yonmei

12:46 pm: Royal Infirmary photos, taken yesterday
Yesterday was the first time I'd been there in daylight when visiting my dad.

( Royal Infirmary of Edinburgh )

Tags: edinburgh, nhs, photos

04:14 pm: Words
These are words whatho associates with me. (None of them are omelettes.) If you want words, say "Words!" in comments.

( China, soup, Edinburgh, activism, Mulcahy )

Tags: childhood nostalgia, edinburgh, m*a*s*h, meme, slow cooker, soup, travel

11:37 pm: A Gude Cause Maks A Strong Arm: Day Minus 13
Jules Gibb writes in the Gude Cause songbook that she wrote this song in 1986, to commemorate the opening of the original Pankhurst House as a women's resource: that it was inspired by a woman in her 90s in a local nursing home who had been a suffragette.

( Oh you never knew my Nana, she died four years ago. She lived in that old folks home in Moss Side, you know, I used to go on Sundays, sometimes took the kids, I was always so proud of what she did. )



Tags: edinburgh, gude cause, history, i am a feminist, poetry

03:21 am: A Gude Cause Maks A Strong Arm: Day Minus 15
This song was written for The Fall Out Marching Band, a London-based anti-nuclear band who joined the Walk For Life from Faslane to Greenham in 1983. My parents are both anti-nuclear campaigners for years before any of us were born or thought of: I was able to date my childhood memories of early anti-nuclear marches by the chants and protest songs.

Well, more or less, because I think I remember this one from 1982: with my mum, I went to Greenham to Embrace the Base in December that year.

Hey you Gen'rals in the military
What d'you need more atom bombs for?
You got enough bombs to kill us all 10 times
Yet still you keep on asking for more.

Take those toys away from the boys
Take those toys away from the boys
With those B Fifty Two and the F Sixteen and the S Twenty
Trident Trident Trident Pershing Pershing



Tags: edinburgh, gude cause, i am a feminist, poetry, war

11:25 am: A Gude Cause Maks A Strong Arm: Day Minus 16
The song under the cut was collectively composed by women in one of the first Scottish Women's Refuges in Edinburgh in 1977, during a power cut in which they all sat together in the candle-lit kitchen to keep warm. The song was first printed in My Song Is My Own: 100 Women's Songs first published in 1979 by Pluto Press.

( Oh the weans are greetin' and the sink is leakin' An' ye're staunin' in the pub wi' yer pint o' Tartan Special An' ye say ye're educatin' a' the younger generation Tae yer left wing politics and that's a fact. )





Tags: edinburgh, gude cause, i am a feminist, poetry

11:35 am: A Gude Cause Maks A Strong Arm: Day Minus 17
Mary Brooksbank, Dundee mill worker, socialist and union activist, poet and songwriter, went on strike for the first time at the age of 14 (1901 - my great-grandfather was on strike that year too!): she and other young women working in the jute mills marched and won a 15% pay rise.

We Are Out For Higher Wages, Mary Brooksbank (1897 - 1978)

We are out for higher wages,
As we have a right to do,
And we'll never be content
Till we get our ten percent -
For we have a right to live as well as you.

"I have never had any personal ambitions. I have but one: to make my contribution to destroy the capitalist system."





Tags: dundee, edinburgh, gude cause, i am a feminist, poetry

10:43 pm: What I did today
I went to Stockbridge Sunday Market via Eildon Street and Inverleith Park. I haven't walked down Eildon Street in years: my great-aunt used to live there. The new owners have planted a hedge in what was Aunt Margaret's garden, which lets them sit by the sunny wall sheltered from direct gaze by the street: it's a very specific and local hedge, because (I presume) they don't want to block one bedroom's view of the firework shows...

I went on through Inverleith Park, which has a pond on which several grown men were playing with toy boats. (There was a cluster of them by the bank, with their controls, looking very grim as if a toy boat was Serious Business. I suppose it might be, if the boat was attacked by a swan.)

There were rumours that Artisan Roast was going to be at the market, but they weren't, so I bought myself a plain and an almond croissant to eat in the office later (but I shall try to resist in future: they aren't making any reductions whatsoever given they're selling their pastries from a market stall, and good though their croissants are, they're not £3.30 worth of good...), and had an excellent lunch of Stir-fry Yaki Udon noodles from HaraJuku Kitchen. There is nowhere to sit down - the market is just a cluster of stalls along Portgower Road, which runs from Inverleith Park to Comely Bank - so I sat down on the pavement with my back against a sunny wall and managed my chopsticks quite nicely, considering I am way out of practice. (For years, I thought I didn't like "Chinese food": it was only after friends asked me to meals at Chinese restaurants that I discovered what I don't like is the state a stir-fried meal gets into when it's stored in little foil boxes for half an hour to an hour and then eaten steamy-soggy, greasy, and luke-warm.) I suppose I could have walked back to Inverleith Park without my lunch getting too cold: next time I might do that, if they're still there next time I go.

So then I walked back via the river path to find out what was going on at the Car Free day on the Shore.

