#creepy

Rob Brydon doing Jimmy Saville

a cat staring at you in an accusing way

baked beans boiling

air stewardess make up

Danny Alexander; it'll all come out out one day

journalist and columnist’s profile photos in the Guardian

crows ignoring you

drivers who don't wave “thank you” back

too serious folk musicians

people who put up their own home-made signs

seeing the word “roster” and thinking about Atomic Rooster

writing ideas down on yellow stickies

missing socks

zero bids on eBay

the backside of the cupboard under the sink

old violins in sale rooms

monkey faces

buses that say “out of service”

birds stuck in a chimney breast

Roy Keane

three spoonfuls of sugar in a cup of tea

people who come to meetings and say nothing

white Audis

breakfast TV couch presenters

huge biomedical databases

Caithness

1.  Retweeted by John Barclay

   Norman Lamont ‏@normanlamont  Apr 30

   #creepy Late at night as you work on your computer your dog gently lays its head on your knee. But you don't have a dog,

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2. John Barclay ‏@Johnbarclay1  May 1

   #creepy you put a foil tray into the microwave, switch it on but there are no sparks

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3. John Barclay ‏@Johnbarclay1  May 1

   #creepy a pigeon flies into your window

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4. John Barclay ‏@Johnbarclay1  May 1

   #creepy the power blips off and then comes on

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5. John Barclay ‏@Johnbarclay1  Apr 30

   @emmaleehutton @_untrust_us electric blue I think

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6. John Barclay ‏@Johnbarclay1  Apr 30

   @_untrust_us that's possible

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7. John Barclay ‏@Johnbarclay1  Apr 30

   @_untrust_us and made of runny toffee

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8. John Barclay ‏@Johnbarclay1  Apr 30

   #creepy if your soul had a colour what colour would it be?

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9. John Barclay ‏@Johnbarclay1  Apr 30

   #creepy if there ever was to be a murder near to where you live, who would the victim be?

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10. John Barclay ‏@Johnbarclay1  Apr 30

    #creepy all the mail you've ever sent starts to return to you, unopened, a letter at a time every day

A nation of drunkards

Unkind remarks about the demon drink: Maybe wee Eck's not far away from the awful truth and maybe we have a lot more in common with our Russian brethren than we might think. The awful, primal, clawing feeling that every so often we just need to reach out and grab some warm, glowing liquid in the hope that it will burn into our battered (deep fried) and frail, shared consciousness and somehow dull the sharp pains born in all our human weakness and the realisation that comes with that terrible knowledge, all power is of course tyranny but no respectable politician would ever admit it. That's the old black magic of the golden dawn of Irn-Bru and the democratic v the non-democratic processes being acted out in both the Ukraine and Bella Caledonia. Slanj and just get on and do it.

Restless Natives

Modern Graffiti: Here we have a sign put up over another sign to inform whoever (the great British public I presume) that they cant park somewhere because it's private. The trouble is that it's not private property at all and the sign itself is quite clearly trespassing on another sign's territory that probably belongs to Fife Council and not the person who is now obscuring their sign which should be marking the Coastal Path but it's now obscured by the new and unofficial sign. What we really need is a sign that clearly states "don't believe all that you read on signs" and another that says "we don't need anymore signs". Thank you.

Last night's GoT

"And whatever you do don't mention the rape incident at the funeral..."

I experienced a bit of a flashback last night, it was a feeling I got mid season during Lost a few years ago. That bit when the time slip thing happened and the characters moved all over the plotline in a very confusing way. Here we are again in Game of Thrones, normally an exciting and engaging watch, now in season 4 or something and I suddenly felt we were in the saggy middle, the soft muddle or the misplaced middle. Stranded. That  awkward point in a series where nothing is really quite happening, there's a bit of familiar repetition and you feel the writers are going a bit too far in padding out the excessive padding. Conversations take place, there's sex, violence and swearing, the slaves are freed up at last (again) and there's some odd sexual scene that's just too strange and there's other gratuitous or horrid behaviour...but it still doesn't work. Better next week? I hope so.

