In the footsteps of ghosts

Jules Verne on tour in the Central Belt.

Ghosts are just people who live outside of a body, that's all, nothing to get too worried about. In their pale and unresearched condition it is just possible to detect them and then to follow them, on their travels. I've been doing this for a while now, mostly across Scotland but also in other places. Perhaps you should try it.

Today the swifts returned to their nests in our coal cellar. I was alerted to this when one of the cats came running out of there, looking a bit guilty. Seconds later and very much to my relief two swifts flew out at high speed and headed away across the fields. I suspect that there will soon be some deadly games taking place, a lot of watching and waiting and at the very last moment some springing into action and jumping. None of this is for me, I've learned that when you try to intervene in nature and fix things or try to improve the chances of what might be considered a favourable outcome you get an unexpected and usually worse result. Let it be.

Victoria Hospital

I visited here today, Fife's new hospital. No car parking space, joking choking smoking Fifers outside in their track suits, faces wrinkled by the stress of confusion, tobacco and benefits. Buses crush past, full of the freeloading pensioners hoping for a bun and cuppa and a visit, a day out to health care excellence. Inside the lifts work smoothly but there's no furniture, no TVs, no shaver sockets in the wards, no towels or extra bed linen. The staff are pleasant and smiling. The staff try hard to cope with a system that doesn't know quite how to communicate, left hands fail to meet up with right hands, people are confused, jaws drop open. The staff are working hard, working their asses off to keep things right but somewhere in the project a failure has occurred, oh and there's no more money to put things right either. Local MP Gordon Brown planned this, the Tories implemented it. Now the NHS reforms and the clumsy NHS 24 will morph into uncontrolled monsters and finish it, any day, any year now.

Jump start

When you inadvertently  leave the light on in your car then you drain the battery, then you need a jump start, with jump leads.  Just remember to always follow the electrical safety code: Black to black, red to red and blue to Smithereens. Works every time.

Hair of an old man

I woke up this morning with old man's hair. It was mostly on my head and none of it was running the right way, it was old, badly behaved and cantankerous, it had lost it's elasticity and it's memory. It was like fake hair. Like straw or thread or some lifeless grey thing that had knitted it's way across the top of my head and was now travelling on it's, of it's own accord in some direction I couldn't quite fathom. Bitter and peppered with too much sunlight, car exhaust fumes, sugar and not enough hormones. Then the awful question, “does it have a funny smell, like old people do?” That's all you need first thing in a day destined to full of maps, computers, electric mirrors, biscuit fibres and packet soups, tales of time travel and desperation and remote examples of unproven food poisoning – none of it to do with me. On days like this, when you are thinking the thoughts of a young man or of a man at least a half of your age you don't want to be bogged down with the frizzled frustration of your old hair. At least the experience has given me a strategy, a way forward, a plan, a bit of revenge. I'll be there at the barbers on Friday afternoon, looking across the sunlit Firth of Forth and watching that old man's hair fall onto my shoulders and onto the floor as it's snipped away and swept up in a dustpan, punished like the regular and persistent offender it truly is and then stuffed into an imaginary cushion that's gifted to some care home or bit of imagined sheltered housing, there to hold a sleepy head, a tumbler of false teeth, a saucer of digestive biscuits and a rolled up copy of the Daily Express. I will go down of course but I will be fighting and I'll ignore, inhibit and ethnically cleanse the aspirations and false claims of this rebel hair. “£8? Keep the change!”

Curved dog on green grass

It was nice that whilst I was in Aberdeen yesterday wrestling with the young 'uns, eating birthday cake and walking dogs the Aberdeen football team were down in Dunfermline. There they were soundly beaten by the mighty Pars in what might be described as an upset or more accurately our first home win of the season. On the road home I celebrated the event with a double cheeseburger at the traveller's haven that is Forfar MacDonald's. Sitting in there with small children we were subjected to some more of the master strategy of Olympic marketing. Each happy meal now contains a stylish pedometer with which you can measure your fitness (or "rainbow points creation" according to the instructions). If you shake it rapidly above your head whilst sitting eating you also get a very good score. So cooped up then in a MacD's in Angus at nine o'clock on a Saturday night we can't escape the long bony finger of long bony fingerland promotion, a finger that, if sucked, would no doubt taste like chicken nuggets. At least we're all in this together, perhaps even willingly.

Big A marks the spot

Big A says "here's D&G Autocare's Inverkeithing branch!".

