Chilled!

The secret art of relaxation...

Tentative stirrings of Spring – a little bird told me!

What a morning! Out with the dog at 7 a.m., it was four below zero, with a hard frost lying heavy on the ground. A crystal clear sky with the remaining half of a huge moon low on the horizon, and Venus shining brightly quite high in the north-west. It was barely light, despite the lack of clouds, and there was a magnificent dawn sky pending. Heading into the park that surrounds the golf course in Stirling, our usual morning haunt, the first thing I noticed was the birdsong. This is the first time this winter that I have noticed such an array of dawn song from the local birds. In particular, the blackbirds seemed aglow with the potential for Spring (“Hello ladies! Look at me…”), with lots of robins (liquid trills) and great tits (swinging on squeaky fences) active too. Spring might actually be coming – you heard it here first (“I saw some grass growing through the pavement today…”) – and I saw some snowdrops in flower on Stirling University campus at the weekend – there you go – it's official!

All the major mountains visible from the golf course (the four 3000 feet+ Munros – Ben Lomond in the west, Stuc A’Chroin and Ben Vorlich to the northwest, and Ben Chonzie more or less due North, plus Ben Ledi, not so high but no less worthy) looked truly breathtaking this morning and more like Alpine peaks, all having received a recent re-dusting of their winter-long snow cover. The early hour of my walk meant that I missed seeing the first rays of the dawn sun turn them into golden, shining beacons, which I have seen before many times, a phenomenon that only lasts a few minutes but to which it is almost impossible to do justice in a photograph (with my photographic failings anyway). Something that’s better just to enjoy and revel in while it is happening. Live for the moment!

A Hard Case

A Hard Case

You clasp the weed with a crooked claw
Or two, if the season of fighting has been a good one.
Tearing and stuffing into a maw of knives and forks,
An armoured omnivore you are, of all things you find.
I've watched you sieve, and poke and tear and cram.
An encased organic factory, processing your deck of mud.

The world comes in through those stalking, stalked eyes,
Front facing, yet seeing like some giant movie projector, you scuttle left or right,
Never moving forward but, like some immovable wall, backwards neither.
Even when you are too big for your boots,
A minor miracle you are, split and out you come again, but bigger.
A softy only for hours and then the hard man's back again.

A permanent calcium hunch, a pie dish on legs.
Lunch, ready wrapped in its own case, for a hungry host of scales or feathers.
You thank heavens for cool, wet, dark, deep mud, twice daily your security blanket,
Sinking down with a shake of bum and shell
As the tide, Moon's great wake, waits for no thing that breathes deep the tantalising mix of sea and river.
In your world of the eating and eaten, you're a three inch wide boy, taker-on of all-comers.



Scot Mathieson
November 2007

RSPB Big Garden Birdwatch weekend

This weekend is the RSPB's annual Big Garden Birdwatch survey - basically, you are asked to record the highest number seen of each bird species you record in your garden during a one hour period at any point during the weekend, and then submit the records to the RSPB. More here. It is a large-scale survey, generating relatively low quality but widespread data, but since there are so many participants across such a wide area of the UK, it has provided some useful longer-term trend information about our more common (and often increasingly less common these days) species of garden bird.

My list from this afternoon is:

Wood pigeon: 4
Robin: 1
Jackdaw: 4
Starling (noisy little blighters): 9
Greenfinch: 1
Blackbird: 2
Carrion crow: 2
Chafinch: 2
Coal tit: 1
Dunnock (Hedge Sparrow): 1

There was a sparrowhawk which, technically speaking, wasn't in my garden, so I'd better not put it in - shame! :¬)

Poll: Which of these is the most worthy eco-project?

The public is being invited to vote for the most worthy eco project submitted to the EOG Association for Conservation, which will award money to the winning project and it is up to us to choose which it should be.

To see the projects over the last couple of weeks take a look at them on the below and then cast your vote - I voted for the bees.

Poll: Which of these is the most worthy eco-project?

Don't try to teach your grammar to suck eggs

This is for all the (other) pedants out there. None of the following is my own work! Thanks to the University of Minnesota's Centre for Writing:

Humorous Reminders of Common Writing Mistakes


1. Avoid run-on sentences they are hard to read.

2. Never use no double negatives.

3. Use the semicolon properly, always where it is appropriate; and never where it is not.

4. Reserve the apostrophe for it's proper use and omit it where it is not needed.

5. Verbs has to agree with their subjects.

6. No sentence fragments.

7. Proofread carefully to see if you any words out.

8. Avoid commas, that are not necessary.

9. When you reread your work, you will find on rereading that a great deal of repetition can be avoided by rereading and editing.

10. A writer must not shift your point of view.

11. Do not overuse exclamation marks!!! (In fact, avoid them whenever possible!!!)

12. And do not start a sentence with a conjunction.

13. Place pronouns as closely as possible, especially in long sentences, as of ten or more words, to their antecedents.

14. Hyphenate only between syllables and avoid un-necessary hyphens.

15. Write all adverbial forms correct.

16. Don't use contractions.

17. Writing carefully, dangling participles must be avoided.

18. It is incumbent on us to avoid archaisms.

19. If any word is improper at the end of a sentence, a linking verb is.

20. Steer clear of incorrect verb forms that have snuck into the language.

21. Take the bull by the hand and avoid mixed metaphors.

22. Avoid modernisms that sound flaky.

23. Avoid barbarisms: they impact too forcefully.

24. Never, ever use repetitive redundancies.

25. Everyone should be careful to use singular pronouns with singular nouns in their writing.

26. If we've told you once, we've told you a thousand times: avoid hyperbole.

27. Also, avoid awkward or affected alliteration.

28. Do not string a large number of prepositional phrases together unless you are walking through the valley of the shadow of death.

29. Always pick on the the correct idiom.

30. "Avoid overuse of 'quotation' 'marks.'"

31. Never use more words than are necessary to get your point across: be concise.

32. Awayz check you're spelling. (Your spellchecker would only pick up one of the two errors here.)

33. Always be avoided by the passive voice.

34. Every sentence a verb.

35. Last but not least, avoid cliches like the plague: seek viable alternatives.

Heavy horses

"Heavy Horses, move the land under me.
Behind the plough gliding slipping and sliding free.
Now you're down to the few
And there's no work to do:
The tractor's on its way."

(Jethro Tull, Heavy Horses, 1978)

I’ve been thinking a bit recently about what horses mean to me, spurred on, if you’ll pardon the pun, by Jethro Tull’s 1978 song “Heavy Horses”. I was driving back home last week after a day working in the Borders and it is the first time I’d listened to the song for years. It triggered a whole lot of thoughts and memories concerning horses. There’s a sub-text to the Tull song that, one day, when the oil runs out, the heavy horses, the Clydesdales, Percherons, Suffolks, Shires and others, will have their day again, be called back to harness and celebrated for their usefulness and strength. Horses as a working tool for land management when the oil runs out? Silly old hippy nonsense surely! But no, horses have made something of a comeback in recent years, especially in forestry, where specialist log extraction in sensitive areas is sometimes best accomplished by horses.

A little web searching reveals a wealth of thriving heavy horse culture in Britain and wider, with a whole range of professional and amateur bodies devoted to preserving and restoring the culture of heavy horses as working animals. There is a Heavy Horse Centre between Perth and Dundee, there are numerous societies and trusts (The Working Horse Trust, British Horse Loggers Charitable Trust, and the European Federation for the Promotion of the Working Horse (FECTU), to name a few) and many forestry and land management consultants who use working horses (e.g. Heavyhorses.net, British Horse Loggers. Other contractors are available!). I even found an interesting blog: trojanheavyhorses.blogspot.com


Clydesdale

So, for a few days, I’ve been contemplating the influence that horses have had in my life. For as long as I can remember, I have been drawn to the idea of heavy horses and the romantic notion of the “living tractors” with all their horse brass and quiet power. I don’t manage to attend the Royal Highland Show at Ingliston every year, but the heavy horses are a major attraction for me when I do. Now, don’t get me wrong – I have never owned a horse, never helped look after a horse. Blimey, I’ve never even ridden a horse, not even pony trekking. But I think these sentimental notions derive from the earliest age, when parents and grand-parents talked about working horses in their younger lives in Ayrshire. We always had horse brasses hung as decoration in the house, as I suspect lots of people did.

Of particular note is my memory of Dad telling us many times how, as a boy, he helped with the collection of milk churns from dairy farms on horse and cart. To my childhood imagination, that horse was always a big Clydesdale (rather than the wee working horse that it probably was in reality). I remember, as a very young child in the early-mid 1970’s, Dad pointing out to us the big draught horses from one of the Edinburgh breweries, still pulling the dray wagons to make beer keg deliveries around the city. The fact that we only ever saw them when we were driving through very early morning Edinburgh (this was a time before city bypasses, when all roads converged on central Edinburgh) on our way to a holiday stay with grandparents only added to the sense of drama and enjoyment!

I experienced another link to the days when “horse power” was still a serious option in agriculture through the grand-dad of my closest childhood friends. For most of my childhood and teenage years, our family lived in a row of cottages on a big farming estate in East Lothian. These had been modernised to convert six original tiny cottages to form two small cottages. My friends’ grandfather (and their mum as a little girl) had lived in one of the original six cottages, where he had worked as a ploughman on the farm (just that change in housing density in itself tells a whole story about rising living standards for working people through the 20th Century, and the increasing mechanisation of British agriculture). He told us a number of times about his working life. Rising each morning at about half past four, he had to prepare his horses for the working day, would spend a day working the horses in the field, and then would have to feed and look after the horses before his work was done for the day. It sounded unbelievably hard work to my young ears. No wonder tractors were seized on with such enthusiasm when they first appeared!

But a celebration of big horses is not restricted to those working with horses. Many Scots will be familiar with the big horse statue on the M8 motorway. The artist who created this magnificent equine celebration is the Glasgow-based sculptor Andy Scott. He specializes in statues of horses as public art and you can see more of his wonderful, inspiring work at here. But he is working on something particularly spectacular just now. A remarkable project is underway, courtesy of British Waterways Scotland, who run Scotland’s canal network, the people who brought us the Falkirk Wheel, Central Scotland Forest Trust and Falkirk council (collectively the Helix Project). Only a few miles east of the Wheel, where the Forth and Clyde Canal reaches the sea at the River Carron next to the M9 motorway, two 30 metre horses head statues are to be built as part of the Helix Project by Andy Scott, to create an iconic entrance to the canal network. They will be known as the Kelpies, after the mythical Scottish water horse spirits. What’s more, one of the 30 metre high heads will dip, as part of a mechanism to pump water in and out of the canal’s sea lock. I was privileged to be invited to the launch of the 1/10 scale “maquettes” of the Kelpies statues at the Falkirk Wheel in 2007, when Andy Scott spoke very movingly of the influence of horses in his life and in his family that led him down his own personal artistic path.



Andy Scott's 1/10 scale maquettes of the Kelpies (c)S Mathieson

The Kelpies are due to be built by 2012 and will create a fine historical link back to the role of horses in Scottish life, not least on the canals where almost all canal transport back when the canals were built in the late 18th to early 19th centuries would have been horse-drawn. I, for one can’t wait to see them!