With the Santa Run on the 11th of December, Kim and I are in training which involves running up around the Lempitlaw track and in our new shoes with our springer spaniel toddling on behind.
The training run goes – Jailhouse to cattle grid, down hill to pond, over sheep gate to geocache tree, passing the barn that I almost hit when landing, over to where our ISDN telecom lines lie in a puddle and up the rapidly disintegrating hill to the ‘marked for demolition’ steading and back down the road past the gawping horse strokers and our house back to the jailhouse and some welcome beverages.
The Borders town of Selkirk runs an annual festival to celebrate Walter Scott’s influence on the town and what I initially thought would be a dull affair turned out to be entertaining with holding owls, having a silhouette made by an artist cutting my profile with scissors, djembe drumming to frighten the horses and Kim’s mother asking who the strange woman was in the corner of the music tent – err, that is the politician David Steel in a wig. Fuelled with a combination of stovies, haggis, whisky, cucumber gin, roasted chestnuts and gluvine we wandered through the carol singers, fiddle players and the Souters all dressed up in Victorian garb.
I am in training for the djembe drumming concert and an official photographer came along to take photos of the group and to hear the chanting that has been frightening the Smailholm residents.
The chant is Djolé (Jolé, Yolé) and is a mask-dance from the Temine-people from Sierra Leone. The mask is presenting a female although it is carried by a male during the dance (so far the drumming and chanting are the only thing we are doing in front of an audience)
Laila i ko korobeh, korobeh, korobeh, mami watonay,
aya,
sico leleleko aya
sico la i ko, sico la i ko,
wa wango sico la i ko, wa wango sico la i ko
(repeat until audience leave)
As a relief from drumming and training there was the Gutbuster Christmas Party with a vindictive inflatable parrot – the following is an eyewitness account by Kim
rather than go out for a meal, we all took something to eat and drink down to the swimming pool, and jim closed the doors and put the inflatable
island and water polo nets up in the pool… so it was grown up fun
night in the pool!!
The ‘island’ is a huge inflatable obstacle course
2/3 of the length of the pool, and you have to try and negotiate the
forest, get round the 12ft parrot, over the 10 foot crab, through
smuggler’s cave, and up a huge slope at the end and slide down the other
side. Well, dignity went out the window, particularly as it was
liberally hosed down to make it as slippy as possible – took me about an
hour to get it sussed, and each obstacle was a milestone – past the
forest, past the parrot, quite a few goes to get over the crab (I ended
up going under it!), and each time you get hurled off into the water and
have to start again! I couldn’t think why I was panting so much, but it
was absolutely exhausting, and you have to cling on with your toes,
knees, stomach, fingernails -everything! Finally me and another girl got
to the slope at the end.. I could hardly reach the handles, but with
much encouragement from the blokes, finally scrambled up and plunged off….
I kept seeing mike swimming back to the start, and once I’d ‘done it’,
finally registered the fact that after about 20 goes, he still hadn’t
got past the parrot!! so when everyone had finally done it, we all
rallied round (including the non-swimmers spectating in the cafe) to
urge him on…. tension was high, excitement was high, mike was
positively purple with effort.. but YES, he finally did it!! well,
almost… one chap gallantly tried to push him up from behind up the
final slope, and when that didn’t work, gamely climbed to the top and
held out a helping hand… they pulled and pulled, others pushed and
pushed from behind, and then the whole island ripped from its moorings
and toppled upside down! it was hilarious.. we could hardly stop choking
with laughing! so he was deemed to have passed and got a big cheer when
we went to get food and drink!
This was followed by a violent game of water polo and enough cheese and wine to undo all the good exercise. We were still aching the next day as the balancing act found muscles that walking, jogging and drumming hadn’t reached.
December entertainment continued with a ball at Kelso where coincidence brought the person who organised the Millenium Bridge naked romp next to myself over dinner to reminice over the swaying motion. The idea of pretending to be an American suddenly started to look bad when I was grabbed by Betsy for ‘bonding’, ended up stroking a lovely reflexologists hairy purse (reflexology apparently is a side effect of neural transfer between the parts of the brain controlling the foot and the genitals) before being bundled in the boot of the car and fed strawberry vodka to stop me drumming.
And so the Santa Run arrived – 1500 folk dressed in their Santa outfits jogging around Princes Street was a sight to behold – the warm ups included Santa conga lines. The countdown 3,2,1 was followed by a slow shuffle as all the santas were trying to squeeze through a narrow gate – and then the pace quickened to a slow walk and finally we broke into a jog before running into the line of Santa Pipers (a na a na). Twice around the park and running especially hard when the cameras were pointing at us, we retired with our medals to the German Christmas market for mulled wine and a spin on the melting ice rink which was masquerading as a paddling pool, along with an underwhelming spin on the big wheel for views over Edinburgh – including the festive sight of inebrieted Santas in most Edinburgh pubs imbibing in the Sprit of Christmas.
The best offer I had all year was in the Kelso fish and chip shop, returning from djembe drumming practice, where two extremely merry gals one Spanish and one Polish were offering ‘triangle sex’ – the children took this story with the typical pinch of salt with the incredulity that I had prioritised gluttony ahead of lust.
Our djembe drumming concert evening came, conflicting with the last episode of Space Cadets so it was surprising that Smailholm Village Hall was packed to the gunnels to see us on stage pounding away and singing. We started with ‘Gunga Din’, followed by ‘David Bellamy’ and then the finale was ‘Angelina Jolie’ – although I think I managed to play a bit of each at the wrong time – people even got up to dance as we drummed and the event raised money for African villages, probably to buy weapons. On returning Stuart had brought his friend home for a beer so I joined them – the story of the lovely reflexologist, especially stroking her hairy purse and the link between feet and genitals, came out and I waxed lyrically about her and her healing hands when it turned out that Stuarts chum knew her – and how do you know this lovely creature I asked – ‘She’s My Mum’. The world is far too small.
