Exasperated Blackberry

Going from an old phone to a new one is fairly traumatic. This time it's from a whatever it was dumb phone to a sparkly and not so smart Blackberry (this is for business not pleasure). I never have been an early adopter of new technology so I'm always catching up and even my slim guitar stunted fingers seem a might too big for the tiny qwerty keys and trackball touch thing that wobbles like jelly on top of smoothie in a glass of Activia. I will persevere however and climb that hill. So what have I learned recently?

The wonders of e-book via the 3D Kindle, all apps, magazines and finger flicking good stuff.
Wav files are miles better than Mp3s.
Microwaves can be made to defrost chickens.
2 in 1 Nescafe is very good for you early in the morning.
I can live, survive and thrive using a Macbook.
In-car temperature controls and trip computers are good things.
Chips in cats will allow cat flaps to operate (?).
Smart TVs are not so smart.
Rewiring a dimmer switch.
My Sky password.
The Blackberry trackball touch.
Smoothie and Activia can successfully live in a shared glass if correctly chilled.
You can buy whisky on-line from on-line retailers.
Cheesy beans are good.
A Porsche doesn't need high octane fuel.

That's about it - but I still feel just a little uneasy and out of step with things...I imagine that's how David Bowie must feel all of the time.

An error occurred

Entering a strange new world.

An error occurred when I was starting to type and I completely forgot what it was I was about to write. Thankfully the Blogger error appears not to be fatal and it may just be possible to slip into some parallel universe (as a cat might) and so avoid the tricky situations posed by life, a diet of Harry Potter films and parking in disabled spaces  - but only for a really short period of time and because I had to pop into the Post Office. Karma will punish me.

David Bowie has finally made a new record and created quite a fuss on the Twittersphere. Fortunately it had all passed over like a fresh January storm before I got home, I will give it a listen in due course.

Driller's Procrastination (DP)

Thirty five year old Black and Decker, still works up to a point despite numerous mishaps and bodged repairs.

Two holes and a pen mark.

Possibly the finest collection of blunt drill bits and chuck keys North of the Pentlands and South of the Ochils.

I'm a DP sufferer and I don't really care who knows about it. It's a whole new form of mental illness and I've diagnosed myself with it albeit in a mild and fairly nonthreatening form. It's all about fiddling in the margins, inventing delays, building obstacles, seeing technical deficiencies and generally messing about when you could just get on and do the drilling. Well today after a long period of self inflicted therapy, some rain and a garlic potato I broke through in way that would have made any average American comedy/reality audience whoop and holler with delight and admiration. Yes it's true I drilled about four easy holes into a simple piece of wood. Now all I have to do is get to the top of the step ladder.

Spirited away to Kelty

Unlikely doppelganger doorknob. 

The highest football pitch in Fife sits at a lofty 600ft above the level of the choppy North Sea and it was there that I spent the afternoon blasted, dazed and confused and entertained by some murky Sunday football, thanks to Kelty Hearts under 19s. As is the custom the final scoreline was less than flattering to us but the toilets, car parking and the confused coffee service were of a high calibre. The Soundtrack to the afternoon was provided by those jolly Scandinavians "First Aid Kit" (The Lion's Roar) and the oh so serious Texans "ZZ Top" (La Futura) with readings via Kindle from Call of the Wild and The Adventures of Tom Sawyer. It was special on so many levels,  that kind of super cultured Kelty afternoon that's been missing from the not so sadly departed old nag that was 2012.

Earlier in the day we began with the traditional hangover bustin' Cowboy/Cowgirl breakfast; eggs, chilli egg bread, olive egg bread, flat Fife sausage, bacon, beans and tomatoes - works a treat. I started eating it and I'd no hangover, fifteen minutes later I had a head like a Townhill (Lochside) brick that's been blasted in the oven since Tuesday. Marvellous stuff really.

Funniest thing I've seen on TV in ages: Cuckoo "Grandfather's Cat Episode", oh yeah!

The low road

The sole of a boot found on top of a dry stone dyke. 

An abandoned water pump, buried in rubble, unused for years.

I've been pounding the Fife Coastal Path, well the small part of it that runs close by the front door. There's a lot to see and a lot that's hidden and likely to stay that way. Out on the beach people dig fishing worms, gather up driftwood or logs and timber here and there, quad bikes rumble, some dogs run wild whilst  some walk obediently by their owners, kids play and muddy cyclists and hi-vis runners stay fit.  The light plays tricks and the chilly River Forth widens and narrows and then as night falls turns grey and invisible. Then the January winds kicks in, rain joins the winter party and it's time to head home for hot chocolate and seat by the warm stove.

