I feel like there's been a lot of dying going on lately. I suppose it's probably only been happening at the usual rate really, a hundred people dying every minute of every day, but all the same... four friends or relatives of friends have gone down in the space of two weeks, and that's enough to make Death a presence in my life in a way that it hasn't been in a long, long time.

( In Tarot, Death stands for boundaries, transitions, changes. Out with the old, in with the new... )

I’ve been having great fun lately customising USB sticks using epoxy putty.

(cross-posted from my sculpture blog, where it probably looks much prettier)

After four years of living in Scotland, I finally head up to Aberdeen to visit my old friend Becka, to escape from Edinburgh life for a while.
( Much stuff is done. Pictures are taken. )
On Friday I take the train back to Edinburgh.

The Kolkata Metro was the first underground railway system in India, opening in 1984. It has just one line, running from Dum Dum in the north to Tollygunge in the south, but this is expected to be extended beyond Tollygunge by some time around 2010, and a new east-to-west line, connecting to Howrah - the city's main national rail station - has been approved by the central government.

We finally get to ride on it when we get a day to ourselves to be tourists. As we wait in a longish but extremely efficient line to buy amazingly cheap tickets (6 rupees to get half-way across town - that's less than 8 pence), I read the regulations prominently posted on a pillar and I am disturbed to note that the authorities have felt the need to specifically prohibit the carrying of dead bodies on the underground system.

Our train arrives soon after we get there, though it takes a while to leave, ours being the first stop on the line. The train is noticeably wider and taller than one on London's Tube (and hence *much* bigger than one on the Glasgow Metro), with much less curved walls, making it possible even for someone my height to stand upright by the doors. I have to do this on our return journey during the afternoon rush hour, and find it means that even when the train packs a lot more people than one of London's rush-hour Tube trains, it is far more comfortable to stand up in.

What is more, the whole system has air conditioning and the train's windows stay open, making it amazingly - embarrassingly - much cooler than the Tube during Britain's relatively feeble Summer. All in all the ride is vastly more comfortable than the average crowded Tube ride, the only down-side on the comfort front being that rather than individual cushioned seats, each side of the train has a sort of bench running down it. We immediately sit down when we first board a train, and by the time it pulls out it already seems unfeasibly packed. It is not uncomfortable, though, and I can appreciate the efficiency advantage.

The trains and to a lesser extent the stations both tend towards the grey, and the lighting has that very faintly blueish, curiously colour-draining quality which seems oddly characteristic of public interiors in Kolkata. I don't know if the fluorescent lighting uses a different gas here, or if it's all the dust, or just the contrast with a city which is otherwise so colourful, but it seems quite striking to me - especially when I think of the 70s-tinted orangey-yellow light of Glasgow's underground trains. Many of the stations have attractive decorations along the platforms, so for instance the two stations named after Bengal's national poet Rabinbdranath Tagore feature his illustrations and poems along their walls. At our destination, Park Street, there is a little museum display at the side of the platform, and the tunnels leading us to the surface are adorned with square spirals every few feet.

As we leave the train in streams of dozens, a cheerful tune starts to play, and it seems as if the whole thing has been carefully choreographed like a scene from a transport montage, but it turns out it's an advert playing on one of the televisions dotted along the platform. I'm intrigued, because I've never seen TVs on a train system; P puts it down to the national obsession with cricket.

We are invited to an exhibition about Indian film legend Raj Kapoor, because the organiser is a friend of P and her mother's. It opens a season of his films showing at the cinema here.

I get a slightly surreal feeling as soon as we enter, brought on mainly by the intensely bright lights that shine from stands at various points on the way in. It only occurs to me later, as we are leaving, that they are there to illuminate passing celebrities for the sake of photographs and TV cameras. On the way in, we pass by an ongoing press conference and go straight into the main gallery room.

The exhibition is small but well put together, with many beautiful stills and publicity shots from Raj Kapoor's films together with original props and costumes, censors' certificates and so on. Though he was an enormously popular actor and film-maker his movies were often controversial; we see here a shocking on-screen kiss from the 1970s, an obviously sexy woman in sheer top inside a temple, a scene of breast-feeding. Largely ignorant myself, I learn a lot from all this, and from P's additional explanations.

