I’ve been to Durham a few times since I studied there but the friend I was with hadn’t been there since I left nearly 10 years ago.  And I rarely go into the town itself now (I have another friend out in one of the villages).

We found that a mystery pair of smug-looking warthogs has appeared in front of St Mary’s College:

and there’s a new, very orange building along from St Mary’s which holds the Institute for Middle Eastern and Islamic studies.

And the Upper Room sculpture has gone, after it became rotten.

But otherwise, nothing much changes.

Anyway, I just finished ‘Her Fearful Symmetry‘ by Audrey Niffenegger and I want to write a bit about what I thought of it before I go read any reviews – I always feel like they start bleeding into my own opinions, even if I try to stay independent.

I was a little wary before starting ‘Her Fearful Symmetry’ just because ‘The Time-Traveller’s Wife‘ made me cry so much at the end that I never want to read it again!  So after getting ‘Her Fearful Symmetry’ out from the library I circled round it a few times before starting on a Saturday night when I knew I would be able to get completely drawn into it and it wouldn’t matter if I found anything upsetting (there’s a reason I don’t read fiction on trains any more).

The reason I’d picked it up from the library on impulse was that I was really fascinated with the premise – a pair of rather unworldly, ethereal 21-year-old mirror twins inherit a flat by Highgate Cemetery from an aunt they’d never met, and then some strange events start happening…   I am completely fascinated with stories about twins and have wondered about writing a novel about twins some day (although this book has left me totally intimidated!)    It turns out that there’s also another pair of twins whose story is central to the book – the aunt and the mother of the young twins.  Issues of togetherness and separation are completely key to the novel and are illustrated in both twin and non-twin characters.

I loved the depiction of the cemetery, which is pretty much a character in its own right, changing with the seasons and populated by all manner of people and animals, living and dead.   One of the major characters is a tour guide there and now I definitely want to take a tour next time I’m in London!  As a backdrop to the proceedings, it adds both depth and character.

I usually like the fiction I read to be pretty strictly realistic: I’m not a fan of magic realism.  One thing that I particularly liked about ‘The Time Traveller’s Wife’ was how Niffenegger wrote a highly ‘realistic’ and believable type of time travel, with all the detail set out in a very plausible fashion – it made you feel sure that if time travel existed, this is exactly how it could happen.  In ‘Her Fearful Symmetry’ she does just the same thing for haunting, coming up with a remarkably believable scenario.

I admire her plotting tremendously in both books (I do wonder whether she’s one of these writers with a room full of detailed charts – surely she has to be).   Some of the plot twists in ‘Her Fearful Symmetry’ are rather guessable – but maybe they are intended to be?  I don’t think it spoils the book.

However, there is one plot detail that I’m pretty confident could not happen in real life and jarred a bit – and few others that are probably pushing plausibility. I’m a bit frustrated that I can’t say what they are without spoilering!   It seems ridiculous that I’ll accept the existence of ghosts as realistic and then get hung up on mundane details, but they are an issue because they start to make you feel less immersed in the world of the book.

Even having said that – I found the book an utterly compelling read.  I started it last night, read till I couldn’t keep my eyes open and kept going as soon as I woke up this morning until I’d finished!  And I did cry at the end, but not nearly as badly as for ‘The Time-Traveller’s Wife’.  Definitely a novel that’s worth a look, for its writing, for its plot, for its fascinating characters and for its marvellous Gothic setting.

My post is here: What it is to be a woman.

The one picture I have of the river rather shows how grey it was…

I can thoroughly recommend Angus Miller’s Geowalks – they are really interesting and I always learn something new, about geology or about Edinburgh in general.  I wouldn’t say that geology is necessarily the top subject I would choose to learn if I was studying again, but it’s a lovely excuse to get outside.  And we needed a reason that day once it started raining!

We walked from Dean Terrace in Stockbridge along the Water of Leith past the Modern Art Gallery to Roseburn Terrace.  So not a long walk, but enough to talk about.  I was looking forward to seeing two more Antony Gormley men (having finally seen the first one a few weeks back) but one was difficult to see through the trees and the other one had disappeared!  I know they are designed to fall down if the water is high, so maybe that’s all that happened.  But you have to worry in these days of metal theft!

We took a look at St Bernard’s Well and discussed the dyke of igneous rock that cuts across the mudstone and sandstone – something I certainly would never have spotted.  There’d another one at the next (less decorative) well.

As usual, there was some discussion of where the stone for the houses and bridges came from, as well as the local stone that everything is built on.

Under Dean Bridge, a rather neat graffiti artist had been at work (thanks to Skip for stitching the photo for me).

I think this was my third walk on the Water of Leith (different sections) with Angus.  I’ve been on a couple of hills and a central Edinburgh walk as well.  I am very sporadic when I go, and I’ve only been on the short walks in winter/spring.  One of my aims for this year is to be fit enough to go on his longer summer walks, which are often outside Edinburgh.  The walks have been great for introducing me to bits of Edinburgh that I didn’t know yet (this time I certainly connected streets that I knew individually but couldn’t have fitted together).

