Category Archives: Wendy Welch

The Monday Book – The Sinner

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The Sinner – Stuart MacGregor (J Philip O’Hara 1973)

There are many facets to the city of Edinburgh – cultural, historical, academic and poor suburbs. I lived most of my life within easy distance and rode the thirty minute train journey most weeks in the late 1950s and early 1960s to go to jazz clubs and folk clubs. It usually involved climbing the steps from the station to the high street, stopping at the pub halfway, then on up to Bunjie’s coffee bar and finally to number 369 and the jazz club before racing for the last train home.

MacGregor’s book is set around that time and captures the atmosphere well.

There are really three strands to the story – the main character is Denis Sellars who has an on-off relationship with Kate and is a folksinger. Then there is a debate between traditionalist folkies and entertaining folkies. There are many thinly disguised real people who emerge in this strand. Denis is caught in the middle and his brother is being groomed as an entertaining folksinger.

I could fairly easily recognize many of the ‘real’ people who were referenced and I worried about that, as I don’t think they were as ‘right and wrong’ as MacGregor suggests. My memory is of a much more understanding time and Hamish Henderson (who is one of the thinly disguised ones) always encouraged guitar wielding youngsters like me.

I do believe, however, that he captured a particular atmosphere of cultural Edinburgh at that time really well. That I recognized!

The relationship with Kate was also believable and, I’m sure, would chime with many of my generation.

MacGregor was a medical student at the University of Edinburgh, helped start one of the first folksong clubs in Scotland, and wrote songs and poems. After graduating, he married and moved to take up a job as a doctor in Jamaica. He died in a road crash around the time this book was published.

I was amused that the cover looks like a reference to Bob Dylan’s second album.

His best known song is ‘Coshieville’ a bittersweet love song set in a small hamlet in Perthshire when the hydro-electric dams were being built – here’s a nice performance –

Canning While Upset

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Sorry we’ve neglected the blog this week. In honor of our 24th anniversary, Jack and I did the most loving celebrational activity ever – took separate vacations. Jack went off to spend eight days visiting four friends, while I stayed home to do whatever I wanted. I still had a few day job meetings in play, so it was a mixed holiday, but still offered time for self-discovery.

Canning doesn’t have to be hard

What I discovered: when I am upset, I don’t create. I clean, can, and garden, but don’t write or crochet. I do a lot of praying, but the praying tends to be while I am pounding stakes into the ground for plants, or slapping stuff into layers in jars and adjusting weights, even whipping a mop around the floor.

My friend Jen calls it “bearing witness,” this in-the-zone blitz of activity. Afghan women, COVID deniers, friends deceived, earthquakes and fires, mounting anger leading to terrible economic repercussions, on it goes. We’re in trouble not only because of events, but because of attitudes, and this will get worse before it gets better. So many voices, so little worth hearing. Is it possible to drown in noise the way one could in water? My mop moves across the floor and my mind holds still.

Anyway, if not exactly creating, what have I been doing to soak up the grief and anger I feel at losing unvaccinated friends this month amidst all the chaos? Here’s a list of things I canned this week while Jack was away and the kitchen was mine to command. Two of these things are a lie. See if you can spot them.

Chicken breasts with garden vegetables

Steak with potatoes and green beans

Unicorn fetuses (2 per jar)

Individual strawberry rhubarb tarts

Beef stew

Eggs, raw

Spicy chicken tenders (5 per jar)

Individual pineapple upside down cakes

Lasagna

Burrito filling

Individual breakfast quiches

Body parts of the self-aggrandizing astroturfer who convinced my late friend not to get vaccinated

Homemade ketchup

Milk

It’s a kind of creativity, I guess, throwing yourself into work as prayer, prayer as work, and pitting one’s efforts against “you can’t can that” proclamations. (Yes, you can.) It runs deeper, but at the same time, it’s just canning. I’m a big fan of that poem by Robert Frost, Two Tramps in Mud Time, which no one ever hears because his estate is so locked down about who can quote him. It sums up my week of canned prayers:

Only where love and need are one,
And the work is play for mortal stakes,
Is the deed ever really done
For heaven and the future’s sakes.