Away

I’m in in Aberdeen overnight, on my way to get married on Saturday in Ballater.

Please leave a Limerick, and I’ll get back to you in a week and a half or so.

Sandstone Blog

I’ve just written a quick ditty on the Sandstone Press website: my first contribution to the blogspot there.

I’ve tried to be relatively serious.  Athough my book is quite light-hearted in places, I don’t want to dent the gravitas of a major Scottish publisher.

Hopefully, though, I’ve got the tone right and my contribution is not too pretentious and self-absorbed – I’d hate to become one of those awfully up-themselves writer types…

Now, where’s my polo neck and Gauloises?

Three – the soap opera continues

You may recall from some previous posts that I’ve been having some awful trouble closing my old mobile account with Three.

For those new to the saga, here’s a run-down of what’s happened, with some more recent developments:

June 2009 – I get an iPhone with 02.  I close down my account with Three.

June to September 2009 – Three keep charging me line rental, failing to remember that my account has been closed.  There are also other issues about notice periods that aren’t worth going into here.

September  2009 – I write to them demanding a resolution and refund.  They write back saying yes but don’t.

October 2009 – I finally receive a bill (but not a final bill), which states that I am owed £118.71.  This money is not forthcoming.  I write back asking for it.

2 November 2009 – I get a letter back apologising, saying the money will be with me in around seven working days.  It isn’t.

Today – I phone up and ask where the money’s got to.  Apparently, I am told, it was posted on Friday, but is now a sum of around £20.  I ask if any explanation accompanies it, stating why it is a lesser amount.  I am told no, and demand that such an explanation is sent.  I doubt I will receive it, nor to be honest the cheque.

I’ve had a hunt around the internet and there are an alarming number of stories about poor Three customer service that it is hard to sift through it for anything comparable.  In my last letter I also threatened to go to the ombudsman, but seemingly I cannot do this until my complaint is closed and Three say that they cannot do any more for me.

I might try to write to them tomorrow, but barely know where to start and think that it might be better once I’ve slept on it.  I should also dig around for an email address, too.

As you can imagine, I have more important things to spend my time on this week than Three’s incompetence.

Knock on the door

I got back earlier this afternoon from my stag do.

Part one was a tremendously fun day of paintball, quad biking and clay pigeon shooting at Highland Activities.  They’re based in Kinloch Laggan, on a vast estate in a beautiful part of the world where cheesy TV drama Monarch of the Glen was filmed.  Part two was a night of food, music, one or two beverages and lots of laughs at a house in Contin.

It was great fun but I am now shattered.

The last thing I needed, then, barely half an hour after getting home, was some Jehovah’s Witnesses knocking on the door.

Funny really, because I somehow knew that it would be some sort of religious visitor when I heard the knock, and it was only Monday past that I had two other JWs trying to tell me something or other.  Like that earlier visit, I gave them short thrift, interrupting their polite spiel to tell them I wasn’t interested and was a Christian, closing the door in their face as politely and firmly as I could.

It brought to mind that I had them at my door a few weeks ago too – and that wasn’t the first time.  Always in two, always starting out with an indirect line of conversation – starting out with leaflets about drug abuse, blood transfusions or “the truth”.  However, I am now skilled in instant recognition of copies of “The Watchtower” so am able to interrupt their enquiry before they get too far into their stride.

I am sure I should deal with them in a better way – by authoritatively taking apart their arguments, or showing their faith up to be an alarming misuse of the Bible; and of course I could certainly be more polite.  All of the above require patience and research, however, and I have a tendency to neither, at least on this matter.

But more than that, I am a bit concerned that they have been at my door so much lately.  Either they are rubbish at cross-referencing their outreach plans, or they are just hugely persistent.  And am I doing something wrong?  Am I only encouraging them by answering the door?

Now they know someone lives here who isn’t 100% rude or abusive (surely not that rare?), are they going to redouble their efforts?  There’s a Kingdom Hall not a million miles away from my flat, so perhaps I am one of their targets – handy, unthreatening, and professing a faith they regard as close to their own.

I wonder how soon it will be before they’re round again…

Unknown

My stag do is tomorrow. I’ve been told nothing about it, which is moderately disconcerting, other than that I am being picked up at the ungodly hour of 8.10am.

The one thing I do know is the name of a place we’re getting food. I’ve googled it, and it could either be Dingwall, Stafford or Southend-on-Sea.

Rock and roll…

Contributing to our wedding sermon

Our wedding – ten days away, now – will feature a sermon delivered by Duncan MacPherson, minister of Hilton Church of Scotland, where Nicole and I both worship.

We have asked Duncan to preach on Luke 24, specifically the story of the road to Emmaus, when Jesus (after his resurrection) appears to his followers, who are slow to realise who he is.  One of the key points of the passage is the dialogue between the followers and Jesus, a dialogue key within any Christian marriage.

Duncan has emailed me to suggest that, with blogs being a good form of dialogue, maybe thoughts from readers could be obtained through my blog.

