Alcohol

Alcohol is a fuel, is poison, has no taste, tastes good, is an acquired taste, can be mixed, can be diluted, can be savoured, comes in numerous forms, generally liquid, clear or coloured, cheap or very expensive, banned but legal, popular but hated, creative and destructive, fun or ugly, tells the truth or tells lies, knocks you out or peps you up, makes you quiet, makes you loud, makes you go home, makes you come out, is serious, is stupid, is grim, is healthy, kills germs, burns out organs, wrinkles skin, keeps you young, part of religious ceremonies, not part of religious ceremonies, misunderstood, fully explained, drunk in secret, drunk in public, made in Scotland (also available in other countries across the globe).

41 years

Funny when you realise that many things happened 41 years ago, I could make a list but I won't bore you or myself any further. Deliberate mistake: the image is of the CD not the vinyl version. Back in the day (authentic Canadian expression) the word digital was unknown, cassettes were new and you could see Led Zep and Barclay James Harvest for less than a £1 in any given student refectory. (Sounds like many an old man rant recalling when you could enjoy Gracie Fields, Bing Crosby and the Marx Bros. and still get change, a bottle of cream soda and a fish supper for two sterilised Robertson's jam jars and a farthing.)

Hats

I like hats and the idea of hats but sadly I'm not a hat person.

Dull as a new phone

The dull, unsexy, unfunky but practical new phone. This device is mainly used to listen to voicemail, trial predictive text quirks and take photos of random events at home, at work and in outer space (mostly from a vantage point here on earth).

The cobbles of George Street Edinburgh (detail).

I have never before written about my cobbles obsession, so this is a first, an ode if you will to the lovely, stony cold cobbles and their parking markings, painted on irreverently by the people from the council who we assume know what they are doing. It seems though that someone else needs to champion the cobbles.

Now that I've written about the cobble thing I need never mention it again. Job done.

The rich have suffered enough*

Small child's well constructed view of the sky, the clouds and stuff like that.

Conversations with my small grandchildren are generally more rewarding than the external regular adult kind I endure most days. Yesterday we wandered around the Foggy Foggy Forrest mulling over numerous important topics mostly stick related. In a wood sticks seem to be of most importance to kids with lots of wild speculation about their properties; who would win in a battle between two people fighting with sticks if one stick was a sword stick and the other stick was a gun stick? That’s tricky, it also assumes that nobody will come along and imagine a hand grenade stick or cruise missile stick and so on. One upmanship is only tolerable up to the point that the game allows, not quite like the real world. Most of today’s sticks were regular swords however, best suited to trashing any remaining nettles, attacking innocent stone walls and testing their metal [sic] against other sticks, normally those still attached to their parent trees.

Above our heads an aircraft was circling in a curious manner, three times it passed over at quite a low altitude. The pilot was in an airport queue no doubt but you can’t help thinking that maybe he needs some where to ditch, a field for a forced language or a clear piece of road to use as a makeshift runway. Thankfully not the case today.

Once the stick debate ran out we moved onto woodland animals, which was the most dangerous? Badgers always seem a bit menacing to me despite their “Wind in the Willows” image and of course foxes, but the ones that actually cause the most trouble to us mere humans are pheasants. Completely stupid and with no road sense every journey around here means trying to avoid the scrawny females and the bright but seriously dim males. As this unravelled we rapidly moved up the animal scales with comparisons of animal battles. Who would win between a lion and a tiger? Seemed to me like a straight draw but if the tiger has his tail on fire then he’d surely be mad as hell and just shave it. Not sure who would be setting the tiger’s tail alight however. Then there are the trolls currently based under bridges looking for a toll or a forfeit, small kids love this idea though they tend to dispute the under-bridge areas as totally troll habitat preferring some ogres or goblins to be under there. Trolls need to sell themselves a little more aggressively in modern film and literature.

Vampire Zombie grandfather (far right) floats around supporting cast of grand kids.

