Free Disneyland

Free for some, others must pay the full price, it's an ill divided, wonderful world out there.

Meanwhile the airports reopen: the blame, recriminations and law suits will follow shortly.

Not cool

It's not cool to worry. Cool people do not worry, they are impervious and resistant to and above the slough of worry. They float above the clouds of worry or sometimes just for the hell of it they dive down into those same dirty clouds and inhale and on the other side emerge with no worry. No worry, injury or consequences; for the ordinary and mortal there are consequences, for the cool there is only continuous progress and the shining light of being right.

Worry is unbelief, lack of trust, confidence and conviction and in general terms thinking and believing in the worst. Of course the worst hardly ever happens, it's an illusion, a beast, like the Devil or the Bogeyman or visiting some sterile industrial wilderness. The conclusion? We can be cool, we can not worry by choice, we can breathe in the cloud in great hearty lungfuls. Then one fine day we might all fly again - by Zeppelin of course.

Some time in America

Inconvenient to say the least...life is just one thing after another.

Set the controls for the heart of the sun

Nice weather recently, shows up all the muck on the windscreen thought.

Things may come and things may go but after nearly 45 years of the "revolution" you still get hippie English teachers at secondary schools. Is there some special college that turns them out or are they just drifting in some time-warp and appearing in our class rooms and at parents evenings as they pass across the universe, burning very brightly with their wispy beards and tweed jackets? (and that's just the ladies). I don't know but I did have a long conversation about them with my hairdresser today as my own once luxuriant ex- hippie locks were shaved back to reveal various bald bits and more silver hairs than my hero John Delorean ever had. So as it was a sunny, aircraft free and unscripted afternoon and I'd just suffered a crap morning at work the haircut formed part of a five pronged treat festival for me, treat details as follows:

1. Haircut and banal conversation - £7.00.
2. Late lunch from a Greggs sandwich emporium - £2.95.
3. Alloa beer and Magners purchases at Tesco - £18.50.
4. Miscellaneous trouser purchases from Debs - £40.00.
5. Coming home and cooking with huge garlic chunks because tomorrow is Saturday - £8.50.

For everything else there is of course Mastercard, please add your name, MC number and 3 digit security code into the comments box below, many thanks.

Tiny particles

Tiny particles from the core of the earth
Now in orbit or at 30000 feet.
Confound terrorists, activists and strikers alike
Who's efforts couldn't stop the airline fleet.

(Clever tiny particles)

(but I hope you blow away soon)

Warr Guitar Baby

More conclusive proof that I live in a musical, cultural and social vacuum - the late, great personal discovery of the Warr Guitar, about 20 years after it's invention (thanks to Norman for the tip). If I ever learn to play the normal (Peace?) guitar I might consider taking up the Warr, maybe one fine day. I also hear that somebody's invented a mobile phone, another launched instant noodles and that threepenny bits are no longer legal tender. Wow.

The other shower...

...because the current one is clearly falling apart and sadly the Conservatives despite their manifesto promises are as clueless, inept and irritating as their Labour counterparts.

Most of today has been spent repainting, regrouting, resealing, repairing and recovering from the bathroom upgrade (or deep clean as it has come to be known). The soundtrack to this highly hazardous activity was from the good old boys at Planet Rock, it was like being sixteen again: Yes, ELP, Zep one after another - it was like working in a care home.

Then out through the garden to clean up the nearby woods, carry lumps of timber across country, gingerly remove litter, tat and various discarded rusty things and then have a bonfire and a much needed beer - for relaxation purposes only. The wheelbarrow also has a flat tyre, how do you fix that? After that I headed back to the front to regrade the two tons of Flintstones quarry chips into my own sweaty version of the fast lane of the M6, smooth but with a few authentic potholes. Bored with road building I moved onto taming the Clematis, Clitoris or Cotton Candy Weed or whatever it's called that climbs across our house like an unwanted cat-burglar. It was like wrestling a drunken Glaswegian snake and I resorted to extreme measures to tame the beast, snip snip meaning painful surgery. By now I'd built a magnificent trellis type of construction so the well coiffured plant could be attached to it's new frame with some chunky tie wrap and surprisingly few major injuries for me. I'm of now to inhale some aerosol bath sealer, purely for medicinal purposes.

Below pinched from Rosie Bell's blog, from a series "After the Fairytale".

