Drinking Tea Will Muddle Your Brain

Sometimes I worry that Domestic Bliss has ruined my ice-cold demeanour and unsentimental outlook on life. To wit, I am sitting here with a lump in my throat after stumbling across this:

For me the most moving moment came when the family in front of me, comprising probably 4 generations of voters (including an 18 year old girl voting for her first time and a 90-something hunched-over grandmother), got their turn to vote. When the old woman left the voting booth she made it about halfway to the door before collapsing in a nearby chair, where she began weeping uncontrollably. When we rushed over to help we realized that she wasn't in trouble at all but she had not truly believed, until she left the booth, that she would ever live long enough to cast a vote for an African-American for president.

Then again I also found Make Art From Starbucks Junk with a really, really cool TIE Fighter and I was instantaneously reassured that despite lapses into sentimentality my inner self will remain a 12-year-old geek (with an ice-cold demeanour).

This morning I read Nancy Mitford's Love In A Cold Climate which reads like a funnier and far more grown-up version of Dodie Smith's I Capture The Castle (which left me completely cold, I'm afraid). I'm now off to find more of Mitford's novels as I think the brisk winds of October are best kept away by tea, knitting and books set in interwar England (Waugh as well, I think, in addition to Mitford). Hello, favourite bookshop, here I come.

Distant Sun

My love affair with Glasgow continues. Glasgow Botanic Gardens (a ten minute walk away from Casa Bookish).

And you get squirrels in the Botanics! They'll throw stuff after you if they feel you're trespassing into their territory. Violent little beasties. You also get a host of birds. This little guy sat on top of one of the greenhouses and was so busy screeching that he didn't notice me thrusting a camera in his face. Or perhaps I'm just not very threatening.

And, yes, it really is autumn. All those gorgeous hues and light rain and brisk wind.. Mmmm.

Tonight we'll have our second helping of David's homemade chilli-tomato soup and I have a pumpkin on the kitchen counter just waiting to be made into delicious pumpkin soup and a hearty pumpkin pie. Man, I just love this season and Glasgow's one of the best places to be during autumn.

PS. I'm also eyeing some pumpkin coloured alpaca yarn but I think I've talked myself out of buying it. After all, why would I want to look like a giant, fuzzy orange blob?

For the Love of Old Books

I like many things, but there are not many things that I love. I definitely love incunabula (books printed between 1455 and 1500) and early modern period printed books. Yesterday I went to Edinburgh to look at some very old printed books from Scotland. I was not disappointed. I have long been interested in and worked on the shift from (handwritten) manuscripts to the (printed) books. The shift is not as abrupt and clear as many people assume; post-Gutenberg handwritten manuscripts were still produced and printers arguably sought to make their product look as much like handwritten manuscripts as possible. Although The Scottish National Library do not hold any incunabula (as far as I know), I was pleased to see some early 16th century books which still displayed evidence of this urge to mimic handwritten manuscripts: typefaces designed to resemble handwriting, woodcuts trying to look like hand-drawn illustrations and rubrication (emphasising parts of the text using red ink). Gorgeous, fascinating stuff.

And Edinburgh was her usual, gloomy, beautiful, fantastical self. I like visiting the city but I couldn't live there, I think.

Jigsaw Falling Into Place

Things seem to fall into place today as you'll find from these links and stories. Rhi wrote:

I received an email from an old internet friend that I'd fallen out of touch with several years ago. After adding each other to the key social networking places (as you do) we discovered that since we last spoke, we have continued to share interests. It's hard to explain why that makes me so happy, but it does: the friendship that I treasure most seem to be those that can hang infinitely in the balance, but always fall back into place in the most satisfying way that says: Here we are again

..the friendship that I treasure most seem to be those that can hang infinitely in the balance, but always fall back into place in the most satisfying way that says: Here we are again. I really like that. I really do.

And then from one Canadian to another Canadian. Ever heard of kinnearing? It means "To surreptitiously photograph a celebrity or person of interest because you are too nervous or respectful of their privacy to ask for a photo " and was coined by a well-known Canadian blogger when she was too shy to approach Greg Kinnear. Things come full circles as the blogger discovers when her friend gets Greg Kinnear to kinnear himself (and also pose with a half-knitted sock).

And finally, I'm putting on my raincoat today as we'll be making our way down to the Bigman Festival down by the Forth and Clyde canal. It's less than a mile from where we live and the site is a curious blend of Victorian engineering prowess, urban deprivation and natural beauty. And now it'll feature an Andy Scott sculpture, apparently. Somehow that just perfectly sums up Glasgow.

PS. I have a post about women, knitting, and empowerment brewing in my head but I think I'll need to run it past a few people first.

Is It Only Tuesday?

You know what I abhor? The phrase "one of them". I was told Saturday that all foreigners should leave Scotland and when the speaker learned I was foreign, he qualified his words with a "but you're not one of them" excuse. If I had a penny for every time I have heard people use that phrase, I'd be knitting cashmere sweaters. It's a lousy, cheap way of trying to seem less xenophobic and more inclusive, but the phrase only makes the speaker appear more racist and exclusive. Anyway. Sorry for that mini-rant. It has been a long week even if it is only Tuesday. My head is pounding and I still haven't had dinner (because cake does not count). Let's go for some delightful links.

+ Viktor & Rolf's Barbican Exhibition. Side-by-side comparisons of runway models and quite creepy dolls. Interestingly, it took longer to recreate V&R's clothes in doll-size than it took to create the original runway look. + Interesting Bookcases and Bookcase Designs. I used to know someone who lived in a 17thC Copenhagen townhouse and who'd use the rafters as her bookshelves. It was awesome. I really like the children's bookcase-bedroom, actually. Wonder if it would be possible to recreate that in an adult size? + The Word Clock. What it says on the tin. + Czech uranium glass buttons. Uranium?! I came across these listings on eBay and I still don't know what to make of them. + I'm not a huge fan of cupcakes but this shark attack cupcake mountain is fantastic.

Finally, Charles Bernstein on the current global crisis:

Let there be no mistake: the fundamentals of our poetry are sound. The problem is not poetry but poems. The crisis has been precipitated by the escalation of poetry debt—poems that circulate in the market at an economic loss due to their difficulty, incompetence, or irrelevance. Illiquid poetry assets are choking off the flow of imagination that is so vital to our literature.

One For the Danes

Spotted in Glasgow City Centre.

Not Danish? Here's an explanation of why it is hilarious.