HARD TO FIND

It struck me late on, well into my career, that you need to team up with people who want success as much as you do. In this sense I routinely made bad judgements in my choices of who to work with. Not that the insight necessarily helps. It’s still difficult to find truly committed people. There are opportunists and no end of passengers. It will be a different day indeed when I come across someone where the goal is as important to them as it is to me.

ALAN BENNETT

Bennet in ‘An Englishman Abroad’ talks about irony. He says that, “the British are conceived in irony. It’s inescapable. It washes away guilt and purpose and responsibility. It’s like joking but not joking, caring but not caring, serious but not serious. We have an inordinate need of irony that both protects and imprisons us.” What Bennett says here about the Brits you could multiply several-fold and arrive at the Scots.

NEED

People sometimes make their need for others a moral matter, like a matter of some great integrity, verging on a higher purpose, when all the time it is just a dependency being indulged, something I’d say to be overcome. You can reach a point where such relationships merely contaminate. I don’t think it has to be that way but mostly it is.

PREFERENCE

I seem to prefer fusions. In music I like crossovers where several blends come together in something new. This is better for me than anything roots or folky or so called authentic. Same with sexual attraction. I find mixed race more attractive than any kind of supposed racial purity. In more abstract terms, I’m more disposed to synthesis than analysis.

SYNCHRONICITY: A MENTAL MANOEUVRE

I notice, strangely, that what’s happening externally, in front of my eyes so to speak, often mirrors where my thoughts have been in previous hours days or weeks as if prescient. Yet the events taking place are likely to have no particular relation to my actual life, only the inner one. You could analyse this several different ways each as interesting as the other. Each would be as unsatisfying as the other. Hardly worth the bother. Just some kinda mental manoeuvre that doesn’t seem to do much.

PRIMAL

Sometimes I think that perhaps I just don’t have that primal aspect - that quality, that anarchic impulse, the nihilistic, self-destructive tendency that some creatives exhibit. My defining factor seems more transcendent, ethereal in a way, not rooted enough in the soil. In the past I always seemed to be operating on a lateral plane, not actual enough. Does that rule me out as a contributor? How necessary is the primal factor?

SEDUCTION

When it comes to sexual seduction it takes more than the mere biology for me. For me to get interested and motivated there has to be something of romance, drama and circumstance for it to work. Moreover there has to be some kind of motion on the part of the woman besides idle beauty.

ELAINE STRITCH QUOTE

“It’s not the work, it’s the stairs.”

EDWYN COLLINS QUOTE

Talking about the musicians and music scene around Scotland in the 1980s Collins described what he saw as “socialist rhetoric with a Thatcherite mentality”. I couldn’t have said it better.