New dawn of some golden day

It can get noisy around these parts but we mostly respect the environment.

More than ever we're now using some obtuse and oblique strategies to describe, understand and justify our lives and I suppose to re-connect with people who orbit the same sun but not the same spot of land. A constant balancing act of blogging, micro-blogging, texting, blue toothing photos and music and the odd 150 or so emails that wraps the process in fun and clever mechanics. Sometimes watching TV is almost relaxing, the friendly ping of Twitters in the background, newspapers littering the floor as Jonathan Ross returns to the screen to grin at Tom Cruise, already busy out grinning him. Which one would the average straight guy go gay for? Is it a contest at all?

The morning frost was scraped from the car and a light January sun rose over the hedges as we headed away into Edinburgh to collect the little box that contained the remains of Smudge our cat. The usual mess of roadworks and debris greeted us into and waved us out of the city, Smudge's carton sat on the back seat, like a gift from Amazon or Play.com. At least she's back home now and we'll scatter her ashes somewhere, sometime. It seemed a good idea to buy a selection of chocolate, pizza and finger food to munch through for the remains of the day.

Before that is started on it was the heavy but healthy brunch with smoothies, sausages (must be beef), eggs, hash browns, beans, toast, bacon and a pot of tea for Ali. It set us up for a hoovering and dusting marathon, experiments with light bulbs and starters and a stream of weekend laundry. Saturday is the day for utilities, kids wrestling with PC applications, Sky Soccer Saturday, dreams of the great Scottish novel, waste bins, exploring the depth of the freezer, glossing across the mail and papers and a single candle burning on the table to remind us of a little cat.

Tomorrow is Burns 250th birthday, the media and the tourist board are excited, it's their big time and they milk like it really meant something. Haggis will be stabbed and eaten and Burn's rather inaccessible works skimmed over as cliches and warm but now exhausted phrases are repeated with an acquired profundity by people trying to connect with something already dead and disconnected from most of our daily lives. The books are dry and open, the pages are staring at the ceiling but the words fail to to lift off and fly, mainly because no one really wants them to or needs them. They are like Bible passages or Dickens prose, best summed up in a few short songs, skimmed phrases or strap-lines and then put back on the shelf for the next festival of the glorious past or redundant holiday ceremony. On Monday Tesco and M&S will discount the neeps and mash and then lay out the aisle ends with Easter eggs, yellow chickens and daffodils. You know it makes no sense but you'll put your PIN number in anyway, these are your sins and you carry them with you, no matter where.