Dru, Steinbeck and the Book of Deer

Dear Juliet I think I'll do that thing about my being thirty-five tomorrow (hope you're not dying of curiosity) as I was thinking more about another thing: that Somebody Up There Likes Us but He Stomps You Hard if You Go the Wrong Way... That's what it always felt like. That things were supposed to work out one way, and God help anyone who went in the wrong direction. I summed it all up in The Glorious 14th . And as the late and not-so-great Rolf Harris might say, "oh, and it makes me wonder..." Anyway... I wasn't born in Scotland. I was born in Wolverhampton when my parents were living in a small Shropshire town called Shifnal. I mentioned this the first time we met but I was on the biggest adrenalin trip of all time and pretty incoherent, you probably didn't hear and I had no reason to refer to it again. I intended to stay in Roberton, Scotland, but the independence referendum managed the massive job of making me change my perspective (could the tools ru...

Dear Juliet "Now I lay me down to sleep, I pray the Lord my soul to keep. If I should die before I wake, I pray the Lord my soul to take..." Just half-remembered this prayer, and I did wake up all right. I'll do another post for you to receive just before 8.00 am tomorrow, Sunday 12th, but I'll just throw this one in to fill any gaps. A smattering of thoughts: It seems I'm thirty-five (I'll explain later). The recipe for my lethal mocha is: Three heaped teaspoonfuls of hot chocolate. One-and-a-half teaspoons of coffee. Two-three tablets of sweetener (in the UK, Canderel). One-and-a-half teaspoonfuls of sugar. Three squeezes of syrup (Lyle's Golden Syrup). Chocolate milk (optional). Huge Starbucks mug. Too many chocolate chunk cookies and optional Frasier ! The last time I told you all that, you said "goodness!" Next, I think you've read all the articles on my blog. There's that one about telling Trump exactly where he can stuff his ESTA ,...

Dear Juliet If it seems I am later than 6.00 pm, I am sorry. I got back about 4.30 pm your time (no jokes about crashes because I don't think you'd like that) after a good trip north and a great reconnection with the guys at the Welcome Break. I stayed at the Days Inn there for the first time, got reacquainted with their Starbucks and saw Alice Amanda in Forth, South Lanarkshire. She's been disabled all her life and bust her femur a few months ago. Hope I was some help. Tidied up the parents' grave, saw Longwood again, great chat with Tina MacArthur, who used to be our cleaning lady and heard all the stories about you over the years. It would be very very strange yet perhaps quite fitting if you ended up in her living room one afternoon... Tried to find that Thing for you, and it will come from Scotland but I'm going to have to use the internet. Don't worry, it won't be a T-shirt saying "JAMES WENT TO SCOTLAND AND ALL I GOT WAS THIS LOUSY T-SHIRT!"...

Dear Juliet Never thought I'd write that again... Anyway, I'm writing this en clair through the tracks of my tears so I can be sure that you know in advance I'll be away in Scotland 8th-10th April inclusive. These days I live in Shropshire. That old timer in my head which enabled me to compensate for the eight hour time difference is a bit rusty, but I think that'll mean from your perspective I'll be away from approximately 1.00 am on the 8th to about 6.00 pm on the 10th. I'm not much into apps and complications (you should see the amount of electronics my new'ish Nissan Note has) so I won't have access to Facebook or to my blog. However, I can now send and receive emails on my smartphone (Apple 13) which I definitely will be taking with me. I even toyed with the idea of giving you my number, but unlike our old correspondence I'm not absolutely sure it's you. I'm almost sure, but not quite. I could be nattering away to a large black man in ...

  "Kirk, I thank you. What you have done is..." "What I have done, I had to do." "But at what cost? Your ship, your son." "If I hadn't tried, the cost would have been my soul." (Kirk and Sarek. Star Trek III : the Search for Spock ) When I first crossed America in 2010, it did feel a bit like I was stealing the Enterprise for my Helen of Troy... Mind you, I only walked up Sunset Boulevard, not the slopes of Mount Seleya. But as a metaphor, the idea of filching a starship was better than you'd think. In Star Trek III , the cast had given up trying to play young and were being their middle-aged selves. Captain Kirk was having a mid-life crisis and the Enterprise had been shot to pieces in the previous film. There was every chance their illegal mission to resurrect Spock wouldn't work, that they'd make fools of themselves, sacrifice their careers... And they went and did it anyway. Because Spock meant everything to Kirk and that wa...

Stephen King is an underrated artist. His massive commercial success often blinds normally sagacious critics to his genuine ability, but the first time I read Rita Hayworth and Shawshank Redemption , I couldn't put it down. Shawshank was also a novella. They're shorter, tauter and therefore harder to write than a fully-fledged novel, in which egotistical auteurs often have too much room ridiculously to ramble. The copy I got came in at a lean and mean 113 pages, not one word was wasted and he wrote lines I'll remember for the rest of my life. And of course, once I'd got there and back again from America in 2010 like an overlarge Hobbit, I saw echoes of that trip in many things. Shoes and ships and sealing wax, cabbages and kings... All gave me pause to think of my latter-day Alice and ask myself why the sea was boiling hot and whether pigs have wings! I bored a lot of people to death. But that's what Jody's grandfather in Steinbeck's The Red Pony  also did ...