She points out a few quite big names from the Bengali film industry, and our host introduces us to a nonplussed Randhir Kapoor, the also-famous son of the man himself, as the daughter of actress Suchita Ray Chaudhury and her husband. He seems disappointingly unmoved by her exaggerated claim that I'm a big Raj Kapoor fan and know all the songs.

As I tell a TV interviewer who calls me over after a couple of minutes with P, I do actually know the refrain of one song from the one Raj Kapoor film I've seen most of - Mera Joota Hai Japani, from the excellent Shree 420. They get me to sing it for the camera, and I totally fluff the third line. It's terrible.

'But my red Russian hat' indeed.

We go for a walk around mababa's very nice Golf Green flat - not heading anywhere in particular, just exploring. Surprisingly close by we reach slums, with tiny brick buildings huddled close together all around the shore of a large pond, cycle-rickshaws in long lines along the adjacent street. I stop to take a photograph over the water, through a length of huge concrete pipe, and the kids sitting on the next pipe along get very excited, crying 'camera!' and going on in rapid Bengali - while another three or four kids are scrambling to join them I get on with taking the picture I'd stopped for, then I take theirs as they grin and wave. They seem very pleased.

As we are setting off again another group of small children spot the camera and immediately clamour for their photograph to be taken too, posing together with great gusto - their cycle-rickshaw risks escaping in all the commotion. I like it when actively want me to take street photos; I'm often too shy to ask. Everyone is very friendly, several people calling out 'Hello!' - I am plainly a curiosity, but apparently not an unwelcome one.

Down the road we reach another, much cleaner and better-maintained pond. It is fenced all around with razor wire to keep out the poor, but gratifyingly it is full of people who have hopped over the gates regardless. Three young men see us wondering how to get in, and direct us to the gate a little further on. It is locked though, and P is in a dress, so we leave it.

Just around the corner the kids with the cycle-rickshaw catch up, and stop us again. One of them jumps down, places his hands on his hips and grills me in quite good English - assertively, but not in a hostile way. Where am I from? I tell them I'm from Edinburgh, in Britain, but it's impossible to tell how much he understands. I suspect his English, however well-pronounced, may not stretch far beyond the few questions he asks us. What am I doing here? P explains in Bengali that I'm her husband, and he seems quite wrong-footed by this.

We keep on heading in the direction of the nearby cemetery, down a long street with next to no shade. It is not that hot, really - I've had much hotter days in Britain, let alone here - but the intense humidity makes it far harder to take. By the time we reach the cemetery gates I'm starting to feel slightly faint, and wondering if we should have turned back long ago. To our relief the cemetery is open, and after a few questions the guard waves us in.

There is nobody else inside - nobody alive and human, anyway. It is profoundly peaceful, overgrown enough but with clear, grassy paths. Nowhere here has felt so distant from the crowding bustle of human existence. In the shade of a big banyan tree which I can barely resist climbing, there are two benches and a very welcome water-pump. The water isn't safe to drink of course, at least not for foreigners, but cooling down by wetting my limbs and face allows me to feel human again. We rest on the benches and wait for another big cloud to give us respite from the sun.

The graveyard is busy with other forms of life. Crows chase chipmunks, their sworn enemies, around trees, up and down. We see mynah birds, a flock of tiny, sparrow-like birds, a bright yellow one something like a budgie, and a pair of beautiful red-winged birds - perhaps kites? - which look something like a cross between crows and eagles and act like they're in love.

We leave the cemetery again by its only entrance, and decide to try following the roads around its other edge, hoping to find more shelter. These neighbourhoods are relatively prosperous, and it shows in their quietness, the bars over their windows, the manned parking spaces beneath each building. It's a short walk back to the slums though, and this time we take a short-cut right through them.