Being a person who thinks in straight lines I thought I'd use that peculiar skill to go home today via a motor car tyre emporium and thereby renew the worn tyres on my worn car. I did and my first point on that mental but not geographically straight line was Kwik-Fit Inverkeithing. They have tyres alright but  they only had one in the size I needed and it took them 50 precious minutes to find that out and tell me about it (lesson learned, phone first no matter how painful the concept of a motor car tyre sized conversation is). An hour later I'd bought that tyre but was still two black circles short. Happily just around the corner sits D&G Autocare, they're not as glossy and slick as Kwik-Fit but they had the correct tyres and they fitted them with the speed and precision of an F1 pit crew (well almost and not as inept as a Mercedes F1 pit crew either) despite being obviously busy. Three guys plugged in my new tyres in under 10 minutes, a really good and helpful service that I would dare to go out on a limb on and recommend  to one and all. Surely this proves that I'm not so grumpy, world weary and negative all the time and it's Friday!

My Dull Gothic Refuge

Interior brain shot - detail.

Give me strength: Somebody on Radio Scotland has been popping chemicals today in a big way, Drive-Time was filled with a selection of awful slow news filler items, each of which defied memorisation but each of which was delivered in such horrid, shouty and high frequency modulating tones that I was almost physically unwell whilst jogging home in the slow lane of the M90. These tedious stories were full of "amazings" and "fantastics", words that would be banned by any self respecting fascist state or tin pot news agency. It was like an acid fueled episode of Blue Peter in the nineties, all teeth, mascara, puppies and charity cardboard. They bodged up a bizarre item on dancing in the Barrowlands as part of the Cultural Olympics and then had surreal imported report from the inquest of the poor "death in a holdall spy" that sounded like some hyped up Enid Blyton story. All we need now are more of  the desperate slavers of Ali McCoist and the grizzled grumbled whispers of Walter Smith as they try to justify Glasgow Rangers' serially criminal business behaviour over the last twenty years. Perhaps of course I'm just a sad miserable soul and the chirpy sounds of radio friendly chit chat and trite current affairs are too much for the dark and gloomy Gothic innards of my brain's passages and my clogged up cynical consciousness. That and it being a wet Thursday as well.

And what's more: Ah yes (as above), it's that lamentable Ewan McGregor / Tom Kitchin / Dennis Lawson Scottish pretentious twerp accent and brogue. These guys live their lives in a perpetual mist of "amazing" and "wonderful" experiences, they must be knackered by it all really. You can just  imagine them exiting the privy and sharing the truth about their "incredible" daily bowel movement and "marvellous" bog roll wipe with their "gorgeous" wives and "brilliant" children...still a wet Thursday then.

Nice

Flying Saucer for sale etc.

For Sale. Flying Saucer, 1 careful owner, currently parked on a Bulgarian mountain top, $1,000,000 ono. Not in use at present but has potential, possible restoration project. No time wasters please. Use comments box if interested.

Still on the theme of flying:

John Barclay ‏ @Johnbarclay1

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#perfectseat Skyscanner has concluded that the most sought-after spot on a standard aeroplane is seat 6A.

Down on the windfarm

Industrial monstrosities. I don’t much care for wind farms and I don’t much care for Donald Trump. Renewable energy needs a bit more work and less of a Heath Robinson approach, too much of it seems like bad science and awkward political desperation – so any idea is better than no idea. Let's (in Scotland) try and be good at something, let's recover a little national pride now that we produce hew-haw in the way of manufacturing so let's catch the wind via Chinese engineering and Korean investment. That'll restore our stubborn tartan pride all right. So we'll just get behind the first thing to come along that looks like a free lunch (no respectable Fifer would miss out on that), so it has to be renewables but we'll invest in them before they are actually proven or fully understood, we'll either be at the cutting edge or the cliff edge. It's not a great modus operandi and it's an impulsive ploy that panders to the assumed will of a baffled and to some extent absent electorate and a hungry for green anything media. I'm not saying we should play it safe but what are we really good at? What's significant in our history? We need to capitalise on three things in this geologically stable, wet and tsunami proof little land; Steam (burn our crap), hydro (seize the rain) and atomic (have a fallback).

Synth/guitar

No way to treat a Danelectro. (Caution! Excessive audio experimentation can lead to anxiety,  neurosis, disappointment and remorse before any exhilaration or satisfaction actually kicks in).

Just on the cusp of the edge of the periphery of the beginning of the early planning stages of the conception of the storming of the exploration of doing the scoping for the first tranche of the start of figuring out, sussing out, checking out, understanding and then getting my head around another noise making app and deciding what exactly to do with it. The big boys call it Audio Sauna. I'll call it hard work.

Not another cat related post!

The spoils go to the victor.

Missie's Diary: Sympathy for the rabbit.

