tag:karinepolwart.com,2005:/blogs/blog-1?p=2Blog 12019-05-07T15:45:20+01:00Karine Polwartfalsetag:karinepolwart.com,2005:Post/57457412019-05-07T14:36:04+01:002020-09-07T12:14:08+01:00THE WHOLE OF THE MOON (Pt. 1) | the unicorn’s lament for Frida Kahlo<figure><img src="https://cdn-images-1.medium.com/max/1024/1*uHtIt1ked1cx1quhkVi1VQ.jpeg" class="size_orig justify_inline border_" alt="" /><figcaption>Artwork by Jen Frankwell</figcaption></figure>
<blockquote><strong>unicorns and cannonballs<br>and palaces and piers<br>trumpets, towers and tenements<br>wide oceans full of tears</strong></blockquote>
<p>Every time I come across her dear beloved face — on pillow-slips and paper plates, Barbie dolls and skinny tees — I wince. Mostly, she is wearing red roses in her hair. And her dark eyebrows meet in an inscrutable stare.</p>
<figure><img src="https://cdn-images-1.medium.com/max/1024/1*SQuKIFFlfv9UwekSfy3ueQ.png" class="size_orig justify_inline border_" alt="" /></figure>
<p>Lipsticks and handbags, and worst of all, baby grows. She, who could not bear a child, a little <em>Dieguito</em>, who shared her pain in blood and paint, in pelvic bone and scalpel steel. Emblazoned on baby grow.</p>
<p>Frida. Dear Frida. Lo siento.</p>
<figure><img src="https://cdn-images-1.medium.com/max/1024/1*d3Oyp75_s-KG5HaNZ0osrA.png" class="size_orig justify_inline border_" alt="" /></figure>
<p>I saw her once, talking with a wee man from Dundee. In the image, she is smiling. And they’re bathed in blue light. I sense he understood her, as not everybody does.</p>
<p><strong><em>“she was a woman to whom life had been cruel” </em>(Michael Marra)</strong></p>
<figure><img src="https://cdn-images-1.medium.com/max/1024/1*BUn915fBJ-d4-RWPjX-viQ.png" class="size_orig justify_inline border_" alt="" /><figcaption>All Will Be Well by @gillgamble (prints at her Etsy shop)</figcaption></figure>
<p>I knew them both, for I know them all: the poets and the painters; the dreamers and the seekers; the ones who blaze like comet tails and reach for the stars.</p>
<blockquote><strong>Too high<br>Too far<br>Too soon</strong></blockquote>
<p>No.</p>
<figure> </figure>
<p>(Yes)<br>(Yes)<br>(Yes)</p>
<blockquote><strong>I pictured a rainbow<br>You held it in your hands<br>Please. Please. Would you hold it again?</strong></blockquote>
<figure><img src="https://cdn-images-1.medium.com/max/1024/1*awsGmpJBBpCar_75-Kq33g.png" class="size_orig justify_inline border_" alt="" /><figcaption>Illustration by Jen Frankwell</figcaption></figure>
<p>Trust me, I know what it is, to be a sign, a plastic souvenir or a glitter-frosted cake. I see myself in windows too, shiny, pink and fluffy, on rucksacks and pyjamas, and on packed lunch boxes.</p>
<p>I was powerful once, you know. I was mythic. I was strong. I was not a child’s plaything, or a politician’s lie.</p>
<figure><img src="https://cdn-images-1.medium.com/max/570/1*wd-leLJFQXkboOlsrcrQfA.png" class="size_orig justify_inline border_" alt="" /></figure>
<p>I was purity of heart.<br>I was something to aspire to.<br>I was courage.<br>I was magic.<br>I was harmony and hope.</p>
<p>And now I am derided as the scheme of venal men, who decry the vassal state whilst Building Their Own Empires.</p>
<p>And meantime, dear beloved Frida dangled on a wrist, the wrist of a woman who has flicked it in disdain at those who hurt, as Frida did. Insult to injury.</p>
<figure> </figure>
<p>Me, and Frida Kahlo, twin symbols of the times: the fantasy of hope; the reality of pain.</p>
<p>Mock me, if you will. But right now, you need me because I am not real. For what isn’t yet real, is the only hope you have.</p>
<p>I can take you to the place where every precious dream and vision still resides, and bides its time, although there isn’t much left.</p>
<figure> </figure>
<blockquote><strong>I spoke about wings<br>You just flew<br>I wondered, I guessed and I tried<br>You just knew</strong></blockquote>
<p>How did we come to think imagining was easy? It is not simple. And it is not safe. It is the labour of living.</p>
<p>So…</p>
<p>Climb on the ladder<br>Cut through the lie<br>Stretch for the stars</p>
<p>Learn how to fly<br>With a torch in your pocket</p>
<p>Seek Brigadoon!</p>
<p>And sing it, and sing it,<br>The Whole Of The Moon.</p>
<p><img src="https://medium.com/_/stat?event=post.clientViewed&referrerSource=full_rss&postId=9ef046282ed8" class="size_orig justify_inline border_" height="1" width="1" /></p>Karine Polwarttag:karinepolwart.com,2005:Post/56711502019-03-06T14:56:43+00:002019-10-24T10:46:05+01:00WOMAN OF THE WORLD (Pt. 2) | the one that got away<figure><img src="https://cdn-images-1.medium.com/max/720/1*l_OA0XYWeFtoZFUspZhDKw.jpeg" class="size_orig justify_inline border_" alt="" /><figcaption><em>St Enoch with Child, by Smug</em></figcaption></figure>
<p>It took my breath away when I saw it first, this beautiful, tender image of a mother breastfeeding her child, painted on the gable side at the corner of the High Street and George Street in Glasgow.</p>
<p>The mural, by the artist Smug, is one of a series commissioned by the City of Glasgow. And the bairn in arms is St Mungo, Glasgow’s patron saint. Whilst his story or miracles is dearly held on many people’s lips -</p>
<blockquote><strong>Here is the bird that never flew<br>Here is the tree that never grew<br>Here is the bell that never rang<br>Here is the fish that never swam</strong></blockquote>
<p>- the story of how he came to Glasgow as a child is less widely known. It’s the story of St Enoch, his mother, Glasgow’s other patron saint.</p>
<p>We’ve come to know and say this aloud only very recently, that St Enoch, of the shopping centre on Argyll Street, and the city underground station, was, in fact, a woman. I remember the shock of finding out, from Elspeth King’s <em>The Hidden History of Glasgow’s Women</em>. I was working for Glasgow Women’s Aid back then in the mid 1990s. I asked around amongst Glasgow pals. And I wasn’t alone. Surely St Enoch was a man?</p>
<figure> <figcaption><em>St Enoch Shopping Centre</em></figcaption></figure>
<p>Man or woman? Does it matter? Yes. It does. If the history of any place, or any people, is written only in the lives of one, this affects how we understand ourselves, and how things are now. All the more so, when the unspoken stories are like those of St Enoch.</p>
<p>Recorded first by the names Teneu, Tannoch, or Thaney, Enoch was a 6th century princess from the area around Edinburgh known now as Lothian. As a young woman, she was raped by Owain mab Urien, the neighbouring King of Rheged, who was disguised as a woman at the time. Her son was conceived in this violation.</p>
<p>When her father, Loth, found out, his dishonour and wrath fell upon his daughter. He sentenced her to death by stoning, strapping her to a cart and pushing her from the summit of Traprain Law in East Lothian.</p>
<figure><img src="https://cdn-images-1.medium.com/max/1024/1*g6UlMVLRffenReQwJVCNPQ.jpeg" class="size_orig justify_inline border_" alt="" /><figcaption><em>Traprain Law</em></figcaption></figure>
<p>She survived. But Loth tried again, setting Thaney out into the Firth of Forth at Aberlady Bay, in a coracle, a wee boat without rudder or oars.</p>
<p>Again, she survived, washing up eventually near Culross in Fife, a major monastic settlement. St Serf took her in, and her son, Kentigern, was born. Serf is said to have nicknamed Mungo, dear one.</p>
<p>Mother and son travelled later to Glasgow. And it’s there that Mungo’s story takes star billing over Enoch’s. The city needs to mind both.</p>
<p>I wrote this for <em>Thaney</em>. Recorded with Malinky for our album <em>Three Ravens</em>, it combines Scots and English language:</p>
<blockquote><strong>“I will make my bed fu’ narrow<br>And in it I will lie my lane<br>And my bonnie boy there beside me<br>Nothing more to rue again”</strong></blockquote>
<p><img src="https://medium.com/_/stat?event=post.clientViewed&referrerSource=full_rss&postId=189d11753b0" class="size_orig justify_inline border_" height="1" width="1" /></p>Karine Polwarttag:karinepolwart.com,2005:Post/56711512019-03-06T14:55:13+00:002019-03-08T11:23:27+00:00WOMEN OF THE WORLD (Pt. 1) | we’ll make it even better yet<h3>WOMEN OF THE WORLD (Pt. 1)| we’ll make it even better yet</h3>
<blockquote>
<strong>Song:</strong> Women of the World</blockquote>
<blockquote>
<strong>Artist & Writer:</strong> Ivor Cutler</blockquote>
<blockquote>
<strong>First release:</strong> 1983</blockquote>
<figure><img src="https://cdn-images-1.medium.com/max/1024/1*mZCIUKGxf7qBZYOLYRRGEg.jpeg" class="size_orig justify_inline border_" alt="" /><figcaption>Artwork by Jen Frankwell</figcaption></figure>
<p>For International Women’s Day 2019, I’m releasing a version of Ivor Cutler’s <a href="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=miLfo_n9_Zo"><strong><em>Women of the World</em></strong></a>, alongside a month-long series of short blogs inspired by some rather mighty Scottish women.</p>
<figure><img src="https://cdn-images-1.medium.com/max/340/1*BlqNXLBRQy5RXiyvhsAzWw.jpeg" class="size_orig justify_inline border_" alt="" /></figure>
<figure><img src="https://cdn-images-1.medium.com/max/768/1*-AjxPB2Xc68THfyNwoKcUg.jpeg" class="size_orig justify_inline border_" alt="" /></figure>
<p><strong>Mary Brooksbank’s words, scored into the walls of the Scottish Parliament, are a reminder that our political structures and social policy are for the collective betterment of ordinary people.</strong> Her life, as a mill worker, political activist and songwriter, was both bitterly hard and hopeful. I feel a massive debt of gratitude to women like her, who’ve gone before us, and who’ve struggled for the health, housing and social support systems we enjoy today.</p>
<p>Born in Aberdeen in 1897, Mary moved to Dundee as a girl. There, she looked after her younger brothers to enable her mother Rosie to work. At the time, infant mortality in the poorest areas of Scottish cities was 20%. Five of Mary’s nine siblings didn’t make it past infancy.</p>
<p>She took her first job as a bobbin shifter, aged 13. In 1911, 70% of Dundee’s women and girls worked in jute mills, and two thirds of the city’s workforce was female. They were cheaper than men (who were often laid off at 18). Dundee had the highest rate of employment for married women in the whole of the UK.</p>
<p>Within months of starting work, Mary was involved in her first strike. It was in her blood. Her father, Sandy Soutar, had founded the Aberdeen Dockworkers Union, and the family home was a hotbed of political activism in a time of flux and protest. Between 1889 and 1914, over a hundred strike actions were called in Dundee, most of them led by women.</p>
<blockquote><strong>We are out for higher wages<br>As we have a right to do<br>And we’ll never be content<br>Til we get our ten percent<br>For we have a right to live as well as you</strong></blockquote>
<p>The campaigns worked too. Women’s wages rose considerably.</p>
<p>Mary would later become a labour organizer. She was active in The Communist Party of Great Britain, from which she was eventually ejected for “indiscipline” (aka a dislike of Stalin and advocacy of women’s rights). Via the Working Women’s Guild, and throughout her life, until chairing the Old Age Pensioners Association of Dundee, she campaigned for public health, social housing and living wages.</p>
<figure><img src="https://cdn-images-1.medium.com/max/1024/1*yC4LCwOSbrzyAtdNALoflg.png" class="size_orig justify_inline border_" alt="" /><figcaption><a href="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=YQDX1zUY41I"><em>Oh Dear Me sung by Sarah Hayes, Inge Thomson, me & Annie Grace. Click here to watch.</em></a></figcaption></figure>
<p>I first encountered Mary’s song <em>Oh Dear Me</em> in a chilly Victorian classroom at Boroughmuir High School in Edinburgh in 1997. Every Monday night for two years I attended an evening class called “Women and Folksong”, which was led by songwriter, and community activist, Eileen Penman. At the time I had just started in post as a Children’s Rights Worker with Scottish Women’s Aid. I was heavily involved in campaigning around essential support services for children and women fleeing domestic abuse and newly enchanted with the world of Scottish folk music.</p>
<p>My classmates worked in social care, child protection, palliative nursing, and youth work, precisely the kinds of community services Mary fought for in her own time. The act of singing in community in that draughty old school was physically, emotionally and politically restorative for all of us. For me, it is still. Indeed, it’s why I sing. Mary Brooksbank knew this feeling too. In a poem called, simply, <em>Singing</em>, she wrote:</p>
<blockquote><strong>There’s nothing that can daunt me lang<br>Gin I have power tae sing a sang</strong></blockquote>
<p>It’s beautiful to hear Mary herself in conversation with folklorist Hamish Henderson, over at the <a href="http://www.tobarandualchais.co.uk/en/play/24693;jsessionid=1A0ABF7AFDC06A8A28349BB4BECC3481"><strong>Tobar An Dualchais /Kist of Riches Archive</strong></a> at Edinburgh University. You can hear a snippet of her too as a prelude to <a href="https://theshee.bandcamp.com/track/jute-mill-song-song-for-mary"><strong><em>Song For Mary</em></strong></a><strong><em>,</em></strong> which I wrote to commission for my friend Rachel Newton and The Shee.</p>
<figure><img src="https://cdn-images-1.medium.com/max/700/1*m99GD6BW82D6MoErq5nFcw.jpeg" class="size_orig justify_inline border_" alt="" /></figure>
