Authors Electric

Yes, that's me and my Jay on the steps of the Cannes Film Festival Hall I've been thinking a lot about Time lately. It's funny stuff. It can unroll before us invitingly, like a red carpet to a rosy future; it can stretch out uninvitingly like dreary road through a dull landscape. It can whizz by much too fast when we are spending it doing what we like best with the people we love best; it can crawl and drag when we are spending it doing what we like least with the people we love least. It can be purposeful, planned, productive; it can be jumbled into purposeless fragments of pointless activity. One thing is for sure: it marches on and on and on until it stops = at least for each one of us one day. How do you view time? In the abstract, it is always exactly the same, measured out in relentless segments which get added together into bigger segments. Its beat is steady, unchanging, unchangeable. Have you ever wanted to plead with it to slow down or hurry up? You're ...

As I write this on the 31st December, there is less than half a day left of 2016; as I type that, I mistakenly type 2106; and as I correct it, I think of the year 2106, ninety years from now. Hogmanay - as we Scots call it - is very much a time for looking back. Nostalgia is king. I could spend this blog relating lots of Hogmanay tales. Indeed, that's what I had in mind as I made myself a cup of coffee and settled down to my laptop: childhood reminiscences of 'first-footing'; parties that lasted all night; party pieces of songs, skits, poems, joke routines, piano and accordion 'turns', the same every year; specific Hogmanays when everything went very wrong, or even very right; maudlin memories of dear departed relations and friends . . .  You get the picture - and aren't you glad I have changed my mind about this blog? If you are NOT glad and would actually like to hear about those long ago 'real' Scottish Hogmanays, can I risk a wee plug for my fir...