Hoolies I have known ...

This startling photo was taken by Karen Brodie last Saturday as the participants in the Festal Evensong that had just celebrated 140 years of the Cathedral of The Isles poured out in a swish of red and gold onto the steps and stopped to pose. Small people to the front, they said, and some of us obliged. Far be it from me to lurk in the shadow of a mitre ...

It's been a long time since my first posing on these steps as part of an ecclesiastical extravaganza - the picture below was taken in the summer of 1973, when I have to say I felt as if I had a bit part in a Fellini film. It wasn't long after that that I was confirmed in the Episcopal Church, and another 6 months would see me uprooting myself from Glasgow and moving to Dunoon on the back of an invitation from the priest whose institution as priest-in-charge of Cumbrae as well as of Holy Trinity Dunoon was the occasion for that bit of finery. You can see that in those days we were soberly dressed in black (I think they were our MA gowns, and cassocks for the boys) whereas nowadays we are more Whoopie Goldbergish in red (donated by an American church). The red gowns used to have dreadful white polyester scarves, but we managed over time to lose these ...

And if you look closely at the two photos, you should recognise one constant - or rather, four constants: the four members of the St Maura Singers, a relatively new group back then; a somewhat older one now. Two men, two women. We (the women) were both pregnant in the first photo; decidedly not so last weekend. So it's been a while, and we've seen a great many hoolies in this lovely place.

There's nothing quite like a full house to boost the spirits; nothing quite like a good choir to sing with to make the spirits soar. I reckon I've been lucky to have my faith journey as well as a chunk of my musical life linked into the Cathedral on Cumbrae - or the Cathedral of the Holy Spirit, or the Cathedral of The Isles, if you prefer - for it remains special, full of benevolent spirits and still numinous in the incense-remembering silence of an evening alone in the Butterfield building. I've shared it with musicians, with retreat groups, with a Cursillo weekend, with a preaching workshop, and simply with our friend Alastair who is the organist there. But no matter when I go or with whom, this is my place* - which may explain why I look so pleased with myself in Saturday's photo.

That said, it was a crazy weekend. Many of us who made up the choir had arrived on the Friday for dinner and had rehearsed until 10pm; the following day we began at 10am and went on till 1pm with a 15 minute break; the Evensong - an enormous sing - took up the afternoon; we rehearsed till 10pm in the evening. On Sunday, we began at 9.45am to practise for the Eucharist (a Mass setting we'd never seen before); when that was over and we'd grabbed a salad it was back to get ready for a concert at 3pm. I haven't worked so hard in years, and neither has my voice.

I attribute its surprising resilience to a summer spent singing along to Leonard Cohen, actually - it's fair ironed out the break around Middle C that used to cause me such bother, and in a summer of builders and no choir it's been good to have something to sing with. How long, O Lord ...?

A final thought: I have no idea what anyone not involved in this kind of thing makes of it. It's clearly formed a big part of my life, and I've had a lot of fun. But normal? I don't think so ...


*This is not strictly true, you understand: there are probably hundreds of people who'd say the same, but ...

The Missing Link

 Readers of this blog will know that I've been dabbling in my family tree - can one dabble in a tree?

It was this photo that clinched the knowledge that the families I'd been trying to link were indeed the one extended family. This came from a tweet from the cousin I've been pestering for the past year, intermittently, with suggestions about various relatives and dates, and when I looked carefully - i.e. not on my phone screen - I recognised faces. I hope he doesn't mind me sharing it further, with my part of the family as it were ...

The first face I recognised was that of the young man in uniform in the middle of the back row. He was my uncle, my mother's wee brother. I didn't notice right away, but I'm convinced the woman second left on the front row is his sister, my aunt. But the face I saw next was the woman standing beside my uniformed uncle - and then the man beside her. My Great-aunt Chrissie, and her English husband Jack Smith. That tilt of the head - those ears ...

And then I went burrowing and found this photo in a box, a nice, clear photo taken by my father.

Recognise the same couple? This was taken in 1958, in Arran, outside the house we rented every summer, and I remember the day they came to visit - presumably because we were there for the whole 8 weeks of the school holidays when they had paid a visit to Scotland, travelling from Letchworth where they lived. And yes, that's me in the photo, with a dire hairstyle - it took me a while to find what to do with short hair after my pigtails came off; I owed, I fear, a debt to Helen Shapiro for several years thereafter.