If you missed this one but would still like to look at this bit of the Water of Leith with new eyes, there’s a leaflet from Edinburgh Geological Society.

Edited to add: the Water of Leith website tells me that there are indeed three ‘men down’ at the moment!   A good thing I didn’t get round to going looking for the statues in Leith!

I’m thoroughly embarrassed that I’ve never marched before – when I think of all the important causes I’ve let go past!  I slightly excuse it by saying that St Andrews (where I was a student) wasn’t really much of a marching place, but really it’s mostly a fear of crowds and an unfamiliar environment.

Anyway, I decided to get over myself and go along, even though I didn’t know anyone else who was going!  (Most of them have that pesky thing called ‘work’ to go to.)  I met some lovely people and it was a nice friendly non-scary march with some good speeches at the end.  Certainly the most useful Valentine’s Day I’ve ever spent.

There were some really fab banners and I’m very impressed with anyone who can get ‘heteronormativity’ into a chant…

(Some far better pics available here including decent crowd shots – mine were incredibly fuzzy and I was right at the back so they pretty much show the back of people’s placards!)

As Patrick Harvie said in his speech, marriage has come a long way in recent decades.  I still have my qualms about the history of the institution, but every day I see people re-shaping marriage into a modern, equal partnership.  It’s definitely time for all loving partners to have the same right to marriage – and it’s something that’s supported by the majority of the Scottish people.  Let’s hope that all the party leaders follow through their pledges and we have equal marriage sooner rather than later.

‘Man on Wire‘ is a dramatised documentary about Philippe Petit‘s amazing stunt in the 1970s where he walked a tightrope between the two buildings of the World Trade Centre.   I was feeling a bit sleepy when I started to watch it and wasn’t sure whether I could make it through a film.  Well, I literally sat bolt upright throughout with my eyes wide open!

It is just utterly extraordinary.  The feat itself is almost unbelieveable.  I knew, vaguely, that someone had done this and I’m sure the first time I heard about it I must have been amazed but since then it had really dropped from my consciousness, and I probably could barely have told you whether it was real or not.   However, after Mr Woodsmoke loved the film ‘Project Nim‘ (which I blogged about the week that I started blogging!) I went looking for something else by the same director (James Marsh) and found that he’d made this documentary.

What I didn’t realise at all until we started the film was just how big an endeavour it was for a team of people to illicitly take a load of equipment up to the top of both buildings of the World Trade Centre in order to set up a tightrope between them.  It was two hundred metres between the two towers. They sent over the guide wire with a bow and arrow.   they had a ton of gear to transport.  It’s almost enough to make you believe that there’s some conspiracy that they’re not telling you about, because it seems so unlikely.  A bunch of guys got into the WTC with fake IDs, persuaded the goods lift attendant to take them up over 100 floors when the highest inhabited floor was the 82nd, and hid out under a tarpaulin until the guards had gone home!  It’s like an adventure novel.  Clearly WTC security was not all that hot in the 70s!

I think one of the reasons I was so grabbed during the film was the vicarious adrenaline of watching the tightrope walking (there was what I think is real footage of his previous walks on Notre Dame and the Sydney Harbour Bridge, although there are only stills of the WTC walk).  I can barely go up 10 feet without vertigo so it all seems absolutely horrific.  But Philippe Petit sounds like he doesn’t have a care in the world and was lying down and doing tricks on the WTC wire, 450m in the air!

The film itself is a mixture of interviews and reconstructions (a bit like Touching the Void) along with some real footage from the time.  I found it less confusing than Project Nim, where there was more real footage available and I was frustrated by sometimes being unsure what was real and what was reconstruction. I’m conflicted about documentaries that do blur the lines between real and reconstructed – the technique feels a bit dishonest, however effective it is.  But in this case, it was mostly the case that the people involved told their stories to camera and then they were acted out – not too bad.

I couldn’t recommend the film highly enough.  It was just mindblowing.  I’m off to watch all the special features and commentaries now!  I may have to watch the film a few times before I can bring myself to believe any of it.  What a story!

Like everyone else I know, I have a bazillion chargers for electronic things (how come as phones – other than iphones – harmonised on which charger they take, cameras seemed to go the other way and move from mini-USB to annoying proprietary interface?)

A few years ago, I saw a charging station which I could have sworn was on ikeahacker, but I can’t find it now.  It was a kitchen top cabinet (so a cupboard which is very narrow front-to-back) which had been modified to sit on the floor and was used as a dedicated charging area in someone’s hallway.  I’ve been wanting one since then but never figured out where to implement it.

Then the weekend before last, we reorganised our living room, adding a couple of Leksvik shelf units, one with a closed cupboard.

I realised that this was finally my chance!  I ordered a 6-way individually switchable surge protected extension lead and stuck it in the cupboard with blu-tack.   We made a very inelegant hole in the backboard of the cupboard using a drill and a hacksaw blade and fed through the cable.  It now takes our most-used chargers, with rarer chargers sitting in a box (currently a shoebox!) to be swapped out.

