Hope in Mid Hope

impossible songs

Mid Hope - where are all the residents these days?



impossible songs

The search for Syrus carries on sporadically, determinedly, on the web and across the wide open and closed up spaces of West Lothian. We’ve had a sighting in the south over past Winchburgh; we’ve plodded across fields and down country lanes but found nothing. We’ve re-explored Mid Hope (as in the picture) and leafleted the scattered the dwellings that run across the estate. Now we know how big a place this is and how small a cat is in comparison. We also know a lot about the other cats lost in the area, many more than you’d think. Some disappear altogether, some return after a few days sporting and injury or two, some saunter back in and plop themselves on the couch as if nothing had happened. In our case it’s been one fruitless and frustrating search after another with no sign of the cat returning so far.

An alien finger in my Peri Peri

impossible songs

impossible songs

The Captain Beefheart mysteries

Hit that long lunar note and let it float, they say, others just freak out in a moon age day dream, oh yeah. I approve of both opposing positions and dead artists. Van Gogh’s art is in a weird style, to the uninitiated anyway. Meanwhile and coincidently an art exhibition takes place next door in the village hall, wine and Pringles flow freely and across the stained wooden floor; none of the artists present had a bandaged ear but we are in the strange position of having a village hall but not a village. The exhibit’s titles are many and various, some are more meaningful than others, some titles are better than the paintings.

Blips

History is all around, as is geography generally. Picasso breathes the same oxygen as all the others and his work is quite popular in Hollywood I understand. Perhaps his technique was more focused. Monet was an enigma and a skilled and popular gardener. Potato scones are also well liked around here, eaten raw with a little butter (?) or fried or grilled. My favourite chord sequence is Am, G, F, Em, G, Am, it can be played for hours without being boring for the player though not the listener I’m afraid.

Kittens attack innocent trees masquerading as house plants. Occasionally a dwarf giant is felled by their mighty claws. Squeals of surprise and stilted pain follow but the hard lesson is never learned. In the morning I shall vacuum up the fallen and part chewed leaves without ceremony but with silent respect, apart from the drone of the hoover.

Happiness is easy for Clive James to define but that is nothing to do with his nationality. Meanwhile I continue to empty the dishwasher and rub down the George Foreman in order to seek out my own tortuous route to happiness and self actualisation.

An alien finger in my Peri Peri (yawn!)

A bottle of Peri Peri sauce, purchased locally but we suspect it may contain a severed human finger in its darkest, secret heart. The question is, or should be, “at what point do we stop using the product?” Some might say use the sauce until the upright, rigid, dead digit appears in full view. Others may beg to differ and reject the sauce without any further ado, quite naturally. Some might enjoy, in a way they can’t explain, some subtle new aspect of the sauce’s flavour. Others may drain the bottle only to find small slivers of broken glass down at the bottom and wonder what the fuss was about but worry about consuming glass (a modern practice that many world religions are now against).

Almost peace in our time

The view from Creg-Ne-Baa in Freuchie, near Cupar.

impossible songs



impossible songs

Another busy week has passed, everyday crammed full with the ongoing cat search (exploring different, protracted and generally unsatisfactory lines), football, kids homework and exploits at their new secondary school, Transformers, Life on Mars, South Queensfery Comedy Nights, kittens in everything, Emma’s return from Sri Lanka, Paul on a mission to find Syrus, many meals and a few bottles of wine. I also spent a few anxious days tracking down my lost kilt, a particularly relevant item as we slide inexorably towards my oldest daughter’s wedding - now only a few weeks away. My precious Black Watch kilt had found a temporary home in a shop near the Hawes Inn, the reunion was almost emotional, thankfully quick and only cost £16.

Empty Headed

impossible songs



impossible songs

My head is empty.

Despite it being a busy and in many ways successful week our missing cat remains the primary concern and despite our natural optimism for all things, an air of gloom is prevailing. My own head feels strangely empty; I don’t think I’ve managed to have a single colourful thought or inspirational moment. Not having a head full of thoughts might seem like a good experience, like some deeper level of peace but actually it’s more like continually staring at a blank sheet of paper that you can neither move away from or write on or shade in. Of course like all things this will pass with either a happy ending or the realisation of an uncertain and sad outcome, we wait patiently. In the mean time the two kittens are sparring, running wild and growing bigger everyday. Their ongoing manic antics almost fill a certain gap.

