Train-ing Day.......

Today I find I’ve got the time for writing a blog as I’ve been down to Liverpool for a training course on writing and reviewing fire risk assessments. This means I’ve a few hours to kill on the train and for once I’ve brought the laptop with me so I’m sitting at a table as I whizz backwards through the countryside in the gloom of a Scottish summer at 70 or 80 miles an hour, typing away and listening to some great music pouring out of my headphones.  I’m not sure but from some of the glances that have come my way I may have been singing along. It’s not a pretty thought, so if you’re reading this and have just spent three hours beside a nutter singing out loud on the train from Preston to Edinburgh then I sincerely apologise

It’s not like me to be organised but for once, after just 53 years of practicing, I have my act well and truly in order, at least in one tiny way. I’ve made use of some odd bits of time here and there to organise scheduling of ‘The Sunday Post’ poem blogs right through to Christmas and have several more sitting ready to schedule to start off 2013. It felt very odd to be sitting here in July posting a blog for Dec 23^rd even if the weather is more reminiscent of early winter with the last few weeks of record rainfall.

The poems are the only bit of the blog I’ve consistently planned in advance and usually I manage to keep a week or so ahead, but for once I found myself with a list of poems in mind and some time to both get them transferred into blogger and to organise them into a preferred chronology of sorts for scheduling. Not that the order makes any sense because of structure or anything like that. I like to be organised with the poems so that there is always a regular posting to cover the event of work interfering with blogging or, as is sometimes/often the case, I find inspiration has deserted me. As far as ‘normal’ posting is concerned I tend to just bash away with whatever is in the brain cell at the time. That seems to work for me for the most part. The only exceptions to this are the Scots history tales as they tend to need a bit more in the way of research and structure is more important to make sense. These have been missing of late because they tend to take a while to research and organise and I find myself writing and rewriting to make things clearer or to flow better.

Time for blogging has been sparse recently and has coincided with one of those spells where inspiration has been posted AWOL too. I’m not a naturally ‘creative’ kind of writer so imaginary tales or situations aren’t really my thing even though I do like to read a lot of fiction. In the past I often posted tales of interaction with Jess our cat, which proved popular, but work has separated Jess and I to a fair degree and she now spends much more time with The Lovely G so I am bottom of the list of preferred partners. Being bottom of a list of two isn’t too bad I suppose in the big scheme of things. I suppose there are tales to be told of working with Autism Spectrum disorders but I have hesitated on this so far. Beyond the obvious protection of privacy and dignity I’m not sure if that’s a topic I want as part of what’s been to date simply a personal blog. Actually, having just written and read that off the screen, I’m pretty sure I won’t be writing about that. The potential pitfalls may be just too great.

Despite the bad weather, the summer {?} is marching on and the annual cycle repeats itself as Edinburgh braces itself for The Festival. Venues are beginning to put out hoardings and billboards are jumping up all over promoting everything from circus acts to ladyboys or the huge influx of comedy shows.  For me this is the best time of the year to live within easy reach of Edinburgh. I love the city at festival time and, while normally I would grump for Scotland about queues or rude tourists or shop assistants or creaking public transport or a myriad of other things, I will happily choose to spend days among the crowds, put up with being jostled while queuing for anything from tickets to drinks to a place at a public convenience and happily point lost souls in the direction of castles, toilets, pubs, clubs or shows and revel in making conversation for a while with people I would never normally talk to or may never meet again.

My personal highlight to The Festival is the Edinburgh Book Festival, the world’s largest book festival and destination for literally hundreds of authors of all genres to come and meet the public. British authors are a huge part of the book festival and I enjoy going to see a few regulars every year: Ian Banks, Ian Rankin and Christopher Brookmyre. These Scottish authors are constants at the festival and are some of the hottest tickets for us parochial Scots. Luckily as a ‘Friend of the Book Festival’ I’m able to get tickets in advance of public release which guarantees me two tickets at any 10 events I want to see. These three are always the non-negotiable first on the list as they are some of the finest raconteurs and ad-hoc responders to unexpected questioning from the audience. Ian Rankin and Christopher Brookmyre have particularly Scottish voices compared to Ian Banks but he is probably the best of them all in terms of what he is willing to give to the audience. One of those people you would love to spend an evening in a bar with – although he could probably drink me under the table. We share a love of single malt whiskies and his book 'Raw Spirit' - about touring the distilleries of Scotland on assignment to find ‘ the perfect dram’- is one of my favourites as it’s a highly personal tale of the jaunts and japes that often took place while enduring the hangovers that attention to detail in an assignment like that seems to have demanded and covers not only his love and knowledge of whisky but of his love of Scotland and its 'great wee roads', for cars and motoring, family and friends and all in his unique style of inquiry into those crazy trains of thought that sometimes come through in his writing.

