ODDS and ENDS

Digging around in some storage boxes the other day, I came across the following bits and pieces.

#1 - A card containing Mother Shipton's predictions, something my Grandma kept in her dressing table drawer, passed on to my mother, then via her to me. My 10-year old blog post about Mother Shipton and her prophecies is HERE. These are words of her predictions, as printed on the card.

#2 - A photograph taken at the blacksmith's shop in Gretna Green, part of a coach trip with my mother in the early 1990s, after Dad had died. Gretna Green became famous as the venue of many "shotgun marriages" in the days when stringent English law on marriage caused couples, desperate to tie the knot, to escape to Scotland where marriage laws were much less strict. Gretna Green was the first place over the English/Scottish border, the blacksmith's shop was the first building travellers encountered. The town now makes a pretty penny from tourists! Our trip included a stop at the blacksmith's shop, with opportunity for a fun photograph depicting a runaway marriage. In the photo below the guy seated with the shotgun - playing bride's father, was my late partner (for over 30 years), the lady seated (in the role of bride's mother) is my mother. I am in the crowd - behind and between the top hat of the rather elderly groom and a girl wearing a striped jacket.

#3 A photograph I took on one of our many trips to Tenerife in the Canary Islands. One evening I must have noticed the setting Sun in just the right place for this:

Arty Farty Friday ~ Burns Night

Robert ("Rabbie") Burns born in Scotland on 25 January 1759 - 260 years ago today. Burns wasn't a painter but he qualifies for the "arty farty" banner for his poetry and quirky style.

Most people will recognise a few of Burns' poems: Auld Lang Syne (a New Year favourite when put to music); My Love is Like a Red Red Rose, for instance.

Others need a wee bit of translation - To a Mouse is one of these. The poem is available at Wikipedia with "a modern translation".
The original last two verses go like this

But Mousie, thou art no thy lane,
In proving foresight may be vain:
The best-laid schemes o’ mice an’ men,
Gang aft a-gley,
An’ lea’e us nought but grief an’ pain,
For promis’d joy.

Still thou are blest, compared wi’ me!
The present only toucheth thee:
But Och! I backward cast my e’e,
On prospects drear!
An’ forward, tho’ I canna see,
I guess an’ fear!


I like this summary explanation of the poem from Schmoop

The speaker is plowing a field and accidentally turns up a mouse's nest. The mouse is shivering and terrified. The man stops his work to try to comfort the mouse.

He tells her to relax. He didn't mean to break into her nest. But then the speaker starts thinking more about it—the mouse is, after all, pretty justified in being freaked out. Mice should be scared of humans. We set traps for them, we set cats after them, and we plow up their winter nests. The speaker apologizes on behalf of all humankind. He says that the mouse might steal little bits of food from human farms, but who cares? That one little mouse doesn't eat much. And now her little winter house is all in a ruin. He imagines the mouse planning ahead carefully for the winter—she worked so hard to make her nice little nest, and then, BOOM. The plow goes right over it.

But hey, says the speaker—that's life. Whether you're a mouse or a man, your plans—however well-laid—often get messed up. And after all, the mouse has it easy, compared to a human. Mice live in the present moment, while humans look to the past with the regret and to the future with fear. Lucky mouse.

Also notable:
John Steinbeck took the title of his 1937 novel Of Mice and Men from a line contained in the penultimate stanza: "The best laid schemes o' mice an' men / Gang aft agley" (often paraphrased in English as "The best-laid plans of mice and men / Go oft awry").

In Douglas Adams's Hitchhikers Guide to the Galaxy series, mice are the physical protrusions into our dimension of a race of hyperintelligent pan-dimensional beings who commissioned construction of the Earth to find the Question to the Ultimate Answer of Life, the Universe, and Everything. When their plans go wrong they lament that "the best laid plans of mice" don't always work out.