The loneliness of the long distance rubbish

So what about the applied mechanics of recycling, staying sane and staying greenish all year round? Half way out on the road to find a seasonally uncluttered drop off point I ask myself is it really good practice to take all your recycling material in the boot of your gas guzzling car to the recycling centre? By then you rinsed out the cans and bottles in the precious, maybe even hot soapy water. Folded flat the cardboard and taken all the windows out of envelopes and the cellophane from the ready meal boxes. Of course you've stored these items for a while somewhere within your valuable house space, tripped over them a few times and then finally stuffed them into the car in order to drop them into the appropriate bins at the recycling centre. That is assuming that the council have emptied the bins and that there's room in the bins. There is also a strong possibility that it's windy and pouring rain while you stuff the precious material into the deliberately too small container apertures. Trouble is, once you start you just can't stop.

Almost normal progress

I did prepare quite a lot of this food but I didn't eat as much of it as I thought I would, that's always a strange part of entertaining and general grub husbandry. Now we've a fridge full of tasty leftovers.

Headed back to the steady state of normal, Christmas tree surgically removed from the arse of the house, bright shiny things entrapped in dark boxes, sliver balls rubbed up and rolled into their shoe box beds, lights coiled and crammed into large plastic repositories and hot ashes hosed down and hoovered; the celebrations can be well and truly declared over. The trouble is I'm a bit fuzzy on what we were celebrating, possibly the fact that we can freely celebrate the passing of the shortest day, maybe new calender numbers or just being born into a country that has a fair amount of civilisation and healthy sanitation going on in it most of the time. All that and of course the art of ingenious pie making and stuffing. Most likely the Romans started it and the Picts pinched the idea and it's completely stuck with us now. So much that it's hard to celebrate anything without sticking a slice of pastry and savoury contents into your face at some point. Progress.

In other news we've gone straight in at the deep end and started watching the "Breaking Bad" box set. Already I can feel my life slipping away in a pleasant four-eyed trance. I may need more pie.

Inflammatory and offensive...

...to some but that's just the way things are. Everybody takes offense a little too easily these days and it just may well be that your taste in music / films / food, your political beliefs, your religious and philosophical ponderings and your appetites for this, that and the other are, if placed under close scrutiny just a little bit dodgy. Just remember the tiny speck that you are and that there are at least a billion people in China who don't give a Tinker's Cuss about what you or I think. So let's all have a better perspective for 2013 (The Hebridean Year of the Unlucky Pig and the Inarticulate Blogger) and may God, Communism, Capitalism and the Great Bloated Pumpkin King bless you all.

Psychedelic Pill

Yes I own a copy and to be honest I was confused by it. That awkward first listening when you fear the worst and revisit the sleeve notes for clues. No big grab effect, cosmic hook or be-jewelled ear-worms. Something that's a one play album, no depth or engagement possible and then filed back in oblivion as a musical relic despite the pretty packaging. If I were truly heartless then it'd be stuffed onto Ebay for £5 along with some stellar hope for the best and a fond farewell in a second hand jiffy bag. None of that came to be. I found something else that resides beyond any music or sound scape, that's a properly valuable experience if you can ever get yourself in there. So if all your life you've been looking for some narrative soundtrack to tell your story then maybe this is it. This Psychedelic Pill. This is what it all comes down to - distillation and focus and a drug called music. The different, slightly disappointing thing that marks you out as just another confused passenger mishearing some instructions and reacting badly at an inopportune moment. All quite normal really. So contrary to what you thought it would been the listing allows for none of the big hitting stuff, none of the classics, those pieces that you thought would define your three score and however many, all set up there in an ever changing imaginary list that's just too fluid to settle into any kind of permanent structure. Then, quite by surprise on the day you die it'll solidify like porridge and shrivel up into the three chosen songs that they play on a bad sound system at your funeral and all the while nobody is listening nor really caring what any of it might mean. That's because your long gone now and it's clearly too late. Anyway it's always about somebody more alive and more articulate than I ever was and they're livin' on trying to express a feeling for you, in a way that you never could. Then again it is completely possible that I just made this up and let my apparently arbitrary tastes fit the model so that you'd be more confused and that you'd never really know quite what was on that list o' mine. It's not that I tried to hide it or that I couldn't be bothered. It's more to do with the fact that it just doesn't matter now.

