Fat Mac has turned over a new leaf (almost)

Fat Mac doesn’t get out much.  It doesn’t help, as we’ve seen before, that he can’t always remember what day it is, and it also doesn’t help that his ambition is to become a recluse.  But I feel it’s important that he doesn’t spend all day, every day, in omphaloskepsis, so I invited him to a book launch last night.

I’d hoped  that we could go for a coffee or something to eat after the launch, which was rather ambitious as Mac has often stated that he didn’t enjoy the last meal he ate in a restaurant in the early 1980s and has no intention of eating in one ever again, and of course we ended up in a pub instead – and of course it had to be a pub that he could remember drinking in, in the 1970s.

However, for once, the evening didn’t turn into an open grave, and I truly think that he may be a reformed character.

Two days in Dunkeld

We had intended to go south to visit Hadrian’s Wall, but the weather forecast was for severe gales in that region, so instead we spent two days walking in the Dunkeld area.

Our meal (guineafowl) in the Atholl Arms Hotel was super.

Aberlady Bay

This was the first walk for some time, due to my recent operation, but everything seems fine now, and yesterday we enjoyed a very windy six mile walk around Aberlady Bay and Gullane Point, ending up in the Old Aberlady Inn for a super ‘rosbif’  meal.

Harbour Green

When I walked out of the recovery room last week, the nurse said, “You certainly don’t look like you’ve just had a general anaesthetic!”  The next day I was merely slightly groggy, and the day after I felt a bit better, and so I expected to be up and running by Monday.  Then, on Tuesday, I was in a lot of pain.

So I read up about the operation, and armed with good information found out why days 4/5 are often the worst, and that it would take up to two weeks to be fully recovered.  It has been a slower process than I thought, and I haven’t been doing much at all for a week, apart from slowly working my way through Kissinger’s new book.

Yesterday I took a walk down the Prom, and saw how the new development at Harbour Green was progressing.

P.F. Sloan

I’ve been reading What’s Exactly the Matter with Me?: Memoirs of a Life in Music, by P.F. Sloan and S.E. Feinberg.  It’s about the life, times and music of P.F. Sloan.  Sloan wrote, produced, or co-wrote with Steve Barri, a large number of hit songs in the 60s and later.  They include Eve of Destruction, and A Must to Avoid (performed by Herman’s Hermits).  He lived for a while in Laurel Canyon, and thus knew and worked with a lot of the people I wrote about in this post.

P.F. Sloan is a bit of a strange character, and What’s Exactly the Matter with Me?  is a rather strange read – for example, at one point Sloan writes about meeting James Dean two years after his death.  But his take on the music industry and why and how groups wrote and released music in the 60s is riveting.

In the above video you can get a feel for the character of P.F. Sloan.