“Jesus, these people are stupid, they don't even understand the basic game of small animal juggling. It's a Friday night, they're all drinking red stuff and sitting on couches in the warm room looking half dead. Why wouldn't I do them a favour and try to liven things up? So all I do is bring in a baby rabbit and drop it on the kitchen floor. You'd have thought I'd brought in an improvised explosives device, talk about over react, I was just giving them the opportunity to play some indoor sports and socialise a bit. So what do they do? They shout at each other, chase me out of the house and then corner the poor rabbit, attacking it with kitchen implements, broom handles and mops. No wonder it dives under the cupboard and refuses to come out, that's a nice welcome to give a visitor. It's like some scene from a Frankenstein movie with the ignorant peasants going nuts with torches and pitchforks. They seem to have only two settings, asleep and angry mob, pathetic really, I don’t think they'll ever amount to much. Anyway I don't know what happened next I went back out and enjoyed some night time smells, overheard owl tales and did some strutting. I wonder when they'll jack up the nerve to try to apply some more of that Savlon stuff to me again?”

Clint's Diary: WTF.

“Things are getting worse, I'm upstairs, trying to sleep on my bed, the one they sometimes borrow and she comes running in and picks up that annoying plastic hair dryer thing. Then she goes downstairs, so I follow, just to take a peek. God Almighty, she's firing it off at a poor stunned baby rabbit that's hiding under a cupboard like she's Dog the Bounty Hunter, WTF? How's the rabbit supposed to react to that? Don't humans understand the innocent fun of animal blood sports and the related normal social niceties? This place is screwy, I'm going back to bed.”

Anna's Diary: Stoned again.

“I fell off that bloody couch arm again or did that bitch push me? No zero tolerance around here. I don't remember much about anything really, those drugs they keep slipping me in the prawns are really messing with my head but they've got me well hooked now. Still it's five star bed and board with endless narcotics for free and those other two dummies keep them distracted most of the time bringing in their little furries and feathers. It means I can enjoy my sweet dreams, sniff the radiator and silently dribble anywhere I like. Nice.”

Everyone and everything

Note to self: Thinking about something and forming it up into either a complaint, an observation, a comment or a criticism or any kind of stream of words inside your head is not actually the same things as using those words in confronting somebody, having a conversation, preparing a written draft or recording a vocal or any other outside thing. Left alone thoughts stay firmly inside your head, your own space, deep  in your brain, invisible and silent. They have to be verbalised, spoken or written down (possibly mimed?) if they are to be shared with anybody - they have no proper existence until you put them out there, somehow. That applies to everyone and everything - except for cats that is, they of course can easily read human minds.

No need to say too much

Bits of Dollytown.

The All Bran Biscuit Breakfast regime and disposable trousers. You may be surprised to read that these two things are not in any way related. The breakfast biscuits are a conundrum, they of course pose a (healthy) threat to the lower man but at the same time are almost pleasant and are also suitable for a good yoghurt dunking. I've now trialled and risk assessed them to the point where I can comfortably eat one a day. Should you be tempted to eat healthy these are worth the effort but you must first take the test. The disposable trousers are the M&S variety, foolishly worn while (double foolishly) wandering into a thorny thicket in a work related escapade. Those thorny thickets play havoc with % mixes of wool, polyester and whatever else is in there – at least the price makes their immanent disposal seem a little less painful.

Radical Prick. The term “radical cleric” is used to describe Mr Abu Qatada. His real name is however Omar Othman but he is also a scholar, a refugee, a key figure in al-Qaeda and he doesn't much care for despots and foreign invaders because they are enemies of Islam. He is also an active supporter of terrorism and extreme Islamic objectives. Fair enough then, he does seem to have a meaning to his life and a whole lot of well supported human rights that apply to him apparently - but he really needs to lighten up a bit.

Wind Forms. Alex Salmond duped the great unwashed Scottish electorate by failing to tell us that a Korean wind farm company, Doosan, were no longer coming here to take advantage of our desperate economic plight, subsidised factory sites and cheap labour and free wind. Their plan to open a research facility and a factory has gone for a ball of chalk until the right economic conditions prevail, the SNP stop crawing about renewables like they'd discovered the idea or until Donald Trump shuts up.

Loch Lomond Daily Photo

I know I moan about Scotland (mainly the politicians) a lot but I still love the place and think it's a beautiful country to visit (as I live here I visit it quite often). Even on a simple working drive, you get just a few miles from Glasgow and the traffic and all the rest of it and find yourself by Loch Lomond. Full of quirky casual surprises, snow on the hills, sun glinting on the water, a fresh breeze to clear your head, clouds forming swirling shapes, sheep and cattle, birds twittering and...there's a MacDonald's just five miles down the road if you're at all peckish. We have everything here.

