Category: Uncategorized

Last night my friend Donald and I went to the Whaligoe Steps Café for an oatcake class with the café’s chef and co-owner, Karen. I guess enough of us raved about her oatcakes and asked for the recipe that she decided to share her secrets with us. Plus she’s always trying to come up with inventive new themed evenings and events for her patrons.

I’ve also added oats back into my diet over the last couple of months, and without getting into gastrointestinal details, I’ll just say that I’m convinced they do me good. So being able to make tasty oatcakes like Karen’s instead of buying the blah store-bought ones was an appealing prospect””particularly when they’re made of something that’s so cheap it’s practically free.

So here I’m going to shake my head and try to empty out what I remember, half so I won’t forget, half in case you’d like to try making them, and half because I haven’t blogged in a long time. *(Yes, my blog is a corner of the universe where it’s possible to have three halves.)

Ingredients & instructions

100 grams of oats, in the following proportion:

• 50% medium oats
  
• 20% jumbo oats
  
• 20% pinhead oats
  
• 10% finely milled oats (this acts as one kind of binder)

To this, add about 10 grams of brown rice flour to act as a binder (corn flour also works). I’m not keen on eating too much starch, but my experiments in low-carb cooking have proven to me that anything cracker-y or bread-y without a ‘real’ binder tends to turn into a mess that falls apart.

We experimented with adding all sorts of different dry seasonings, spices, and seeds””fennel, chilli flakes, sesame seeds, Maldon salt, black pepper, orange zest””and just about everything worked! (Black pepper was my favourite.)

Mix this up with your hands, then stir in one tablespoon of olive oil (optional, but it adds a better “mouth feel”, Karen said), and finally add a small splash of hot water. Now mix it all again.

It’s important that the mix clumps together but is not wet: if it’s wet, it’ll have to bake for longer, which changes the consistency and makes it more likely to burn.

Roll this out as flat and thin as you can between two sheets of baking paper (the silicone kind, not parchment, which will stick, apparently), then peel the top layer off. If the paper left heavy wrinkles in the surface, the oatcakes will be a bit ugly, so you can put the parchment back on and flatten them out. Then remove the parchment again for baking.

Why not cut out cookie-cutter circles like the oatcakes you get in stores? Because, Karen said, that means you end up working with about 1/3 of the dough while the rest gets put aside to set into a “glumpy” mass that’s much more difficult to roll and might as well be thrown out. Instead, Karen’s oatcakes are big, primitive looking sheets of crispy deliciousness that look like something Romans would eat.

And you know what? Karen informed us that Romans did eat oatcakes: They carried around oats, added some of the salt they got with their pay, and cooked up cakes on their shields! So much for oatcakes being a Caithness speciality.

Now put your rolled-out oatcake into the oven at 170°C for 12 minutes.

Partway through, though, take the oatcake out and flip it over, peeling off the parchment, and put it back into the oven so they other side can dry out evenly.

P.S. What about the bookbinding class I taught, or the relay race Craig and I ran, or having my Scottish family all visit at once? Well, that all happened, but I’m still a bit tired (though each of these was fun) and haven’t anything particularly enlightening to say. So instead you get a recipe.

I just saw this on the telly in the pub: a tandem bicycle event from the Paralympics. One of the people on the bike””presumably just one of them””is visually impaired.

My childhood best friend was in a wheelchair, and in the course of our friendship I developed a real distaste for the condescending way people speak about the disabled as “brave”, or use them as a reminder to feel better about their own situation. The Paralympics drive up all those feelings again.

That said, there is something awfully damned inspiring and moving about their achievements.

How have I not discovered Markdown before?

I’ve been writing marketing e-mails and website copy for over a decade, and text formatting has been a constant hassle. (I’ve got a database of old articles that are borked because all of their bolds, italics, and line-returns got stripped by the system my client was using at the time.)

Markdown is a way of coding text so you can get special formatting, like the above-mentioned bolding, italics, and links, but, unlike HTML, it’s very simple and is still readable by humans””in fact, it looks a lot like things we’re accustomed to doing when we want to use formatted text but it isn’t available, like:

"I *really, really* want to make a **point** here!!!"

…Which would render as “I really, really want to make a point here!”

So I’ve asked my project manager if I can start submitting work in this format, because I think it’s going to save our web team a lot of hassle. I know when I was doing web design I hated having to work with Word files””stripping out all the jumbled, awful code that program added, yet having to do a side-by-side, line-by-line comparison with the original to make sure I didn’t lose anything important from the original text.