<p>Mary was impoverished for many years as result of her political activity. Blacklisted from all the city’s jute mills, and with a dying husband and ailing parents to care for, she took to street singing. Song was a matter of survival.</p>
<p>Mary lived the final years of her life in a modest Dundee flat, surrounded by friends and books. She died at Ninewells Hospital on March 16th 1978. She is remembered now largely by the songs she left behind, several of which are still heartily sung on the Scottish folk scene. In late 1999, on <em>Last Leaves</em>, my first ever album, recorded with Scots-Irish band Malinky, I sang her cheery celebration of itinerant music <a href="https://open.spotify.com/track/5dEXBryrz61YaoUIYnT64e?si=sAqYqVD3QiW8DsWx8fnWXA"><strong><em>Love and Freedom</em></strong></a><strong><em>.</em></strong></p>
<p>If a Parliament like Scotland’s is to hold an inscription within its walls, as a minding to its core purpose, then let it be the sigh of a small woman, a working, caring, struggling, singing woman who would not keep her mouth shut, and who bore immense grief and hardship without collapsing under the weight of it.</p>
<p>Mary’s own poem <em>Nae Regrets</em> captures her spirit best of all:</p>
<blockquote><strong>A gey rauch road, fell snell weather<br>A fecht tae make it a wee bit smoother<br>Gin we shaw our eident grit<br>We’ll make it even better yet</strong></blockquote>
<p><img src="https://medium.com/_/stat?event=post.clientViewed&referrerSource=full_rss&postId=e771f044afde" class="size_orig justify_inline border_" height="1" width="1" /></p>Karine Polwarttag:karinepolwart.com,2005:Post/56497492019-02-19T09:11:00+00:002019-03-08T11:23:57+00:00THE MOTHER WE SHARE | just in time<blockquote>
<strong>Song:</strong> The Mother We Share</blockquote>
<blockquote>
<strong>Artist:</strong> Chvrches</blockquote>
<blockquote>
<strong>Writers:</strong> Iain Cook, Martin Doherty, Lauren Mayberry</blockquote>
<blockquote>
<strong>First release:</strong> 2013</blockquote>
<figure><img src="https://cdn-images-1.medium.com/max/1024/1*klx0kPT5nEc7m9vsU9uLiQ.png" class="size_orig justify_inline border_" alt="" /></figure>
<p>Back in 2006, <strong>Roddy Woomble</strong> of Idlewild approached me about writing for a project called <a href="http://www.chemikal.co.uk/ballads/"><strong>Ballads of the Book</strong></a><strong> </strong>which he was curating in collaboration with Chemikal Underground Records in Glasgow. His idea was to have Scottish bands and songwriters set to music lyrics by Scottish poets and novelists. The musicians included Emma Pollock, King Creosote, Aidan Moffat and Norman Blake. And the writers numbered Iain Rankin, Alasdair Gray (who designed the album cover too), Louise Welsh and Robin Robertson (recently Booker shortlisted).</p>
<p>I was delighted to be asked, and was offered a beautiful wee Edwin Morgan poem called <em>The Good Years</em>. The song setting would later become the opener to my 2008 album <em>This Earthly Spell</em>.</p>
<figure><img src="https://cdn-images-1.medium.com/max/316/1*cRDTWkDTQNtHSUM0qNcEbw.jpeg" class="size_orig justify_inline border_" alt="" /></figure>
<p>In 2007, just ahead of the <em>Ballads of the Book</em> album release, Celtic Connections Festival in Glasgow programmed a sister concert, at which I played. Closing the show that night was a band I didn’t know: Aereogramme. It was love at first quivering synth patch.</p>
<p>Their setting of Hal Duncan’s <em>If You Love Me You’d Destroy Me</em> is my favourite of the Ballads of the Book project, and the <a href="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=kYEVPOuZbJc"><strong>cinematic pomp of the band’s live set totally slayed me.</strong></a></p>
<p>I left the show thinking: I want to work with them.</p>
<figure><img src="https://cdn-images-1.medium.com/max/911/1*PIV-6iL82QoZCc-aYFTAdw.jpeg" class="size_orig justify_inline border_" alt="" /></figure>
<p>And then, three months later, after four album releases that had failed to break, the band split up, releasing a wry press release that cited, amongst other things “an almost superhuman ability to dodge the zeitgeist”.</p>
<p>Damn it.</p>
<p>From the ashes of Aereogramme emerged The Unwinding Hours, a writing duo of Craig B on vocals and guitars and Iain Cook on pretty much everything else. Their opening musical foray was <a href="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=YubEFJNPg10"><strong>the spare and lovely <em>Solstice</em>.</strong></a></p>
<p>I fell for thus band too. Indeed I convinced myself I was the band member they just didn’t know they needed yet.</p>
<figure><img src="https://cdn-images-1.medium.com/max/500/1*gNmr8OmN8N_ahwbVXZ6WBQ.jpeg" class="size_orig justify_inline border_" alt="" /></figure>
<p>By the autumn of 2011, I had gathered enough songs for a new album of my own. And I thought of Iain Cook. He seemed to come from an altogether cooler musical world than mine. I sent him a demo of a song called <em>Half A Mile</em> and asked if he might test out some production ideas with a view to producing my next album.</p>
<p>Yes, came the reply. And what came back a week later from this first demo test was utterly beautiful. Disconcerting static textures. Intricate percussion. Broken riffs. It was a sound quite different to any I’d made before. And I loved it.</p>
<p>And so began an intensive 3-month period of pre-production to create the palette for my album <em>Traces</em>.</p>
<p>By the time we switched to final stage recording at Castlesound Studio in Pencaitland, Iain was working on a new musical collaboration. I remember him playing us some demos and testing out the logo look for this new band: Chvrches.</p>
<figure><img src="https://cdn-images-1.medium.com/max/800/1*FjEh7PGucg0lIfc4b4ts7Q.jpeg" class="size_orig justify_inline border_" alt="" /></figure>
<p>It sounded, and looked, mighty.</p>
<p>By the time, I took my <em>Traces</em> album on the road, in 2013, Chvrches had launched their debut album <em>The Bones of What You Believe In</em>. I remember stopping for a break at a dismal service station on the M6 and hearing the muscular, hooky synth pop of <em>The Mother We Share</em> getting piped across the foodcourt. This is when you know you’ve made it, I tell you.</p>
<figure><img src="https://cdn-images-1.medium.com/max/1024/1*wOduHHdx5utND5_o8mFiQg.jpeg" class="size_orig justify_inline border_" alt="" /></figure>
<p>I love the song and that first album, in particular. All three band members, Lauren Mayberry and Martin Doherty, as well as Iain, are gifted writers, multi-instrumentalists and producers in their own right.</p>
<p>Chvrches have since released two further albums, <em>Every Open Eye</em> (2015) and <em>Love is Dead</em> (2018).</p>
<p>I’m glad I got to work with Iain. Just in time. I hear he hangs out with Dave Stewart these days … I totally couldn’t afford him now!</p>
<p><img src="https://medium.com/_/stat?event=post.clientViewed&referrerSource=full_rss&postId=3e476ea2217f" class="size_orig justify_inline border_" height="1" width="1" /></p>Karine Polwarttag:karinepolwart.com,2005:Post/56379312019-02-11T14:45:37+00:002019-03-08T11:31:17+00:00DIGNITY (Pt. 4) | dreaming and dignity<p><em>I’m thinking about home</em></p>
<p><em>I’m thinking about faith</em></p>
<p><em>I’m thinking about work</em></p>
<p>The city is different at this hour. The office clerks and counter staff are still in their beds. The bairns are just beginning the long holidays. And the sky is soft and expansive over the Tay.</p>
<p>Where the Nethergate and Marketgait meet, the pavements are a reek of fags, and a bustle of women in jeans on their way to the early cleaning shift.</p>
<figure><img src="https://cdn-images-1.medium.com/max/615/1*1BLQjllzZZ1hhH8CdQSa3A.jpeg" class="size_orig justify_inline border_" alt="" /><figcaption>Pitt St, Dundee</figcaption></figure>
<p>Thatcher is barely out the door, and good riddance. Meantime, the only women to be seen in the management corridors at Tayside Police HQ on Pitt Street are the ones hoovering and dusting it.</p>
<p>I’m on summer cleaning cover there, July to September 1991, just ahead of my final year studying Philosophy at Dundee University.</p>
<p>My colleagues, Ruth and Helen, are sisters in law, pals, who married two brothers. They scan ‘The Tully’ <em>The Evening Telegraph </em>each week for news of weekend weddings, and compile a hit list. Then on Saturday, the two of them don smart coats and hover around kirks in the nether regions of the city, waiting for newly wed strangers to emerge.</p>
<figure><img src="https://cdn-images-1.medium.com/max/792/1*7y_x5Q9TZpTvzDcmcTQ2oA.png" class="size_orig justify_inline border_" alt="" /></figure>
<p>On our Monday morning tea break, they report on veils and flowers, voile and lace extravaganzas, and gravity-defying hair-dos.</p>
<p>Sometimes there’s an autopsy.</p>
<p><em>Should’ve seen the state of that bride at Ardler</em>, says Helen<em>, thon looked like an under baked meringue</em>.</p>
<p><em>Aye, and hardly a penny for they bairns</em>, says Ruth, <em>Roosty pooches! The disgrace of it!</em></p>
<p>The scrammie, or scramble, the tossing of coins for luck as the couple get into their bridal car, is a matter of some honour.</p>
<p>And judgement.</p>
<figure><img src="https://cdn-images-1.medium.com/max/702/1*kxc8UsJHGADfshYSvBJH9Q.png" class="size_orig justify_inline border_" alt="" /></figure>
<p>Ruth works Forensics. It’s my favourite shift, with floors you could check your make-up in, not that I wore any at the time. Ruth does, mind you. She’s immaculately turned out every single day. Suntan. Gem crusted rings. Hair curled and piled high on her head, Bet Lynch style.</p>
<p>Forensics is the only department with a buffer.</p>
<p>You know that rush of air that goes past you as a kid when, after weeks of shoogly stuttering, suddenly, you can ride your bike, all by yourself? Mastering the buffer is like that. For half an hour it’s a wild beast, clattering the skirting of the Forensics lobby. And then, click! It’s as if Torvill and Dean have swept across the ice.</p>
<p>Buffing a floor is a delicious meditative drone. I can tell from the way Ruth shadows me that she feels the very same. And takes pride in the literal sheen of her work. She wouldn’t swap this patch for any other in the building.</p>
<figure><img src="https://cdn-images-1.medium.com/max/1024/1*Gk1nZCyYbAbrBJRqNyXq_Q.jpeg" class="size_orig justify_inline border_" alt="" /></figure>
<p>By contrast, there’s no glamour whatsoever in cleaning policemen’s lavvies. Marianne’s shift is in the basement. Same level as the cells, where she works as an occasional turnkey too.</p>
<p><em>Jakies and junkies</em>, she says, when I ask her what it’s like working nights. The jakies are mostly older men, homeless, drunk and harmless. <em>Poor souls that reek of pish</em>, says Marianne<em>, just needing a bed</em>.</p>
<p>The addicts are different. More volatile. <em>You have to watch for needles when you’re frisking</em>, she explains,<em> with the AIDS and that.</em></p>
<p>At the time around half of Dundee’s intravenous heroin users were HIV+. There was a lass in my first year philosophy tutorial class who disappeared for a few months because she was indeterminately ill. She came back the following year, and made public that she was HIV+. Her boyfriend had been using. She’d got it from him. It was a bold thing to tell at the time. We were all so scared still, and so ignorant.</p>
<p>In the basement bogs at Pitt Street, the standard-issue cleaning product was a tall aerosol canister of thick white foam. It absorbed the urine traces from the seats and tiles, turning it yellow, like snow that a dog’s been at. The best you could say of the job was that it made a palpable difference.</p>
<p>It was muggy down there, and it reeked of stale sweat and testosterone. The basement housed the shower block, which was the only part of the building where I didn’t feel entirely safe. There was a PC who cycled to work, and he’d shower before his shift began. I never cared for the way he looked at me, at my bare legs, with his chin up and his head slunk back on his neck. I couldn’t escape the feeling that he was hoping I’d walk in on him, hairy and half naked at a bench.</p>
<p>He’d never have tried any of that patter with Marianne, I tell you.</p>
<p>Martha is almost certainly not much older than me, and morbidly obese. Her size and inflexibility make it impossible for her to get into some of the manky crevices that a cleaner needs to get into. Everyone knows this, because they’ve all covered her shift at one time or another, and found it dangerously wanting.</p>
<p>When she’s out of earshot, they moan something terrible about it, and about the coke cans and sweeties that she stashes all over the place. But still the others reach the parts they know she’ll miss. Discretely, they clean up after her, so she won’t be found out.</p>
<p>It’s kindness. And pride. And solidarity.</p>
<figure><img src="https://cdn-images-1.medium.com/max/754/1*C3whXiWblHLJA-XAYTpcHQ.png" class="size_orig justify_inline border_" alt="" /></figure>
<p>This, after all, is the city of Mary Brooksbank, an ex-Communist mill worker, labour activist and songwriter, whose jute-mill inspired song <em>Oh Dear Me</em> will, less than twenty years hence, will be etched into Iona marble on the Canongate wall of a new Scottish Parliament in Edinburgh.</p>
<p><em>Oh dear me, the warld’s ill-divided</em></p>
<p><em>them that work the hardest are aye wi least provided</em></p>
<p>It will happen so soon, this new Parliament. And yet, in the summer of 1991, we can scarcely imagine it’s possible at all.</p>
<p>But imagining is where it all begins.</p>