Eventually we moved on from sticks and the call of the wild, random aircraft observations and troll watching back to the house. Here I was about to make a cauliflower cheese. It was something I had been fantasising about for a few days all based around a blurred and recurring childhood memory (that had returned like a long lost postcard back into my head) of eating cauliflower cheese at home with my parents as a small boy in the fifties in black and white. It had been burned in places (a good thing) and contained some of the green parts of the vegetable, these had been coated in cheese and were, as far as I was concerned particularly sought after. I resolved to replicate the suddenly memorable dish from my middle-aged flashback. It seemed simple enough; from ASDA I purchased a cauliflower for a pound (and thanks to a BOGOF offer also received a green and sprouting bunch of broccoli for the same cash), I was all set. I knew a tub of unloved cheese sauce lay hidden in the freezer so I copped that and boiled up the chopped cauli. Then for the cheese topping, this was to be a combination of those exotic cheeses that sleep, untouched in the bottom of the fridge following some cheese and crackers feeding frenzy many moons ago. Those left over flavoured bits with no clear purpose or inherent natural attractiveness, next to the half tub of Philadelphia. These same pieces were duly grated and set to one side, as all the good cooks say. Everything was plopped into a casserole and left under the grill to brown and congeal nicely. Unfortunately when the time came I could not devour the meal with the vigour and enjoyment I had anticipated, in fact I didn‘t touch it at all. Too much home made soup before hand. Maybe tomorrow.

*please ignore irrelevant blog title, allegedly a quote from Peter Mandelson.

Ace of bass

I saw the sign and it opened up my eyes, I saw the sign.

No one's gonna drag you up,

To get to the light where you belong.

But where do you belong?

Life is demanding,

Without understanding.

Project dawn. Day 1, went well, went out in the weather, worked for a number of hours, car wash and cleaners, returned home with shopping and miscellaneous grandchildren, filled the lounge with unexpected and unwelcome smoke. Invented a device and devised an invention. Cat and toad avoidance strategy kicked in. Built a better kind of soup utilising the mystery potatoes (49p) but no cauliflower as yet, allowed it all to mature. Read numerous stories, bedtime and ....relax. Rose wine.

Car wash art

From the early blue period: 25 seconds in.

The darkness descends: 37 seconds.

Close to the warm rinse, the blow over and the ultimate release: 58 seconds.

Traditional

Traditional Thursday evening post. A recipe for Rocky Rhodes, easy if you try, you need:

Marshmallows, Mars Bars, Maltesers, Double Deckers, Chocolate, Milky Bar, Galaxy and other stuff. Nuke in the microwave and pour into a bowl and allow to cool. Once it has solidified you eat it but not it all.

Tonight looking for a address in Dalkeith (in the pouring rain), I did the unmanly thing and stopped to ask instructions from a group of blokes fixing a car (in the pouring rain). I am never in Dalkeith but it turned out one of the men worked for me twenty years ago, last time I saw him was five years ago in France. Odd (in the pouring rain). His directions were perfect.

Picture of the artist as a middle-aged man, thanks to Julien Pierrefeu.

Useful/complex

The promise of an endless stream of Asian/English/Russian/you name it music and entertainment, a billion blogged downloads and Internet scratchings, news from any unreliable source and the thrust for information and illicit commerce, images and hunger, vapid sexual content and MasterCard and Visa symbols. Offers and traps, engines that are powerless but full of fruitless searches, their infected results spinning in a spiral. The exhausted replicants and number coded names and addresses of the Second Life disciples and the Facebook junkies, the cyber warriors now returned from the war, destined to become the cyber wanderers, left wondering. Sometimes I call up the Google screen and stare into the snow white letterbox with it‘s grey boundary lines: I have no words to type in there, there is nothing that I want to type there. Everything is accessible and available but there is nothing there that is interesting. Walk away from the screen.

Funny that spell check thinks Google should be goggle.

