason. I was at the time in the first throes of gastric flu and as we spoke, I started to sweat profusely. My stomach next began to grumble and moan ominously and soon enough audibly. I was made to squirm in my seat and had to cross and uncross my legs over and again to try and ward off the coming deluge. God knows what Adele thought of these gymnastics, though her PR told me later that she had asked him if I was alright (I never did determine whether she meant physically or mentally).<br />
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Anyway, in the end she did at least make it worth my discomfort. As our conversation drew to a close, her face lit up and she recalled for me an appearance she had once made on Dutch television. It was a morning chat show and the host had also brought along Adele's number one fan - a robust woman from Amsterdam who it soon enough became apparent wanted rather more from her pop idol than an autograph. "She could not keep her hands off me!" Adele exclaimed to me.<br />
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"Then no word of a lie, at the end of the show she asked me to go home with her. I said to her," she boomed and with another laugh like an express train about to erupt out of the tunnel. "I said to her, 'Thanks and all love... but I like dick.'"<br />
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<i><span style="font-family: "times" , "times new roman" , serif;">[You can hear my Friday Night Chronicles radio show from 8pm-9pm each Friday and repeated on Mondays from 3pm-4pm </span><span style="font-family: "times" , "times new roman" , serif;">at: </span><span style="font-family: "times" , "times new roman" , serif;">www.cuillinfm.co.uk/livestream.php]. </span></i><br />
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<h3>
<span style="font-family: "times" , "times new roman" , serif;">This Week I Have Mostly Been Listening To:</span></h3>
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<span style="font-family: "times" , "times new roman" , serif;">https</span><span style="font-family: "times" , "times new roman" , serif;">://www.youtube.com/watch?v=pJ77qFtnfe0</span></div>
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<span style="font-family: "times" , "times new roman" , serif;">Ryan Adams - Outbound Train</span></div>
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<span style="font-family: "times" , "times new roman" , serif;"><br /></span>Effortless-sounding but magical all the same from one-time boy wonder now master craftsman.</div>
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Paul Reeshttp://www.blogger.com/profile/17802572793315969562noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-5872994934716510802.post-38834356734582712522017-02-01T02:38:00.003-08:002017-02-01T02:38:48.404-08:00Over the Hills and Far Away<div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;">
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The other week we learned that the Highland Council had approved outline planning permission for our house. A couple of days later, the builders broke ground on our plot to test the underlying soil. This also revealed no nasty lurking surprises, such as a stream of impenetrable rock, news which was met by us with a giddy sort of relief. All things being equal, the start of the build itself is now just a few more weeks over the horizon. So close, in fact, that I have begun to write up a blizzard of 'to do' lists, manic like one of those toy bears that crash cymbals together and the content of which my wife Denise absorbs with saintly tolerance. And perhaps 'source and erect American-style postbox' is not the most pressing of our needs.<br />
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Yet this <i>is</i> the looming beginning of something we have pondered dreamily, discussed avidly and in total been planning and considering for more than two years now. And as well, its close proximity has left me vulnerable to outbreaks of Wistful Reflectionitus. This is a state of mine that all of my family have come to flinch from since it causes my eyes to mist and me to gibber on with tales they have heard countless times before. Why, I fell into it just last Friday and as I drove to collect young Charlie from school. As the sea loch that will be ours to look out over, Loch Harport, came into view at the crest of the hill road to Carbost, huge and deep purple on this crisp midwinter's afternoon, I thought back to perhaps the very moment I decided that I had to get the hell out of Dodge. Never mind that I am not, nor ever have been and would in every aspect entirely useless as a cowboy.<br />
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Anyway... This was in the late spring of 2010 and I was at that time alone in a motel room in Bend, Oregon. I had just spent three days interviewing and in the company of the grizzled American singer-songwriter John Mellencamp. Then 59-years-old and with the hooded eyes of a hawk, Mellencamp is a William Faulkner kind of character; hard-bitten, ornery and mean but also heroic in the sense of his being among the last of his dying breed. Johnny Cash, a man who knew about such things, once hailed him as one of the ten greatest ever American song-writers and I for one am not about to go against the Man in Black.<br />
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Mellencamp's story is also right out of the pages of fiction. He was born one of five children in the blue-collar town of Seymour, Indiana in 1951 and grew up to be a high school track and football star. By 19 he was married and the father to a daughter, but ran off to New York to get himself a record deal. A couple more wives, two sons and a heart attack later, he had sold many million albums, initially under the stage name of Johnny Cougar, but was so consumed with rage at the world in general that he took to calling himself Little Bastard. Eventually, and after punching out a record company president and writing and recording a hit album in a week just to win a bet that he could, Mellencamp gave up being a rock star and transformed himself instead into a dyed-in-the-wool folk singer. At this, he has also excelled. By the by, he is too an accomplished and acclaimed painter and has had his work exhibited in galleries and museums all over the US.<br />
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I had gone to meet him at the space-age chrome-and-glass barn that acts as is his art studio and is located deep in dense woodland right off the highway near Lake Monroe, Indiana. He stalked into the airy room like a bull: squat and musclebound and albeit with his hair made up into a towering quiff. He peered at me through a fog of smoke from a cigarette clamped between his teeth and was dressed in black and carrying a wooden cane of Victorian vintage. He looked spectacular. Unscrewing the top of the cane, he produced from it, like a rabbit from a hat, a three-foot-long blade which he proceeded to brandish within inches of my nose. And then he barked at me: "You've got 30 minutes, motherfucker."<br />
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In fact, once he ascertained that I wouldn't recoil from him, Mellencamp warmed up. We sat across from each other at a long, dark-wood table and he chain-smoked and chatted away for more than two hours. He spoke in a slow, measured drawl and in a way that was utterly transfixing as he reflected on the storied passage of his life. I could very happily have heard him out for many hours more, but I got together with him again the next morning and to fly up to Bend in his private plane for an outdoor show that he was doing with Bob Dylan. On the flight and apropos of nothing, he began to list for me his various ailments and which included diabetes and a high-pitched and incurable ringing sound in his ears. "But I'm ready ready to roll with time," he concluded. "Because Johnny Cougar was not going to amount to a hill of beans, but son of a bitch, he's still hanging around 43 fucking years later."<br />
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In total, this encounter had a profound effect on me. It was that night that I sat perched on the end of a motel bed and thought about how short all of our time is here on Earth. Right there and then, I resolved that I must spend what was left of mine doing what I truly wanted to do, which was not to go into an office every day and be a manager of people and budgets, and to live where I pleased, which was on a relatively remote Scottish isle. It took me a good while after that for me to free myself on one hand and on the other for Denise to be convinced to join me on the island, but inadvertently we have John Mellencamp to thank for whatever's left of our lives and how many others can say that?<br />
<br />
