I read Tracks, by Robyn Davidson, about twenty years ago and enjoyed it, so today I went to see the movie.
At the end of the film there was some applause, and someone asked, “Why isn’t everyone clapping?” British reserve, I expect, because it is a stunning film.
What struck me was how much, in some scenes anyway, Mia Wasikowska, who plays the part of Robyn Davidson, looks like Lindsey, for example in the scene shown above.
I ordered a couple of books which were mentioned by Theroux in Dark Star Safari, and another one about life in Cape Town in the 1950s.
We took a walk in the Borders, up to the Three Brethren, near Selkirk. Here’s the WalkScotland route.
Despite having a forty-year-old OS map, which gave details of forrest plantations long gone, and missing several recently created tracks, we didn’t get lost once, no, not at all.
We didn’t get lost mainly because I refused to take directions from The Map Reader (who, as usual, wishes to remain anonymous), who pointed way to the west of the ‘correct’ direction (to explain, she was actually pointing out an alternate route mentioned here), and instead we took a (more or less) direct route starting from Yarrowford, mainly up no paths at all apart from at the beginning. The hills are very dry this year, so this was no problem.
An excellent walk! Wonderful views of the hills in the Borders. At times, we were walking along old drove roads. We could look over to Newark Castle, once owned by the Black Douglases.
The Three Brethren
In the distance, the Eildon Hills
The Three Brethren are well constructed cairns that were erected at the start of the 16th century by the lairds of Yair, Selkirk and Philiphaugh to mark the boundary of their land.
After the walk, on the way back to Selkirk, we passed the site of the Battle of Philiphaugh, 13 September 1645, fought between the Scottish and the English and the English and the Scottish (as usual, it was complicated, especially so as the Marquess of Montrose, who was in charge of one side, had previously switched sides). The Irish and the Highlanders were also involved, because in those times they hated to miss out on a good battle, though most of the MacDonalds had deserted Montrose, because they were worried about what the Campbells were doing whilst they were away. More or less the same groups were still at it (fighting) a hundred years later, in 1745. Wikipedia states that: Today the (most likely site of the) battlefield is home to Selkirk Cricket Club. No jokes here about sticky wickets, then.
After the battle, 100 royalist followers of the Marquis of Montrose (mostly Irish) were shot in the barmkin of Newark Castle. Montrose had previously escaped, and he went on to also escape in 1650 after his forces were defeated at the Battle of Carbisdale in Ross-shire.
After that battle, according to Wikipedia: he was surrendered by Neil MacLeod of Assynt at Ardvreck Castle, to whose protection, in ignorance of MacLeod’s political enmity, he had entrusted himself. He was brought a prisoner to Edinburgh, and on 20 May sentenced to death by the parliament. He was hanged on the 21st, with Wishart’s laudatory biography of him around his neck.
But, according to this Wiki entry, MacLeod had been away at the time that Montrose sought his help at Ardvreck, and it was actually MacLeod’s wife, Christian Monro, who put Montrose in the dungeon, though MacLeod (who had served with Montrose at the siege of Inverness in 1645) saw which way the wind was blowing and eventually took the credit for arresting Montrose.
Anyway, soon after Montrose was hung, when the Scottish Argyll Government switched sides to support Charles II, Montrose was officially rehabilitated in the public memory, his: mangled torso was disinterred from the gallows ground on the Burgh Muir and carried under a velvet canopy to the Tolbooth, where his head was reverently removed from the spike, before the procession continued on its way to Holyrood Abbey.
Sir Lachlan Maclean, whose mother was the daughter of Colin Mackenzie of Kintail, and who married Mary MacLeod, the second daughter of Sir Roderick Macleod of Macleod, had previously been a supporter of Montrose, up until the Battle of Kilsyth (15th August 1645 – a month before the Battle of Philiphaugh (see above)) when he went home.
And you thought that Game of Thrones was complicated!
I’ve written elsewhere on this blog about battles involving Macleans, Mackenzies, MacDonalds, MacLeods and Munros. What I’ve noticed is that the MacLeod chief was rarely in the exact place at the exact time when important things happened.
Last week, the day after my brother-in-law’s funeral, we had lunch with my sister and then drove back south, stopping for the night at the Glenmore Campsite, which has grown in size considerably since I last stayed there. Very nice, though.
On the Saturday morning we drove to Boat of Garten, and had coffee in the The Boat Hotel, where, on the wall, there was an old photo of the chain ferry.
Then we walked down the Spey for a couple of miles, until we came to some standing stones and a chambered cairn.
Tullochgorum Stone
Strathspey Railway
I think that this news is quite significant: Automated identification of Open Access (OA) articles from hybrid journals is now working.
This is a highly important development in the efforts being made towards enabling systematic and easy identification of Open Access articles in hybrid journals – for aggregators, discovery services and Abstract & Indexing service providers – and it is also significant for researchers and others who want to discover and identify always-freely-available articles wherever they may appear (in OA journals, hybrid journals, or journals to which they or their institution subscribe).
