Consume and Connect [573]
Greetings from The Borders...
I’m Christian Payne, photographer and writer.
In this weekly dispatch I have no idea how to get started, but by the end I hope we’ve been able to seek out novelty, explore the relations between things, how we share, what we share and consume, plus where we might be going.
Thanks for opening this email.
#TheAction
‘Work’ has been relentless on the days I’m focused on smallholding things. But there have been some welcome deviations.
One being a trip into Edinburgh for whisky and records.
Not only was I able to purchase the Record Store Day LP’s i’d missed out on elsewhere, I was able to pick up a couple of bargain blues compilations from Vinyl Villans pictured below left.
After there, my old friend Ian from Vinyl Revival UK chaperoned me and Gordon to the relatively new Diggers- Leith. A fantastic little bar with great value whiskies. After that I finally got to visit the sister pub and legendary Athletic Arms. Pictured above middle and on the right.
Most people call it ‘Diggers’ due to its position between two graveyards and as a result it was popular with local gravediggers. Still is, but you won’t see their spades leaning against the bar anymore. They most likely have machines for that now.
I got to meet the landlord Kev McGhee (pictured above) and chat about his renowned whisky the now banned Dalry Milk. More on that below.
It’s just one of the 780 whiskies they have behind the bar. Here is a quick look at the list.
Shame it was only a flying visit. If you live in Edinburgh, I’ve a yearning to explore these places and others. Let me know if you have a little time and a sofa free… I’ll be right there. :-)
Back at base, my yearning for more only exists in the realm of firewood. Oh… and wood chip. Although I didn’t ask Saint Fiacre directly (patron Saint of gardeners and hemorrhoids (which I assume are related), my invocations over the last couple of months must have all hit some celestial inbox at the same time, as not one but four miraculous wood chip donations arrived in a single day.
This is a lot of chipped and logged wood. I really hope this decisive end to the Leylandii and Ash was fully justified, as I’d rather not piss off the Dryads.
The Leylandii is a fast drying softwood at 6-12 months but is not high up on the list of quality firewoods as it burns hot and fast so is best used for kindling or mixed in with harder woods.
With this recent delivery I am starting to think I may well have to borrow or procure a mechanical splitter. As it stands I’ve a good 2 tons to process and having already done about 3-4 my hands are starting to feel it.
#TheSeen
I have a bunch of photos piling up in my ‘to-edit’ folder but here’s one taken this week in Edinburgh.
Snapped while on the way to Vinyl Villans.
What a brilliant work of art. I hope it stays there.
#TheWords
I finally read Orbital by Samantha Harvey.
If you are not still blown away that we’ve had humans living in space for a quarter of a century, this might not be for you.
That said it took a while for me to give it the attention it deserved and I read a good chunk of this small book during the recent moon mission.
Set on the International Space Station it follows six astronauts circling the Earth over the course of a single day. 250 miles up. Sixteen sunrises and sixteen sunsets.
I’m drawn to minutiae and attention in my own work so a novel without a plot resonated. It doesn’t really go anywhere but round and round. Like us. Like life.
I imagine this book will do some folks heads in, it has a rhythm and perspective that need your full attention. For me it was meditative. An observational study from orbit. A beautiful piece of work with it’s repetition somewhere between poetry and prose.
Carl Sagan would have got it. He once said…
“Imagination will often carry us to worlds that never were. But without it we go nowhere.”
And that’s why this feels like more than fiction to me.
Nothing imagined is entirely fictional. Just a hypothesis waiting for evidence.
Find kids books by age
#TheHeard
Thanks again to Ian from Vinyl Revival UK for not only holding these three records for me, but also taking them on his weekend trip to Edinburgh where I could collect them.
I’ve just listened to Motorhead and am currently listening to The Micheal Schenker Group. Both great albums from two bands I’ve enjoyed live. I’m saving Jackson C Frank for later tonight. You might remember me sharing some audio of my ‘Uncle’ Banjo John playing some Jackson C Frank three years ago in this post.
On Sunday’s my daughter and I pop into Berwick Upon Tweed to partake in a guitar orchestra. It’s aimed at any level of guitarist and has us playing simple riffs or strumming patterns along to various visual prompts.
Weirdness is encouraged. I apologise for sharing a Facebook link but I can’t find it on YouTube. This is a recording from the week before when we could not make it. Enter this meta product at your own peril.
One arborist who was delivering wood chip this week told me a cool story about something he’d found inside a tree. I wish i’d recorded his recounting, but we were shovelling a small avalanche of wood chip at the time so here’s me remembering what he said. I’m in a ramble mood so there’s 4 mins and 29 secs of intro before I get to the point. 🙄
#TheConsumed
This is the whisky Dalry Milk that I mentioned above.