At the weekend we all four of us took a trip back into our recent past. The small West Coast township of Applecross is one of our very favourite places. On a clear day, it is visible to us on Skye from the higher points of the Staffin Road and out across the sea; a ribbon of tiny-seeming white buildings tucked under the vast Torridon range of peaks and set at the lip of a gaping natural bay. We first went there on holiday six years ago and on Sunday visited again. Despite its geographic proximity to Skye, getting to Applecross from here necessitates a two-hour drive made in an almost perfect arc. This is mitigated by the fact that the journey off the island and around the mainland coast is one taken through a landscape of hulking mountains, pine forest and rust-coloured moorland and with the sea a near-constant passenger's side companion.<br />
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Furthermore, the most direct route is via Bealach na Ba, the Pass of the Cattle, the highest mountain road in Britain. An 11-mile stretch of hairpin bends and stomach-churning sheer drops, this single-track pass is cut between two jagged peaks and rises steeply to a height of 2,054 feet before plunging down again into Applecross. Often as not, inclement weather causes it to be closed in winter but we were fortunate to have picked a clear day on which to navigate it. Nonetheless, the higher up we went into the cloud line the darker, more brooding the sky became. Snow covered the ground on these upper extremities and flecks blew at us from out of the grey-black gloom. And then in an instant the sun broke through and off in the distance we could see back to Skye, rugged and imposing out of a blue, blue sea.<br />
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Back at sea level, we drove at first west out of Applecross and for the four or five miles extra miles it takes to reach Golden Sand beach [that's it pictured at the top of the page]. This idyllic inlet is backed by a sheer wall of sand around 70-feet high and which the fit and intrepid among us [ie; the boys] habitually run up and roll down again. We had discovered this place on that first family holiday up here and it has retained from then its sense of utter serenity, since there does not appear to be more than three or four other people and a dog on it at any given time. After an hour of death-defying, head-long slaloms down the epic dune [them] and gentle strolling along the shoreline [us], we drove back the way we had come and made for the Applecross Inn.<br />
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Let me say without reservation that this is the best pub in all of Scotland and perhaps in the whole of Britain. Certainly, it has won numerous awards testifying to the former and with good reason. There it stands at the sea's edge, off-white and welcoming, beckoning the visitor to come inside and sit beside a roaring log fire. They also serve the most divine fish and chips at the Inn, which we all feasted upon and then sat nursing our full stomachs as we gazed happily out at the bay where battalions of Oystercatchers and waders picked over the rocks and squadrons of gulls swooped above the water.<br />
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Of course, this vista was more than enough to set me off again remembering and I went back to the summer's morning of 23 July 2011. Here we all were then in Applecross, the boys paddling in the shallows and when my phone beeped with the news that Amy Winehouse had died. I'd had the pleasure of meeting her just once and on that occasion she had tried to throttle me. It was at the <i>Q </i>Awards and in between the times of her first album, <i>Frank</i> and the planet-gobbling <i>Back to Black</i>.<br />
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Amy had bowled up to me across a crowded hotel ballroom, beehive set like rock and announced herself like this: "'Ere, you should give me a fekkin' job." Mildly shocked, I replied that since she couldn't get it together to make a record every couple of years, she hardly seemed cut out for a magazine's monthly deadlines. At which point she grasped my throat in her hands, squeezed briefly but hard and then flounced off once more, cackling like a banshee. That was the extent of our exchange, but stood there years later and amidst the beauty of Wester Ross, her death at 27 seemed to me all the more tragic, senseless and wasteful.<br />
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"Did I ever tell you about the time Amy Winehouse strangled me?" I asked the boys on Sunday. "God Dad, about a million times," announced Tom, sighing deeply. And then he led his brother off to do something more interesting such as count pebbles.<br />
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Back in Portree, I have also started to wonder how long it will be before we move into our new home and then again can start to feel as if we are locals. Ever unable to keep a thought to myself, I mentioned the latter to a colleague at the radio station. "Och, I've been here 43 years and the lady who lives next door still calls me an incomer," he told me, laughing. "So the answer to your question is never." Presently, though, I am looking forward to nothing so much as putting that to the test.<br />
<br />
<i><span style="font-family: "times" , "times new roman" , serif;">[You can hear my Friday Night Chronicles radio show from 8pm-9pm each Friday and repeated on Mondays from 3pm-4pm </span><span style="font-family: "times" , "times new roman" , serif;">at: </span><span style="font-family: "times" , "times new roman" , serif;">www.cuillinfm.co.uk/livestream.php]. </span></i><br />
<span style="font-family: "times" , "times new roman" , serif;"><br /></span>
<br />
<h3>
<span style="font-family: "times" , "times new roman" , serif;">This Week I Have Mostly Been Listening To:</span></h3>
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<span style="font-family: times, times new roman, serif;">https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-oTw6n-rHJw</span></div>
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<span style="font-family: "times" , "times new roman" , serif;"><br /></span>
<span style="font-family: "times" , "times new roman" , serif;">Radiohead - Identikit.</span><br />
<span style="font-family: "times" , "times new roman" , serif;"><br /></span><span style="font-family: "times" , "times new roman" , serif;">Thom Yorke and his merry men: the perfect soundtrack to a drive up and over a mountain. Who knew?</span></div>
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<span style="font-family: "times" , "times new roman" , serif;"><br /></span></div>
Paul Reeshttp://www.blogger.com/profile/17802572793315969562noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-5872994934716510802.post-90102768252537473282017-01-06T03:32:00.002-08:002017-01-06T03:32:35.172-08:00Blowin' in the Wind<div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;">
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Storm Barbara hit Skye like a battering ram just before Christmas. Whilst not as destructive as was initially feared, nevertheless it was a weather front to be reckoned with, unleashing winds of 75mph and causing schools to be closed and ferry crossings to be cancelled. More than enough to prompt us to head off a day earlier than planned to be with family in England over the holiday. I was surprised at the wrench I felt as we drove over the road bridge to Lochalsh on a brooding 22 December morning. It has been just four months since we pitched up here, but already of course we have started to put down roots. With each passing day, I have felt drawn deeper into the ebb and flow of island life, to both its gentle rhythms and wilder beats. And with that exponentially further and more apart from many aspects of the world we left behind.<br />
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These twin senses of settlement and remove were sharpened in the weeks leading up to Christmas. To be here then was to feel, well, Christmas-y. What's more this was in the kind of warm, wide-eyed and abundant way of my childhood. The mountain peaks dusted with snow, the crisp, bright mornings when frost twinkled on the ground or each evening when Portree's ring of festive lights blinked and winked in the gloaming, our youngest son Charlie's school Nativity Play - no doubt each encouraged an unfettered festive spirit to well up. Yet it surged through me, I think, mostly on account of how time seemed to have been rolled back to another, more innocent age and when we weren't all bombarded at this time of year with... stuff.<br />
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Since there are no chain stores on the island, or HD screen billboards or teeming retail parks, there is also no compulsion from early October on to submit to the orgy of consumption that is the modern Christmas. Frequently, I was bid a happy Christmas by beaming strangers and as if they really meant it, and for all that glory be. Having in recent times spent the season grouching and grumbling, as if begging for a visit from Scrooge's ghosts, this year I instead gaily put together a Yule-some playlist for my weekly radio show and even once caught myself whistling while I walked.<br />
