In the suburbs of Cuckoo Land

Nice to get up early (well the usual silly time) and make some kind of effort to seize the day today. Thursday the something or other of October. The plan is to sort and move and possibly discard major items and minor items as a preparatory prelude to our impending house move. Things like bags of coal, bikes, garden implements and useful bits of found flotsam & debris will form a major part of this. The process will require some sound judgement, realism, a large green vehicle, good kinetic practices and a fair amount of coffee and pop tarts. The problem I have is maintaining a clear and focused head (just like the good Danny A) and not allowing myself to be diverted by some rootless sat-nav into the suburbs of Cuckoo Land. A well established little place nearby that I've been known to visit from time to time. You can tell when you're there when you hear the La La tunes start to play in your head and thoughts about flowery guitar tunings and the re-mixing old bits of music creep in. Here comes the sun.

An artist's impression.

What is wrong?

Why is it that years after her sudden spurt of fame the music of Lily Marlene Allen is still ruining and ruling the AOR airwaves?  Somehow her old material (there may be new stuff somewhere) has become a staple of evening radio. So it breeds and survives there, popping up when you least expect it, stuck in between Joy Division and Muse or Bob Dylan and Rush and all I can do is wonder...why?

Meanwhile all across Central Scotland the Northern Lights spotting and hysteria has almost broken out. All you need to do is stay up all night wearing wellies, a duffle coat and a woolly pom pom hat, avoid any industrial scale light pollution and point yourself to the North night sky. Then shoot and capture the wonderful images with your handy iPhone and then post them on some BBC site. Easy done and pretty effective. See them here: http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/uk-scotland-19883720 The experts say tonight will be another good one for more views so get out there.

Phone in a toilet

Today I managed to drop my Sony whatever it is phone into a conveniently situated toilet bowl. Plop! Thankfully the bowl had not been used so the water was clean, at least to look at. The phone was quickly rescued but not exactly given the kiss of life.  Now it seems the phone is rather unhappy and no longer operational, the water has had it's way and multiple short circuits must have occured. So that's the end of that. Not a great start to the week. I immediately headed off to the barbers and had myself a jolly good hair cutting session followed by a rather bulky Dairylea sandwich. I'm still a bit glum however.

Fruits without labour

Oktoberfest Fife-style: Early morning fruits grown in the garden of our new house with absolutely zero effort or input from us. Then the view from the garage as a spider spins a nice dewy web across the door and reminds  that we were not the first to pass this way.

Tesco dailyish photo

Because I'm older than you I don't mind paying attention to detail: Spotted in that haven of good taste and value - Tesco South Queensferry. First it was on offer at £5.61, then they cut it back to £4.20 and finally it's available at £1.05. The trouble is that the £4.20 and the £1.05 offers are currently running concurrently on those lovely Tesco shelves about an imperial foot apart (light bulb section). My advice is to choose wisely when it comes to shopping, maybe looking elsewhere now and again? Every little helps.

May take up to 10 minutes

Alan Sugar's Amstrad Sky Plus box must be the most feeble and over sensitive electronic device ever built. Any blip or hiccup in the power supply effectively shuts down this device and it goes straight into a mighty huff and then refuses to come out. Any material saved on the hard disk is also under threat at this time apparently - that's nice, add a new threat and fear factor. This has happened three times in the last few weeks and it takes more coaxing than Lazarus to get the breath of satellite life back into it. First of all there's the googling for help, then the button and power fiddling, then watching the little blue lights flip on and off (?), then the reassuring message on screen arrives (as above) and you wait. Then everything goes blue and you press various buttons on the remote, then you wait again. Then it finally works again, but you can tell it still holds a grudge. All this  makes me wonder (and this applies to most modern technology) why once you get it home it always turns out to be such a piece of shit and why we, the innocent consumers and customers settle for this. Groan.

Friday's artwork x 3

3 x new pieces on offer today. Representations of the cat known around these parts as Clint*. The artist is currently unknown, they may indeed be self portraits.

*all sub text to be rightfully ignored please.

Infinite variables of chaos

A recurring dream, a crew member on an airship, poking through the fog, crossing the Atlantic, setting records and living on the edge of a great hydrogen filled bag of danger. It's the nineteen twenties but the Great War is still raging. Nobody could stop the trench warfare, nobody could cancel anything out even though you'd think all that military and industrial power would've some how done so long ago. And me, I'm still on the airship on a secret mission. I need to eat less toasted cheese around bedtime. I need to make a cheese free promise to myself. It also makes you /me wonder when it was that people started using the word "environment" in the way they do, I never did hear it when I was at school. So now I'm watching the thriller "Hunter" on the BBC; I heard the phrase used  in this blog post title, I'm applying it to various things now. It makes sense.

