Rathbone's Ramblin'

[Bob Jefferson]

Makes sense. You may want to die, but you don't want to die fat!

[rapunzell]

[teddygirl]

Not the best of starts to the New Year for you then Rathbone
So glad you are okay.

Mr TG has also received one of "those invitations", I will be making his appointment pronto.

[rathbone]

[SoupDragon]

[mr magnolia]

[rathbone]

At last I got the call from Waterstones: my Christmas present had arrived!!!!

Back in those halcyon days when Harold Wilson was Prime Minister and I was an eager young architecture student I used to spend much of my hard earned grant on copies of Domus, which piled up on the floor beside the copies of Oz and International Times. By the time I was a radical young architect slumming it in a squat in Kilburn and selling copies of Red Mole on Camden High Street, they were in a sorry state and when Mrs R. and I moved out to our country retreat in 1976, they were ditched.

Now they have been reprinted by Taschen as a collected edition, so what better for putting under the tree?

So, a month after tree was put out behind the garage, the call finally comes and off I go to the local Waterstones.

“Sorry for the delayâ€

[SoupDragon]

Wow what a marathon!

Hope you're now sitting with feet up enjoying the read.



Would Amazon not have been an idea. At least they deliver to the door but then you'd have missed out on all that fun!

[rathbone]

Not much of consequence to ramble about recently, so I've spent the time working on this:



It's based on a photograph of Melrose Abbey that I took last year on my way between visiting Sunnyporty in Cumbria and EpyKat in sunny Porty, worked on in Photoshop and then painted in acrylics.

[teddygirl]

[sunnyporty]

[Scoop]

[Bob Jefferson]

Rathbone, you never cease to amaze me. Are the illustrations on the Marine Gardens thread your work?

[Epykat]

[rathbone]

[Dadaist]

[bellybabe]

[Poppy]

[rathbone]

[rathbone]

[Bob Jefferson]

[Bob Jefferson]

[Scorpion]

[Epykat]

[rathbone]

It rained yesterday, which was good.... the first time in six weeks here. I’ve been waiting for a bit of precipitation in order to get the mulch down. (There’s no point in doing it when the ground’s dry).

I also wanted to get on with the mulching because of the therapeutic effect that spreading muck has on my senses.... I was in need following the incident at the Community Council meeting on Monday. Nothing to do with Gossip and Tittle Tattle, I may add, but a straightforward accusation that I was a luddite. Me! The man who embraced a Sinclair Spectrum within weeks of it being issued. Me! The man who invested in an electric screwdriver when all around thought they were merely a fad.

It was all Tim’s fault. He asked for for the number of my mobile ‘phone. I said that I didn’t have one. The hush that descended on the room was palpable. I looked up, and every other eye was looking back at me. Talk about intimidating. And then it began. How could I not have a mobile phone? What did I do in emergencies? How did people get in touch with me? ........ How did I survive?

I explained that I had managed to get from the 1940s to now without the aid of a mobile phone quite successfully. I had run a department with 600 employees and a £20 million a year turnover with no major disasters. No-one had ever said that they had a problem contacting me and I had never knowing irritated anyone on a train. And just think of all the time I’d saved not having to respond to text messages.

There was a collective intake of breath..... and then I made a mistake.
I pointed out that I survived the first eleven years of my life without a television. We got rid of the copper and the mangle for a washing machine with a wringer when I was ten. We never, ever, had central heating and it was fun scraping the ice off the inside of the bedroom windows in winter and even now I have a thing about microwaves.

The motion was proposed, seconded and passed that I was an unreconstructed luddite.

To add insult to injury, I went for a pee after the meeting. There was no-one else in the toilet, other than this disembodied voice from one of the cubicles, cheerfully discussing his personal life with someone else on the other end of his mobile, quite oblivious of the amount of unwanted information he was sending out to the rest of the world. I didn’t wait to hear if he was also engaging in a game of poo-sticks.

So, mulching now completed, I’m feeling a lot happier. The Garden’s looking good as well.

[arachnid]

[Epykat]

[rathbone]

[rathbone]

Paul is creosoting his side of the fence and the nostalgic whiff is taking me back to my childhood........... much as the cups of Tetley and the Malted Milks served by ecm in the boycott bunker took me back to those heady, revolutionary days of 1968.

