Long day's journey into (shortest) night.

At the cottage, hosting littlescot1  and parthenia14 for the longest day of the year. I'm taking my hostly duties seriously. We've been off Beaver hunting in Knapdale (a lovely walk round one of the prettiest lochans I know). No Beaver, but plently of midges, ticks, and a crannog.
This evening we were off at the Kilberry for dinner, a lovely, leisurely affair, with one of the nicest steaks I've had in a long time and a very nice Spanish red to go with it.
We drove back around midnight, when there was still plenty of light in the sky. I'm tempted to stay up until dawn, just to see the sun come up, and so far Townes van Zandt and Steve Earle have done a good job of keeping me up and spinning. It's down to me and littlescot1 now (even Merlin has gone to bed) and he's looking a bit frazzled. Still, if I keep pushing the 21 year old 'Fiddich at him, he might make it through the night.

(no subject)

via ironed_orchid and others

Take no more than 15 minutes to produce a list of 15 books that have influenced you in style, ideas, relationships, language, or other ways that you find important, and/or books that have really stayed with you -- you keep thinking of that quote, you are always remembering that character, you are frequently reminded of that moment.... that kind of thing. This is not a favorites list.

In no particular order...

Damon Runyon, From First To Last
Raymond Chandler, The Big Sleep
E.E. "Doc" Smith, Second Stage Lensman
Richard Condon, Money is Love
The Hot Rock, Donald E Westlake
The Guns of Avalon, Roger Zelazny
Down Wif Skool, Geoffrey Willans
Leviathan, Thomas Hobbes
The Communist Manifesto, Karl Marx
In Defence of Anarchy, Donald Black
A Theory of Justice, John Rawls
The Women's Room, Marilyn French
The Naked Eunuch, Germaine Greer
Our Bodies, Ourselves, The Boston Women's Collective
The Black Report: Inequalities in Health, Margaret Whitehead

It's all about meme

Words meme from chickenfeet2003

Reply to this meme by yelling "Words!" and I will give you five words that remind me of you. Then post them in your LJ and explain what they mean to you.

Five words from chickenfeet2003

whisky

I'd never had an alcoholic drink until I was about 17 or 18. I never tried beer as a kid, and I still don't like it. I spent four years at university without drinking anything other than the odd Black Russian. Then I left University, my fiance dumped me, and I dived head first into a vat of cheap white wine. That's right, a woman drove me to drink, and I never had the good manners to thank her for it.

I had my first taste of real whisky when I was about 22 or 23, and I knew that I'd found my drug of choice. I don't actually drink more whisky now than I did then, but I do buy a hell of a lot more.

I tend towards the Western whiskies, from Campbeltown, Islay, Skye, The Orkneys.


Argyll.

I'm a Glasgow boy, born and bred, and I don't think I could live outside of a city, but there's a part of me that's drawn to the sea, to islands and beaches and the cry of gulls. And part of me, also, that seeks continuity, that looks to the past in the belief that those who came before us where much as we are. Argyll gives me that, all within 30 miles as the raven flies from Glasgow. That's 90 miles of road, though.
I bought a small place in Ardrishaig about 10 years ago. Ardrishaig is in mid-Argyle, or Knapdale depending on who you listen to. Either way, it has all the attractions of the islands for me, except I can get there without a ferry. Kilmartin Glen, 10 miles north, has more prehistoric sites than you can shake a hand-carved shepherd's stick at. The land is lousy with history - Jacobites, the kingdom of Dalriada, the original Scots, commando training bases, James Bond locations... Ach, come on up and say hello.

seafood

Again, seafood wasn't something I had much of growing up in Glasgow, unless it was battered. But almost 20 years ago I discovered prawn tails sold by the bag from a shed at Ardkinglass, and there was no stopping me. It's part of the bounty of this country - salmon and lobsters, prawns, venison and steak, oh, and whisky too.

nationalism

I'm not too keen on nationalism. It's something that, like religion, seems always to go to the dark side. It's almost a way of organising people into a hate machine. I feel a lot closer to a worker in Delhi or Deleware or Durham than I do to the Duke of Argyll. So long as we're organising our politics in nation states, though, I feel that each state has the right to self-determinism. That makes me a supporter of independence for Scotland, but I don't think it makes me a nationalist.

comics

I was talking to unblinkered  the other day about how I used to navigate my way around Glasgow from public library to public library. I had very few books at home when I was growing up - maybe a couple of dozen. There wasn't any type of anti-intellectionalism at home, far from it, but books were expensive, and borrowed from libraries, not owned. On the other hand, I was allowed to get a comic a week. Up until I was about 8 or 9 these were UK comics, like The Valliant (my favourite) The Hotspur and the Victor. They were all anthology titles, with strips about plucky athletes, plucky footballers and plucky criminals alongside war stories and comic cuts. I always read about 5 or so years ahead of my reading age, so I sort of topped out with them when I hit nine or ten. Luckily Marvel started reprinting their superhero comics about then, stories from the 60's or The Fantastic Four, Spiderman, and, my favourite of the time, The Silver Surfer. I didn't know it at the time, but Marvel were pitching their stories at college kids in the States, and they had a maturity of vocabulary and plotting that made them vastly different from Alf Tupper, the Tough of the Track. They were also very much products of the Kennedy age, peddling civil rights, fighting corruption and, later women's rights. I got hooked, and to a certain extent I still am.