If you write for the web, you should be using Markdown!

Before I get into that, my books are now available on Kobo devices!

So, the other day I was searching for a good gay novel, thinking I’d like to see what’s out there. Surely I’m not the only person writing fiction which features incidentally gay characters in the middle of a plot that isn’t about that.

Nope.

Here’s what I found (which I hesitate to even post here because it ventures so close to p*rn):

This makes me feel I have a duty to put something better out there. If that sounds snobby, so be it. I don’t care, because all that stuff above is not fiction, is not literature, it’s verbal pornography for wanking over. Sex-fantasy stories, the same coming-out story told over and over by people who are too old to be lingering over those images and should have something more to say by now, ‘forbidden love’ wish-fulfillment”¦

I’m not saying it should be censored, but if that’s the best we can imagine for ourselves, that breaks my heart.

Surely there’s better work out there, but you can’t find it for the vast sea of naked torsos.

I’ve pre-ordered Mike Rohde’s upcoming The Sketchnote Handbook, because I’m intrigued by this new form of communication””which I’ve been doing for years without having a name for it. But Rohde and others have made a business practice out of, essentially, doodling along to condense the ideas of a talk. I love it!

Could I add this to the things I do professionally? Would I want to? I don’t know, but I would like to cultivate the ability.

I’ve been making lots of notes on paper lately, and I want to collect these in one place””partly because it’s good to look back over these flashes of insight, and partly, I admit, because they look kind of pretty and I always wince a little when I crumple up one of these pages and throw it in the recycling.

So between last night and this morning I made myself a sketchbook:

I gave it ‘deckle’ edges, but I cheated and used a vintage photo trimmer that gives the paper a ragged look, yet is a lot quicker and a lot less effort than tearing each page. I guess I wanted it to look a bit rough, because a book that looks perfect is intimidating, and intimidating books stay on the shelf, unused.

I think I’m finally getting the spacing right between the book-block and the covers, so the resulting hinge works and doesn’t pull the insides away from the spine. (Sorry for the book-nerdiness there, but I’ve been struggling for a while to get this right.)

Testing the book out this morning, I discovered that the paper’s a bit bleedy for my fine markers. That’s sort of a shame, but then, it’s also an invitation to freely use up the pages and surrender that notion of having to produce “art”.

So I got started right away, thinking aloud on paper:

This is one of the best things about using shorthand: I can write any crazy stuff I like without an inkling of self-consciousness, ’cause only a handful of people in the world could read it””not that anyone would be bothered. (Though I do carry around a cheat-sheet of the principles in my back pocket.)

Some of the squares on my time-management boardgame pose a question or ask me to reflect in certain ways, so these pages were me getting around to answering those questions.

Gosh, it’s a good idea to talk to oneself! It’s amazing how much barely conscious material floats around in my noggin””which I can actually work with once I look directly at it.

Now it’s time to write an article, and this afternoon’s challenge is to work on an info-graphic for my client’s blog. This is something new! I’m fine with the ghostwriting being anonymous””that’s how that works””but I think I should push for credit for the graphics, if they work out.

Last weekend, Craig and I went to see a gallery exhibition at the Lyth Arts Centre. It’s called “Infinitas Graçias“, and features small paintings from a Mexican church”””ex-votos” made to thank saints for interceding on their part. The art is primitive, childish, and often gory, with blood flying out of people’s mouths or limbs. And, from this cultural distance, it’s difficult not to smirk at some of the subject matter.

From the show’s description:

“This exhibition includes reproductions of over a hundred such works from a church in the mining community of Real de Catorce, where the tradition is particularly strong. They contain images of rural life with animals, vehicles, road accidents, hospitals, murders and family dramas. We see life in a country with no NHS, where religion offers the only hope for those in need.”

As I mentioned here yesterday, I’ve been feeling distinctly out of sorts since getting back from Canada””listless, depressed, hollow. For more than I week, I’d been waiting for the mood to pass, but it didn’t, which was starting to worry me.

It’s particularly difficult to suffer from poor mental health in an age where so much is framed in terms of “manifest destiny”””especially around Olympics-time, where hard work is given as the solution to everything. “Get famous! Be rich! Be number one!” Whatever field you’re in, you’re told that if you’re not winning, you’re just not trying hard enough. How do you “win” your way out of a depression?

