The weather forecast for Brisbane, Queensland

I mentioned in my last post about the current balmy weather. Even Lady Voledoomcat has been purrsuaded to get out and lounge in the sun today, and we have been gassing most of the day over the fence with The Bikers, admiring their new pond and Pong’s (the new kitten’s) ability to lie on a warm slab beside same and dangle her long black tail into the water. She’s not going to catch much with that tactic, populated as said pond is with assorted tadpoles, diving beetles, pond skaters and whirligigs.
We’ve been getting our act together at The Grannary, because we are about to desert this sainted celtic land and head south and east, inverting ourselves at latitude zero, as we set off for a family wedding in Queensland.
We’ll be a little bit south of Brisbane, down on the Gold Coast. Life’s a beach, after all. The wedding was originally going to be in August, but it was decided by the locals that the weather would be far too cold, in fact, they were concerned that April might be also too cool for such festivities. Having done a little research through the auspices of the BBC weather website, I’m of the opinion that these Aussies are crazy. As far as I’m concerned, the weather we’re about to encounter will fry the wazzocks off me in about three seconds flat. Just take a look at this:

And for those of you who are impressed by old money:

A spring sunset

The last week has been balmy weather for spring – post-equinoctal stuff, I’m sure, but warm, sunny days and shirt-sleeve weather are to be celebrated in this part of the world, whenever they occur.
Mrs PtC and I managed to get out and grab a sunset from Loch Beag a few days ago – all right, it might well have been a week ago, and the sight of the sun setting behind Jura was fabulous, even if the air became very cold very quickly.

Chookters in Auld Reekie

One of the unexpected outcomes of the Glasgow blogmeet last year was that Mrs C and I were invited to stay with BondBloke and BondWoman for a couple of days, and last weekend we called their bluff and went up to Edinburgh. A fairly bold adventure, since meeting folk for a couple of hours in a Glasgow bar ain’t the same as inviting those same folk to stay for a couple of days under your roof and share bread with them, particularly if you haven’t actually met the old lady herself. Still, the Bonds are made of stern stuff, used to rubbing along with some of life’s weirder throwbacks, so we fitted right in.
We left Argyll about half-four on Friday evening and drove via Balloch and Stirling to Edinburgh, where, only one false turn later, we tracked our hosts down to their palatial, and extremely stylish, flat in a converted warehouse in Leith. The course of the weekend was soon clear; after a swift meal and couple of bottles of wine, we were down in the Malt and Hops downing several pints of the very repeatable Pale Rider pale ale – albeit a wickedly 5.2% alcohol content. I seem to recall very little of the rest of the evening, but since Her Maj was more than happy to keep conversation going, my snoozing on the sofa didn’t seem to cause the party to lag too much.
The following day dawned clear and cold and Edinburgh was infested with a wind from the colder armpits of Siberia to keep us country types humble. We executed a trip to the Dean Gallery and the Gallery of Modern Art to see a goodly assortment of cubists, surrealists, wild childs and installationists, as well as some of the great Scottish colourists. I have to say, there were some bizarre installations, although we all agreed that the pickled leaves hanging in jars from the ceiling did something for us that the curdled milk bottles forming the 3D image of a woman on the saltire somehow failed to.
We meandered back into town and found ourselves in the Milnes bar in Rose Street, where a couple of pints of Old Speckled Hen blurred the rougher edges of the previous evening’s excesses. Scotland were busy losing to France, a tale which we could see unfolding in the silence of the Scottish fans watching the TV and the restrained pleasure of the few French in the bar.
Next stop was the Cafe Royal for a couple of pints more and a few nachos and suchlike. I drew on my quasi-Welsh heritage (okay, I went to school across the border in Wales from my childhood home in Herefordshire) to cheer on the Welsh in their victory over England. I may even admit to the occasional Oggy-oggy-oggy escaping my lips in a moment of excitement.
Match over, it was time to find somewhere to eat, and a bus-ride down Leith Walk took us to Suruchi Too, an Indian restaurant which rejoices in a life-size carved camel in the midst of the tables.
The food was great and set us up for heading down the shore to The Shore, where some live jazz was anticipated later that evening. It duly appeared, as the following photo of two duetting pianists competing to find the beat will testify.
Not up to a late night, we retired homewards a little after eleven o’clock and were all crashed out not much later.
A good visit, nice to make/confirm some new friends and enjoy a little bit of metropolitan excesses after these rural fastnesses. The Bonds are good hosts and great company.

Feel the hose …

It’s astonishing the things that go on in the local primary school, but this is the sort of thing that can give a kid a life-long interest in music. I can still remember my trumpet teacher playing a music stand …

Second-generation blogging

First-known instance, at least to this keyboard-numpty, but nice to see the youngsters getting the hang of this techno-thingy. Read on.

A little family history

I promised to pass on some of the family tales that Mum related to me when I saw her over the New Year. Here are a couple:
Mum’s great-grandfather was a GP in Parham Harbour, on Antigua. He died young and left his wife and children in abject poverty, which was extremely incongruous in the white population of the island at the time. Great-grandmother took to sewing crinoline hoops into dresses to make ends meet and somehow retained her social status and raised her children as a consequence.
Mum also told the tale of a strange journey she made to Jamaica in 1942 when she was only eleven years of age. She was travelling by plane from Antigua to Jamaica to stay with relations when she was put off the plane at Puerto Rico to make room for someone more important – this was wartime and transportation was an uncertain business at the best of times, but for an eleven-year-old girl travelling on her own this was more than a little unfortunate. She was put into an hotel by the airline where she was left alone for a month. She had a vast suite of rooms to herself on an upper floor. Frightened, she would check under her bed every night before going to sleep. She took her meals in the dining room and American GIs would buy her comics to amuse her. She eventually arrived in Jamaica just after her twelfth birthday.

