I will begin this entry with a quotation from 'Saidleafon Cuaraidh' ('The Stolen Diary') by the famous Gaelic poet Somhairle Camshron:
Cofaidh le bainne, mas e
ur toil e. Cait a bheil a' fuireach?
Ubhalghort agam. Tha isean
taobh a-staigh dhinn:
'S e bancair a th'annam...
Evocative and hauntingly soulful. To those of you who are too ignorant to speak Scottish Gaelic, I will provide a translation, though so much of its power is lost through translation that your understanding of the poem will be limited, and you will remain an emotionally stunted dwarf for the rest of your days. Here, Camshron says:
Each man lives by words
alone. Cannot stories reach beyond the veil?
[Untranslatable. lit. Ugliness is found among the old clans of the island of Eigg, traditionally bereft as they are of written language.] Cursed are
those who steal books:
They steal the men who write them.
Such were my feelings when I awoke a few weeks ago to find my computer stolen, apparently by a Nazi. The woe I felt was not from the realisation that I would be denied my daily access to people's personal webpages with photos of their cats and links to their favourite bands, but rather through my inability to communicate my life via this electronic diary.
I wept to think of each of my readers clicking 'Horton's Folly' in their 'Favourites' folder only to be met with no updates, and sinking further and further into melancholy as the days went by. The man who stole my computer did not merely steal a steam-powered machine assembled from metal cogs, microwaves, buckles, pegs, and chips. No dainty reader, he stole me from you. That is his crime.
That the thief was a Nazi I have no doubt for he also perpetrated a small hate crime all over my bedroom carpet. Despite several buckets of bleach, I have been unable to remove the stain. What is more, he stole a pile of DVDs, but did not take Robin Hood: Men In Tights. This parodic romp of a film is a cinematic delight - I find it impossible to believe that anyone stealing DVDs would reject this one, unless through some devoted anti-semitic stance, for the director is the renowned Jew, Mel Brooks.
Such bigotry disgusts me. I must now go and recover myself, for my anger still stings and will taint further writing. Tomorrow I will reveal how I at last recovered my computer from the thief.
Cofaidh le bainne, mas e
ur toil e. Cait a bheil a' fuireach?
Ubhalghort agam. Tha isean
taobh a-staigh dhinn:
'S e bancair a th'annam...
Evocative and hauntingly soulful. To those of you who are too ignorant to speak Scottish Gaelic, I will provide a translation, though so much of its power is lost through translation that your understanding of the poem will be limited, and you will remain an emotionally stunted dwarf for the rest of your days. Here, Camshron says:
Each man lives by words
alone. Cannot stories reach beyond the veil?
[Untranslatable. lit. Ugliness is found among the old clans of the island of Eigg, traditionally bereft as they are of written language.] Cursed are
those who steal books:
They steal the men who write them.
Such were my feelings when I awoke a few weeks ago to find my computer stolen, apparently by a Nazi. The woe I felt was not from the realisation that I would be denied my daily access to people's personal webpages with photos of their cats and links to their favourite bands, but rather through my inability to communicate my life via this electronic diary.
I wept to think of each of my readers clicking 'Horton's Folly' in their 'Favourites' folder only to be met with no updates, and sinking further and further into melancholy as the days went by. The man who stole my computer did not merely steal a steam-powered machine assembled from metal cogs, microwaves, buckles, pegs, and chips. No dainty reader, he stole me from you. That is his crime.
That the thief was a Nazi I have no doubt for he also perpetrated a small hate crime all over my bedroom carpet. Despite several buckets of bleach, I have been unable to remove the stain. What is more, he stole a pile of DVDs, but did not take Robin Hood: Men In Tights. This parodic romp of a film is a cinematic delight - I find it impossible to believe that anyone stealing DVDs would reject this one, unless through some devoted anti-semitic stance, for the director is the renowned Jew, Mel Brooks.
Such bigotry disgusts me. I must now go and recover myself, for my anger still stings and will taint further writing. Tomorrow I will reveal how I at last recovered my computer from the thief.
Somhairle Camshron in traditional Hebridean dress
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