Ultimate sandwich

One more turkey sandwich. This month's Heathen Winterfest has seen us dip into a rich vein of locally sourced produce, bought in damp and rainy farm shop barns and rickety butcher shops. No electronic tills, tags or reward points were used in the making of these communal meals but some animals and root vegetables were seriously damaged. They gave their lives for curry and the twin births of those seasonal cultural icons Jesus and Santa. It's as if we'd suddenly caught onto the old Fife Diet experiment and for a brief moment tried to take the non-global approach to life seriously. I suppose we run the risk of being picketed by irate Tesco shareholders, Zombie economists or active members of the Conservative Party. As if any of them gave an ounce of seasonal stuffing about our paltry consumption levels, intolerance to white sugar or the mud on our mock Wellingtons. So here we are, burning dried logs, living the outlaw life on the fringes of society and playing Scrabble, it's a kind of life I'd always dreamed off experiencing. Ignoring TV schedules, high street sales and shopping, reviews of whatever year it was and idiot news, listening to Psychedelic Pill and chasing strange cats from their squatter beds under Christmas trees, squishing through the chemical run off from some vast fields, fixing doors and being hypnotised by touchy feely colouring in schedules and warm alcohol. Time for another turkey sandwich and getting into things without having to explain.

Non-white Christmas

So the Christmas panic is over and some lucky places on earth experienced peace and that kind of thing, I hope you had some also. Here we had the full on Christmas party jigsaw experience coupled with that awkward nostalgia felt for sweets and confectionary from the past. Tastes, strange brands  and prices from that difficult decade that was the 70s. 1000 pieces, none of them easy.

Room full of mirrors

Ah, Christmas Eve. Too busy this weekend to be busy with anything other than all those details and bits of things and pieces that add up to Christmas - but right now I quite fancy something from the Chinese takeaway. That's just how I get sometimes, anyway Merry Christmas to you when it comes.

Went out

...came back. This fine fellow was siting on the windowsill in the spare room. Confident, nonchalant, looking me up and down, that sort of thing. The other cats seemed strangely indifferent to the new guy, well that's their problem. We tried out-staring each other but I blinked so I promptly chased him out of the house with a hair dryer.

Might just do this...

...tomorrow, all we need is for the numbers and omens to add up. 2hrs 4 mins, 48 frames per second, 21st of December (longest night, shortest day and the possible end of the world), Black Friday, busiest day of the year for traffic, good choice of ice creams, floods, fire and pestilence and all that final wrapping and vegetable shopping not quite nearly done. Drone, drone, drone.

Edinburgh stuff

I was indeed in Scotland's capital city today but sadly failed to spot any of the elusive new trams they have there. On the Ten o'clock BBC news I did hear that one was seen carrying out speed trials in preparation for that far away day in 2014 when they run for real on metal rails from here to the far away middle of the town, oh yes! Apparently the mighty machine reached speeds of up to forty miles per hour with no red flagman in attendance. It is said that some local simple minded women who saw the machine speeding along fainted as if overcome by the vapours, cows couldn't give milk and hens stopped laying goose eggs. Angry farmers who watched it pass by shook their fists in the air and cursed God that such a thing should ever have come to cross their now barren and scorched fields. Christmas Cabbages and Brussels Sprouts were seen to shrivel and die and a donkey in Ratho suffered a massive heart attack at the Premier Inn. Meanwhile in nearby Gogar lightening struck the RBS HQ food court and the quiche dispensing machine jammed shut trapping some small children on a day out from Bathgate. In Sitehill all road traffic stopped thanks to the trams reputed sonic boom effect, it's believed that the windows in Arnold Clarke's were badly shaken as was the Hungry Drunk Burger van and a number of it's clientele. These trams have a lot to answer for but then again that's progress for you.

Out Now!

In the heat of the non-existent battle and as ever conscious of our ability and appetite for serial time wasting we've taken yet another small step towards the deep end of musical obscurity. This celebration of all things mundane, mediocre and slightly delusional takes the form of a CD entitled:

 “Queen of the Seas” 

which has currently been deposited in the eclectic musical data vaults of Bandcamp (it may well find it's way to other repositories in due course, that depends). From this mysterious location it can be listen to and downloaded apparently, if you're inclined towards that sort of thing. As it is the season to be more jolly than pragmatic we may also distribute a few copies to friends who are either hard of hearing or in need of a mid-winter jolt of some sort. At 10 Mid-Equator minutes the CD is fabulously short, almost sweet as a Malteser you might say and it plays quite well on all forms of modern sound reproduction equipment. Of course it's always wise to check with your local dealer or a trusted adult who understands the operation of such complex things. Anyway we think it's rather good, as for that red and itchy rash and the aroma of stale nutmeg, well the less said about those things the better.