Cover versions.

If you like live (recorded) music and ambling and rambling covers you could do worse than invest in The Saturday Sessions from the Dermot O’Leary Show. Forty four eclectic live pieces on one of those CD things from all sorts of interesting and naturally groovy acts, showing off and sounding pretty raw and no over dubs.

One lost cat

impossible songs



impossible songs

Syrus.

Sad to say our beloved cat Syrus has been missing for a full week now. We’ve searched all his known haunts but in the large wooded and agricultural lands that surround our house it’s not easy to cover all the possibilities. We’ve knocked doors, leafleted and used various cat web sites to advertise our loss but nothing has come of it so far. Losing your cat or your cat getting lost is not good.

Pulp Friction

impossible songs - flintstones fans.



impossible songs

Yes we have no Pop-Tarts.

In my regular sorties to swoop, hunt, gather and pillage in the supermarkets and of course be baffled by the choices and offers, I’ve also been noticing the disappearance or non-availability of certain key products. Supermarkets sell the illusion of choice and variety but actually fail to offer it. Some items have all but disappeared from the shelves or now come in other, foreign forms. You can’t just blame the product life cycle theorists or supply and demand. It is of course the Food Police hemming us into brands and products we only think we want. The confectionary and crisp aisle seem to suffer the worst and I also have concerns about their cereal stocking policies. This vague, bad but still living feeling is the result of trolley denting in Asda, Tesco and Morrisons. Trips to the Coop and Sainsburys are to stressful even to count in these, the wobbliest of statistics.

The appliance of science.

Why is there no cooking pot that, by using centrifugal force spins the contents so that they don’t stick to the pot during cooking? I have studied this medium at various theme parks: Alton Towers, Disneyland, Busch Gardens, Universal Studios to name but four and not counting Codona’s fun fairs of the sixties. Answers on a postcard please...

Happy Trails.

Without the Flintstones there would be no Red Hot Chilli Peppers, king ribs and dinosaur chicken bits or Simpsons. They are the spiritual source and traceable ancestor of many fine and misguided media creations and whacky barometers of modern life. Fred, Barney, Wilma, Betty, the Water Buffalos and Dino (so brilliantly named after a red Italian flop of a sports car) have changed all of our lives. I’m now trying hard to think what exactly Top Cat and his gang might have influenced. (Top Cat, Brains, Fancy, Choo-choo, Benny and Spook were their names).

Ugh.

Davy Crocket: A man who killed a bear at only three (was that the time of day?) and then went on to become the King of the Wild Frontier, where ever that was or is. Born on a mountain top in Tennessee, no maternity wing or emergency room in those days. None of these things explain why his song is going around inside my head like a cartoon merry-go-round this morning.

Contractually obliged blogging

impossible songs



impossible songs

The 2nd Ferry Fringe Open Mike event ran last night in South Queensferry’s Stags Head Hotel (the Stag). A little delay on the PA , a little twiddle on the controls, some tangled leads, a couple of shandys and few willing performers and a surprisingly enthusiastic audience, some local and some refugees from the huge cruise liner currently parked under the Forth Bridge. We’re all sold on song down here and we’ll repeat the event next month, around the 20th at the same venue.

The cat (the big adult one) has yet again gone awol. I spent the early evening hunting for him in what I think are his favourite haunts, how do you ever know these things? So it’s five days and counting since he dropped a mouse on the kitchen floor as I looked down at his grinning cat face - it's 6.30 am and I'm still in my pyjamas.

Dress down Friday. I’m now working on a site that offers the odd (for me) option of a dress down Friday. This means that if you turn up in your automatic choice of school uniform as it were, you look a bit of a chump. Suddenly I’m having to rethink my meagre wardrobe to see how it can cope with this cultural change. Thankfully there’s little if any sartorial effort made by my fellow workers, well the male ones anyway and there’s only three hundred and twenty working Fridays left for me to fret over.

