The Great Unknown

Moffat Book Events started in October 2010 as a community group with a constitution, and is now in the process of becoming a Scottish Charitable Organisation 'to promote the advancement of the Arts,Heritage, Culture and Science of Moffat and District'. A theme of our forthcoming October 15/16 event is the nature of identity, from a personal physical point of view (our DNA) and psychologically (in October: the significance of Merlin, the wizard/shaman figure in the Arthurian cycle). As Alistair Moffat discovers in his A Genetic Journey , all that an analysis of our DNA proves is that 'we are all immigrants'. Notoriously, while Scotland's politicians campaigned for 'independence' in recent years, a group of Scotsmen was running Britain from Westminster. Even now, our UK Prime Minister is a Cameron. So what, in 2011, does 'nationality' mean? According to an item in yesterday's (Thursday June 16) Moffat News , 'The Great Unknown' - theme of a monumental artwork to mark the west coast boundary between England and Scotland at Gretna. This £2m enigma is conceived as a counterpart to 'Northumbriana' - Charles Jencks's massive recumbent green goddess - and Antony Caro's rusty metal 'Angel of the North' to the east. In addition, land artist Andy Goldsworthy will be making a 12-mile long trail across the Debatable Lands, scene of 300 years of lawlessness, raid and counter-raid by border families who acknowledged no authority but the sword.

Pentecost at St John's

Yesterday, Sunday June 12, we celebrated Pentecost at St John's, Burnside in Moffat. I had been feeling a bit empty and low, until I remembered that I live virtually next door to the community I had been thinking I lacked. Through the clear windows of the little white church, the sky was blue and the leaves on the trees an intense bright green. Pentecost is a milepost in the year, a time to take stock, and make ambitious plans. In my handbag, I am carrying Bishop Seraphim Sigrist's new handy pocket-sized collection of meditations A Life Together as emergency reading matter, savouring it as it is intended to be, not rushing. As soon as I got back from church, it was time to set off for a picnic in the forest with family and friends. The miraculous weather held; the children played on the pirate ship, the new picnic table was inaugurated, the hens pecked around in the grass nearby and Flo the family's faithful Cairn terrier sat under the table being fed pieces of cold sausage. In a kitchen cupboard, I found a packet of meringue nests at least five years old but none the worse for that, which we ate crumbled with our strawberries, raspberries and blueberries. A book was planned, school issues aired, we went on a slug hunt but they had all gone to ground. On our way out, we met Lee who lives in the barn coming in - we had borrowed some of his salt to sprinkle on our tomatoes. I saw two hares on the hill, and a buzzard over the newly felled open land at the east end of the plantation. The willow tree by the house is flowering, sending out puffs of thistledown seeds called 'pukh' in Russian. Tolstoy was only 4ft 11. I cannot get over that, after a lifetime imagining him a bearded six-footer like my sister's partner Jacques. All in all, an auspicious day, when a long-dreamed of plan to organise an event to celebrate the life and work of that great Christian, martyr and friend Father Alexander Men looks finally possible to bring to fruition.

A Moveable Feast

I described myself to an old friend as 'a moveable feast' when she asked for my current telephone number, because I only use my mobile telephone nowadays. I now read that this is becoming the norm among the under 40's. For the first time in my adult life, I cannot tell you what my landline number is. I do not give it to anyone as a contact because I never collect messages from it. The landline receiver sits unused in the kitchen behind the microwave, its only function being to enable the broadband from BT. I am keen on community or 'oral' history because change such as this creeps up on us and before we know it, we have forgotten - or risk forgetting - that for years, things were different. In our house when I was growing up, if the telephone rang my parents vied not to answer it: 'You go. 'No. you go' 'I went last time' etc. When I started work as a reporter on a daily paper in Cardiff, all such compunctions had to be overcome - one was endlessly on the telephone to complete strangers - but in advancing age they have returned. I do not like the telephone. I prefer email. The Enigma of Arrival by V S Naipaul is a fantastically good book, keen Proustian-quality observation and speculation on every page, every line. It is the sort of book that nourishes one's daily life.

Merlin in Moffat

We're holding a Friends of Moffat Book Events evening at Brodies in Altrive Place to share ideas about our Oct 15/16 2011 celebration of Scotland's Family Tree. What is it defines who we are ? Alistair Moffat has been looking at our DNA, with the conclusion that 'we are all immigrants'; so we fall back on acculturation myths with the help of Count Nikolai Tolstoy, and consider the earth beneath our feet with peat expert Ruth Tittensor with whom we will be exploring Merlin, after whom a cave is named on Hart Fell, and the peat laid down when the climate changed and the trees fell 5,000 years ago. NB There are many faces in this picture: can you see them?

