Other countries

I have started to write this a couple of times this morning, having a few problems.

The whole Kavanaugh thing has knocked me a little. Ah well.

In other news, R has a contract in Edinburgh. He'll be working there 3 days a week.

Edinburgh is impressive enough, if you like Regency meets Medieval. From memory, it looks better soot streaked or in the rain; by better, I mean more likely to inspire you with cult-in-the-city style nightmares. It's a pretty place, much more so than Glasgow, but I prefer Glasgow, more heart in it. I will probably be going up for a few weekends before the contract ends.

I studied my Masters at Edinburgh, and swear to god I basically spent a whole year drunk, not even through preference. Our Reader would start the morning's lecture with two bottles of some terrible brew of his own making, force us to drink it in his lessons, then lead us all to the local pub which I think was the Pear Tree or the Pear and Partridge, something like that, and then get us all totally smashed until we came home. It's a miracle I finished the course with my liver, let alone a pass. This was also the height of the Edinburgh heroin problem, where frankly you couldn't pass a doorway without someone asking if you wanted a score. I was a very fortunate girl considering the dangerous places I went to, the appalling characters I met. My lifelong needle phobia stood me in good stead, I was never drunk enough, never desperate enough, to be tempted.

Of course, everything is much brighter and cleaner now. It will be interesting to see it again.

If I go up to Scotland, staying in a city is only a part of what I want to do. Out, out into the land! So beautiful, if it isn't raining... Of course, it's always raining. And it's an interesting point in time for a Scottish job to turn up, because I want to get to the Mitchell Library and check out the Stirling Council old archives. The joke however is that an awful lot of recently uncovered stuff re the McLachlans has been moved from Stirling to Edinburgh, so I suppose the city would be in the right place to find family stuff...

But I have an awful lot of other work that requires my attention.

Today, into town. I just need to stir my stumps and lift my mood.

Poison

So I unblocked my brother on FB a while back without really knowing why. I guess I miss him or rather I miss the good him. Didn't check his page, didn't contact him... A mutual friend made a comment about Kavanaugh, so Bro went off on one of his misogynistic rants, and I replied to that friend.

Bro could see the comment, so whoop-dee-skip, he's instantly up for a fight, and is privately messaging me as well.

When his opener was ' You unblocked me? Who died?' and my answer was almost 'Not you unfortunately,' I realise I may be further from forgiveness than I thought. So I didn't answer at all.

Then last night I had a dream.

I was with a group of friends planning to visit a quite obscure but very beautiful part of England, people talking about extraordinary views. One friend in particular is someone I'm close to in real life, renowned for her level headedness and honesty. We did a bit of shopping, pretty shower curtains (why?) and then got back to my room, where there were two circular mosquito killing machines pouring out some kind of pesticide vapour into the air, but they were broken, and the stuff was everywhere, toxic, choking. One of the machines was on fire; it had a little message on it saying 'You are in danger.'

My honest friend dashed away out of the room into the air outside. I don't remember if I followed her or how we fixed it, but somehow it was all OK; even so I was yelling and moaning in my sleep, waking myself and my husband up.

Things calmed down. On of our cats insisted on sleeping on my pillow with me, something he has never done before. I woke up again to find poor puss puking down the side of the bed. All clean now, and Puss is fine, but a very rough night.

If dreams are a message from the subconscious then I think mine is just giving me a huge warning to stay away from Bro. It may not be his fault, it may be that my anger is much more extreme than I recognise. I can't think of any other poisonous situations in my life.

Sometimes the answer is just to get out of the room.