In between brewing large amounts of Bolognese sauce and other magic potions for the weekend, hoovering and daydreaming I’m musing over the possibility of building a kit guitar from, err... a kit. The idea being to obtain a unique and well put together plank and all the accessories that I can then finish and customise in my own eccentric style and then brag to various musos about. I’m not wholly enthusiastic about the Airfix and Mechano aspects of this but the design and finish bit has a certain appeal. Something to pass onto the grandchildren so they can shove the neck through a 4x12 at the high school dance.

Pimp my Jaffa Cake

impossible songs




impossible songs

Soft biscuits

Should a Jaffa Cake be soft, giving and forgiving all over or should it be crisp at the edges and softer in the middle? The orangey bit should be the same in both cases, jammy. Big, modern soft cookie/doughy biscuits are odd, any biscuit without a crunch is really more of a cake, of course that begs the question, are Jaffa Cakes biscuits or, as their name suggests cakes? If you like them crisp (as close to crunchy as a Jaffa Cake gets) then they are probably biscuits. Of course none of this matters in the least. My personal favourites are digestives, in a jam sandwich.

Scotland’s weather is the same as it is everywhere else.

No gardening for almost a month, the rain has not let up, the plum tree has collapsed and our grand plans (whatever they were) for taming the wild jungle a few feet from this window has not materialised into any tangible form. Well I guess there’s still 2008. No, I am not obsessed with weather, time travel, hand washing or avoiding wet (dunked) biscuits, not in the least.

Heroes and Vulcans

Wednesday night is good for the time being because “Heroes” is on. More unfathomable American time paradox and superhuman tosh in the genre of Lost or Smallville but it keeps those of us of a certain age amused for at least 45 minutes, never easy with an attention span like mine.

Flexible structures

impossible songs



impossible songs

Climate change and the quest for a decent protest.

It’s not easy to make your mark in the world today without either falling flat on your face or flat upon your back (James Thurber: The bear who could take it or leave it). All good causes sometimes seem like lost causes and you have to think very carefully about what cause you take up and how you support it. My problem is that I tend to easily see and appreciate everybody’s point of view: Air travel is good; people can quickly and cheaply travel around the world for business or pleasure. Air travel is bad; great lumbering aircraft pollute the skies, burn fossil fuels and encourage no-brain tourists to pollute beauty spots. I haven’t the heart or conviction to complain about either position, I like to hope that one may cancel out the other in some piece of mathematical perfection and all parties will at least for a short period be satisfied. The thing is all our lifestyles and ideals have ratcheted up to some kind of unreasonable point now where it is difficult to remain comfortable on this splintered and unmaintained fence, where most of the time I want to be. I suppose it’s true to say that you can never really win an argument with somebody stupider or more blinkered than you, if they can’t get what your point is or they can’t accept it because they can’t grasp it what do you do? Pitch a tent at their airport or stun them with tasers?

Back to work.

Today I returned to work after two weeks of meandering, pottering, and walking with my hands behind my back and whistling. Doing nothing in particular, reading Harry Potter aloud, sitting outside pubs, scooping up kittens and kitten poo, nose to tail on motorways and lost a mile from your hotel, theme parks and sunny spots and rain battering onto your umbrella, home cooking and far away cooking, Pot Noodles and the greenest of salads, sheep and goats and paddling in a lake. So the summer has gone until the next Indian Summer and the bluebirds have ceased in their song, the house martins are tetchy and the thistles and plums are growing in all directions. The power and destructive capacity for nature is impressive: Flood, sun burn, cold nights and showers of meteors, what a marvellous climate we enjoy in this small corner of the universe. Life is seldom dull and going back to work wasn’t so bad, it allows another strand of purpose to unravel and then weave itself into some other unexpected pattern. Just glad I’ve avoided the M40 today unlike some of my colleagues.

Away from it all

impossible songs

impossible songs

A few days away.

Alton Towers and the Lake District - a short tour.

My Alton Towers visit was a better than the last one (10 years ago?), a bright sunny day, the park not too busy and the rides themselves were pretty good with queues almost bearable. It’s hard of course not to feel like a ripped-off captive in any theme park. Food and drink prices are extortionate, the actual quality is low and few of the attractions match the plastic and glossy blurb that describe them in brochures or web sites. A bit like most ordinary life really but to be honest I quite enjoyed the whole illusion of meaningful distraction and the prices scam.

