Tag Archives: United Kingdom

Per Ardua Ad Astra

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Jack goes to great lengths to get his Wednesday post up this week – –

Wendy and I just arrived in Knoxville so completing the first stage of our journey to Scotland. Tomorrow we fly from here to Atlanta and then overnight direct to Edinburgh.

Apart from during the Covid 19 pandemic I’ve organized small group tours of Scotland every year since 2009. Two years ago I decided to stop, but requests kept coming so here we are again; the second final tour! There are already requests for the date of next year’s Third Final Tour.

They take a lot of liaising with an agency over there to organize bookings for hotels, ferries and visits. I also have to coordinate with my driver for the minibus. My longtime driver was an old friend, Colin, who sadly died a few years ago. Colin was much more than just a driver – a great singer and historian. However I had become good friends with another great singer and historian in the form of Alan Reid. He was one of the founding members of the well known ’Battlefield Band’, traveled the world with them and often drove their band bus. So a perfect fit!

Once I’m confident I have all the ducks in something resembling a row, I then start sending regular emails to the paying customers with travel tips and information about the tour.

Finally I have to start thinking about travel arrangements to Scotland for Wendy and me. Checking flight times and prices and deciding where to stay for a couple of nights before the tour starts,

Then I start to worry about whether I’ve thought of everything and what might go wrong, because there’s always something. We’ve had everything from an overnight hospital stay, an emergency dental visit, a ferry strike and bags that didn’t make it with their owner. We even had a family who missed a flight connection and arrived into Edinburgh on the second day of the tour!

But heck – once you’re three hours away from home there’s little point in worrying!

Whit’s fir ye will no gang by ye – que sera, sera – what will be, will be. Hi Ho Scotland here we come!

The Monday Book – On the Move: A Life by Oliver Sacks

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Guest review by Janelle Bailey, avid reader and always learning; sometimes substitute teaching, sometimes grandbabysitting, sometimes selling books

On the Move: A Life by Oliver Sacks

I actually listened to this one rather than reading the print version, BUT there were so many things I wanted to go back to in reference that I have since starting it purchased the printed edition as well.

Eventually I will read everything Oliver Sacks ever wrote prior to his passing, in August of 2015. By my own estimation, I am maybe 1/6 to 1/5 of the way in so far. My entry to Oliver Sacks was, like many, watching the movie Awakenings, which was based on his book by the same title. Having no idea who Oliver Sacks was and/or how he was involved with that project, I was with his very brief and relevant collection of thnext introduced to his writing via one of his short–three essays, I believe–collections called Gratitude. And ever since then I have been quite fascinated by Sacks’s stories, his brain, his storytelling–really by everything, seemingly, that makes Oliver Sacks, well…Oliver Sacks, and I wish to know and understand it all. His is a fascinating story and for so many layers of reason.

Sacks is smart and funny, thoughtful and sometimes artistically selfish, but engagedly entertaining; everything that I have read of his has given me some new perspectives on life, added interesting new layers of consideration for my own, made me think about something or some things differently from how I previously had. And if I ever do seek the attention of a psychologist, I plan to ask whether he/she/they have read Sacks. I think that’d be my standard for the smartest among them. He’s a scientist, a medical professional, a doctor–and yet he tends to people and their concerns in a patient and thoughtfully thorough way, having pondered so many situations and collected so many interesting cases over time.

In On the Move, one of his final literary projects, we read more of a memoir of Sacks’s earlier life and experiences as well as his most recent, both his initiation into romance and relationships along with fairly solid distate for it all, his coming out as a homosexual, and then as only occurred many years later, his finding true love at 77 and building a relationship with Bill Hayes. And learning about him prompted me to add his own Insomniac City to my tbr list as well.

Additionally we learn about Sacks’s relationship with his very successful and similarly smart parents, both doctors as well, and each of them passing away before him. On the Move is also about Sacks’s move from the UK to the US, and here he also explains his preference to remain an “alien” over pursuing US citizenship.

Sacks has lots to say and is a great teacher of life.

On the Move: A Life is a great read. Just like a woman who came into the bookstore recently looking for a book by Sacks and sharing why she similarly admires him, I, too, am (and already!) reading Sacks’s Musicophilia next. May I just say how much it pleased me to have someone asking for Oliver Sacks books? She explained that as a retired AP Psychology teacher, she was on a mission to read everything he had ever written. Me, too, Ms. __…me, too!