Ness was in pain,
suffering from sciatica – which I haven’t heard of before but from
Ness’s description sounds like inflamed nerves, or very painful to
say the least. Doctor, painkillers, do nothing for rest of day,
cancelled night out with Mark & Eliza, haggis for dinner, slouched
in front of TV
Fri 2 Feb
Ness was still in pain.
The only way to get some relief was by lying face-down on bed. I
faffed on the laptop updating media library, prepared traditional
spag bog for dinner (with chicken liver and pork belly), and went
out on my own to see Eroica and Nevsky performed by the Royal
Scottish National Orchestra, at the Usher Hall, a fantastic
performance, it was being broadcast live on Radio 3, grand gutsy
symphonies, music with balls. Drove back and had the spag bog with
Ness and watched TV.
[INSERT
REVIEW OF PERFORMANCE HERE]
Sat 3 Feb
Slouched, faffed, didn’t
do anything in particular (or at all), drove to Sainsbury's & Fort
Kinnaird and went slow to make the day go by, getting back to the
flat by late afternoon, Thai trout for dinner
Sun 4 Feb
The day started badly. I
was still frustrated at Ness not feeling well, and berated myself
for being unreasonable. I started to do sailing exercises upstairs
but stopped, Ness did a jig-saw on the coffee table in the lounge. I
cleaned the flat instead, and later watched Ireland-Wales and had
another go at sailing exercises,
Mon 5 Feb
Fresh fruit for breakfast
together and I went for a beach walk. Ness was still aching but
getting better. The light outside was clear and crisp light, very
low tide, met widow walking west highland terrier, her late husband
used to coach David Wilkie (Ness later explains connection, small
world eh!), round tea rock and back, down to water line, jets come
flying low overhead, scenery reminds me of why we have moved here
and what it is we're looking for. Afternoon, drive Ness to Western
General Hospital for Lymphodaema Support Group meeting. On the way
we stop at the Chinese and Polish shops on Leith Walk. At the
comfortable and homey Maggie's Centre I do some sailing coursework
while Ness is in the meeting. Late when we get back, and do
leftovers for dinner (haggis bubble-and-squeak, red (yellow) Thai
curry, and spag bog) and watch Waking the Dead.
Tue 6 Feb
Lie-in and after breakfast
we go to the Sports Centre to go for the health suite. Call from an
agency to confirm an interview, yippee! shit! Afternoon Ness
headache and throw up, maybe overdid it with the hot sauna? I shop
and fiddle.
Wed 7 Feb
?
Thu 8 Feb
?
Fri 9 Feb
?
Sat 10 Feb
?
Sun 11 Feb
?
Mon 12 Feb
Can’t really remember.
Probably spent most of the day in, “interview preparation”, going
over my CV.
Tue 13 Feb
Interview preparation,
walk along the beach, generally trying to keep calm and we were both
trying to make sure I would be in a good state of mind for
tomorrow’s interview.
Wed 14 Feb
Early start, and we drove
to the Gyle centre for my interview with BT. Ness came with me for
moral support. At the Gyle we had a coffee at Starbucks, with other
“werkers” getting their pre-work coffees in. Then I sauntered over
to the BT office. Signed in, had to wait as the interviewer was a
bit late. Shown to a little meeting room by a secretary, and then
Keith, the interviewer, arrived with two coffees, and a case study
for me to spend some time reading through. Aargh! Suddenly it was
very real, this business thing. Anyway, the interview went rather
badly and I was having trouble answering many of his technical
questions. The more he asked the harder I found it to come up with
credible answers, and I got the feeling he was beginning to skip
through the questions. TOGAF? No, never heard of it. BizTalk? Hmm, I
tried to feign recognition but it didn’t register quickly enough.
Sonic? Nope. Zackmann? Hmm, rings a vague bell, but can’t tell you
anything about it. Can you draw me a high-level architecture? All I
could come up with was some boxes and lines. Lame, lame, lame. Don’t
call us, we’ll call you. Another coffee at Starbucks to get over it,
and then we carried on into the town centre. Went for lunch at the
café in the Fruitmarket Gallery, a smart little place round the
corner from Waverly station. Took a long time for our sandwiches to
arrive, but we still had enough time to take a look round the
gallery before I had to go for my next appointment. The exhibition
was by Trenton Doyle Hancock (copied the blurb from
www.fruitmarket.co.uk about the exhibition below). I had my
appointment with the agency and came away feeling rather better
about myself than I had this morning. A bit of last-minute Valentine
shopping, and then I collected Eddie from the Castle Terrace car
park and drove to meet Ness at the Polish shop on Leith Walk.
Traffic was so busy that Ness had already got there and done the
shopping (tasty Polish bread) by the time I got there. We drove
home.
Announcement of exhbition on Fruitmarket Gallery's web site
Trenton
Doyle Hancock - The Wayward Thinker
Exhibition 10 February – 8
April 2007
The
Fruitmarket Gallery is proud to present the first European
solo exhibition of the work of Trenton Doyle Hancock, a
young American artist whose paintings, drawings,
assemblages, installations, sculptures and objects pack a
powerful visual and imaginative punch.