Again we are conscious of how much we stick out in this crowd, but nobody seems upset by our presence, and (to my mother-in-law's evident surprise when we tell her later) nobody asks us for money, or for anything more than a photograph. I am fascinated - not leeringly, I hope - by this glimpse into a lifestyle which is usually kept at such a distance from the affluent minority I generally interact with. Amazingly elaborate collections of wires deliver electricity to the masses, presumably illicitly. Some of the huts are made of wood or wicker, woven together, but most are built of bare bricks. In the narrow alleys between rows of huts, goats nibble leaves while kids and clothes are washed with buckets.

We are obviously greatly intriguing especially to the children, and when P asks one if we can get through the way we are going, we start to accumulate a great helpful crowd, showing the way ahead. They seem pleased by their collective mission, leading us quickly down the winding path through their home. We thank them all as we emerge at last just a few metres away from our marble-floored, blissfully air-conditioned flat. I hadn't even noticed these slums were here. I wonder if I will ever get used to this sort of juxtaposition.

The first night we are here, we eventually manage to convince P's parents to let us go for a walk during a respite in the rain. I am surprised and disappointed to find that it has actually stopped raining entirely, the point of the walk being to get out in it, but it doesn't last. After we've been walking for about ten minutes a few drops land on us, and I notice that a few feet to our right it is now pouring down. On our left it is still almost totally dry, but when we turn down the street that way it catches up with us in a minute or two, and soon we are walking through the most intense downpour of my life.

Much of the pavement is already flooded, and the water rises quickly. P's father has given me his very good raincoat, and I only get at all wet on my top half because I tip my head back for the rain to wash over me, the pelting water refreshing me like nothing else. My lower half, on the other hand, is soaked through in seconds and soon I am dragging an amazing amount of extra weight along with me. My shoes really, really aren't meant for this sort of weather, and they'll barely be usable after this ordeal; my own raincoat, which P is wearing, seems to have lost its waterproofing, and she is soaked through to the skin with little obstruction. I don't think she minds at all though, despite her mother's horror on our return.

The rain hardly lets up for a moment the next day, and I begin to understand why people sometimes go a bit mad in monsoon season. The exhiliration of the skyfall doesn't fade entirely, but with my ruined shoes, my clothes all wet and not the slightest chance of being able to make it to a shop and buy more, or indeed to go anywhere at all, I begin to feel detached from it, and a little troubled by the thick, murky humidity of the air and the constant grey darkness of the outside world.

That night is the world Twenty20 cricket final, India versus Pakistan, and though I've never entirely got cricket I can't help but be caught up in the excitement, and I am very pleased to be here for it. My head aches too much for me to catch the entire match, despite the much shorter running time of this new format - just a few hours! - but I see enough of it to get a feeling for the match, and when I'm out of the room I can follow much of the action just by listening to the whoops and wailing of the dozens of other people watching the match in earshot. I make it back into the room with the TV for the powerfully tense, close-run climax. Pakistan only needs another twelve runs to win! Eleven! The pressure is showing on the batsman's face, but he knocks it for six! Is this the end for India? His eyes twitch, fists and teeth are clenched in tens of millions of homes around the world. I wish I'd joined baba in a glass of whisky while I had the chance. He knocks it high and far, backwards, straight into the hands of a waiting Indian fielder. It's all over!

I open the window just to hear more of the cheering of the neighbours, and notice for the first time that the road has really become a river, flowing by maybe three feet deep. That doesn't stop a crowd of truly loud revellers wading their way down the street chanting 'INDIA!' and yelling enthusiastic slogans in Bengali. Fireworks go off around the city, barely distinguishable by their timbre from the thunder which has kept rumbling all through the match.

The Kolkata we walk into from the airport this time looks nothing like the one I remember from my first impressions on the previous trip.

Where last time visibility was constrained by fog, dust and the darkness of the pre-dawn, today it is already more-or-less light out, and only the amazing rain keeps us from seeing far.

