The Man Who Knew Too Much

The black shine of a pistol barrel pokes out from behind red velvet curtains at the Royal Albert Hall. A visiting royal is to be shot at the precise moment a cymbal crashes during the performance of a Bernard Herman oratorio. The McKennas, played by James Stewart and Doris Day, have blundered onto the plan, trying to rescue their son from the would-be assassins.

Doris Day spots the gun barrel and sees its target. She screams a moment before the cymbal crash. Startled, the assassin misses, and is himself killed—he falls to his death—when the police rush into the box he’d occupied with his near-sighted accomplice who’d been following the score.

The other morning I was thrilled to visit the Albert Hall and see I saw where this all happened.  Why not, I reckoned, look for the rest of the London locations for the Hitchcock film.  First, the taxidermist shop said in the film to be at 61 Burdette Street.  There is no Burdette Street, but an actual taxidermist shop at 61 College Street was used.  I went there.  Torn down, replaced by an apartment block.  Next the Anglican church which in the film is located in Bayswater on Ambrose Street.  No Ambrose Street, but an actual church was used.  I went there--the church is in Brixton, not Bayswater.  Torn down. 

But this weekend I'll view an early Hitchcock film, The Lodger, outdoors near where much of it was shot in the 1930s.

Unless KLM puts me on a flight by then to replace the one they cancelled because of the ash.

What I’m Packin’

I took a picture of my shoes just now. A silly thing, no doubt. As if the work of the day was done, the can of Tennent’s opened, the pantlegs rolled up.

I give myself a 95 for decisions on what to bring with me on this trip of a hundred days, a 98 for the footwear—the Blunnies and my dad’s old slippers, topped up with the sandals from Santander once the Euro winter backed off.

I added a sweater, two t-shirts, four or five pairs of socks, one pair of pants from the high-end nautical wear shop in Vigo, and a travel mouse for my netbook. 85 for all that. Longjohns, bathers, shorts—not worn often but handy at times, 89. Nylon rain jacket and three umbrellas lost, wrecked or left behind, call that 80. Plastic accordion document file (full), new netbook, Tupperware box of office supplies, 99. Camera, thera-band, clothesline and pegs, deck of cards, mink oil for the Blunnies, duct tape, jackknife (in case I need to start a tractor), pillowcase/laundry bag, two books (Paterson and The Given), th’underwear—also 99.

By now I’ve sent home three boxes of stuff, a hundred bucks in postage. When I pack Friday to leave Saturday morning, with four days to spend somewhere, I should be able to more or less toss it all in my bag and backpack, no worries.

Going shopping in Edinburgh tomorrow though.

Spring Healing

I see the skin on the back of my left hand is healing.

Sometimes when you call a plumber it’s a couple of days before he/she can get out to the house, and in the meantime (“in between time’, as the popular song would say next) you leak, you stay split, you make a mess all over, you start to think maybe this is the way it’s going to be.

Same with the back of my hand after I spilt hot water on it. Red. A deeper red, almost a crimson bruise. A dried, weathered look, like some old fence I’d never get around to mending. I asked the Tassie woman who lives next door if she had anything for it. “Here,” she said, handing me a bottle of good scotch.

Only took an hour or two, the hand feels much better. Next: the knee.

Who’s this moving alive over the moor?”

“All voices should be read as the river’s mutterings” writes Alice Oswald as a preface to her beautiful new book, Dart, from Faber & Faber, a book/poem set on the river near where she lives in Devon. The mutterings—fragments of human voices, history, river culture, close observation of the river itself in continuous flow—stay true and quick, in language with muscle and snap all the way through.

The ending might be a tad over-defined, in my opinion, but I’ve added Dart to the list of books the traveller carries, in the form of place = form of poem section, next to Steveston.

And with a draft of my Hillsdale book complete, for now, I’m moving on to a series of imaginary real pubs, beginning (as much as any idea “begins”) yesterday with a visit to the Polton Arms, this morning with the dream pub, this afternoon with a bus ride into Edinburgh.

Getting There

86 pages off the top of the deck of the old printer at Hawthornden today, April 1, no joke—that’s the (in)complete first draft of Journey to Hillsdale, An Auto-Geography.