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The most Christmas-y day we had on Skye was actually the Saturday before Christmas itself. That afternoon occasioned the inaugural Santa Dash around Portree, and in which the four of us were enthusiastic participants. In this we joined 230 or so other happy souls for a run up, down and around the town and in ill-fitting Father Christmas suits. A wonderful event, it began with our red and white-clad horde being led into the town square by a band of pipers and ended with us all feasting upon mince pies and sponge cakes washed down with piping hot tea, coffee and mulled wine. However, in between times I became as shamefully competitive as it is possible for one in fancy dress to get.<br />
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Determinedly, up the stiff opening climb of the two-mile course I streaked passed my wife Denise and Charlie and scores of others, my eyes blazing, arms and legs pumping like pistons, red bobble hat bobbing savagely. Utterly mindless of the fact that most everyone else was out for nothing more than good-natured fun and proceeding merrily along in jolly groups of families and friends, I was like a one-man band playing death metal at a barn dance. The nadir of my manic performance was reached on the ensuing descent. Ahead of me and crossing a muddied field, I spied my other son, Tom and his friend Connor happily bouncing along together. Not for long. In my temporarily deranged sights they were vulnerable young zebra to my predatory lion. I bounded upon and then by them and as I went may even have cackled sadistically.<br />
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Not long after and perhaps hastened by appalled looks from my fellow parents, I belatedly jolted to my senses. On the home straight, a hundred yards in front of me and closing was a lad of nine (which does rather put my imagined Mo Farah-like dash into perspective), and who seemed to me to be faltering. Clearly, none of the throng lining the route would cheer me were I to take him down and with the finishing line in sight, since that would make me an idiot. As this rationale flashed across my mind, the youngster turned his head, smiled, somewhat maliciously I must say, and then quickened his pace, leaving me gasping and for dust. And there is no fool quite so sad as a beaten old one.<br />
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Afterwards, the four of us drove to a secluded spot four miles up the road and sawed down our own Christmas tree. Syke's byways are peppered with saplings sprung from seeds blown out from its verdant pine farms and the harvesting of them is welcomed, since otherwise they would grow to become obstructive. The kids loved it, though this was as much to do with the fact that in order to claim our prize, I had to wade through a bog and impale myself on pine needles, still attired as Santa, albeit a wet, bedraggled and thoroughly abject looking Claus.<br />
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It was Christmas 14 years ago that Denise and I first came to Skye and for our honeymoon. We spent a fortnight nestled in a wee bungalow in Struan on the north-west coast, and the whole time the wind howled like a wounded beast. We had a coal fire for warmth and ate Christmas dinner looking out through our picture window to a broiling sea loch. Doubtless, the pull in us towards the island dates back to that time. Skye is a temptress and she seeps into your bones and soul,<br />
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Partly, it's the primal beauty and sheer ruggedness of the place that does it; how it engenders in you a profound sense of being out on the edge of things. As well, there is the strong suggestion here of timelessness, of belonging to place as old as the Earth itself. Its plunging cliffs are comprised of rocks of the blackest basalt which date back 2,800 million years and to when the planet was blast-furnace hot and still being formed from molten magma and poisonous gases. Human beings arrived on Skye some time between 10,000-5,000BC, making our occupation of the island but a rapid eye movement in the grand scheme of things. These were Mesolithic settlers and with a primitive culture, but they established Skye as a homeland and archeologists have unearthed remnants of a subsequent Iron Age fort and Bronze Age settlements on its heath, hill- and moorland.<br />
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In the ninth century, Viking invaders from Scandinavia crossed the sea, shed blood and gave the island a name, Skuy, Norse for 'misty isle'. After their occupation, the next hundreds of years belonged to the clans. Clan MacLeod ruled to the north, Clan Macdonald in the south. In 1745, a daughter of the Macdonalds, Flora, achieved lasting fame by helping Bonnie Prince Charlie to flee to Skye from the mainland, escaping from the dashing of the Jacobite rebellion and the clutches of the victorious English forces at the decisive Battle of Culloden. Seventeen years later, a scion of the MacLeods, John Ross, a Royal Navy officer and sometime MP, secured his infamy by beginning the Clearances, the enforced eviction of thousands of small-hold farmers that for more than a century bedeviled the islands and highlands. A venally cruel act meant to free up the land for livestock, it served to reduce Skye's population alone by two-thirds, the dispossessed and destitute shipped off to uncertain new lives in North America, Australia and New Zealand.<br />
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I was all but ignorant of this history when we left Skye for London in the new year of 2003, but I was bound for another maelstrom and one partly of my own making. I had not long been made Editor of the venerable monthly music magazine <i>Q</i> and one of my first tasks had been to secure an attention-grabbing cover star for its looming 200th issue. I wanted someone who was steeped in rock and roll tradition, but who might also prick the stuffy air of blokeishness which permeated on the title. So it was that I alighted upon Courtney Love, just then attempting to recover her music career from years of self-inflicted carnage.<br />
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Love was residing in London over that Christmas and I arranged to have her respectively photographed and interviewed for the cover by the estimable team of Rankin and John Harris. I returned to find the office in a rare state of excitement. Rankin's session had gone better, more extraordinarily than any of us could have anticipated. For Love, who appeared scarily decadent and unhinged, had during the course of an eventful, shambolic night set fire to the racks of clothes hired for her for the occasion, stripped down instead to her knickers and led Rankin a not-so-merry and topless dance down Park Lane at 11pm. This concluded with her flagging down a black cab and to the bemusement of its driver, prostrating herself across the vehicle's back seat. And consummate pro that he is, Rankin had recorded the entire episode for posterity.<br />
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Alas, there was also an all-too-significant hitch. Love had not yet sat for the interview and wanted to speak to me before she would. Consequently, on the first Monday evening of that year the two of us had a two-hour phone conversation, me in our poky north London flat, she in her West End hotel room. What she made of I cannot possibly say, but even now I shudder at the memory. Mostly, I recall how she ranted and raved at me and in a way that made her sound quite insane. "Hey!" she barked when I was first put through to her. "I'm just having my anus waxed."<br />
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Impossibly, things only got progressively more surreal from there. With the full horror of the photo session having evidently dawned on her, Love had formed a damage limitation strategy. She told me that now she wanted to design our cover herself and for it to also include a motley assortment of her friends and contemporaries. Otherwise, she said, there would be no interview. I refused and she railed at me. She tried again and once more I said no, and she shouted at me a whole lot more. Round and round we went in this seemingly endless circle. At one point, she broke off to instruct a nanny to put her daughter, poor Frances Bean to bed. At another and as I slipped into a catatonic state, she seethed: "Fucker, I just told you who my real father was and you missed it, didn't you?" Indeed I had, but I could have cared less.<br />
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Eventually, I was able to squeeze more than a word in edge-ways and to bring matters to a head. "Let me ask you Courtney," I said, though by no means assertively, "would you allow me to write a song for your next record?" "God, no," she shot back. "Then whatever makes you think I'm going to let you do my job for me?" And at which point the phone line went dead.<br />
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In the event, we didn't get our interview but put a photograph of a dishevelled, half-naked Courtney on our cover anyway. Predictably, she exploded with rage, firing off a statement in which she claimed I had arranged to have someone break into her hotel room and steal from her private pictures. For good measure, she added that I was an 'asshole'. Over the next ten years and through many other situations, I grew used to having a gnawing feeling of dread in the pit of my stomach and of living my life in monthly increments of panic as I waited on each issue's sales report or found out the latest economy I would be required to make.<br />