What rain it is! I had always longed to see a monsoon in Kolkata, and the elephant weather-gods seem to have laid one on specially for me – this borsha began yesterday morning, and already the streets are flooded. I have only seen rain like this two or three times in my life, and British rain never has this staying power. My only point of reference for the flooding is way back in my childhood, crossing the causeway to Mersea Island at high tide, mighty wings of water thrown up about us as we slosh through.

The dusty, deserted streets of my previous arrival here have been washed clean, and we pass many people on our way through. Everyone wears sandals, and most people – including one cyclist – carry umbrellas. In cycle-rickshaws, passengers hide from the driving rain beneath sheets of rough plastic; no such luxury for their drivers.

The slowly building prosperity of the city is noticeable, too – we swish beneath new flyovers and past long rows of elaborate, sponsored topiary, but I don’t think the shanty-town is getting any smaller or more secure. I wonder how the people in handmade wood-and-plastic huts like these cope with this kind of rain…

I am surprised by the tangibility of Manchester’s city-feel, a palpable shift in the texture of existence as we step through the train station. It feels like I’d expect it to, sort of hard-edged and slouchingly alert.

Its looks come as more of a surprise, and I realise how little notion I had of what this city would look like: Full of pretty red-brick buildings like Victorian fire stations, as it turns out, with sweeping curves of glass and concrete radiating from the train station. There is an incongruity to everything, a glaring ‘That’ll Do’ attitude to the fitting together of architectures.

It strikes me that perhaps much of the difference between the feelings of different cities can be accounted for by which bits of which decades have got lodged, and continued to resonate there long after they’ve slipped from view in the rest of the world. I’m intrigued by how much of the Eighties still seems to linger here; not the plasticky pop-and-leg-warmers Eighties people seem most nostalgic about, but the slightly grimy making-do-in-spite-of-the-Tories Eighties that I mostly remember living in. We gaze into a bookshop with a train-set running in the window, advertising the mini-shop upstairs which still sells Hornby model kits and parts. The set is decorated with cows in all sorts of unlikely locations, which makes me think of Kolkata, but the fact that many of the cows are parachuting makes it seem rather less like an Indian city scene.

Very pleasingly, free buses shuttle around the city centre, and we take one two stops down the road to get to the coach station. Next to us a very small South Asian boy with enormous eyes practises his smile on us enthusiastically. He hasn’t quite got the hang of it yet, but the message gets through.

As we locate our coach stop so we know where we’re going, the heavens opan and by the time we jog to a nearby café it is torrential. It only gets harder as we munch on some deli-ish food and refuel on fresh juice, so that by the time we leave there is nothing we can do to keep our selves and our bags from being soaked through on the short run back to the overcrowded bus shelter.

I finally took a box of my old ceramic clay creations up to Edinburgh, from my parents' place in London where they've mostly just been clutter for the last few years.

I still miss working with actual clay, very much sometimes. Having these guys up here reminds me how much I enjoy it, and just how different it is from polymer clay or epoxy putty. I really must sort out some way of making and firing sculptures up here, whether the Edinburgh Sculpture Workshop (which didn't quite work out for me when I joined it a couple of years ago) or somewhere else entirely. There are probably places I could go in Glasgow, or even Paisley, aren't there?

I'm going to try selling some of these, I think; see if people are willing to pay for them something like as much they're worth to me. That varies enormously, if anyone's wondering - some of these are nowhere near my best work and I'd let them go for a tenner or less. My very favourites, on the other hand, are not going to be leaving my hands for less than about a hundred quid.

On another related note, I have a box of unfired sculptures in London, left over from the time my local craft centre had to shut down about four years ago. Many of them are slightly broken, but they shouldn't be too hard to repair. However, I would need a one-off use of a kiln and I still have no idea how to arrange such a thing. Anyone got any suggestions?

There are some more new photos of old ceramic sculptures here (also some old ones).

We get all clothed in Lincoln green, don our Robin Hood hats and concealed chains, and run through our plan of action a few times - practising our high-speed nonchalant strolling, rapid unlocking and locking action, what to do if the police grab whoever you thought you were going to lock onto, and so on. We don't have as much time as we'd have liked, but we're feeling competent enough.

