…Listening to Ladies Who Lunch, Loudly and Long…

…this ol’ Jurassic Scots scribbler is normally impervious to extraneous noise… utter silence is not welcome when I write or indulge my SOSYAL NETWURK stuff on the laptop… at home, background bruit is usually provided by SKYNews, which is so bad, its often good, if yeez know what I mean… I can sit in any people-packed clone of the Starbucks chain, with multiple conversations humming away around me, happily tapping away on the Mac… on long train journeys, constant, ambient noise is never a distraction to me… what a shock to my aural system it was then today, when I visited a Japanese restaurant for a late lunch… it was almost last orders when I sat in my booth… no compooooter with me, just fiddling with messages on the Samsung thing-y… the only other diners at that hour were a group of expatriate ladies of middling age, crammed into the booth next to mine… I say ‘crammed’,  ‘coz, regardless of how wide or long their table and seating arrangements, it clearly wasn’t accommodation enuff for their conversation…

…I should have known at the start when I tried to give my order for Gyoza Dumplings, Shrimp Tempura and Chicken Katsu… the caterwauling from the adjacent group made it necessary to repeat the order three times… I wasn’t so much ‘listening’ rather than having my ears assailed by the four of them all talking at once in what appeared to be four different simultaneous ‘conversations‘… the modus seemed to indicate a philosophy of ‘the louder one speaks/shouts, the more important the message’, even though not one of them was taking heed of anyone else’s diatribe… my initial pique at this prandial interlude lapsed into amusement as the unspoken competition from the Society of Screechers degenerated into a free-for-all race to determine which of them could say the most without apparent pausing for breath… I would like to record what any of the conversational content from the quartet was about, but sadly, communication fell a distant second to volume control… the lunch itself was enjoyable – its hard to screw up on the menu items I had chosen… and I s’pose I should whisper a small ‘thanks’ for being able to attend Listening to Ladies Who Lunch, Loudly and Long, as it served as great practice for when next I’m in my normal sound-bound writing mode… see yeez later… LUV YEEZ!

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…age is not just a number… it’s sum’thing that’s earned…

…this ol’ Scots Jurassic scribbler considers himself immeasurably fortunate to have in a global SOSYAL NETWURK countless wonderful friends who p’raps are showing just a tad wear and tear…

…infancy, teens and a few decades thereafter have elapsed in my own existence on this planet… the early ambitions, hopes and travails of a lifetime and career are valued mem’ries… pensionable age arrived a wee while back… but here’s the strange thing… I rarely feel ‘old’… physically of course, the litheness and athleticism these bones and muscles once possessed as a young professional footballer, have faded a touch… ‘ambling’ has replaced ‘sprinting’ as the preferred mode of forward bodily movement… a once-medal-winning tenor voice struggles to reach any kind of upper musical vocal register (although, thankfully, the ability to hold a key remains intact, Mabel)… so, am I about ready to be carted off to the Old Writers Graveyard yet?… not bluudy likely!… I have made myself part of my own, personal recycling project… other, different skill sets and attributes are kicking in now… the brain, once as sharp as a billiard ball, is keener than it ever was, and I use life experience to spike my thoughts and speech with as much humour as I can derive… patience, a formerly elusive quality, visits on a regular basis, and sits neatly with my frame of mind most of the time…

…I’ve come to acknowledge that making mistakes is common to every human being alive, and these are the learning posts for later years… ‘wisdom’ is merely having ‘been there and seen the effects of stuff’… ‘wit’ is simply translating smiles and laughs into WURDS… and prob’ly most of all, ‘love’ is a by-product of letting good things come into yer life, and not a desperate attempt to ensnare adoration from others… in my not-so-‘umble opinion, age is not just a number… it’s sum’thing that’s earned… see yeez later… LUV YEEZ!

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…Authors… yer book’s a what kinda seller?

