Live from Scotland, where Rhona is Rhona and never has a D in it

In a scene which I am sure is distressingly familiar to Vista users everywhere I have sat in a Wifi cafe for the past 25 minutes watching my laptop’s battery life plummet even as the Network and Sharing Center’s evil icons show their red x and endlessly spinning circle while the Internet icon remains grey and soulless. Anyone still on XP thinking of taking the plunge… Don’t Do It. I will be reverting to XP as soon as I’m able. Let some other sucker live through the endless bugs in this system.

Two weeks of reading and feeding, writing, walking, thinking, talking. Scottish weather has not been all bad. A little rain, some wind, enough blue sky. Not freezing, for the most part, though a frost on the grass today and a clear chill on Princes Street as I wander around Edinburgh. Tea has helped, and the odd evening dram. Out to a movie last weekend: Into the Wild, a good enough diversion for the cabin-fevered.

“Applause whilst thou livest, serveth to make thee that fair mark against which envy and malice direct their arrows, and when thou art wounded, all eyes are turned towards thee (like the sun, which is most gazed on in an eclipse), not for pity or praise, but detraction.” — William Drummond, A Cypress Grove (1623)

I don’t know, is that supposed to make us feel better or worse about not getting acclaim in our lifetime?

Other reading I’ve done includes: Auden, Larkin, Hughes; Sean O’Brien, Colette Bryce, Susan Tichy, Sandra McPherson, Leslie Adrienne Miller, Thomas Lux. Wandered into a little prose as well, the Drummond above, also Thomas de Quincey, Confessions of an English Opium Eater, and Joan Didion’s Year of Magical Thinking.

And had a lovely trip to the Rosslyn Chapel, which I was for some reason slightly shocked to learn Dan Brown never visited, though they are certainly awash with visitors now, so at least the chapel is reaping some of the benefits which it can put into its restoration fund. It seems they have some bad problems with damp getting inside the stonework, caused by some well intentioned restoration work in the 1950s. Anyway it’s an amazing place and I’m happy to have had the chance to see it.