I am unreasonably chuffed with it!  Everything is kept contained (although if I want to be able to see/use my phone or Kindle while charging it, there is just enough space between the doors to feed the cable out).   Everything has a home.  When I remember to pick up some cable ties, it shouldn’t be spaghetti any more!

If I can ever be bothered, there are some next steps I could take.  If I moved the actual socket round the corner (it’s currently to the right of the bookshelf) I could cut a larger hole in the cupboard and have the socket neatly recessed so the bookshelf sits flush.  If I was being particularly anal (who, me?) I would think about having shelves/holders for the electronic items as they charge, although the top of the shoebox seems to be doing the job just fine.

I should add that nothing I have to charge gives up any significant heat that would make me alarmed about charging it in a cupboard!

Anyway, it’s pleasing that an idea I saw ages ago has finally come to fruition.

Today, instead, we had a ‘work in progress’ day where we bring in things that we’ve written outside the group.

I do appreciate the chance to have something critiqued in more detail than we can normally get into (because normally we just read out our writing: today we distributed copies).   As always, there were some really helpful comments.  I find it particularly useful to run something past the group when I’m not sure whether it’s generally understandable – it’s a good mixed group so if everybody ‘gets it’ I can be pretty sure it’s comprehensible.  I’ve come home with a few notes that I’m sure will make my poem a lot better.

But I feel a bit at a loose end having not written in the usual way this afternoon.   I did try to write something on the train home but it’s a bit feeble.  There’s something about that quiet, timed atmosphere that seems particularly conducive to getting something written.

The first time I went to the writing group, the timed writing seemed a bit like an exam (not a bad thing, I rather like exams).  ”Turn your papers over now!  Your question is…” and the relief when one of the three prompts is something that seems tractable.  In contrast, writing at home has started to feel a bit like coursework: something that I keep putting off then do half-arsedly.  Even the poem I took along today was one I’d done for a (now defunct) online writing group rather than just spontaneously.

I don’t think I know of anywhere else locally where you actually write in your writing group rather than just bring something along, but if there is one, I’d like to hear about it!  Or if anyone would like to join me in some timed writing, in real life or online.   Clearly I need the adrenaline!

Speaking of interactive, I got tangled up in some rope by these guys who were also making balloon kebabs and playing with dry ice.

I had a good look at the programme on the way home and the things that excite me most are:

InMotion: this is a combination of science, dance and sport that will take place at the National Museum. I’m really impressed with how they’ve done the sport aspect actually. Everything seems to be going for the Olympics thing this year which I tend to find rather yawnworthy but this looks really interesting, bringing in robotics, prosthetics and physiology. And I’m really looking forward to seeing Scottish Ballet’s and Dance Base’s contributions.

E²: The Edinburgh Enlightenment Exchange. Ignoring the dodgy use of the square and the fact that as far as I can see there are actually three Es going on there, this event looks brilliant. To quote from the programme, it is “bringing together some of Scotland’s most creative individuals… scientists, artists, musicians, authors and other creative innovators”. For someone like me who would love to be a polymath and ends up being a bit of a gadfly, this sounds like loads of fun. It’s a whole day of presentations and performances.

Future Human: A series of films and talks about where humanity is going – I’m really looking forward to the talk on ‘the self illusion‘ and the showing of the film ‘Transfer‘.

Since I just spent the last of my Christmas money on tickets for StAnza, I’m particularly looking out for free events, so I’m really pleased to see that ‘At the Fringe of Reason‘ (talks organised by Edinburgh Skeptics) is coming back to the Banshee Labyrinth – I loved it at the Fringe and I’m really keen to see the programme! I’m also looking forward to the mathematical walking tour and the photographic exhibition that’s already up in St Andrew’s Square.

There are so many other exciting events going on – and I haven’t even touched on all the stuff for kids.  I would love to hear which ones you are looking forward to.

PS.  If you are interested in the environmental events, craftygreenpoet has a useful list of them over here.

I am sure that Norman MacCaig’s Toad in the poem of the same name is walking like a fridge: “You clamber towards me on your four corners-/right hand, left foot, left hand, right foot.”

I have extended the use of ‘walking like a fridge’ in this household to mean ‘how you walk when you are so stiff that your body is just one big block’. That is certainly what I’m doing today! I was out on a geowalk along the Water of Leith yesterday. The walk itself was only 4km so pretty trivial. But by the time I’d added on the walk from the bus and the walk to where I was meeting my friends, mapmyrun tells me I walked 7.7km (4.8 miles). I’m ashamed to say that that’s probably the longest walk I’ve done in over a year, and I can feel it this morning!

The good news is that I didn’t think about my feet once in the walk, I had no blisters at all from the new shoes and only a tiny sore-ish point on the bottom of one big toe. Great! I’m hoping I can get walking that sort of distance regularly a couple of times a week, and build up to doing some longer walks. Having the right shoes is a good first step!