Fargo on TV

Some good stuff on Sunday night TV: "He's a big believer in coincidence apparently and what he lacks in common sense he makes up for in self-esteem." Lou - ex-cop.

Squeezed muddles

A race to the bottom. Ed Miliband says that a Yes Vote will mean just that. This grinning snake and a poor apology for a Labour Party leader knows this only too well, that's exactly the race that his own party is running in at the moment both in Scotland and in England. It's just not as it should be; who would have thought that the Labour Party would ever struggle to find respect and credibility in Scotland of all places? It's a measure of the damage done by New Labour and their abject failure to remain on the creative left of politics as a result of chasing the Home Counties vote and the support of that nebulous, fickle and impossible to define “squeezed middle”. I've got some sympathy for those Scottish Labour supporters who believe  that the only back for the party here is to swallow a load of other bad medicine and some pride and vote yes. Gordon Brown etc. hang your head in shame.

Dead Pope Society. Pope John Paul, a dead man who is now to be made a saint, but despite all the pomp, prayer and celebration he will remain dead through the ceremony and well beyond. Even the great and powerful Oz and a large gathering of delusional but well meaning people in Rome cannot bring him back from wherever he may be now on the cosmic treadmill. No sausage rolls or chilled Prosecco for John Paul when the speeches are up. I'm sure, apart from being Pope and presiding over a hugely corrupt and corrupting religious body he was a probably nice chap who meant well (even if some of his hypocritical team did not and are clearly evil incarnate). So the obvious and difficult to digest fact for some that he's as dead as the Monty Python parrot and that his canonisation is simply a surreal, superstitious  and ridiculous event. That  may be a tough fact for the faithful to understand. Once again organised religion exposes itself as man's most optimistic, ignorant and futile series of emotionally charged practices – chronicles of wasted time if you will (as a wise man once described his life). P.S. Other Popes are also available for impromptu canonisation.

Here's a Pope that knows a thing or two.

Enter Shakira

It was lentil and bacon soup from a Morrison's can. Lunch. Heated up in the microwave for three minutes, stirred twice and then double plated so I didn't burn my fingers. I supped it slowly (for me) as I looked at Wikipedia, the history of pulp comics and their artwork. It was one of the featured articles of the day that I would scan a random hoping to find a story or an angle or something interesting or titillating. I'd given up on most news sites (apart from proper factual ones) and though Wikipedia had a reputation for being corrupted or unreliable I didn't really buy that. Most of the daily dose of pseudo facts I hoovered up were...believable. Eating the lunch time soup took about three wiki clicks as I jumped onto biographic pages (for artists) and then some image files where I check their work. It was cartoon sex and sci-fi mostly. Pin-up girls, big headed robots and flimsy space suits containing muscular men. A time before science was real and threatening and before CGI made everything believable and ultimately boring. A wonderful world had briefly existed in rough paper and glamour but It had been squeezed out of existence by progress and neurosis of our modern world. Why hadn't anybody realised that the Star-Trek crew on the Enterprise would just unquestioningly use their handhelds and communicators? They'd all be out there in space anxious and neurotic about picking up the latest upgrade or downloading a service pack or an app. The writers had seen the future all right but failed to put stupid people (aka us humans) into it. 

The soup was gone and my mind moved on, I looked at a few political pages but, frankly, they were dull. Dull and unbelievable. The opposition made promises about what they'd do in two years time when they won. As if the world and the electorate would stand still, frozen on the spot waiting on that time happening. It was a distant Christmas or a twenty first birthday present for a sixteen year old. Sentences that began “We will...” were there to be ridiculed. The sad politicians learning nothing from history or from their own recent experiences. They swam in a strange pool of media events bubbling and repeating their messages like rotating goldfish. I washed up the dishes and rinsed out the can. I rinsed out the can and stuck it into a bag of general waste as there was no recycling here, unless I took it home. That idea though worthy was a tedious one. One I didn't want to think about and as a result it tugged at me for all of five minutes. I would save the world a recycle tin cans another, easier more convenient day. When I had the means and the focus, not right now plus I seemed to align itself (recycling) with a kind of political obedience and set of behaviours that I felt like rebelling against. Why should I just adopt that mass conscious and always do the right thing. I fancied a fag and a Mars Bar and a great bulbous glass of deep red, fruity French wine. Three compatible but incompatible evils that I might, in complete defiance of the Daily Mail, Telegraph or BBC whatever channel, enjoy. Life had to be about enjoyment in order to rise above the misery of media scrums and corrupt debates. Advertisements and good advice. The joy of doing things and, in the process and without caring too much about the consequences of just fucking yourself up a bit. Enjoyment.

