10 At Kirroughtree/Team Basecamp MTB Wolftrax
one
bug-bites = sleepless nights: ah! such a tender expression: if only I could have hacked my legs off at the knees with a cleaver …
two
We saw Maybole three times; a lot for a Friday night. The road, split open by frost, hugged the coastline through the fields at Turnberry; already harvested, packed into bug-black pork pies and neatly arranged around the edges of the shorn fields: a landscape and language outwith my experience: Pinmerry, Kirkoswald, Crossraguel Abbey, Pinmore, Pinwherry, Glenhapple, Minnigaff, Kirroughtree … by the Cree.
three
Just the best pre-race evening meal ever.
four
Van + adrenalin + bug-tiredness = sleepless night
five
Meeting Aidan again after what must be 3-4 years. We paired at my first “10 Under the Ben” with the team name of ‘Cheese and Onion’! but never settled on who was what …
six
Lap One, and my turn to go first—neither LC or I had ridden here before (which was—in addition to topping-up our reservoirs of self-harm, misery, agony and a Calvinist world-view that subscribes to the authority of, “God made the back for burden”—one of the few sensible reasons for entering this event) so this was going to be fast and blind; “fast” understood in all its heaving and panting relativity.
seven
My attachment to the colour gold was revealed to me: it’s to do with corduroy, and a women’s agricultural tug-of-war. Oh! the hell and honey that is sweet singletrack!
eight
Steve—who pitched next to us and shared the easy-up—rode solo in the Sen Vets and completed 8 laps … missed top spot on the podium by 4 seconds! … nonetheless, numero uno!
nine
laps: good numbers; and our best performance to date. (See reference to self-harm, misery etc., at six: The report card reads: “… can do better”).
ten
Paul—Perth Camera’s—solo’s in the Sen’s, completes 10 laps, places 4th.
I listened to the rain falling on the roof of the van as we fell asleep, thinking of all the places where water collects and flows.
That’s How Wrong My Love Is
A while back I read an essay titled, That’s How Wrong my Love Is, by Lynne Tillman. (The Happy Hypocrite: Hunting And Gathering; Issue 2, Autumn 2008) and in it she describes how she watched a pair of mourning doves in their nest everyday: ‘witnessed the entire cycle of a nesting mother and father, a chick’s beak cracking through the eggshell … the baby’s first flight’; in New York, in the backyard of a group of smaller apartments which are often ‘quiet, untrafficked, almost bucolic settings’.
The essay moves to talk about how she feeds the doves over a period of five years and becomes intimate with every detail of their existence; how the doves become to a great extent habituated and dependent on her, and how she by turns becomes habituated to them; how she feels guilty about not feeding them when she is away, ‘not doing my duty to them’, but telling herself that there is plenty of food on the streets of New york, and on her return, continuing the habit.
I suffer from the same feelings of guilt when I leave home and similarly console myself with the thought that—for most of the year—there is plenty of food in the fields and fruit bushes around my ‘almost bucolic’ garden for the playful and colourful finch’s, blackbirds, thrushes, tit’s, woodpeckers … I spend my time with, and who visit the bird table near the Catriona’s.
Pidgeons—‘ugly’ big members of the same family as doves—start to congregate at Tillman’s window and ‘greedily consume all the seed’; frightening off the doves and complicating her pleasures, in the same way as grey squirrels do for mine. Tillman’s essay is essentially concerned with ethics, or how living ethically is necessarily a conscious endeavour. She writes: ‘I love animals, I am an animal, I’m a mammal, a human being, I like most people, love many, despise one person, though I don’t want to hate anyone. I am also selfish and want what I want. My greatest and most enduring problems in life are ethical … Not feeding the mourning doves regularly is wrong, but I generally give myself a pass. My not feeding the pidgeons because I find them big and ugly is unethical’.
sausallita calling
Reading from June’s copy of ‘Poetry’ Magazine at the picnic table … and a “kopi-lewak or “kofi-annan” … and the suns’ ray … guiding a father, and his sons (on holiday from Mumbai) on the trails … into a soft evening light of ’skin-so-soft’ and paddling—in the drain of the bike wash—as I wash the dirt off the hire fleet …
The Catriona’s
To soon discover what colour the flowers will be: and soon again after that, to gather, for family and friends, the tubers from the soil.
tic-tac-toe
The chestnut “cross” on the wooden post at the front of the picture is an object I made and used in the performance, In The Hunting Dogs With Dear And The Heart Of Charles; a work “about” the murder of Jodi Jones. I was on my way south to spend the weekend with my future wife and step-daughter when the news of Jones’ death came over the radio—as I drove through Dalkieth itself.
The bird table at the back of the picture was made by an elderly gentleman who attends “my mothers church”: two poems, The Rosenberg And Bird Table and Sunset will be published in Issue 6 of the print-based poetry journal, ANON — launched on 9th July at the Scottish Poetry Library, Edinburgh. (see link on the ‘blogroll’ if you would like to read more about the journal itself and/or purchase it).
