Burns units

[desperance]

Last night I played impresario and compère, at a Burns Night event to benefit the Lit & Phil. We held that in the Union Rooms, another gorgeous 19th-century building just across the road from the library; it used to be a gentlemen's club of some description, but is now tragically transformed into a pub. (I say "tragically", and you may interpolate as much irony into that statement as you think appropriate: but actually I learned last night that it had stood empty and abandoned for a long time, and really I just wish the Lit & Phil had swooped on it. It could've been a library annexe and a pub, and a club for members, and...)

So we had a whole bunch of writers reading Burns, or occasionally post-Burns; and we had Scots jigs and reels (courtesy of one of those chains, where Kay asked me and I asked Pete and he asked Roger who asked Rona who asked Sarah-Jayne and Victoria, who said yes; and were young and wonderful and oh so young, going off after in search of a late session in a pub and did we want to go along and thirty years ago of course I'd have said yes and now of course I said no, I'm tired now...) and of course there was haggis and whisky and beer, and if I hadn't been so stressed out at having to keep things happening it would have been entirely fun.

And then I went home and slept the sleep of the damned; and dreamed of a walking-party where fjm wanted to see the geese, and we found a farmhouse cafe where someone paid for us to drink all the drink they had and eat all the food too, and somehow I ended up cooking it, icing cakes and scarifying pork (left-handed for some reason, which I am not) and making kedgeree. With a goose-egg. Now I want to make kedgeree with a goose-egg, just to show it off.

And now I am in the Lit & Phil and trying to write about a burns hospital and airmen and nurses and such. And ghosts. This is hard. I am forming an opinion that says most ghost stories are short stories for a reason. The inherent structures of a haunting do not seem to lend themselves to the essential narrative of a novel. There is incident and then revelation, understanding, perhaps resolution - but really not a lot of what you might call actual plot. Actions and consequences. I feel like I'm trying to marry chalk and cheese, and it's all going to end in a horrible divorce.