Mumford & Sons v M&S

It seems to be the done thing these days to dislike Mumford & Sons, they must represent some kind of pimply derivative indie based folky thing that irritates those  intelligent people in the know. I've not really heard much of their stuff, just radio and TV smatterings. What I have heard is lukewarm OK but nothing special and still the Radio Jocks and TV types are gushing about M&S in that vacuous way they do. The next big thing getting bigger and then arriving at bursting point. They're not going to change my life, not if this, their third album and their tedious strums are anything to by. Not a bad CD cover though - complete with good shoes. I'll stick with the old M&S two can dine for a Tenner offer, same price as a CD and available at a store near you now. Some Twitter wag thinks all their stuff is a bit...as below (did I say strummy?).

Bucket lists revisited

Revisiting bucket lists, I'm coming out against them. They're all about experiences and that woosh factor, thrills and spills and far away sunsets. Good though they are, as lived in moments, none of that counts for much. That's all OK but it's not life, it's not what life is about. I'd rather build a tower and have it stand for a thousand years that just jump from a tower with a parachute and then need to do it again. The huff and the puff of the walk and the journey are fine but it's the footprints in the fresh snow that tell the story of where you are and where you went to. What we are is fragile and contradictory, what we experience is vapour and impossible to share but what we create from and around those things is the real deal. You realise it only in stages, quickly and in the moment as life takes huge strides and passes you by. Sitting on a warm couch, listening to your grandchildren talk about school and games and football. In a restaurant with children and partners and grandchildren, living on through their dreams and tensions, their hopes and what they will do with their hands. Friends who laugh with you, holidays and sunshine. Deleting the emails you don't need to read and turning away from what and who wastes precious time. So you film and build, record and write, draw and capture the arc of that perfect story, make discoveries, push yourself to capture this time, this time that is now. Because you'll never have it back again.

Less whoosh, less whamm, more life (I so used to draw these things up...).

Tesco Daily Photo #99

If this is how you normally park your vehicle in any car park anywhere on the planet then you can go and give yourself a good old fashioned...flying feck, ya feckin' eedjit!

Hot dog shit

You forget about the subtle details of dog walking when you do it infrequently. There are the "get out of the house"  panics, the lead pulls, the stubborn stops, the deviations of direction, trying to assert some kind of influence over an animal with a strong mind of it's own. It's all a part of the fun of taking your canine friend out and about in the Aberdeen rain whilst retaining some kind of assumed control. The worst part however is the (rapidly acquired) skilled used of the tiny bag into which the hot dog poo is deposited come that tricky moment. Then the awkward sensation of carrying it around in your pocket, hot and steamy until you finally find the red poo deposit box pinned to some convenient lampost...what a good feeling (for all concerned).

Breathe like Buddha

This morning a kindly sounding lady on the radio told me (and about a hundred thousand others) to take five and breathe like Buddha. Just breath easily and concentrate on those breaths, your mind will empty and in all the hubble bubble toil and trouble of the world (making toast and reading a newspaper whilst texting were the examples given) you will find true peace. Next time I'm texting, toasting and trying to read I'll try it. The strange thing is that despite my scepticism and cynicism I'm still thinking about that message and technique some twelve hours later (and dreaming of that golden Eastern peace). I'm so suggestible, maybe I should just give up, dress in Saffron and join a cult.

My Grade 1 attempt at Doomsday Prepping (see it on the Nat Geo Channel) failed when today  I broke into my back up stock of pickled baby beetroot and ate at least four pieces. I'd stupidly left the jar of attractive red anti-cancer root pickle in a drawer at work. It caught my eye and that was the end of another piece of forward planning not to mention a solid 75p investment in the future of the planet. Perhaps I just need a bigger jar or just a return to the drawing board. There must be other ways.

Late starter

I cant really be bothered with bucket lists or even unbucket lists. I'm not a list maker. The trouble is I'm conflicted by the obvious pressures of age realisation, the notions of running down the clock and worst of all missing out on something. Looking at other peoples' ideas may be inspiring but it may also be depressing, all the dolphin swimming and parachute jumps, conquering mountains and visiting the capital cities of Europe. Maybe a list is forming, maybe I'll follow it, maybe I'll be inspired, maybe I'll just do what I've done for the last umpteen years; wait and see what happens. This article might help...