Brains are useful, complex things. Sensitive fleshly thinking machines that can run for up to a hundred years without any major problems. It is gratifying that they are well enough made to allow this and so enable the owner to forget about them, mostly. They also act as houses for the soul and somehow, in some hard to understand and even harder way to explore smoothly accommodate the person and the personality. Some people boil this down to electrical impulses, connections and tiny fiddly bits, others see these processes as a blue green haze with yellow edges, visible to dogs and eagles but not to fellow humans. I don’t know either way, I admire the ghostly mystery inhabiting others mostly from a safe distance and occasionally and more enjoyably right up close. Regular brain feeding is required but again the type of essential food cannot be categorised, everybody, every brain feeds differently. When brains break down it’s not so good, things can change rapidly, tragically or slowly but noticeably. In this though I believe the soul remains constant, it may however see or perceive the world a little differently and that can be disturbing for both the owner and those outside. Seems you never know where those thoughts will lead you. Look after your head and in time you will grow into yourself.

A fistful of Hendrix: it’s exasperating sometimes that great bands and musicians didn’t do more with their talent. Perhaps though that’s it, leave them always wanting more. Leave them.

Signs

People occasionally lie because this is the only means available to them of defining the truth.

Signs: This weekend I’ve been driving around noting irritating and pointless (and wasteful) road signs. My main purpose in driving around has not been to find signs to criticise, I have been carrying out other worthwhile errands most of the time. These {the signs} portrayers of squandered information sprout like large, high-vis weeds and lollipops all across our country, taking up your road tax funds, bolstering sign company’s profits and blighting the already ugly roadside environment. My main sources of my well contained sign-anger recently have been:

a) “Elderly people”. Entering Dunfermline one is greeted by this stupid message. Trouble is there are no obvious elderly people straying onto the road anywhere near the sign, nor have I ever seen any wobbling precariously on the kerb or short-sightedly striding across the road in this area in a particularly hazardous way. What is the point and who are they really referring to any way? At 55 I’m possibly seen as elderly to some but I’m driving a car so how does it affect me and should younger drivers be watching out for me? I am liable to do mad, unscripted things from time to time. Frankly, in line with all of David Cameron’s fairness and equality blustering the sign should just say watch out for people, they are (as I would say) feckin’ eedjits and they can come at you, any time, any place, any where. Perhaps I should stop near to the sign, get out of the car and stand idly beside it and see what reactions I get from other drivers.

b) “Litter picking in progress”. Nothing fundamentally wrong with this message other than two of them were yelping out their warning at 2000hrs on a dark winter’s night on an empty piece of roadway. Completely pointless and misleading and illustrative of road workers who couldn‘t care less anyway.

c) “Countdown to 30”. Not content with the obvious 30 speed limit signs, we now signpost the signs by placing countdown signs 300, 200 and 100 metres from the main sign giving us four signs instead of one. If you are so thick that you don’t get the slowdown message first time you probably are no more than a slimy piece of sightless plankton driving along in a Subaru with the seat reclined.

d) “Brown signs”. Firstly there will be a normal sign for a town and then a few yards later a brown sign reminder that names the towns but also tells you via some crossed cutlery or a little bed picture that there is a restaurant, a hotel or possibly and toilet in this town. In my time I’ve been to a few towns (and villages) and have noticed that almost without fail a town will contain restaurants, hotels and so on. What do the sign makers think we would expect to see in towns if not these things? The town is already signed and would anybody be surprised to arrive in a town and find nothing but houses and no other features or facilities…there is of course Cumbernauld I suppose.

e) “Cycle path 100 metres”. Not quite sure who this sign is aimed at, will cyclists feel some special relief by knowing that the path is approaching, can drivers now put the foot down safe in the knowledge that there are no stray bikes to dodge? I suppose the good news is that there is a town nearby that has beds and also forks and knives and you’ll be there in no time without any bicycles getting in the way.

d) Motorway warnings: These are seldom relevant to your journey and generally show stupid and vague messages like “check your fuel” or “watch your speed”, never anything relevant like “left lane closed 200 yards”. They don’t do punctuation marks either so messages like “are you driving safely” look both patronising and ignorant. Useless.