At the Burns Birthplace Museum in Scotland, there stands a piece of arty fartyness in tribute to the "Mouse" poem:

Fast-forward two and a quarter centuries: Alloway, Scotland in 2010. The Robert Burns Birthplace Museum was under construction, almost completed. Its caretaker, the National Trust for Scotland, had launched a competition to find an artist who could create a public work of art, to celebrate the poet, that would be situated on the walkway of the new museum. The contemporary Scottish sculptor Kenny Hunter received the commission; he had already established his name around the globe with large works of animals and people and skeletons that have been labeled ‘anti-monuments.’ The artist has noted his sculptures “look as if they have just popped out of a machine or a Kellogg’s cornflake packet—yet they are monumentalised and subversive.” For the winning work Hunter chose to pay homage to none other than Burns’s mouse, a seven-foot bronze that he titled Monument to a Mouse. In an interview, he said, shortly after hearing his proposal had been selected “my cat deposited a dead field mouse outside my door just before bedtime. It’s a common thing for cats to do of course, but the mouse was in just the right pose and unusually for my cat she had left it perfectly intact. So I put it in the freezer and took it to the studio in the morning to begin work on the model. It helped tremendously in developing the form that my monumental mouse would take.”
https://mouseinterrupted.wordpress.com/tag/kenny-hunter/

I've always enjoyed reading another of Burns' poems:
A Man's A Man For A' That.
Last verse:

Then let us pray that come it may,
(As come it will for a' that,)
That Sense and Worth, o'er a' the earth,
Shall bear the gree, an' a' that.
For a' that, an' a' that,
It's coming yet for a' that,
That Man to Man, the world o'er,
Shall brothers be for a' that.

Being translated:

Then let us pray that come it may
(As come it will for a' that)
That Sense and Worth over all the earth
Shall take the prize and all that!
For all that, and all that,
It is coming yet for all that,
That man to man the world over
Shall brothers be for all that.

I fear that the prediction in those final lines will still, even in 2019, be a long time coming. But ten out of ten to Rabbie Burns for his optimism!


Finally, recalling Robert Burns' wise, but unlikely to be granted, plea...:

Saturday and Sundry Thoughts on the Outlander TV series, & on Two Battles

I recently bought a used set of DVDs, as a change from Netflix etc. These cover season 1, volumes 1 and 2, of the TV series Outlander. Any tale with time travel embedded, for us, is always worth a look!

So far we've watched only volume 1 of season 1 - and in black and white. The new TV set we had to buy when ours decided to go awry, has yet to be fully sorted out for use of our older DVD player. I do believe that, as I type, the husband has managed to do this, so volume 2 will probably be viewed in colour. I actually enjoy black and white movies, and lack of colour in volume 1 of Outlander didn't bother me at all - in fact I thought it rather enhanced the mysterious side of the time travel involved.
From the Wikipedia link above:

Outlander is a television drama series based on the historical time travel Outlander series of novels by Diana Gabaldon. Developed by Ronald D. Moore and produced by Sony Pictures Television and Left Bank Pictures for Starz, the show premiered on August 9, 2014. It stars Caitriona Balfe as Claire Randall, a married World War II nurse who in 1945 finds herself transported back to the Scotland of 1743, where she encounters the dashing Highland warrior Jamie Fraser (Sam Heughan) and becomes embroiled in the Jacobite risings.

The second season, based on the novel Dragonfly in Amber, awaits - if we decide to continue.
We are enjoying the beginnings of this tall tale of time travel with a side of steamy romance, and background of history, fairly honestly reflected, so far. As we left volume 1 of season 1 the the epic Battle of Culloden was on the far horizon. Mention of the Battle of Culloden sparked my interest.

My maiden name was Scott, though I have not found any direct link to Scotland in my genealogy, and the Scotts in question were based in Suffolk, way down in the south-east of England. There are several theories as to how a Scott family (or even more than one Scott family) arrived so far south back in the 17th and 18th centuries, or earlier. One, among other theories I've come across, is that some prisoners from various battles, including the Battle of Culloden, were sent to Norfolk, in England, to work on draining the marshes there. Norfolk is a county bordering Suffolk. People of Scottish background, away from their homeland, were often referred to as, for instance,
James the Scot then, eventually, just James (or whatever) Scot(t).

