A man needs a maid

I can't quite figure out what a 24 year old Neil Young would have to say that would connect with my 17 year old self but a connection of sorts happened way back then. Naive and inexperienced and all that, a million miles away from the leafy Laurel Canyon wonderland and the Canadian prairie (in every sense), but it meant something at the time. So I caught myself singing "a man needs a maid" in the shower (?) after a pretty sweaty, full on working day. I was two glasses of wine in on an empty stomach. I managed at least two verses before forgetfulness set in.

The daily harsh reality being I made two trips to Broxburn tip today (aka the recycling centre), it's as unglamorous as it gets. Wood louse and creepy crawly infested fence posts, rotting timbers and broken wooden slats were duly disposed of. It felt, in the post thunderous August heat like climbing Ben Nevis in a diving suit. I've turned soft and unfit, I've sweated pints and been bitten by the local berry bugs as if I was the UN supply team in a famine situation, I'm now a blobby jelly man. Then I cut the grass and then I did some concrete shoring and mixing. Now all I want is a shower and lo and behold I begin to sing "a man needs a maid" and feeling conflicted as I douse myself in fake coconut body whatever gel. 

In my head it is not PC, I'm not sure why, I suffer some kind of self inflicted abstract ageist guilt. The things I liked, the phrases I go to, the thoughts I think might just be ... incorrect. Of course nobody is actually listening to my inner narrative and judging it or any of my questionable opinions as I try to keep up with the best possible contemporary guidance and pretend that I care about them and their incomprehensible logic. Like trying to walk the unenviable tightrope of SNP or Labour Party acceptance and correctness, a fucking intellectual trial and a joke in itself. Anyway at some kind of weird, possibly incorrect level, out of step with the current enlightened view ... a man probably needs a maid, I think.

Unprecedented Times

 

Sometimes there's no point in trying to write anything remotely original when there are plenty of other people, clearly cleverer than me, who can put things out there in both words and images better than I can. I do not despair at this obvious fact, I'm quite happy about it. It means I don't feel I need to take any actual responsibility for even trying to make up imaginative stuff or be relevant. Why only the other day I was saying that very thing to Mr Putin and his pure bred American red-neck lackeys, it was during one of our strategy mind control and planning, telepathic conference calls on Zoom. 

Just thinking that somebody needs to set up a newspaper or some online slightly shitty type of newscast and call it "Unprecedented Times". Maybe it already exists in the Harry Potter universe or some such fantasy landscape.

In our gated community

 

Designed to keep out the good people, keep the cats in (but there is a sizable kitty escape gap under the actual gate that's causing some chin stroking), be a timber bulwark against the cruel storms of the world and reduce the south gable end of our house to some kind of apocalyptic grey zone where the sun won't shine and nothing will ever grow again (but there will be hope as we set our faces towards grim reality and rebuild with the tortured muscles of the crude and unsophisticated life forms that we have become, a brave newish kind of alternative world). That was/is the plan and now it has come to be. It has shape, texture and a latch and hinges. I give you a poetic and unrealistic rendering of the new gate.

Here's my train

 

The roar of the engines and the blue fumes of diesel greeted him as he crossed across the platforms in the railway station. The slightly wonky and very analogue information board flipped through various versions of destination information  reality. Like some living Scrabble board it mixed the names of towns and times as it struggled to display the relevant departure information. A giant clockwork beast running down it's inner windings as he imagined elabourate and complex gears and workings spinning furiously behind the digits and letters. The journey looked straightforward. Change at London Euston and then onto Victoria, presumably by foot with local directional advice given freely all along the way. In the background the station Tannoy system seemed to perpetually argue with itself, there was no filter on the broad Liverpudlian advice that buzzed from the aging speakers, conveniently nothing actually said could be made out or understood.

Platform 2 was for London. Liverpool had been a brief stepping stone, London was likely to be more of a spiraling path, he wasn't sure. Portsmouth was something that might happen and that too was more of a stepping stone. London would require some money making, some kind of hustle and a bed for as many nights as possible. He had options, a bit like a hand in a one sided pontoon game, some might come up with the right numbers, but as for the others, who knows? These thoughts made him nervous. He truly had no idea where he was going. The journey represented an answer and a hurdle.

There was about a twenty minute wait before the next train so he found a bench. On a barrow nearby there were baskets of racing pigeons quietly cooing in anticipation of the freedom of the race. A space in the platform roof was allowing pieces of sky to send sunny beams down onto their wicker baskets. Their eyes like tiny lights searching out for hints of blue, directional information and clues as to the whereabouts of their only true master, the sun. The great orb that guided and encouraged them on journey after journey, race after race. Concepts they couldn't understand as they were simply deluded birds, masked and blunted by their calling to fly as freely and quickly as possible, guided by the sun and mysterious elements back to some cosy loft in Southport or Birkenhead where a warm perch and a prize of regular corn supplies awaited them.

He looked through the wicker work windows into the pigeon's temporarily cramped world and in turn they reacted with quiet indignation as if he was some kind of peeping Tom. They avoided his gaze at all costs with animal determination, it's not as if he was their manager about to administer a team talk of tactics before the game. No, all the whispering had been done a while ago, they were on their own on the leading edge of their competitive journey and so was he. There is such a thing as unexpected mental strength in all breeds and creatures. Flight as opposed to fight. "Oh, here's my train." A great green Deltic with a stripy yellow face was shunting a row of claret passenger coaches into the hungry platform siding.

Rogues in a parcel

 

I'm almost sorry for poor old Lord Banff. He must've just said, "Yeah, whatever."

Cafe Girl

 

What is her name, that cafe girl? All speckled colours and avoidance, woolly scarf, student face, reading a grey green book in a grey grey cafe by a grimy station in a washed out city. She's still reading, still not looking up from the book, still sucking the glowing life from a cigarette. A cheap little coffin nail of a cigarette from a cheap little carton. The kind too mean to include coupons or vouchers. There is no upside to this smoking, it's just some vaguely nihilistic activity that feeds nothing as you breathe it in and mix it with those rippling, cranky words you're pulling from the page. 

 

He wonders how long he can sit here. He looks at the other customers. They all form some jagged edged composition framed by his view of the slippery world. His Irish perspective distorts the scene with a cruel familiarity. A Liverpool made of both simple and complex atoms spinning and blundering that will slowly cough up a Lennon or a McCartney or a Cilla type or some football player hero a time or two in every generation. The crowd cheers and chants. Those relentless Mersey Beat jingles, now tired and overtaken, more like rain in a bucket than Ringo grooving on a snare and tom tom. The golden days are gone, evapourated when the genius left the bottle and the bottle fell from the wall.

...................................................................................................................................... 

 We're over on left wing now, proper and it's a manky ill-fitting day and the Beatles are some shattered thing that lives on in teenage memories, pop art, charts and frenzied tabloid excitement. A situation only destined to get worse as you get older as it's relentless tailspin mirrors that of your own life. And now, waiting on the train he can't pull his stupid eyes away from the sad girl pretending to be deep reading bloody Kafka. Everything is so obviously temporary, feelings and ideas float in and out, like tide water in a frustrating cycle. He gets up and heads over to the station as the cafe girl slowly disappears in a silent puff of her own frail white cigarette smoke. A half crown coin, she'd balanced on it's edge on the Formica table top flips onto it's face with a clatter that goes unheard.

 

 

 

Unspectacular Success

Guessing that nobody wants to hear about how Blogger's new and "improved editor" is as clunky as an overweight pig in a MacDonald's dustbin so I'll not mention it here. I am clearly of an age and attitude where any improvement generally looks like some sort of corporate cost cutting step backwards. This seems to apply to just about everything. It may be that on one balmy night as I slept the deep and untroubled sleep of the just and righteous, the meaning of the word "improvement" was changed by order of a Papal Bull, the Illuminati and the Kremlin and the dire consequences are only now lapping up from my flooded basement wetting my cold toes. Subsequently I also missed all the related woke-based activity and outrage on Twitter and so this significant linguistic change simply passed me by. Not for the first (or last) time either I'd imagine. Life is a series of awkward, unstoppable events. Why am I just realizing this?

Lost

Liverpool is a bigger city than Dublin, that's because it's filled with people who came from Dublin or thereabouts. This was because of the Industrial Revolution and the cruel colonial human trafficking system that was called  the British Empire. The Scots and the Irish have always recognized this but apart from a few all are historically brainwashed into thinking that this was all some kind of "good thing". This is a thinking that still prevails today as we play out our political games in an infuriating stop/go system of government that is stricken with fear of exposure as it is guided by the voices of the ruling dinosaur families and plutocrats.

Near the railway station was a greasy spoon. He went in, ordered a coffee, toast and scrambled eggs. He paid with British coins he'd collected from relatives. He had a few Pound notes and a Punt note, that was it. As he finished the meal and supped the milky coffee dregs he looked up. A girl was sitting at the table opposite, her head in a Kafka book and a cigarette dangling between two fingers. He willed her to to look up and across over the pages but she refused, or at least she showed no intention of engaging with some young Irish tramp in a railway station. 

For him this was a familiar situation. Sat in a public space, hoping for some casual conversation, ordinary talk or at least some pleasant chatter, nothing too deep. First catch the eye, then a smile, then a few easy words. It seldom happened. "People," he though, "are all too far up their own arses these days." These days were of course the golden times of analogue before we'd all be swept away in the chaos and confusion created by digital. A time when souls would become truly lost but communication would become so much easier and also so much more dangerous and difficult. 

Liverpoo

The artist as a younger, dumber man.

 And so it came to be, one sweet spring morning in 1973, a young man bearing a slight resemblance to Charles Manson stepped onto a ferry from the fictional port of Dublin and made his way, by degrees and diversions to the motherland and the English city of Portsmouth. But not quite. He'd no clear idea what he was about or that one day his FaceApp distorted image might appear on an unsupported and unloved blog, but it did. The future was somewhere else and actually best avoided. He fancied himself as a poet for no good reason, having neither read nor understood any it and then only ever gazed over glossy magazines of a certain kind, but he knew that an education and experience in life were closely linked, so poetry it was to be (unless music might grip him) and the life of a rover. An unusual choice for a man with little respect for God's word or the word of man or a decent sense of direction. He had written some material recently however:

"There was a young lady from Dublin, whose ailment was really quite troublin' ". 

He was stuck at this point but remained confident that the train ticket to Portsmouth was the start of a journey that would surely fill in all of those elusive and missing words from start to bloody finish. Those that began at the start of the book and wound their lonely way across page after page until, tired, sweaty and hungry they reached the end. After the end there would be a few more blank pages, as was the custom. Forwards, afterwards, thanks and perhaps an index if the subject matter warranted such a device.

Alighting from the boat in Liverpool he thought of two things, the first being his lack of money and the second begin a clear idea of how to proceed (other than using the newly purchased ticket to Portsmouth Harbour Station). He did know that it was possible to get another ferry from Portsmouth to France. That was an interesting prospect, la belle France. Art with a capital Art. A short hop across the Channel and perhaps an opportunity for agricultural work, farm girls and cheap wine and a garret. It was a slow burning fantasy he occasionally enjoyed in the dead of night.

"Hey, Charlie fuckin' Manson, fuck off back to California or I'll call the rozzers!" The local Scouser salute went down well. He'd heard it before. Most often when he stood up to address the cult meetings in his official role as treasurer and finance manager. All that and the trouble there had been since was in the past. That and the screaming of his ex-girlfriend as she trapped his duffle coat sleeve in the front door of the house the New Year's Eve she chucked him when he was too pissed to bother. Trapped by the coat sleeve in a locked front door, too drunk to explain, too confused to free himself, like a Canadian bear locked in a lumberjack's toilet. A situation destined to end badly for all concerned. But it never did end, it just revolved around in his head like a long playing record on a broken deck at 33rpm. It was as if these things had happened to other people and he'd just read them somewhere, but then again he wasn't much of a reader either.

Cemented Steps

A day of cement fixation has passed, thankfully. I'm taking steps to design steps to build steps to future proof the various awkward levels that exist in and around our garden. It seems that older folks can become confused and disorientated if the world they view fails to meet their own slightly distorted expectations and sensory perception. They might just crash to the ground as if struck down by Jehovah and break a bone or two or get a nasty bruise the size of a Steam Punk tattoo. This can lead to loneliness, isolation, time in A+E and a morbid fear of the people who shop at the Co-op. So I'm working on a long term solution for our garden grounds in order to stay safe.

The design part requires kick starting with a few vacuous thoughts that generally lead nowhere, sad to say this involves imaginary bricks orbiting around my head as the Blue Danube plays in the background, this is a bit disappointing and not helpful. The building part, which takes place in the real world, involves a lot of trial and lot of error and some cement mixing and the heavy lifting of blocks and slabs. Also getting things level is suddenly important. All potentially quite disappointing and frustrating for the inexperienced builder if there are failures. Then more of the same as I correct the various unplanned mistakes a few times over while the unruly cement quietly sets impatiently in the background, deliberately thwarting my progress. 

Phew! Done now for the day and at no time did I use or even consider the Golden Ratio and how I might apply it to the construction project, perhaps that's where I'm going wrong. 😕

Arthur's Seating Arrangements

Arthurs Seat on Acid - not for the first time.

For the ongoing avoidance of any doubt the seating arrangements are pretty simple, as it stands (or sits), two in the front and two in the rear. Please behave responsibly as you take up your allotted space. The conditions may be slippery so take care. The bike below is not an hill however and is a simple two seater.

All well and good you may say but the bike isn't a motor bike, it's an electric bicycle that looks like a motorbike but then again it is a motor bike but you pedal it and cycle it but at some point a motor kicks in and it has a rear pannier and somebody else who is not the actual rider can travel on the pillion. The trick is to maintain a healthy level of charge inside and out.

And another thing: These days I'm mostly fed up with people either saying stupid things or getting away with doing stupid things and not getting picked up for them or corrected. I'm particularly fed up with the SNP who despite doing reasonably well in dealing with Covid appear determined to a) do stupid things and b) allow people (mostly SNP people and woke luvvie types) to get away with doing stupid things. All in an irritating kind of self destructive Labour Partyish way. So I'm slowly walking away from all this and whistling some lift music tune quietly to myself.

Gathering of the Red Ant Army

Technically not really a gathering, more of a march to the shops and back again, numerous times a day. This keeps the Red Ant war machine in good order I presume. There's no commentary here, no music, no actual observations, just some random background noise generated by other ant observers and passers by. They were all passing by and a few were, as you'd imagine also passing through. Sometimes sad, sometimes blue, glad that I bumped into you etc.

I'd write more if I could but this "new version" of Blogger is as clunky as the old version and whilst the format is possibly better in some smart techy way I'm struggling to see any significant improvement. Then again why should I expect improvement or even consistency from something that I think I get for free (I assume we are not counting the blatant sharing of data and information that trundles on somewhere in the background as Google toys with my poor choices, thoughtless clicking and the occasional shopping indulgence made via Amazon). Free but not really. I blame Putin and Trump.

Boys - Black Stuff

It's all over the local Bookface pages like a sticky rash, there are yellow signs popping up in the street and a pamphlet has arrived through our letterbox. We are being warned. Cheap, cheerful and invariably messy road upgrading technology will be imposed upon our worn out street. Using state of the art technology invented about two hundred years ago and inspired by the Romans and the Flintstones, hot tar and cold chips will once again coat our road surface. The big day is Thursday, weather and Edinburgh City Council's Budget permitting. 

I'm less than excited about this so called "improvement". A summer time tar parade of black goo and scary thoughts of loose chips ricocheting like bullets across car windscreens and the sweaty temples of bald headed old men isn't wonderful. The blocked drains, the tar coated shoes, the petrol heads screwing up the virgin surface with Fiesta powered burn-outs, the glued up bicycles. Ugh. A bleak and terrifying weekend lies ahead with WD40 and elbow grease at the ready to clean up all comers, all goers, all animals and various parts of once pristine car bodies. It's murder if it gets into your teeth or the water supply they tell me.

Cat reacts to news of imminent local road repairs.

Bog Roll Blues

The less than perfect consequences of Scottish street artists trying to succeed with 3D effects. A well deserved "A" for effort however, "C+" for humour and wit. Today's rain will have obliterated it by now so I'm glad I captured it yesterday.

This song isn't really blues, or bog roll blues (as done by the Groundhogs many years ago on Who Will Save The World), so it's not blues but it's not happy either. No clear idea as why ice cream and fresh fruit feature here at all. 😏

Song about a cat

Monday: Here's a song about a cat. The cat was called Syrus but that may not have been his real name. He was a bit of a wild one and he was a great fluffy ginger Tom. We took him in from a cat rescue centre. He stayed for a while, entertained us and pretty much kept himself going in rabbits. Then one day he just didn't come home. We never saw him again.

Two Easy Pieces

Today's activity and two found objects: Probably gardening, searching for hidden treasure, practice pronunciation, wash strawberries, check the weather, more gardening, more trailing cables, move brown bins around, plant things, stop and think and reflect.

Tuna the day:

Edinburgh Daily Photo

 

Things around here are not anywhere close to normal for July 31st, (my first time visiting the city in months) not a lot of people. These are views from the threshold of the Harry Potter shop, I didn't venture in this time either. Previously we'd hiked up Arthur's Seat, scoffed an iced latte, eaten a hasty picnic and paddled in the pools of the Scottish Parliament, not sure that was a part of the original design's functional concept. Busy day and 28C for much of it .... then along came the rain.

Her Majesty

Dear Impossibles,

Just a note to say that in these long July evenings I like nothing better than kicking back and listening to a few of your tunes along with a good measure of brandy and ginger and a 99p box of Maltesers.  At the moment this song is one of my favourites. It did make me wonder if you knew that Analog Mann is in fact the German spelling for Analogue Man? A mistake perhaps? I don't suppose you did know that as you're both uneducated commoners and of course nobody really cares about the finer points of language these days. 

Anyway, best regards.

Elizabeth.

P.S. No M.B.Es for either of you this year and you can't have Cambridge either as I gave it to one of my grandsons.

Silence

This track was recorded in Germany in October 2002 on a sunny Sunday morning, pretty much live with only a second guitar overdub added later. It was recorded onto Sony mini-disk, not the usual CuBase we'd used on the other tracks. This was mainly because we had some extra time left to record and the actual computer system had crashed completely so the Sony system was used. I still like the live, punchy sound and the simple drum track. The cover art shown here wasn't really used other than for a handful of copies and the actual CD was never put out for sale.

Easy

Just for a change and to remain topical but not controversial, this blog may actually share and promote small segments of our music, past, present and furtive. (Imagine if you will an awful, irritating, sycophantic, mid 70s, Radio 1, put on, mid-Atlantic DJ type drawl), "This one's EASY!"