I decided to just sit with it and wait it out. But last night, remembering the Mexican exhibit, I decided to throw out a desperate prayer. Not being Catholic, my choice of saints was severely limited, so I decided to make up my own: St Max, named for Maxwell Perkins, the editor who discovered and shaped the work of Lost Generation writers like Hemingway and Fitzgerald. My prayer wasn’t especially articulate, more of a pre-verbal crie de coeur like “Get me out of this!”

It worked.

Hey, I know I made it up. But it worked, so I don’t care what the mechanics were here. This was an intractable funk that had me scared, and now it’s gone.

So here’s the retablo I made for Saint Max:

Hell, I don’t even know that much about Max Perkins. I haven’t read the famous biography. But I’ve come to recognise that I’ve got a cast of inner characters who might be Jungian archetypes or voices of conditioning or even little bits of crazy, and they dress up in different personas. I don’t think there’s any actual connection to their real-world cognates; they’re my own internal version of that person, representing something specific.

I think Hemingway was nudging Max’s elbow, too. Last night I sat in bed reading from a huge chunk of lumber containing all of Hemingway’s short stories, and I was moved by the deftness and care with which he attended to little, tiny details of life””the mixing of ice with booze (a favourite of his), the look of the fresh sheets and sparse furnishings in a holiday cabin, the feeling of being a passenger in a train berth at night watching the world go by through a portal. Anything and everything was worthy of attention. Somehow this brought the creative world down to an accessible level in my mind.

Yes, I know: Hemingway“”hardly an easy benchmark to compare oneself with, but this was about invitation, community, not competition. Besides which, Papa has his own weaknesses, like his female characters who all speak like poorly programmed pleasure robots with the nag chip inserted:

“Oh darling, we will have such a jolly time, won’t we? Please tell me we will. Even if it’s a lie, I want you to tell me we will be jolly.” (He lies to shut her up, then takes a drink as they drive in an open-top car and he thinks about the war.)

Today I woke up and immediately knew something was different, like the boiler-tank in my belly had been filled back up with water. I wasn’t scorching and empty, I was full of steam and couldn’t wait to get the day going. None of the specifics are any different, but it’s an entirely different world, an inviting one. The slick slate tiles of the old buildings outside and the grey sky above””it’s beautiful. The weak lick of the gas fire here in the pub, the old couple with the tousled white hair having coffees””I love them. The work before me today””an exciting puzzle I know I am the equal to.

Whatever the cause, thank you for this.

I’ve been back home for over a week now, but part of me still hasn’t landed.

Years ago, I went through a dangerous period of depression, but thankfully I received a lot of support from friends and family and managed to climb out of that valley. So many great things have happened in my life since then that I figured it wasn’t even possible for me to go back there.

Until now. Let’s take Sunday as an example: I had the afternoon free to do my creative work while Craig caught up with his pile of Post-It notes and other odds-and-ends. Hooray, right? I was finally back in my space and able to tuck into my novel.

Except I couldn’t write or draw or do anything. I couldn’t muster one iota of belief in my abilities, nor did I feel like I had anything to say. By the end of the afternoon, I’d given myself permission to just be a person with a job and not create anything else.

Thankfully, I recognise this as something chemical going on in my brain and body. How? Because it’s free-floating; there isn’t any cause, and it can attach itself to anything.

Here’s how stupid it gets: Yesterday morning I was making a new box for all the postcards Craig’s collected, and I found one featuring a little trollish character with a ginger beard and a kilt that touches the ground. The caption read: “Hamish in John O’Groats”, and I started crying. What? Why? The loose thread of reason running through the emotion had something to do with Craig being willing to have a “Hamish” thing in his collection, that he’s make me part of his life. I was grateful, yet didn’t feel worth it.

Last night, we met friends in Thurso and went to the art show taking place at the high school there. I loved how democratic the show was, featuring names and images we recognised from galleries and shops right alongside rank beginners, with everything in-between. Some of the pieces were horrible, childish muck, and others were arrestingly original, beautiful, or fun. (Prince Charles’s watercolours were actually quite good.) So it was a nice night out, and provided some inspiring input.

Best of all, though, was talking to an acquaintance there””a ‘transplanted American’ who writes a great column for the local paper. When I confessed to not being quite myself, she said she’s just come back from several weeks in the States and is feeling the same way. It was such a relief and a comfort that I just had to hug her.