…in the WURLD of publishing, after ‘the cheque’s in the mail’, the phrase most prob’ly more abused than any other is the ‘such and such Best Seller’… it seems to my warped understanding that the old meaning of ‘best‘, being ‘the Number 1 above all others’ doesn’t quite translate that way in the book business… at any given moment, promotional blurbs abound tagging dozens… nay, tagging hundreds… even more nay, tagging hundreds and p’raps thousands of titles simultaneously as ‘Best Seller’…

…could be ‘The Noo Yawk Times Best Seller’, the ‘Sunday Times Supplement Best Seller’, the ‘Platinum, or Gold, or Silver, or Ruby, or Tin, Garbage Writers Guild Best Seller’… or maybe the ‘Local Dry Cleaners Writers Best Seller’, the ‘Best Seller in my Front Room’… yeez get my drift… and by the way, the addendum is always ‘#1 Best Seller’, as if emb’dy would ever tag yer tome as ‘#2 Best Seller’ or any other ordinal configuration… demotion from the supremo position is just not done, Dahlings…

…let’s face it, there are literally (see what I did there, Mabel) millions of books in circulation, which makes the validity of the ‘Best Seller’ label even more precarious… I feel it’s time to introduce a multiple-choice selection of ‘Best Seller’ tab choices for we scribblers whenever we launch our wee masterpieces onto Auntie Amazon Kindle, or assault the Waterstones and Barnes & Noble bookshelves… fr’example, here’s a selection for yer consideration:

1. ‘Quietly Making Its Way In Its Amazon Genre’ Seller’
2. ‘My Granny LUVS The Way I Wrote This Book’ Seller’
3. ‘I’d Appreciate More Sales So I Can Cover This Month’s Rent’ Seller
4. ‘If The Typos And Grammar Errors Are Ignored, It’s Not A Bad Story’ Seller
5. ‘I Know The Cover Is Blank Artwork, But Dickens Never Had Fancy Covers Either’ Seller

…I’m certain there are gazillions more ‘Sellers’ like these which yeez can conjure up… bring back a bit of ‘Honesty In Novel Advertising’… see yeez later… I’ve got to finish writing my ‘If It’s Not a #1 Best Seller, It Should Be’ Seller… see yeez later… LUV YEEZ!

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…Robin Williams… a few thoughts…

…okay, okay, okay… he was not universally admired… but those to whom his humour and style didn’t appeal must have been less than 0.0000001% of emb’dy who ever watched him and listened to him… I’ve been re-running some of the interview clips he did on television chat shows over the years, and remain constantly mesmerised at the speed of his brain, his genius in spinning WURDS , and accent impersonations, and just out-and-out ‘Williams-isms’… undoubtedly a ‘one-off’ comedy titan… his blockbuster movies, Good Morning Vietnam, Mrs Doubtfire, The Dead Poets Society, Aladdin, The Birdcage, Good Will Hunting to name a few… and yet, sadly,  a touch over three years ago in August 2014, this man, this genius, this creator of so much pleasure for others, took his own life… I will not pretend to begin to understand the enormous personal battles that conditions and illnesses such as depression and others cause… but it struck me this morning watching one of the old televised interviews of how ‘one-way’ the entertainment stream was… all coming from Robin… making others laugh, his physical body gestures enhancing much of his spontaneous spiel… but his eyes lacked sparkle… NUTHIN was going to him… he was eternally ‘on stage’… giving out, rarely receiving… history will show many comedians over the years have taken the same route as Robin… the onset of depression or other mentally debilitating conditions, followed by suicide, a common record… of course, being a famous celebrity made the news of his death all the more shocking… but… and here’s the thing… there are many hundreds of thousands, possibly millions, of ordinary folks who suffer the same tortuous anxieties, struggles and fears… I don’t consider myself within a million miles of the same condition that attacks people in this way, but one saying I adhere to is this: ‘EVERYBODY  you meet, EVERYBODY, is fighting some sort of battle we know NUTHIN about… be kind always’… see yeez later… LUV YEEZ!