<p>At tea break on Mondays, after Ruth and Helen’s bridal lowdown, Martha talks about Paolo. He’s from a well-to-do Italian family in The Ferry, she tells me, pulling a photo of a handsome dark haired young man from her pocket.</p>
<figure><img src="https://cdn-images-1.medium.com/max/680/1*s1JS1xTt7I1Fje2d6WZnGw.png" class="size_orig justify_inline border_" alt="" /></figure>
<p><em>He looks nice</em>, I say.</p>
<p>Ruth shoots me a glance. And when Martha’s lumbered away again, she turns to me, sharply,</p>
<p><em>Paolo disnae exist. Just so you as know, </em>she sighs.<em> But let the lassie have her boyfriend.</em></p>
<p>This revelation from Ruth is neither a mockery nor a betrayal. No. She’s telling me this in order to protect Martha. So we all have the measure of each other. So we all have each other’s backs.</p>
<p><em>Let the lassie have her boyfriend.</em></p>
<p>Dundee has its very own localised word for dick. Toby.</p>
<p>The desk sergeant is a toby.</p>
<p><em>Thinks she’s fucking stupid</em>, says Ruth.</p>
<p>Front desk is Betty’s patch. Betty looks like a younger version of my granny, with her Tweedy skirts and bottle bottom specs. She has a studied line in vacuity. I reckon I would’ve figured this out myself. But Helen and Ruth put me right before I have to.</p>
<p><em>See Betty, </em>says Helen, <em>always playing the joker</em>. <em>Christ knows it’s easier that way.</em></p>
<p><em>But you</em>, Ruth spins to point an immaculately manicured nail right at me, <em>don’t you think for a minute you’re the only clever one here</em>.</p>
<p>Betty writes letters to the editor of <em>The Evening Telegraph</em>. Indeed, she’s only recently been engaged in a printed spat about the merits, or otherwise, of the first Gulf War. The target of her pen is a regular letters page correspondent. Double-barrelled name. Ex-military.</p>
<p><em>She was the Dux at the school</em>, says Ruth, <em>Douglas Academy</em>.</p>
<p><em>Could’ve done anything</em>, chimes Helen, <em>anything.</em></p>
<p><em>Had a bairn</em>, says Ruth.</p>
<p>It’s not clear that Betty has ever mentioned her letter writing to anyone. It’s discussed in hushed tones. She writes under her maiden surname, and Sunday-best Elizabeth. This is not writing in order to be noticed. Or applauded. It’s writing from a deeper place, for a deeper purpose.</p>
<p>Nevertheless it’s noted in the caretaking staffroom. Quietly. Proudly. The front desk sergeant doesn’t need to know. It’s an act of invisible defiance that he doesn’t.</p>
<p><em>Toby.</em></p>
<p>At the end of my second summer of cleaning at Tayside Police HQ, six weeks after picking up an MA in Philosophy, Derek, Head of Janitorial Services, offers me a full-time job as a turnkey in the cells.</p>
<p><em>It’s better paid than the cleaning</em>, he says. I’m flattered by the offer. It means I’m trusted, and liked, and that Marianne, down in her sweaty basement patch, thinks I’ve enough steel in me to manage the poor souls and addicts on the night shift.</p>
<p>I never took up the offer, so I’ll never know if she was right. Instead, I took a part time post as a philosophy tutor at the University. The worst I had to deal with was the occasional indignant young guy who couldn’t bear the idea of a young woman in green steely Doc Martens critiquing his Wittgenstein essays.</p>
<p>I felt anything was possible then. And one of the greatest advantages some of us have over others is this belief that you can, that you’re entitled to try.</p>
<p>And when all things are not possible, we do our best.</p>
<p>Ruth’s Forensic Department floors were gorgeous. And in her weekend wedding watching with Helen, she went fishing for glamour outside those churches on the edge of Dundee.</p>
<p>Martha cherished the photo of the non-existent Paolo that she kept in her overall pocket <em>(let the lassie have her boyfriend). </em>And those women around her looked out for her, and looked after her.</p>
<p>And Betty wrote lucid letters to the papers whilst allowing the desk sergeant to think she was a total daftie. It was a question of survival, of self-respect.</p>
<p>Beauty.</p>
<p>Love.</p>
<p>Dignity.</p>
<p>Maybe the dream itself is everything?</p>
<p>Maybe it’s enough?</p>
<p>Maybe it’s a start?</p>
<p><img src="https://medium.com/_/stat?event=post.clientViewed&referrerSource=full_rss&postId=137fcdf856c4" class="size_orig justify_inline border_" height="1" width="1" /></p>Karine Polwarttag:karinepolwart.com,2005:Post/56374912019-02-11T13:19:06+00:002020-08-21T08:35:36+01:00DIGNITY (Pt. 3) | betty bags a booker<p>Dundee grandmother, Elizabeth McDade, is the surprise winner of the 2030 Booker Prize for her debut novel <em>The Bagging Area</em>. A tragicomic tale of robotics, redundancy and redemption, the story mines McDade’s thirty-five year experience as a cleaner at the Police Scotland HQ in Dundee, before advanced maintenance bots made cleaning staff obsolete.</p>
<p>“The transition back in 2024 was brutal,” recalls McDade. “The Government was talking up the savings to the public purse, and there was a lot of <em>Guardian </em>guff about the liberation of the human spirit from manual drudgery. But we’ve been trained to turn up and do what we’re told for centuries. And without work loads of folk have no sense of purpose or dignity.”</p>
<p>McDade explains the book’s title, “Remember twenty years ago, when the unstaffed supermarket tills first came in? We were all constantly getting buzzed and red-lighted by those ‘unexpected items in the bagging area’. Well we’re in the bagging area now. We are those unexpected items that don’t quite fit”.</p>
<figure><img src="https://cdn-images-1.medium.com/max/1024/1*io4W6moqE3lC4l_UpNWPKA.png" class="size_orig justify_inline border_" alt="" /></figure>
<p>Known to fellow staff as Betty Donaghy, McDade writes under her maiden name. The 52 year old was a dux medalist at Morgan Academy, before becoming pregnant in her teens. Former head of janitorial services, Tom Mair recalls, “Betty’s been getting printed in the Telegraph letter-pages for decades, under the name E.R. McDade. It’s brilliant social commentary stuff. But she never wanted anyone to know”.</p>
<p>“When I got laid off”, stresses McDade, “I wrote every morning at the Wellgate Library, just to stay afloat and feel that I mattered. Thank goodness the council never shut the place”.</p>
<p>Booker Judge Jackie Kay says, “Elizabeth’s debut work speaks to the opportunities, and the indignities, of technological change and to the ultimate resilience of the human spirit”.</p>
<p>Asked if she missed her cleaning days, McDade laughs, “I don’t miss the piss on the back of policemen’s urinals”, before adding, “I do miss the camaraderie and the space to think and imagine. Boredom and rhythm are the mothers of invention. We’re just saturated with stimulation now”.</p>
<p>McDade insists there’s nothing remarkable about her ascent, “The talents and voices of ordinary people have been lost to soul destroying work for centuries. Maybe automation does open up new opportunities, if we manage it kindly. At the very least, we’ve got our stories — and the bots don’t have them yet”.</p>
<p><em>The Bagging Area</em> is published by Canongate Books.</p>
<p><strong>About this:</strong></p>
<p>In 2017, I was asked, to my surprise, to participate in the launch of The Scottish Futures Forum. The Forum is a non-partisan, Scottish Parliament-sponsored think-tank with a remit for exploring long-term civic and cultural challenges and opportunities.</p>
<p>The topic for the opening session was Culture and Technology.</p>
<p>A folk singer and songwriter is not an obvious choice for this one.</p>
<p>My fellow contributor was video games entrepreneur and leading Scottish business advocate, Chris Van Der Kuyl. By the by, Chris, like Betty, and Deacon Blue’s Ricky Ross, is from Dundee. Amongst his many gifts, he does live sound for the mighty Gary Clark (of Danny Wilson fame), and was pals with Dundee legend Michael Marra (if you don’t know about Gary or Michael then, jings, what treats await).</p>
<p>Chris knows a lot about technology. I do not.</p>
<figure><img src="https://cdn-images-1.medium.com/max/827/1*kSxsaCfmUJCRPNIKs5rvsA.jpeg" class="size_orig justify_inline border_" alt="" /></figure>
<p>I spent weeks genning up on the technological trends that are already shaping our future lives. In the end, Chris and myself were on pretty much the same page about the personal, civic and ethical challenges that rapid technological change presents.</p>
<p>This is one of three brief stories I presented to the Scottish Futures Forum as a provocation on the theme.</p>
<p><img src="https://medium.com/_/stat?event=post.clientViewed&referrerSource=full_rss&postId=2e450335c96b" class="size_orig justify_inline border_" height="1" width="1" /></p>Karine Polwarttag:karinepolwart.com,2005:Post/56195282019-01-29T13:29:51+00:002019-01-30T22:20:00+00:00DIGNITY (Pt. 2) | people, power and paper boats<p>Allow me to introduce you to visual artist <a href="https://www.instagram.com/jenfrankwell/"><strong>Jen Frankwell</strong></a><strong>. </strong>Jen is based in Forres, where she crafts deft multi-layered images from pencil drawings and postcards, vintage paper and pin badges, statistical data and textile remnants, and whatever else takes her fancy.</p>
<p>She makes beautiful bespoke sporrans too.</p>
<p>Wit. Edge. Colour. Politics. Faces. Layers. Typewriters. Machair. Textiles.</p>
<p>What’s not to love?</p>
<p>I think Jen is an absolute wonder herself. Indeed, I’m not sure I’ve encountered a visual artist with quite the same capacity to get, visually, what it is that I’m trying to say through music and words.</p>
<p>Her specially commissioned image for my Scottish Songbook band cover of Deacon Blue’s <em>Dignity</em> holds a richness of detail, some obvious, and some buried, or cryptic.</p>
<figure><img src="https://cdn-images-1.medium.com/max/1024/1*nJkVPx0hhFy9rgYzSRX9YA.jpeg" class="size_orig justify_inline border_" alt="" /></figure>
<p>With her permission, here are some of Jen’s email notes to me on the references embedded in the image, with a few follow through notes from me too.</p>
<p><strong>Clenched Raised Fist</strong>:</p>
<p>J: faith, endurance, solidarity, defiance, politics, optimism, grit, joy, also a wee nod to Northern soul and gay activism in a roundabout way cos Tom Robinson uses a clenched fist on his albums (not that he’s actually Scottish).</p>
<p>K: The fist is from an existing image on Jen’s Instagram page that caught my eye, and convinced me (though it didn’t take long to decide) that she was the perfect artist for this collaboration. <em>Dignity</em> speaks directly to the social and economic upheaval of the time and place it was born: late 1980s industrial Scotland.</p>
<figure><img src="https://cdn-images-1.medium.com/max/1024/1*BkFKejweBB8fqXS6CW3F3A.png" class="size_orig justify_inline border_" alt="" /></figure>
<p><strong>Suicide Statistics</strong></p>
<p>J: The fist is gripping a graph of male suicide stats from 1981–2016. The top line is for Scotland, the middle for Wales and the bottom for England. They sit on the graph like that. I didn’t separate them. The Scottish one is so much higher than the others.</p>
<p>K: this won’t be the last mention of suicide on these pages. Mental health, dignity, purpose, hope and community are intimately intertwined.</p>
<p><strong>The Finnieston crane</strong></p>
<p>J: It’s on Deacon Blue’s <em>Raintown </em>album cover and also represents Glasgow and industry, ‘home’ and ‘work’. I use the criss-cross patterns from the structure as part of a recurring theme.</p>
<p>K: The crane is known in the city as Big Bertha.</p>
<p>It’s worth adding that of Deacon Blue’s songs, it’s not only <em>Dignity </em>that got under the skin of the Thatcher-era. So too did songs like <em>Wages Day</em> (“this long narrow land is full of possibility”) and <em>Town To Be Blamed</em> (work, work, work, rain, rain, rain, home, home, home, again, again, again). The whole <em>Raintown </em>album captured the mood of the day.</p>
<figure><img src="https://cdn-images-1.medium.com/max/1024/1*vcstHZZk2iBl7sdRKGGopw.png" class="size_orig justify_inline border_" alt="" /></figure>
<p><strong>The wee sailboat</strong></p>
<p>J: A direct reference to the dinghy in the song lyrics, and to fishing and the sea.</p>
<p><strong>Paperboat</strong></p>
<p>J: the Clyde / <em>Dignity</em>/ George Wyllie/ ‘impossible’ daydreams. I’ve done the image of it in the style of an 80’s crappy public service leaflet (i.e. Protect and Survive) I’ve added lots of image noise so it looks like it was cut out of an 80’s monochrome leaflet.</p>
<p>K: In 1989, artist George Wyllie sailed a 78-foot boat, crafted from paper, Velcro and steel, up the River Clyde. It’s a fondly remembered event in Glasgow, and one that symbolised both the city’s shipping heritage and its decline. Wyllie’s other best known work was Straw Locomotive, which was constructed exactly as its name suggests, and was suspended from the aforementioned Finniestone Crane. Wyllie said of it at the time,</p>
<p><em>Today, in Springburn, industry is at a low ebb… What has happened?<br>The ‘Straw Locomotive’ can ask questions but cannot give answers.”</em></p>
<p>I have a song called <em>Paper Boat,</em> inspired by Wyllie, which only just failed to make it onto my 2018 album, with Steven Polwart and Inge Thomson, <em>Laws of Motion</em>.</p>
<figure><img src="https://cdn-images-1.medium.com/max/1024/1*FxQPi4bza_hXaJ5vXfQ5RQ.png" class="size_orig justify_inline border_" alt="" /></figure>
<p>The song goes:</p>