Maybe it's normal

Maybe it's normal for some folks to spend over two hours tele-conferencing. It's not normal for me but it happened, like howling into and then listening intently down a Bird's Custard tin connect by twine to somebody sitting up in a tree a hundred yards away. It doesn't work for me.

Meanwhile the wild wind blew and the cold rain beat down upon our house and the bedroom widow blew in. Mostly it was left to me to sleep through it, the fresh air helping keep my sinus' clear, the noise of the clattering window soothing me back to the land of Nod, to the East of Eden.

Some minor and marginal political type human observations:

Boris Johnson says that the police should've arrested Andrew Mitchell. I quite agree.
Danny Alexander looks fat and unfit at the Lib Dem Conference - he needs a change of life style.
Nick Clegg is pathetic.
Alex Salmond managed to blow £370,000 on food and entertaining during his first term in office. No wonder he looks the way he looks. Maybe that's also why he behaves the way he behaves.

Interesting theory

Every so often you just  burn it all down and start again.

Ever heard the theory that there's an 11 year swing between punk and psychedelic values in western pop culture? It goes a bit like this: 

1955. tight clothing, short punchy aggressive songs, amphetamines, birth of rock n' roll.

1966. looser fit clothing,long hair, longer more experimental tracks, grass, LSD. Beatles, Dylan, Everybody must get stoned.

1977. Punk. Tight clothes, shorter hair. Sho

rt, aggressive songs. Hippies fuck off.

1988. Ecstacy, Stone Roses, Happy Mondays, Baggy clothes. Rave culture. I am the resurrection.

1999. The Matrix, Nu metal, Eminem. Peace and Love completely ousted once more.

2010 and onwards...basically we are in the midst of what's supposed to be a psychedelic era. The Stone Roses recently reunited. Bob Dylan is everywhere. John Lennon has just been named NME's ultimate icon. Neil Young's new album is entitled psychedelic pill and the first track is almost half an hour long. Richard Hawley's latest offering is hailed as a psychedelic masterpiece and receives 5 star reviews all round. The most viewed television event is a sprawling, confusing, almost psychedelic Olympic opening ceremony headlined for better or worse by a Beatle. The closing ceremony was headlined by the Who. And for the rest of the decade it's going to be the 50th anniversary of everything that happened in the 60s. Which means plenty of media coverage for each passing milestone. Eventually, everyone will get so pissed off that they will banish sixties culture for at least another 11 years. But of course, Tomorrow Never Knows.

P.S. not my theory, pinched from a FB link.

Dalmeny Daily Photo

In the distance, the Forth Bridge. 

The train now standing isn't stopping. 

This one is stopping.

The Indian Summer arrived and covered the whole weekend in golden sunglobs that were nice but didn't produce much heat. We made the most of what we had, as you do in the UK: it was the Edinburgh University open day, an opportunity to buy football socks, being puzzled in the automated corner shop, demonstrations in the city, traffic jams and constructions, train spotting in Dalmeny, heaving sacks of stones, black bagging rubbish, watching Dr Who's space cubes whilst curried and wined out and fitfully dreaming. Next day it was up early and showered, football in a sunny Aberdour, recycling, eating muffins and sausages and apple pop tarts, designing kitchens and back to work. Busy busy.

Expanding Horizons

This exhibition is well worth a visit if you happen to be in Edinburgh.

Same old jeans

Just realising that it's been maybe nine earth months since I wore a pair of jeans. The uniform of uniforms has fallen away from grace and favour and no longer do these scraggy blue icons from wherever come first in the choice of daily trouser clothing. It's about forty two years in jeans of some sort (also forty two years since the last loon pants outing as well) not that I'm counting this properly. The trouble is they've been replaced by chunky unfunky chords mostly or occasional lazy Chino type of things. It's all quite unsatisfactory really and a bit Doolally Debenhams (which was where I got my last pair of jeans I think). Somewhere along the line I've lost the real me, having said that I've not fallen quite so low as to resort to the comfort minefield that is trackies...yet. That's the worst look of all, black shoes, trackies and an open neck shirt. See it exhibited in a mall or a Morrison's car park near you any day of the week but not on me.

Project 29

It was a tough day at work today, suddenly I seem to know where all the bodies are buried and I've been told that there's some wisdom residing in this old head of mine. I was quite unaware of that. Meanwhile the wide mix, reverb guitar and drum rolls in Project 29 pin me back to a place of some kind of sanity. I do like having my reference points set up in there. In the black hole.