High on a hill in Staffordshire there is a golf club and hotel with magnificent, open views across rolling hills and farm land, I stayed there for two nights and it was clean and pleasant and good value. Sadly however none of the helpful staff there had even the vaguest command of the English language, for a short time I was an outsider. We got by on gestures and pointing and a lot of Monty Python style “slow” talk. Do words matter?

The Lake District was a warm cataclysm of brainless traffic non-stop from the M6 to Windermere and Ambleside. Two places that must have been fantastic 60 years ago but are now held hostage by trippers and coaches and dirty money in a mess of street furniture and confused one way systems. After an hour of slowly boiling anger and going nowhere I turned up the road for Coniston and by complete chance discovered a quiet, decent spot on the waterside by Coniston Hall. The stumpy Cumbrian hills that pass for mountains here in the UK were green and magnificent in the August sun, the air was clean and the beer pretty normal but nice. The start of a brief but valuable 24 chill out began. Next day normal service resumed, grey skies masked and choked the peace and the impending rain filled my sails and blew me home across the border.

Patience and timing

Endless waiting and getting nowhere. I seem to spend a disproportionate amount of time waiting for other people. Clearly my own sense of timing in other things is wrong and I am therefore unable to work to the button to mesh neatly with whatever should be happening next. This means I am wasting a huge chunk of my own time. It also means that other people don’t share my sense of appropriate “earliness”. If everybody did then they would be in sync with my time and I wouldn’t waste so much waiting on them. A dilemma only I can solve.

8 Relative Quirks

Ali and Emma - mother and daughter.
impossible songs



impossible songs

http://normanlamont.typepad.com/lamontations/2007/08/8-random-facts.html

Norman Lamont asked us (using the link above) to list eight kookie (or otherwise) things about ourselves, clearly we did not have enough to drink but here’s a good stab at the list anyway. It’s not easy when you live on the normal side of a line that is not normal but is a simple continuum on a line from the place that is normal to the place that is not normal but may be natural and comfortable and is probably, depending on my mood and point of view where I may well feel most at home and that is not normal. The other problem is that we lack the requisite number of blogger types to share this shit with so it may go no further. If it works it works. Oh! and I have to do this today because I have to.

8ight quirky things about Ali & John.

I’m ambidextrous and can do mirror writing with both hands, backwards.

Ali and I have seven children between us: Three girls and four boys, (and I have three grandsons).

We first met when in a Christian cult in the 70s.

I was arrested at the Windsor Free Festival in 1974 while asleep.

Ali is a qualified accountant but has never been to Majorca(?).

We have four cats (three of whom live with us) and two of whom are kittens.

Ali can speak (conversational) Japanese.

I used to gig on the same band/disco circuit as the Bay City Rollers.

Lost, long weekend

The young stag and his guitar

impossible songs


impossible songs

Aberdeen

Zipping into and out of the speed camera’s all seeing eyes on the A92 is now a routine for me on my regular trips to the other family bases in Aberdeen and McDuff. We had a couple of days there mooning around shops, watching DVDs and “Heroes” and playing with various grandchildren whilst the seagulls squabbled in the background.

The journey home focused on the search for a Forfar bridie, would this mythical food be better than the local Stephen’s steak bridie or a Gregg’s steak bake? Eventually after fathoming the Forfar one-ways system and high street glaze of charity shops and building society’s I found a baker. I ordered two of the mighty beasts (Joe and I were to partake but Liv only wanted a muffin): the result, not so good, dry short crust pastry and a pleasant but hardly world beating mince filling. The last time I was in Forfar, in the mid eighties at a football match, the bakers had all run out of bridies so I got nothing and have been wondering about them since. The subsequent twenty year wait was not worth it but it reminded me how good our own local baker is.

Newcastle

Friday saw me heading for that unfamiliar form of transport, the train. The goal was to meet up with sixteen other souls, most a lot younger than me for Guy, my future son-in law’s stag weekend in Newcastle. I was apprehensive to say the least but decided to enter into the spirit early on by clattering my bottle of whisky onto the rail carriage table at two o’clock and inviting those there to participate in its demise. Of course they already had a healthy supply of beer and the journey south became pretty pleasant and relaxed. Virgin trains (well this one) are good.

