The Search for the Grail

impossible songs on a virtual pilgrimage to Legoland

impossible songs

There’s nothing wrong with Bulgaria.

Thursday night and I’m at OOTB, my hip pain and various bruises not quite so acute and I’m hoping that a few hours of eclectic singer-songwriter mumbo jumbo will prove an adequate distraction. It’s a fair enough night with some older participants popping in: Fiona Thom, Roddy Renfrew, the driven Davie Watson and Ben Young to name but a few. Ben played a song called “Battle of the Bands” that stuck with me. One part of the lyric was spot on in its incisive observation “there’s no one here who’s going to remember what you played, singers singing with nothing to say”. The irony and pathos in that line and hopefully hovering it over the heads of the OOTB audience of songwriters, burn-outs, hopefuls, merry pranksters and me (I'm all of those and more a various times) was a magic little moment.

Ben's song did make me reflect again on modern music, entertainment, re-made films, covered songs, tribute acts, re-released albums and packages of work that are blown up to be “classic” when they are little more than regurgitated crap that was never really any good anyway. Wouldn’t we all give everything to just find something new to say, something in a fresh, unexplored part of the spectrum and then express it neatly, articulately and all balanced up on a good tune? That is like digging up the Holy Grail, the Fountain of Youth and the lost Ark and then getting them rolled up into a golden three minutes forty seconds of timeless performance. Better to live in hope than die in Bulgaria.

Fit and knowing it

impossible songs

impossible songs

Looking on the Brightside.

Despite numerous personal setbacks, injuries, missed TV programmes, wildly clashing priorities, heavy work schedule, no garden progress, shorter than ever days and attention seeking cats it may have been a good week. I’ll know for sure once the painkillers, over eating and alcohol wear off. Constructive humour, cat licks and the wee men in the Nintendo Brain Training houses are decent diversions so I will remain confident that at the light at the end of the tunnel, there will be yet another tunnel. Built by a psychologically challenged engineer and bricklayer who knew his tunnels and the great universal purposes that they were designed for. Once you are in a tunnel just keep going, if it does not lead to the surface, it certainly will lead to another tunnel so at least you always know where you are. In a tunnel.

Fit against all odds.

So the choosing of incorrect foods give you cancer? Wine, bacon, ham, sugary drinks, red meat (and I suppose double cheeseburgers and anything Italian) need to be risk assessed and managed out of your life, your menu and your shopping trolley and replaced of course with green fibrous items that grow in the ground and are crunchy, full of watery goodness and eaten whilst breast feeding.

RECOMMENDATIONS INCLUDE:
Limit red meat
Limit alcohol
Avoid bacon, ham, and other processed meats
No sugary drinks
No weight gain after 21
Exercise every day
Breastfeed children
Do not take dietary supplements to cut cancer


I’m a little puzzled how somebody of my age can undo the “no weight gain after 21” advice, well meant as it no doubt is. I feel so cheated that this advice was not made available to me in 1976. Having said that I’ve only gained about 3 stones in the intervening years and I do practise a daily and religious regime of exercising – mainly based on fidgeting and climbing stairs many times over in order to get the things that I forgot to bring down in the first place.

Fruit from the Far East

impossible songs try Pocky but avoid admiring the cute monket design on the box...

impossible songs

Recovery

Despite my horrific injuries I slept most of last night, showered and shaved in the morning, squeezed my rigid body into my car and drove somewhat cautiously to work. My first day back in a week was bearable and for long periods of time I forgot about my various sore places and tender spots. Honourable toil and a hard day’s work are indeed a blessing from the various painted and gilded gods that orbit this scarred and abused earth. As it happens I don’t really toil, I sit behind a desk and click a mouse on email after email (well I did for all of today).

Feline Recovery

The naughty kittens aka Clint and Smudge paid a visit to the vets today to have their various little boy /girl bits done away with. When I came home they were looking well and fairly lively considering their ordeal, I can’t image I’d be jumping up onto tables a few hours after an encounter with the scalpel in such a precious area. Cats are made of tough stuff these days (cat meat I imagine).

Pocky Recovery

Pocky is a sweet from the Far East, a combination of chocolate and banana in the form of an edible straw that tastes like straw. Popular with kids, tourists, students, followers of strange beliefs, uni-cyclists, Pocky fetishists, double-glazing salesmen, employees of GAP, Subway and Marks and Spencer’s and the many fine people who run the Bangkok Gypsy floating water market. Buy it on EBay.