My husband, aka anyjazz, in researching his family history, found that the earliest known ancestor on his mother's side was one Sander (short for Alexander) Milleson, who arrived in Massachusetts USA on a ship carrying prisoners, the majority of whom were Scottish, taken during the Battle of Worcester in 1650. Sander's name appears in the ship's list of prisoners, he is #178 on the 'John and Sarah' passenger list. He can be linked to other known members of husband's maternal family members. These prisoners were put into indentured labour for a number of years, and later released. Husband's relatives moved, eventually, into Pennsylvania, then into Kansas.

How erm...'cool' would it be if my ancestor and my husband's ancestor were Scottish prisoners from battles a century apart, sent off in different directions, one to the New World and one southward to England then, centuries later, courtesy of the internet, two of their distant relatives met and married?

Mini Rant and More Thoughts on Scotland

Tomorrow the Scots will have their chance to vote on the issue of Scottish independence from the United Kingdom. I've already said my piece on this, post is HERE. Reading around during the past few days, though, I've been shocked at the naked racism contained in much online commentary. Some commenters seem to assume that it's alright to malign the English in general, as a race - one blatant example from many:
Comment under a piece at Smirking Chimp:
Giving the Sassenachs a Big Scare by Eric Margolis:

from "oldeyank"

Well deserved split.....Fuck the English!
Nasty, vicious, arrogant, pompous ass, condescending, buck-toothed chinless wonders. Serves them right! And, about bloody time.

Would it be acceptable to make comparable comment about African Americans, Native Americans, Jewish people? Of course not. Because it's about the English people it's seen to be okay?
No it's not okay! Do some Americans actually understand what racism is? This reveals that there remains a need to nurture racism in the hearts of certain factions in the USA. When they are pilloried for hating this group of people or that group of people, they turn on a set about whom they know practically nothing and shed their vile hatred upon them with impunity (or so they assume).

I have never seen such a load of arrant bullshit, written by Americans in comment threads, as I've seen on this topic. I did come across one very good observation late yesterday, it's part of a weekly post at Avedon's Sideshow
I hope the blogger, Ms Carol, an American resident in London, will not object to my copying it here.

OK, the reason Scots want independence from Westminster is that Westminster is being run by a load of right-wing scum that seems to take special pleasure from screwing Scotland. (Well, Maggie sure did.) Of course those people are also screwing most of the people in England, which is now a runaway train, thanks in large part to the way the Labour Party membership has allowed their own party to be run by people who may not be capital-C Conservatives but are certainly Tories. Which sounds a lot like American politics, of course, except that there doesn't seem to be much threat of, say, California declaring itself an independent nation and taking it's Democratic votes in the Electoral College with it. A lot of people are fretting that without Scotland, England will be stuck with Conservative governments forever, but that is true only to the extent that everyone is happy to let neoliberal policies keep marching on without an argument. The question, judging from the kinds of arguments some of my friends are having, is whether the answer is a new generation of Labour members banding together to take back their party on behalf of real people, or whether creating a new party is the more feasible path to that end. Again, sounding familiar. In both cases, of course, nothing is going to work unless people are prepared to fight the right-wing rhetoric, as well as the policies, with something more than fevered angst.

Rant over.

Whatever the majority in Scotland decide tomorrow they will have to abide by it. Speaking of majorities, would it not have been a fairer basis to the referendum if a minimum percentage had been made a requirement in the Yes/No result, before a complete break from the UK were possible? I dunno exactly what percentage, but certainly nothing as close as most predict the result is going to be.

I hope the Scots do not forget, as they cast their votes, that the new boss will be "same as the old boss" (as sung long ago by English rock band The Who). As another commenter, elsewhere (edcaryl) observed, "This is Scotland's version of Obama's old "CHANGE" slogan - and "YES WE CAN!" It means all things to all people... and nothing".

I doubt anyone voting tomorrow will be reading this blog. Anyway, an interesting piece I found, written by Ewan Morrison, an award-winning Scottish author and screenwriter, is a good read for general interest. The experiences described can be related to many politically-related issues and attitudes. Something to bear in mind as, in the USA, congressional elections in November approach, and a General election in 2016 is being gambled upon already.
Title: YES: Why I Joined Yes and Why I Changed to No


Last words go to two other commenters from around the net, the first whose screen name I've accidentally lost:

Whether or not Alex Salmond gets his place in history as the man that destroyed the UK, he will still get his place in history as the man who divided and destroyed Scotland, inciting hatred and spite across Scotland and UK. Would hate to be in Scotland when the results come through. Could be a dangerous place to be.