Born in 1974 in Oklahoma
City, Hancock grew up the son of a Baptist minister in the
semi-rural town of Paris, Texas. At university, he studied
illustration, then drawing and painting, and was initially
uncertain whether to pursue cartoon illustration or fine art
as a career. At that point, he recalls, ‘I formulated a
mission statement. The idea was to have a painting project
in which I could freely jump between modes of production and
maintain a set of characters that inhabit the work’.
All Hancock’s mature work
has been driven by this mission statement, and is produced
in the context of an epic, ongoing saga which turns
autobiography into mythology in a classic battle between
good and evil. On one side are the peace-loving Mounds, the
illegitimate progeny of prehistoric apeman Homerbuctas and a
flower meadow. Mounds are covered in black and white fur,
are rooted to the ground, and ooze moundmeat, a pink
substance suspiciously reminiscent of Pepto-Bismol. On the
other side are the evil vegans, a race of inbred descendants
of Homerbuctas’s legitimate children, jealous of the Mounds’
relationship with their father. Due to generations of
inbreeding, Vegans have strange physical mutations and have
lost the ability to see in colour. They gather together
underground and attack Mounds whenever they can in order to
bleed them of moundmeat, which they convert into tofu.
Hancock’s narrative is not
subject to the constraints of linear time, but unfolds
episodically, the artist moving backwards and forwards in
the histories of his characters to develop stories around
them. In the section of the narrative presented in this
exhibition, our hero is St Sesom, a free-thinking Vegan
minister, a distant descendant of Homerbuctas, who begins to
dream in colour. In one dream, it is pointed out to Sesom
that Mounds and Vegans are descended from the same father
and need not be enemies. Sesom is commanded to help other
Vegans become human again by being friendly to Mounds and
consuming their moundmeat as meat rather than tofu so that
the Vegans might ‘regain strength, stature and spectral
happiness’.
Sesom’s story is told
through large collaged paintings, prints, drawings,
sculpture and incantations writ large on the Gallery walls.
Hancock’s work is a submersive experience, his theatrical
installations banishing pre-conceived ideas about art while
thrusting the viewer literally and figuratively into his
mythic drama. He seeks to absorb everything - including the
space in which he exhibits and the audience he exhibits it
to - into his created environment, using language to drive
the story and the audience’s understanding of it, while also
seeing words as key visual components. He makes his
narrative dominate and control its surroundings by
physically writing it out on the walls.
Hancock’s saga is exuberant,
subversive and curiously beguiling. It is presented through
a variety of cultural tropes and visual styles, the artist
mimicking comic-strip superhero battles and medieval mystery
plays with equal panache. His mythical drama unfolds in an
obsessively detailed, candy-coloured world that owes
something to Hieronymous Bosch, something else to Max Ernst
and a great deal to the teeming visual imagination of its
creator.
Thu 15 Feb
?
Fri 16 Feb
Nice steam session at the
health suite at the end of the day.
Sat 17 Feb
Great day! Beautifully
clear, sunny, intense blue skies, and pleasantly cold with it. Slow
start to the day, brekkie and stuff, and we come up with the idea to
go out to the Jamhouse for the evening, which we thought was going
to be a jazz bar, with Jools Holland behind it. Later we went out
for a walk at Ravensheugh sands, a short drive east of North
Berwick. A super walk, reminiscent of our coastal walks in northern
Estonia. Definitely one to remember and do again. Waves rolling in,
clear, clear skies, and fresh air. We had made a picnic lunch and
had our sandwiches sat on a stone bench, then carried on walking
round and towards the sands. I couldn’t resist the water and took my
shoes and socks off to paddle. Freezing cold! Ness had been putting
a brave face on it but was now beginning to reach saturation and we
headed back to the flat to chill. In the evening we drove into
Edinburgh and met Mark and Eliza at the Jamhouse. It was a big
disappointment, a large echoey hall, with standard pub-rock fare
being belted out, poor acoustics, and rather underwhelming
overpriced food. We didn’t bother with desert and settled our bills
and left as soon as we could. Shame, but on the whole it was a
fantastic day.
Sun 18 Feb
Ness has a cold waiting to
emerge and was feeling pretty yuck. Frustrating, but I tried to do a
little better than last time and be a bit more understanding. Ness
did her best to put a brave face on it, but it was a full blown cold
and there was only one thing for it, to sick it out on the settee
with films and DVD’s. I spent some time doing sailing coursework.
Outside it was a glorious sunny, but cold, day. Shame we didn’t make
it out at all, but there’ll be other nice days. For dinner we had a
venison recipe from Clarrissa Dickson-Wright’s Game book, a
Norwegian venison stew, but we did it with the defrosted strip of
venison we had bought in Alnwick (“ennick”) around Christmas. It
bore no resemblance to the fresh red meat we had bought for Caz and
Andy. Instead there was a brown rather unpleasant smelling mass,
with gobbets of greyish meat rolling off on the sides, yeuack.