This year the festival has potential to be extra fun as I get to go exploring with my new telephoto lens which promises to be ideal for some of the candid people shots that I love to take. Since getting my newest addition to my camera kit I’ve not really had the chance to get out and about and find out exactly what my 150 – 500mm telephoto lens can really do. Weather and work have conspired against it.

Oops - time's marched on  - and I've been goofing off doing other stuff as well as writing a bit now and then - and the train is coming into Edinburgh. Time to pack up and get on my way home.

See you later.

listening to:

Edinburgh Book Festival 2010 - Ian Rankin

Hullo blog,

 As this gig is an immediate sell out on release of tickets I'm glad that my level two membership of the book festival let's me buy before general release as for me the Ian Rankin event at the festival is a must see every year.  It's not just that he's revered by the Edinburgh Book Festival going public and indeed by Edinburgh itself who claim this working class Fifer as one of their own, or that I've read every one of his world famous Inspector Rebus novels, that I share the characters love of pre-1978 rock music, malt whisky, or even that I love that Rebus inhabits a highly familiar Edinburgh landscape even if he has made it one of the world's murder capitals and therefore, fictionally at least, not particularly safe for us mere mortals. It's not either because I'm particularly captured by crime novels other than in a convenient easy read kind of way, at least most of the time, although I really love the need for a tight and hopefully innovative yet realistic plot in a genre which is so densely populated that it's easy to feel like you've read it all before. I suppose it's that somehow he's managed to take a well drawn character, an incredible, and incredibly small, city and a tightly weaved plot and gel them all together again and again without any of it becoming either too glamorous, too seedy, too predictable and, clearly judging by the success, above all to keep it real.

It's reality that shines out of Ian Rankin. It would be easy to brush by him in the street or in the pub for he is like most of us most of the time - pretty anonymous - and that seems to be how he likes it. He lives in Edinburgh and clearly loves the place. You can bump into him, like I have, in Rebus' favourite den, 'the Ox' or the Oxford Bar, simply because this is one of the places where he has drunk for years and he's comfortable enough in his skin to be recognised or not and not be put off by either. Rankin and Rebus both drink there for the same reason. The beer's good and they are comfortable there, they always have been. It's real in every very ordinary sense of the word

Last night there was no new book for a reading so there was an extended conversation with the chair for the event, fellow Scots crime novelist, Lin Anderson, followed by the usual question and answer session. Much of the conversation naturally turned around Rebus, even though Rankin retired him a few years ago {the novels worked in real time and Rebus like all detectives had to retire at 60} and has published two books - still set in Edinburgh - since. People want to know how Rebus is coping with retirement {drinking more and working part-time on the cold case team at police headquarters, Fettes}. Are there any plans for a book based on his female sidekick Siobhan? {it's something I've considered, so perhaps at some time} or his arch nemesis Cafferty? {ditto} And what about the main character of his last book 'The Complaints', Malcolm Fox, teetotal policeman of  the internal complaints dept. Will this become a series {Very likely. Both Fox and Breck, the other, more dubious police character feel like they have more mileage in them. Fox will definitely be featuring again and I think his character will develop more now I have got to know him a bit better. He may have a few more faults in his character to come out.}. Would Fox and Rebus ever come together in a novel? {It would be interesting to have them working in the same building on cases that converge. It's fascinating how Rebus might react, worrying if any of the skeletons in his cupboard might surface and how Fox would react under those circumstances too}.

Ian spoke about 'Open Doors', the tale of an Edinburgh art heist. This first novel after Rebus was his most successful ever. {If I'd known that was going to happen I might have pensioned Rebus off earlier! }.  He pointed out that it was only after it had been published and recognised as a success that he realised this was the first book he had written where no-one had been murdered. It's been picked up to be worked on for TV, as has 'The Complaints'. Interestingly Rankin has retained some rights in these transactions and hinted that he would have some, if limited, say in the adaptions for screen play and even in the casting of characters, something that never happened with the translation of the Rebus novels to TV. He admitted that although he has copies of the TV Rebus at home, he has never watched any of them, even now after the apparent demise of the character. The reason for this, he said, was that he didn't want another persons interpretation of Rebus to get into his head. Questioned about who was best cast as Rebus he did say that one of his friends commented on the difference between John Hannah and Ken Stott playing the part was that at least Stott looked like he would punch you in the face.

The fact that Rebus the series still lies unwatched in the Rankin household would seem to say that Ian really is unsure that Rebus has finally left the stage. I wonder if he is haunted by his spectre across the bar-room in 'The Ox' too..........

Interview over Ian picks up his i-pad; a small sheet of paper covered in tiny script detailing what he is doing every day this week. He smiles at the audience, the grin of a cheeky schoolboy.

" The screen size is great, it's lightweight and the battery lasts for ever!!! "

{I've paraphrased Ian's responses to questions}

Ian's wki bio is here, his website here and an interview with him here

Listening to Mogwai 'Friend of the Night'