Carry On

Jessie Mae

Jessie Mae Hemphill (October 18, 1923 – July 22, 2006) was an American award-winning electric guitarist, songwriter, and vocalist specializing in the primal, northern Mississippi country blues traditions of her family and regional heritage. (Wiki)

Via.

Some Thoughts

Just a riff on a dark, wet, windy night.

I know this island inside out, not as well as some, but as much as most. So it’s been a surprise to have been surprised by life here.

- It’s heartening to have plenty fuel for the fire, food in the fridge and wine on the rack. When one of this triumvirate lacks things get niggly, an expedition is needed. There’s a pretty good feeling to know the cottage is stocked up for a good few days.

- I like seeing the lighthouse at Tiumpan Head blink early in the morning and when it gets dark. I can see it through the kitchen window.

- If there’s a ship sheltering in Broad Bay I know the weather is about to suck badly. I’ll always check it on Ship AIS to see where it came from.

- There are always rabbits in the garden at 7am. We eyeball each other through the bathroom window in the morning. One day I’ll pop one with an airgun and have it for dinner (just kidding).

- Wood stoves are the greatest thing ever. I never want to live without one ever again. Lighting and keeping a fire going all day is great, cooking on one is awesome. Socks dry great on it too. Coal is better than wood, to my chagrin. Peat would be nicer.

- Harris Tweed weaving is the thing I was born to do. This may be a sad thing or a grand thing. Either way it’s true.

- It’s a doddle to live without a mobile phone.

- I’d be screwed without the internet. Properly, screwed. Much as I can handle a bit of solitude, the connection keeps me sane.

- Boats are cool. As are buzzards.

- TV is awful, just awful. I never watch it these days, even the news drives me barmy. Thank God for films.

- You can get by with a pretty limited wardrobe. I currently have 2 pairs of jeans, two shirts, four teeshirts, a jumper, a set of waterproofs, two wooly hats, a scarf (and enough underwear to get through a whole week since you didn’t ask).

- The streetlights get switched off here at midnight. Stars are pretty awesome.

- Sunrises and sunsets are incredible. You just need to to be up and out to see them.

- The silence is deafening. It took weeks to get used to it at night.

- I really need a car, buses just ain’t cutting it. Although the music and gaelic banter is worth the ticket price most days.

- Things I am looking forward to: Sea kayaking to islands to camp on, putting on gigs, making gin, illicit whisky making, getting a dog (and possibly a cat), getting the Airigh stuff rolling, summer, buying a telescope, lambing season, hens, reading and writing more, traveling more.

- Real life work is a joke. Less than 6 weeks off a year? Go fleek yourself. And knocking your pan in to make money for other people? Pfft. Feel like a total mug having done that for so long. And for what? Nothing, when it really comes down to it.

- Proper butchers. Yes, I will have the tripe, oxtail, ham hough, lamb kidneys and chicken livers thanks. Have yet to tackle the fishmongers but, yes, herring please. Pretty darn good delis here too.

- I am still decompressing, weights off shoulders take a little time to fall.

- I would not like to be a single man here. If school girls and married women are off limits then your pickings are slim.

- Taxis are expensive but whisky is cheap.

- I miss people in Glasgow I thought I wouldn’t. And don’t miss others I thought I would.

- Family is more important than I ever knew.

- No regrets.

Pàdraig MacAoidh

Pàdraig MacAoidh is a writer, academic, broadcaster and native Gaelic speaker from the Isle of Lewis.

He has worked at the Seamus Heaney Centre for Poetry, at Trinity College, Dublin, and for BBC Alba, recently wrote an critical study of Sorley MacLean and is currently the Sgrìobhadair at Sabhal Mòr Ostaig.

 

Logorrhoea

Bu tu gaol òir m’ òige

do ghàire ghaoil mar fhir-chlis

an geamhradh gorm Leòdhais

mo ghaol, mo rìbhin òg.