Autumn

impossible songs

impossible songs

Autumn Allman Brothers.

An autumn wide week of visits and gardening, roaming nowhere in the woods, balancing school holidays and activities, grandson baby-sitting and queues of motorway traffic has passed. Autumn also teaches us that a better name for Amy Winehouse would be Amy Winepuss (according to my kids). We are all getting fed up of any version of “Valerie” manifesting itself on the radio.

As easy as falling.

Today I suffered the injury and indignity of falling from a step ladder. I was cutting the hedge and tottering on top of the ladder quite successfully for all of five minutes and sniping the nasty spines of hedge, holly, tree or whatever it was, happily enough. Then I tried a slow descent in order to move to another patch and for some reason it all went badly wrong. I travelled from vertical to horizontal in a millisecond landing with a thump flat on my ear, elbow, hip and knee. Apart from pain in various places and trembles and shakes I became aware of warm blood running down my head. I lay there for a moment and decided not to crawl towards that white strange light or shout “help, help!” in what would have been a feeble voice. I also considered the “Working at Height Regulations” and whether or not I could sue myself and thereby gain some reward from the accident. Then I though of my own perilous finances and the gravy / vegetable stock train that is Impossible Songs and decided against litigation. By now the dull pains were getting sharper so I decided to attempt to stand up. Thankfully I found I could do so and staggered successfully into the open arms of Ali, (busy in the front garden) who administered first-aid, tea and sympathy. After that the kittens set upon me, purring their delight at my injuries and immobility as they showed complete solidarity by falling asleep on my heaving chest. I blame it all on on jet-lag and time-chaos caused by irresponsibly moving the clocks back.

Kitchen fireworks.

In what looked like becoming a day of household accidents Ali burned her nasal internals and both hands while slicing a red chilli whilst making a South American salad. It was innocently marked up with only two Tesco flames out of a possible five but still did some serious nose and finger damage and brought the kitchen to a complete standstill delaying the injured man’s tea. This prompted a discussion about the possibility of wearing a chilli helmet, gloves and mask to avoid further incidents. I myself was a victim of chilli burns a few months ago when I thoughtlessly wiped my eye while chopping one of those little crimson fireworks. It’s compellingly relevant and true that nine out of ten homes happen because of accidents these days.

Where are they now?

impossible songs & hispanic Goonie memories

impossible songs

Non-Goonie Wisdom:

You cannot escape the incisive gaze of those of us who like to watch you eat.

In some countries the advent of the motor car is known as “The invasion of the men with wheels who should have known better”.

There is a certain hidden catastrophe in all lives and we dare not discuss it.

Smart thinking should never be associated with the rather vague notion that is city linking.

If your aircraft crashes on a mountain in the Andes and you survive relatively intact then get away from the top of said mountain as quickly as possible. Never assume that they are “coming to get you”.

There is a man in India who lives on a diet of nuts and berries that are gathered for him by wild squirrels and tame racoons – why not try that?

Scotland’s national dish is a pie on a roll with brown sauce and tragically has been completely overlooked by the wider world of fine dining.

If you are poor, recently divorced or down on your luck then finding hidden treasure can be easy, provided that you have followed the map and all the clues correctly. Ask the Goonies or Scooby-Doo and Shaggy for some tips.

Mobile phones, ankle socks and moustaches were banned in Romania by Calvinists and the Papal Guard as early as the late seventeenth century.

Just where exactly has a cats paw been when it comes out from a litter tray?

In Morocco it is possible to obtain a licence to fly a magic carpet.

“There is no red meat or white meat, only meat.” Yoda.

Everything is just copied, cut and pasted from somewhere else on the web. Art is simply research and repetition.

Francis Vincent Zappa did not outlive Leonard Cohen.

What is this strange and mystical power that cheese has over us all?

We all aspire to retire and live comfortably on a decent pension in a warm, hospitable and familiar country where only a very small percentage of the population are mad.

Once a decision is made about the new crossing for the River Forth I’ll be able to relax.

Mr Bing Crosby had a fine voice.

The Goonies begat the Fratellis in a strange but wonderful moment of madness - but it seems like a long time ago now.

Every post is a question

impossible songs are troubled by great works of art and their hidden meanings...

impossible songs

If I had an answer I’d write it down but I’m as stumped as a one-legged lumberjack.