What there was, actually, was even less than Stockbridge Sunday Market: a pen had been put up for a five-a-side football game that looked uncomfortably like a cage match (I suppose they really did need the cage wall on the side by the river, or they'd have lost their football sure as fate) and a set of stalls about energy conservation on the other side of the bridge. One of them was giving away free hessian ILoveLeith bags, so I got one, and another was letting you have a free glass of freshly juiced apple juice, if you cycled for about a minute or so per glass on an old bike that was set up to power the apple juicer.

...and then I went on to the office where I brewed myself up some coffee, ate my croissants, and watched Evita while I did data processing work for several hours. I took a break between five and six when I walked up to ScotMid and bought myself some tea, because the chip shop across the road was beginning to sing wistfully to me in its siren way, and when that happens, I should probably eat something more sensible.

But I got almost all the data processing done. It's got to be all done for the 24th. Yes, that's Thursday. I have too much to do, and if I got the bulk of it done on Sunday, I could half-watch half-listen-to a movie while I did it.

I first saw Evita when it was a musical in London in 1982: my drama class went on a three-day trip to London during which we saw an alarming amount of theatre, including Evita, The Cherry Orchard, and Barnum. Plus one play we got unexpected tickets for, because (probably) it was so awfully bad. I forget what else we saw. Of the three big evening plays, the one I remember vividly is Barnum: though the songs from Evita stuck with me longer. It was odd: I vaguely knew what the plot must be from having read more history of South America since than I had then, but I don't think I ever really followed the plot of the musical till I finally saw Madonna's film. I'm interested to find that the film doesn't name Che until the credits roll up the screen and you finally (if you didn't already know) find out who Antonio Banderas was playing. (The film does not pass the Bechdel Test. The only conversation two women have is between Evita and Peron's previous mistress, and since it's a conversation in which Evita is telling her she's getting dumped, it doesn't count.)

I also got an e-mail from my sister about next weekend: she's coming up for a visit.

Tags: eating some delicious food, edinburgh, films, just my life really, lunch, walks, work

08:47 am: A Gude Cause Maks A Strong Arm: Day Minus 20
Flora Drummond and Chrystal Macmillan - Chrystal and the General. Two Scottish feminists from very different social classes.

Macmillan was one of the first women to take a degree at Edinburgh University. At the time, the Scottish Universities were a constituency that voted for an MP to represent them in Parliament: the legislation said "all persons" who had taken a degree could vote. Macmillan argued that "all persons" must include women: the answer of all the courts who heard her argue the case - all the way to the House of Lords (she was also the first woman to argue a case before the Law Lords, too) was that at the time that legislation became law, only men could take degrees, therefore only men could be allowed to vote in the university elections. Macmillan was also a pacifist and didn't care for Emmeline Pankhurst's "autocratic" way of running the WSPU: she is remembered on various sites about "forgotten Scotland".

Drummond applied to be a postwoman, was turned down because of her height (she was five foot tall) and turned into one of the most ferocious campaigners for the vote: there's a famous photograph of her being arrested after a demonstration in Hyde Park, surrounded by four policemen, all of them much taller than her, all looking a little bit embarrassed, and Flora Drummond looking highly amused at the four big men putting her under arrest. (She used to point out, when talking about why she'd come to London and got involved with the suffragette movement there, that the rule about how tall a postie had to be was inherently discriminatory, since men tend to be taller than women.) She wasn't a pacifist - there's a memorial of her in Hansard for the ages, an MP getting up and snorting about this woman taking munitions girls to France, who had been involved in the publication of a suffragette magazine that printed LIES about MPs. She's supposed to have got her nickname of "General Drummond" on the 1908 march, when - because of her height and also I suspect because if you can, why not? she directed the march riding on a horse.

This song was printed by the London Society for Women's Suffrage for a day of "songs sung at the Albert Hall on Suffrage Saturday, June 13 1908."

( Now everybody's heard about The string of names and a' that Of certain dames who feel in doubt If they should vote and a' that. For a' that, and a' that, their arguments and a' that, We've better on the other side, and mean to win for a' that. )




Tags: edinburgh, gude cause, history, i am a feminist, poetry

08:59 am: A Gude Cause Maks A Strong Arm: Day Minus 21
In 1911, Ethel Smyth, even then a noted composer (though not yet Damed), wrote the music for the song under the lj-cut. (The lyrics were written by Cicely Hamilton, a successful playwright in the 1900s, a member of the Women's Social and Political Union and the Women's Freedom League, a founder member of the Actresses' Franchise League and the Women Writers Suffrage League, and the author of Marriage as a Trade.)

In 1912, after a coordinated campaign in which the windows of opponents of women's suffrage were smashed all over London, Ethel Smyth - and Emmeline Pankhurst and over a hundred other campaigners - had been arrested, tried, and sentenced to two months imprisonment in Holloway Prison. On one occasion, while the prisoners were taking their outdoor exercise, Ethel Smyth (she would then have been in her mid-fifties) appeared at a window overlooking the prison yard, and conducted their singing of the "The March of the Women" by waving her toothbrush.