 

Nan robh mi nam fhear-iomchair

‘s chan e fear-bholg, fear-cuideachd,

bhithinn air tairsginn gaol maireannach

an àite logorrhoea

 

agus a-nis tha mo ghaol aig tèile

mar bu chòir ‘s mar bu dual,

ged a tha do sholais nam speuran

a’ lainnireadh thar a’ chaoil.

 

Logorrhoea

You were the gold love of my youth

your laugh love like the northern lights

in the blue Lewis winter

my love, my young love.

 

If I was a bearer,

not a waster and follower,

I’d have given you lasting love

in place of logorrhoea.

 

Now my love’s another’s

as is right, as should be

though your lights are in my skies

glittering across the kyle.

 

(Reproduced with kind permission of Pàdraig MacAoidh. Further work available via From Another Island – Clutag Press + thanks to Kevin.)

Mor Macleod 1914 – 2012

Mor Macleod, a highly respected Lewis tradition-bearer and the very last orphan of the Iolaire disaster, has died peacefully in Ospadal nan Eilean, Stornoway, after a brief illness. She was 97 years old and had all her faculties to the end.

Born Marion Smith in Earshader, Uig, in December 1914 – her younger brother, Coinneach Iain Smith, would be a noted bard – Mor vividly recalled word coming (two days late) to Earshader of the wreck at Holm, on 1st January 1919, and the death of her father, 46-year old Kenneth Smith, and so many others. (Her mother, who died in November 1980, would be the tragedy’s last widow).

Over 200 returning service men had died when HMY Iolaire hit rocks and sank - just yards from safety - at the mouth of Stornoway harbour. Only 79 men survived. Celebrations to greet their home-coming on New Year’s Day 1919, turned to an extended period of mourning as corpse upon corpse washed ashore in the days and weeks to follow. Many bodies were never recovered.

It was Britain’s biggest peace-time maritime disaster and tore the heart out of an island as scarcely a single village on Lewis did not lose men in the sinking. The majority of the dead came from Lewis. Seven belonged to Harris while 31 were crew members from different parts of the UK.

Mor was frequently interviewed on the loss of the Iolaire  and made a memorable appearance on BBC’s ‘Coast’ programme in June last year, quietly recalling how she had sat, puzzled, on her grandfather’s lap as his tears splashed onto her face.

But Mrs Macleod – who had spent her youth largely in the company of very old people and amidst rich oral tradition – was an authority on many aspects of Lewis lore, life and geneaology, and appeared frequently on radio and television, discussing everything from the healing properties of the bog-bean to Lewis Evangelicalism to oldtime wedding customs to how to make a really good marag.

With some help from the Iolaire Disaster Fund, and proving bright and capable at school, Mor duly travelled to Edinburgh and trained for nursing. She was duly appointed, in 1937, District Nurse for Barvas and Brue, and supplied primary-healthcare to that considerable area throughout the Second World War, armed with little more than a bicycle, the primitive physick of the time, and keen professionalism.

She had of course personally to deliver every infant born in Barvas and Brue – there were then no hospital confinements – and was quietly proud that in her decade of service she never lost either infant or mother.

She also liked impishly to recall the diplomacy necessary when pressed, more than once, if she believed in tinneas a Righ - the prevalent belief in rural Lewis that the touch of a seventh son (or, in a pinch, a seventh child) could cure scrofula, a glandular form of TB.

Retiring to marry local crofter John MacLeod in 1947, Mor settled happily into family life but never ceased to read, learn, and exercise her keen brain. Possessed of bardic dignity, matchless presence and speaking the most beautiful, purest Gaelic - to say nothing of utter, pitch-perfect command of English - in her latter decades she took quiet pleasure in being approached so often to impart lore and knowledge.

On the ninetieth anniversary of the Iolaire sinking – an exceptionally fine New Year’s Day, January 2009 – Mor sturdily attended the little open-air service of commemoration at Holm, along with the other surviving orphan: Alasdair ‘Sandy Mor’ Macleod of Garrabost, who died in 2010.