Slow boat to Linlithgow.

Today we wandered the shores of the silvery Forth, through leaves, mud and burn jumps up to Blackness, a village without a shop or pub but with a pretty decent castle. At one time in Scottish history this must been the main route by water for the Royal Family’s travels from Edinburgh to Linlithgow Palace - for a quiet weekend now and again. Hard to imagine travel round these parts in times before the A8000 or the M9. It was also strange that when talking to the Historic Scotland rep at the castle the old abandoned building at Midhope came up in conversation. Is this Scotland’s most forgotten piece of epic country house architecture from the 17th century? Why does nobody really know anything about it? Are there more of these mad and odd cousins hidden all over the place, in the trees and bushes, decaying away while we polish the stones at Stirling and Edinburgh?

Zombie Sports

While walking in the woods we had a long discussion about the status of zombies, their souls, our souls and zombie animals and related aberrations. Zombies are undead people and I have a problem with that, it’s just not black and white enough, you’re either dead or alive as far as I’m concerned. Unless of course you are in the TV show Lost which is in a different place altogether. The truth is I don’t understand zombies as a concept, how do their motors really run? Where is the conscious mind of a zombie? None of this is worth bothering about so I'd rather think about plots involving zombie animals, zombie seagulls and rodents, zombie dinosaurs, zombie penguins etc. all fine as long as they stay within video games or daft movies.

Mona Lisa smile

The Mona Lisa, just how hot is she really? A girlie painting stuck in a room in France but painted in Italy, not much bigger than an Arabic postage stamp, no clear or understood facial expression and surrounded by Japanese tourists trying to snap her with their mobile phones, oh and painted by a gay genius who also invented the helicopter, various codes and heavy rock music. Queues gather every day to observe her image hanging upon a golden wall and her face has been used to promote everything from cheap fireworks to chewing gum. Now in the final dirty deed she has been exposed, only for having shaved her eyebrows and singed her lashes, all for attention and as a hedge against possible blackheads (just like our own sweet Lana Lang). Whatever these all add up to I don't care and I can forgive her everything and still love her.

Back to the garden

impossible songs

impossible songs

Don’t fear the bleeper.

Another birthday has passed and today I feel normal again. For one thing I’ve not died on my birthday, something I don’t fancy doing, especially early on in the day before you’ve received all your presents, that would be pants. I suppose a bit like dying on Christmas Eve or just before you go on an expensive and well planned holiday. I’m sure views on this vary depending on religious and philosophical beliefs but I’d much rather die on a day when I’ve nothing special planned for the next. It would minimise any feeling of loss or being cheated out of something and I guess be less of an inconvenience to others.

Having wrestled with the controls of my funky new phone and in true baptism of fire style texted hurried and essential messages (beyond normal new phone training) to practice using it, I’m now finally getting there. This means that I have now forgotten how to work my old phone - but he/she won’t let me go, oh no! (a potential Steven King script idea?). My old phone woke me with a 6.25am alarm yesterday from deep within my briefcase and then asked me if I wanted to switch him/her back on. I did the only kind thing and said an emphatic no. I hope he/she didn’t have too many elaborate plans for the rest of the day.

My birthday was a very pleasant affair (apart from a certain 0 – 5 football result due to bad Karma over my a views on English rugby), quite a few family members flitted across my day and Ali produced an excellent surf’s up meal that seemed to last all evening. Cards and presents were duly received and appreciated and I had no hangover at all on Sunday morning.

We plough the fields and scatter in all directions.

The new electric rotavator had a trial run around the garden this afternoon. Ali remained at a safe distance on top of the hedge doing a fly past with the Black and Decker trimmer while I wrestled single-handedly with the banana coloured ploughing machine. Like Luke blipping across Endor on a speeder bike I cut through the weeds, soil, grass and rubble. By next year this brown field site will be a cricket pitch surrounded by palm trees, orchids and other lush vegetation. It proved to be an exhausting couple of hours work mind you, I’d spent the morning erecting goal posts and then taking them down at the boys football so that’s two sessions of actual physical labour to endure today. My soul however felt pure and satisfied afterwards and I fell into a smug sleep on the couch watching the end of the Brazilian Grand Prix (yawn).

B52

impossible songs v the B52s

impossible songs
B52 forever.