Now that’s out of my system I can be calm and serenely peaceful again, like those smug religious, wordy and righteous people on “Thought for the day“ at 07:25 on Radio Scotland.

Strange lights

Strange lights above the parish of Hopetoun, much mud on the roads, rain piddling down and my hard to catalogue collection of puddles growing by the hour. Despite the weather we had a fine night out spent with grandchildren, torches and, essential for his time of year, light sabres.

Top o' the cake from the superb Drummond wedding on the 5th. A pretty good time was had by all and the best of best wishes to the happy couple.

Edinburgh Night(s)

Mirror Man Mr CBQ performs at the Voodoo Rooms - some sound from one guitar.

Harvey Nicks at Night

I've decided that my next career move will be to enter into the project management of the City's current Tramtastic scheme, it badly needs a kick up the arse and the contractor is robbing us blind and wrecking the place. My main thrust will be to fire the troublemakers, remove the whole costly rail, wheels, engines and power hokum and base the system on one of two well proven alternative technological solutions, these are (my good fellows) ahem :

1. The use of young offenders and ne'r do wells to propel the modified tram carriage by a combination of lifting and pushing. Passengers will experience a silent hovercraft effect apart from some background swearing, B.O. wafts and aggressive comments from the propulsion system.

2. The "Flintstone Method" involves the passenger in an intimate travel and self help work out regime that allows them the opportunity to break sweat (and possibly limbs) as they travel across our great city whizzing effortlessly on their own two feet for £2.50 a trip.

Other sub-optimal options are:

a) Reintroduce Clippies to take fares, stop folks spitting on the windows, slap people with crew cuts across the back of the head and encourage community singing.

b) Revise the routes so that they concentrate on visiting IKEA, chip shops and football stadia.

c) At all costs avoid going to the airport or Ocean Terminal as no sane person would want to visit either place.

d) "Extreme Tramming" that takes Tiso wearing punters up and down Arthur's Seat and across the great Pentland Army firing ranges.

I promise to deliver all this for a mere £250k PA. So Edinburgh Council, forgive and forget those voters who rejected your daft congestion charge and bury your spiteful tram roadworks revenge and start again.

Tales from a parallel universe

Sulking: The question can you actually sulk alone or can you only truly sulk in company or at the very least when those around you see you leave the room clearly in a sulk and therefore know and fully appreciate your current sulky state and thereby render it credible as a form of protest? Obvious to me that without sulk recognition there is no proper sulk, man (or woman) cannot sulk on their own. In other words a sulk cannot survive in a vacuum. This creates the formula (where S=sulk) S>x (the amount of people in the room) if S(x-x)= -S and d = distance and t (time spent in sulk) S (1x+1d+1t) = S³t-x-d = -S(-xdt) = 0. Not sure that this actually works every time however.

You know that it’s a special kind of day when you wake up and eventually (after feeding the cats and emptying the dishwasher or emptying the cats and feeding the dishwasher) shower singing segments from “Tales from Topographic Oceans” to yourself. This is disturbing for a number of reasons but mainly two in particular a) I have not listened to said album for 35 years therefore it is not fixed in my memory and b) a sure sign of growing old and mad is remembering and recalling things clearly from the past and but being able to remember what you did during the last weekend. Not long after singing I completely forgot about all that and went back to visualising the regular drumming tin monkey and laughing to myself about either some of Malcolm Tucker’s insults or Bob Servant’s attempts to get a talking lion exported to Dundee from Africa. Then like a bolt out of the blue some 14 hours later “Tales from Topographic Oceans” came back into my head like some late train arriving at a misty station platform all golden and set in sepia tones. Clearly the drugs are not working.

