SUPERSOAKINGCALLYPORTRAITRAINFALLISATROCIOUS!

I enjoyed going up to Callendar Park this evening, especially because it was raining. There genuinely is something lovely and lonely and melancholic and inspiring in the Scottish spirit that responds well to rain - we get so damned much of it, after all, that if we hated it we would just walk around angry and miserable most of the damned wet time. It's a kind of grizzled, drizzly, angsty happiness, half-hopeless, not soaring, but always still there, a warm inner glowy pilot light that no amount of inches of frigid soaking skyfall can ever quite put out. Fire under a sheltering tree, poetic smoke drifting in our boiling veins. As usual there went mental dogwalkers, out exercising unimpressed Fidos in the rain, their soggy canine displeasure communicated in their barks at each other and at the local wildlife. "Can you believe these stupit buggers brought us oot in this bloody rain? Ah cannae!" Magpies swooped through the early evening sputtering light, off on or back from secret stealing missions somewhere, treasures beating in their tiny excited avian hearts. Swans, the local wildlife kings and queens, squawked and honked imperiously on the lake, as overawed and cowed moorhens and ducks drifted on by, no competition whatsoever in the aquatic fowl style stakes. A hoodwearer mother and granny and laddie of two or three fed bread to ducks from a bag, with him staying slightly away as he wasn't too sure of all the noisy feasting fowl and what they might do. Soaked empty memorial benches reminded us all of people we never knew and will never know, loved ones safe and warm at home. Empty picnic benches whispered of fun family days full of excited children screaming and dads kicking a football about and mum chatting and tending to the family. The low sodium arc light glistening on the sullen table puddles threw a ghostly beautiful shroud over this summer's lifesaver activities. Callendar House was beautiful as ever, gothic local Falkirk reveries, a slideshow of old and new times shuttling through my tranquil retro-dreaming wet dripping flesh. Faint ancient battlesounds rung out in the internal pensive air, the Cromwell scum massacring men and their screaming-for-attention bones now mouldering under a tomb-sheltering tree. You can hear the quiet roar of the last ten months winding down at this time of year, only a couple of weeks til the firecracker quakes and booms and sky-splattering gunpowder plot colours soar above the coming bonfire and council tax-paid public conflagration. Remember, remember, the fifth of November, penny for the Guy being slowly nudged out by month-long American capitalist neurosis and culture murder. Random photays taken, fading light and architecture juxtapositions, a faulty light throwing dubious blinking staccato shadows up the history-packed back walls of the spire-slapped building. Scottish historical phantoms drifted freely round the now-commodified tourist destination, marvelling at the wallbound explanations of their lives and deaths, brows wrinkling in terse ectoplasmic confusion at what-the-Hell modern gizmos and gadgets and lighting sources. If you looked really hard you could see them incompletely slashed against the fake inner lights, past Scottish combatants and servants and squires and horseriders, message-carriers, history-makers, land-sorters, battle attendants, all imprinted themselves on your ecstatic and amazed inner eye and gone in the blink of a century. They drifted proud and noble and evil and innocent from a time before our history was constantly derided and spat upon by interloper ideology and hateful-agenda-wavers and nerve-wearers. The sun will never set on their time and place in the warp and weft of exclusive Scottish history, mystery , tartan evolutions and revolutions, swords and muskets and land stealing, clans and jigs and eternal Highland glories. The proud green strutting woods surrounding the beautiful six centuries of evolving Scottish architectural reverie did not give up their secrets, shushed spies, nodded at tales of intrigue and violence and sleekit mythical bogeymen crawling and gibbering amongst the mini golf nonsense. The woods held their arboreal wheesht, their promise to never let all they had witnessed by known, never to fully explain, to leave superb animal and human mysteries to be explored forevermore. Falkirk and Scotland would not have it any other way. And then all too soon it was hometime, jacket soaked, darkness descending in a slow steady slap of vision-shifting black on the town, a fool's mission to get drenched through, a drookit scarecrow mess of historical musings and squishy wet clothes dreaming of Scottish spire representation done in French Renaissance style. Traipsing sludgily across mud and grass and council-tended history of all our Celtic tomorrows, listening to faint ghostly heed-me sirensongs of Scots of old and new and now and then calling for my attention, too late, too wet, too darkening, to sludgy, too beautiful, too heidfu overload, too easily ecstatic organic, back to the car, get in, sigh, drip on seat, switch on headlights, roam home for a short soon-leaving-forever time.

THE NEVER END