In an archival recording of Ethel Smyth remembering the suffrage movement, she remembers this song being sung, as loud as massed women's voices could raise it, outside the walls of the prison when force feeding was taking place, so that the selected victims could hear it.

( Forcefeeding in 1912 and 2009 )

( Shout, shout, up with your song! Cry with the wind, for the dawn is breaking: March, march, swing you along, Wide blows our banner, and hope is waking. Song with this story, dreams with their glory, Lo! they call, and glad is their word! Loud and louder it swells, thunder of freedom, The voice of the Lord! )




Tags: edinburgh, gude cause, i am a feminist, poetry

10:43 pm: A Gude Cause Maks A Strong Arm: Day Minus 22
On 10th October 1909, there was a Suffragette Pride March from the Meadows to Leith, via Princes Street: Gude Cause.

On 10th October 2009, several thousand other people - including me - will be repeating the march - not all the way to Leith: we'll finish on Calton Hill.

(We did it a couple of years ago, from Princes Street to Calton Hill: a hundred or so women, the first core group of determined walking feminists.)

On the hill, two years ago, we sang "Bread and Roses": and tonight in the launch of the Gude Cause songbook, we sang it again. A slightly adapted version from James Oppenheim's lyrics written in 1912, inspired by a banner carried by some young women marching in Massachusetts during the textile workers strikes: "WE WANT BREAD AND WE WANT ROSES TOO".

( As we come marching, marching, In the beauty of the day, A million darkened kitchens, A thousand mill lofts gray Are touched with all the radiance That a sudden sun discloses, For the people here are singing: Bread and Roses! Bread and Roses! )




Tags: edinburgh, gude cause, i am a feminist, poetry

11:43 pm: Lunch with flowers, 4th August
I have been treating myself to an advance gloat about What To Do In Montreal: and one of the things to do is clearly to have lunch here on Tuesday.

Also, tomorrow morning I plan to go to a meeting to save a local primary school, and I'm slightly torn:

1. The building is terrible. Really, it's awful. It's pretty much guaranteed to be too-hot in summer, too-cold in winter. The roof is flat and probably leaks a lot.

2. But it's literally just across the street from the block of flats that is most of its catchment area. And they put in really excessive speed bumps to force cars to go real slow - because they used to take the road at speed as a short cut, be damned to the primary school.

3. The grounds are fine: there's plenty of grass and places to play.

4. The community centre wing gets used for all sorts of things. The fruit-and-veg co-op. Meetings. Film nights.

5. ...maybe what we ought to do is see if some mad funding body will actually come up with the money to build a new school?

But: in practice, what's going to happen is the council want the land on which the school sits, which is probably at this point a lot more valuable than the school. And they will sell it to a property developer. And they're making noises (have been for years) about how that block of flats over the road ought to be emptied out and demolished anyway.

Still. I'll go along to the meeting. Who knows?




Tags: edinburgh, montreal

05:39 pm: Friday, er Thursday five: what's your culture?
afrai describes this as sort of like IBARW for the indolent. Cool.

( List 5 things which are basic common knowledge in your culture, which people outside are unfamiliar with. This is not about obscurity, but something everyday to you, that others go bzuh? at. )

( What was the last book you read that was written by a person who is a different race than you? Do you seek out books written by people of other races? Why? Why not? )

( What did you eat at dinner last night? Would you call it ethnic food? Why? )

( Has your gender presentation changed over the last 5 years? Has this change/lack of change been a deliberate choice on your part? )

( Do you discuss race and racism in your insanejournal/blog or in person? Why have you made that choice? )

( Bonus question. Were you aware of International Blog Against Racism Week? Did you choose to participate in it? Why or why not? )

Tags: edinburgh, friday five, let's all be outcasts together, meme, scottish politics

06:47 pm: Today I saw Art and bought stuff.
Art was Paula Rego, who is utterly fabulous and if you like nursery rhymes or Jane Eyre or just really intense line drawings you should go see. I went with hfnuala and purplerabbits, though I didn't realise what her ljname was until reading about it on hfnuala's lj.

( afterwards )

Tags: doors open day, edinburgh, wine

04:01 pm: Cramond
Went out this morning to go to Cramond with Catmunk. We've been going there 20 years now: we used to build sandcastles and count coppers to figure out if we could afford one scone and a pot of tea for two, now we contemplate what a scone apiece will do to our thighs and share one.

Freezing, freezing wind. Came home to have lunch and haven't gone out again except to hang some stuffup on the washing-line.

Tags: edinburgh, scones

12:02 am: Posted using <a href
Plaisir du chocolat! (chocolat Mozart!) <3 <3 <3

Tags: chocolate, eating some delicious food, edinburgh, seeing friends

05:52 pm: Ouch, my feet.
I met up with hfnuala at Cafe Truvo at 9:30, but then had to go off and find a cash machine. blue_monday, brandnewgun, and brandnewgun's partner N. turned up just after 10.

( a long walk )

Tags: breakfast is a good meal, childhood nostalgia, edinburgh, imaginary friend meetup, walks