But how strange that it should be Aunt Chrissie, someone we rarely saw, who should be so immediately recognisable. My grandfather's sister, whose voice I remember as being wonderfully deep - a family trait. I can remember her telling her husband to go and keep my father company when he went outside on this day, worn out by hours of family gossip, seeking solitude: how we laughed! He always joked ruefully about how this same Aunt Chrissie told him that when he married my mother he became her 57th relative; for the rest of his life he referred to my mother's family as the Heinz 57 varieties.

So that's today's excitement. This genealogy malarky can become engrossing - and hugely time-consuming.

I'm back

I've been away. Not just from the country - but yes, Sicily was wonderful, thanks - but also from my normal online activity. Instead of posting photos and writing posts, I've spent all my computer time recently fighting with my recalcitrant iPhoto library, full of duplicates and photos on their sides since my computer died and needed a heart transplant exactly two years ago, and backing up furiously as I fixed it so that my repairs weren't lost. I've been in and out of the Time Machine - and had the vapours when it too failed for a week - and I've rationalised the things I wanted to keep.

But now I'm back. I have a new machine, and am currently using the new keyboard that came with it (don't like it as well as the old one; it's wireless, which is ok, but the keys are less sensitive) and a trackpad instead of a mouse (jury's still out, though there are good things about it). I'm working on Safari instead of Chrome for a change (I originally left Safari cos I couldn't access all Blogger's features) and fighting to remember the tabs I had before. My files are rationally organised for the first time in two years - I only found out today that they were chaotic because of a saved backup when the new hard drive was installed.

I'm looking to get my photos out of the camera and the phone, into iPhoto and then onto Flickr. I hope to find some interesting things to write about instead of this self-regarding computer stuff; you can tell how obsessed I've been. But first I need to thank my pal Rob for spending so much time helping me today despite my tendency to squawk "what are you doing now?" at awkward moments. I'm looking forward to learning a bit more at the Apple store when I go for lessons - I'm interested in doing more with my photos for a start. Right now I'm off to put my grandchildren back on the desktop, and then I'm going to bed.

Rob, if you're reading this - I got the printer to work, all by myself!

Blogging off

I've been neglecting this blog for the past fortnight - away walking in Lanzarote for a week, of which more anon, and now off to Iona for a couple of days. Normal service will be resumed as soon as possible, but in the meantime there are a few Lanzarote pics on flickr

Captions and socks

I feel it only proper to direct readers of this blog to Mad Priest's place, where he has been running a caption competition on my pic of +Martin and Tigger. Do mosey over there if you want to have some fun with it; there are comments from everywhere, it seems, except Scotland.

I shall perhaps appropriate some of the comments for further consumption among the technophobes of Argyll - except, maybe, the one about the socks. I think the originator of it must be an American. Think suspenders - British ones.

Strange interests

Regular readers of this blog will recall that, just over a week ago, I wrote a post about my own experiences of punishment and boredom in my own school days. I illustrated it with a photo of the belt/tawse/strap with which I was issued at the start of my teaching career in Glasgow. Quite apart from the comments which the post itself aroused, I'm fascinated by the traffic to the blog and to the photo itself on flickr. At the time of writing, the photo has been specifically viewed 70 times in the past week, and a trawl through the details of my stats shows that several links came from a search for belting which may be thoroughly educational in intent or may not.

Interesting, don'tcha think?

Inspiring photos

There's a new idea for story-writing using photos as stimulus. I'm not sure if I quite got the idea, but you can see what I did with it here. The main problem faced by story-writers in the classroom is the horror of the blank page, and having a string of pictures to kick-start the process is one way to overcome that.

Of course, it isn't new. I recall a large-format book with a green cover called, I think, Petites Histoires Illustrées, which was supposed to inspire us with desire to write wee stories in French. However, as the book formed part of our S2 course when our vocabulary was strictly circumscribed, every story seemed to be set on a day when il faisait tres beau temps in which le soleil brillait and les enfants etaient heureuses. I recall being quite underwhelmed, but then writing in a foreign language was never quite my best skill.