I don’t watch much TV but when I do there often is little bearded bloke there talking quite intelligently. I don’t know who he is or how tall or short he might be and I often wonder how he managed to get that job. I also think that about President Sarkozy and various people in the media and petroleum industries. Sometimes life seems unfair when you look at the untalented slobs and ugly people who have managed to become rich and successful or reached the pinnacle of some sort of vital and illustrious career structure. I suppose therefore it’s quite good that little bearded blokes make it onto TV and capture a captive audience, there’s hope for us all, particularly if you believe in parallel universes.

Volvo Duett

Hello and welcome to newly formed shrine to the irresistible and wonderful Volvo Duett. Automotive love at first sight...almost.

The name Duett was intended to signify to a car that could be used as a delivery vehicle during the week and as a comfortable sedan away from work. Nice idea. the glory years were from 1953 to 1969, not sure what happened next, Progressive Rock was invented I think.

Here is a special variant complete with custom trailer for children or people of restricted growth. Clever people these Swedes. They also invented the Saab convertible some time later. Memo to self: spend more time in Scandinavia.

31/10/10

This was yesterday

It’s 1050, I’ve toured the estate and secured a few wind blown items and have now settled for a cup of Aromatic Thai Lemon Grass packet soup, the last one of any left you’ll understand. This hot Asian dishwater experience has been supplemented by a much needed and long looked forward to boiled ham roll c/w mango chutney. Late breakfast or early lunch? Who cares. My thoughts then returned to the real but fictional Bob Servant; winning a computer in the ‘Booling Club’ raffle and only ever getting Spam emails and thereby constructing credible email conversations with the idiot spammers is a wonderful premise but is also worryingly realistic and possible. For me most emails are work related, captured and watertight in the work system they are relentless, continuous and generally low on humour or anything joyous and funny. The health & safety tomes are by far worst…that aside my personal emails are a different tin of processed meat and corn syrup. Like Bob my emails are high on Spam content also with those self generating ones from suppliers you’ve used once for on line purchases. That one transaction comes crashing back to torment as they see that point of sale moment as a regular opportunity to tell you of their dull wares and offers. Then there are the Freecycle people who offer used mattresses, soiled baby clothes and CRT monitors, rather than just cart them back to the landfill site they email in the hope you‘ll collect their trash and give them a token bottle of wine or a box of Maltesers out of eternal gratitude, oh and they get some woolly karma plus points also…so that’s about it.

I often wonder (when I watch mobile phone commercials about glossy people in street cafes chatting, texting and surfing in some stream of consciousness way to their many friends in Milan, Monte Carlo and Los Angeles) about the grim reality of my normal experience of these things. I can go weeks without a decent “friends” email and few days without a family text and maybe a whole day without a Twitbook update or bit of sharing. The thing is I’m perfectly happy with that, much of this stuff, rather than give your life some glamorous functionality that escaped your parents is just an intrusion. That’s a word you don’t hear much when mobile devices are being hawked, “this superb device will take your life to a whole new level of intrusion - and not the good kind either.”

So I’m settled in this paradox, the hours when my phone sits idle with the barrage of texts when a loved one needs lift or we’re low on milk, balancing the deletion of Spam with the once in a blue moon bargain that intrigues and leads somewhere constructive, the hilarious clips posted on Facer with tedious “just woke up” updates and the wonderful family holiday/birthday/just mucking around photos with, well nothing really. I’m just grateful to the boys at Star Trek for designing and building this brave new chattering world, now if only I could find a place to park and a drop off zone that doesn’t charge you a pound for the privilege (you wait, it’s coming to your high street and mall). Finally on connectivity and plugging into the heartbeat of the universe did I mention those guys you see grazing and shopping in Tescos with silver gunmetal Bluetooth headsets wrapped around their ears? “You look like feckin’ sad eedjits by the way!”

Black Tie etc.

Night time stranded tram.