A hybrid journal is a journal where only some of the articles are Open Access.
The solution to automating the identification of OA articles in hybrid journals is based upon Table of Contents (TOC) RSS feeds.
A publisher wanting to support the automated discovery of Open Access from its journals only needs to create its RSS feeds by following these best practices and these steps.
I’ve written about this issue several times in the past, and now there is a simple solution which is being put into practice. The solution could be used by various discovery services. JournalTOCs is currently demonstrating it here.
In the above screen dump, the third item is an Open Access article published in a hybrid journal.
More information about this exciting new development is available at the JournalTOCs Blog.
“They drove away, leaving me by the side of the road. That was to be fairly typical of my experience with aid workers in rural Africa: they were, in general, oafish self-dramatizing prigs and often, complete bastards.”
Well, that’ll teach them for not giving Paul Theroux a lift across the Ethiopia/Kenya border. The quote above is on page 155 of Dark Star Safari, by Paul Theroux, ISBN 0-241-14048-x
I always enjoy reading Theroux’s books, and Dark Star Safari is no exception. It was published in 2002 and I’ve been waiting for a period clear of other things in order to read it, so that I can savour it.
Theroux isn’t keen about many of the charities and aid agencies that work in Africa, and quite rightly so. A great deal of aid is wasted. The well-intentioned externally-aided project to build a textile factory somewhere in Africa – it will probably fail sometime after the project is completed and the aid people have gone home. The cast-off T-shirts that people in the West send to Africa through some charity or other – they probably ensured that the textile factory failed. The schoolbags that some people send – they will probably ensure that the local leather worker is put out of work. The enormous amounts of funds that are often made available by banks to developing countries – they have the effect of undermining democracy in the recipient countries – because why should a government worry about what it’s voters think when the sources of real income come from outside the country? Theroux knows all of this. He revisits towns which, over the years, have had vast amounts of aid invested in them, and he sees little or no benefit from when he was there thirty years previously. On page 286 he cites several books about the decline in African fortunes as a result of donor aid. There’s also Moyo’s book, Dead Aid.
This is not to say that all aid is bad. Emergency aid is important. Some charities do good work. Personally, as a librarian, I like Book Aid International which doesn’t simply send rubbish old books to Africa, but rather allows African librarians to pick and choose which books they want for their libraries from those donated. I wrote about this in the past. I like Mary’s Meals, which provides lunches of local food, cooked by locals, to school kids who otherwise would not eat during the school day.
But an awful lot of other charity and aid work is not only a waste of time and money, but can actually do harm as well. As well as the pictures of poor kids from Africa which we see so frequently on TV, how about some items on success stories in Africa. Africa is a big place, and there are many successful businesses, but you wouldn’t know this from TV and newspapers in the West. As an individual, if you want to help people there, don’t just give money in some tear-jerk reaction, but instead one of the things you can do is buy stuff from Africa when there’s a choice of products, or food, that you need. There’s plenty to buy. For example, do you like my African kikoi?
I’m enjoying my Fair Trade coffee whilst I write this. I’m also currently working on some things designed to help researchers in developing countries. Some good researchers can be tempted away from working in universities in Africa if they can’t get access to new research findings, and other researchers obviously need access to good information. INASP help to negotiate deals for libraries in developing countries that enable researchers there get access to thousands of scholarly journals. 45 such publishers are listed here. I’m currently working on providing customised current awareness services to twenty libraries in developing countries, at no cost to those libraries, through JournalTOCs Premium, the institutional version of JournalTOCs. I get some pay (hourly, and much less than consultancy rates) for this work, provided through an EPSRC grant.
Here is Theroux at his best: “The smoke from the fires lit in braziers, the stink of the pissed-on walls, the grafitti, the dust piles, the brick shards, the baked mud, the neighborhood so decrepit and worn, so pulverized, it looked as though it had been made out of wholewheat flour and baked five thousand years ago and was now turning back into little crumbs. And yet I loved riding through the crepuscular dusk, parting the air that was penetrated with food smells and smoke and garbage, jogging through the puddles, with the muezzin howling, the dogs barking, the children chasing my sorry pony – the lovely evening sky showing through the dust cloud and striped bright yellow and cobalt blue. And then the pyramid, smaller than I had expected, so brown and corrugatted and geometric it looked like giant origami folded from cardboard.”
I wish more authors could write like that. In Dark Star Safari, Theroux reports on his travels along some interesting roads and rivers on his trip from Cairo to Cape Town. I particularly enjoyed reading about his journey down the Shire from the Elephant Marsh, in southern Malawi.
I had intended to quote some other passages from Dark Star Safari, but I won’t, because its best if you read the book yourself.
Well, here are the final photos and clips from Grenada and Barbados.
IMHO, the photo above is quite bizarre.
St George’s is a very attractive town.
Typical street in St George’s
Breakfast on the first day.
Bathsheba, on the west coast of Barbados.
Taken in the north of Barbados.