Far from a book, even if someone decides to publish it eventually, with much yet to see, write, photograph, figure out and revise, the thing has barely reached the launch pad, never mind the blasting off. Still, I’m happy to have come this far, having left for Portugal with 130 pages of single-spaced fragments, 150 pics, and the thickest wad of photocopied material I had room for in my bag.

Get me back to Hillsdale, maybe by the end of the summer I can finish a second draft. In the meantime, you’re all invited to the Jane’s Walk I’m leading on Sunday, May 2.  Details to follow.
Now, time for a little mischief.
Later: I kidnapped her lunch, that Aussie rotter of a neighbour, and came back to find that she’d kidnapped mine.

How Would Little Larry Get the Manhole Cover Off?

I met a man and woman yesterday on the path from Roslin to Polton. “Do you mind if I ask where we are,” the woman said, holding out her map. I showed her: across the North Esk from Hawthornden house. “That’s where I started,” I said, “and I’ve looped around through Roslin to where we are now.” At that she paused, glanced at her husband, and said, “Well, we’ve just come from Roslin. One of us is terribly wrong ” We shrugged, laughed, wished each other well, and carried on in opposite directions.

I was the wrong one. Let’s forget the details, noting only that by the end of the afternoon I’d walked miles—most of them in exactly the wrong direction, over significantly uneven terrain, and in the rain. I never did find my way home, only to a pub in Roslin, which became my instant home, what with excellent pints of Tenant’s, a Liverpool-Sunderland footie match on tv, and a bar matron who, having touched my sleeve and remarked, “Oh luv, you’re soaked”, said I’d take a taxi home and she’d call one for me right now.

For the second time on my recent travels, then (the other time in Vigo), I’ve made a series of right/left decisions that have been precisely correct, but 180 degrees wrong. As if my private gyroscope, until now a source of pride, has tipped or gone away.

So, in the next sentence or two either I add that to the breakdown ledger known as my body, or I find “lost” in my body of work these days, my auto-geography of Hillsdale, as in, people used to get lost all the time finding their way to our place amid the crescents and drives and cul-de sacs so favoured by 50s-era urban subdivisions, requiring elaborate sequences of directions, often administered by dad over the phone to relatives who’d given up and pulled into the Esso on Albert, or the time my son Larry, who must have been 6 or 7 at the time (one long-time Hillsdalian told me), disappeared in the afternoon. We couldn’t find him—where the heck is he? F. and I checked with the neighbours. I even took the manhole cover off at McNab and Jubilee in case he was down there. In the end we found him sleeping in his own room.

A Thousand Years, My Rear End

“Rained all night,” says one of my breakfast companions at Hawthornden. “I wonder if the Picts built fires in their caves, or thought the caves were enough?” (The Picts (for those like me who didn’t know) were pre-Celtic people “of uncertain antecedents” who ruled, if not terrorized, most of Scotland for more than a thousand years, harassed the Romans and the Britons, were eventually Celticized, Christianized, and confined until “nothing more was heard” from them after 844 AD.)
We’d toured their caves upon arrival here at Hawthornden Castle, more a great house built onto the remains of a castle, that had been built of sandstone on an impressive jut of stouter rock, in which last night the Picts may or may not have huddled in their caves out of the rain.

The Picts where short folk. For me, not so short, a tour of their caves meant dodging both the puddles of water and the stone roof. I spent the whole time stooped over with my hands on my knees. This is how they lasted for a thousand years, I reckoned. No one else could stand more than two minutes in one of their caves.

“It’s thought,” says my companion, “the Picts were covered with tattoos, or painted themselves blue. Imagine, running naked across the heather, painted blue.” Well that would be fine, it seemed to me. There’s room in the caves to paint yourself blue.

Living up in the house/castle has been something of a Pictish cave-tour experience in some ways. I can’t fit my knees under the breakfast table. The climb up the spiral staircase to the top floor is a little like feeding a long towel through a wringer washer. And if I want all of my body, including the top third, under the shower nozzle, I have stoop and squeeze, without extending my rear end through the shower curtain where it might drip water onto the floor and from there, as the sign says, go “underneath the lino and cause problems below”.

But the prize—richer than rain, brighter than fog, lead-glazed glory for a man’s rear end—is pictured here: