The Christmas Miracle

I have never been one to believe in bunkum but a recent viewing of Miracle on 34th Street has made me realise that miracles do happen. Putting aside the not-so-subtle misogynistic subtext that divorced Doris is cynical and doesn't believe in Santa Claus because she is too busy trying to juggle looking after her similarly cynical daughter, Susan, while also working as a high-flying department store executive, it is a truly heartwarming tale. Santa Claus, also known as Kris Kringle, is facing a life in a padded cell for insisting that he is, indeed, the big man in red. Fortunately, his lawyer, Fred, manages to prove that he is the real deal when 50,000 letters addressed to Santa Claus arrive at the court. Santa is then joyously released, all charges of insanity dropped, and gives Susan a house in the suburbs for Christmas so that her Mum can quit her city job and tend home for Fred. 

Santa Claus quietly trying to undermine Doris' economic independence

Tonight a miracle happened in my own living room. While settling down on the settee, I fluffed up my nest as normal, moving cushions around for maximum comfort. Yet one cushion stayed where it was in an impossible balancing position on the vertical settee cushion. 

Christmas cushion: the new virgin birth

There is no trick photography here, that cushion is really holding itself up. And it is surely not just a coincidence that it is the Christmas cushion which embodies the miracle. No, this is part of something big. I'm now keeping an eye on the reindeer ornament on the tree just in case it starts crying tears of blood.  

No sticking devices were used to create this miracle

Penguin stages dirty protest in jealous rage

An update on the two giant pandas, Yang Guang and Tian Tian, which have taken up residence at Edinburgh Zoo. A rockhopper penguin has been staging a dirty protest about the celebrity treatment the pandas have been receiving. Shunning the traditional method of smearing faeces on the wall of one’s cell, the penguin has been defecating on the panda fans, from a height, as they queue to get a glimpse of the black and white bears.

The BBC reports that the protest is a result of burning jealousy. The penguins, which were once the darlings of the zoo circuit, are now considered to be washed-up, jaded, old birds. Since the arrival of the pandas, they have been staying up all night drinking, reliving the faded, halcyon days of the seminal penguin parade. Once considered to be conscientious, house-proud animals, the penguins now sleep all day amongst the empty bottles and over-flowing ashtrays, without even rousing at the offer of a fish. 

Rockhopper penguin: furious, smelly and spoiling for a fight

Hope is not lost for the ‘deviant’ penguin though. Good fortune arrives in the unlikeliest of disguises. In the final seconds, the film cuts to one of the pandas which looks like it is has died a sad and lonely death on the decking of its enclosure. With no pandas hogging the limelight, the penguins would be superstars once again. Failing that, an offer of a place on I’m an Aquatic, Flightless Bird Get Me Out of Here! might be forthcoming.   

Back to basics

Pencil sharpenings evoke a memory of school. Asking permission to leave your seat to use what seemed like an industrial pencil sharpener, complete with hand-crank, attached to the teacher's desk. Then graduating on to using the (more mature) pen in secondary school where pencils are deemed to be too babyish. Once this transition has been made, most people don't go back to the pencil. Unless, for example, when undertaking some sort of artistic pursuit.

Sharpening a pencil: a satisfying past time

The pencil made a bit of a comeback in the form of the mechanical variety, particularly in offices, where it masquerades as a pencil of the future, come to make life easier for everyone, free from the manacles of the sharpener. Like many, I was lured in by Evil Futuristic Pencil Droid, wowed by the perennially sharp leads, the convenient click, and the clip to attach it to my pocket. But I've seen the error of my ways and have come to appreciate the warmth and the beauty of the Humble Pencil. It won't let you down like Evil Futuristic Pencil Droid. You now where you stand with Humble Pencil; none of that clicky-click-oh-no-the-lead's-broken-again nonsense.

While reacquainting myself with the pleasure of pencil sharpenings, I came across this wonderful blog post by Matthew James Taylor about The Art of Sharpening Pencils. He describes four styles of point: standard, chisel, needle, and bullet. My favourite is the needle point which reminds me of a heron's beak. 

Do not use this pencil to administer antibiotics

I admit that I am also lured back to the world of the pencil merely by the fact that we say pencil sharpenings and not pencil shavings. Somehow it seems to be more appropriate for Humble Pencil.   

So cute I almost forgot about the summary executions

I have been enjoying the coverage of the recent arrival of two giant pandas at Edinburgh Zoo from China. Yang Guang (Sunshine) and Tian Tian (Sweetie) touched down on Monday after being transported by the FedEx Panda Express. The jet lagged bears, who are the first giant pandas in the UK for 17 years, were piped off the plane and taken to their new £285,000 enclosures at the capital's zoo. The pandas are on loan from the Chinese government for 10 years, at a cost of £640,000 per year. It will also cost an additional £70,000 a year to feed both pandas, with bamboo imported from an organic farm in the Netherlands. Pandas spend 14 hours a day eating and get through 18,000kg of bamboo a year. Yum. It has been observed that there are now more pandas in Scotland than there are Tory MPs.

I am no panda expert, although I do consider myself to be a grade above many people in Scotland in terms of panda familiarity, due to the fact that I have seen a panda before. San Diego Zoo, 2001: it is such a treasured memory for me. When I think about how I queued for 45 minutes to shuffle past an enclosure as I stood on my tip-toes to get the merest glimpse of a black and white thing in the distance, I just well up. And so I think I am in a position of authority when I say that Yang Guang (boy panda) does not look as I thought he would. Is it just me that thinks he looks like a person in a panda suit?

A Scottish zookeeper dressed up as a panda

The cute pictures and wide array of panda factoids distracted me long enough to briefly forget that the pandas are being exploited for commercial purposes (the PandaRama bag, the first piece of merchandise announced by Edinburgh Zoo, comes in at a cool £30) under the guise of a breeding programme. Moreover, the fact that the Scottish Government is now cosying up with its Chinese counterpart, which perpetrates some of the most horrific human rights abuses in the world. China, among other things, is the world’s leading executioner. There are currently 500,000 people in detention, without charge or trial, and millions unable to access the legal system. This is to say nothing of political persecution, female infanticide, torture, Tibet, repression of dissent, and general all-round nastiness. Take me back to the pandas!

Pandas are opposed to the death penalty

And finally, my favourite kind of panda: it has to be the red panda. Has there ever been a more adorable creature? 

Red pandas: cute as the cutest button can be

Rory Rides Me Raw

The Vaselines are a Bellshill indie band from the late 1980s. Comprising Eugene Kelly and Frances McKee, the band only released two EPs and one album. Although they split in the same week that the album, Dum Dum, was released, they later received rightful recognition when Nirvana covered three of their songs. The Vaselines' music is visceral, capturing perfectly the raw feelings of being young. What I particularly love about them was the endearingly ramshackle approach to the band which included not being able to play their instruments very well and forgetting to take instruments to the very few rehearsals they had.

One song, Rory Rides Me Raw, is supposedly about Frances McKee's bike Rory, although an eyebrow must be raised at this. I certainly don't have such a relationship with Mr Spencer. Mind you, his saddle is quite comfy. 

 

A new way of living

Mr Spencer has changed my life. Although only in the formative stages of our relationship, we spend time together almost every day and I wouldn't change him for the world. He is a refurbished 1960s Raleigh Trent Tourist bicycle which was built for me by Common Wheel in Glasgow.

I had various bikes when I was younger. My Dad is a cyclist and my brother and I would be taken on cycles around town, he and I falling in line behind my Dad like a family of ducks. I've had a couple of bikes as an adult including the endearing, but terribly impractical, folding bike, Penny. Penny was bought to accommodate space constraints; however, the supernova weight of her and the inordinate amount of exertion required to cycle even just down to the shops meant that it was not a long-term option.

What a delight it was then when I finally collected Mr Spencer. The unadulterated joy as I cycled away and yet I didn't even know then the immeasurable benefits that Mr Spencer would soon bring to my life.

Susan B Anthony, a leading American suffragette said, “I think [the bicycle] has done more to emancipate women than anything else in the world. It gives a woman a feeling of freedom and self-reliance. The moment she takes her seat she knows she can’t get into harm unless she gets off her bicycle, and away she goes, the picture of free, untrammelled womanhood.”

Cycling embodies true liberation. I have the freedom to go where I please, when I please. No more waiting around at the bus stop, perpetually at the whim of the private bus company. No more shuffling onto the bus in the morning with the army of drones as they fill their heads with the trash that The Metro is espousing that day. No more playing the moribund bystander in rush hour traffic jam. No more paying for increasingly expensive petrol and rip-off bus fares. Even when the dreich Scottish weather is at its worst, when icy sheets of rain lash down on my face and I'm soaked to the skin, it's still better than getting the bus. And it's better because I have autonomy. 

Mr Spencer outside Rua Reigh Lighthouse, near Gairloch

Cycling is not solely about practical transportation from A to B. It gives me space and time to think. It gives me the opportunity to explore, to go places I would never otherwise have gone, and discover new things, whether that's a forgotten derelict building, or a second-hand book shop hidden down a lane.

When riding a good bike, the beautiful mechanics mean the smooth movement of the rotating pedals feels like you're majestically gliding to your destination. And there is no other feeling in the world that compares to freewheeling down a hill on a warm, sunny day.

Being a cyclist means being part of a community. Exchanging a nod with a fellow cyclist passing by evokes an air of civility from a time gone by. That doffing of the cap is not a phenomenon that can be experienced when boarding a bus or while driving a car. And with that single nod of acknowledgement, it becomes clear that you are now part of something.

Desperately seeking socks

They are available in many different shops, in all sorts of different colours and styles, so you would imagine that it would not be such a protracted chore to buy some new socks. Typically, when I have something specific in mind, the very thing I seek eludes me like a two-bit tease. Two pairs of socks; one plain red and one plain mustard. This was what I originally had in mind. This was, of course, before my two loyal pairs of brogues went on strike. Before every Tom, Dick, and Jenny had a pair of brogues which would add the finishing touches to their faddish wardrobe of the minute.

My search led me to online shops, high street stores (when I could summon the gumption), Ebay, even supermarkets and yet each search proved fruitless and my feet remained unhappy in shabby socks of yore. My innocent searching on Ebay led me to the not-so-hidden world of the foot fetishist. The next time pay day seems a bit far away, I'll know that I can sell off a couple of pairs of grubby socks to fund that week's shop down at Lidl. £8 for one tatty pair of (formerly white) sports socks with 6 days of bidding to go. And that's not even to mention the market for used tights. 

Cosy socks

  One day, I was feeling confident, yet evidently confused, as I finally left a shop with not one, but three pairs of socks. Inside the shop, I my abulia had me by the scruff of my neck for a good 25 minutes as I weighed the pros and cons of each different pair of socks available in the three for £6 offer. 

 

Back at the office, in the cold light of reality, the socks were revealed to be far from copacetic. As the haze of denial slowly lifted, I realised that I had bought a collection of entirely frumpy foot coverings that also strayed into the realms of novelty. My 'favourite' pair which in the shop looked like they had a very jolly snowflake pattern turned out to have twee lovehearts on them in between a design which only slightly resembled a snowflake. The second pair were red with small dalmatians on them, the like of which I had not seen since my time in the school orchestra. The third pair, which even in the shop I couldn't fool myself that I was really that keen on, were grey with an oranges and lemons pattern and would definitely be usually spotted on a Christian woman  wearing a mid-calf length skirt and a pair of sandals. Suffice to say I returned them later that afternoon.

But as one doors closes, another one opens. When I returned the ill-judged triumvirate of frumpety foot wear, I happened to pop into another shop, merely on the off-chance of finding a replacement. And what should I find beaming like a beacon of light on a dark and stormy night? A pack of five socks in a variety of colours including the holy grail mustard. Of course, it typically transpires that, when put to work, these socks are short, not quite as short as the very stupid trainer sock but heading in that direction.

And so the search goes on which at least gives me a small project in between anything interesting and worthwhile I might want to do. It's the little things that count, don't you agree?