Odds and sods

1. Lenin's Tomb recently featured a comment-box chess game, a particularly appreciated OT branching. Strike against purely political posts, for which ML or PoV are amply equipped. Bogol featured a vg post with a recipe for calm chowder. These are simple pleasures.

2. Now that GG has defeated Oona King (unmistakenly celebrated), the knives are out and his warts are showing. No- not the barrels of oil 'scandal', but his poor wife's quandary. Is he a cheater or are the phonecalls from women claiming affairs a CIA plot? For the sake of balance, Pandora (Indie gossip column) has also published a scandalous ditty linking Oona romantically to Straw.

3. In my wish-fulfillment dream last night, there was unlimited imaginary access to a monstrously large bathtub filled with bubbles. It was... dreamy, from the set of a Busby Berkeley movie.

4. Wrote to AL Kennedy today after another seething 9/11 article in the Guardian, who's speaking at the Word-Power radical bookfair at its opening tonight, c/o her agent. The poor kids Nini and Dodo will be dragged along to the bookfair, but Elaine always includes kids' book selections too on the stands. Maybe they'll remember later that money spent on books is never wasted.

5. On disembarking today, a solitary black shoe is upright on the pavement near the bus stop, standing up in strappado leather and tapering heel height. It's situated between the BlindSense charity shop (ivory wedding dress, never worn, 75 quid, in window) and the late-license ikea-outfitted style-bar. Which is it attached to? A number of branching stories could be constructed, some of them linking to Mary-Ann, whose appalling death seems emblematically chilling.



6. To David Duff- there's nothing here for you, and nothing to interest you. You have mistaken me for someone else, so please be gone. Strangers disturb me- you're cramping my style. These are notes to myself, and you do me disservice by criticism.

7. Now that spring's here, we've been up the hill (Arthur's Seat) a coupla times a week recently, enjoying the later nights and the yellow of the broom.


Here's the contours of the Hill as you approach it via St Margaret's Loch, and up through the valley till you're past the Lion's Head and in through the cleft between hill forts to the upper loch, Dunsapie, which boasts ducklings at present. That high pass is surely the 'Lion's Crotch', a placename invented by NiNi which we're now forbidden to mention. Swans are still brooding their egg clutches, and protecting them from the predatory gulls.



Arthur's Seat is allegedly the geological formation that prompted Hutton (and afterwards Lyall) to imagine deep geological time, and is one of a chain of volcanic plugs stretching along the Lothian coast inc. ?Cairnpapple, Arthur's seat, Trappain Law, Berwick Law, Bass Rock.