As is well documented, the 1967 summer of love slowly transmuted into the autumn of discontent and the winter of wondering what next. What next turned out to be 1968.

I was in the Art College drama group in those days, busy preparing our version of Brecht’s Mahagonny for that year’s fringe.

As the mood changed, so did our choice of play. We initially switched over to Brecht’s The Resistible Rise of Arturo Ui, but that foundered as no-one wanted to play Hitler, and finally, after absurdly wasting a fortnight on Ionescu’s L’Avenir Est Dans Les Oeufs, we settled on some 20s Russian adgitprop thing which I’ve forgotten the name of. (A load of old tosh for the main part.)

As the Vietnam demonstrations in London grew closer, the fervour grew more intense. For a whole couple of days the student body at the Art College went on strike, demanding ...... well, we didn’t really know what we were demanding. We occupied the canteen, ate all the sandwiches, painted spontaneous banners which were closely copied on those we had seen in newsreels of what had been happening in France and, strangely, sang lots of Jacques Brel songs.

In those days a revolutionary idea wasn’t really a revolutionary idea if it hadn’t been thought up in the Meadow Bar. After downing numerous revolutionary ideas that Spring, it was decided to hire a mini-bus and take a delegation of comrades down to the demo.

For some reason (probably because I went out for a pee) I was given the role of official photographer. I was thrilled, though it wasn’t my usual job: I wrote the music reviews in Student. Ian usually took the photographs, but he couldn’t get away that weekend.

The journey down to London was fairly uneventful. Nobody was ‘accidently’ left behind at any of the stops and we did find a parking place at Walter’s mate’s in Turnham Green. Once all sixteen of us had piled out of the bus we decided to split into smaller groups and to meet the next day in Trafalgar Square.

I went off with Merv, Alan and Steve. After getting off the tube in Piccadilly, we wandered round for a while, mostly drinking guinness in pubs off the back of the Circus. Steve bought a carry-out, but had nothing to carry it in, so picked up a touristy union jack bag at one of the pavement stalls. Then we went to the pictures. (I can’t remember what the film was, but it might have Isadora starring Vanessa Redgrave).

A few more pints after the film and then our thoughts turned to somewhere to sleep for the night, so it was into a taxi and off to the LSE. Smart thinking........ of course the LSE was occupied and anyone could doss down in the corridors and lecture rooms for the night. There was only one problem: Steve’s carrier bag. We could bring the booze in, but the bag had to stay outside. Union Jacks were not permitted. NLF flags - that was different.

Come the morning, it was a case of wandering around again until it was time to meet up with everyone else. We had a good breakfast in a greasy little cafe off the Aldwych and then made our way roughly towards the meeting place. The last of the carry-out was consumed sitting on a park bench in Soho Square.

Needless to say, we didn’t meet up with anyone we knew in Trafalgar Square.


I was busy snapping away with the two ton zenith slr slung around my neck.

When the crowd moved, I moved with it. I eventually washed up in Grosvenor Square, feeling frightened, buzzy and ‘grown-up important’ all at the same time. It was one of those situations where you just had to let yourself go with the flow, or else you would come to grief.

Eventually I bumped into Merv and Alan again. We decided to spend the rest of the day rowing on the Serpentine.

(Merv. rowing on the Serpentine with his revolutionary tie.)

Back on the mini-bus it turned out that I was the only one who had come within viewing distance of the American Embassy. Most of the guys hadn’t even started off on the march, using the time to sleaze round Soho or get pissed in overpriced hostelries.

None of the photographs were good enough to use.

The revolution came and went. We went back to Mahagonny. It played in a little hall off Lady Lawson Street. Seven people came the first night. The average after that was three, but the tea and biccies were good!

[rathbone]

I coulda been a contender........... but I bottled out.

Maybe it was the heat of the day, or that long, slow crawl through the roadworks at the Road Bridge, or even the sinister shock of the black Dakota monolith, but by the time Birnam came into view, I just couldn’t do it.