Likewise, an old pal who travels a lot told me by e-mail that she’d got a virus from a woman who sneezed on her throughout a long flight (she jokingly suggested this should be illegal””and I think she has a point! Visibly sick people should at least be required to wear some sort of mask or sit in a dry-clearning bag or something). Now my friend is sick and has jetlag. She told me she lost a friend years ago to suicide, and his GP suggested the virus he’d caught (H1N1) “could have contributed to [his] feelings and inability to cope”. I get it: I was sick in Toronto this trip””my first cold in years, which in itself was a letdown””and I can tell that it hasn’t gone away completely.

I read a blog article this morning that called people out for only “life posting” about their successes and about how HAPPY! and GREAT! they are””and added that comparing ourselves to others is always a recipe for disaster. That does seem to be the stick I’m beating myself with, which the Internet makes readily available.

What’s the remedy? I don’t know yet. Compassion for where I’m at. Patience: I don’t think this is going to last long, and that was the mental tape that looped around when I went through my bad spell, thinking a low state was reality“”permanent, persistent, and pervasive.

Not making any big decisions for the moment. Just staying with what’s in front of me.

I’m fine, really; I just find myself without any inner resources at the moment, and that’s weird.

So instead of being ashamed, thinking “No, don’t show that! You won’t look good. It’ll seem like you’re asking for help and being sucky,” I’m just putting it out here in the interest of making mental health less of a taboo.

This is my last day in Toronto”¦ again.

Last night, I hung out with old friends, one of whom I see each trip here, and a few others whom I haven’t seen in years. We hung out in the gay ghetto. Unlike my walk through there with James there on Sunday, where I thought “Good riddance!” about the whole place, I felt a fondness and affection for all of it””the trysts, the dramas, and the times with friends who were never the object of the adventure, but are now clearly the treasure from those years.

But it was kind of a paternal, knowing sentiment I felt. I would never go back to that life. There is, however, a real comfort in stitching my past into this future I’m living. I bumped into an old flame on the street, very happy to see him and pick up the connection, but completely unconfused about how that will fit in. People each belong to different parts of my heart, but that one predominant patch of real estate””the home where Craig lives””is protected land.

And this is the thing about the past and the future: My habit is to leave the past behind, or to find something not-right about it as a way to propel me forward. Increasingly, though, I see that I can move forward and carry my past lovingly with me.

People do this with work all the time, finding some horrible flaw in their employer or work situation that motivates them to make a change. Why not just skip the drama and go, to build on that past without the demolition work?

That said, my Toronto-clock has run out. It’s been lovely, and I’m glad to know I’ll be back, but my energy for this place has run down and it’s time to go back to Scotland. I want to see the big, open, green fields of Caithness, to stand at a sea-cliff made of jagged, up-pointed layers of rock, hearing the sea crash against it, to watch and hear those birds whose names and cries I’ve learned: fulmars, kittywakes, razorbills, guillemots, shags, oyster-catchers.

I need to be in the home I’ve made with the person I love, and to get back to my other creative work””feeling rejuvenated and refocused after my Canadian vacation and the time spent here in this dynamic workplace.

Toronto has some new subway trains without the doors between the cars; now you can see all the way down the straw-like train as it curves and judders its way through the subterrain of the city. There are so many people sitting on the indestructible red faux-velvet seats or hanging on to the jungle-gym of brushed metal poles””all tottering back and forth as the train bumps along.

I look at these folk and wonder what we’re all doing. This is the big question of my life, which I’m quite convinced is insoluble: “What’s the right thing to be doing right now?” As one course I did put it: There’s nowhere to go, nothing to do. This is it.

“Surely there’s something to do with it!” says a voice in my head. Yeah, and that’s art. Or goals. But I can’t make myself believe that it matters, ultimately, except as a game of understanding, and for finding the pleasure of present-moment awareness.

I had a nigh-perfect day today. It started with making pancakes with my hosts Lisa and Alvaro, who gave me strict guidance about how to cook my coconut ones, which, sure enough, turned out perfect-looking”¦ but not perfect-tasting. Why? Because I asked for measuring cups but then didn’t want to ask Lisa for measuring spoons, so I got the baking soda a bit wrong.

