Categories: uncategorized
Date: 31 March 2007 19:38:00
Tomorrow morning I'm heading north to Pluscarden Abbey where I'll be on retreat until next Friday. This is, of course, Holy Week - tomorrow's Palm Sunday, and Friday will be Good Friday. And I only contacted the brothers last week to ask about going up to them for a while. It should have been a fruitless idea: Holy Week is usually booked up by the previous Christmas. But I emailed on Saturday night, and as it turned out, they had a cancellation on Sunday morning. So I'm going.
I'm very tired. I keep slipping into that odd state of detachment which can feel as though one is losing one's sanity completely - but in fact it's known as "stress". Like a fool I went down to Ikea this morning and tried to find picture frames. I don't recommend Ikea if you're feeling stressed already. You'd be quicker just stabbing yourself in the leg and going about the rest of your day.
After giving up on that idea I trailed back up here. This is the first day I have spent on my own in many months. My wife and children journeyed south this morning, you see, to visit family. I was to have gone with them but the retreat seemed like a wiser decision. So I tooled around the house for a bit, and then I put an Ubuntu Linux cd into the laptop to see what would happen. What happened was quite lovely - within five minutes I was watching a video of NELSON MANDELA explaining what "ubuntu" means, and why open-source software is so important to a fair world! NELSON MANDELA! I couldn't have been more impressed if Che Guevara had done an advert for Rice Krispies.
I ran it as a live cd for a bit (e.g. the whole thing just running off the cd) and rapidly became very impressed, particularly with its calm and cheerful way of detecting all my stuff and just making it work, without any of the usual nonsense that WIndows insists on. It had no bother with my wireless internet access, either. So I installed it. I tried using a Windows program to partition the hard drive so that Ubuntu had somewhere to live, but I couldn't get it to work. Then I put the Ubuntu cd back in, ran the installer, and it politely reorganised my hard drive for me with barely a mutter. And here we are: I'm writing this from inside Linux, and it's hard to think of any reasons to go back to Windows. Except for games, I suppose. But everything else is right here. And it's FREE! I have four or five Ubuntu CDs here if anyone wants them. They're great. OpenOffice does everything I ever needed MS Office to do, except it does it for free, and it's secure. It'll even open my old Office docs, change them, and then resave them as Office docs again. I've yet to explore much more of Ubuntu but I strongly recommend the experience.
Hmmmwhat else. I've joined the Scottish Green Party, largely to stop myself joining Solidarity which I'd be bound to do in a weak moment if I wasn't already spoken for. I even found myself lingering around a Communist Party stall in Buchanan Street last weekend... so it seemed a wise time to get politically hitched again. I'm still a bit antsy about my decision. The Scottish Greens seem very local in outlook: decentralisation of is one thing but the issues the Scottish Greens are centring on seem to verge on the parochial. Maybe it's just me. I need to keep digging.
But mainly I need to get away, a long way away, in body and soul. I need to seriously re-examine my life and my relationships. I don't think I'm doing too badly for a guy with two kids and a housemove on the go, but if current life-expectancy estimates are anything to go by I've got roughly another forty years left on this planet and I don't intend to spend any more of my time living like I'm engaged in trench warfare on the bloody Somme. I've heard rumours of a life beyond this, where people smile deliberately and time with one's children isn't just another thing to be checkedoff on a list. It's Pluscarden for me, by God!
If I'm not back by next weekend send out a search party.