Dave Keir

I’m often caught between the instinct to watch something or take a photograph of it. The latter seems to collapse the spell of the former. But, hey… at least I can share it here.

You can Google where Durris is, but the sky is long gone.

Sundays have never been my favourite. There’s something ineffably gloomy about them. Even when the sun is shining it causes me to squint my eyes and turn my spirit inward. Yesterday it didn’t shine. In fact the contrast between the latter part of last week and this weekend just past couldn’t have been greater, given the time of year. A falling off a cliff from to 24 to 11 deg.C. The lazy chill of the easterly wind as I stepped outdoors for a cigarette. A leaden Midlothian sky crawling westward.

I spent the day alternating between guitar practice and lying on my bed with eyes closed, pretending to have power-naps. In truth, it was all about keeping my head down. Twice I explored the television channels in attempts to find something to engage my attention without success. I cooked dinner and resisted the temptation of wine.

The guitar practice sessions made sure I had made use of this melancholy day. Trying to get under my fingers certain parts of certain songs I really should be able to play better after all these years. Finally determining to do whatever takes to unlearn mistakes and get the correct muscle memory ingrained. So as not to feel a rising anxiety as I approach these passages in the heat of battle when more than me is listening.

At 9:30pm I pulled the curtain down on the day. This morning the drive up the M90 / A90 to Aberdeen whiling away the miles with cognitive bahavioural therapy.

Rock on.

Eek! What’s a man supposed to do?

Suggestions, as always, below please.

I’ve been privileged during this wonderful spring weather in the north-east of Scotland (where I reside during the weekdays) to see lambs gamboling in the field next to the house. It is a heart-lifting sight. But when I think for a moment, it is also a ridiculous spectacle. I presume it to be a form of play but something about it doesn’t look quite right. You will see a little woolly critter trot along then without warning or any visible means of stimulation, vault as high as it can into the air without any vestige of amusement apparant on its face, then land, and continue on its way. If any of its peers catch sight of this they likely to repeat this vertical move to the point that there could break out a short epidemic of the behaviour. You might, if reason deserted you, wonder if the field that is their home had perhaps become super-heated phenomenon underfoot for a moment or two, or whether some species of invisible and hitherto unknown species of wasp, with a fondness only for lamb, had invaded their home. I resolved to google the issue.

Next day, all I could find out on the world-wide-web was that gamboling is a form of play.

Well, that’s simply not good enough. There must be some evolutionary purpose to them having developed a panache – and indeed an enviable skill – for spontaneous vertical motion.

When I was thus watching and wondering one evening this week just past, my neighbour ambled (note: not “gamboled”) alongside me and we shared some pleasantries. (I was careful not to breathe the business end of a bottle of Chianti in her direction). We watched these bouncing lambs for a spell and she wistfully informed me that they’d be fattened during the summer then delivered to the abattoir for slaughter.

Have your day in the sun, dear creatures, and whatever the cause of your gamboling; jump now! Jump high! Jump often!

Along the Water of Leith. Ten miles from Balerno until bailing out at Stockbridge and humping up the hill to Princes Street in Edinburgh and getting a bus back home. So never reached Leith this time but I know its seafood eating places already. But today epitomized this Scottish spring. Lots of sun – a fantastic April. But even today a keening east onshore breeze ready to take the skin from your lips. Many different moods to be experienced on this winding waterway. Here’s a reflection of one:

But given the ambiguity of this, I’m not sure whether someone was attacked with guitar or whether a guitar was used as a means of defense. I suppose I could read the story, but hey, some things are best left nicely poised in the mind…

Here’s an extract from the lyrics to my song Entropy:

Oceans will rise,
Continents fall,
As sure as night follows day

She don’t know
Why they come
And they do not stay

Well, oceans have been rising and continents falling – at least sliding beside and underneath each other – since I wrote these words and with cataclismic results: pacific rim, New Zealand, Chile, Haiti, Japan.

My point in the lyric was a none-too-serious attempt to compare decay in human relationships with examples of the physical world’s inexorable journey from order into chaos. Hence the song’s title. Now, I wrote that song with that lyric in the early 1990s when this planet’s tectonic plates, so far as I can remember, were not on the march.

I still like to play this song at gigs and stuff. But when I sing that part, I can’t help feeling uncomfortable in light of current and recent events. I have no idea whether members of my audience might assume this is a new song written opportunistically after these disasters – inspired by them – instead of a couple of decades before, and as a sideways glance at love.

The smart reader will be wondering why I’m so absorbed about possible reactions to some words in my song instead of the plight of the peoples that are victim to the circumstances to which the words accidentally and obliquely refer.

Just my musings. Thanks for listening.