Arriving safely at the secret drop-off point, our merry band makes its way through the woods, stooping to keep out of view of the cameras that line the perimeter fences, and pondering whether wearing hats like that is ever really practical for forest-based outlaws.

We emerge from the trees right by the roundabout, and quickly make our way over - the strolling idea is soon abandoned as it becomes clear the police sitting in a car across the road have clocked us. There is a blur of action as we get across to the turning in to the North Gate of the base, police loudly radioing in behind us.

We smartly sit down and commence locking on before the police - only two of them, to our nine - can seize any of our number. We don't quite get close enough to the centre to completely block traffic both ways, but at least one side is neatly obstructed, and the other suffers some disruption. We could probably shuffle into a better position if we had planned for this in advance, but it's hard to plan every detail.

With padlocks, D-locks and arms all locked together, even though we are not locked onto anything else, the police are effectively prevented from dragging anyone off. What is more, for whatever reason, in spite of six months of more-or-less daily blockading, the police on hand obviously don't have the equipment to cut us loose, and it is only after maybe twenty minutes that the necessary backup even arrives.

We sit or lie around and sing songs in the sunshine while we wait for the inevitable. Most of us don't really know enough political songs though, let alone specifically anti-nuclear ones, and we soon lapse into random campfire favourites. This generally keeps us and the police quite entertained, as they laboriously set up big blue shields around us. They claim these are for health and safety reasons (what if a link of chain were to ping off and hit a legal observer?) but we don't altogether believe them; it seems more likely that they are mainly there to prevent us getting publicity shots of police taking bolt-cutters to the chains around people's necks, and so on. Charmingly, the supports on the inside of these barriers form perfect saltires.

We get a small sampling of the opinions of random drivers-by; one guy in a truck sticks two fingers up at us, a woman in a car with a small girl honks, waves and gives us a big thumbs-up; two cars with grinning inhabitants slow down on the roundabout to take photos.

I would estimate that it takes the police another twenty-five minutes to finish erecting the barriers, despite their superficially neat design, and only then do they bring out the cutters and start making their way through our chains. They don't even notice that one of us is only attached to the others by interlocked arms until it is too late. We are there for perhaps an hour and a half before the barriers come down; all in all, it is striking that attaching only to one another, with quite flimsy chains, creates quite such an effective obstruction. Still, lessons are learned, and we come away with various good ideas for future blockaders...

Pictures here.

I am the first to be successfully arrested, somewhat annoyingly. Still, someone has to be I suppose, and I think they just cut free and pulled away the nearest person. They drag me to the police minibus and ask me to wear a seatbelt; I sit there and take some pictures with my phone, send one to diotina with an update on my situation, listen to people still singing while I wait for the police to work their way through the others. It is a gratifyingly time-consuming process. The sun is shining, and apart from one or two really stubbornly grumpy policemen everyone is in good spirits.

When most of us have made it to the van, I suddenly notice a big evidence bag full of 'Daim' - tiny little Dime-bar sweets - just sitting in my lap. This is puzzling, as I certainly didn't put them there and I can't imagine how anyone else could have either. I figure they must be a present from the gods of peaceful protest, and quickly distribute some between my comrades before one of the policemen notices, and rather bashfully confiscates the bag.

When almost everyone has piled in, Oli and I are abruptly removed again and taken to a tiny little unpadded cage in the back of a smaller police van. This is uncomfortable, but not much more so than sitting in the road chained to other protestors, or even sitting on logs around a camp fire really. I am most annoyed that it is too cramped for me to keep my Robin Hood hat on.

