Win Zippy

impossible zippy songs

impossible songs

Win Zippy

A whirlwind visit to McDuff and Aberdeen to check on the grown up children and their progress. I received a late bottle of a Glenfiddich liqueur and a DVD of the Da Vinci Code and the unexpected removal of the rear part of the car’s exhaust to add to the fun of a few days out. In a northern mix of rain and sun we braved Codona’s funfair by the beach in Aberdeen and were somewhere between being fleeced and rewarded by the various attractions and arcades. Grabbing a gift from those “crane” machines is a popular family obsession (on the last visit we salvaged two large cuddly Disney toys); this time it was just one, but a giant Zippy no less. I dread to think of what its actual cost to us must have been but who cares?

We were just finishing lunching on mince, skirlie and salad (this is Aberdeen!) and listening to a Freddy Mercury impersonator doing his sound check whilst the football results rolled up on Sky sports. Then we wandered over to the arcade where the kids were still pummelling the “crane” thing just in time to see a giant Zippy hover across the booth and into the hopper that was set to give him freedom. A great and rare moment to savour after two hours of struggling with these crap machines – much cheering and air punching followed.

After three glasses of wine, some fajitas, chocolate and Glenfiddich the Da Vinci Code doesn’t seem so bad a movie, apart from the last quarter and the whole ridiculous Roslin guardian thing. It’s very hard not to think of the retail park, Costco, Ikea and all the Swedish meatballs and Chelsea Tractors just a few minutes away from one of Mary Magdalene’s temporary resting places. One piece (?) of Scottish history they’ve managed to miss out of the vague and patchy Scottish curriculum, next year perhaps? After all history is “just one thing after another” and who really knows what happened when?

Three pumpkins

impossible songs

impossible songs

Three pumpkins and a mild furore.

Hovis and Oblivion are the names of these two fine, slowly rotting seasonal creations carved out from the best of Tesco pumpkins. The third is in McDuff on top of a fridge and frightening any small children that venture too close. Cutting open these pointless vegetables or fruits or whatever they are has now become an annual event for me and I am an expert – commissions welcome.

Random weekend...

impossible songs

impossible songs


Random weekend jottings:

Photo above: Many hands make large non-fat delicious fruity pudding disappear. The hands in question belong to Ali, Tommy and most importantly Caroline (who made the pudding). I held back for all of ten seconds before piling in for my slice.

Who knows the history of and the correct words to the “Worm Song” (Nobody likes me, everybody hates me etc.)? The problem is what form of lyrical magic should come next, “I think I’ll go and eat some worms” or “Because I like to eat worms”. The debate is raging on, answers on a postcard please.

Freuchie is a small village in Fife. I spent the morning after my birthday walking around it taking photographs for the ASC website. Sunny, open and clean with the radio masts of East and West Lomond looking down upon the bright Eden valley below. One thing that spoils Freuchie is the inappropriate garish street furniture everywhere; signs, instructions and large yellow painted tracts of roadway representing the worst parts of traffic management. Every where you look some piece of heavy duty signage reminds you that you should be obeying some trivial rule. There must be better ways to get traffic control messages across than this and keep wee villages looking cute.

I wandered back to the new holiday cottage where deep conversations about building works and alterations were taking place. I avoided these and watched a solitary robin as he skipped and skidded across the patio slabs in the hazy sunshine. I enjoyed the peace and sensible planting of the back garden for a few moments and then returned to help with the measuring up. I also watched a horse peeing in the field across the road, unbelievable how much urine a small horse can produce. I thought for a moment that it could be the equine equivalent of blogging.

Lunch on Saturday was Pittenweem Haddock and a pint of Belhaven upstairs in the local pub (avoiding Sky Sports in the bar below) 100 yards from the house. The haddock was nice enough but I doubt it ever saw Pittenweem or ever spoke with an East Fife twang, the fishing industry in Fife is no longer what it once was.

We watched Mettalica’s “Some kind of monster” on TV during the week. I’d just come in after a long day spent down in Birmingham and it seemed like perfect couch fodder television. Turned out it was fun, excruciating and fascinating and for Ali an unexpected feast of metal, one of her early musical loves (?). The statistics on Metallica’s sales and life style excesses are mind boggling and their behaviour is incomprehensible but it all hangs together somehow and they survive. Makes me wish I’d tried a bit harder at playing those tight E minor riffs when I was a teenager.

Quote of the week (?) from “My Name Was Judas” by CK Stead:

“Our friend was not the Messiah, nor will there be one, this is the truth I write, it will not hurt you, grasp it.”