Today I am 52 years old and it’s been a nice day and a feeling so far. By and large I am however finding that 52 is not all that unlike being 51 and 364 days. Of course I have only ventured out so far, so far anyway, but later I intend to venture even further. I am also trying to avoid any mention of rugby, Paris or England or English fans or glorious or Jonny Wilkinson or sports commentator, it is not easy today, on my birthday of all days. One solution is to fill part of the day with watching Dunfermline take on the stripy shirts and weegie accents of Hamilton Academicals at football – a decent alternative to rugby I say. This evening I’ll eat, drink, daydream, muse and maybe watch cartoons or read the paper.

Life in general.

Some tips / suggestions on how to behave and some actual conversational examples:

When asked I replied “I was just in that kind of mood at the time”.

When approached I said “I’ll do that because I think I should”.

When ignored I said nothing that is repeatable here.

When invited I said “I’ll certainly be there”.

When offered a seat at the table, I took it quietly.

When offered the cash I said “Thanks very much”.

The fat shall inherit the earth

impossible songs & the obvious picture

impossible songs

So it has been confirmed that by 2050 the diet dodgers of the UK, the obese, the corpulent and the clinically overweight will be in the majority and a threat to all other life forms on the planet. Well I’m not bothered; they (the fat people) can take pride in their evolutionary success and at the same time take responsibly for their own size and the running of the world (or UK) as well. That’ll teach them, some decent real life stress and having to think about problems instead of puddings might just help shed a few of those precious pounds. The rest of us may now have a fighting chance of getting a shot of the arm rest on a flight and a reasonable increase in private personal space at the same time. Of course if the government was serious about this they’d treat fat people in the same appalling way they treat smokers, gum chewers and TV personalities. All you do is ban fat people from restaurants, cafes, burger bars and the sweetie counter and Pik-a-Mix bar at Woolworths. That way, using the proven road of social exclusion, you will drive them back into conforming to the states’ desired eating regimes. The only problem is that in order for social exclusion to work you have to have created a society that people actually want to be included in. Me, I’m with the unreal Vikings, Kirk Douglas and Tony Curtis, onto this in an unscripted way.

Other things you won’t be able to do most probably before 2020 or by the end of the next Labour government's reign:

Smoke tobacco unless in a private submarine, a barrel going over Niagara Falls or on the moon.
Buy alcohol in bottles/units bigger than 50ml and certainly not at all in a Scottish supermarket.
Carry a Mars Bar or Twix onto an aircraft.
Have sex up in a tree unless wearing a harness and safety helmet and the tree consents.
Urinate into bushes unless involved in a near death experience.
Say anything at all about someone else’s religion.
Tell jokes about fellow human beings or snigger to yourself.
Drive a car above 20mph or anywhere on a road without traffic calming measures (eat that Subaru boys!).
Have zips on your trousers (just too dangerous).
Squeeze spots while looking into mirrors in toilets at Motorway Service Stations.
Criticize the wisdom of having street furniture and warning signs that are in ten languages including Welsh and Polish. This includes multi-lingual signs saying “caution scalding hot water” on all scalding hot water taps.
Be in the same town as a product containing traces of nuts.
Use cash to buy anything other than drugs or sexual favours.
Wear odd socks, hats, checked shirts or a loud tie.
Kick dogs or squirrels if they bite you.
Not wear a condom at all times - just in case. (Applies to both male and female.)
Blog any weird stuff like this.

A passive pot at clouds

impossible songs

impossible songs

Weather Report

It’s the time of year when cheese puffs are rebranded as Witch’s toes and innocent pumpkins are gouged out by reluctant adults and turned into repositories for surplus IKEA tea lights. Nobody ever eats the inside of the pumpkin but we all say “I’ll do something with it this year, perhaps make a pie, that would be nice”. Poorer people break their knives and skin their knuckles and bellow at their impatient children whilst hollowing turnips out for the same smaller effect. Their tea lights come from the Co-op. Yes! Halloween is upon us, the nights are drawing in (yawn) and the great bonfires are being built on green areas and recovered land on which to burn the bodies of unbelievers, adulterers, doorstep Mormons and Social Democrats. It is of course a metaphorical bonfire but it can still be viewed through any housing estate white plastic lounge window on a flat screen TV set to BBC2 or the History Channel (this is a type of modern suburban irony). After these events a long winter, mainly a mixture of floods and frost follows.

