Long live the weeds and the wilderness yetGerard Manley Hopkins. I was always a wee bit suspicious of a man whose middle name was Manley. (Of course, as a boy I assumed it was 'Manly'.) He probably did loads of things in his busy
and fulfilled life, but for Scottish schoolchildren of a certain age he will be remembered for one thing, and one thing alone: the poem 'Inversnaid'. But if there was just one thing to be remembered for, what a wonderful thing. I visited Inversnaid last week, travelling the hour and a half west out of Glasgow, and memories flooded back.
Back in 1982, Ronnie Renton (the best teacher in the history of Scottish education) handed out copies of this poem to a classful of unruly Weegie kids, for whom nature was two trees within 10 yards of each other. None of us got it. Ronnie expounded the beauty of the language; the crackling onomatopoeia; the coined words and phrases; and the final call to arms, exhorting us to love and protect our wilderness. Decades on I stood by the powerful waterfall, the sky-studding hills, the enchanting loch itself. It all made a beautiful sort of sense, at last.
Fish suppers for a healthier gannetIt's January, so I am on a health kick.
When food is so central to my life, I struggle with adopting any approach that might limit my intake of a) red meat b) cream c) pork d) butter e) anything else I like the look of.
Of course, being the gannet that I am, I do like healthy things. I like green vegetables,
I like salad-type things and (despite the protestations of my chum Kendo) I like juice. These are not problematic. Avoiding a nose-bag lunch of delicious dim sum or an evening spent with my close friend lamb curry proves a deal more challenging.
But I must display discipline. I must tread the path of virtuous eating. I must embrace
a more modest meal offering. And let me tell you, I have discovered a more modest meal offering that sets my palate alight with flavour, my mind racing with opportunity. Smoked fish accompanied by a sprouted bean salad. While I allow the hot smoked flavour of the fish to meld with the nutty freshness of the sprouted aduki beans, the unctuous fruity pepperiness of the olive oil, the bite of the chilli and the freshness of the lime, my body welcomes the plethora of Omega 3 acids from the fish, the skin-repairing vitamins of the beans. Oh yes.
I am eating healthy food and I'm loving it.
I only wanna be with you, DustyOne day last week my friend Maddalena had mentioned the arrival of spring in an e-mail. Given we are still very much in
the epicentre of winter, it seemed a little previous of Maddalena to make mention of the season of prima vera. However, she's a good soul and once she had put the idea of daffodils and bunny rabbits
in my head, I found myself inevitably daydreaming myself into a cotton jumper, contemplating a more temperate outlook. The following morning seemed to present a brilliant opportunity to practise for spring 2009. From inside the flat the sun shone, the sky was blue. It might have been a summer's morning.
The scene was set. I made my way to my music and thought long and hard about the correct spring-like tunes to fill the flat. I considered the amplified rock of Deep Purple;
I toyed with a rare Ethiopian jazz compilation I picked up last week; I even considered a bit of bhangra to blow away the wintry cobwebs. Nothing sounded or felt right. Then it happened. My finger spun the dial to "D" and the dulcet and decorous Dusty Springfield filled my day. Beautiful. Springfield by name, and by nature.
It's pure hatred – all the way from the corner shop to the front page It's a curious word that evokes many different kinds of reaction.
I personally hated being called one – first and foremost I was not and never had been a Pakistani and therefore could never be described as a 'Paki'. (I'm sure almost all of those who regularly taunted us with the word were unaware of the bad blood that existed between India and Pakistan, post-Partition. No doubt they would have celebrated yet another level of sociopolitical and constitutional hurt they were causing Indians with this jibe.)
Moving on from the geographical and cultural inaccuracy, there was no shortage of issues surrounding the word. The rage that thundered quietly inside when it was cruelly spat out at me felt like a wholesale denial of my Scottishness, as well as my Indianness. The word had become a lazy, ignorant catch-all for anyone with brown skin. And while I heard it often enough, there were very specific occasions when the word was seen in the written form. These occasions were mostly, from my childhood at any rate, when the word was spray-painted or daubed on to the rusty metal shutters of a small newsagent's or grocery shop somewhere. It was more often than not followed by the word 'bastard', as if 'Paki' itself was not harsh enough. I remember with the clarity of the contemporary,
a teacher using the word when sending a pupil off to the corner shop. I struggled to find words to lodge my disapproval. I struggled and failed.
At university the brown-skinned belligerents reclaimed the word. The theory was that if we used the word, it somehow undercut the potency of it as a racial slur. That was bizarre. After years of hating hearing that harsh sound, I then had to become accustomed to using it, for fear of alienating my ethnic peers. This experiment in linguistic re-appropriation ended soon thereafter: too much pain, too many negative connotations for me to allow that sound to tumble out of my mouth.
It seems a tad anachronistic to have the word back in circulation in 2009. The fact that its use has become front page news is indication enough of how much we have all moved on. And perhaps the greatest irony of all is that all the while, when being used to hurt and harm, little did the 'Paki'-users know that the word itself means "pure". If I'd have known, I'd have been happy to be referred to as such.