I do repeat or reuse the same words a lot. At first, or when I first noticed it bothered me and I tried to retrace my steps and find others. I thought that was what writing must be about, proving your vocabulary. Finding different ways to say the same thing so that what you say is more entertaining or informative or just less repetitive. But then I thought about my own streams of thought and colours. It's fine to repeat colours in patterns and designs, in pictures or illustrations, why not words? Why was I being tough on myself? If that word came out three times in a paragraph (as long as the word isn't amazing or fantastic) then why not just use it and go with the flow. For all the readers that there are will they really care or criticize? That actually would be good, some actual attention over the use of repeated words and my limited vocabulary. There; my vocabulary, some place in the wasteland between a Premiership Football Manager or a social worker and a scholar of English Literature or Richard Dimbleby. That was where I sat, which is no place in particular but is a least a position. I had a position in vocabulary and was unafraid to use it. My position in good grammar usage was however a different thing altogether.

The dishes, three bowls and two spoons, a can opener and a knife were done by hand. There was tomato sauce on the tin opener, or perhaps tomato soup. I wondered how long it had been there as I scraped it away with my fingernail and ducked it into the hot, soapy water. Then I clashed (?) the clean dishes on the draining board, walked away and checked my phone. I had a brief Star Trek moment but let it pass. Those poor actors I thought, play acting with dumb props and suggestions but without anything in the script that actually placed them in the future. Just plywood and cardboard knock ups to hold and, if the word had been around at the time, interact with. All that functionality without any of the social anxiety. No wonder everybody wants to live in the future.

At three o'clock, in a moment of total harmonious perfection and agreement between unrelated items the rain, as predicted on the BBC weather web site, began. It may not have been precisely the correct kind of rain, there are about a thousand kinds though only a hundred descriptive terms are in current use. Whatever this one was (approximately slow drizzle, like olive oil applied to those crunchy green leaves on as cookery show or the end of an uneventful but none the less necessary piss) it was a kind of rain. Good enough for me and welcome for the hanging baskets (an unfortunate name for them if there ever was) so as to restore life to dry things and just pleasant enough to add a zesty ambiance to the air and the day. It was also nice to look out upon. Rain, when you're not in it allows a smug superiority in the rain viewer. A smugness that allows a giggling mockery for those out there, trapped by duty, or travel or some other piece of self inflicted or demanded misery. A special place in rain is reserved for those poor souls who ventured out unprepared (without a car), boys with T shirts and tattoos, girls with cardigans and old people who've lived on this planet a long time but failed to plan for the obvious and inevitable patterns of weather. “Have you learned nothing!” I wanted to shout, “Eighty years shuffling around here and you still don't get it!” of course if they're eighty then perhaps worrying about protection from the rain isn't quite so important. Rain, in normal quantities wont kill you. If it's a lake or a swimming pool then that's a different thing. I wondered if anybody had ever actually drowned standing up when out walking in the rain. A proper cloudburst. Unlikely but there must be somebody, most likely in the US Midwest or Florida who had gone out this way. If may not been recorded, today I would be clip on YouTube or a Vine, gone in ten seconds like one of Noah's enemies.