<p><em>a tiny man, a tiny boat / of tender paper hull and sails / they float up river ushered by the tide / and in that little boat, a light /is constant through the keening days and nights / with only heaven for a bride / grief is just love with no home / grief is just love with no home …</em></p>
<p>One last wee note. The final track <em>Laws of Motion</em> is called<em> Cassiopeia</em>. It’s based on the UK Government’s 1970’s public information leaflet <em>Protect and Survive</em>, which lays out how to “survive” a nuclear attack. Jen wasn’t aware of this when she mentioned the leaflet. So her note made the hairs on my arm stand up. It’s a pretty niche wee group of us that keeps pdfs of 1970s public information leaflets on our desktops (<a href="https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/uk-scotland-south-scotland-46793926">though I suspect recent COSTA poetry winner, J.O. Morgan</a> from just down the road in The Scottish Borders is one of them).</p>
<p><strong>PCBS and electronic circuitry</strong>:</p>
<p>J: industry and also I’m using it as a visual reference to rivers and the canal system.</p>
<p>K: I come from a family full of engineers. And my growing-up home village of Banknock, Stirlingshire, sits on the Forth and Clyde Canal.</p>
<p><strong>Different papers</strong></p>
<p>J: brown papers — retail and postal — graph/squared/lined — academia/writing /journalism</p>
<p>K: If you ever want to buy me a notebook, plain or graph only, thanks very much. Lined paper does my head in.</p>
<p><strong>Lace motif</strong></p>
<p>J: References Ayrshire Lace, which was a massive industry in Glasgow and was choked to death by the invention of the Swiss embroidery machine (progress can be a right bastard) and also by the American civil war, which stopped the flow of cotton to Europe (geek textile reference).</p>
<p>K: the process of globalization and its impact on local skills and craft has been going on for a long time …</p>
<figure><img src="https://cdn-images-1.medium.com/max/844/1*6d2r1nrhDoZ5swHSvh0YaA.png" class="size_orig justify_inline border_" alt="" /></figure>
<p><strong>Coats thread label</strong></p>
<p>J:<strong> </strong>textile and clothing industry, Singer sewing machines and JP Coats</p>
<p>K: … in March 1911, more than 90% of workers at the Singer Factory in Clydebank walked out, in a dispute sparked by piecework pay and punitive working conditions. The strike was a landmark in Scottish union history because it united workers of different occupations, and cut across divisions of gender and religion sectarianism. It’s widely regarded as the first industrial battle in Scotland between local labour and international capital.</p>
<p><strong>Clocking on cards/wages packet</strong></p>
<p>J: Maynard Keynes.</p>
<p>K: Imagine: Deacon Blue’s Ricky Ross on a Cretan beach reading John Maynard Keynes’s <em>The General Theory of Employment, Interest and Money</em>. A wee bit of light reading for the holidays … Keynes was one of the most influential economists of the twentieth century, and wrote extensively about the need to manage international capital and intervene in free markets. He opposed the UK Government’s policy of austerity during the Great Depression of the 1930s. Thatcher didn’t care for his ideas. And, let’s just say, he’s not a popular economist amongst those who determine economic policy in our times.</p>
<p><strong>UB40</strong></p>
<p>J: Thatcher (I can’t even type her name without my internal voice going full blown Tourettes)</p>
<figure><img src="https://cdn-images-1.medium.com/max/866/1*TH_cB75gzvDfW7UOhuQHYg.png" class="size_orig justify_inline border_" alt="" /></figure>
<p><strong>Green shield stamps</strong></p>
<p>J: Hope, dreams and determination.</p>
<p>K: Green shield stamps were a way of encouraging shoppers to save up for stuff, originally through pre-internet-era catalogues. Everyone over 40 remembers the lure of the Littlewoods and Kays catalogues, no?</p>
<p><strong>Flowers and background watercolour</strong></p>
<p>J: I’ve done this as bursts of colour, I’ve done it in the colours of the machair flowers - they represent our wildernesses and our nature (urban as well) and our ability to bloom and thrive in the darkest and most difficult environments. I’ve done them as explosions of colour like at a Holi festival so they’re also a nod to our diversity and all the cultures that we are. They represent ‘home’ on a broad level.</p>
<p>K: Machair is the grassy coastal dune plains of the Hebrides and parts of Ireland. It’s the most vulnerable of all land in Scotland to erosion and climate change. The machair of Lewis gets a wee mention in my song <em>I Burn But I Am Not Consumed</em> (from <em>Laws of Motion</em>). You can watch it here, in performance with the <a href="https://www.bbc.co.uk/music/audiovideo/popular#p04q5cmf">BBC Scottish Symphony Orchestra</a>.</p>
<p><strong>Sunblest bag</strong></p>
<p>J: also from the lyrics though I’ve flipped it so that it becomes part of the background texture. I got my school packed lunch in <em>Sunblest </em>bags all the time.</p>
<p><strong>Font</strong></p>
<p>J: the fonts are typewriter fonts because to me they’ll always be associated with guerrilla girls, zines, post punk and the DIY movement and the explosive energy within that.</p>
<p>I owe Jen massive thanks for investing herself in this project, in such a heartfelt way. There’s more to come from her. So watch this space.</p>
<p><img src="https://medium.com/_/stat?event=post.clientViewed&referrerSource=full_rss&postId=7eba87e7b06a" class="size_orig justify_inline border_" height="1" width="1" /></p>Karine Polwarttag:karinepolwart.com,2005:Post/56195292019-01-23T15:52:05+00:002019-01-30T22:17:47+00:00DIGNITY (Pt. 1) | the places other songs can’t reach<blockquote>
<strong><em>Song:</em></strong><em> Dignity | </em><strong><em>Artist:</em></strong><em> Deacon Blue</em>
</blockquote>
<blockquote>
<strong><em>Writer:</em></strong><em> Ricky Ross | </em><strong><em>First release:</em></strong><em> 1987</em>
</blockquote>
<figure><img src="https://cdn-images-1.medium.com/max/1024/1*nJkVPx0hhFy9rgYzSRX9YA.jpeg" class="size_orig justify_inline border_" alt="" /><figcaption>Artwork by Jen Frankwell</figcaption></figure>
<p>A song about a Cleansing Depot worker who dreams of buying a wee boat, and heading into the Atlantic, Deacon Blue’s <em>Dignity</em> was the first single release from the band’s debut 1987 album <em>Raintown</em>. In its initial outing the song failed to reach the Top 40. But a re-record and re-release the following year saw it rise to no.31 on the UK Chart. Its highest ever chart position was in 1994 at no.20.</p>
<p>In my head, it was a chart topper, for the bald stats tell you nothing at all about the number of weddings and funerals <em>Dignity </em>is played at, even still. They say nothing either about the conviction and love with which a Scottish audience, in particular, hollers “<em>I saved my money</em>”. And nothing about how the song makes certain older men cry, or about how it rankles still others. One person’s dewy-eyed, middle-class sentimentality is another’s beacon of hope.</p>
<p>Songs are like that. They mean what they mean, to me, to you. They land in our lives however they land. And those meanings and resonances are impervious to argument.</p>
<figure><img src="https://cdn-images-1.medium.com/max/1024/1*xpMq5WzU-nI003xRMzj6zA.png" class="size_orig justify_inline border_" alt="" /></figure>
<p><em>Dignity</em> isn’t just a song in individual lives. It’s found civic roles too. It was played at the closing ceremony of the 2014 Commonwealth Games in Glasgow. And it was <a href="https://www.scotsman.com/lifestyle/video-choir-perform-deacon-blue-s-dignity-at-new-v-a-dundee-1-4800310">sung <em>a capella</em> by a massed choir of women at the 2017 opening of the V&A in Dundee</a> (Deacon Blue lead singer and writer, Ricky Ross, is a Dundee man).</p>
<p>Whether you like it or not, only a song of a very particular reach and symbolic power can get into as many emotional crannies as <em>Dignity</em>.</p>
<p>I have a huge soft spot for it. And I’m endlessly curious as to why some songs matter more here than there, more to you than to me. I’m fascinated too about by the sheer heartfelt meaning so many of us find in, or attach to, pop songs, and especially, here in Scotland, to Scottish-made ones.</p>
<p>So, for the remainder of this month, I’d like to share some of my thoughts, about just this one song, about where it takes me.</p>
<p>And then perhaps there will be a few more songs to explore in the months to come…</p>
<figure><img src="https://cdn-images-1.medium.com/max/1024/1*G2Ty3sqQdvRGGNXiG73W6Q.png" class="size_orig justify_inline border_" alt="" /></figure>
<p><img src="https://medium.com/_/stat?event=post.clientViewed&referrerSource=full_rss&postId=7c18bb70cf5c" class="size_orig justify_inline border_" height="1" width="1" /></p>Karine Polwarttag:karinepolwart.com,2005:Post/45231012016-12-23T10:53:20+00:002021-06-28T08:47:04+01:00HOW THE ROBIN GOT HIS RED BREAST<div>
<div class="_2cuy _3dgx"><div class="_1mf _1mj"><span><span>“Mum”, whispered Amina, “I’m so cold I can’t feel my toes any more”. </span></span></div></div>
<div class="_2cuy _3dgx">
<div class="_1mf _1mj"> </div>
<div class="_1mf _1mj"><span><span>Her mum sighed, and then stopped. She peered into the trees all around them, and listened. It was quiet. “Ok, love. We’ll sleep here in this clearing for tonight”.</span></span></div>
</div>
<div class="_2cuy _3dgx">
<div class="_1mf _1mj"> </div>
<div class="_1mf _1mj"><span><span>They had been walking all day. And the whole day before. And the day before that. It was a long time since they’d slept in their own beds.</span></span></div>
</div>
<div class="_2cuy _3dgx">
<div class="_1mf _1mj"> </div>
<div class="_1mf _1mj"><span><span>“Let’s build a fire”, said Amina’s mum.</span></span></div>
</div>
<div class="_2cuy _3dgx">
<div class="_1mf _1mj"> </div>
<div class="_1mf _1mj"><span><span>From a tall pine, a wee grey bird was watching as she peeled curls of birch bark from a fallen tree. Amina gathered bracken, leaves and spruce twigs into a nest, and her mother took her Fire Stone from her bag. She struck it over and over until a spark jumped into the dry bark and leaves. Amina blew into it until the fire caught hold.</span></span></div>
</div>
<div class="_2cuy _3dgx">
<div class="_1mf _1mj"> </div>
<div class="_1mf _1mj"><span><span>It was already beginning to grow dark in the wood. And the wee bird was watching. </span></span></div>
</div>
<div class="_2cuy _3dgx">
<div class="_1mf _1mj"> </div>
<div class="_1mf _1mj"><span><span>“I’m hungry”, said Amina. </span></span></div>
</div>
<div class="_2cuy _3dgx">
<div class="_1mf _1mj"> </div>
<div class="_1mf _1mj"><span><span>“I know, I know”, hushed her mum, “I’ll find us something to eat, I promise”. She pulled a blanket from the bag and wrapped it around her daughter, tucking her in close to the heat. Amina felt her feet begin to thaw out. </span></span></div>
</div>
<div class="_2cuy _3dgx">
<div class="_1mf _1mj"> </div>
<div class="_1mf _1mj"><span><span>Her mum poked a long branch into the campfire to make a torch. “I won’t be long, Amina. Stay right here please”. And then she disappeared into the trees.</span></span></div>
</div>
<div class="_2cuy _3dgx">
<div class="_1mf _1mj"> </div>
<div class="_1mf _1mj"><span><span>The wood uttered strange sounds. Whelps and whistles. Creaks and rustles. Amina stared at the flickering fire and her eyes began to feel heavy. </span></span></div>
</div>
<div class="_2cuy _3dgx">
<div class="_1mf _1mj"> </div>
<div class="_1mf _1mj"><span><span>And the wee bird was watching. </span></span></div>
</div>
<div class="_2cuy _3dgx">
<div class="_1mf _1mj"> </div>
<div class="_1mf _1mj"><span><span>Brambles. Amina’s mum plucked them fresh and juicy from the bushes, and dropped them carefully into the side pockets of the bag. It wouldn’t be enough to feed them both, but it was a start. </span></span></div>
</div>
<div class="_2cuy _3dgx">
<div class="_1mf _1mj"> </div>
<div class="_1mf _1mj"><span><span>Back in the clearing, Amina slept on. And the fire beside her began to shrink. There was a crinkling of leaves, and from behind a juniper tree emerged a black nose sniffing the air. </span></span></div>
</div>
<div class="_2cuy _3dgx"><div class="_1mf _1mj"><span><span>A lone wolf crept into the clearing where Amina lay.</span></span></div></div>
<div class="_2cuy _3dgx">
<div class="_1mf _1mj"> </div>
<div class="_1mf _1mj"><span><span>And the wee bird was watching. </span></span></div>
</div>
<div class="_2cuy _3dgx">
<div class="_1mf _1mj"> </div>
<div class="_1mf _1mj"><span><span>Hazelnuts. The wood was littered with them. “They’ll be so delicious”, Amina’s mum thought to herself. And she stuffed them into her pockets. “But we’ll need even more food for tomorrow’s journey”. </span></span></div>
</div>
<div class="_2cuy _3dgx">
<div class="_1mf _1mj"> </div>
<div class="_1mf _1mj"><span><span>Still Amina slept. And the campfire grew weaker and weaker. Snap. Crack. Snuffle. The wolf crept closer and closer. </span></span></div>
</div>
<div class="_2cuy _3dgx">
<div class="_1mf _1mj"> </div>
<div class="_1mf _1mj"><span><span>And the wee bird was watching. </span></span></div>
</div>
<div class="_2cuy _3dgx">
<div class="_1mf _1mj"> </div>
<div class="_1mf _1mj"><span><span>Wild mushrooms. The kind you can eat. “Perfect”, said Amina’s mum. And she pulled them from under the boughs of an oak and filled her bag. </span></span></div>
</div>
<div class="_2cuy _3dgx">
<div class="_1mf _1mj"> </div>