Buy a CD, watch a video

New CD - out right now - click cover to hear samples and buy.

impossible songs

Video produced and shot by Confushion: Music by Impossible Songs.

Saturday

impossible songs

impossible songs

Saturday morning diary.

No discernable hangover but a fuzzy head.
Watching re-runs of Scrubs on TV
Finding disgorged mouse stomachs on the paving slabs
Elvis at the Last Supper, beside whom would he sit?
Where to go for the rest of the day.
The shittiest thing that ever happened to me.
Having a shave in the shower and realising how much of your face you’ve missed when you come out.
Sitting up on the worktops
A sausage and fried egg bap with brown sauce.
Where does morning dew come from and how come it lasts all day?
Wearing an old T shirt.
Walking along the corridor singing Peter Gabriel songs.
A long conversation about autism.
Flaky broadband not working.
Trying not to eat the remains of last night’s popcorn.
Having an idea for a song and then forgetting it.
Deciding to go out for Saturday lunch, but where to go?
Deciding not to go to a Japanese Supermarket even if it may help the kids do their homework project.
Changing the bed sheets.
Sitting outside in the frail October sun.
Being 50 years and 51 weeks old, well almost.
Suddenly having something that may turn out to be the beginning of a retirement plan.
Going to the bottle bank yesterday and taking the bags out of the car today.
Interesting new Gnarls Barkley video.
Finding a lottery ticket in my pocket.
Coffee, tea, Coffee, tea, Coffee, tea, Coffee, tea, etc.
Thinking about another busy week ahead.
Thinking why are certain things sexy and certain other things not.
Why have I got spots this week?
I’m looking forward to something but I don’t quite know what it is yet.
Appliances making odd clicking noises and water pipes gurgling.
Being unable to get away from the couch.
Grenadine, Sprite and cherry cocktails.
Lunch at the SQ Bistro, baked potato, haggis and cheese. Weird but tasty.
£30 parking fine in South Queensferry High Street. Bugger.
Home and straight into the garden.

City of Bamboo

impossible songs

City of Bamboo - modern myth, modern fable, tea cloth underneath the table, never here, never able...

In the City of Bamboo
We sit cross legged and we watch you
We study all the things you do
All the stupid things you do
It seems you hardly have a clue
In this City of Bamboo

We are free but we are slaves
We stay excited and are brave
We’re resentful and engaged
As we seek the prefect wave
To try to be as good as you
In this City of Bamboo

The girl will cook a prefect meal
The doctor asks “how do you feel?”
The peasants offer jellied eel
The rushing rodents make you squeal
You just do what you have to do
In this City of Bamboo

The banker’s coins they shine like art
The actor plays his vital part
The priest and prostitute must part
That damp ignition will not start
I cannot leave and nor can you
In this City of Bamboo.



new video

Sugar Moon

impossible songs

impossible songs

Sugar Moon

Never mind the conspiracy theories about space travel and lunar landings and all the rest, none of that matters anymore. Space is out there and we all know that in time we will all be “out there” also – even it it’s as cremated ash particles. So I like to speculate every so often on what may be beyond earth and I currently like to think that the moon’s surface is made of sugar. Sugar burnt black and brown, syrupy at the edges, oozing and congealing as it basks in the rays of our sun shining down through the non-existent atmosphere. And right there below the surface are a number of warm, soft baked pears. Sounds ok and feasible to me, so remember when you next visit the moon, bring a spoon and a carton of fresh cream.

Video

A fun afternoon was spent at the Confushion household filming a version of the song “Not Pretty”. Ali and I now feel sure we can get Equity cards on the basis of our fine, spontaneous and largely unscripted performances, maybe a Brit, a Bafta or an Oscar awaits? Of course full credit must go the direction and production skills of Fraser and Karen as we stretched them to their limits with our petulant artistic demands, strops and a series of unreasonable requests. A quick dish of Fraser’s curry soon calmed us down and filming resumed with Ali digging her very red fingernails into me and my trousers getting soaked by a brace of water cannons. These deadly weapons were aimed and fired by some innocent children coerced into participation by the aggressive production team and Ali in particular. The drive back to East Lothian (in wet pants) was reminiscent of sitting uncomfortably in a moving steam bath, a thing I seem to have done many times in nightmares. Ali however slept soundly all the way home, purring like a well fed cat. We eagerly await the final, polished and edited version of the vid.

Go Forth and Tunnel

It’s a Forth tunnel we need, not another bridge. Locally fabricated in Rosyth, sunk in the estuary, pumped dry and filled with a roadway. There are lots of suitable sites in the South Queensferry and Rosyth areas. Bring your shovels next weekend and we’ll do some test digging, or if you have about £50million to spare then give me a call. It’ll be money well spent as (once the powers that be decide what to do) a new bridge will be at least £1.5 billion and the project may become even more embarrassing than the sad saga of the Parliament Building.