Mor and John cared at Brue for her mother, Mrs Christine Smith, in the final year or two of her life - six decades after the Holm calamity and when Mor herself was already an old woman.

- John Macleod

Shed Music I

Might make this into a regular feature…

Music from the loom shed on 06.01.12:

Alasdair Roberts – “Too Long In This Condition” LP

Joanna Newsom – “Have One On Me” LP

Charlie Poole – “The Very Best Of Charlie Poole” LP

Alberto Rada – “Premio Platino para los Vallenatos Legendarios” LP

Richard Pryor – “Greatest Hits” LP

Flow

Flow is the mental state of operation in which a person in an activity is fully immersed in a feeling of energized focus, full involvement, and success in the process of the activity.

Or put more simply, flow is roughly the equivalent to what most people refer to as being “in the zone” or “in the groove”.

Being such a desirable state, flow is naturally linked to happiness.

Flow leads to those inexplicable moments when we are “surprised by joy.” These precious moments seem to be gifts, almost accidental peak experiences in which life seems rich with meaning, joy and wonder. When and why do these magic episodes intrude upon our humdrum existences?

Psychologist Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi believes:

“Contrary to what we usually believe, moments like these, the best moments of our lives, are not the passive, receptive, relaxing times…the best moments of our lives usually occur when a person’s body or mind is stretched to the limits in a voluntary moment to achieve something difficult and worthwhile. Optimal experience is thus something we make happen…for each person there are thousands of opportunities, challenges to expand ourselves.” 

I and the loom were in flow for most of Friday, the tweed rolled off with ne’er a hitch, glitch or snarl and the first tweed was soon finished, cut out and tied ready for collection.

Good times.

Part of the pleasure in weaving is tuning in to the sound of the loom as it weaves. Any change in sound is a good indicator that something has changed or gone awry but when nothing goes wrong the cacophony of rattles, burrs and clanks can make for some interesting aural Rorschach.

One can easily imagine the relationship of the Bheart Mor to Gaelic song, their meter and timings go hand in hand, but my mind, still trying to shake 15 years of clubland, can’t help but slip into the 4:4 of classic Chicago House and Detroit Techno.

And so, as the rapier blurs back and forth, the sound of Joey Beltram’s infamous 1990 release mentally looped over and over internally, reed-beat cutters providing bass, weft weights clattering like hi-hats and heddle snares coming in from everywhere…

Not quite the idyllic Hebridean scene but whaddya do..?

First Tweed

First Tweed, a set on Flickr.

Zen And The Art Of Loom Maintenance Pt 2

Harris Tweed weaving is the art of perfection.

No hyperbole or hubris here, honestly, it is literally the case. The product of your work, to pass muster at the inspection table and earn the mark of the Harris Tweed Orb, must be near flawless. Which is challenging given the multitude of things that one can do, with the greatest of ease (especially a new weaver), to flaw a tweed.

There are of course some highly skilled old ladies at the mill, sharp of eye and darning needle who will spot and and correct your errors, but they have their limits. After a point you pay for your mistakes or even worse, the tweed can be failed and you’re not paid at all.

So if anyone ever questions the high price of this island cloth, or doubts its value and worth, please tell them they are paying for perfection and direct disbelievers to this tale….

There is an old Japanese proverb that says “When you aim for perfection, you find it is a moving target”

A wise buddhist also said. “Even monkeys fall out of trees“

And so began my day of Zen And The Art Of Loom Maintenance.

It’s been a while since I read Pirsig’s book (to which this blog very vaguely riffs upon), but it sprung to mind today as my loom went awry. From memory, his classic 1974 novel tackled the meaning and concept of quality, the disparity of form and function and the ideas of rationality and romance.

When the loom started to play merry hell today, these various dichotomies presented themselves and as obliquely as usual, provided another unintended extrapolation into a wider, more personal context.