<div class="_1mf _1mj"><span><span>Amina shuffled under the blanket, as the fire dwindled almost to its embers. The wolf took a deep breath and made ready to pounce. </span></span></div>
</div>
<div class="_2cuy _3dgx">
<div class="_1mf _1mj"> </div>
<div class="_1mf _1mj"><span><span>A flash! A flutter! Swooping down from the pine tree, was the wee bird. He’d seen it all. The wolf. The fire. The girl. Her mum. He knew exactly what to do. Just a wee grey bird tick, tick, ticking in fury as his wings grazed the hairs on the wolf’s back. He flew low over the fire and he blew and blew with all his might. The flames leapt into the face of the wolf, who staggered back, yelping. </span></span></div>
</div>
<div class="_2cuy _3dgx">
<div class="_1mf _1mj"> </div>
<div class="_1mf _1mj"><span><span>Just then, Amina’s mum ran into the clearing, yelling and waving her torch. “No! No! Leave her alone!” The wolf scarpered back into the woods. </span></span></div>
</div>
<div class="_2cuy _3dgx">
<div class="_1mf _1mj"> </div>
<div class="_1mf _1mj"><span><span>Amina felt her mum’s arms around her. “Are you ok? Are you ok?” she muttered. “Mum, it was the wee bird that saved me. Such a tiny wee bird, mum”. And she pointed to where it lay on the ground, just beyond the fire, not moving at all.</span></span></div>
</div>
<div class="_2cuy _3dgx">
<div class="_1mf _1mj"> </div>
<div class="_1mf _1mj"><span><span>Amina’s mum picked it up gently. She could feel its heart still beating. As she turned it in the palm of her hand, she could see that all the feathers on its breast were burned. They glowed a vibrant orange-red, like the flames themselves. </span></span></div>
</div>
<div class="_2cuy _3dgx">
<div class="_1mf _1mj"> </div>
<div class="_1mf _1mj"><span><span>Amina’s mum began to cry. She cried for joy. She cried for sorrow. For the wee bird had almost killed himself to save her daughter. </span></span></div>
</div>
<div class="_2cuy _3dgx">
<div class="_1mf _1mj"> </div>
<div class="_1mf _1mj"><span><span>And, you know, this was long ago, but many things are just the same. That wee bird’s chest has glowed ever since. For this is how the Robin got his Red-Breast, the bold wee robin who looks after us all. </span></span></div>
</div>
</div>
<div class="_1mf _1mj"> </div>
<div class="_1mf _1mj">***</div>
<div class="_1mf _1mj">A fledgling adaptation from an old, old tale. And a sister story to that of <em>How The Spruce Became Evergreen</em>, which appeared as a spoken piece in <em>Wind Resistance</em>. With thanks for initial comment from the wonderful brains of Katarina Juvancic and Liam Hurley.</div>
<p><br><a href="http://feeds.wordpress.com/1.0/gocomments/windresistance.wordpress.com/767/" rel="nofollow"><img src="//feeds.wordpress.com/1.0/comments/windresistance.wordpress.com/767/" class="size_orig justify_inline border_" alt="" /></a> <img src="https://pixel.wp.com/b.gif?host=windresistance.wordpress.com&blog=111133558&post=767&subd=windresistance&ref=&feed=1" class="size_orig justify_inline border_" alt="" height="1" width="1" /></p>Karine Polwarttag:karinepolwart.com,2005:Post/42590482016-07-01T12:02:16+01:002019-03-08T11:39:20+00:00BURNING<p><img src="https://windresistance.files.wordpress.com/2016/07/kp-wr-fala-21-6-2016-26.jpg?w=620" class="size_orig justify_inline border_" alt="KP WR Fala 21-6-2016-26" /></p>
<p>Fala Moor is speckled just now with the gorgeous white lambswool-like tufts of bog cotton. I’ve been gathering in stuff from up there along with “Wind Resistance” director, Wils Wilson. The drying pulley in my kitchen is hung with sedges and grasses, and I have tiny fragments of lime green, raspbery red and copper-hued moss laid out on the piano. Sphagnum cuspidatum. Shpagnum capillofolium. And so-called glittering wood moss. The close-up detail of the colour is quite beautiful.</p>
<p><strong>one day your burned me til my skin turned black</strong><br><strong>and my mouth like a desert couldn’t sob or sigh</strong><br><strong>in the dry days that followed I heard the moorcock cry</strong><br><strong>go back go back go back</strong></p>
<p>Bogs are by nature wetlands. Indeed, Fala Moor is defined as a <strong>Wetland of International Importance</strong>. Under EU legislation (while it still applies …), it’s an SPA, a <strong>Special Protected Area</strong>. Under UK legislation it’s a SSSI, a <strong>Site of Special Scientific Interest</strong>.</p>
<p>Yes, bogs are wet. When they cease to be wet, they’re no longer bogs.</p>
<p>A glance at Fala Flow on Google Earth reveals a mottled patchwork surface and a visible smoke plume in the north eastern corner of the moor. This is evidence of <strong>muirburn</strong>, an autumn/winter gamekeeping practice that involves burning strips of heather moorland on a cyclical 10 to 20 year basis. Its chief contemporary purpose is to cultivate Red Grouse numbers on commercial shooting estates. Red Grouse seek cover in mature heather but prefer to feed on new shoots that burst forth after burning.</p>
<p>Muirburn is governed in Scotland by the Scottish Government’s <a href="http://www.gov.scot/Publications/2011/08/09125203/3" target="_blank">Muirburn Code</a>.</p>
<p>It has a long history, as much else on the moor does. And it’s complicated.</p>
<p>Nowadays, it’s a controversial management strategy which fiercely divides ecological opinion about what it is to “look after” designated areas of land and which interests are served by the kinds of stewardship we support.</p>
<p>As a practice, muirburn does indeed protect Red Grouse numbers and there’s some evidence that it appears to reduce, for example, deer tick populations. The grouse shooting industry (and it is an industry, like any other), whatever ethical stance you take on the activity itself (and you can catch me for a pint sometime about mine), is a supplier of hundreds of rural jobs. It’s a powerful economic and political lobby, which has identified itself with the cause of sustainable environmental stewardship. <a href="http://www.heathertrust.co.uk/">The Heather Trust</a>, for example, is essentially an alliance of game estates that “pr<span class="st">omotes integrated and sustainable moorland management for agricultural, environmental, sporting and conservation uses”.</span></p>
<p>It’s tricksy.</p>
<p>The<a href="http://scottishwildlifetrust.org.uk/docs/002_057__muirburnpolicy_nov2012_1363799503.pdf" target="_blank"><strong> Scottish Wildlife Trust</strong></a> believes there should be a “presumption against burning any blanket peatlands or raised mires”. It points to concerns about the integrity of deep peat ecology and hydrology, the effect on biodiversity and ground nesting birds, in particular. It urges more scientific research.</p>
<p>Fala Moor is a blanket bog of raised peat.</p>
<p>The current RSPB director <a href="http://www.rspb.org.uk/community/ourwork/b/martinharper/archive/2016/04/29/england-39-s-moors-a-burning-issue.aspx?pi353792403=4">Martin Harper</a> has also written recently about the importance of “proper regulation of an industry whose unfettered ambitions to produce ever higher red grouse numbers for the gun are causing growing concern over the direct and indirect impacts on wildlife, including hen harriers and other raptors, the ability of our moorlands to cope with increasing rainfall and to play a part in reducing the risk of catastrophic floods downstream, and the impact on deep peat soils that lock up carbon and prevent its release into the atmosphere and into our drinking water.”</p>
<p>It’s complex, this “looking after” business.</p>
<p>At Fala, to get all local on this again, an intentional muir fire in 2000 blew out of control. It’s not clear what long term impact that fire has had on the bog’s wetland viability but its current formal status, according to Scottish Natural Heritage, who monitor the site, is “unfavourable”.</p>
<p>What is to protect? What is protected? By whom? And why? What really matters to us?</p>
<p><img src="https://windresistance.files.wordpress.com/2016/07/muriburn.jpg?w=620" class="size_orig justify_inline border_" alt="muriburn" /></p>
<p> </p>
<p><br><a href="http://feeds.wordpress.com/1.0/gocomments/windresistance.wordpress.com/566/" rel="nofollow"><img src="//feeds.wordpress.com/1.0/comments/windresistance.wordpress.com/566/" class="size_orig justify_inline border_" alt="" /></a> <img src="https://pixel.wp.com/b.gif?host=windresistance.wordpress.com&blog=111133558&post=566&subd=windresistance&ref=&feed=1" class="size_orig justify_inline border_" alt="" height="1" width="1" /></p>Karine Polwarttag:karinepolwart.com,2005:Post/41841652016-05-17T09:26:50+01:002019-03-08T11:46:58+00:00the risk in being good<p>Oh my goodness. Robert Frost’s <strong>Exposed Nest</strong>. What a poem.</p>
<p>What is it to do good? What harm can come from intervention? How swiftly do we turn “to other things” and often have no measure of the consequence of what we think of as our “caring”? Quite a raw spot this one, I think, and not just on microscopic level. Just think of the abundant socio-political parallels for interventionism and the righteous certainty of doing-what’s-best OR for-your-own-good …</p>
<p>And yet we want to care, we <em>need</em> to care. I’m quietly terrified that we might forget. This impetus to care, and the infrastructures we imagine into being and create around us in order tor care for one another, these are key to <strong>Wind Resistance</strong>.</p>
<h3>The Exposed Nest</h3>
<p>You were forever finding some new play.<br><span class="text_exposed_show">So when I saw you down on hands and knees<br>In the meadow, busy with the new-cut hay,<br>Trying, I thought, to set it up on end,<br>I went to show you how to make it stay,<br>If that was your idea, against the breeze,<br>And, if you asked me, even help pretend<br>To make it root again and grow afresh.<br>But ’twas no make-believe with you today,<br>Nor was the grass itself your real concern,<br>Though I found your hand full of wilted fern,<br>Steel-bright June-grass, and blackening heads of clovers.<br>‘Twas a nest full of young birds on the ground<br>The cutter-bar had just gone champing over<br>(Miraculously without tasking flesh)<br>And left defenseless to the heat and light.<br>You wanted to restore them to their right<br>Of something interposed between their sight<br>And too much world at once–could means be found.<br>The way the nest-full every time we stirred<br>Stood up to us as to a mother-bird<br>Whose coming home has been too long deferred,<br>Made me ask would the mother-bird return<br>And care for them in such a change of scene<br>And might out meddling make her more afraid.<br>That was a thing we could not wait to learn.<br>We saw the risk we took in doing good,<br>But dared not spare to do the best we could<br>Though harm should come of it; so built the screen<br>You had begun, and gave them back their shade.<br>All this to prove we cared. Why is there then<br>No more to tell? We turned to other things.<br>I haven’t any memory–have you?–<br>Of ever coming to the place again<br>To see if the birds lived the first night through,<br>And so at last to learn to use their wings.</span></p>
<div class="text_exposed_show"><p><strong>by Robert Frost</strong></p></div>
<p><br><a href="http://feeds.wordpress.com/1.0/gocomments/windresistance.wordpress.com/518/" rel="nofollow"><img src="//feeds.wordpress.com/1.0/comments/windresistance.wordpress.com/518/" class="size_orig justify_inline border_" alt="" /></a> <img src="https://pixel.wp.com/b.gif?host=windresistance.wordpress.com&blog=111133558&post=518&subd=windresistance&ref=&feed=1" class="size_orig justify_inline border_" alt="" height="1" width="1" /></p>Karine Polwarttag:karinepolwart.com,2005:Post/41836952016-05-16T22:54:34+01:002020-07-13T11:28:13+01:00a palm for a blackbird’s nest<p>With thanks to Heather who pointed me to the legend of St Kevin And The Blackbird. Here’s the mighty <a href="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wKGmQcSFbMc">Seamus Heaney</a> reading his poem about the same … “a prayer his body makes entirely …”</p>
<div class="poemHead"><div class="poemTitle">
<p>There’s much in this that resonates with my diggings and delvings at the moment for <strong>WIND RESISTANCE</strong>. Birds, of course! And also: the qualities (and imaginative and ethical power) of myth; human connectedness to other creatures; the meaning of compassion; the concept of sanctuary (both in terms of Kevin’s historic life as a hermit and his body – in this tale – as a sanctuary for another life); suffering and love and how they elide.</p>
<p><img src="https://windresistance.files.wordpress.com/2016/05/kevin.png?w=620" class="size_orig justify_inline border_" alt="Kevin" /><strong> </strong> image by Michael Cook @hallowedart</p>
<h2>St Kevin and the Blackbird (1996)</h2>
</div></div>
<div class="post-690 post type-post status-publish format-standard has-post-thumbnail hentry category-poems"><div class="entry">
<p>And then there was St Kevin and the blackbird.<br>The saint is kneeling, arms stretched out, inside<br>His cell, but the cell is narrow, so</p>
<p>One turned-up palm is out the window, stiff<br>As a crossbeam, when a blackbird lands<br>And lays in it and settles down to nest.</p>
<p>Kevin feels the warm eggs, the small breast, the tucked<br>Neat head and claws and, finding himself linked<br>Into the network of eternal life,</p>
<p>Is moved to pity: now he must hold his hand<br>Like a branch out in the sun and rain for weeks<br>Until the young are hatched and fledged and flown.</p>
<p>*</p>
<p>And since the whole thing’s imagined anyhow,<br>Imagine being Kevin. Which is he?<br>Self-forgetful or in agony all the time</p>