Having trundled the car down to a spot by the river, we made our way through the skirl of pipes to the arena. The pipes were skirling because there were what seemed to be a dozen of them, ranging from young laddies egged on by their mothers, through numpties in ray-ban shades, to auld jocks, all playing a different tune over a different drone. Ambient, it wasn’t.

The stalls around the enclosure were the usual mix of tat, tat and tourist tat, mixed in with ethnic fare, like hamburgers, diet coke and something long and slippery in a bun. The gates opened at 11:00, events started at 12:00 and the parade arrived at 12:30.

Yes, this was the 143rd Birnam Highland Games and World Haggis Eating Championships.

After a cermonial circuit of the field, Epykat, Sunnyporty, the elder Rathbonette and I settled down on the wooden settle just to the side of the Heavy Event Throwing Area. ( We knew it was the Heavy Event Throwing Area because there were signs telling us not to enter.)

As with everything heavy and highland over the last five years, all of the events - putting the stone, throwing the hammer, throwing the weight over the bar and tossing the caber - were dominated by Gregor Edmunds. After his first hammer throw sailed across the grass and came within whistling distance of Epykat’s handbag, the excitement diminished as he proceeded to take over almost every event. (I ended up rooting for a wee ginger lad who looked about seventeen, could hardly lift the hammer and gave up when it came to the caber - give him five years and he could be up there with the best.)

Things started to become ominous with the announcement of the annual Kiltie Dash. “You could do that”, said Epykat. Fortunately, it was only open to people wearing kilts, so I declined.



Then the competitors took to the track in front of us. Some had kilts, but some were simply wrapped in anything tartan. One guy had turned his car coat inside out and tied it between his legs. If I had known, I could have whipped the Massai blanket off Sunnyporty’s couch before we left.

Then it was the climax of the day. The World Haggis Eating Championship. “You could do that”, said Epykat. “No I couldn’t”, I thought. We got up from our bench behind Big Gregor and made our way up to the table beneath the lion rampant. The competitors had to eat a whole haggis and down a bottle of Carlsberg (courtesy of the sponsors). Fastest to eat all the haggis wins. As we stood, the tray of steaming haggi was carried past. They looked fat and greasy. By the time the whistle blew, they looked cold, fat and greasy.



Each of the competitors had a different technique. Some cut their haggis into portions; some split them open and scooped out the contents. One lad cut open one end and squeezed the lot into his mouth like toothpaste. The winner was a diminutive young lass in a pink baseball cap........ I could have done that!

Still, the mince pie supper and can of vimpto from the chip shop in South Queensferry more than made up for my lack of courage with the haggis.

[Epykat]

[rathbone]

Astute readers of the Marine Gardens saga over on the Local History forum will have realised that it has now reached the end of the road.

I have been doing the local history thing every morning (more or less) since December 2006, so I've decided to give myself a break.

It will be back when I feel like it (maybe next month, maybe next year) and probably focussing on the war years.

Meanwhile I might start to ramble again

[Bob Jefferson]

Congratulations on completing what turned out to be quite an epic. Dedication beyond the bounds of sanity! I'm really looking forward to Portobello during the war years, as reported by the Scotsman, but you've earned your sabbatical.

[Epykat]

Obvioiusly his age is catching up with him . He can't even muster the strength to come for the Festival this year and the World Haggis Eating Championship will have to do without him again.

[rathbone]

When I said I was having a break, I didn't realise it would be such a long break. Now fully refreshed, I'm back.

Actually I was sidetracked by what started out as a wee project to research the history of the Edinburgh Beat Bands of the 1960s, a project which just grew and grew and grew and grew.

One of those bands was The Hipple People. In fact they were the first group I ever saw live, in 1963 at what was called the Portobello Youth Club. Does anyone else remember the Portobello Youth Club and any of the other groups who played there? (The Hipples, by the way, are still together and playing!)

I haven't forgotten my promise to start a Porty in Wartime thread and that will follow eventually. Meanwhile I'm concerning myself with reminiscences of the old Portobello High School...... do other people remember Granny Parnell, Robin Dinkie Dempster, Big Ben Main, Daddy Weaver, Hovis Brown et. al? and is there any mileage in recording those recollections before its successor bites the dust?