Catriona’s are between the cross and the sun going down.
10 Under the Ben/Team Basecamp MTB Wolftrax
The Latin root of the word ‘compete: com(petere)’ means ‘to seek’, or as the radical architect William McDonough explained it; “competition means to train together … and then race”—the true purpose of “competition” in other words is to help each other become fit and strong, whatever the task.
two
The last thing I did before leaving home was “earth-up” my potatoes; pulling up more ground to cover over the green leaves pushing through the soil: slightly eccentric race preparation perhaps, but I knew I’d ride better if I got this done. You’ll hear that potatoes are good for “cleaning out the ground” which—depending on how one looks at it—is either true or near nonsense. In my experience—and it is limited to this audience of Catriona’s—it is the gardner that cleans out the soil looking after the potatoes; the crop “trains” the gardner to be attentive and ensure that in the competition between it and “weed” the crop wins out.
three
A cabinet curiosity asleep in “the hearse” (Chéz Volvo) on Friday night.
‘Anxiety Dream #4’
On the edge of a steep ravine, on a gentle slope of a path
going North-East, you have a little walk, pushing a bicycle.
six
I know how much Lindsay my riding partner loves to go fast and smooth—we’ve spent hours chasing each other down muddy trails but I have an incomplete picture of him riding the race circuit: big-ringing it along the puggy-line; cutting elegantly through the rock field in the woods … the shared experience of an action which, as each hour passes, as each lap becomes more enriched by experience, more complex, visual, unfixed and liquid in the intense heat—to help each other become fit and strong.
seven
Small kindnesses and gentle words in evening sunlight.
eight
Anxiety Dream # 5
Sitting on a rock out front of a burger van with a live one with onions and ketchup, a cold beer, and some Australian guy in a thong setting fire to stuff.
nine
The cleats of ‘Anxiety Dream #4′
ten
I spent the afternoon after the race driving the uplift at Wolftrax; a way to kick-back after the intense experience of the previous days racing—you don’t spend much time with your race partner during the ten hours of the race except to exchange a few words in the transition area: words about how the track is running, what to watch out for, words of encouragement, words charged with all the explosive energy that the body has just emptied itself of … I imagine a new poetic of the transition area … the exchanges “adequate”, urgent … good to haul myself up a fireroad in a Landrover instead of on a bike then, and enjoy the energy of other, fresher riders—to help each other become fit and strong, whatever the task.
A New Year For The Roses
I went over to Scott’s in Blairgowrie yesterday to buy seed potatoes—on the advice of Willie my Postman and oracle on all matters vegetal.
This meant driving over the hill and through where my grandparents once lived in Coupar Angus. I have many fond memories of staying with them in Princess Croft, mostly of their generosity: of cold mince rolls and meat pie’s; of fishing trips down to the river which meanders through the surrounding fields and of working, not least, the “tattie holiday”. I remember being paid £8 a day on that last holiday—the same as the adults that year, after other years when it had been less—and how rich and exhausted I had felt at each days end—not just with the money, but with this hard accumulation to physical labour in muddy fields in all weathers; with my grandfather and uncles working the drills; taking tea from flasks and sandwiches from boxes. But sometimes I also wished that it would all end so that the “torture” would stop and my poor back would be left in peace to “stand up straight” for as long as it wished … the whinging of a youth unaccustomed to any work whatsoever let alone physical and repetitive work at that. These days in the field involved a different way of speaking, a language of soil and weather and crop; a stoic, but forgiving (and sometimes dirty) humour; a language of reek and touch; a dark language of the body, of pain, discomfort, endurance and for most others, necessity— A “temporal” community, which was then outwith my experience, but which I would again meet the likes of years later in Aberdeen when I cut fish on the docks for a living—at Buthley Brothers—after I’d completed my formal studies: the length of each day, six days a week, at a steel table with freezing water, a sharp knife and six women jawing on one unrelated subject after another from the start to the end of the shift seemingly without taking breath: but this time the pay didn’t seem commensurate to the weight of the labour, to the fish being cut—my life, circumscribed then, as it is now, but as it wasn’t in my youth, by a need to earn a living—but the talk, the cursing, the humour, the gossip … was passionate, and familiar to me. This was the year that Costello sang ‘A Good Year For The Roses;’ I ate a lot of broken yellow fish and the once oil-rich capital of the north-east of Scotland slid inexorably into a new granite sheath dressed like a ghost town: difficult years, in one way or another for many.
Willie had suggested Duke of York’s but the man was waiting for more to come in, so I bought Catriona’s instead, fifty of them, and sixty onion “sets” and plan a four (tattie) three (onion) drill layout when the weather lays off with the waterworks.