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…Tobermory… a wee town with a huge musical heart…

…the distance in time of almost fifty years makes the mem’ries no less bright… some of yeez know already I’ve shared that prob’ly the six best years of my life were spent as a young Trainee Master of the Financial Universe as a junior officer in the Clydesdale & North of Scotland Bank Limited in Tobermory on the beautiful isle of Mull in the Scottish Hebrides… the population of the town was less than 900… but the musical talent per capita must have been one of the highest anywhere on the planet… entertainment in the form of television was passe… we folks made our own social evenings buzz… I recall vividly one of the many ceilidhs in the Mishnish Hotel bar… around nine p.m., the owner of the hotel, Bobby MacLeod appeared with his accordion…

…Bobby was one of the finest musicians, not just in Scotland, but globally… his famed Scottish Dance Band included Pibroch MacKenzie, the most talented fiddle player of his day, who lived two doors or so away on the Main Street…

…Pibroch’s three lovely daughters, Anne, Joanie, and Fiona were superb vocal harmonists… Janet Tandy (now MacDonald), a future Gaelic Mod Gold Medallist in solo singing… and yer own blogger here, who, with no false modesty, also went on to collect a fair haul of Gaelic Mod solo singing medals… we all congregated in the Mishnish… unplanned, as the best ceilidhs always are… and away it started…  it took all of around twenty seconds for the spontaneity to infect everybody in the place and others arrived in before closing time an hour later at ten o’clock… but ‘closing’ was in name only… the doors were closed, merely to conform with local licensing regulations, but the party carried on… and on… and on… of course, liberal sprinklings of the ‘electric soup’ were gargled during the night, which fatigued out somewhere around 5 or 6 in the morning… we all had WURK to go to!… there was never a schedule of songs or tunes, but in true ceilidh style, someone would call out, for example, ‘Janet, give us ‘Mo Mhathair’ (‘My Mother’), or, ‘Seumas, how about ‘Loch Leven?’… or Bobby and Pibroch would immerse us in soulful laments, stirring jigs and reels, or dance tunes, the MacKenzie girls would deliver fabulously melodic ‘Puirt a beul’ (fast, intricate, unaccompanied Gaelic ‘mouth music’)… other people in the bar would jump in with a song or poem… seemingly from nowhere, a bagpiper would materialize… and we were all in Music Heaven… to Tobermory, a wee town with a huge musical heart… thanks for the true ‘time of my life’… see yeez later, LUV YEEZ!...

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…Glasgow Dockland Govan’s version of Rudolph Valentino…

…a wee reprise post from three years ago…

Source: …Glasgow Dockland Govan’s version of Rudolph Valentino…   

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Here is my interview with Seumas Gallacher

…the wonderful Fiona Mcvie carries a piece on yours truly today.. many thanks , m’Lady 🙂

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authorsinterviews

Hello and welcome to my blog, Author Interviews. My name is Fiona Mcvie.

 

Let’s get you introduced to everyone, shall we? Tell us your name. What is your age?

Hello, Fiona. First of all, many thanks for letting me revisit. I normally don’t get asked back a second time anywhere.

I’m Seumas Gallacher, self-named ‘ol’Scots Jurassic scribbler’ which puts me certainly above the legal age to be a writer.

Fiona: Where are you from?

Born in Docklands, Govan in Glasgow

Fiona: A little about your self (ie,  your education, family life, etc.).

Government junior school until age 12. Then won a scholarship to a fee-paying school, which meant the fees were taken care of. Almost never went, ‘coz my Ma told the headmaster of the primary school we couldn’t afford the school uniforms. The headmaster paid for it for three years from his own pocket. Won a second three–year…

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…old paper comics… the genesis of my reading habit…

…there are many modern innovations, I s’pose, for which the WURLD can be thankful, such as mobile telephones, iPads, Smartphones and the whole range of electronic communication devices which seem to have become transplanted parts of our anatomy… I see children in push carts playing with cartoon images on tiny screens… teenagers in clusters, each oblivious to the other, noses pronged into their wifi-laden machines… older, allegedly more mature people, congregated around dinner tables, constantly flicking the ‘light-up’ switch, every five minutes, while lending pretence to communal conversation… and I think back to when we, of a certain age, were children… none of these ‘insta-plug-me-into-the rest-of my-virtual-planet’ gizmos existed back then… we played games in the street… exercised all day (although we didn’t call it that) until darkness beckoned us home for supper… no need for text messages to bring us back…