And no-one published the results on the Internet, did they?

French, by the way, is green.

Pictorial story challenge

I'm back from the wilds of Herefordshire, though organising my life (mainly in the laundry and larder departments) has kept me from my laptop today. So can I just publicise the appearance of a new challenge on Frying an Egg - a visual one this time - to keep you busy till I blog again.

And I s'pose I'd better write a wee something there too.

All things in Creative Commons?

Like most of the bloggers I know, I publish my photos on flickr. I use a Creative Commons licence in an attempt to place some legal restriction on the re-use of my images. The badge is clearly displayed under the full-size, downloadable version of each photo, as it is on this blog. So where's the problem?

Well, the problem is that not everyone seems to realise there is a problem. Recently I was sent a small publication about lay ministry in the Scottish Episcopal Church - and there, completely unattributed, was one of my photos. Now, I had already used that photo myself for inclusion in the local paper - but this did not mean that it was up for free use by other publications. Not that I was looking for payment. All I want is for the photo to be attributed to me. There were several photos in this book, and no acknowledgment was made of any of the photographers. I happen to think this was merely slovenly attention to detail - the kind of unprofessionalism that gives an organisation a bad name.

Sad thing is, there's a sense in which, because it's the church and because I know one of the editors as well as the person responsible for producing the book, I feel I ought not to be feeling any of this - let alone blogging about it. I should be smiling sweetly and feeling happy to have been of service. And I am - but I'm also aware of all the people I don't know who have taken the trouble to mail me about using my work and who have linked me to their sites where I can see the photo in question clearly attributed to me. We need to respect people's intellectual property wherever we find it - and we need to demonstrate that respect.

There. Rant over. And I realise the CC licence has been upgraded. Need to do something about that...

Update: 3 June. As a result of this post and the ensuing comments I received today a full and unqualified apology from the Synod Office. It seems that those who sent photos with their contributions were assumed to have made the necessary checks. Conversation over for now - and perhaps another step made in tightening up publication guidelines.

Gender bias?

A visitor
Originally uploaded by goforchris.

I've been posting my Madeira photos to flickr over the past few days, and this one is, I think, my favourite from the Carnival evening in Funchal. The figure at the window of the restaurant where we were eating seems to me to carry all the mystery and slight menace of the occasion, feelings which tended to vanish later in the exuberant crowds of the parade. This glamorous "lady" belonged to the group of wonderfully exotic dancers who were marshalling in the Old Town, and the excitement as the various white-clad figures appeared out of the shadows was palpable. You can read more about the parade here.

However, I realised this morning, some twelve hours after I'd uploaded the photos, that there were a couple which were considerably more popular than the rest - 9 times more popular, if the number of views was to be believed. These pics were of more scantily-clad ladies - and yes, they were actual ladies, not chaps dressed to kill.

Does this mean, I wonder, if most of the folk who flickr are, like the Carnival ladies, chaps?

Second try...

I don't really like the way these frames spread themselves over the page, but think this set of pics - from the bin the bomb march in Glasgow earlier this year - works better with this treatment. And it didn't take me so long this time ...

A photo question and a bird in the bush.

I need a friendly geek. Today I was sent a photo as part of a text message to my phone (Sony Ericsson K6 10i). I want to transfer it to my computer, and thence to my blog. However, sending the photo anywhere does not seem to be an option, bluetooth or otherwise. Any thoughts, out there?

Meanwhile, in the unwired world of my garden, there is a blackbird's nest. Maybe that should be a blackbirds' nest, for there is a male, a female and what seems to be a largish baby - though as said nest is deep in the heart of an ancient Weigela and I don't want to disturb the birds I can't really tell if I'm seeing the baby which I can hear cheeping, or if its mum sits on it when at the nest. I find myself walking past and peering without looking interested - absurd, really. The birds seem unbothered by us - presumably used to our comings and goings. It's quite exciting, really - and of course rather late in the season. I hope the kid makes it. I shall be keeping a weather eye open for Albertz* from next door.

*Actually a female cat, named by the footie fans before they ascertained its gender. It has much to live down.