This film is an artistic representation of a visit to the house that John Buchan was born in. Peter and Sian visited 20 York Place, Perth on Saturday 16th September 2017.
Memory hold-the-door from omphalos
Music credit: Scott Walker Revisited and the BBC Proms
The maverick sociologist, Patrick Geddes, was of the view that in terms of education there needed to be a synthesis of all new knowledge and that such knowledge needed to be based on experience as much as theory.
In this short film the conversation is taken from a BBC Radio Scotland broadcast, 13th September 2017.
A novelty in interviews from omphalos
The music tack is “The Fresh Monday” by Dexter Britain (which is under common license)
The Antiquary: “is preoccupied on every level by the relation between past and present.”
Mary Midgley: “These doctrines are often bizarrely over-confident and over-simple”
George Orwell in Why I Write: “… one can write nothing readable unless one constantly struggles to efface one’s own personality”
Raymond Tallis in Summers of Discontent “There are several things to be noted about emotions. The first is they fill the world with meaning”
Kenneth Calman in Makars and Mediciners: “It is perhaps here that the role of literature and the arts generally can have an advantage, by the author exposing poor health choices and behaviour patterns, in ways which are more powerful and effective than that of the medical teacher or professor. The writer’s imagination and expression can change things. The word can be powerful.”
Nathan Filer in The Shock of the Fall: “I think that’s what I am doing now. I am writing myself into my own story and I am telling it from within”
Andrew Greig: “He knows fankle from bourach.”
Raymond Tallis in Defence of Wonder “When we are in love we see the ordinary things about another person for what they are: not in the slightest bit ordinary.”
Gilbert K. Chesterton: “The world will never starve for want of wonders; but only for want of wonder”
“She makes sunlight dim” (Sian)
Thomas Tranströmer to his lifelong friend Robert Bly: “In this climate it`s all or nothing. Anybody not 100% for is “self-evidently” 100% against. Have I given you a little picture of the climate? All you can do is Follow your own crooked conscience, wait for the moment of truth and hope you won’t need to be ashamed one day of how you lived through these years.”
Raymond Tallis: “[Philosophy is a return] into that nearest, which we invariably rush past, which surprises us anew each time we get sight of it”
Tomas Tranströmer: “Balansnummer is ‘balancing act.’ The poem is partly a protest-poem against the prevailing mood in Swedish intellectual life. What I say is that finding the truth, being honest etc. is a difficult individualistic act of balance, you have to put off the rhetoric, all slogans and moustaches and prejudices and . . .”
Stephen Bann, MIDWAY: Letters from Ian Hamilton Finlay: “I recall saying once to Finlay that the special feature of the letter as a literary genre was that one never went back on the first draft to produce a fair copy.”
Nathan Filer in The shock of the Fall: “I have approximately 7.4 x 1027 atoms in my body”
Ian Hamilton Finlay: “Sometimes my wee best seems just not good enough”
Richard Holloway in Leaving Alexandria: “The toughest lesson life teaches is the difference between who you wanted to be and who you actually are. And it can take a whole life to teach it”
Robert Louis Stevenson: “Letter to a young gentleman who proposes to embrace the career of Art”
A. S. Byatt in Possession: “He put little slips of paper in the entries that made up his fragile narrative or non-narrative”
Adam Nicolson in Sea Room: “I’m wedded to this plunging-off form of thought, and to the acceptance of muddle which it implies”
Mukul Kesavan in Looking Through Glass: “Like all chroniclers of the relatively recent past, history ran out against the present”
Julian Barnes in The Noise of Time: “He bought a large scrapbook and pasted ‘Muddle Instead of Music’ onto the first page.”
Ronald Ross: “Science is the differential calculus of the mind, Art is the integral calculus; they may be beautiful apart, but are great only when combined.”
Walter Scott in The Antiquary (in Oldbuck’s room) “Amid this medley, it was no easier to find one’s way”
Margaret McCartney in The Patient Paradox: “The conclusion that variability is bad is distant from the much simpler observation that patients are all different.”
Robert Crawford in Young Eliot: “Leafiness suited him”
Alexander McCall Smith in Chance Developments: “His one and only book, ‘The Future Lies in the Past’, eventually published”
Patrick Deeley in The Hurley Maker’s Son: “I sensed the sun, beaming from a place that was higher than the world”
Penelope Fitzgerald in The Bookshop: “The sky brightened from one horizon to the other”
Hanya Yanagihara in A Little Life: “You made art because it was the only thing you’d ever been good at, the only thing, really, you thought about between shorter bursts of thinking about the things everyone thought about.”
John Berger in Here is where we meet: “To find any sense in life it was pointless to search in the places where people were instructed to look.”
Edmund De Waal in The White Road: “He writes a letter about how things are made, but it is actually about compassion.”
Alice Hoffman in Faithful: “No one could count all the stars. There are far too many.”
Madeleine Thien in Do Not Say We Have Nothing: “So familiar to me, like an entire language, a world, I had forgotten”
John Steinbeck in Of Mice and Men: “Both men glanced up, for the rectangle of sunshine in the doorway was cut off”
In my last post I considered a “thought paper” entitled “The habits of an improver” and welcomed that critical thinking was considered a necessary habit.
The word “engineer” or “engineering” is to be found on 42 separate occasions in this Health Foundation thought paper.
The word “ethics” does not appear at all. Despite the fact that the introduction begins with this quote:
That ethics do not seem to be considered amongst the “habits” necessary for “improvement science” is concerning.
The last time I looked, I found this result using the Healthcare Improvement Scotland search facility:
The former Chief Executive for the Mental Welfare Commission for Scotland used to introduce me as “Bayesian Peter”. Bayesian is the name given to interpretations of probability and returns to Reverend Thomas Bayes original considerations of complexity.
Healthcare, like life, is complex. We are human and live in an ever changing world.
This is not all so simply “engineered”.
Ethics is integral to science. I do not deserve the epithet “Bayesian Peter” – for whilst I am interested in ethics this does not mean that I am more ethical than you the reader.
However, I want to say as clearly as I can, and yes with passion, that without ethical considerations “improvement science” should linger in quotes.
This is a film about John Henry Anderson who was known as ‘The Wizard of the North’
This is a film about an eccentric old worthy from the city of Perth, Scotland.
The odd Dr Todd from omphalos
This film is about the road over the Capel o’ Mount in Scotland and a ruined Inn called Knowegreens.
The Only Absolute Non-Stops from omphalos
Music credits:
(1) ‘Beyond the Strath’ – by James Ross
(2) ‘For one night only’ – by King Creosote
Radio clip: from BBC Radio Scotland “Thought for the Day” late 2106.
My view is that to go forwards one really has to appreciate backwards.
[The film is about identity – can it be found in a name – and questions what belonging to a place really means] [forgive the narcissism]
It is a film partly based on serendipity.
Correction Wynd from omphalos
The two key locations are:
(1) Correction Wynd, Aberdeen
(2) Gauch farm, Cabrach, Aberdeenshire.
Music credits:
(1) ‘Rare Species’ – The National Jazz Trio of Scotland
(2) ‘Oh Me Oh My’ – The Deadly Winters
(3) ‘And so we must rest’ – Bill Wells and Aidan Moffat