At the station we are held firmly by the arm while we spend a surprisingly long time waiting in a corridor, beside a door from which occasional screams and other distressed sounds emerge. We chat with the officers holding our arms, about protest, politics, war and so on. They are fairly friendly and thoughtful. The older one, holding me, has obviously given the issues some thought, at least; he understands why we're protesting, but while he agrees the world would be a better place without nuclear missiles he still thinks the fact that we have nukes makes us safer (even if we should never use them), on the grounds that it scares off countries who might otherwise be tempted to use them (or similar tactics) against us. I talk about our disarmament obligations under the Nuclear Non-Proliferation treaty, and the fact that the most serious threats we seem to be facing lately seem to either not be countries, in which case we wouldn't know who to nuke anyway; or to be countries run be dictatorial nutcases, in which case it would hardly be fair to nuke their populations. I don't think he is entirely convinced, but he can see both sides of the argument.

The other guy, Oli's policeman, looks to be in his early twenties. I don't think he has ever given any of this stuff much thought. He just likes being a policeman. He glances at Oli's book, Kerouac's Dharma Bums, and says it looks like it'd be to deep for him; Oli says he doubts that, but I don't think he believes him.

Finally we are led in, our coats and phones are taken away, and I find Jesse already sitting in a cell. He explains that all the screaming was from some extremely drunk and rowdy local, who had to be restrained because he was lashing out. My general impression is that this is what the police in this part of the country spend most of their time dealing with, and that for most of them the stream of polite, peaceful protestors who pass through provide a welcome respite. The contrast with most of the police I've encountered at protests in London is remarkable.

As paraphrased from Professor John Atkinson at a thesis-writing workshop
(Picture Brian Blessed playing Michael Caine)

Blocks of granite,
Blocks of text
Building into a thesis.
Strategies for laying down.
Strategies for tearing up and laying back around
That brand new gas main.
Build a space to fill
With your results
So when you get them in
There's structure waiting.
Two things are most important
That we’ll learn:
Summarising big ideas in one page,
And knowing what to do
When things go tits up.
Start by sketching,
Building up a shopping list
Then slot the pieces in
A standard structure

Tell the story of success
How do you tell that story?
Twenty minutes can become an hour
But nothing never becomes anything.
Visit the thesis every day
Even if only for brainless work.
Write in one-hundred-word paragraphs
Three of them make up a page.
Simple language helps things
Keep on moving.
Adjectives and adverbs
Just cause problems.
Explaining every little thing is good.
Take a look at other people's theses.
Don’t bog yourself down
With unpleasant duties.

'I won't go into Wittgenstein today. I like to go into Wittgenstein, particularly when there’s malt whisky involved.'

diotina and I are moving in with Suz and babydyke_82 towards the end of the month, to a lovely flat in the West End. It's quite exciting.

In other news, if anyone's interested, I've just updated my other blog, Oolong's Long Oo, with a review of the wonderful Cloudspotter's Guide. I've also syndicated it as longoo, and also added an Email Subscription thingy thanks to a service called FeedBlitz, which seems quite cool.

The mad wind blows on.

Still no sign of winter in the normal sense. Next to no frost, let alone snow - just months of endless gales.

Clouds scud by like they have a date they just mustn't miss; rubbish careens through the streets, dancing free while the city's giant wheelie bins roar their anguish to the skies.

At night the wind resonates in a thousand screaming nooks on every street, bangs and rattles a hundred windows. This town is being played like a vast, ill-tuned instrument.

Again I'm up at four a.m., and I can't even tell if I'm an insomniac or just a light sleeper.

For those of you who haven't been following her journal, diotina's lovely short film, Addition, has qualified as one of five finalist in the Scottish region of the BAFTA 60 Seconds of Fame competition! If she's voted as the best in Scotland, she gets to go to the BAFTA ceremony where the film will be shown on a big screen... so go vote if you haven't already! As I understand it ('cast your vote by the following methods: voting online on www.60secondsoffame.co.uk and/or phone vote') you're allowed to vote once online and once by phone (09018271061) which costs 10p from a BT line.

The film is also going to be shown on BBC News Scotland some time this week, apparently, but we don't know when.

In other, much less exciting news, thanks to the excellent aitkendrum I have a new/old desktop computer incorporating a motherboard I already had in a nice, shiny box with a working power supply, which is great; both of us now have non-clunky computers to work on. Also I finally got the oven here fixed, so I can start baking my critters again.