<p>From the neck on out down through his hurting forearms?<br>Are his fingers sleeping? Does he still feel his knees?<br>Or has the shut-eyed blank of underearth</p>
<p>Crept up through him? Is there distance in his head?<br>Alone and mirrored clear in love’s deep river,<br>‘To labour and not to seek reward,’ he prays,</p>
<p>A prayer his body makes entirely<br>For he has forgotten self, forgotten bird<br>And on the riverbank forgotten the river’s name.</p>
</div></div>
<p> </p>
<h3>From Seamus Heaney – <em>The Spirit Level</em> (1996)</h3>
<p><br><a href="http://feeds.wordpress.com/1.0/gocomments/windresistance.wordpress.com/461/" rel="nofollow"><img src="//feeds.wordpress.com/1.0/comments/windresistance.wordpress.com/461/" class="size_orig justify_inline border_" alt="" /></a> <img src="https://pixel.wp.com/b.gif?host=windresistance.wordpress.com&blog=111133558&post=461&subd=windresistance&ref=&feed=1" class="size_orig justify_inline border_" alt="" height="1" width="1" /></p>Karine Polwarttag:karinepolwart.com,2005:Post/41774392016-05-12T09:13:09+01:002019-11-04T01:30:36+00:00Pigeon<p>“Mum, I think I can talk to birds”, says my nearly nine year old son first thing this morning. “Wow. That’s cool!” I reply, “What do you say to each other?” “Well it’s kind of hard to tell you, because, well … we don’t talk human”. And he procedes to make some soft cooing and burbling noises. “Ah, is that pigeon?” I ask. “Yup”. “Is it pigeons that you talk to, love?” “Well I talk to a lot of different ones, but mostly pigeons and doves” he says, before adding “because they’<span class="text_exposed_show">re I think they’re kind of most like people”. “And what happens when you talk?” “Well I listen to what they’re saying and then I say something back. And then they talk back to me. And a lot of times they come up closer to me. One even let me touch it once. I htink they like me”. “Oh that’s great, love. Do you mean it’s a bit like when Harry Potter speaks parceltongue to the snakes?” “Exactly!” he says. “Mum, what was the first bird I ever saw?” “Ooh I”m not sure, dude.” “What’s the one you’ve told me about before?” “Aw. I know the one you mean. You never actually *saw* that one though. You mean the barn owl that swooped over our car the night you were born, yeah?” “Yeah the barn owl! Like the one I held at the Owl Centre one time”. “Uhuh, she was beautiful. Do you know in Gaelic she’s called The White Faced Old Woman of The Night? So she’s sort of a wee bit like a white witch.” He pauses for a moment to absorb this. “Mum, do you think she’s the one that gave me my bird-talking powers?”</span></p>
<p><span class="text_exposed_show">I absolutely LOVE my son. I think he is amazing and wise. I think he’s a brilliant listener, a thinker and a gorgeous compassionate wee soul. And maybe he doers to talk to birds. And maybe they do talk back.</span></p>
<p>That barn owl – <em>cailleadh oidhe</em> – is part of my WIND RESISTANCE tale. And so is my beautiful son.</p>
<p><br><a href="http://feeds.wordpress.com/1.0/gocomments/windresistance.wordpress.com/433/" rel="nofollow"><img src="//feeds.wordpress.com/1.0/comments/windresistance.wordpress.com/433/" class="size_orig justify_inline border_" alt="" /></a> <img src="https://pixel.wp.com/b.gif?host=windresistance.wordpress.com&blog=111133558&post=433&subd=windresistance&ref=&feed=1" class="size_orig justify_inline border_" alt="" height="1" width="1" /></p>Karine Polwarttag:karinepolwart.com,2005:Post/41751642016-05-11T09:38:20+01:002017-02-05T13:40:21+00:00You are all bog-born<p>Some notes on a walk to Fala Flow yesterday afternoon, during which I said to the moor: <em>Please tell me about yourself</em>. Ragged and incomplete … but a glimmer in it … something to develop.</p>
<p>I have room for you<br>
but I am not for you<br>
I am for myself and all that lives in me</p>
<p>I’ve been here a long time</p>
<p>I am earth and I am water<br>
I am sedge and I am sky<br>
I am chicken wire and culverts<br>
4x4s and Barbour jackets<br>
I am 7 dense metres of peat and raised moss<br>
I am old, dead things<br>
I am alive, alive, alive</p>
<p>You’ve skipped barefoot through my heather<br>
and lain down among the mosses<br>
with your fingers and your lusting<br>
and your soft, pale bellies<br>
You’ve made love<br>
and made life<br>
inside your dark, damp bodies<br>
as I have in mine.</p>
<p>You are all bog-born.</p>
<p>When the plagues and the soldiers<br>
marched up the Royal Road<br>
north – south<br>
east – west<br>
you dressed your wounds in sphagnum<br>
and you drank from the Flow.</p>
<p>When the khaki suits hunkered<br>
in the bunkers at the mudflats<br>
and the test bombs thundered<br>
under Aberlady Bay,<br>
I welcomed the geese<br>
who were chased from their beds,<br>
who were weary from the north<br>
where the glaciers gleam.<br>
I salved their pink feet in my cool lochan waters.</p>
<p>Since ever you arrived<br>
I have looked after you,<br>
with your digging and your draining<br>
and your cutting and your clearing.</p>
<p>I’ve been fuel for your fire.<br>
I’ve been light to see in winter.<br>
I’ve been meat upon the table,<br>
if you should be so lucky.</p>
<p>One year you burned me til my skin turned black<br>
and my mouth like a desert couldn’t sob or sigh.<br>
In the dry dust that followed I heard the moorcock cry:<br>
go back go back go back</p>
<p>go back to what?<br>
go back to where?</p>
<p>I am tired,<br>
so tired of the tackit boots of keepers<br>
and the clatter of the beaters<br>
and the shotgun expeditions<br>
that cost thirty grand a day.<br>
And the EU directives<br>
and the eco impact studies<br>
and the economic models of your moorland plans.</p>
<p>It seems I need to be managed.<br>
I do not know what’s best.</p>
<p>I am 12,000 years old.</p>
<p>And to those day-tripper walkers<br>
who are out to find themselves<br>
in the clear air of the day<br>
and the laverock’s song –</p>
<p>You never slow to listen<br>
to the pounding of their footsteps,<br>
the crunching upon gravel,<br>
the crinkling through the rushes,<br>
the snapping in the muirburn<br>
and the shlooping of the bog.</p>
<p>I am not your fucking muse.</p>
<p>Listen:<br>
It’s dusk and the moorcock cries:<br>
go back go back go back</p>
<p>go back to what?<br>
go back to where?</p>
<p>The first place you ever knew<br>
was warm and wild and wet.<br>
In that dark womb you grew.</p>
<p>You are all bog-born.</p>
<p> </p><br> <a rel="nofollow" href="http://feeds.wordpress.com/1.0/gocomments/windresistance.wordpress.com/417/"><img src="//feeds.wordpress.com/1.0/comments/windresistance.wordpress.com/417/" class="size_orig justify_inline border_" alt="" /></a> <img src="https://pixel.wp.com/b.gif?host=windresistance.wordpress.com&blog=111133558&post=417&subd=windresistance&ref=&feed=1" class="size_orig justify_inline border_" alt="" height="1" width="1" />Karine Polwarttag:karinepolwart.com,2005:Post/41736302016-05-09T23:03:57+01:002017-02-05T13:38:01+00:00The plover loves the mountain<p><img src="https://windresistance.files.wordpress.com/2016/05/screen-shot-2016-05-09-at-20-43-07.png?w=620" class="size_orig justify_inline border_" alt="Screen Shot 2016-05-09 at 20.43.07" /></p>
<p>On the night of May 5th into May 6th 2016, when I might ordinarily have stayed up stupid late drinking red wine, watching the incoming Scottish Parliamentary election results and ranting to the world on twitter, I was, instead, happed up in an Arctic sleeping bag in a tent pitched beside my local peatbog lochan, Fala Flow.</p>
<p>Even in darkness on a southern upland moor, human industry is omnipresent. The traffic never truly stops on the A720 Edinburgh City Bypass some eight miles to the north and cars continue to travel the A68 north-south trunk road which passes through my home village of Pathhead. Still, as creatures we are diminished in the scheme of things in these hours and it’s possible to imagine a world that’s that’s not wholly in thrall to what Robert Burns called “tyrannic man’s dominion”.</p>
<p>The sound that wakes me and my tent-mate, sound designer and composer Pippa Murphy is the plaintive bell of the <a href="http://www.bbc.co.uk/programmes/b03dwy1y">Golden Plover</a> (and BTW BBC Radio 4’s 5:58am Tweet of the Day is one of my first great love affairs on this making-trip – thanks Pippa!) Isn’t that just a beautiful call? And all the more so in anticipation of a sunrise. Hot on the heels of the plover come oystercatchers, skylarks, meadow pipits and the “go back, go back” rhythmic clamour of the <a href="http://www.bbc.co.uk/programmes/b038qj9c">Red Grouse</a> (known in Scots as moorcocks).</p>
<p>The whole chorus is a wonder, which Pippa captures (as we continue to lie cooried in our bags) on her SONY PCM-D50 courtesy of some lovely microphones borrowed (thank you) from Edinburgh University. I’m not quite sure exactly <em>how</em> as yet, but that sound will play a role in the show.</p>
<p>One of the key threads to <strong>WIND RESISTANCE</strong> is my personal enchantment with birds and the landscapes they inhabit, as well as the sounds they make, the complex lives they live and the stories and myths they’ve inspired in us. To me, they have a lot to say about the aformentioned dominion of human beings and how our lives entwine (and sometimes mess) with the lives of other creatures.</p>
<p>The musical and sung content of <strong>WIND RESISTANCE</strong> is still very much in the air. Indeed, I think there are new songs still to write. One which feels essential to the piece however is Robert Burns’ lyrical <em>Now Westlin Winds (Composed in August).</em></p>
<p><strong><em>The partridge loves the fruitful fell </em></strong><br>
<strong><em>The plover loves the mountains </em></strong><br>
<strong><em>The woodcock haunts the lonely dell </em></strong><br>
<strong><em>The soaring hern the fountain</em> </strong><em><strong> </strong><br>
</em></p>
<p>It’s a song which arrived in my life through the letter box of a grotty Dundee bedsit in October 1992, the night before the funeral of my beloved Grampa, Peter Quinn. My soon-to-be boyfriend at the time, Dougie, delivered to my door a cassette version of Dick Gaughan’s all-time classic folk album <em>Handful of Eart</em><em>h</em><strong><em>. </em></strong>It was a big deal because we were both totally skint at the time and it was an actual <em>bought</em> tape, from Grouchos record store in the town centre, unlike the thoughtful mix tapes Dougie had been cooking up for me all autumn (and through which I discovered the mighty Mr Gaughan, as well as James Taylor, Michael Marra and John Martyn).</p>
<p>I’ve loved the album ever since. I associate it with that time and place, with the memory of my Grampa and with Dougie himself. If you’ve never heard it, Gaughan’s version of <em>Now Westlin Winds</em> is as good as the song is ever going to be sung. EVER. It’s perfect. Indeed it’s so perfect that it should <a href="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vZ7oYCx6tBw">Never Be Attempted</a> (I mean, listen to it).</p>
<p>Still I’m going for it. Indeed, I’ve gone for it more than once before, not least in the rather surreal surroundings of the Scottish Parliament’s main chamber, in the company of The Queen and her coronets, and her moorcock-shooting Prince, at the opening of the last session of Parliament, following Holyrood elections in 2011.</p>
<p>But it’s my first public outing of the song which holds a key as to why it’s pivotal to WIND RESISTANCE. In 2003, I led a community education folk song class for the Adult Learning Project in Edinburgh, now the Scots Music Group. One of the participants was a man called Robbie, who worked for Scottish Natural Heritage. At class one day he asked, “How do you fancy a gig in Kingussie singing to a visiting party of Swedish ecologists?” “Why on earth not?” I replied. And he added, “You have to sing <em>Now Westlin Winds</em> though”.</p>
<p>I knew and loved the song already anyway. No sweat.</p>
<p>When it came time to sing to the fair Swedes in the back room of a Highland hotel, Robbie stepped up to explain why the song was so important to him.</p>
<blockquote><p>“It’s one of the earliest understandings in poetry or literature of <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Deep_ecology">deep ecology</a>“, he said. “Burns understood that the world is not ours, as humans, that we are only one of many creatures who inhabit the earth”, he went on, “and that even as human beings, we have so many different ways of living in the environment that sustains us”.</p></blockquote>
<p>And he proceded to interrogate the entire lyric with this idea in mind. It was fascinating, moving, stirring. And it gave a song that was already deeply meaningful to me a whole new resonance. A resonance that has stuck and that is at the heart of this show.</p>
<p>Now I just need to figure out how to do it justice.</p>
<p><strong><em>Now westlin winds and slaughtering guns </em></strong><br>
<strong><em> Bring Autumn’s pleasant weather </em></strong><br>
<strong><em> The moorcock springs on whirring wings </em></strong><br>
<strong><em> Amang the blooming heather</em> </strong></p>
<p> </p>
<p> </p><br> <a rel="nofollow" href="http://feeds.wordpress.com/1.0/gocomments/windresistance.wordpress.com/214/"><img src="//feeds.wordpress.com/1.0/comments/windresistance.wordpress.com/214/" class="size_orig justify_inline border_" alt="" /></a> <img src="https://pixel.wp.com/b.gif?host=windresistance.wordpress.com&blog=111133558&post=214&subd=windresistance&ref=&feed=1" class="size_orig justify_inline border_" alt="" height="1" width="1" />Karine Polwarttag:karinepolwart.com,2005:Post/41736312016-05-09T17:00:59+01:002017-02-05T13:38:02+00:00Breathing into life<p>My first outing for the ideas behind <strong>WIND RESISTANCE</strong> was at The Old Church in Hackney on February 28th 2016, as part of <strong>BREATHE</strong> Festival. Ah, let’s just say it was pretty<em> fresh </em>(I was still writing the piece as I passed The Emirates Stadium into Kings Cross Station that day from Edinburgh …).</p>