And from "barrybethel", appropriate to a blog where astrology is frequently a topic:

Perhaps it's cyclical also. Students of markets such as Elliott, Kondratiev, Gann etc. have long noted that there are tides in the affairs of men (oh, and the Bard too it seems).

Sometimes we are harmonious, productive and all for closer union - the next, it's all going to hell and divorce and war are on the cards.

Maybe it's just in the stars.

Maybe so!!

An Independent Scotland? Will auld acquaintance be forgot?"

It's hard to know what to say about the upcoming referendum in Scotland. The people there will vote on 18 September whether Scotland should remain part of the United Kingdom or break away to become independent. I can see the "yes to independence" voters' reasoning, with regard to political matters. Scotland leans left, while they see England and Wales (or England anyway) as leaning right, so the Scots majority object strongly to having mainly right-wing policies foisted upon them (join the club!) This might be a piece of propaganda, as it relates to most of England, especially England north of the midlands.

What the Scottish people are using as an English stereotype is the class-conscious, toffee-nosed home counties (a wide area surrounding London), along with a majority of southern and south-western English. Up North it is (or was in my 60+ years there) a different scene.

Fantacising here - instead of Scottish independence, there could have been a vote on Scotland and Northern England together seceding from the south of England. Northerners and the Scottish have much in common, to my way of thinking. They had mining, shipbuilding, fishing trawlers, heavy industry etc. in common; much, or all of that in some cases, now lost.

It's none of my business now, even though I'm still a UK (dual)citizen officially. I'm unlikely to return. The thought of Scotland leaving the UK still hurts in a way. Silly, I guess. What also hurts, and also is silly of me: I get angry at some of the comments thrown around by Americans on this issue. Americans who have Scottish ancestors love to rail on about historical English brutality, but completely forget that the Scots were a very warlike and war-loving breed themselves. In this they quite probably outstripped the English. In any case, what the heck the dubious history of centuries past has to do with this referendum quite escapes me.

Scottish Independence. Wouldn't a better plan have been to vow to start a combined British political mass movement to try to overthrow the southern element which many English dislike as much as the Scots do? Did nobody even consider such a plan? Are Brits as fast asleep as Americans are on this front? We, the ordinary people of all nations, need to stick together, not fall apart. Divide et impera (divide and conquer) - that's exactly what the world's oligarchies are after.

My favourite comment, so far on this topic was a one liner from one "Tralfaz Wizard" (don't recall exactly where):

In the larger scheme of things it seems kind of like switching bridge partners on the Titanic.

Last Stop before 2013.......

New Year's Eve - this is a celebration where the Scots play it to the hilt - and further! They call it Hogmanay. I'm not a native Scot but I was, as it happens, a native Scott (my Dad's surname).

In my young years, even in Yorkshire which lies in northern England and around 200 miles to the south of Edinburgh, Scotland, certain traditions for New Year were still carried out. My grandmother would insist that the the "first footer", first person to come through the door of the house in the first minutes or hours of 1 January, should be dark-haired and bring in with them some fresh greenery, a piece of bread and a piece of coal. Her son-in-law, my Dad, was her favoured first-footer as he then had jet black hair. I suppose the three items to be brought in represented good health, food and warmth - necessities for the coming year.

The other tradition she honoured, though I'm not sure where it came from, was to eat a special dish on New Year's Eve, she called it "White Rabbit": cooked rabbit meat covered in a savoury white sauce. Mystery to me - I wonder did it originate from that hurrying scurrying white rabbit in Alice in Wonderland? ("Oh dear! Oh dear! I shall be too late!" Alice follows him down the rabbit hole into Wonderland.....as we follow time into the rabbit hole of the New Year?) Probably not, but who knows? I never did fancy eating a cute wee rabbit and always declined the dish in favour of a piece of Nanny's delicious chocolate cake! (Right: John Tenniel's illustration of Alice's White Rabbit)

I was going to post a traditional Scottish song here in honour of Hogmanay, but after listening to one or two decided instead on this, from my favourite Scot: