A plague of crayons

In these troubled times where posh buffoons are in charge of the most important things what this country needs is a plague of crayons somewhere, but not on our household. These are virtual images. By that I mean they have some virtues as well as not actually existing. This is modern art in as much as it was created a few days ago and some time after the actual Renaissance and in no particular order Dadaism, Cubism, Surrealism, Realism, Pop Art and various other famous schools of arty things. Today we all have the tools and technology to become brilliant, all we lack is the energy and the inspiration and the few available lucky breaks meshed with the correct algorithm.

Big Slug

Yes it's a monster, a huge mutated slug, 6" long and longer when it stretches out to move. It might be radioactive. It may even have super powers, there's no way of knowing as I was careful not to anger or insult it. In the hostile environment of a wild garden you cannot be too careful otherwise the nettles, thorns and now slugs may bite back, sting or give you a nasty itchy rash. I observed it's low, sluggish you might say, progress across the stones and then, due my indifferent attention span lost interest and I guess it progressed on into the lush and dripping vegetation for some hearty meal or other. It may have done that or come a cropper, perhaps being eaten by some passing goose or a low flying crow. You can never tell and I'll never know.

Dear Satan #2

Dear Satan,

Sorry to bother you when you're so busy with your climate chaos, North Korea, whispering in the dumb-ass Trump family ears, fixing Facebook algorithms and reducing the size of chocolate bars but just what is it with you and our socks? I know that you read this blog so don't try to ignore this issue. Can you please explain why, anywhere in this (?) world, it is impossible to get comfortable socks at present time? 

I'm a size 8, socks tend to come in batch sizes of 6 - 9 and so on. My feet are at neither end of this scale and it's obviously bad news for the 6 and 7 folks. It must be an even worse torture for these poor people. Sizing and sorting needs fixed because socks do not stay in on one place on your feet (as you might reasonably  expect from any piece of clothing or footwear) they move and ride about in all directions when on your feet. Movement = friction = heat. That is not a good thing within a sock, shoe and foot sandwich, it causes rubbing, chaffing, red skin and leads to pain. Actual pain and tiredness. I suspect you're also meddling with the materials and allowing poor quality wool and other textiles to screw with our feet and trap sweat and heat regardless of what the labels and descriptions claim.

The bad behaviour of socks is a constant source of frustration for the world, they should not have sadistic lives of their own and be the cause of so much discomfort. Please get yourself out of the sock design business and allow the better parts of science to get involved so as to improve the quality in order to allow those of us who walk around a lot to at least have some comfort and less injury as we quietly live our lives.

Thanks in anticipation,

John

Steely Dan don't need tribute bands

Soft underbelly of the biscuit tin on the day I heard the news...

Walter Becker's death made me wonder about when a band is still a band. Donald Fagen says that a Steely Dan band will carry on and continue to play in Walter's memory. The old hits roll on like in that 10cc song who's name escapes me. That's a nice thought I suppose but once Donald Fagen goes then that really should be over for Steely Dan. I don't like bands of ghosts carrying on, milking the back catalogue of the founder band with some tenuous link to the original, a one time bass player or a roadie or an adopted cat. Things need to die away naturally and not exist in some perpetual roundabout of attributed members joining an everlasting and lucrative club. Yeah, I don't really like actual tribute acts either (I know it can be fun bopping to the past but...), maybe it's the young wigs and the old faces and nothing to do with the music.  But regarding the sad loss of Walter Becker I always loved the eerie and sophisticated work of Steely Dan, too many clever references and wonderful chords for me to ever fully understand or copy, too painstaking and perfect with the solos sometimes, too NYC and not enough LA, too clever and not enough stupid. Great formulas, ever lasting sounds and everlasting conundrums.

Accidental Wes Anderson

Cheap blogging continues: As the lucky hordes, 50000 strong, are out there walking across the Queensferry Crossing and taking numerous smug, grinning selfies we here, left on the banks can only browse the internet and moan. Oh, wait a minute here's a site that celebrates things that are, by accident if you will, just a little Wes Anderson in their look and feel. Interesting and nothing to do with local affairs at all. At least it's a reasonably fine afternoon for the once in a lifetime trek. I'll get over my error in not applying and therefore my exclusion sooner or later.

Hell is full of recycled nothings

Dark things, dirty dark things lie together in the bin, cat food sachets, green curry containers, polystyrene pots and the awkward nozzle bits from Mr Sheen and used up hand soaps. Where will/does it all end up?

The dark recesses of recycling remain a modern mystery and a source of righteous guilt. What goes where, should it be rinsed out, what can you mix, why bother? We do our best but it's a fuzzy process and based on my discreet observations around the modern world most people don't give a modern toss (that's about 50p). No matter what you put on the packet it all goes unread and just gets piled up elsewhere. It's kind of nobody's responsibility to care, all we want is a simple, preferably coloured instruction that tells where to fling our juice/yogurt/chicken soup carton so we can reduce the guilt and feel smug. So what if it's sent to Spain or China or burned up to power essential services in hospitals in Glasgow, as long as it's done out there in the great unknown by young offenders and surly pirate types wearing donkey jackets and hi-vis then that's fine. It's too much trouble to learn and to worry where it all ends or how it returns to us as shopping bags, tins of sugary drinks,underwear and Kia Rios following a convoluted route there and back again. 

And there's the awful horror of knowing that what doesn't get used up is being compressed into squeezed up messy wee atoms and molecules and then buried at the bottom of the sea or in a secret mountain in the Far East where yellow trucks and diggers work 24 hours a day under arc lights piling up the world's waste. We need to stop buying rubbish that is only fit for recycling into more rubbish but we all need our rubbish and the perplexity of it's relationship with us for any of our lives to have meaning...said no one ever.

Last rays of August

A Laurie Lee or a Lewis Grassic Gibbon would have the language and the vocabulary to properly sum up and describe the last few rays of the sun on the final evening in August, leaving the door unlocked and ready for the arrival of September in a twinkling of hours. I don't however. Photo by Ali Graham.

Slow internet day due to porridge on the line

One of those days when I'm time poor and Internet poor, apparently it's running at the speed of low lying porridge today as is my conscious mind. Perhaps I've become too enthralled with Game of Thrones and am in some kind of cold turkey phase, maybe it's because I'm a Londoner, no that's no true. There is no adequate explanation (note spoof album covers, lot's of GOT revisionist twaddle out there). We did watch Logan last night, the TV was calling in some far away way. It was a bit of a disappointment, formulaic and without any real points to like. It could have been so good, "superhero mutants get old and infirm, a bit cranky and lose the plot", lots of potential, none of it realised and way too violent in stupid ways. I'm using the word way a lot, I blame the internet and the BBC and other things that gum up life with their gum and porridge.

Unexpected and disturbing

Well this is unexpectedly disturbing and sinister, a strange eye graphic that I've downloaded and then uploaded quite intentionally but under duress. It's as if my fingers and some (dull) part of my brain were briefly  taken over and controlled by an unworldly force of some kind. The good news is that these actions have neutralized the awful curse that came as part of the original eye package. However for those of you viewing this for the first time right now, I'm afraid the curse still retains it's full and unpredictable power, all set aside for you. Just of those things I guess.

Kits, Kats and Ants

Actual ants photographed by me yesterday in East Kilbride (or EK for short).

Ants: If you look closely at this photo you'll see lots of tiny Leaf Carrying Ants carrying pre-cut leaves along a piece of rope to some ant friendly destination or other. It's hardly dangerous tight rope artistry, in fact it's a bit like you or me carrying a large leaf across the Forth Bridge but fair play to the ants, they just get on with it without any obvious complaints.  It does illustrate a certain amount of commitment, team work and dedication by the ants which I roundly applaud. I do wonder however about the actual ant political system that runs silently in the background and the methods by which this repetitive labour is organised.

Actual Kit-Kats photographed by me today in the kitchen of our house.

Kit-Kats: Loved the world o'er and particularly in Japan, the humble Kit-Kat is defying (for the mean time) the universal shrinking ray of progress that other sweet treats have succumbed to. You still can get four reasonably sized CHUNKY Kit-Kats for £1 in reputable stores, maybe even in Poundland. This bucking of trends will probably spell economic disaster for the brand eventually but I for one am happy to be indulged by their maverick style and marketing recklessness. Of course they may just be there as loss leaders or perhaps they're just taking the piss out of skinny Mars Bars and puny Snickers which are now so small they'd pass convincingly as Celebration sweeties. I suppose smaller sweets are no bad thing, assuming you only scoff one and stop there. Greedy bastards who eat two where they'd have eaten one need to hang their heads in shame and look out for the great grinning diabetes monster  and likely dental chaos lurking in the dark shadows ahead of them.

Start your engines

Festival Best

There's some kind of big arts festival on in Edinburgh at the moment, quite busy really with all sorts of people attending. Multicultural you might say. Zany in places and generally expensive as well as expansive. A nice day though out for those of us from the sticks used to fences and fields. Just too many things to see and do so I missed a load of photo ops, easily dazzled by everything going on really. I even had to drink water to cool down at one point. People and footfall generate heat. Perhaps that's why the world is hotting up with the warmth of misty global warming coming up from our shoes and armpits rising to the bright heavens where even God himself or herself cannot shield us. There may be other reasons also but don't tell Dee-Dee Trump.

High hopes, rhythm and jam

I also find spelling tricky, words with no vowels are particularly hard, rhythm is probably the worst. How can that first h be correct and why isn't it just rithem or rythm if you want to lock out the vowels? Anyway I always find cheeky chappy guitar god  Jeff Beck  amusing as well as being stunningly brilliant and hypnotically watchable. He seems to be the late bloomer of the famous Yardbirds (or Yyrdbyrds) three pluckers and the most consistent and arguably original player still going. Clapton had a long and purple phase, mellowing out as he aged and got bored. Page burned super brightly but never, ever matched the quality of his early work from 69 to 74 and seems only to be  interested in remastering old tapes and recordings these days. Beck emerges as a plucky and stoical workhorse of a guitar player who has plugged away and grown in style and technique to his current masterful place. He has a quirky, fluid and explosive style that the other two can't really match. OK the tunes are mostly covers and rehashed classics but his take on them is wonderful to watch and better to listen to. The tortoise beats the hare ever time, if it takes a life time. Over indulgent use of coke and heroin doesn't help either. 

Four whole days

So, this evening marks the end of a spell of work that has lasted a whole four days. It's a fine, quiet, tired kind of pleasant feeling. Like settling down for the evening on a forgiving couch with a grey goose, a Marmite toasted sandwich and flagon of Choco milk, the one you love and various singing birds and mammals crooning in a pleasant Walt Disney style as the end of day's shadows lengthen and the promise of always more is always more than you might have expected. You fall asleep and dream of great clouds of common sense and brevity floating by but tethered by fishing line that's almost invisible and there are no fish to speak of. Then you play a joke on  the Hebrew God by pretending to create an alternative universe of your own  just to test his sense of humour. Oh how we laughed and how he out smarted us with his new and very serious  version of Hell.

Knitted Bunny

Just a simple, knitted rabbit sitting on a barrel in the Biscuit Cafe in Culross. We were there the other day, Ali had wholesome warming soup and I had a scone with jam and cream. Speaks volumes I guess.

Sympathy for Easy Rider

I still have a very soft spot for the old movie Easy Rider, the second X-Rated film I ever saw at the cinema and one that formed up some of my most immature and rebellious attitudes creating a simple world view in my tiny mind. I still have the tiny mind. The first X I ever saw was Midnight Cowboy, it was titillating and funny but I didn't understand much of it. The bridge between age fifteen and sixteen seemed to be a huge gulf in those days, permissions were hard won. At sixteen you could smoke, see Xs, marry an actual woman, get a motorcycle licence and join the Army (well you could do that at fifteen), apart from marriage all these things were hot on my radar once I'd turned fourteen. The demon drink wasn't really tempting me either, how strange.

Everything then was about being old enough or being smart enough or brazen enough to sneak in or around whatever adult managed barrier there might be. It was an age based war of attrition and time would always be on my side or so I thought. I've gotten over all that now, though I was quite excited when I first graduated towards my free travel bus pass.

Herbal remedies from the 17th Century

In the old days painting the ceiling involved a bit more than a can of white emulsion and roller.

Strange views from tiny houses with tiny windows.

A stall of ancient remedies, thankfully I've no 17th century illnesses at the moment.

Quite impressed at the way this Smart has been adapted to act as a mobile coffee stall. Maybe the adaption isn't really permanent but it's an eye catching way to vend coffee.

Culross in Fife is mad about the TV show Outlander, I'm not but I get the importance of it for fans and locals. Crowds gathered yesterday to view the sights and locations and obviously get a little 17th century medicine in the process. We settled for soup and scones from more recent times. Anyway Culross is actually pretty cool, twas a grand day out and we arrived and departed with our haul from the farmer's market and craft staffs on bicycles.

Another fabulous epiphany

Hell's own fiery gateway, designed to draw you into your doom.

It's been a while since I last bought something on Amazon, maybe a month. It was a book about photography that was intended as a gift and was duly given. I'm slowly slowing down in some reverse gear of entropy for browsing buying. I do have a few items languishing in the basket, that tatty receptacle for all double minded and doubtful potential purchases. Those stillborn goods that were never such a good idea or were explored and then shelved following an encounter with a bottle of red or two. The thrill of Amazon has gone (song title anyone?).

Right now eBay is also less of a magnet for uncontrolled shopping, it's still my go to for guitar parts or (?) bargains but some of the thrill of the chase has headed over the hill, auctions are just frustrating really and the sense of criminal competition takes the shine of any "won" item. So maybe, after all these years two things are coming together unexpectedly: (a) that I'm needing less stuff (b) and when I do need stuff I'm less likely to purchase it on line as my default position. 

At the moment the evidence for this is a bit sketchy as if emerging from a sketch. I'm easily led though,  I may lapse and binge at any moment instead of exploring the mean streets and shopping arcades of today's brave new world in all it's shabby and exploited finery, I don't know. The lure of bright shiny things is a hypnotic and insidious brain leveller that can overcome the strongest instinct. I can resist anything except temptation as Oscar Wilde once said, that day in an empty, smoky drawing room  when no one at all was listening.

Those groovy purple pickup covers and control knobs did not buy themselves you know, nor were they gifts from Santa. Twas eBay that found me them via some industrious people in China.

Sunday Post on a Saturday

Sometime back in the day, in the early sixties, my old mum used to bundle up three or four weeks worth of Sunday Post papers (that's about 3 or 4 papers I guess) and wrap them in brown paper and take them to the Post Office where they'd be sent off to Tasmania. My mum had an old friend in Tasmania she said, but they never wrote to each other, never visited nor telephoned. It struck me as a strange relationship and one I couldn't understand and still don't. It was as if my mum had taken on some obligation, possibly after the war when folks were moving all over the place, to provide these papers to somebody who maybe wasn't really much of a friend or all that interesting, anyway she did it faithfully just the same. 

By return we'd get a single Christmas Card type "Tasmanian Photo" calendar every year, hardly fair exchange in my view, one calendar featuring numerous photos of the Hobart Bridge for fifty two used Sunday Posts. Not a good deal. Still the Sunday Post was my first proper paper to read, filled will prim, parochial and superficial stories and opinions, some news, some kirk propaganda, some sport and of course the Broons and Oor Wullie. It was a strange old fashioned beast in those days, it may be still, I've hardly seen one in years. It almost smelt of a care home or an old lady's sitting room.

Anyway the practice of sending the Post ceased one fine day. A cousin of the lady recipient wrote to say she'd passed away a few months ago, no need to send copies anymore, the dead don't read. And that was that. No hording the papers, no brown paper, no calendar at Christmas. I imagined a huge pile of papers sitting there by her cold fireside in Tasmania, who would claim them now? 

A subtle change had taken place, that paper, with all it's tittle tattle and homespun wisdom suddenly seemed less meaningful. It still came into the house but now it was bundled with the other papers, the Daily Express and the Sunday People, they were rough and shouty, hardly appropriate bin fellows. I just read the centre page comics now, I seldom laughed at them but I studied the characters and the way the strip moved along. I liked the black and white inking and the brutal little Scottish world they exposed. Dudley D Watkins became a kind of quiet hero, one you wouldn't ever brag about. But as for the copies of paper itself, no more international travel across the wide world, sending it's news and sports results to Tasmania a month or two late for some ex-Pat to snooze over. No more backwards time travel or over a blue ocean in a mail sack to an upside down island, no secondhand news, it was over. 

The Sunday Post, as right on as ever.

Pointless

The informal commemorative plaque reminding us that a cash machine once operated here adjacent to the Post Office that also no longer resides within these fine stones. All built and put together with good intentions but obsolete now.

Dunfermline and the structural decay of the Scottish town, a brief non-history and shallow critique lacking both depth and vision: 

Scottish town centres are headed the way of the dinosaur, they are quickly becoming irrelevant and will soon become extinct. The slow death rattle of the phone shop, charity shop, pound shop, too many competing cafes and paid parking spaces is deafening and the social decay has  become a sad cancer in these once busy and bustling centres. Reinvention is required, space needs to be reclaimed for public use and the zoning policies and blood sucking of rates and values require some kind of amnesty. 

My honest reaction towards being in a medium sized Scottish town centre is wanting to get the feck out as quickly as possible, being there is not a pleasant experience. Buy a birthday card, get a haircut, get home, even the coffee shops are homogenized lumps of dead air and sanitised brownie you wouldn't really want to sit too long in. Dunfermline, Kirkcaldy, Leven, Alloa, Glenrothes, Cumbernauld once thumping, beating hearts have become dead zones. The blood and energy seeped away a long time ago as we all started to live lives that no longer matched the 1950s town plan or concept. We, the public have been let down by planners and councils who've failed to see the social change, the revised stratification of customers and the on-line retail revolution that now defines how we do things and get our stuff. So the town becomes a haunt for the poor, the disaffected and the oldies. Each group there for their own valid reasons but none being well served by the graffiti walls, crumbling structures and creaking template that holds them. So who, with the right amount of clout, has a plan?