<p>And it grew.</p>
<p>And grew.</p>
<p>And kept growing and growing through the afternoon.</p>
<p>Armed that evening with thirty odd pages of sellotaped text printed in the kind of pale blue ink that’s a nightmare to see under the light of an angle poise lamp in a church neuk, my first letting go was a rather breathless endeavour.</p>
<p>It felt intensely risky. And overtly and directly personal in a way that many of my songwriting output manages to skirt around.</p>
<p>I apologised a lot. Too much, yes.</p>
<p>And I’d forgotten – <em>again</em> – that I wear glasses now! I remembered too late for assistance with seeing through the inky blue paleness of my ideas.</p>
<p>Yet, there was the kernel of something that mattered. I ended up in conversation at the close of the night with mothers who shared their birth stories, amateur ornithologists who talked animatedly about their favourite birds, with hikers and bikers and ecologists, and all kinds of folks railing against the immanent political threat to those elements of our collective civic life that we’ve created from a sense of care and responsbility for one another.</p>
<p>I spent the next two days re-writing and honing and took the show to The Traverse Theatre Bar in Edinburgh for its second work-in-progress run through on March 1st.</p>
<p>Performing in Edinburgh is a different beast for me than London because there are always so many people in an audience who are familiar, not to mention actual loved ones and friends. Amongst those I knew was a man who’s erstwhile organiser of a local Folk Club, and now anchor at a local radio station. He would’ve seen some of my very earliest gigs as a traditional singer and member of bands like Malinky, Macalias and Battlefield Band. Jings, I thought, in a moment of profound self-doubt, surely he’s gonna think this is wierdo pretentious guff?</p>
<p>It was brave, he said later. Bold. Before reminding me that he’d worked, prior to retirement, in environmental protection. It’s a minding not to project my own anxieties onto them. It’s an affirmation too.</p>
<p>Sanctuary. Maternity. Moss. Flight.</p>
<p>Thanks to everyone who attended those two sold-out early shows and for the perceptive and helpful feedback I received from many of them afterwards. Anything created by a writer of any kind only half exists on a page or on a tongue. The rest of it is breathed into life by others when it lands inside them and gets entangled in their experiences and values, which are not mine. It’s what I love most of all about live performance, that it’s real time communication, a partnership in making meaning out of this beautiful and brutal world.</p>
<p> </p><br> <a rel="nofollow" href="http://feeds.wordpress.com/1.0/gocomments/windresistance.wordpress.com/120/"><img src="//feeds.wordpress.com/1.0/comments/windresistance.wordpress.com/120/" class="size_orig justify_inline border_" alt="" /></a> <img src="https://pixel.wp.com/b.gif?host=windresistance.wordpress.com&blog=111133558&post=120&subd=windresistance&ref=&feed=1" class="size_orig justify_inline border_" alt="" height="1" width="1" />Karine Polwarttag:karinepolwart.com,2005:Post/41736322016-05-08T17:03:08+01:002017-02-05T13:38:02+00:00A wind at my back<p>When I walk on my local moor at Fala, Midlothian, south east of Edinburgh, I get filled up with space and wind, ease and earth, and a visceral sense of connection to the depth of time. So when, in the autumn of 2015, BREATHE – a bold new arts festival at The Old Church in Hackney – invited me to perform on the theme of AIR for their inaugural programme, I thought immediately of Fala Moor.</p>
<p><img src="https://windresistance.files.wordpress.com/2016/05/screen-shot-2016-05-08-at-16-33-29.png?w=620" class="size_orig justify_inline border_" alt="Screen Shot 2016-05-08 at 16.33.29" /></p>
<p>I heard the clattering, snaking skeins of pink-footed geese that fly each autumn from Iceland and eastern Greenland to winter on this unassuming patch of southern Scottish peatbog. And I talked and waved my arms into my computer from my kitchen table about what those birds might have to tell us as human beings … a bit like this:</p>
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<div class="embed-vimeo"><iframe src="https://player.vimeo.com/video/145503133" width="620" height="413" frameborder="0" title="on human skeins and embodying pink-footed-goose-ness" webkitallowfullscreen mozallowfullscreen allowfullscreen></iframe></div>
</div>
<p>And from these domestic ramblings and environmental observations, a new show – WIND RESISTANCE – was born.</p>
<p>This site documents my WIND RESISTANCE journey from my kitchen to an intimate church in London where more than thirty pages of sellotaped-together ideas started to cohere into what will be, in the months to come, a run of performances at the Edinburgh International Festival in co-production with Edinburgh’s beautiful Lyceum Theatre.</p>
<p>It’s already been quite a whirlwind.</p>
<p>Sincere thanks at the outset to Rachel Milward and The Old Church team in Hackney and to my friend, dramaturg and writer, Ruth Little for the opening of a door afforded by BREATHE festival in late February 2016. You were the first kind wind at my back.</p><br> <a rel="nofollow" href="http://feeds.wordpress.com/1.0/gocomments/windresistance.wordpress.com/32/"><img src="//feeds.wordpress.com/1.0/comments/windresistance.wordpress.com/32/" class="size_orig justify_inline border_" alt="" /></a> <img src="https://pixel.wp.com/b.gif?host=windresistance.wordpress.com&blog=111133558&post=32&subd=windresistance&ref=&feed=1" class="size_orig justify_inline border_" alt="" height="1" width="1" />Karine Polwarttag:karinepolwart.com,2005:Post/41736332016-05-08T16:13:16+01:002017-02-05T13:38:02+00:00The starting blocks<div data-shortcode="caption" id="attachment_115" style="width: 4260px" class="wp-caption alignnone">
<img src="https://windresistance.files.wordpress.com/2016/05/fala-karine-pippa-walk-06-05-2016-e1462731269312.jpg?w=620" class="size_orig justify_inline border_" alt="Fala Karine Pippa walk 06-05-2016" /><p class="wp-caption-text">Pippa Murphy & Karine Polwart on Fala Moor 5/5/2016</p>
</div>
<p>I’m a singer. A musician. A writer. I write songs. And essays. And ranty facebook posts. I notice the world. I tell stories. I listen. I walk. I stand still and ask questions. I wonder. I think about time and all the people who have gone before me. I rejoice in the other creatures that inhabit my south east Scotland part of the universe, especially the feathered creatures of the air. I think: Why? How come? What if? Now, it seems, I am writing something for a theatrical setting, which is both a dream I’ve had for a couple of years and a quite unexpected turn of events. The world has turned, rather quickly, into a place where something I had only half-imagined into some possible future is actually going to happen. I’m just catching up. This online space maps the process of me writing and thinking and making to catch up. I’m writing here primarily for myself, as a discipline, as a witness, as a friend. But maybe there will be something of interest for you?</p><br> <a rel="nofollow" href="http://feeds.wordpress.com/1.0/gocomments/windresistance.wordpress.com/6/"><img src="//feeds.wordpress.com/1.0/comments/windresistance.wordpress.com/6/" class="size_orig justify_inline border_" alt="" /></a> <img src="https://pixel.wp.com/b.gif?host=windresistance.wordpress.com&blog=111133558&post=6&subd=windresistance&ref=&feed=1" class="size_orig justify_inline border_" alt="" height="1" width="1" />Karine Polwarttag:karinepolwart.com,2005:Post/39027172015-10-18T22:28:12+01:002015-10-18T22:28:41+01:00THE HERALD : ARTICLE : WHY I'M VOTING YES<a contents="I ended my marriage to create a healthier, happier family...I want that for Scotland tooTuesday 16 September 2014 / Opinion" data-link-label="" data-link-type="url" href="http://www.heraldscotland.com/opinion/13180283.Karine_Polwart__I_ended_my_marriage_to_create_a_healthier__happier_family___I_want_that_for_Scotland_too/" target="_blank">I ended my marriage to create a healthier, happier family...I want that for Scotland too<br>Tuesday 16 September 2014 / Opinion</a><br><br> <br>THE Scottish independence referendum process has coincided almost exactly with the amicable, intentional but disorientating break-up of my marriage.<br><br>That micro-scale process of separation took me into bewildering, distressing territory last year, hopping with a carry-on case between the spare rooms of pals for a couple of months, waking to remember that my kids were rising from sleep somewhere else, and moving initially into a depressing wee corner of a house with little more than a camping mat, a sleeping bag, a kettle and a sunflower-yellow deckchair.<br><br>Metaphors that compare the political union of the UK to a marriage are overused, tired and flawed.<br><br>Nevertheless, I believe that the ways in which we make sense of the vast emotional landscape laid bare by the independence question itself - our bone-deep notions of solidarity and commitment, separation and abandonment, autonomy and co-dependence, security and risk - are formed in the fullness of our individual experiences and choices in this world.<br><br>This is not only heart stuff. It informs how we receive and make sense of information, how we consider what's relevant and important to us in the arguments presented. What we value and what we reject is revealed in the assumptions we make and the questions that we pose, and in how we identify the resources we think we can muster to cope, and even, eventually, thrive.<br><br>The arena of politics, our imminent decision about Scottish independence, reverberates with the sounds of our own lives; with those we love and have loved, with our hopes and fears, our accumulated triumphs, grief and losses. This does not make us irrational. It makes us human.<br><br>The imagined steely eyes of the head that we're asked to deploy when faced with numbers about possible independence - about reasonable oil barrel estimations, tax rates and revenues, public spending and national debt - these eyes are situated in flesh. We reach for metaphors that look or sound a bit like us, a bit like what we know.<br><br>And so the entrepreneur might weigh up a prospective independent Scotland as if it were an investment opportunity, while the established business owner promotes the UK as a familiar trusted brand.<br><br>The architect might envisage a future nation as a building project, while the psychologist talks about Scotland, or the UK, as if it were a client in need of therapy. But there is no view without a lens.<br><br>I have many lenses, as do all of us. And yet despite the imperfect fit of the Union as marriage metaphor, it's the perspective of a soon-to-be divorcee, a mother of two young kids, with visceral recent experience of carving a dignified and mutually respectful kind of separation from the father of my children, that informs my own Yes vote.<br><br>I made the decision to end my marriage in order to create, with my ex-partner, a new kind of family structure that would enable us all to be healthier, happier and kinder, more creative, energetic and united in our separation. This is exactly what I want for Scotland, too.<br><br>I did not leave my family home because I hoped or expected to be wealthier. There's little economic sense in reducing two household incomes to one.<br><br>But some things mean more than this. And in any case, my experience of separation has rekindled a sense of financial responsibility and a far greater awareness of how I make my own money, what I'm willing and able to dedicate and sacrifice to that end, how I spend it, and what it's for. I want that kind of fiscal awareness, vision and prudence for Scotland too. We need to know where our money comes from and where it goes. We need to feel we can influence the decisions that affect this.<br><br>I can't honestly say that the break-up of my marriage has enhanced my security or stability. Indeed, these featured in my estimations largely as things I knew I'd have to compromise upon in the short term in order to imagine, invent and establish a better life for my family.<br><br>Separation has been, often, a practical and emotional guddle: a mire of documentation that needs to be altered, the urgent need for a tool that I've just remembered is no longer mine, the absence of anyone to cook alongside.<br><br>Marital separation, as I understand it, has been hard work. It has also been necessary and right. It's required new forms of communication and an acknowledgment of frustrating but unavoidable co-dependencies. It has necessitated a radical reorientation of relationships and resources, in a climate almost hard-wired for conflict, an environment in which parents are viewed as winners and losers of their own children.<br><br>This is a reality for many people. But it needn't be. And I refuse to base my hopes about the kind of family or the kind of country I want to live in on the cruellest and most limiting forms of human behaviour.<br><br>I don't expect everyone to think or act like me. Nor do I assume that any possible reshaping of the British Isles would be as peaceable or reasonable as my experience of marital separation. Still, I believe it's necessary and right.