The “Toon” was jumping when we set out for the evening after experiencing a very generous couple of happy hours in a bar near our hotel, every pub and club was jammed and sweaty with various groups all desperate to revel for whatever reason. To be honest I felt like and alien intruder who was using a non-scientific method to study some new life forms, all of whom became steadily blurrier as things progressed.
Next day it was karting and paintball. The karting was manic and painful, 60mph karts on a 1.2km track racing for half and hour. The paintball was painful and manic. Bullets of paint slicing into heads, ears and mouths, incomprehensible games that ended in carnage and an unforgiving surface on which to fall when the bumble bee of paint bearing your name struck home.

After a shower and a decent Italian meal we were back into the “Toon” for more of the previous night’s random exploration and body limits testing. This time a few of our young soldiers were a little wounded from the previous 24 hour’s excesses and manoeuvres so the mood was calmer and the drinking a bit more controlled. The stag himself avoided any real torture, tattoos or ritual humiliation (apart from a ceremonial shooting at the paint ball venue) and once we’d picked up the pieces the next morning we agreed that the weekend had been a great success.

GNER trains took us back to Scotland in what can only be described as an appalling standard of accommodation. Crowded carriages, no seats, and toilets awash, no air-con working and the bar closed for stocktaking (?). Quite what tourists heading for the festival in Edinburgh think of this beats me, I’m sure the Soviet railways in the sixties couldn’t have been much worse.

Modern life is...

Art imitates life and vice-versa on our kitchen notice board. The more colourful pieces are fire-engines (red) and fish (blue).


impossible songs



impossible songs

Dalgety Bay

I visited Dalgety Bay a few days ago – (as a taxi driver for the bridesmaids who were to get their dresses fitted). My first thought on entering the sterile and manicured place was, “why would anybody spend good money on a house down here?” Of course me and Dalgety Bay go back a long way, almost 40 years or so to the time when it was a few new Wimpey houses, a shop, a kirk and a large abandoned airfield with a few factories. In those days kids (typified by me) did what we did, hung around, got drunk, listened to music and there was space in which to move and breathe. An unhealthy glow of unreal memory sits upon my recollections of this time I’m afraid, perhaps that colours my current view a little too much. Anyway now the whole Bay area has grown like the Simpson’s cartoon town of Springfield. An un-stylish mish-mash of property developments, council houses given the owner occupier glam treatment and an itchy rash of apartments and so-called waterside retirement properties. It’s taken it forty years to look like this; I wonder how it will be in 2047?

Home life

At a more cerebral level Dr Kawashima’s two brain training games are taking over our lives. Scores, ages and sibling rivalry competitions burn on through the various levels sparking minor quarrels and mini challenges. My own preferences currently reside with the more sedate and frankly less arduous activity of Wii golf. Of course I should really be writing songs about deep and meaningful issues or cutting the grass or making plans or putting up security lights but there will be time for all that.

Simpsons Movie

Of course it’s funny, witty and works on all the levels you’d expect it to. Small children laugh out loud, adults grin in recognition, those that don’t get it go to Evan Almighty (a film that looks so appalling I have to close my eyes at the trailers and turn away from the adverts) and then they eat in Pizza Hut. So the Simpson’s movie is really just three long, funny episodes stuck together and either enhanced or ruined by being viewed along with members of the public who laugh at different times from you and with the smell of popcorn and nachos festering in the background.

Up the inflatable hammers

impossible songs

impossible songs

Aberdour Festival (the Strat and tambourine get a rare outing).

Things I learned today and at the Aberdour Festival:

Buffalo burgers are very good. Now I understand what Native Americans and the first settlers enjoyed in their diet, unfortunately taking it to extremes. These particular buffalo came from the village of Puddledub in Fife, naturally. Buffalo sausages are also pretty good I believe.

LED Lights on guitar effects pedals are unreadable in bright sunlight. This means you can’t set your tone or drum machine up at all.

When you’re a teenager feedback is fun and the essence of rock and roll, when you get order it’s just a nuisance.

No matter how many leads ad adaptors you have with you, you never have the one you really need.
Inflatable hammers can cause extreme pain when battering your head from a short distance away.

Some Asian dance and music is pretty funky indeed and in Fife a massive crowd pleaser as it turns out.

Not all CD players operate in an intuitive and easy way. Press and guess is not a good way to queue up music for dance groups.