So, if you have any comments – even just a single line – about what you think makes a strong marriage, Duncan says he will aim to incorporate such thoughts in his sermon.  Just go ahead and post them here, anonymously if you like.

It’s a novel form of interaction in a sermon, and I wonder what thoughts folk will come up with.

Blogging on Sandstone Press

Over at the Sandstone Press website, there’s a section where authors and directors contribute occasional thoughts.  As a forthcoming writer of a book Sandstone will be publishing, I will be joining those haloed ranks.

My recent post on Kosova has been republished there, and no doubt will be followed by others that I write in the run-up to the launch and beyond.  I’ve got a few ideas of things I could write about, but if you have any suggestions, dear reader, then let’s have them.

Of course, I’ll not be abandoning this blog in any way, just moonlighting occasionally.  I’ll link to all my Sandstone Press blogs here too, to save you adding another RSS feed to your reader.

Lots going on

Nicole and I get married in under a fortnight and we’ve been busy with all sorts of bits and pieces, the details of which I will not bore you with.

Work, thankfully, is travel-free until then, but on a busy day in which I have battled the freezing cold weather to do various chores I somehow squeezed in a trip to visit my publisher in Dingwall.  I think the details of the book’s launch – sometime around the beginning of February – can be revealed in the next few weeks.

In between train and meeting, I headed up the hill overlooking the town and took a couple of photos at the top, where you can find the rather impressive Hector MacDonald memorial.

It was very, very cold, though.

Winter is pretty much here…

How to worship

I am off to Stirling tomorrow and Weegieland on Friday, for some quick work trips.

While I am away, here’s something to entertain you.  Anyone who’s been to a pentecostal church – or anyone who’s not, for that matter – might find it quite amusing.

Remembering Kosova

I’ve just finished reading Shadow Behind the Sun, a book I blogged about a wee while ago. By Remzija Sherifi, a Kosovan Albanian, it tells the story of her life under the oppressive Serbian regime and and the 1999 war, and her family’s escape to Scotland as refugees. Intermingled with this narrative are reflections on the refugee and asylum-seeker community in Glasgow, where she found work.

It’s a brilliant book – told plainly and uncompromisingly, but with dignity throughout. The way that the increasingly fascist (my word, not the author’s) regime in Belgrade began to clamp down on the majority Albanian population in Kosova was a dark time, and while the general drift is known to me, many details were helpfully revealed in Sherifi’s book. She does not hide the facts about what happens to the Kosovans, but neither does she demonise Serbs or find reason to hate them as a race.

The book brought back memories of my own time in Kosova in 1999. Shortly after the war and when the NATO troops had moved in, Kosova was in a state of devastation, but also an exhausted relief and an emerging optimism.

While a decade of UN administration and constitutional uncertainty – still not resolved despite Kosova’s recent and controversial declaration of independence – has led to a something of a reality check, and the euphoria had gone when I re-visited in 2001, there are still things to celebrate. This article on BBC News, for instance, covers the unveiling of a statue of Bill Clinton in the Kosovan capital, Pristina.

The US President in 1999, along with Tony Blair and other NATO allies, led the military action against Milosevic’s regime which – although shamefully late – was successful in ending the war in Kosova and freeing the Albanian majority from around a decade of apartheid. Clinton, Blair and others were seen as heroic liberators by the Albanians, and even the then-NATO press spokesman Jamie Shea was held up as a saviour – it was he they saw on Albanian TV broadcasts every night powerfully repeating NATO’s promise that Milosevic would be beaten.

Indeed, in one of the most surreal moments in Kosova’s time in the headlines, I remember seeing a news report some months after the war, in which Shea – then basically just a NATO civil servant – was utterly overwhelmed on his first visit to the province by a delighted mob of joyous Kosovans all chanting his name.

There are so many stories to tell of my time in Kosova – which, it is amazing to think, was a decade ago – and I’ve never really told it in a formalised way. Although my forthcoming book contains a few tangental anecdotes from that adventure, one occasion not in the book which is worth telling now is when our truck was painted by some Albanian kids in Pristina one afternoon.

Most of what they did was graffiti – misspelt endorsements of heroes such as Clinton, Blair and the UK’s Foreign Secretary at the time Robin Cook. One creation struck me as quite peculiar, though. A tall, dense, red column had been painted by one child, towering over the work of his friends’, and the best way I could describe it would be as a cross between a triffid and a skyscraper. The young artist informed me it was Madaleine Albright.

Two years into the disappointment of the Blair years, our government in 1999 seemed awfully flawed to us; increasingly in the pocket of big business and increasingly unable to avoid perpetuating and exacerbating the inequality and moral bankruptcy of years of Tory rule.

To the Kosovans, however, who sought not political perfection but merely freedom from death, Blair, Clinton and co were everything they’d hoped for. In their eyes, they delivered. They were liberators.

No wonder Kosovans – the Albanians, at least – have built and celebrated a statue to Clinton. The horrors you can read about in Remzije Sherifi’s Shadow Behind the Sun make it perfectly, chillingly clear why.