<br><br>In these final few weeks of discussion and decision about the referendum, I've heard a repeated critical narrative about decided Yes voters like myself. That is: to vote Yes is to have succumbed to a sentimental and otherworldly optimism, and to have been infected with a kind of narcissistic hope that makes reasonable risk assessment and sound analysis impossible.<br><br>To vote Yes is to be suspiciously free of doubt and beguiled by false certainties of a more egalitarian, just and wealthy future for us all.<br><br>The dominant Yes narrative itself speaks to this kind of visioning and makes too much of disparaging No-voting caricatures: at best, unnecessarily pessimistic and at worst cowardly, elitist and self-seeking.<br><br>My Yes is not predicated on presumed certainties and guarantees about the fairness of the future, though I confess to a crushing sense of inevitability that nothing will shift otherwise. It's rooted instead in a desire for engagement, agency, responsibility and hands-on graft in the crafting of something that does not yet exist.<br><br>I'm not riding a wave of Yes euphoria. I'm afraid: afraid of those markets that govern so much, and that I still fail to understand; afraid of the scope for spite and recriminations in the event of a Yes vote because profound hurt, shock, and a sense of having been affronted, mitigates often against reasonableness and good sense.<br><br>And yet I am emboldened. I am resolute.<br><br>Without a belief that things can be otherwise, and maybe even better, nothing can change. The re-imagining and remaking of my family has taught me that change is risky, that transitions are messy.<br><br>It means sketching new charts to navigate places that were once familiar, but which look suddenly strange. It is easy to feel lost. But when you are lost already, alienated from your own home, change is necessary, and change is right.<br><br>That is why I am voting Yes.Karine Polwarttag:karinepolwart.com,2005:Post/39015372015-10-17T13:33:56+01:002020-01-23T09:36:36+00:00SONGS OF SEPARATION<a contents="" data-link-label="" data-link-type="url" href="http://www.songsofseparation.co.uk/the-isle-of-eigg/" target="_blank"><img src="//d10j3mvrs1suex.cloudfront.net/u/180149/c65f35d07541c116340ec38d0645d3cf0feb94fc/large/e1d0f998-f386-4f6a-b51d-5bc4668cf7db.jpg?1445084599" class="size_xl justify_center border_" /></a>What sound will emerge when ten mighty women folk singers and musicians from Scotland and England get together for a week on one of the small isles to explore the notion of separation? I'm very excited to find out on my first trip to Eigg (hurray!), which is famed for its myth of the Big Women, and for its magical singing sands, and which has an incredibly vibrant contemporary multi-arts scene of its own. Isle based bass player Jenny Hill is the brains behind the project. She's pulled in a team that includes myself and Eliza Carthy, my splendid harper/singer pal Mary Macmaster, the extraordinarily inventive Kate Young, all three members of award-winning English ensemble Lady Maisery i.e. Hannah James, Hazel Askew and Rowan Rheingans, as well as brilliant guitarist Jenn Butterworth, and fiddler/singer Hannah Read, a New York-based Scot who spent much of her childhood on the Isle of Eigg.
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<br>The concepts of separation, independence, unity and solidarity have dominated my life these past two years on a profoundly personal and political level. There's a deep well of stuff in all of this. I cannae wait to dive in! <br><br>By the by, collaborative (largely) publicly funded arts projects such as this one now depend upon "online metrics" in articulating their range and impact. Their worth and success is, in part, externally measured and judged by online presence and public responses to it. That's the reality. So, if you're curious to know more about this particular project, and you like the idea of ambitious collaborative exploratory arts initiatives in general (not to mention ones involving women!), you could (if you like!) view a wee "like" on our facebook page (below) as a sort of a politically supportive act.<br><br>Thanks.<br><br><br><a contents="https://www.facebook.com/songsofseparation" data-link-label="" data-link-type="url" href="https://www.facebook.com/songsofseparation" target="_blank">https://www.facebook.com/songsofseparation</a><br><br><a contents="WEBSITE" data-link-label="" data-link-type="url" href="http://www.songsofseparation.co.uk/the-isle-of-eigg/" target="_blank">http://www.songsofseparation.co.uk/the-isle-of-eigg/</a>
</div>Karine Polwarttag:karinepolwart.com,2005:Post/39015362015-10-17T13:29:36+01:002015-10-17T13:30:08+01:00GRIEF IS JUST LOVE WITH NO HOMEThe phrase has rattled around on the edges of awareness for over a week and has finally found it's way into a new piece. I don't think I can call it a song proper. It's a response, a prelude to a beautiful song written by Alkinoos Ioannidis, a Greek-Cypriot songwriter with whom I'm collaborating in Athens this week. His song is called "Pilgrim", from an album of songs all on a pilgrimage theme. It's an odd coincidence as I'm digging away at a longer term project with storyteller Claire McNicol - also called Pilgrim.<br><br><br>"Grief is just love with no home" has become a refrain for the piece, which is shaped around the image of a wee man in a wee paper boat. That's what comes of visiting the marvellous George Wylie exhibition at the Mitchell Library in Glasgow in early February (Wylie constructed an 82 foot long paper boat and sailed it up the River Clyde in 1990, in what's perhaps the best remembered and most loved public art statement yet in this country). <br><br><em>A tiny man, A tiny boat<br>Of tender paper hull and sails<br>They float upriver, ushered by the tide<br><br>And in the little boat a light<br>is constant through the keening days and nights<br>with only Heaven for a bride</em><br><br>The new piece and more coming this weekend to Athens' Fuzz Club for an airing. Athens. Where Spring has arrived already and winter coats are no longer required. Show me the way!<br><br><br><a contents="Find our about Alkinoos here:" data-link-label="" data-link-type="url" href="http://www.alkinoos.gr/" target="_blank">Find our about Alkinoos here:</a><br><a contents="You can hear a version of Pilgrim here:" data-link-label="" data-link-type="url" href="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-4WEhLKGg34" target="_blank">You can hear a version of Pilgrim here:</a><br><a contents="Find out about George Wylie here:" data-link-label="" data-link-type="url" href="http://georgewyllie.com/" target="_blank">Find out about George Wylie here: </a>Karine Polwarttag:karinepolwart.com,2005:Post/39015352015-10-17T13:27:12+01:002016-09-27T14:18:46+01:00THE SCOTSMAN : SAY AWARD ARTICLE It was sports day at Tynewater Primary School in Pathhead last Friday and I did that classic parent pep talk, the one that goes: “Don’t worry about not winning the egg-and-spoon race, son. It’s not about the winning.” Except in a race, well, it kind of is, isn’t it?<br><br>I own up to a ferocious competitive streak. If schools still did The Mums’ Race, I’d be that mortification of a mother hunkered down in the starting block position on the edge of the football pitch, waiting for the headteacher’s whistle.<br><br>Awards for artistic endeavour, on the other hand, make me itchy. I tell myself that I haven’t chosen this life as a songwriter in order to compete directly with other musicians to see who’s best. That doesn’t mean I lack purpose or creative ambition to better what I do, or determination to reach more ears. It doesn’t mean I don’t feel occasional barstool consternation about some guff that’s being critically fêted.<br><br>But when your primary entry route into life as a professional musician is a late 1990s “Women and Folksong” evening class in Edinburgh, in a Victorian school room full of decompressing social workers and teachers, a class which winds its way afterwards to a communal singing session at The Oxford Bar, then brassnecked musical competition sits particularly uneasily.<br><br>I’m one of ten artists lucky to be shortlisted for the 2013 SAY Award (Scottish Album of the Year), the winner of which is announced next Thursday. Despite my genuine misgivings, I feel fortunate and chuffed to have had a whack of curiosity and attention drawn to my own stuff from people who otherwise wouldn’t give me a second of their stereo time.<br><br>Of course, I don’t believe that my most recent album Traces is actually better than Inverness-based fiddler Duncan Chisholm’s Affric, an album of immense grace and beauty, which didn’t make it past the SAY longlist of 20. Indeed several of my favourite Scottish albums of last year didn’t even make it into that 20 (Jo Mango’s meditative Murmurations, for example). This is no criticism of the judges or the process by which decisions have been made, which has been delightfully above board. Nor do I offer it as evidence of the pointlessness of judgement. I have my own barometers. Don’t we all? And isn’t music, of all the art forms we care about, the one about which most of us feel perfectly, passionately qualified to make our own assessments of merit?<br><br>But sometimes we just don’t know what we don’t know. And so, instead, I’ve chosen to look on what the SAY Award has put out there as evidence of the depth and range of musical creativity and productivity in this wee country right now and as a focused opportunity to check it out for myself, and to talk loudly to others about what I think, what I like. I’ve bought six new albums as a result, two from artists I’d never even heard of.<br><br>What I hear is music that is variously melodic and poignant (weep at the delicacy of Oh Oscar, the closing track of Admiral Fallow’s Tree Bursts in Snow), and rhythmic and wry (smile at Dave “Solareye” Hook’s Better Together vs Indy flyting between Britannia and Caledonia on Stanley Odd’s Marriage Counseling).<br><br>It’s music that’s gloriously uncluttered and careworn (Paul Buchanan’s Mid Air lays bare his mighty vocals over little more than piano) and attentively complex and multilayered (Meursault’s Something For the Weakened is an understated revelation to me here).<br><br>It flags the singular vision of well-known and loved musicians doing something quite unexpected (as Human Don’t Be Angry, Malcolm Middleton swaps indie pathos and spleen for ear worm 1980s synth hooks), as well as the chemistry-set-fizz of newcomers (the Mercury nominated Django Django).<br><br>The shortlist reeks of both the band unit as a creative force (add the mighty Kilsyth rockers Twilight Sad and Lau to Django Django) and of deliciously meandering inter-artist collaboration (RM Hubbert’s collision with last year’s SAY Awards winner Aidan Moffat on Car Song might be the most achingly lovely track on any of the albums on the list, for my money).<br><br>Finally I’m happy to celebrate the fact that most of the music in evidence on the ten albums that made the shortlist defies the suffocating strictures of The Sub-Three-Minute Radio-Edit Single. I don’t care if it makes me an irrelevant snob to be unconcerned that the two most commercially successful musical exports of last year (Calvin Harris and the intelligent and astute Emeli Sandé) made it only as far as the 20-strong longlist. To those who wonder why Sande’s million-plus selling Our Version of Events (which spent 66 consecutive weeks in the Top 10 of the UK Album Charts – the longest such spell for any debut album since charts began) isn’t deemed “good” enough to make the Scottish Top Ten Albums of the Year, I say this.<br><br>Breathe. Just go and listen to Lau’s magnificent album Race the Loser, on which there’s not a track even within pitching distance of three minutes, and on which the band demonstrate their full musical and sonic capabilities on seven-minute plus narrative instrumental and vocal soundscapes such as Far From Portland (best use of accordion coupler mechanism ever) and Torsa. Forth FM is never going to get behind it.<br><br>This strikes at the heart of one of the many mercies of being an own-label, Scottish folkie or independent of any kind. The idea that you might write a daytime-hit-single is ridiculous. Nobody wants to hear a song about a petrochemical plant and 1980s UFO visitations to Bonnybridge, a song that skips between 5/8, jig time and 4/4, and which features treble-layered piano accordion and Sheffield steel plant samples (yes, this is one of mine), whilst listening to Steve Wright in the Afternoon. Do they?<br><br>This realisation, when it finally comes, is a relief. And it means that the album, not the single, is my primary art form, and the primary art form for most recording musicians operating beyond the mass end of the market in Scotland today. That’s basically 99 per cent of us. We don’t lack aspiration or savvy. We don’t scorn commercial success. We hanker after creative, affordable ways to spread the word about what we do and about the music we wish other people loved too. Thanks to the SAY Awards for upping the ante (and, by the way, there is something childishly gratifying about seeing your album alongside loads of your own favourites on a massive billboard on Edinburgh’s Easter Road). Choose curiosity rather than complacency, celebration rather than derision. Good luck to everyone.<br><br>• The winner of the 2013 SAY Award will be announced at Glasgow Barrowland on 20 June.<br>Karine Polwart