Thursday 22:33 p.m.
' He's never early. He's always late. The first thing you learn is you always gotta wait.' The inimitable Lou.
Sober and straight. Got to be good for the purification and accumulation.
I spent three hours this afternoon meditating up at the hut, and took a lot of photies on the mobile phone. There is no cable thing with it and no mention of uploading these photies onto the computer in the 65 pages of instructions, but I'll enquire tomorrow at the Carphone shop on the way to Bellshill.
The Clydes came from Bothwellhaugh, a wee mining community between Bellshill and Hamilton, known as the Pailis. They had a huge bing there, but the mines were closed and the community shrank away. By the time the Clydes came to stay across the fence from us in Thorndean Avenue, in the upper storey of the next block of four council houses, the folk left in the Pailis were going a bit Appallachian.
Rab Clyde was a couple of years older than me and well built. Rab knew stuff that no else knew. It was Rab who knew how to make arrows from brambles, stripping and heating the stocks, burning the tips to make them hard. You could learn stuff from Rab. It was Rab who started us making expeditions to the big rubbish dump up by the Strathclyde Park. We started collecting copper wire and burning the plastic off it. The best thing was the old teevees which had some kind of copper wire transformers in them. We ended up with a ball of copper about half the size of a football and took it to the local scrapyard up by Stewart's Street. The man gave us fifteen shillings for it, an eyepopping amount of money to us.
Then there was the tatties though we were less successful with that. Rab said you could go into tattie fields after the farmer had cropped them and find lots of tatties just lying about, and so you could. We spent a day up Thankerton filling a couple of hessian sacks full of tatties, but were so knackered by the time we got back to Orbiston Drive that we gave most of them to Mrs Lynch for a couple of shillings. Mrs Lynch had thirteen children to feed.
He also showed us how to catch baggies (minnows) and stickelbacks using wine bottles with the hollowed, concave bottoms.
The place where Bothwellhaugh used to be in now under the huge toxic loch they created when they expanded Strathclyde Park.
The Clydes were only there for a couple of years. His old man got a job in the Durham coalfield and they moved to England.
Only done about six hours meditating today so far. But I sat up in bed last night for a while because ... well, sober and straight and I don't go to sleep so easy.
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5 comments:
Re trhe atties - there's a film by Agnes Varda called The Gleaners and I, that's full of that stuff.
I'm so fortunate I always kept my mouth closed when windsurfing at Strathclyde Park.
Albert?They poured the Calder River into the wee pond and Wena's old man said the water in it was worse than under London Bridge. People got thrown in there after stag parties and such and were hospitalised with diseases too horrible to contemplate. If you could survive a gulp of that, the Ivory Coast would hold no fears for you. Hotboy
I think I must have got a homoepathic dose.
Arthur? Is that you? Did you really windsurf in Strathclyde Park. I find that unbelievable! Hotboy
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