Whisky Toad

 

There maybe two bees in this photo or one bee and a smudge, not sure. I've discovered that trying to count the amount of bees in a garden at any one time is difficult. They simply refuse to stay still long enough to allow you to focus in on them. There's probably a scientific method that allows an accurate figure to be arrived at using a complex statistical formula, a grid, two finely sliced lemons, a pot of jam and a special camera borrowed from NASA.

Speaking of insects: Why, when said in a certain way,  does the word "mosquito" also sound a lot like "whisky toad"?

IKEA Robots

 

Walking round our local IKEA the other day I decided to imagine that all the staff (all safely masked and uniformed) were in fact robots, a bit like in the TV show Humans. It made my store visit slightly trippy and if I'm honest uncomfortable. Even if imagined there are some things you cannot easily unsee so we avoided making unnecessary contact.

In the end we booked out at the actual robot till and it was, as it turned out, perfectly safe. Then over to the food emporium for a coffee and a cinnamon swirl and my first actual encounter with a proper imaginary robot. All was fine, I was handed our swirls in a nice bag and then two empty cups with which to tackle the now familiar coffee robot device. 

"All watched over by machines of loving grace" as the prophet and heretic Jeremiah so accurately predicted in 1968 via the Incredible Spiderman #39.

South Queensferry Daily Photo No.13

 

We come and go, we are all alone except we are not. As above: a rocky promontory where tourists and day trippers sit and noisily scoff fish and chips while enjoying the view. The smells hang in the air in the still of the slow summer evening but I've had my tea. Locals generally avoid this area for their own personal reasons, all of which remain a set of closely guarded secrets that outsiders can never know or understand. That also includes me.

Meanwhile an old Saab (there are only old Saabs now, a fact that annoys me) is still stuck at the top of  a short set of steps that it can never hope to negotiate. It sits and stares forlornly down the close, towards the High Street and all it's bright, shining, imagined pleasures and distractions. There is also fresh festival bunting as now it is THAT time of year.

If you are sensing any sense of despair in these words then your sense of your sense of despair could be described as reasonably accurate but still sadly misplaced.

Liked but not fully understood

Bob does tend to look a little menacing these days, even at 80 years. It lends a certain weight to his words.  Actually I do understand everything referred to, everything said, every word, light and shade, tone and aspects of nuance ... and I understand it all better than you because of my own lived experiences and big dramatic ears, there.

At the Barbers

Overheard/addressed at the barber shop:

As a young man Donald Trump was an early supporter of action against global warming but later changed his tune.

Only pepper a steak after it is cooked. Pepper burns and should be the last thing you add during frying steak. Steak and chicken need to "rest" after cooking.

The army always include curry powder in their ration packs to pep up leftovers and other bland foods.

Joe Biden is being played by an actor as the real Joe Biden has Dementia.

Hair clipper manufacturers only provide cheap electric cables with their items so they can resell overpriced spares when the originals get tangled and broken. Also covering a clipper with Elastoplast provides a better grip in the warm weather. Why are rubber sleeves for trimmers and  clippers not available?

It's easy to confuse TV show Dragon's Den with the Apprentice. (?)

Why are Fridays no longer busy but Thursdays (and the mid week in general) now are?

There is no such thing as a firm price for a haircut.

You cant estimate anyone's age these days.

I wouldn't watch Celtic.

Older bikers are always offended by offers to trim their eyebrows.

Viagra is available on prescription - making it free in Scotland.

Lidl stock the best value wines, bleach and male grooming products. All their stores are "massive". ("I've got their Quick Noodles for my lunch. I know it looks like pizza but it's noodles").

One of Scotland's top surgeons, an Asian chap, was in here the other day and he told me ...

You should not attempt to cut hair and solder electrical items at the same time.

Ready Made Ambivalence

When, in a peculiar serendipitous way you come across a photo that you somehow assign some kind of a more profound meaning to but then you struggle to come up with whatever that might be in a meaningful form of words. In other words (they just keep coming) I'm stuck at the moment with nothing more to say about the image. I suppose it's like writing a song or melody and never quite getting a lyric that fits. 

In this instance I didn't even create the photo. I just happened upon it so I can't even take a small % of any credit. There's some sort of repetitive creative bankruptcy here but the more I think about it the more I understand that this is all quite normal for me. Perhaps it's just a good photo and so there's no need to try to get deeper into it.

Did I mention that this photo, at some weird level, really entices me to have a cool glass of fat but guilt free Coca-Cola?

Life's a long and complex song

Dean Martin's crooning version is possibly the best, "Sweet, sweet, the memories you gave me," declare the luxuriant backing singers, like some hypnotic message designed to lull you to sleep and into those sweet if slightly fabricated dreams.

As the human aging process progresses what were once crystal clear memories morph into odd randomized items, curios and junk tossed into an overloaded and difficult to access psychedelic skip. There's no clear filing or location method, items stay where they fell, mixed up and buried. However that does make the process of recall a lot more interesting and generally means that looking back on life, the possibly fictionalized memories become increasingly more real than the real ones ever did.  A bit like how the western world writes it's history I suppose. We're all at it. Unreliable memoirs are written and over written continually. 

After a while nobody can contradict you about your own version of your life ... the strange beauty and benefits of now dead witnesses paying off. Facts don't matter, just a dynamic narrative. So you self edit according to the outcomes you'd prefer to believe as you go along. After a while they slowly become real and superimpose themselves over the other (realistic but tedious or disappointing) versions. Eternal life is therefore faintly living on in the minds of others as your own bungled work of fiction, coloured by the wreckage of the indifferent recollections of  your peers.

One Plum

After extensive tree husbandry, not to mention patchy care and sporadic attention, we're going to be rewarded this year with a single plum. The fruit of some sweaty labours, assuming that this little green fellow survives the next few weeks of wind, rain, loud traffic noises and random wasp attacks.

I woke up with Cinnamon Girl rattling around in my head, full of unresolved chords resolving and my mispronounced lyrics spilling across my imagination. It had been an uneventful night, the promised thunderstorms described so eloquently by the motorway warning signs in amber capitals did not appear over our town. 

The extreme weather stayed away and presumably all landed on Clarkson's Farm in the Cotswolds to thwart his harvesting plans. I felt slightly cheated. I wanted the rain's sweet drum beats on the window to stir me at 3am as distant thunder rolled across the River Forth like an attacking alien force.

So today it's mild rain, broody skies, sticky temperatures and no biblical style storm. I hope the solitary plum survived the horrid ordeal. Thursday's looking a bit rough according to the Met Office, it may take a battering then, I'll see what the AI on the motorway thinks.

A Prayer

"The great gods of  TV sport remain strangely ambivalent towards the BBC's hysterical but restrained coverage of whatever sporting event is currently taking place."

Dear Lord Jesus, Buddha, The Great Pumpkin, Mohammed, Eric Clapton, Krishna, Mickey Mouse, Ra and Karl Marx.

         Are your children turning out the way you planned? 

Anyway thanks for listening but my expectations are low, as gods you're all pretty useless by the way. I won't be worshiping any time soon. Amen.

House Burning Down Underwater

In the future, global warming, higher sea levels. An everyday occurrence.

Sex Window

Sex Windows: There is such a thing but it's not what you think and best not to Google it. See also Time Buckets, life balance, Parkinson's Law, holistic approach, curse of perfectionism etc.

I sometimes think as you get older you become more comfortable with being average or ordinary. You realize that over time, looking back everything just kind of smooths itself out into a rather flat landscape, not dull or devoid of features but nonetheless quietly familiar and, because all those things are now in the past, quite acceptable. The stories that you might tell yourself about your life are less biased, less spikey or hot. Somewhere along the way a river rose up and cooled the landscape, rounded the hard edges and covered the assorted junk up with sediment. A fish just swam past my elbow. Here's to inner peace.

Meanwhile the interior of our fridge acts as a timely reminder as to the legacy and habits of Howard Hughes. This image is in fact pretty much the opposite of that whole thing.

Glitch

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Bottom of the Garden

If you walk for long enough and far enough you eventually get to the bottom of the garden. Funnily enough I've never heard of anybody walking to the top of the garden. Anyway, when you get to the bottom of the garden, sit down and turn around (not necessarily in that order), the world looks a bit like this, and this.

Play the Mamunia side

 

I wonder if anyone ever called the Wings album Band on the Run, Bland on the Run? Maybe some irate reviewer who didn't bow down and worship Paul McCartney and was subsequently fired by his newspaper tried that along with a two star score. 

It's an album I've not listened to for over 40 years - would it pass/stand the test of time, tide and musical fashion changes? Before radio friendly rock was a thing BotR was a family favourite you could confidently play in any reasonable company. A box of chocolates album where you'd like at least two or three songs and know them pretty well. Granny might tap her feet and the BBC's best establishment figures were featured on the front cover. Cosy and unpretentious stuff, a relic from different times. Standfast Peter Cook (who wasn't even there but I thought was).

Well, though it didn't grow directly out of the Abbey Road album it certainly inhabits the Abbey Road universe. It's on that continuum where the Beatles trajectory, splintered by the split, saw McCartney still plugging away and writing on but without Lennon's raspy face reflected in the mirror. So it's all better humoured, less acidic to the taste, duller at the edges but ... it's OK. It's a good pop/rock record.