Things - part 99

TV: Jules Holland is probably a really nice guy and a great musician but his TV show is as dull as ditch water and Paul Weller or somebody like him is on it every week. I like the fact that if appears to be live (is it?) but as a way to enjoy music it seldom works for me. Back to Radio 6 or Game of Thrones or Modern Family I think.

Awards and Award Shows: Who gives a stuff really?

Cookery: I made a fish pie today that was tasty but as heavy as lead, I now realise that it's possible to put too much fish in a fish pie, something I'd not have considered possible, but it is. Next thing I'm trying will be to put too much chicken in a chicken pie.

Pics & Words: Here's a handy link to a book that Fraser Drummond has just created - fine photos and lyrics, the Sound of Confushion.

First apply some Savlon to the cat

Myths about Savlon: It's true, Savlon does no harm to cats, in fact it's a useful healing medium for those awkward cuts, scrapes  and scabs your average mouser suffers when plunging through hedges, fences and exploring the wild spaces out there. All you have to do is capture the injured cat and apply the magic liniment to the damaged area. You may also wish to apply a little of it to your own injuries, those suffered or sustained as a small part of the wider healing and welfare process.

Things that don't really work in Scotland: Next time it's a sunny day and you're out and about in your motor car, try driving around superstore car parks with the windows down  playing excerpts from the Grateful Dead's 40 year musical career very loudly on your stereo. This is unlikely to produce a reciprocal wave of love and peace or add much to the deeper musical education of the general public. Just park up, go into the shop, get your fishcakes and wine and leave quietly.

Respectable Pirates: Speaking of education you may be interested in learning a little about the beliefs and aspirations of the Pirate Party. If, like me you are somewhat disillusioned with main stream politics but still naively and unrealistically hopeful of some kind of general political renaissance happening (or at least a slight improvement in standards taking place) here in the cash-strapped UK, then this may give you a little hope.

Old Punks & Zen

Sad Society with nice Les Paul Jnr and enthusiastic dancer.

Rosie Bell and friendly piano (the link to Rosie's highly readable blog is on the right) .

Memorial flyer & poster, nice work.

A pot of magical Zen based slate with artistic potential.

A busy day in and out. Out being mostly in gardens, our own on a chilly morning with a grand wean and Fraser Drummond's award winning city plot of green heaven on a slightly warmer afternoon. Tea and cakes were served up by the Drummond clan, plant and wildlife wisdom shared, artworks discussed and a substantial amount of money raised for charity. We followed this up with a brief trip (this is "in") to the shadowy innards of Bannermans for the Fritz VH memorial marathon gig and punkfest. I'd forgotten how loud and tonally restricted live punk can be but you cant help but admire the energy and enthusiasm summoned up by Scotland's finest middle aged punks when indulging in their chosen music. A very mixed audience of Morningside mums, young Goths, leather Punks and balding Mods took time out to remember a real stalwart of the Edinburgh music scene and have a bit of fun. For once I regretted being far too old for punk, I was firmly stuck in the hippie ideals by '77 and apart from tapping my foot and whistling to the Damned and the Buzzcocks missed out on most of it. I hope Fritz would've forgiven me the obvious musical omissions of my own misspent youth.

Best BBC caption ever?

Staying with the media theme this has to be one of the best little labels given to anybody anywhere. I hope it's real.

Skintland

I haven't even read the article(s) but already I'm bristling in that about to be insulted way you sometimes get when some incomprehensible physical threat or piece of abuse looks to be headed your way. Of course I can't be bothered with the Nationalists nor can I stand the current Tory Coalition and to top that I've little or no respect for much of the spin and toadying that comes from the written and broadcast media sludge factory. It all sucks too much and the truth, if it's out there, somewhere beyond mindless rhetoric and twisted opinion is pretty hard to find. I'm not alone in feeling this I'm sure, it's the constant frustration of the "common man" and it can't quite be articulated without the use of some choice swear words none of which seem crude or dirty enough to describe the pathetic posturing and misrepresentation that represents so much of politics and power broking. The squeezed middle isn't just getting squeezed financially, it's an emotional, intellectual  and cultural rollering and bashing we're in for.

A clear voice, ringing with just a little vision and common sense and a smattering of balance would make a welcome change - so only a matter of time before some extreme lunatic and simplistic party fills the void I reckon otherwise it'll be riots and petrol bombs.  But be of good cheer for Wee Fat Eck has already launched a broadside in return and the slippery slope towards the referendum and it's consequences is now steeper and greasier than ever. Things are going to get pretty messy. As for me I'm finding some solace in humming the tune "with or without you", it's the only way I can even begin to try to understand our dysfunctional, conflicted, awkward but rightful place within the UK

Guardian news ‏ @guardiannews

Alex Salmond: Economist will rue 'Skintland' jibe at Scotland