The Sun Breaks Through

I was delighted today when a copy of The Sun Breaks Through arrived on my door mat. This is the long awaited anthology of writing from the Write On Course (based at the Ripple Project in Lochend). I currently teach the Write On Course and was delighted to edit this anthology that contains wonderful poetry and short stories from class members.

A Bit of a Breeze by Dot Stuart follows an autumn leaf as it floats above Edinburgh to finally land in the Lochend Community Garden.

In The Most Amazing Thing Happened Kathleen Byron shows us how the tar sands of Canada affect the surrounding communities

We meet an unusual and melancholy character in Louise Bankhead's The Wooden Peg

St Jane is a poem from Elaine Pomeransky about a Scottish nurse who died in Auschwitz

Margaret Bruce tells us the story of a missing person in I Was Alarmed

[at falling tide on islay] is an atmospheric poem from Louise Bankhead

Everything is not quite as it seems in Kathleen Byron's Where Did You Hide the Body?

The Trams are just the starting point for Dot Stuart's story of reminiscences

and finally Lindsay Oliver shares a story I Love Leith.

The anthology is available from the Ripple Project and costs £3 if you buy it in person or £4 (including postage and packing) if you order it by post from an address within the UK. For overseas orders, please contact the Ripple Project for information on postage rates. The Ripple Project contact details are on their website.

As ever, red text contains hyperlinks that take you to other webpages where you can find out more. 

Coffee, tea and the environment

I recently made a cafetiere cosy, as I became determined to start drinking shade grown coffee, which is the most environmentally friendly type of coffee, as it grows in amongst other plants and offers habitats for birds and avoids rainforest destruction. 

Unfortunately, I haven't been able to find decaffinated shade grown coffee.

Reading this post by Emma Websdale, writing on Mark Avery's blog, reminded me of the environmental cost of drinking coffee.

Mostly I drink tea, green tea in fact, except for drinking a cup of black tea after every meal. I use loose tea (to avoid the paper packaging associated with tea bags) and fill up a tea ball in the morning which I can generally reuse over and over all day (I like my tea weak!). Green and black teas have their environmental impacts too though, not least the fact that they're transported from the other side of the world.

So what is the solution? In my novel, which I'm currently editing, most of the characters drink herbal teas made from herbs they grow themselves or that they pick from the surrounding countryside. The only reason they're all happy to do that is that they're living in a future world where the global economy has collapsed and the tea estates in the Highlands of Scotland (they're also living in a very climate changed world!) are so hated for their record of slavery that no self respecting person drinks the tea.

Personally, though I like some herbal teas, I think I like green and black teas too much to give them up. I'll certainly try to minimise my coffee drinking though until I can find a shade grown decaffinated coffee.

The Spice Islands Voyage by Tim Severin

In 1996, Tim Severin set out to travel round the Spice Islands of equatorial Indonesia on a locally made and designed boat in the footsteps of Alfred Russell Wallace, the brilliant biologist who had come up with the ideas of natural selection and evolution at the same time as Charles Darwin.

There are places where time seems to have stood still, the birds of paradise thriving and happily playing in the trees, hunted yes but in a sustainable way with the local villagers taking responsibility for restricting the amount they hunt. There are beautiful beaches and pristine stretches of water. People are invariably friendly and helpful.

Then there are sights which Severin knows would break the heart of Wallace if he were to return to these same places again. Harbours that are full of stinking rubbish, markets that are full of meat that comes straight from endangered species of birds and animals. Beaches were all the turtle nests have been dug out and every single egg stolen and eaten. Areas where the birds of paradise are being pushed into smaller and smaller patches of trees, their future existence becoming more precarious by the day.

The irony is that Wallace himself was not only a naturalist but a collector of birds and butterflies. in fact he financed his journey largely through the selling of rare bird skins and insect specimens. He also killed not insubstantial numbers of insects and birds for his scientific studies. In those days, it was all on a smaller scale, but even so, the pressures put on wildlife by hunting go far back. 

This is a fascinating book, full of the wonder of the tropical beauty that still survives in some areas of these islands but not afraid to show the less palatable side of life in Indonesia, largely as a result of rapidly expanding human population and rampant greed.

The worst thing reading this though is the knowledge that so much must have changed in the twenty years since it was written, how much more of the paradise has been lost in that relatively short period of time?

The Spice Islands Voyage by Tim Severin published by Abacus.

Canal Cats

Cats alongside the Union Canal, this lunchtime

This cat lives on this boat, I started writing a short story about it a while ago and should finish it! Here is a close up of the cat

And here is another cat, which was eyeing the sparrows in the bushes by the side of the canal

Corstorphine Hill

After yesterday's very mixed weather, today was beautifully clear and sunny, though fairly cold. The light was beautiful on the trees on Corstorphine Hill - this Scots pine for example.

We walked to the top of the hill to the tower, which was built in 1871 in memory of Sir Walter Scott.

Apparently the views are wonderful from the top, but I can't stand climbing long spiral staircases and the tower isn't often open ....

We saw lots of birds, including seeing a great spotted woodpecker for the third time in four days, which is impressive, since outside of Springtime, they always seem very elusive birds for me. We also saw our first nuthatches of the year in an area of the hill where we haven't seen them before (nuthatches are still exanding their range into Scotland and Corstorphine Hill is one of ony two sites where I know of that they can be found in Edinburgh). Thanks to Crafty Green Boyfriend for this photo (click on it for a bigger view).

Just in the same area as this nuthatch we also saw our first treecreeper of the year - again thanks to Crafty Green Boyfriend for the photo (and again you can click on it for a bigger view)

For Saturday Critters 

and I'd Rather-b-Birdin'

young swans

Today's weather has been very mixed, beautiful blue skies one minute, torrential rain the next, then blue skies again then snow. It was unfortunately very dull when we were at Figgate Pond but I think the young swans still look very lovely, almost grown up as they are...

Arthur's Seat

It was a wild, wet and windy day today for our traditional New year's Day walk round Arthur's Seat.

We saw a total of 20 species of birds, despite the bad weather, including a flock of long tailed tits that followed us for a while, a goldcrest and a mistle thrush. There were lots of birds on the St Margaret's Loch, including this young mute swan, who seemed unperturbed by the choppy waters