Clachan Calamities wow Tarbert

I’ve written before about the pantomime we went to see a few weeks ago in Clachan, away down the Kintyre peninsula. Last night the Clachan Calamities went on tour, eight miles up the road to Tarbert. The additional show was put on, not only to raise funds for the village hall in Tarbert, but also by way of popular acclaim for what is a good, fun pantomime.
Her Maj and I had been down in Glasgow all day, doing bits of shopping for luggage for the Australian visit in three weeks time, but made it back to Tarbert in time for a meal and a couple of pints in the Victoria Hotel to set us up for the show.
Tarbert’s village hall is a large wooden-panelled room with a proper stage at the business end. The queue to get in was nearly out of the door when we arrived and additional chairs were being set out in the hall for the late-comers.
Lights! Cameras! Action!! and we were off. The chorus line was as good as ever and raised the audience’s energy levels for the play itself. It was the same cast as previously, even down to the Duck, and there was fun and ribaldry galore, with much tactical play made of chocolate mousse pies at inauspicious moments in the action.
What made this show memorable was the complete and total involvement of the children from the audience in the action. More than once, simple honesty from the kids corpsed the players and had the audience in gales of laughter. Admittedly, the opening “scary” scene where the Spirit of the Ring has her head restored to her had a few of the wee ones in tears, but they soon settled down to enjoy the show.
The show was a great success, signalled mainly for me by the total participation of the children, who loved the magic that this company brought to the stage.
I should add that the raffle was also a great success, with two bottles of wine being returned to the cellar at The Grannary for later consumption.
So, well done the Calamities, and it’s clear that Tarbert want to see more of them, as does PtC, who has already booked his seat for next year’s show.

Electoral reform

Your correspondent has this evening returned from being trained as a volunteer campaigner for the single transferable vote system being introduced at the local council elections for Scotland on 3rd May. The training was delivered to an eager audience of potential volunteers in Inveraray by the network development officer of the Scottish office of the Electoral Reform Society. All one of us.
PtC first encountered STV when a callow youth at university in Birmingham (West Midlands, not Alabama), where the system was used to elect representatives to the student union council and for other offices.
The STV system in Scotland will mean that Councils will have multi-member wards, where the electorate will be able to indicate their preferences and elect, between them, three or four councillors in each new ward. The method used is terribly cunning, but a little complicated to explain in detail. Suffice to say, the more preferences that the individual voter expresses on her ballot paper, the better her views and opinions are likely to be represented in the councillors that are finally elected.
There is loads more information at the ERS Scotland website here, so take a look if you want to know more. There’s also lots of technical information on the vote-counting process at the Wikipedia article here.
The intention is that I shall be available to talk to any group who wants to know more about the STV system in the run-up to the elections on 3rd May and I will do my best to meet with any group or organisation in Argyll (or at least the reasonably-accessible bits) in the next 55 days.
The ERS want particularly to get information to groups such as the elderly, women, rural communities, EU-non-UK voters, young people and so on. They are running a number of campaigns with good prizes, including the Democrazy 2007 competition for bands and musicians.
I have to admit that I had very simplistic ideas about STV when I met George from the ERS earlier this evening. I’ve left meeting him much more aware of how important fair voting election methods such STV are for ensuring that our democratic processes are inclusive and representative of the wide range of views and concerns that local electorates can have.
This is all about fair votes, about ensuring that those who are elected have the consent of all the electors who cast their ballot. There’s going to be a big change coming in local democracy as a consequence of STV and that’s no bad thing. The system is going to take some time to get used to, but ERS volunteers like myself have a role to play in that.
You’ll be seeing a bit more about STV and the local elections in the next 55 days, but use the comments system to find out more; local democracy is coming to Scotland.

Toad-squashing time

It’s that time of year when driving home in the dark takes nerves of steel and the reactions of a fighter pilot. Between the main road and the cluster of houses that shelters in the intellectual shade of The Grannary lie two lochs and a boggy bit, separated by said road from the quaggy and splashy bogs of the sloping bits known in these parts as “the hills”. For this is toad-squashing time.
Little toads, driven by instincts as old as time, and certainly older than roads and motor vehicles, take it upon their little gonads to leave the familiar surroundings of their small patches of boggy hillside to go down to the water and make friends with other little toads, preferably of the opposite sex, for the purpose of recreation and romance, leading hopefully to strings of spawn.
Unfortunately, to consummate their passions, the toads must first cross the road. Here they resemble not so much as occasional leaves blown onto the road, but mark – autumn is far behind us and the gales and frosts of winter have made short work of all remaining leafy protrusions on the bare fingers of the trees – and these are no leaves, but eager toads with but a single thought in mind.
And now, thundering out of the dark upon this congregation of regeneration comes a blue beast of two tons, spitting diesel fumes into the darkening clouds and from which emits a powerful glare in which are caught our amphibia amorata. The driver can only weave a line of best fit between the alert, white bodies in his path and steel his nerves against the inevitable casualties that must result from his passing.
The bloody gauntlet is short, some half a mile or so, but the consolation for the toads of the small numbers lost to the cars is obliterated by the many that fall beneath the unswerving wheels of the timber lorries that herald the dawn with their passing, and the passing of so many small hopes and desires.

Another strange corner of the blogosphere

Came across this courtesy of Richard Leyton – thanks for the tip, Richard. Several LOL moments at Wellington Grey. Reassuring to know that there are some original and clear thinkers out there teaching the next generation.