Playing music in a tented village is pretty good fun and when it rains you are in a tent but the audience isn’t.

Portaloos have not improved significantly in thirty years but remain an essential part of outdoor life.

When you turn your well organised flight case up side down and then take it on a car journey it ceases to be well organised when you next open it again.

An acceptable form of Surf and Turf can be lasagne, pizza and salmon and cream cheese bagels. Add some salad and a couple of Magnum lollies and you’ve a fine, all round meal.

Playing guitar in your socks is ok and helps to operate small switches more easily.

Aberdour Festival

impossible songs

If you’re at a loose end on Sunday 29th allsorts of odd events are scheduled to take place at the Aberdour / Arts / Music / Running / Dancing / Beer drinking / Mind reading / Car-booting / Pigeon shooting / Outdoor cooking / Spooking and prevention of looting Festival. It’s not just the mad dogs and fine ladies of Edinburgh’s legendary OOTB, on no.




impossible songs

Music

The musical experiment of the friends the environment who spent and sent their good intent with intentions of irreverence, in the end they made no difference but I must say in their defence, the exit and the extravagance made history and little sense so never mind and never end the end of all our innocence and of course God did give rock and roll to you personally so don’t abuse or waste this gift.

New religions in food

A temple of eggs. One large omelette topped with scrambled eggs. Four (sliced) boiled egg columns are then prepared and then a fried egg roof is placed upon this structure to complete the temple. Why not try one today? Are there any other food temples you could construct? Some ideas are:

A temple of Mars Bars – very solid and possibly angular. No cooking required.
A temple of beer – generally built while still within the holding container to preserve the quality of the product. There is scope to create a huge structure using this medium.
A temple of rocket and spinach – difficult material to work in, not for the beginner.
A temple of strawberries – seasonal and bright. Use cocktail sticks for strength.
A temple of pork chops – using the traditional BBQ preparation this hot temple normal rises from the smoke of a charcoal base, rests on a grill top and sizzles nicely in a finely balanced and blackened pile.

Dreary but not sorry

impossible songs

impossible songs

Appliances.

Bought a new appliance lately? Some marvellous piece of white good, quite good engineering wonder with a funky name. A box of Chinese components assembled by Turks in a Polish factory and recommended by a middle aged ex-supermodel who insists all washing should be done at 30 degrees – to save the planet. If only it was all that simple. I suppose the good people of Tewksbury and Gloucester are currently kicking themselves over the amount of washing they’ve done in their life time at +40, that and the Easy jet flights to Spain and the Marks and Sparks deserts. Appliances should make life easier of course, tiny robots, unable to walk or talk but kind and benign and understanding of our so subtle human needs. A dish washed here, a sock dried there, some background music, a warm radiator, and a fiery pop-tart, a microwaved bag of Basmati rice or voyage into Facebook on your laptop. Well I’m not voting against appliances, perish the thought, it’s just the way they only ever last for five years or so in normal use and then give up the ghost like some mechanical lemming. If we’d made things that lasted then just maybe we’d actually consume less and somehow put a little more good stuff back into the environment instead of more fumes, landfill and junk.

Floods.

It used to flood all the time and Bangladesh and register with us for about sixty seconds on the news then disappear up some laughing celebrities’ sleeve into the next TV programme, now the chickens are coming home to roost. Anyway nobody under thirty and on less that £100k a year can afford to buy a house in the UK these days, unless it’s on a used up American air-base. New Labour and the grasping estate agents and banks have put paid to that dream so let’s just keep building these unaffordable timber and breeze block temples to modern bad taste in their thousands across the flood plains of Britain and wait and see what happens next.

Small cats.

I know little about cats. I have lived under the same roof with a big one now for five years or so but it hadn’t occurred to me he’d once been a kitten and what that might have been like. Now that we have two kittens in the house I am starting to grasp the complexity of cat ownership. Kittens are insane, almost suicidal bundles of unending energy that jump, climb and cavort in the most madcap of ways turning your home upside down in the process. Two young dinosaurs loose in the house would probably have less impact than these furry fellows as they rampage across everything, chasing each other, bits of fluff, their tails and anything that makes an unexpected move anywhere within their radar. God love the little darlings.