This led to a great conversation with Lisa about how trying to be too much of a polite guest can actually wind up being the thing that becomes weird and awkward, while the host would never care about the things we worry about — like asking for measuring spoons, or doing my laundry, since she offered the use of their machines this morning, which spared me having to ask (while secretly not wearing underwear because I didn’t have any more).

I continued chatting with Alvaro and Lisa while they got the kids ready for their day. I was put in charge of dressing their two-year-old, Kai, in his T-shirt and little green dungarees — which he picked out, but immediately hated once they were on, and tried to pull off as if they were a potato-sack.

They all went off to swimming lessons, and I went into town to meet my old pal James (being subject to yet another stupid Toronto Transit Commission delay that involved taking a packed replacement service bus in the heat). James and I went for a very good and reasonably priced breakfast (thank God, because my money’s all dribbling away from such a long trip, even though I’m not shopping, just buying meals and groceries — oh, and weekly Metropasses for the subway). We had a great, big talk about life and everything.

It was time to move on, but we weren’t finished chatting, so he asked if there was anywhere I wanted to go. I said, “I want to see some forgotten, lost corner of Toronto I’ve never seen before.” He said a tentative “Okay” and we headed off, wandering down the all-too-familiar gay ghetto of Church Street, where both of us thanked the stars that, both permanently taken, we don’t have to frequent anymore. Then James showed me the former hockey rink, Maple Leaf Gardens, which is now a big grocery store. From there we entered the twisting caverns of the PATH underground pedestrian system, and I received a call from my old friend and work-mate, Margaux, whom I’d planned to meet later. We agreed on the Sheraton Hotel lobby, across from City Hall, but she wouldn’t be there for half an hour.

James and I went to the hotel and spent the time wandering around (taking with us a cup of their complimentary flavoured water, me lemon, him raspberry). Up the escalators, we saw trees through the windows there, then found an open door that led out to the courtyard where they were growing.

It wasn’t a courtyard, per se, but more of a space, a garden with little waterfalls, lakes, trees, and park benches surrounded by the tall, poured concrete walls of the hotel. It was a multi-levelled, hidden little oasis in the middle of the city. I’d certainly never seen it before.

I’m falling in love with buildings from the Sixties and Seventies with a ‘grand project,’ Canadiana feel. Some old concrete buildings are blank, pointless, soul-sucking wastes of space that should be pulled down at the first opportunity, but I have such an affection for these other ones, with their odd character and their attempt at a futuristic kind of humanity which, ultimately, didn’t really work. So when you find one of these spaces (like many in the Confederation Centre in Charlottetown) it feels like you’ve found something from a discarded retro-future no one else wants — an architectural “Island of Lost Toys” — so it’s all yours. This was definitely one of those, and I’ll never forget it.

Margaux arrived, and just as we left the building the sky opened up, dropping lots of huge, wet drops, and fast. We ducked into a doorway near the twin curves of City Hall, where we watched lightning above the skyline, and the water collected so quickly that soon our feet were getting splashed. I ended up with two ‘soakers’, since I was wearing my red canvas trainers; I got to squish around in those for the rest of the day.

Then we went to a fancy tea-bar place, where I had an iced root beer float latté (we don’t get those back home!), which I gather must have been a sarsaparilla tea. The three of us chatted, and it soon turned into yet another great conversation, like all the others I’ve been having on this trip — with Craig’s (now my) relatives out West, all of whom I really took to; then my old friends Lisa and Alvaro; my amazing, dynamic teammates at work; my old pal Bruce; and Dan and Babs, the owners of the company I write for, and a couple I now count as good friends.

As much as I’m an introvert — I’ll need to hide for a week when I get home — I do love a good meeting of the minds. What great minds I know here!

When James took his leave to go to his next appointment, Margaux and I went to a movie: Woody Allen’s latest (Something Something Rome or something, which was funny and charming; I’m liking his films since his great Midnight in Paris).

Just before the film, we were talking about art, and Margaux mentioned reading a book on photography that stressed the importance of practising. That idea really struck me: I don’t have a writing practice. Yes, I write copy all week, but I don’t have a practice for fiction. How strange that I should expect to jump straight into a book again after years when I should be warming up, writing for fun, writing any and every old idea, rather than expecting to run a marathon after sitting at a desk for years!

So that was my nigh-perfect Sunday. Only one element was missing: my darling, who’s at home waiting for me. A whole ‘nother week until I see him — oh no!