For a couple of weeks, including while I was in Greece on holiday, I kept thinking in my idle moments that I hadn’t heard Highland Cathedral in ages. My mind sometimes works that way. Pipes, be they of the organ or bag variety, are rarely my kind of thing, but there’s something stirring about Highland Cathedral that grabs me and holds me.
Enjoying a friend’s birthday celebration at the weekend, his iPod shuffled to Amy Grant’s Christmas album (yes, in June), which includes a recording of the tune. When I got home, I went straight to the iTunes store to choose from the many available renditions (mainly on bagpipes, although it’s great on a pipe organ).
In among the crush, for there are many versions available, was something wholly unexpected. I’ll let you find it yourself: the album is Scottish Clubfever and the artists include DJ Frasier!
:-o
Oia, Santorini, June 2008.
Oia, Santorini, June 2008.
A few weeks later and the Irish Water Spaniel pups are getting bigger. Their eyes are open, they’re very mobile, and discernable individual personalities are starting to develop. Of course, given that there are six of them together with bladders proportional to their still-small body size, there is often a bit of a whiff — you can’t bath them too often because their skin and coats aren’t up to it.
But from a distance, especially by photo, very endearing.
I have a long list of books that I mean to read. I’ve just started one of them (Philip K. Dick’s The Man in the High Castle, if you want to know). The last one I read was John Wyndham’s The Day of the Triffids.
I’d pigeon-hole it as SF/horror that is disarmingly well-written — Wyndham’s skilfull use of language emphasises the stark environment he describes.
I won’t give too much away (follow the link above to Wikipedia for all kinds of detail), but I’ll make this observation: writing almost 60 years ago, Wyndham hits many of the now well-known post-apocalyptic tropes (did he originate them?). Reading Triffids, I found myself remembering its echoes in 28 Days Later, Cormac McCarthy’s The Road, Land of the Dead… all kinds of others. I found it a pleasure to read a tale from before many of its key points became hackneyed.
There’s a paranoia that runs through the novel that at first felt a little dated, but quickly seemed to me to take on a new, modern relevance. No-one’s quite sure where the Triffids (man-eating, walking plants) came from, but genetic splicing by foreign government scientists is implicated. The disaster that leaves humankind vulnerable may even have been man-made, too.
Thoroughly recommended.