Weather in the UK is apparently very similar to that of Patagonia on the southern tip of South America. Nowhere else in the world is there such a volatile mixture of climatic extremes it seems. The thing is nobody lives there so they don’t whinge about it the way that we do, particularly on Tuesdays and when subsequently comparing the real weather with the Technicolor weather icon that sits with your postcode on your homepage or to the right on the BBC website. I think that’s enough of this for now.

Weather Report were/are a tedious jazzy rock band made up of fine players who floated like a fat, passive barrage balloon across the musical skies of the late 20th century. Good luck to them anyway.

We can bee strong

impossible songs

impossible songs

Homes fit for Bees.

Despite taking a battering from mobile phone signals, poor weather, pollen pirates and aggressive shell-suited wasps, the bees are fighting back. Clearly some government minister (from an office near Mr Prescott’s former stomping ground) in association with lifestyle style gurus and marketing giants “Dobbies” has decided to tackle the bee decline problem head on. Now you can adopt a colony of the furry bummers and house them in these neat bee condominiums. They can be dotted around your garden or anywhere not too close to a mobile phone mast or bonfire. Albert Einstein and Albert Schweitzer and the many English kings who shared that great name would be proud at how this proactive purchasing and bee breeding action may save the civilised world. It is important that in your enthusiasm to begin a bee colony that you don’t make the possibly fatal mistake of attracting a group of African Killer Bees into your garden. No matter what type of political system they may say they are fleeing from or how oppressed and persecuted they might say they are, don’t believe them. NIMBY.

Smile please

impossible songs

impossible songs

Laser Lollies.

Invention is the mother of necessity and so it was only a matter time before one of our highly skilled researchers here at the Abercorn Institute of Naval Gazing Medicine came up with a white chocolate lolly that incorporates a strawberry laser centre. We’re hoping to market these items around the Balearics all next summer long from a well pimped Ford Transit ice-cream van. Packed with a certain bohemian punch it certainly beats 99s and Mr Whippys into a cocked hat.

A frog of plagues.

There’s nothing quite like coming home from work to find that one of the cats has peed by the back door and that a small frog is happily paddling in it. The orphan frog is removed and returned to the wild in what has now become a well practised ceremony and the yellow stream of territorial marking is wiped up and disinfected. Life then resumes.

She came in through the drive-through window.

Dumb. It is dumb to eat two McDonalds sausage and egg McMuffins back to back, or in any other less than normal seated at a table physical dining position. And another thing, why are there no Taco Belles or Wendy’s in the UK?

A quiet night at the Stag

impossible songs PA crisis

impossible songs

Ali, Norman and I braved the hysterical October weather and South Queensferry’s spiralling property prices to host a flat as a “Flat Earth Society Sat Nav System” Open Mike at the flat Stag. This evening was in honour of the SQ Arts Fest planned for sometime in the future. We jammed along on a few of each others songs for fun, chatted about comics and supped shandy for a while and then ritually dismantled the PA. Of course we could’ve been at OOTB in the fabled city doing honorary John Peel duets. Still I got to bed at a decent time and the nightmares were less vivid. Signed myself out today....

Radioheadwig

impossible songs

impossible songs

TinTin is happy today

impossible songs

A sense of true completeness.

A cup of tea and a chunky Kit Kat, Sunday newspapers scattered and unread. Things done, odd jobs chalked out, some materials used up and a few odd bits left over. The sun coming in through the kitchen window, looking out and noticing that the grass has been cut. Putting fairy lights on the arbour for visiting, fee paying, paid up and flaked out smokers. Buried solar lights that rise and surprise in the Indian summer evenings - we hope. Rubbing Brasso over the scratches on my car and plugging a leak in the radiator with a compound that looks like it’s made out of crushed herbs. Watching a squirrel bury nuts in the lawn and then inspecting the tiny holes he made in it. Stir fried veg and meat in oyster sauce, red wine and a strawberry and vanilla smoothie. Recording loads of programmes on Sky Plus and knowing that we’ll never get round to viewing any of them. A sore throat still being sore but not getting any worse. Swotting up for the next day at work on the couch in a cosy lounge. Looking forward to next weekend, holidays, weddings, Christmas (for no clear reason) and my birthday. Missing traffic jams (until tomorrow).

Brown Bomber and a frog

impossible songs

impossible songs

Things of the spirit...