The Zulu Principle

I sent off for Jim Slater's The Zulu Principle to try to understand how investment in the Stock Exchange works. The first disappointment was his throwaway advice to spend three hours a week studying the shares in the niche chosen before selecting the one that is underperforming. What he hasn't explained yet is when to sell. Anyway, I have signed up for the Halifax online share dealing service so will be tiptoeing into the swamp before the summer is out. Talking of swamps, I am warming to V.S.Naipaul's The Enigma of Arrival which describes his acculturation to life in a Wiltshire village in exquisite and oddly hypnotic - because repetitive - detail, like listening to Bach. It rained heavily last night and at midnight I put my face close to an open window and could smell the wonderful scent of plants exhaling their perfume after many days of drought. There is a family living in a ground floor flat just below the second floor flat where I stay when I am in London with a Mediterranean unconcern for raised voices, including a crying baby and noisy toddler, breaking the respectful silence of this former police barracks. Luckily this family like me are only occasional visitors, and in any case their unconcerned conversation is normal by any standards other than the sepulchral hush of English convention.

Hardy

Today is the birthday of the man who said, "The business of the poet and the novelist is to show the sorriness underlying the grandest things and the grandeur underlying the sorriest things." This could be an appropriate description of the work of V S Naipaul, whose The Enigma of Arrival I started to read yesterday. But the words belong to English novelist and poet Thomas Hardy, born on this day in Higher Bockhampton, Dorset, in 1840. He often helped his father with various building projects, and when he was 16, he took a job as an architect's apprentice. He moved to London when he was 22, to take a job with another architect, and he delighted in the city's literary and cultural environment. He began writing fiction and poetry; his first published story was "How I Built Myself a House" (1865), and he also wrote a novel, The Poor Man and the Lady (1867), which was never published.
He set many of his novels and poems in "Wessex," reviving the old Anglo-Saxon name for the counties of southwestern England, where he grew up. The Wessex he wrote of, though, was part real place, part literary conceit; he always insisted, "This is an imaginative Wessex only."
His first commercial and critical success was Far From the Madding Crowd (1874); it did so well that he was able to quit architecture and write full time. He produced six novels in the 1880s, and seven in the 1890s; two of these -- Tess of the D'Urbervilles (1891) and Jude the Obscure (1895) -- caused so much scandal that he eventually gave up on novels forever. He wrote a few plays, but in the end he returned to his first love -- poetry -- which he regarded as a purer art form anyway. He produced eight collections before his death in 1928. He had two funerals simultaneously: His cremated remains were buried in Poets' Corner in Westminster Abbey, while at the same time, his heart was buried in Dorchester, in his beloved Wessex. (Information courtesy of the Writers Almanac)

Authenticity

Well, James Naughtie, ultra-Scottish presenter of BBCR4's flagship Today programme is an Angle! His DNA shows him to be descended from the Danes who settled in Northumbria and JN's forefather was transplanted from there by David I in the 11th century to bolster the Canmore kings' power in the northeast of Scotland. A commentator on the programme explained that national identity is a mindset, not a collection of genes, giving as an example the uber-English reaction 'Typical!' to news ranging from losing a sock to the outbreak of WWIII, said in tones of triumphant resignation and lack of surprise ('I knew it would happen'). On then to V.S. Naipaul last night at the Royal Geographic Society 'in conversation' with Geordie Greig, editor of the London Evening Standard who I had up to then wrongly assumed to be a woman. Be that as it may, the conversation lurched awkwardly forward, Naipaul coming to life at the news that he had supposedly buried the hatchet with US travel writer Paul Theroux who once ruined my summer holiday on Cape Cod, but that's a story for another day. The gossip columns had reported that Naipaul and Theroux had been reconciled in the green room at the Hay on Wye book festival on Monday (May 30). As Naipaul told it last night (May 31), he had not recognised Theroux when Theroux was propelled towards him, hand outstretched. It was Naipaul's wife who had murmured 'We've missed you', not Naipaul. Etc. Walking away down Exhibition Road (in the process of being converted into a pedestrians-first highway) after the event, the most appropriate comment seemed to be 'What a character'. Naipaul is a great writer, whose work I treasure above all for his 'Among The Believers', his expose of the obscurantist aspects of Islam. His latest The Mask of Africa' is a sly, often comical, profound look at the reality of 'modern' Africa which europeans would be unwise to read as though of something alien to our own shortcomings. Naipaul tells it straight, and, he said last night, tries to load every sentence with 'more than one thing'; other books of his are now on my 'must read' list - A Bend in the River; A House for Mr Biswas and The Enigma of Arrival which my sister, whose birthday we were celebrating, told me last night was Marcel Duchamp's daughter Yeo's favourite book. Dinner afterwards at Madsen, a miraculous Swedish restaurant just by south Ken tube station.