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At such times, I yearned to run away from it all, to isolate myself and always to the misty isle. We would holiday on Skye each summer and it would be as if I could breath again. Eventually, the job and my own inability to turn the magazine's sales and fortunes around burned me out and I left. It took another four years for me to depressurise and be de-institutionalised and only then was I ready to go off and seek a sanctuary on Skye.<br />
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Ever since we returned home here the day before New Year's Eve, it has felt that much to me at least. For days we have endured the tail-end of a second storm, Connor; its winds frigid and hostile, rain lashing from foreboding skies. In the teeth of such conditions Skye retains its splendour but in darker hues. On two of our now regular walks, one around the Scorrybreac promontory at Portree, the other out to the tip of the Braes headland, we have the sea for company and at present it chops and churns in various shades of moody blues, greens and blacks. Yet it also teems with life. Common and Grey Seals regularly surface and dive; Great Black-Backed, Common and Herring Gulls skim the waves whilst doughty Shag, Divers and Red-Breasted Merganser huddle closer to the shoreline. And when the rain abates, you might be lucky enough to see Sea Eagles riding the thermals.<br />
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For us, the year ahead will be one of further and accelerated changes. As I write, the proposal for our house build is passing through the various planning stages required by the Highland Council. We hope to break ground on our plot in the spring and move into our new home by the summer. At the same time, we will have a virgin business to tend to and will no doubt be encouraged into other experiences that will be fresh and unique to us. Though I don't in any eventuality foresee myself having my bum waxed.<br />
<i><span style="font-family: "times" , "times new roman" , serif;"><br /></span></i>
<i><span style="font-family: "times" , "times new roman" , serif;">[You can hear my Friday Night Chronicles radio show from 8pm-9pm each Friday and repeated on Mondays from 3pm-4pm </span><span style="font-family: "times" , "times new roman" , serif;">at: </span><span style="font-family: "times" , "times new roman" , serif;">www.cuillinfm.co.uk/livestream.php]. </span></i><br />
<span style="font-family: "times" , "times new roman" , serif;"><br /></span>
<br />
<h3>
<span style="font-family: "times" , "times new roman" , serif;">This Week I Have Mostly Been Listening To:</span></h3>
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<span style="font-family: "times" , "times new roman" , serif;">https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=pTU1YRYdhcI</span></div>
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<span style="font-family: "times" , "times new roman" , serif;"><br /></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: "times" , "times new roman" , serif;">Trail West - Close to Home.</span><br />
<span style="font-family: "times" , "times new roman" , serif;"><br /></span><span style="font-family: "times" , "times new roman" , serif;">Hailing from another West Scottish island, Tiree, but entirely evocative of Skye as well.</span></div>
<br />Paul Reeshttp://www.blogger.com/profile/17802572793315969562noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-5872994934716510802.post-48929026090604016532016-11-21T04:21:00.003-08:002016-11-21T04:21:29.200-08:00White Winter Hymnal<div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;">
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The other day my friend Paul Pike was good enough to forward this item on to me: <a data-saferedirecturl="https://www.google.com/url?hl=en-GB&q=http://www.independent.co.uk/news/uk/home-news/most-desirable-place-to-live-britain-isle-of-skye-devon-a7422051.html&source=gmail&ust=1479659915342000&usg=AFQjCNFo1jyiIQlgQtgwk3pqt3K156H0zg" href="http://www.independent.co.uk/news/uk/home-news/most-desirable-place-to-live-britain-isle-of-skye-devon-a7422051.html" style="background-color: white; color: #1155cc; font-family: arial, sans-serif; font-size: 12.8px; white-space: pre-wrap;" target="_blank">http://www.independent.co.uk/<wbr></wbr>news/uk/home-news/most-<wbr></wbr>desirable-place-to-live-<wbr></wbr>britain-isle-of-skye-devon-<wbr></wbr>a7422051.html</a> Of course, I agree wholeheartedly with the consensus expressed. Indeed, upon learning of it my first reaction was one of giddy over-exuberance. That, coupled with an urge to share the news as if it were that of a bouncing new-born and I the proud father. And then I calmed down. On reflection, I suspect it was the word 'desirable' that dampened my fireworks since I really don't care for its use in this context. It seems to me too twee and smug; stockbroker-belt tidy and bringing to mind cream teas and the sound of leather upon willow. Whereas in my mind Skye is wild and not for taming. It has its own particular beauty for sure, one that gets into your bones and seeps down to your soul. But it can as well be a roaring, howling beast, forever unsettled and unpredictable. It is sensuous and evocative, raw and thrilling much more than it is plain old desirable.<br />
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Or perhaps I am being an inverted snob and terrible ponce, and certainly not for the first time. At all events, winter's shroud has fallen across the island in recent days and accentuated its most primal features. The peaks and crevices of the two Cuillin ranges and the Trotternish Ridge are laden with snow; the north wind bites and freezes as it swoops down from the mountains or in from the sea; mornings arrive glistening, evenings fall at a beat to a fathomless black and with cloudless skies so devoid of light pollution one is able to behold the iridescent splendour of the Milky Way.<br />
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In total, it is very often right now just as wondrous as I could ever imagine a place to be. Hunkered down in our warm little house on frigid nights, which is to say every one during this past week, the effect is like being wrapped up in a cocoon and made safe from the world outside. Often times that too applies in a more general sense to living on the island: there is here a tangible feeling of being distant and at a remove from events elsewhere. No bad thing this past fortnight at least, when in our glorious isolation even Donald Trump's election to the US Presidency has been made to seem out of reach of whatever demons might soon be summoned forth.<br />
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For us these last three months have been a steady, but continual learning process. The warmth of our welcome has been enriched by the steady diet of tips and recommendations we continue to be fed. Among the knowledge we have latterly been gifted is the location of a shop from which to buy fish straight off the boats that chug out from Portree harbour each weekday dawn; directions to a secreted path that winds up from the town, through pine forest and onto a plateau from which to view the island's three mountain ranges, and panoramas of ocean, loch and ochre-coloured moorland; and the details of doctors and dentists, and teachers at everything from acoustic guitar and yoga to karate.<br />
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From a personal perspective, I have also begun to acquire a belated education in live broadcast radio. In the first instance and just the other week, I received instruction on how to operate the 'board' from a gentleman who necessarily had the patience and forbearance of a saint. Now, I have done radio before. Indeed, for several years I presented a weekly show on <i>Q</i> magazine's sister radio station. This was the <i>Q Show </i>[and how we laboured over that title...], and through the course of it I must have racked up hundreds of hours on air.<br />
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During all that time, though, no-one was ever foolish enough to let me loose on things that required any kind of technical aptitude. Rather, I would simply roll up at our poky but well-appointed London studio each Wednesday afternoon and waffle away for a couple of hours, while a very nice man named Andy Westcott did all the hard work for me. Andy was the show's producer and he it was who operated the galaxy of knobs and buttons that make up the regulation sound board and which were as mysterious to me as the finer points of astrophysics.<br />
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The two of us hosted an assortment of guests on the show, all of whom had the dubious pleasure of being interviewed by me and also reviewing a batch of new singles' releases. It was a simple format, and a 'borrowed' one too, but I left it with a richness of memories. Among the younger, wide-eyed visitors to Andy's and my domain were Florence Welch and Mumford & Sons, just in advance of either of them becoming the strutting, planet-gobbling pop stars they are today. Of our more seasoned celebrities, Belinda Carlisle appeared to enjoy the experience as much as root canal work. Manfully as I tried to coax a smile from the one-time Go-Go's girl, she sat tight-lipped and stony-faced, regarding me as if I were something she had found on the bottom of her shoe. I couldn't think why.<br />
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I thought I had at least tempted a chortle out of the actor Rhys Ifans. He had turned up somewhat over-refreshed and apparently unable to form a coherent sentence. "That's easy for you to say," I informed him when his first utterance proved to be unintelligible gibberish. He made a sound like an engine back-firing and which I took for laughter. Until, that is, he pressed his lips to my ear and whispered very clearly, and with an overpowering stench of booze and no little menace: "You're a cheeky c**t, aren't you?" And then he kicked me hard on the shin.<br />
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Bald-bonced dance boffin Moby on the other hand greeted me as if I were an old friend, throwing his arms around me and pondering aloud when and where it was we had last met. The two of us had in fact never before been in the same room together, much less exchanged even a passing word though I didn't have the heart to tell him. Then there was erstwhile Housemartin and Beautiful South-er Paul Heaton, who really was lovely but also bonkers. At one point, I asked him if he had any hobbies. It sounded a harmless enough inquiry, but unleashed the hounds. "Oh yes," said Heaton, eyes ablaze and he began to reel off a list of all the things that he collected. Among them were football shirts, beer mats, crisp packets, road atlases, ring-pulls from cans of pop, and last but judging by Heaton's exultant expression not least, single items of litter that he retrieved from the roadside when walking his son to school each morning. I backed as far away from him as was possible in a space with the dimensions of a shoebox.<br />
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Perhaps my favourite guest of all was Tom Jones. We heard him coming long before we saw him, as his voice resounded down the corridors of our floor like rolling thunder. "Hello my lovely!" his baritone boomed on numerous occasions and as we were to learn later at every female who happened across his path. The Human Crotch subsequently swept into the studio in a dazzle of brilliant white teeth and expensive cologne, trailed by an attentive man-servant who carried with him several bottles of beer. Tom instantaneously proceeded to regale us with tales of his running around Las Vegas with Elvis and Frank Sinatra, old school charm personified. When it came time to play the first record, he reached out for a beer. "Tsk," admonished his minder, nodding at the digital clock on the wall which read 5.47pm. Tom withdrew his hand like a chastened child. Twice more this routine was repeated and then the electric-red numbers turned to 6pm. "Ah, the sun is over the yardarm," Tom delightedly informed his Jeeves, cracking open a bottle and supping from it with evident relish.<br />
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Thanks to Cuillin FM's equivalent of Yoda, I am no longer so ignorant of the nuts and bolts of the radio operation and have been enabled to fly solo. To date I have done so four times and with only the occasional mishap. Notably, once when pushing up my 'on air' microphone fader at the very same moment as I choked on a rogue sliver of Brazil Nut. Two sheep and an agoraphobic are still wondering at how Kate Bush's <i>Cloudbusting </i>was interrupted by the<i> </i>resulting violent barking noise.<br />
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Sadly, I have had no reason as yet to test out a further nugget of wisdom passed on to me by another of the station's elder statesmen and who is the live on-air commentator on local shinty matches. The other day, this gracious soul informed me that, whenever doing an outside broadcast the best method of protecting a microphone from unwanted noise pollution is to roll over it a condom. "Aye, but the only trouble is that they're delicate wee things and split," he noted sagely. "Every Friday morning now I buy five packets of condoms from the chemist's. Course, I haven't told the old girl in there yet what I'm using them for," he added, beaming, "and she looks at me like I'm superhuman. And you know, word gets around quickly in a place such as this..."<br />
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As a family, we arrived at a landmark of our own at the start of this month. It was then that final plans for our house were submitted to the Highland Council for planning permission. At a stroke, time was made to seem elastic. The 12 weeks it will take for the council to rule will doubtless seem like an age, and yet we can look over the horizon of 2016 and into next year and regard the outline of our approaching future life. That this now has tangible form and a sensation of permanence is a thrilling thing indeed and all the more reason to bunker down and shut out whatever evils lurk beyond our borders. Or at least to not be quite so slapdash when it comes to digesting nuts...<br />
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<i><span style="font-family: "times" , "times new roman" , serif;">[You can hear my Friday Night Chronicles radio show from 8pm-9pm each Friday </span><span style="font-family: "times" , "times new roman" , serif;">at: </span><span style="font-family: "times" , "times new roman" , serif;">www.cuillinfm.co.uk/livestream.php]. </span></i><br />
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<h3>
<span style="font-family: "times" , "times new roman" , serif;">This Week I Have Mostly Been Listening To:</span></h3>
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<span style="font-family: "times" , "times new roman" , serif;">https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=GGpRQyCV7Iw</span></div>
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<span style="font-family: "times" , "times new roman" , serif;">Chris Stapleton - Parachute.</span><br />
<span style="font-family: "times" , "times new roman" , serif;"><br /></span><span style="font-family: "times" , "times new roman" , serif;">Stapleton's <i>Traveller</i> album comes on like Bruce Springsteen and Bob Seger chewing the fat with Kris Kristofferson. Really, what's not to like?...</span></div>
Paul Reeshttp://www.blogger.com/profile/17802572793315969562noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-5872994934716510802.post-40847295372164174372016-10-22T02:10:00.000-07:002016-10-22T02:10:17.956-07:00Faraway, So Close!<div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;">
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<span style="font-family: "times" , "times new roman" , serif;">Right now we are enjoying an unexpected but very welcome Indian Summer upon Skye. Blue skies and an amber sun have encouraged us out into the island's great wide open. And with the days seeming longer and less hurried, I have also been given the chance to pause and reflect upon the scenic road along which we have traveled to this place, the course of which has as well often appeared impossible to predict. </span><br />
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<span style="font-family: "times" , "times new roman" , serif;">One moment of reverie that happened just the other day was for me particularly resounding. At the time, I was sat on a heather-coated outcrop that afforded an aspect of the impressive span of Glen Brittle, an arrowhead of land carved out between rolling hills and the looming teeth of the Black Cuillin range. The great glen looks out towards a majestic sea loch and whilst appreciating the dulcet lapping of the waves and scanning the clear skies for eagles, it occurred to me that almost five years ago to that day I had regarded another evocative sea view. This one, though, was from many thousands of feet in the air and the vantage of a private jet ferrying the members of U2 across the Irish Sea and on to London.</span><br />
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<span style="font-family: "times" , "times new roman" , serif;">Just then I was coming to the end of my ten-year tenure as Editor of the music magazine <i>Q</i>. Being fully appreciative of this fact, in the time that I had left at the job I had resolved to enjoy as much as possible its manifest fringe benefits. I </span><span style="font-family: "times" , "times new roman" , serif;">had therefore commissioned myself to write a cover feature marking the 20th anniversary of perhaps U2's best album, </span><i style="font-family: times, "times new roman", serif;">Achtung Baby</i><span style="font-family: "times" , "times new roman" , serif;">. This endeavor had taken me at first to the band's hometown of Dublin where I had interviewed the Edge over a pint of Guinness in the lounge bar of the city centre hotel the professorial guitarist co-owned with his shy, retiring singer, Bono. And since the band were going on the next day to an awards ceremony in London, I had hitched a ride home with them. </span><br />
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<span style="font-family: "times" , "times new roman" , serif;">So there we sat, U2 and I, in tan-coloured leather seats as deep as buckets and as comfy as a mother's embrace. Opposite me the Edge and Bono reclined, the latter with his eyes shaded by dark glasses and talking a mile-a-minute about how he had spent many a childhood day spotting planes at Dublin Airport. Across a wide, carpeted aisle, debonair bassist Adam Clayton was stretched out with the morning paper. Only drummer Larry Mullen was absent attending to a family matter, which had deprived us of the party's driest sense of humour. We proceeded in this state of gentle repose for perhaps 10, 15 minutes and until the plane suddenly dropped through the air like a stone, the murmur of its engines turning to a protesting whine. The craft then jolted and lurched to one side and the other. "Turbulence," muttered Clayton, hands tightening on the arms of his seat. </span><br />
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<span style="font-family: "times" , "times new roman" , serif;">The next several minutes passed with our plane being bucked and buffeted wildly through banks of deceptively benign looking milk-white cloud. Expressions froze on faces. Sphincters tightened. And no-one spoke, until that is Bono leaped to his feet, stood rigid to attention and announced in his loudest voice, "I'm gay!" And just like the classic scene from <i>Almost Famous </i>that he referenced, we also did not end up crashing to earth in a fireball, but instead landed at a well-appointed airfield on the outskirts of the city and from where we were chauffeured to our final destination aboard a fleet of sleek, black executive cars. I shared a vehicle with Bono, and on occasion even managed to get a word in edge-ways as we glided along. </span><br />
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<span style="font-family: "times" , "times new roman" , serif;">We were disembarked at a discreet side entrance to the Savoy Hotel. </span><span style="font-family: times, "times new roman", serif;">At Bono's bidding, I followed him inside the grand building. His was not a routine check-in procedure. Rather, we were led by a liveried gentleman past a group of staff lined up to greet their VIP guest, their uniforms crisp and freshly starched, and into a private elevator that whisked us several floors up to the Winston Churchill Suite, named after the Prime Minister who had resided there during the dark days of the Second World War. The suite was the size of a football pitch and as opulently dressed as a papal palace in dark teak and crushed velvet. </span><br />
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<span style="font-family: "times" , "times new roman" , serif;">Bono and I had tea and biscuits together. I had spent time with him previously in London and also in the South of France and Hawaii, and on each occasion he had been warm and entirely engaging. Since I very much suspected that this would be our final meeting, I savored the last fleeting details. How tiny and vulnerable a bone-china cup looked in his meaty hand. How the late-afternoon light cast him in the glow of a sepia-tinted photograph. How much I desperately needed the toilet. Before I left, he took me out onto the balcony to better appreciate our elevated location. As we gazed down at the Thames, shimmering in the gloaming, Bono threw an arm around my shoulder and said with a smile: "Toto, we're not in Kansas anymore."</span><br />
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<span style="font-family: "times" , "times new roman" , serif;">Over and again during the past two months I have thought similar, albeit that the circumstances and context have been so different. For example, I would once not have imagined that I might undertake a five-hour round trip by car just for the purpose of viewing a fitted kitchen. But as Denise and I now have to make decisions on the fixtures for our future home, the venture of driving 90-plus miles coast-to-coast to Inverness to acquaint ourselves with an example of precisely what can be achieved within our budget seemed not only entirely worthwhile, but rich with tantalizing possibilities. Likewise, and upon hearing from a neighbour of an unfortunate incident involving a gale and a blow-away trampoline, I spent an afternoon pottering about our temporary garden in quiet contemplation of what could and should be tethered down in the event of the inevitable winter storms. Bikes, bins and even the shed fell under my steely gaze, though given as I am in such matters to eternal prevarication, all remain at risk of being swept away.</span><br />
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<span style="font-family: "times" , "times new roman" , serif;">It was on another potter, and to familiarize myself with the immediate area, that I happened upon Cuillin FM. The island's local radio station is sited across an undulating cow field and uphill from us in a small wood cabin and from where one can look out over a sleepy collection of homes and beyond to the hills and sea. In many respects Cuillin FM is wonderful. For instance, thanks to its Catholic approach to programming it is entirely possible to hear a Scottish jig, a Broadway show tune and Judas Priest all within a couple of hours of each other. And so closely is the station linked to the people of the island, that no-one listening would have been surprised that a morning news bulletin led off with a story about a Dunvegan lady who had woken to find her garden gate had vanished and was appealing for information on its whereabouts, as was indeed the case just the other day.</span><br />
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<span style="font-family: "times" , "times new roman" , serif;">Cuillin FM is also island life in microcosm. It is populated by a motley collection of folk, all of whom band together to bring it to life and keep it running </span><span style="font-family: "times" , "times new roman" , serif;">and in their various and different ways</span><span style="font-family: "times" , "times new roman" , serif;">. The station MD, for instance, </span><span style="font-family: "times" , "times new roman" , serif;">doubles up as on-air commentator on the island's shinty matches and also as Skye's resident grief counselor. It is also ever likely to throw open its arms to interlopers offering assistance, which is how it is that I have come to be presenting a weekly Friday night show between the hours of 8pm and 9pm. As much was arrived at via an introductory email and an afternoon coffee, and in my case most certainly on account of my willing and enthusiasm rather than any particular talent. This seems to me - if not whatever audience I happen to be broadcasting to - a very good and healthy way to progress through life. </span><br />
<span style="font-family: "times" , "times new roman" , serif;"><br /></span><span style="font-family: "times" , "times new roman" , serif;">Doubtless I shall ponder as much and more when I sit in the darkened radio studio next Friday night and the one after, and am otherwise </span><span style="font-family: "times" , "times new roman" , serif;">just about as content as I believe its possible to be. Such will be the case for the next 12 weeks at least and by when I expect to have reveled in yet more interior design porn and for our path to have undergone a few more twists and turns.</span><br />
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<i><span style="font-family: "times" , "times new roman" , serif;">[Hear the Friday Night Chronicles 8pm-9pm each Friday </span><span style="font-family: "times" , "times new roman" , serif;">at: </span><span style="font-family: "times" , "times new roman" , serif;">www.cuillinfm.co.uk/livestream.php]. </span></i><br />
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<br />
<h3>
<span style="font-family: "times" , "times new roman" , serif;">This Week I Have Mostly Been Listening To:</span></h3>
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<span style="font-family: "times" , "times new roman" , serif;">https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1gPQLB3AQcQ</span></div>
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<span style="font-family: "times" , "times new roman" , serif;">Bon Iver- 00000 Million.</span><br />
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<span style="font-family: "times" , "times new roman" , serif;">The new Bon Iver album is, I think, one of three bold, beautiful and often extraordinary records to have come out in recent weeks. Another is Nick Cave's. That the third so happens to be by Marillion I'll just leave dangling here...</span></div>
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<span style="font-family: "times" , "times new roman" , serif;"><br /></span>Paul Reeshttp://www.blogger.com/profile/17802572793315969562noreply@blogger.com1tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-5872994934716510802.post-32421376944740474162016-09-19T09:37:00.002-07:002016-09-19T09:37:50.110-07:00Who'll Stop the Rain<div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;">
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<span style="font-family: "times" , "times new roman" , serif;">Whenever during the past couple of years that my wife Denise or I told someone, indeed anyone resident on Skye of our intention to move up to the island, we were met with the same response. That being a knowing, even pitying look and a single inquiry: 'Ah, but have you done a winter yet?' </span><br />
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<span style="font-family: "times" , "times new roman" , serif;">Now that we are actually here full-time, the subject of our impending first full winter on Skye remains the staple of the majority of our interactions. Why just this week I found it cropping up in a conversation I was having with someone of an otherwise entirely positive and well-meaning bent. Apropos of nothing we had been talking about to that point, I was informed that </span><span style="font-family: "times" , "times new roman" , serif;">my inaugural Season of Doom [or at least words to that effect] had in fact already begun. 'And w</span><span style="font-family: times, "times new roman", serif;">e'll no be out the other side till next April,' was the conclusion to this forebode-some statement, 'and that's if we're lucky.'</span><br />
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<span style="font-family: "times" , "times new roman" , serif;">We are, of course, right now still in the midst of September. And at the precise time that this exchange took place, most of the rest of the country was basking in and/or enduring some of the hottest temperatures ever recorded in Britain. But then, on Skye that very morning dark, ominous clouds had settled low over the island and an ill wind soon blew in - these were 'blowy' conditions in local parlance; or 'Hurricane Rob Roy' to a lily-liver-ed Englishman such as me. And then the rain came. The mere word rain, in fact, does not in any way accurately convey the deluge that assailed us for the next couple of hours.Suffice to say, it was of the same awesome nature and elemental force as the one that had Noah reaching for his hammer and nails.</span><br />
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<span style="font-family: "times" , "times new roman" , serif;">It was then that I grasped a single, salient point which is this: w</span><span style="font-family: times, "times new roman", serif;">inter does not mess around on Skye. </span><span style="font-family: times, "times new roman", serif;">Or indeed hang about. Quite simply, for us this year there will be no gentle transition through the russet colouring of autumn. But rather an abrupt, 'move directly to Go' race towards frigid bleakness and a wild unpredictability that will make the act of opening the curtains each morning a nerve-jangling experience and one pregnant with possibilities. </span><br />
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<span style="font-family: times, "times new roman", serif;">As recently as last November, Storm Abigail tore into Skye from the Atlantic and for several consecutive days blew out pretty much all of the island's electricity supply. Schools were closed, local businesses rendered impotent and people from the more remote areas, which is most everywhere, had to be bused into the capital Portree for hot meals and a shower.</span><br />
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<span style="font-family: "times" , "times new roman" , serif;">Upon hearing of this last act, I felt the comfort of a warm inner glow. It is wondrous to me </span><span style="font-family: times, "times new roman", serif;">that an entire community should rally around in such a way in the face of adversity. </span><span style="font-family: times, "times new roman", serif;">And then again, and from a perspective shaped exclusively by naked self-interest, I found it utterly re-assuring. For should the same fate or one similar befall these parts any time soon, </span><span style="font-family: times, "times new roman", serif;">then my wife, children and I will still be able to depend upon certain creature comforts without the expectation - and it would be a forlorn one indeed - of me 'going Grylls'.</span><br />
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<span style="font-family: "times" , "times new roman" , serif;">In these initial weeks I have as well acquired other welcome snippets of information and learning. For instance, and thanks to our young son Tom's twice-weekly lessons at school, I now know that 'Am faod mi a dhol dhan ttaigh-bheag?' is the Gaelic for: 'Can I go to the toilet?' Potentially life-saving knowledge in a future tempest, no. But a blinder to be able to pull out of one's back pocket during a keenly contested game of Trivial Pursuit: Hebridean Edition. </span><br />
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<span style="font-family: "times" , "times new roman" , serif;">Speaking of all things Hebridean, may I also draw your attention to the unfettered delights to be had from a daily study of the sightings board to be found here: <a href="http://www.whaledolphintrust.co.uk/">http://www.whaledolphintrust.co.uk</a></span><br />
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<span style="font-family: "times" , "times new roman" , serif;">Right now, I cannot think of too many things that are more pleasurable, or thrilling than being able to follow the progress of an Orca, Minke Whale or 'Unidentified Baleen Species' north from Bara to Uist and on to Lewis, giddy all the time with the anticipation of one or other then tracking west towards Skye and uninterrupted passage through the Sound of Rasaay. The Hebridean Whale and Dolphin Trust is obviously the preserve of very good souls.</span><br />
<span style="font-family: "times" , "times new roman" , serif;"><br /></span><span style="font-family: "times" , "times new roman" , serif;">I have now also come to appreciate the spectacle of Shinty. A sport unique to the Scottish Highlands, there appears to be a Shinty pitch in every town, village and settlement in the region, no matter how small or forbidding the terrain. Our youngest Charlie has just started to play Shinty at school and has been in raptures about it. This is not wholly surprising since in total Shinty seems to this uninformed observer to be a combination of the best bits of hockey, football, British Bulldog and the sort of school playground set-to around which kids traditionally gather and shout, 'Fight! Fight!' </span><br />
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<span style="font-family: "times" , "times new roman" , serif;">To further Charlie's appreciation of his new pastime, and since one of his school pal's dad's was turning out, the other weekend we trooped off to see Skye's second XI take on Fort William. Shinty is played at a ferocious pace, the ball sped from one end of the pitch to the other with great skill. Often, players clout it overhead and with the narrow ends of their sticks. Doing so in such a maelstrom I can only approximate to having to thread the eye of a needle whilst being repeatedly punched in the face. </span><br />
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<span style="font-family: "times" , "times new roman" , serif;">We enjoyed ourselves tremendously. Charlie's wee friend's dad less so, since his Skye team were vanquished 3-2 i</span><span style="font-family: times, "times new roman", serif;">n a white/bare-knuckle contest. Furthermore, </span><span style="font-family: times, "times new roman", serif;">he was unable to play much part in the unfolding drama. Ten minutes into the first half and in a typically juddering clash with his direct opponent, he had his collar bone snapped and had to be rushed off to hospital. Fearing the sight of this might have upset Charlie, I turned to put a comforting fatherly arm around his shoulder only to find that he was already re-enacting the offending tackle with near-psychotic glee. </span><span style="font-family: times, "times new roman", serif;">Clearly, the Shinty force is strong in this one.</span><br />
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<span style="font-family: times, "times new roman", serif;">For me, though, the most pleasing development of late has been the extent to which the words of </span><span style="font-family: "times" , "times new roman" , serif;">my good friend Neil are being daily borne out</span><span style="font-family: "times" , "times new roman" , serif;">. As at the very </span><span style="font-family: times, "times new roman", serif;">last minute I vacillated over the wisdom of our imminent move north, Neil it was who gave me counsel. Sagely, he pointed out that it was entirely natural to be struck by a form of terror when one arrived at the metaphorical edge of a cliff, but that my fears would subside no sooner had I steeled myself and jumped. It is Neil's words that I have come back to on the many good days that we have been blessed with so far.</span><br />
