Mr T was running a 1Ok up at Drumlanrig today, and the Ts did the 3k fun run. Of course, you have to ask how running 3 kilometres could possibly be fun, but don't tell them that.

I went for a gentle amble with the dog, and look what I found.

...with Thomas Shelby.


Utterly not with Cillian Murphy, who plays him, I must make clear.

Peaky Blinders. If you haven't been watching it, get on iPlayer right now before the final episode next week.

Betting, Protection, Communism, Gypsies, Veterans, Trauma, IRA, Opium, Significant Violence and Sam Neill doing an Ian Paisley accent. There is nothing not to love.

Or lots of poems in what I suspect to be the world's largest online literary magazine, Zest.
Issue 2 is all about evolution, so obviously I have a couple of poems in it. It's also incredibly exciting watching it load.
The whopping great thing is here: Zest Literary Journal

And Titus enjoyed a little light reading before he dropped off.

Better get to WagTongues then. Full details here:
http://thefankle.net/about/wagtongues-at-wigtown/

Brilliant photo above courtesy of La Fox.

Callander was great, Abbotsford fantastic, posts will follow. But in the meantime, on the Environmental Arts Festival Facebook page, they have placed the photographs taken by the festival photographers, Kim Ayers and Colin Hattersley.

All stunning, but really do check out numbers 143 onwards.

They are here:
https://www.facebook.com/EAFScotland#!/media/set/?set=a.445189912261897.1073741849.360241664090056&type=1

And the really top notch news is that Marion McCready, of Poetry in Progress, has won the Melita Hume Poetry Prize with her first collection, Tree Language. It will be in print, from Eyewear Publishing, in 2014
How fabulous is that! Full details, including the judge's comments on the collection, here: http://sorlily.blogspot.co.uk/

Wonder of wonders, the Green Tea House was there! With a full menu! (Festival food very important, I always feel, and you can't get much better than Catherine Braid.)

Before scoffing, however, we took in The Fall and Rise of the Grey Mare's Tail by James Winnett. T1 and 2 were thrilled by this (engineering! There's engineering here!) but after an initial frisson on my part I was left wondering. It was no Fontana dei Quattro Fiumi, layered with meaning, it just... was. I don't know what it was saying to me.

This is what it was meant to be saying:

"The work refers back to eighteenth century Scotland when a radical shift occured int the popular perception of Highland landscapes, transforming them from hostile wildernesses to be avoided to awe-inspiring destinations to be experienced. Artists were at the centre of this process, developing an essential romantic iconography of which dramatic waterfalls played a key role. The fountain too has long been a focal point for great landscaped gardens as a tool for taming, containing and re-presenting nature. In this way, the fountain encourages a reconsideration of the very nature of nature"

The work itself: "A jet of white water is forced skyward from a gravity-fed fountain placed downstream of a dramatic highland waterfall. Powered entirely by the immense natural energy of water, the intervention has been developed to explore a number of related themes from debates on sustainability and energy use to questions of landscape identity and representation."

Source, once again, the EAFScotland brochure. Now, the Grand Cascade at the Peterhof, say, represents and awful lot of things but probably the least of these is the taming of nature. It's show; glorification, display, diversion, delight. And copied from Versailles, for fairly obvious Peter the Great-type reasons.

By now I was suspecting I was crap at Environmental Art. However, I did meet James Winnett in the car park, where he was selling really rather lovely prints of the installation, created by taking a photograph of it and then finding matching sections of original engravings to form a composite image of The Rise and Fall which looked liked an eighteenth centry engraving. T2 rather perceptively asked how he got an image of the upward fountain bit, and James said, " I drew that bit.".  Seemed like a lovely guy, and you can find out all about him here, and see the print: http://www.axisweb.org/seCVPG.aspx?ARTISTID=13591
I bought a copy of the print too.



Then back down the hill for excellent refreshements, and finally the absolute best thing of the day, The Dark Star Lounge, which was a blacked-out tent in which appeared, at 7.30pm, a magician who also happened to be the Astronomer Royal of Scotland. An astonomy lecture with tricks! What more, truly, could you ask for?

Professor John Brown was an unhurried, easy-going, excellent communicator and entertainer, and the whole thing just had that 'feel' that says 'right'. An absolute star turn.