Memory

The Madcap Laughs

I now realise one of the great problems facing my generation. Memory. Ghosts and black and white footage from a guilty and misunderstood past. I’m old enough and just about lucid enough to recall the recent old world order. The last days of Empire, the fabled, pink tinged and toned Mercator Projection classroom map of the world, made of some kind of glossy cloth. Perhaps that is why I am in this perpetual state on unease, shifting my weight from foot to foot, side to side, twitching occasionally, waiting on the Royal Procession to pass and hoping for permission to carry on and put three spoonfuls of sugar in my tea. It all comes flooding back when I go to a school parents night and talk to those young and dysfunctional teachers: I get the jitters, perhaps it was that chav lady language teacher with bad teeth and complete schemey accent from Lochgelly that did it.

Three minutes thirty seconds is too long for the contents of a small tin of soup to spend in a powerful microwave.

Labour on the rampage. What a bunch of complete tossers make up the shadow cabinet now, I cannot, anywhere inside me find a kind word or thought for any of them. It’s a chronic source of disappointment to see how we (one time socialists) are represented: Milliband Vanilli, Ed Balls, Yvette Cooper, Douglas Alexander and the rest. Absolutely awful, at least it’ll be 4 years before they get a hold of anything they can properly screw up. Of course that means the others, the bloodsucking Tory vampires (not the good kind) with their toady LibDems will prevail. Oh to be in Bermuda, in a triangle, just sitting tight, to avoid the scandal.

Dundee cash machine (in a Scotmid no less) pays out double amounts of notes. A living dream in the septic city of jute, jam, pies and thirty year old grannies. Marvellous, worthy of a folk song. The bookies, drug dealers and off-licences will be rejoicing. The cash machine company director said “If people using the ATM see it as a bit of fun, so be it” and they can all keep the money. The ATM was shutdown shortly after the company were alerted. I’d love to think it was all part of an ongoing conspiracy or anarchist plot.

I don’t have any mouth ulcers at the moment but if I did I’d apply some Bonjela to those little, painful and unwelcome oral volcanoes. Oysters give you ulcers, not many people know that.

Still life with Bonjela.