Black Tie

On average I don the black tie rig out about half a dozen times a year whilst attending the quasi religious rites, Academy Awards and drunken ceremonies that demand their wearing. It’s either the Scottish kilted version or the tuxedo and usually 50/50 between the two. The thing is “black tie” is, when viewed from a safe distance a fairly peculiar set of archaic and frankly silly fashion conventions that result in some strange results as we try to maintain a level of smartness and sophistication. First of all (for blokes here) neither thing is comfortable. Wearing a kilt is tolerable standing up, sitting down it’s like wearing a roll of corrugated iron that’s coated with spiky rust inside. Sporrans are also daft, ok if you were going into clan battle or marching from Kirkintiloch to Campbeltown; it was the perfect place to store your porridge back in the day, now it’s just a nuisance. The other things with kilts are that you cant drive a car easily, take a steady pee or perch on stool in one and Prince Charles appears to like them, that tells you something. A tux isn’t quite as awkward, it’s just a jacket and trousers after all. I’ve abandoned the cummerbund thing though, that’s like wearing a tiny elusive apron that wants to crawl across your lap and round your waist. Clothing with a life of it’s own is never a good thing. The worst part of either set of this socially acceptable bondage gear is the bow tie and winged collar, devices that combine to give the wearer a true red-neck and an uncontrollable urge to burst the button’s stranglehold by nine thirty or earlier if possible. It’s also at about this time when after a few red wines you wonder how we ever got to this place; why not clown suits or battledress? why not spandex or knitted pullovers? We are where we are and I wasn’t the person who defined normal. The ladies of course make all the real effort, do all the planning, smile as their outfits and undergarments restrain and contain them and maintain a quiet composure whilst tortured and tottering in high heels, maybe the kilt’s not so bad.

Heroes

Don’t Vote, it just encourages the bastards! Why are my current crop of favourites a peculiar mix of real and fictional people? Malcolm Tucker, P J O’Rourke, Bob Servant, Neil Young, Steve Jobs, Sherlock Holmes, Lupin III, Ang Lee, probably because that reflects the ratio between reality and fantasy that currently prevails - in some places.

Climate Change

Climate change: Relax, there’s not a single thing you can do about it. There are 1.4 billion people in China and they all want a Ford Ranger.

Big gardens in Dundee

As a late developer it's never too late apparently and your next new discovery may be up the next close or down the next set of neglected road works, anyhow I've just discovering the wondrous wisdom and insanity of Bob Servant, a fellow from Dundee by all accounts. It's a city where some lucky folks have big gardens. I hear that potted versions of Bob's exploits may have made it as far as remote parts of Fife or even beyond.

Event

I’m struggling to find a replacement TV show for the long running and misunderstood epic that was LOST. There is nothing on the horizon and I am a TV disciple without a cause of any kind. The Event has of course appeared in the same Channel 4 slot that spawned LOST many moons ago. This show is a contrived but well produced combination of a number of popular and now familiar modern script elements complete with mysteries shrouded in enigmas and a few aliens thrown in for good measure. LOST/Heroes/Flash Forward/24 all together in an unholy marriage ready for a box set or adoption by Sky if the ratings are good, will any of it go anywhere? Doubtful but it’s on series link on the box.

Tumble

Tumble driers are marvellous things. They tumble your clothes and towels etc. in a jocular way and then after a period of time and some peculiar noises dry them. We now have two of the great white beasts, we are ready for a long wet winter spent in nice clean and un-fluffy clothes. One is old and at the moment broken however it will rise from the dead once the repairman finds a slot in our diaries and declutters it’s innards. The other is a newby, non-condenser type with a great wiry phallic hose and an action as silent as a Charlie Chaplin two realer. We installed it, after some effort and even more discussion in a confined space but at a height that minimises kinetic strains for the (over 50s) regular operators and members of the household. Our contingency plans are therefore almost complete for the winter laundry cycle and should it be required we can take in some - at a fair price of course.