Track 1 – Sea Cloud: Electric Guitar x 2, synth, drum loop and sea sounds.

Track 2 – Ibiza Zen Garden: Electric guitar x 2, bass, Dr Rhythm drums, Ali vocal sample and tiny bell.

Track 3 – Pimp my Dolphin: Synth x 2, drone and bubble samples.

Track 4 – Deep Blue Compression: Electric Guitar x 2, Bass, drum loop, Ali vocal x 2.

Track 5 – Barcelona Taxi: Dr Rhythm drums, Electric slide guitar, bass, applied echo.

Track 6 - Sea Cloud (Reprise): Electric Guitar x 2, synth, drum loop and sea sounds. Remixed.

Stuffing the Christmas Volvo

There's no doubt that stuffing a Christmas tree into a Volvo seems like the most natural thing in the world. I imagine that in the far away land known as Sweden it is some kind of national winter sport, along with it's own world records, specialists, woollie jumpers, thrash metal, icy beer and pigs heads on spikes.Today I had a go, it was the usual seasonal pantomime, the cold's now  departed and we're left with damp and dispiriting gales. You choose your 8 foot tree from a windswept B&Q bin, priced at £27.99 or thereabouts, you lug it to the robot till and in the space of 30 seconds it's jumped up in price to £47.99. You think "fuck it I need this tree" and blame your lack of glasses and curse rampant hedge fund managers and George Osborne. You certainly don't dare query the bar code and by this time you're covered in damp pine needles and have grown strangely attached to your dead wooden companion. Then the ritual of Volvo stuffing begins, the key components being: a) don't damage the precious tree, b) don't get any wetter than you are already and c) don't cover the car in pine needles (it's not a good look) and d) don't drop the tree into a puddle or under another car's wheels. In Sweden they do this in mere seconds. Here, the old Viking genes have worn off a bit and it can take a while and items a - d may well befall the intrepid tree buyer. Any way we're home safe now and the tree is outside in the rain. I know that seems kind of cruel but at some point it will enter the house and be tarted up like Lady Gaga for it's short lived festive fortnight. It's nearly Christmas, phew. Thanks to Wagonized for the Volvo drawing, I take no credit.

Deep cold

It's that deep and stiff December cold, everything  is dark and frozen. The ending of the world on the 21st now seems remotely possible in these conditions, the planet could just slow down and stop in a minus Centigrade mist of frozen air, a silent puff and we all just stand stiff, stuck in our tracks. The running down timing of the year, beating it's own internal clock around and slugging with the sun for the rights to the longest night and shortest day, all taking a perverse pleasure in a deep cold that touches the raw bone's root. There is of course no escape, it's heads down, hands tight in pockets, make a grimace and clutch on to some hot beverage, turn the car heating up, choke on the exhaust, lean on a warm radiator, pull up the duvet. Then there's the internal glow of a golden and supernatural heater that blurs the edges, tapers  away the sharp point of a frozen sting and calms your world down to that of the slowly tilting motion of the earth. Those few precious degrees that feed the seasons and take all the blame for climate and quirks. That'll be the  alcohol, whisky or some such, a winter antidote. Just don't tell the Scottish Government.

Goggle box

Just got around to watching this on the goggle box via the good offices of the British Broadcasting Corporation and Sky's jagged little yellow button. Big lines of Orange amps, some serial guitar face gurning and liberties taken with the tunes but it's all ancient history now. Good enough to do the ironing to, that's the acid test.

Whispered Revolution

Corporations avoiding tax is almost as shocking as celebs having bad / illegal sex or politicians lying or fiddling their expenses or Islamic Clerics being called "radical".  It's inevitable, predictable and come the whispered revolution there will be no more religion, crap cardboard coffee shops, on-line box shifters, bloated phone companies exploiting the exploited, clunky biased search engines, socially excluding networking sites and no Big Bad Blue. That'll be fine then and we'll just have a perfect world full of Nissan Leafs, green tea cafes, wind up laptops, wind turbines, Linda McC sausages, smooth free-jazz radio, rhubarb wine, equal rights for badgers and non competitive sports. Bollox.

Today we removed everything from the garage, checked it, mulled over it and then put it back exactly where was in the first place but in the process somehow forming a slighter bigger pile than before. We are settling in however. Meanwhile that cats experienced the outside world for the first time, it was touch and go for a moment and then they...went. We're now poised with the remote controls, torches and some cold cut chicken to try to entice them back out of the cold black void and into the warmth.