Hey, it happens.

There is a region of the Bonas-Griffiths loom that always plagues me problematically. If looms had chakras, here is my blocked one. It takes up an imaginary box shaped area of space of approximately 12 cubic inches and encompasses the right hand Cutter, Leno, Shed, Alarm and Rapier Release. Within this vortice my weaving prana seems to get beautifully throttled and everything basically goes tantrically tits up. The cutter wouldn’t cut, the leno wouldn’t weave, the alarm was ringing for no reason, the shed was shutting incorrectly…

So after hours of applying rationality and reason I gave up and made a phone call to The Loom Whisperer, an experienced weaver who had taught me many things. But obviously not enough.

To watch someone working, who knows their object of desire inside out, is an amazing thing. It might be a musician or a car mechanic, a horse trainer or sculptor, it’s all the same. They understand the focus of their attention on both a practical and intuitive level, embracing both the rational and romantic, applying both knowledge and feeling simultaneously, using creativity and intuition alongside deduction and reason.

There were things needing done that only someone with decades of experience and a love of their craft could have succeeded in. An anomaly in the split second timing of mechanisms, perceived by an inclined ear or the error in a fractional height difference felt by running a hand over a part. Of course there were skills, long since learned but over the course of three hours there were things being done to the machine that could never be taught.

Long pauses for thought took place as ideas were contemplated, human being discerning mood of machine, looks through squinted eyes.

I did bugger all apart from what I was asked to do and at the end up was instructed…”Try that…”

And the loom sung again.

He packed his bag and left and I began to weave once more and while I wove I thought about Romance and Rationality had how well both can, or at least should, co-exist harmoniously, and result in…balance.

It might take me a few more years to master but I’ll get there.

(With apologies to Phaedrus)

Zen And The Art Of Loom Maintenance Pt 1

Sometimes there are days when you know you should just stay in bed.

I was late getting into the loom shed today, although it was still technically morning, just, and was set to make headway into the tweed that had been tied in the day before.

Yesterday evening had involved “pulling through” the myriad of freshly knotted yarns, a slightly nerve racking affair involving manually winding the threads through the heddles and dents of the reed and onto the the front rollers to be woven. A ratchet wheel to the side draws knots through like tiny herring on a thousand feathered lines and there’s always a slightly tense moment as they strain through the balleen teeth of the beater. A successful pull through is a fine thing, to see every knot take the strain and hold fast. And it was and they did.

Warp prepare to meet thy weft.

Weft bobbins sit on a rather inglorious side table into which various holes have been drilled and nails perfunctorily driven. The bobbin table is like the nerdy little brother to the big loom and I always feel the designers could have made it much cooler, given it some flair or at least a bit of paint. But it does its job geekily enough and that’s all that matters I suppose.

There was only  to be one colour of weft thread but good practice stipulates that the weaver uses two alternating bobbins to ensure a ubiquity of colour as the cloth progresses. Two threads from these bobbins get strung up, through, over, between, around and into a maze of holes, grips and bars until they finally spring through the wiry, Claptonesque fingers of the guides that eventually direct them into the maw of the rapier to be bound in the grip of the shed.

(Riveting stuff huh? Well you were warned…)

Now it’s time to saddle up, check your bells, pump the pedals and ride, weaving just a few inches at first to check the pattern emerges correctly and everything is behaving as it should, all is in the right place, things are tickety-boo. And they were. A nice left-to-right plain twill emerged in tradition tweed colours, natural, mottled, tasteful. A Zen master, had there been one handy at this point, may have whispered the word “Shibui…”

So the planets appeared aligned, a new Harris Tweed was ready to be brought into the world, on a croft in the Outer Hebrides as tradition and law dictates, the Gods had spoken…Let It Be!

But either my karma was do-lally or I’d got sinful fluff in one of the looms’ chakras because it all went downhill from this point forward…