There are many tales about how it was recorded in Lagos, the problems and the personalities, that's all history now. The album still stands up, I still like it, it's vanilla but there's nothing wrong with that. There never was going to be a revolution then, it's unlikely now despite where we currently squat so, if you're listening on vinyl, start with the Mamunia side, that was the norm back in 74. I've no idea why either.

Scotland: Daily Photo

In Scotland, when it's warm we like to go outside and look around, observe activity and that sort of thing. So ... flowers in a hanging basket flanked by bricks and a wrought iron stairway.

Trees behaving badly, bending and growing old on the banks of the Lake of Menteith. The only lake (not a loch) in Scotland.

Hot loaves of bread cooling in a back alley behind an artisan bakery. I dislike the term "artisan" being thrown around like some wartime medal to describe food and drink but it does seem to fit on this occasion and at this location. I was tempted to steal a loaf like some cartoon apple pie from a window sill, I resisted and simply bought one. Everyone gets urges now and then but best to do the right thing if you can.

Looking West

Queen's View in July. A sunny day. Old people, confused tourists, people complaining about the parking, midges and the heat. 10:00 AM. Loch Tummel and beyond. Nice lookout though. The mythical road to the isles or thereabouts. As seen last week.

World's Hottest Cup of Coffee

It's here, I found it, at Ballinluig Services in Scotland, the world's hottest take-out latte, undrinkable for a full fifteen minutes as it slowly and reluctantly cools, even with the lid off. For scientific purposes the ambient air temperature at the time was 23C. Not sure if that is relevant. Takeaway price £3 (a little unreasonable in my opinion) but the high serving temperature means that it lasts a long time, in this case to the next stop another 12 miles along the road. Taste test: 7/10.

P.S. Manipulated idiots are calling today "Freedom Day" in various places, well they can just fuck off with that dangerous rhetoric as far as I'm concerned. 

Insert Volcano Here

Hringar úr Keltar og kóngar línunni okkar fóru með ánægðum viðskiptavini upp að eldgosinu! Fríða skartgripahönnuður.

Our friends in Iceland: They have volcanoes there, emerging, active, dangerous, keeping people curious and on the edge of uncertainty. 

Uncertainty isn't very popular in Scotland, we like to think we have a grasp of events and that we're choosing the correct course of action. We are taught from an early age that the world can be understood and explained, but that depends on who's version of the world's ways you've chosen to believe. You may have been denied a choice. Anyway ...

We have the dead stumps in Scotland, a volcano graveyard, moon-like craters, cold and hard, rounded and smoothed by the ice that passed this way. Worn down. Like the grey, bald heads at a football match, a crowd full of groaning old men at a car show or a bowling tournament, murmuring and narrowing their eyes. Standing in a queue, shuffling along, accepting being fed shit, thinking things aren't so bad, they'll do ... but with no vision as to how they could be better. 

Once hot-headed and alive, once volcanic. Now blankly looking on and sucking in the thin, stale air. Air that we'll all need to pay for in a few years. Meanwhile vacant children play on the grey green volcanic slopes, sheep graze lazily and trees try their level best on an incline as the rains roll down and into their roots, the water disappearing for a time. Dripping unseen and unheard in the dark. There, underneath, the cold stone has forgotten it's origins and doesn't even understand why those lost memories just might matter. 

How can we ever know where we're going to if we've been denied the story of where we came from?

Stray Happy

From time to time I've considered trying to build a career as a ventriloquist, performing comedy and the like. I've never actually learned the art of ventriloquism but I'm currently drawing up designs (as above) for a robotic puppet that based on a paper towel dispenser that I could use - perhaps. 

In my life I've visited many petrol stations and bought petrol, something you buy and use but never really see, like electricity or natural gas or what's actually inside a take away coffee cup when the lid is on tight.

Staying happy in a crazy world. One cat poos on the laundry basket, later the same day the other one poos on the bathroom floor. There's a litter tray nearby. These are well behaved cats of a certain age that have no "issues" that I'm aware of, so what are they saying (if anything)?

Repetitious cookery: I make the same things over and over again, perhaps there are slight variations but basically it's the same stuff rehashed. I've recently discovered anchovies and have taken to having them on toast ... for lunch. I've no idea what this might mean for my next narrow culinary experiments. 

So as we approach what may well be the end of the world I wouldn't blame you if you just turned your phone off.

Garage Conversion

Nothing really, a photo converted to a burning inferno, where graffiti used to be, bots working for the common good of humanity. Breathe in and breathe out.