If you choose to dive into that cool swimming pool well that’s fine by me but don’t expect me to do the same unless I actually want to. Don’t presume or assume that your thoughts and urges are always similar to mine and that your opinions and beliefs some how mirror mine, why should they? And while I’m on a rant don’t even think that I really care about what you think or feel or wish to sell to the rest of the world, I don’t. I do however respect your position, rights and space – so get on with what you have to do.

Afterlife

They say that in Valhalla it’ll be nothing but Guinness and Stovies. An idea I’m not altogether against so I’ve decided to join this Facebook group and in so doing hopefully determine my eternal dwelling place and a basic diet. Everybody needs a plan for their future.

Cat life

Clint the kitten killed his first frog today, before I could stop him. Of course that led on to me experiencing some inner conflict, (and nostalgia in the process) by wondering whether or not I should even consider stopping him from being the natural killing machine he is. The frog is in the wrong place at the wrong time (our kitchen) and it’s only natural for something a step or two higher on the food chain to have a peck at him. So moved was I that I wrote this little snippet in honour of the event:

“Alas and a lack, that little grey frog won’t come back.
Now a kitten has grasped, a frog can make a tasty snack.”

Brown Bomber

As a teenager I wore two copies out, it is the blurry soundtrack to the best and worst of times. It is a fusion of the best of rock, pop, blues and folk and it touched a nerve like nothing else with its energy, guitar technique, noise and latent mystery. I now realise that I’ve been looking for some other musical effort to better it ever since and to date that has not happened - though a few things came close (generally in a genre not far away from this but in forms less well defined), so I’m stuck with it. The strange thing is that I have no real need or desire to listen to it all the way through ever again.

Tiger Balm

impossible songs

impossible songs

The Smiling Angel of Divine Retribution: When she visits the children dance in the streets, bees buzz, the sun sneaks out and away from the thickest cloud, the rain dries and steams on grey pavements and buskers spontaneously sing a newly composed song and then combust. So glowing will your Universal Karma be at the time of the angelic visit that the area surrounding you will light up in a pale but warming radioactive-green and soul sanitising way. Meanwhile a small still voice inside will say to you “Hey now, hey now, don’t dream it’s over, hey how, hey now, when the world closes in”. You’ll repeat this simple mantra 1001 times and then on completion allow your natural cynicism a few brief seconds of life before you crush it like a wasp with the latest copy of Hello magazine.

Thank you: Thanks be to all those who let the gypsy traveller in, who relinquish a space to a white van, to a family in their grubby, sticky people carrier, to a Tesco lorry delivering the bacon, to the football teams and stag weekends and sundry grim faced motorcyclists, the knights and ladies of the road who leave a gap to squeeze a desperate bumper into. Thanks a thousand fold more to the brainless, idle and blind politicians who have stalled and stammered at the prospect of a new crossing for the River Forth. Your lack of balls and action and interest in your fellow Scots has led to weekends, mornings and evenings of misery for your people (thankfully we are not in any decent sense yours!), punch ups, arguments, divorces, horn honking, over heated cars and time wasting on a grand scale while the Road Bridge rusts and it’s successor is still in an iron foundry somewhere in Poland or Germany. To our leaders and FETA thanks a banana bunch.

Tiger Balm is a smooth and spicy little number that contains no tiger components, or rodents or unnecessary quotients. I now have a little jar, a gift from Thailand afar, to rub upon my sore and tired out places, to resurrect and so it my strength replaces, to put heat into the coldest space. I’ll rub some in some day and eat a jelly baby and light a sacred candle to take all the pain away. Having said that I’m not a big fan of Eastern religion(s) or books that you have to read backwards.

Much pasta has been cooked, some even eaten with a rich meat and tomato sauce, but large cold, buttery yellow slabs of the material remain locked up in an open fridge. These then tempt the feeble-minded and hungry into adding into their metabolism some extra micro waved calories of hot, heavy pasta. So is it true that if you micro wave food for over three minutes, 25% of the calorific content is removed? I believe that researchers at the University of Pittsburgh & Pitreavie near Paisley gas works are working on the theory even as we eat, sleep, drink and read the Sunday papers.

All hail the dome

impossible songs

impossible songs

The dome of the Royal College of Obstetricians and Gynaecology, London, England - as photographed by Ali last Friday.