…and we had comics… in the UK, there were the weekly editions of The Beano, The Dandy, and The Topper, where we saw ourselves reflected in the activities of the Bash Street Kids, Beryl the Peril, Dennis the Menace, Korky the Kat, and Desperate Dan (none of yer McDonald’s rubbish for him – mega-kilo cow pies instead, with hooves and horns still protruding from the top of the pastry)…

…and I can’t help but think present day children are missing so much… I recall being absorbed in these comics… and yes, I know they weren’t loaded with strictly grammatically correct literature… but my acquired sense of onomatopoeia must surely have benefited from reading such embellishments as ‘Kapowee!’, ‘Boooooooooom!’, ‘Kerplunnkk!‘ and many such other unmistakable WURDS…

…also, never amongst those pages do I recall ever noticing any nastiness in the storylines… there was more of a slapstick humour nature to it all… but all the participants, apart from any occasional ‘bullies’, fared well… and the basic takeaway is that I believe my reading habit was helped, not hindered by immersion in that WURLD… emb’dy else feel the same way?… see yeez later… LUV YEEZ!

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Sally’s Cafe and Bookstore Update – Amy M. Reade, Seumas Gallacher and Nicholas Rinth

…dear, dear friend, Sally Cronin’s blog this week carries focus on three of we friends of hers (and hopefully, of yours)… as usual, Sally’s wonderful generosity in supporting others shines through … thank you, m’Lady 🙂

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Smorgasbord Blog Magazine

Welcome to the Friday cafe and bookstore update and we have some great new books to add to the shelves. The first is Highland Peril by Amy M. Reade which was published on 5th September.

About Highland Peril

Trading the urban pace of Edinburgh for a tiny village overlooking a breathtaking blue loch was a great move for budding photographer Sylvie Carmichael and her artist husband, Seamus—until a dangerous crime obscures the view . . .

Sylvie’s bucolic life along the heather-covered moors of the Highlands is a world away from the hectic energy of the city. But then a London buyer is killed after purchasing a long-lost Scottish masterpiece from Seamus’s gallery—and the painting vanishes. As suspicion clouds their new life, and their relationship, Sylvie’s search for answers plunges her into an unsolved mystery dating back to Cromwellian Scotland through World War I and beyond. And as she moves…

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…Authoress, Lucinda E. Clarke launches AMIE, CUT FOR LIFE… well worth a read…

…I never fail to be attracted to the WURK of writers who’ve ‘been there, done it, and got the T-shirt’... especially when there’s a serious slant included, a reflection on the human condition… my dear friend, Authoress, m’Lady, Lucinda E. Clarke, has a new book launching on September 30th, AMIE, CUT FOR LIFE, which is well worth yer time to have a wee peek at… let her tell yeez about it:

When I set out to write about my heroine in Africa, battling against all kinds of horrific people, wild animals and the rather unnecessary requirements to consume food and drink in the middle of the bush, I was surprised by the reactions from readers. A lot of things I took for granted, having lived in Africa for almost four decades, were unfamiliar to many. I’d hoped to showcase Africa as I saw it – wild – harsh – cruel – the cheapness of life on the one side and the warm – friendly – wonderful – unselfish people and the amazing wildlife on the other.

I wanted to share my experiences and balance them against what the media tells the rest of the world (and we all know about fake news, and carefully angled cameras).

In Amie book 1, I covered the outbreak of a civil war, in book 2 she comes up against ISIS and in book 3 Amie is coerced by her own people into becoming a spy and gets involved in arms dealing.

I had a good think before I began to write book 4 before deciding that I would tackle a subject seldom talked about openly, that of FGM.  This cruel and brutal procedure is still widely practiced in Africa and this time Amie is called on to protect four little girls who’ve been caught up in an international sex trade with a twist.

Some series tend to fall flat as they continue, the Amie series gets better with each instalment. – Amazon customer.

I am absolutely loving this series! I am so immersed, it amazes me when I do look up not to see any giraffes out my window.  Mary Nickell

Up on pre-order now at only $/£0.99 – publication September 30^th, it’s not a huge risk to take? myBook.to/Amie4  

And if you want to meet Amie at the start of her adventures you can find her here myBook.to/Amie1  also at $/£0.99 the special introductory price.

…thanks, m’Lady, Lucinda… see yeez later… LUV YEEZ!

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