Dalry Milk is a grain whisky from North British Distillery, bottled by Atom Brands. The name is a playful nod to the Gorgie–Dalry area. Released on April Fools’ Day 2025, the bottle quite obviously mimicked Cadbury’s Dairy Milk branding. Intended as parody.
Unfortunately, it didn’t stay a joke for long. Once spotted on sale, it risked being seen as “passing off” as the Cadbury brand. It disappeared as quickly as it arrived after Cadbury’s owners, the mega corp Mondelez, (a company worth in the region of £100 billion) issued a cease and desist.
All of which seems a lot of effort over a small pub just trying to have a little fun with a whisky name.
On the left bottle in the photo you can see the new name… ‘Removed by the Fun Police’. Which you can buy from the pub. Same tipple as Dalry Milk… different label.
If you are passing my place I have a bottle here you can try ;-)
Still on the topic of the price of veg (see last week) this is a pan of macerating rhubarb steeping in a little sugar.
In our local supermarket three sticks of rhubarb was close to three quid. What you see in the pan would cost you over a tenner.
At the moment we can’t eat our home grown rhubarb fast enough. At almost a quid a stick, if we lived in a more populated place i’d be alarming our thriving rhubarb plants under the gaze of CCTV.
#TheThings
I was the last customer in the local music shop.
I’ll often pop in and pick up plectrums, harmonicas and guitar strings. Anything to keep the store going. Margret is always friendly and chatty. The store feels like it’s been there for ever but when I first met Margret ,as I was moving our worldly belongings into a local container, a little over a year ago, she said she’d taken it over from her Brother in the 70’s. I mention how little stock she had back then in this post which also has an audio clip of the harmonica I bought.
The sign on the door said all stock was now free and people had obviously made the most of this as all that was left was a pot of trombone slide wax.
While we chatted I was sad to see that in just the last couple of weeks she had grown far more frail and seemed ready for a rest. There was a steady flow of people popping in to wish her well and she smiled and thanked everyone while obviously holding back the tears.
She offered the pot of trombone slide cream to me, saying that once that was gone she could shut up shop.
I gratefully took it and she turned to a friend who was there to help her close and said “I won’t cry. I won’t cry.”
Before leaving I thanked her for 50 years of service before my arrival and the smiles and chitchat for the last year been here.
The building is sold and will become a cafe. Rumours are that to keep the spirit of the shop alive they’ll have a live music licence. I was sad to see the closing of the last musical instrument shop in Berwick, but glad I got to be one of countless customers who got to use it over it’s half century.
Although I don’t own a trombone, the slide cream is basically a light grease/oil blend and could be handy on wooden or metal drawer runners, sticky zips, or to help seat O-rings and rubber seals. It might also work with screw threads and saw blades.
As the last object handed over the counter by Margret, I shall use it thoughtfully and sparingly as I remember the legacy of Berwick’s longest surviving music shop.
#TheLinks
Remember when social media was all about people connecting and sharing with each other. Now it’s mostly about watching and scrolling. I used to call this kind of staying in touch ‘ambient connectivity’. But that needed both parties to post something at least occasionally.
Now instead of chatting with friends in the feeds, users are fed ever increasing amounts of algorithm-driven content from influencers and brands. Posting has dropped right off and interaction with people you know is minimal.
This article argues it’s no longer really ‘social’ media. It’s ‘parasocial media’. A web of one sided relationships with people they don’t know. We’ve moved from connecting with each other to consuming each other.
AI Burnout via John Hill
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All errors are signs of life. This weekend i’m at a gig and next week is next week.
At the beginning of this post I’d entitled it ‘Consume or Connect’ after the article linked discussing ‘parasocial media’. Now I’m down here, I’m changing the title to ‘Consume and Connect’ as that’s what I hope from writing these posts.
Feel free to say hi in one of the other places I frequent, or leave a comment here. Yes a comment probably positively affects the algorithm in some way, but I’m not fussed about that. Just keep in touch is all. Even better if you are saying hi for the first time.
The internet is a network of endless connections, but I’m here for the human kind.
“The world is so empty if one thinks only of mountains, rivers & cities; but to know someone who thinks & feels with us, & who, though distant, is close to us in spirit, this makes the earth for us an inhabited garden.” ― Goethe
Connect.
See you out there.
Over…
Nettle soup is much better than nettle-wallowing.
The hidden teacup story was great. Did he photograph it?
Reacting more to Alwyns Insta post... Everyone thinks their phone is listening to them when in actual fact the thousands of cookie based trackers on all the devices interacting around an IP address record and thus tracking and grouping people around the Internet all the time are the ones doing the work. Big data is way more revealing than any single voiced statement, which is in real terms a very low value, high risk vector.. because if they were actually caught actively listening to conversations they would be sued out if existence everywhere, even in the US.