Spirit House

impossible songs

impossible songs

Home safe

The newlyweds are back from Thailand with all their luggage, gifts and souvenirs, not a great deal of leftover money but both in good health. They tell of a strange land where water gypsies flourish in stilted communities, hotels have resident elephants, lizards appear in the toilets, each house has a little spirit house and a mini monsoon happens every other day, spicy food is served round the clock, city traffic is indescribable, the beaches are beautiful and clean, the streets are lined with orchids, Buddhas and yellow flags are everywhere and having to haggle over the price of a meal is common place. Sounds a bit like Edinburgh in August.

Problems of a metabolic nature

So what is the best balanced human metabolism? The high running, hungry churning and burning Porsche type, the steady, uneventful and regular Volvo, or the skimpy, minimal and economic, slowly revolving Smart and are there only clichéd types like these? Probably not but the best one to have is of course the one that keeps on running and gives you the least trouble over time relative to actual mileage. Naturally I’m a bit fuzzy on metabolic management, “you are what you eat” is now trite and irritating and true in the same way that fish don’t need to swim up hills or push wheelbarrows. So if you have a slow metabolism can you speed it up by eating more hot curries, drinking smoothies and munching on shredded wheat and doing exercises? I suppose that might work but I can’t be bothered with any of that or the Okinawa way or power eating and any other think that I might have to actually brood over and plan. There lies the problem; I really do not want to have to think about what I eat or how it may affect me. Of course I know I should but I don’t, I just want to fly through this life eating and drinking nice, tasty, brightly coloured and well prepared food (in reasonable but not large amounts) regardless of the consequences. With this attitude it’s obvious that a day of reckoning is clearly not far away - some may say.

I did laugh out loud when I read this quote from Jack Dee in the paper today: A woman wrote to the Daily Mail saying: “I for one am glad that ‘Jif’ has now changed its name to ‘Cif’, as there already is another product on the market known as ‘Jif’ and I found this really confusing”. Really? Did you really? How confused were you in all honesty between a lemon-shaped, lemon-filled, lemon-coloured, plastic lemon and a bottle of scourer with a picture of a bath on the side?”

Prawn day

impossible songs


impossible songs

Sunday we were up without hangovers at the crack of eight for football at Inverkeithing and the usual piddling around with restricted bridge traffic. We were well beaten by a Kirkcaldy side that had an appetite, passion and organisation you don’t see in many teams of twelve year olds. Joe wasn’t too disappointed as he hadn’t expected much in the first place, the team’s reputation saw to that. I also enjoyed my weekly does of exercise by helping dismantle and carry the goal posts after the game.

Not too much road rage today on the bridge either, a few duffers seemed to think cutting into the line 100 yards from the contra flow was clever and some people of questionable intellect braved the bus lane. I always wonder what inner justification these people have for their actions. Heading for ER with a bleeding artery, visiting an ailing relative with lifesaving drugs, delivering a quick frozen heart for transplant or are they just sociopaths with no life? Primary offenders are the pilots of Golf GTIs, Peugeot 307s and people carriers of different origins, generally the drivers are male, wearing shades, appear to be indifferent to their own actions and are chatting on the phone – why am I bothered?

Saturday was designated prawn day. The idea being that we would eat prawns for lunch – pretty simple and unspectacular really. We had some big fat ones with a hot dip sauce, some smaller Scottish ones, wedges and a large amount of salad and not quite enough wine. Prawns are not everybody’s cup of seafood of course so while Joe and I scoffed them happily, enjoying the entire messy experience of shells and spiny bits and the resultant sorting and sifting to strike meat, Liv and Ali took a slower and more measured eating route. Following the feast nobody suffered any serious after effects and we spent the afternoon grappling with a double dose of first year homework, War of the Worlds and the football results. Ali wisely avoided this by heading for Freuchie to tidy up after a month long let.

On Friday Ali returned from London where she had witnessed her father Tom Brown receiving a special honour from the Royal College of Obstetricians and Gynaecology for his ground breaking work on ultrasound scanning. His main body of work was done back in the late 50s but he has retained an interest in its progress and not lost his appetite for all things in this area and engineering in general. Tom has finally gained a place in scientific history and is now highly regarded for his work in this field and for the many health benefits that have accrued from it all across the globe. Ali, Kate and Rhona were present and enjoyed basking in his reflected glory as the “Daughters of Tom Brown” (not forgetting Mrs Geira Brown either of course!).