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<span style="font-family: times, "times new roman", serif;">And a good day here can be founded </span><span style="font-family: times, "times new roman", serif;">on the turn of a corner that then allows the aspect of an expanse of deep blue ocean. Or, as was the case two evenings ago, a brace of Sea Eagles soaring like aerial barn doors between the twin peaks that flank the entrance to Portree's natural harbour. At such times, it is all but impossible not to slip into a state of grace and feel fully </span><span style="font-family: times, "times new roman", serif;">at one with the world around and about. Or, put another way, to start spouting hippy-dippy-sounding babble.</span><br />
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<span style="font-family: times, "times new roman", serif;">I went into just such a reverie on another afternoon last week and when Denise and I were visiting an existing house similar in siting, scale and make-up to the one that we are due to have built. There we were, </span>wrapped within the womb of a single-storey, Larch-clad home perched upon a hill that loms over the picturesque town of Staffin on the island's east coast. Two floor-to-ceiling windows running the length of the building allowed us to drink in the view; rugged green, yellow and brown-hued moorland dotted with snug white dwellings; a cobalt Atlantic ebbing to all points of the horizon. The sun even peeked out from behind porridge-grey clouds and the overall effect was glorious, spell-binding, like a first kiss.<br />
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Afterwards, we drove back down the hill and to here:<a href="http://skyepiecafe.co.uk/">http://skyepiecafe.co.uk/</a> - one of the many treasures that we have already discovered. The good news is that the Pie Cafe is open till November at least. And as I sat there, tucking into a curried lentil creation so divine I could have bathed in it, my abiding thought was this: come on then winter, do your worst...<br />
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This Week I Have Mostly Been Listening To:</h3>
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<a href="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=bi36v7XHPro">https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=bi36v7XHPro</a><br />
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The Peatbog Faeries - Tom in the Front. And for more on Skye's finest go to: www.peatbogfaeries.com/<br />
<br />Paul Reeshttp://www.blogger.com/profile/17802572793315969562noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-5872994934716510802.post-30071751355827752932016-08-30T10:19:00.001-07:002016-08-30T10:19:47.219-07:00Landing on Water<div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;">
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<span style="font-family: "times" , "times new roman" , serif;">The site pictured here, or at least the idea of it, has occupied an enormous chunk of my conscious thoughts for 742 days and counting now. It was taken from the heart of a 0.65 acre plot sited in an elevated position overlooking the junction of two sea lochs, Loch Bracadale and Loch Harport, and at the midpoint of a single-track road that winds like a carelessly discarded ribbon through the township of Fiskavaig on the north-west fringe of the Isle of Skye. And by next summer, all things being good and equal, it will be on this very spot that our new house will stand and we will be living as a family.</span><br />
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<span style="font-family: "times" , "times new roman" , serif;">It took two years almost to the day for my wife Denise and I to accomplish the following: 1/ Determine that, yes, we rather fancied the idea of relocating lock, stock and barrel to this island idyll; 2/ Identify the area of Skye we wanted to live in, find a plot there that we could build upon and then persuade the owner to sell it to us; 3/ Seek out a local firm of architects who could design and manage the construction of said house and within our modest means; 4/ Sell our existing home in England; 5/ Remain upon speaking terms with each other and our two young sons, Tom and Charlie, and also keep sane. In truth, the jury is out on whether or not this very last goal has been attained.</span><br />
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<span style="font-family: "times" , "times new roman" , serif;">Eleven days is the amount of time that has now elapsed since the four of us arrived on Skye not as holidaymakers, as we had done for each of the preceding six summers, but as residents. In reality, our initial landing was not quite the magical experience I had so keenly anticipated. The house we are renting in the island capital of Portree, population 2000-and-something, is neat and modern, but looks out not onto sweeping ocean vistas and soaring peaks but towards uniform rows of other neat and modern dwellings to the front and an electrical substation to the rear. A Co-Op superstore is just a short hop down the hill. </span><span style="font-family: "times" , "times new roman" , serif;">Since all of our possessions were still four days distant from us and the house came unfurnished, we occupied it to begin with like a ragged band of squatters, sleeping in sleeping bags on hard-wood floors and eating meals from off of our laps. </span><br />
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<span style="font-family: times, times new roman, serif;">In the first stages of our becoming domiciled, the more discomfiting facts of island life, ignored or else unimportant whilst we merely visiting, have struck us in rapid-fire succession like volleys from a machine-gun. </span><br />
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<span style="font-family: times, times new roman, serif;">To whit: the waiting list to be registered with Skye's only dental surgery currently runs to 500, which effectively means that if I'm lucky I will get my next polish or filling in 2039; the misfortune of having something go wrong with the household electrics or plumbing is multiplied tenfold by there being no-one to call about it, or at least no-one who is going to rush to your aid any time soon; and if you are anywhere out and about during the hours of daylight and the wind should drop, you are guaranteed to be eaten alive by the psychotically voracious swarms of midges that occupy most of the available air space at this time of year. It is on account of multiple bites from these, the evilest of life forms that Denise's face has swelled to the size of a party balloon and I have routinely gone about in public like some kind of demented wind-up toy, hands flapping madly but hopelessly about my face and other extremities.</span><br />
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<span style="font-family: times, times new roman, serif;">And yet... There are moments, frequent and indelible, when Skye itself seems so epic and plain otherworldly that it truly takes the breath away. Driving young Charlie to school each morning, for instance, we travel along a road that bisects two of the island's three great mountain ranges, the Red and Black Cuillins. To one side the horizon is filled with the Red's vast, Martian-esque domes; to the other lie the Black's jagged peaks as ominous as shark's teeth. Just last weekend, we rested on a perch of rock 2,000 feet up and among the boggling geological features of the third range, the Trotternish Ridge, the mid-afternoon sun casting dappled cloud shadows onto the moorland below, while off to the west the Atlantic lay deep and blue and momentarily calmed.</span><br />
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<span style="font-family: times, times new roman, serif;">The day before we had sat in the reassuringly well-appointed offices of our island architects making final adjustments to the blueprint plans for our house. Fiddling with the dimensions of the doors and cupboards and recesses, and determining the precise expanse of glass required to fully drink in the view above. It seemed right there and then like the beginning of a great adventure.</span><br />
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<span style="font-family: times, times new roman, serif;">Stick around here and you will be more than welcome to follow it through with us. After all, what could possibly go wrong?...</span><br />
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<h3>
<span style="font-family: times, times new roman, serif;">This Week I Have Mostly Been Listening To:</span></h3>
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<span style="font-family: times, times new roman, serif;"><a href="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=HpWoTO-lLbE">https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=HpWoTO-lLbE</a></span><br />
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Paul Reeshttp://www.blogger.com/profile/17802572793315969562noreply@blogger.com5