Still, I persevered with the recipe, but the end result was
unpleasant, lumps of meat that lacked taste and were pasty and
crumbly in texture.
Mon 19 Feb
Ness has a cold and spent
most of the day on the settee watching Lovejoy episodes. We popped
out for some local shopping. I spent time on the laptop. For dinner,
we tried a Moldavian recipe for moussaka, which was very tasty. It
was a grey misty day outside, with a very low springtide in the
morning and at around 5pm a very high springtide.
Tue 20 Feb
I felt rather low for most
of the day, and found it hard to snap myself out of it. Job (lack
of/hunt for), house, and Ness’s catalogue of aches and ailments, all
added up to a general feeling of “this is not going the way I had
envisaged”. Ness coughed and spluttered. I spent time staring at the
laptop. Late in the afternoon we popped out and walked to the rocky
promontory at the harbour and sat there looking out over the sea. I
love this spot. Ness gave a motivational pep talk and the gloomy
mood began to disappear. We popped into the Auld Hoose for a drink,
and then went back to the flat and had more of the tasty moussaka
for dinner.
Wed 21 Feb
Early morning call from
Waldo, from True North, startled us. Turns out TN have been bought
by another company and the upshot is that we’ll have to find another
dealer to sell Morty through. B*mmer! Whilst Morty was a fantastic
way of travelling through Canada and we have some fond memories of
it, it is now beginning to feel like a millstone, and with hindsight
it was a pretty rash buy. It got us up and out of bed (Ness had
already been awake for some time, unable to get back to sleep) and
we threw some clothes on and went for a beach walk. Ness clearly
keen to ensure I was in a positive state of mind for my telephone
interview with Real Time at ten o’clock. Nice walk along the beach.
It was very hazy. You could barely make out the Law and Bass Rock.
If it had been a few degrees colder it would have been a typical
grey winter’s day. Up to Tea Rock, as we have christened it, where I
had the customary cup of tea from the flask. Ness’s leg was still
aching but at least the cold seems to have abated a little. Back to
the flat, and Ness tried to get some kidneys from the butcher,
another effort to make sure I would be on top form. Meanwhile I got
myself ready, shaved and showered. We had breakfast (no kidneys, so
I had to make do with Polish bread and herrings, shucks!) and I
awaited the call from Real Time. Checking email I was chuffed to get
an interview from IBM, a technical phone interview – at last! The
Real Time interview went pretty well, I thought. A pretty
straightforward HR interview. Hopefully I’ll be invited for the next
stage. Making some progress at least. Afterwards I submitted an
application for a job at HP which I had received an email alert for.
A bit of a long shot but worth a try. Meanwhile Ness had been busy
looking at properties for sale in North Berwick and had come up with
a couple of possibles, so we decided to schedule some appointment to
go and see them. A little early maybe as we’re not in a position to
buy yet, but we’re making a start. I downloaded some reading for the
IBM interview, we had some lunch, tasty Welsh rarebit, aka fancy
cheese on toast, and later we went out to view two houses. The first
was an old stone affair on the Quadrant, full of “potential”, but
with a very high asking price of offers over £425,000, i.e. a bit
outside our budget. But it got both of us thinking. Would need lots
of work. We went for a coffee and a cake at the Seabird Centre, sat
on the decking outside, watching the big waves rolling in and
crashing on the rocks. The haze had all but disappeared and there
was a lovely rosy quality to the air, and the white crests of the
waves were beautifully lit up. Fantastic! We briefly returned to the
flat and Ness went back to the butcher to get some rabbit – Ryan,
the butcher, had remembered that we had asked for rabbit several
times. Next we went to see the next property, close to the sports
centre, in the area where there were more “seventies” style houses.
We had already taken a look at this area driving through and had
more or less dismissed it. We both liked the house we saw here,
especially the nice big open lounge and the gardens surrounding the
house. It also rather reminded me of some friends’ houses in
Brussels, with that somewhat different layout, split levels and
stuff. Best of all, it had great views, and at £335,000 (offers
over…) a little more affordable and with less work required on it.
Anyway, we’ll have to mull it over. Back to the flat. I looked up
techie stuff to read up on for the IBM interview, finding Wikipedia
a great starting point and downloading a bunch of PDF’s from the IBM
Education site. Having seen some houses, especially the second one,
but frustratingly not in a position to put in an offer because of
the lack of a permanent income, I’m keener than ever to get the IBM
job. Ness cooked a very tasty risotto with chicken and chorizo, and
we watched an episode of Michael Palin’s Himalaya series. Ness fell
asleep on the settee and I did some late-night revision of my
sailing course before finally going to bed at two o’clock. Ness
couldn’t get to sleep, reading and coughing, and ended up going
downstairs. The sound of little raindrops could be heard on the
skylight velux window above my head, and outside the crash of the
waves.
Thu 22 Feb
A grey wet day. Found Ness
sleeping downstairs and left her to have a lie-in. Had forgotten we
had an appointment to view a flat at ten o’clock,