Good Life

impossible songs

impossible songs

The Good Life

The good life is paid for with the pure gold of guilt.
There really isn’t anything quite like it.
Its deep to the bottom, it’s tall to the top,
And nobody knows when the guilt will stop.

God given and demonstrated, remonstrated, white, Anglo Saxon or Scottish Presbyterian guilt. Mined in the highlands from water soft streams and springs, a Celtic mist of unrequited dreams, black Bibles and Hymn books and sermons on the dysfunctional dismount. Every bloody word and breath made to count. Something surrounding, spinning and dancing, like brave waves breaking, though that isn’t actually happening. It’s a ritual for the observer, a practice for the participant, some masturbation for the sycophant, a dash of mysticism, controlled and crippled in the shining candles and silver cups – all with wine and biscuits.

Guilty over money, guilty over sex, guilty in relationships, guilty about your ex, guilty about perversion, stealing, lying, not properly trying, standing still while inside dying.

Guilty about telling the truth, the shame of exposure and worst still losing your highly valued composure.

Family quilt, family guilt, do what thou wilt, do without guilt, do what thou quilt.

Standing naked before this made up God, imagined in some other mind, yet transferred so effectively over to mine.

Guilty if I deny Him (him), guilty for my unbelief but sick to the back teeth of this piss poor heritage, that sits me at this edge, pulls my loyalty to it’s limit for all the sins I failed so miserably to commit but am credited with.

Here alone, like a bad criminal, every guilty thought a taken prisoner of the subliminal:

God & Guilt.

Walking on egg shells in climbing boots.
Pulling hairs out by their roots.
The roots are deep in generation’s worth of ignorance, twisted.
Here come the black suits to keep you black listed.
Anger to pile on the guilt and squeezed,
Into the hardest bullet ball you could ever believe.
Never fire that bullet.

Jews, Hebrews, Muslims, Buddhists, Scientologists, Amish, Palestinians, Pictish, Catholic, fanatic, frantics, charismatics, statics, caravans and 4x4s, Solidarity Party, Buckfast smashed by the off-licence doors.

Bad Batch

impossible songs - faced with a bad batch...

impossible songs


Bad Batch Engineering

The drain hose on our dishwasher has a pin hole in it, we found it today, and it’s been leaking for months and has created a black, damp morass under the kitchen floor. Just what you like to discover on a Sunday afternoon after a few glasses of wine. I tried to phone the warranty company but they close at 1500 on Sunday (fair enough, try tomorrow). When the engineer arrives at either AM or PM some day next week I fully expect him to say “Ah! There was a bad batch of these hoses issued, you’ve been unlucky...” A few months ago when our oil tank leaked, (yes, we live in the sticks many miles away from the Russian gas fields so we only have oil and running water here), guess what? Our leaky tank came from a “bad batch” that somehow made their way into public use. Any “bad batch” 737s out there, or Space Shuttles or Coca-Cola or Aspirin? Beware folks, remember that quality systems, (you know, the things that numerous consultants are making big bucks from all year long), don’t always give you good quality, just consistently similar crap.

Jesus Camp

Somewhere in the buckle of the Bible belt the Army of God is stirring up it’s youngest and most easily controlled recruits, far away you may say, but it could still happen here yet. Camp out, figure out, work out and space out for George Bush, the right to carry arms and Jesus. Religious geeks wherever you are, stay busy brainwashing the 10 year old kids about “two kinds of people in the world, those who love Jesus and those who don’t”. And so the question is what do you want to do to those who don’t actually follow Jesus: Love them? Help them? Feed them? Do good Christian stuff as per the beatitudes? Be constructive in any kind of way? Hell no, let’s just burn the heathen masses out like the “good guys” did in the Old Testament, like the Israelis did last month when they left a million thirty year old cluster bombs in the villages of Lebanon. That’s God’s chosen people I’m talking about by the way, that’s how they treat their neighbours who don’t follow their God.

It never fails to amaze me how blinkered and intolerant people can be when they adopt fundamentalist beliefs of whatever kind. It’s a slippery slope, best stay away if you know what’s good for you. “White and red, black and blue, trying hard not to be like you”.

Ok enough ranting for one day.

Breathing out your soul.

Breathing out your soul,
In invisible smoke,
The chemical demons,
Explore the emotions,
Explore some kind of consciousness,
Export the emptiness,
So you may set sail,
Make a ghostly thing whole,
Breathing out your soul.