I left the building and got out into the car, turned the key and it started. That hadn't always been the case but I now had a reliable sense of confidence in the vehicle. The drizzle continued and the wipers ticked across the screen at just the wrong speed, just out of pace with the rain as they danced with conspiratorial elegance against each other. Probably Audi had fixed this, lesser manufactures or older models still struggled with adapting to the weather. I bumped off the main road at the turning and zigzagged homeward avoiding pot holes whist trying to make a pattern I couldn't quite see but one that might be seen if someone else was flying in an aeroplane directly above my car and filming it via a camera mounted downwards on the lower part of the plane's fuselage. That was what I was thinking anyway. The part ten became longer, looser and less well imagined as I travelled along the track. There were two bad corners. The first with the boulder (a remnant from the Ice Age I imagined) has generally easier. I did sometimes feel a strange compulsion to scrape the side of the car on the boulder, I don't quite know why. I resisted and soldiered on. Just on the next corner, sharp, blind and challenging a red Mitsubishi pick up truck met me. We slowed abruptly but in unison and crawled past one another. I looked across at the, driver, I was ready  to deliver one of those awkward nods that says, “Hail fellow road user, well met and a good day to you!” I was ready with this move. It was there right up my sleeve but you can well imagine my surprise when I looked across at the truck's cab and saw that the driver was none other than the Colombian singer and some time celeb beauty known as Shakira. I didn't expect that to happen today.

100% Britpop

Britpop. To celebrate 20 years since Blur's Parklife came out we're now suffering a range of awful reminders about a fairly dodgy period in British pop history. Blur, Oasis and Pulp are the only bands I remember, in fact I don't think I ever knowingly bought a Britpop record. Even the splendidly stupid and meaningless genre's name is off putting and hard to divorce from the grinning face of Tony Blair in his full manic 90s splendour. Not a good modern history lesson. So all the splendid and once radical Britpop rock gods have either embraced full and well deserved obscurity and gone onto normal careers as inner city social workers or they're playing out their days building up ever more pretentious projects and churning out the same old sixties type shit as if they'd actually invented it. Others have gained some kind of Hipster and cultural respect and write self centred articles for the posh Sundays or curate art galleries and run organic farms while their Gibson 335s and their Rickenbackers gather dust under beds or on wall hangers in Cotswolds farmhouses. They infiltrated the great British consciousness like cheap burglars who steal your couch but leave your Tag Heuer whilst in the dusty background the shallow voices of Radio 1's near dead DJs sycophantically compliments their every cliched move through a tinny loudspeaker. Oasis sadly sang about being in a rock and roll band and being stars, if only, they didn't even come close. They were stuck in a British built loop of slowed down and turgid musical soup like a Morris Marina groaning in third gear trying to tow a caravan across the Thelwall Viaduct on the M6. Meanwhile, the people that did know how to do rock and roll stayed safe and creative on the other side of the Atlantic and the English Channel. Britpop? Shitpop.

Cloudy and clammy

Paint stripper: slow-mo action shot in B&W.

Every so often just take a little time out and look up at the clouds and try not to trip up either. So a cloudy and almost (at 17C) clammy day when nothing much happened apart from the ritualistic cleaning of bird shit from windows and cars that took place. A long silence followed during which winds and moving air hustled those same clouds from a to b and possibly beyond even as far as c. Indoors the paint stripper chemicals were magically activated when they came into contact with wood, air and accidental human flesh. Oh how we laughed and then screamed with pain and the shock of it all. Back in the kitchen my earlier successful but moodily petulant unarmed robbery from the M&S food court provided a series of tea time treats with milk and two sugars. It all tasted a bit like chicken but we're suckers for any decent three for a tenner promotion that includes fresh green leaves and a Key Lime pie or two. 

Here's a beer I had earlier, sinking into a tartan worm hole. 

Here's a cat thinking deep and profound thoughts about inter-cat and inter-human relationships...and food.

Being exceptional sucks

Having driven 200 miles today on a mixture of business and pleasure related things I'm a bit tired and maybe dehydrated in a mental way.  Too tired to blog and so explore and go on to find deep and meaningful things to say and describe. It's not as if they've disappeared (those issues and things), there are more things there than ever. All excruciatingly important and crying out to be said or critiqued or spat upon with some derisory comment or tirade or laughed at, mocked or built up into some fantastic and creative mind palace of presentational perfection, but not now. Not now when I'm tired and I want to watch trashy TV, drink strong dirty coffee, suck a Cadbury's creme egg and sleep in various stages of shallow awareness and deep, vivid, fitful dreaming. In other words I'm not feeling at all exceptional right now. Normal in other, other words.

And another thing...

A word from Peggy