Not my manifesto

Hard to believe that this pathetic image is the cover of the Labour Party Manifesto 2010, the contents are worse, don't go there. So young families everywhere appear to be heading into or being led into either a nuclear explosion or the Golden Dawn (the darker significance of the Golden Dawn may have been lost on Gordon B) , how daft and uninspiring. This is from the party of "reform" who sadly haven't managed to reform anything despite numerous chances since about 1946. It should've been completely different, I was once a proud Young Socialist - but that dream has died and I'm an old cynic.

Start your life now

...but not by doing this sort of thing. One life affirming, positive step is to avoid the current crop of TV advertisements. Another good move is avoid the chronic, patronising glossy ads in the Sunday sups (but you cant), anyhow the top X crap ads at the moment in my humble opinion are:

1. The Volvic challenge. A dippy looking guy who looks like a reject from a bad BBC sitcom suggests in fairly forceful terms that you take the "14 day Volvic Challenge". All you need to do is drink 1.5 litres of this volcanic water every day for 14 days and you'll feel better. No, I'd rather stick pins in my eyes thank you or just drink the odd bottle of Theakstons.

2. Bing.com. MS search engines tries to engage with normal folks (?) by creating an unlikely and irritating beardy couple who search on line at supersonic speed every time the other utters a word. Bollocks.

3. Go Compare. Nauseating and unfunny, fat opera singer with a false moustache. Nobody could like this drivel. Almost as bad as the bald shouty guy doing the Moneysupermarket ad.

4. 5 Gum by Wrigley. Apparently you slip a piece into your mouth and the effect is like going into a funky roller coaster that runs through some kind of industrial fridge plant at 100mph. No it's chewing gum, you put it in your mouth, it freshens your breath a bit then it turns to Plasticine and you have to gob it out or dump it into a tissue and it makes a horrible mess. It does not equal any kind of roller coaster ride anywhere.

5. Internet Explorer and "I'm a PC". Worst of all is the guy who's proud of hiding his browsing history from his wife - so he can buy her presents he claims, yeah right. He's either on porn sites or he's a paedophile, just look at his scary, smug and insane grin. Yuck! Get Firefox.

Glad I go that lot out of my system - I'm also avoiding cooking and home improvement shows and my blood pressure is normal, I may be almost fit. Having said that I shovelled two tons of chippings today and survived without any Volvic but there are a few odd pains emerging now as night falls.

Arrest the Pope

I'm too busy to wonder why I cannot put the salt and pepper away in different parts of the cupboard, they must stay together at all costs and the sauces must be in a line and the pickles together. Sometimes however the pickles get mixed withe the jam and peanut butter. For some reason that doesn't bother me so much. Meanwhile in the fridge the cheese has a new neighbour - salad, worse than that wretched forgotten salad. (The salad is now in the compost heap.)

In a busy, sunny weekend of whole hearted house painting and half hearted gardening (on my part) I estimate that I must have washed my hands about 75 times and I'm not in the least OC.

Moving into more serious matters Mr Dawkins now wants to arrest the Pope. Can't wait for the Sun's headline if that ever happens. If he succeeds there could be a long line of others - the usual suspects, start your list now.

Cheesy pasta again

I was dreaming of cheesy pasta in that dumb, unthinking way you dream of things you badly want to like. Not sure why I really want to like cheesy pasta at all but the spark of misguided suggestion is in there somewhere. Eventually the feast was prepared with the addition of some hot dog related items, ones that were on the cusp of freshness and possible botulism. It ate it because I was hungry but I knew I wanted to feel different about the pasta but that I didn’t, it was pasta and not very good pasta. It’s always the worst kind of disappointment to experience, wanting badly to like something because you like it in some under served, abstract and unenlightened way and then facing up to the plunging kick in the balls that reality invariably delivers. There are some leftovers for later, maybe about half past six or never.

I cant be easy for old people to really regard themselves as Avant-garde. You Dada folks and Situationalists, how are you doing? Are you better or worse than old punks?

Always an odd experience getting text messages from Credit Card companies.

Politicians and economics. This is not a good mix. Nobody in any party seems to have a handle either on the numbers or the answers to the country's numerous financial problems. Perhaps some professionals from a proven part of the finance industry should have a go - Macdonald’s franchise owners, car boot entrepreneurs and the management team from the Cooperative Bank.

35 bits a week

Once again a popular theory has been debunked and defrocked, confusing and disillusioning the chattering classes. All that awful fruit stuff I've been eating for the last 8 years, 5 a day, 35 a week, 1820 a year: a grand total of 14560 crispy, stringy, juicy, sticky, yucky bits of coloured fibre. I so wanted to live long, prosper and avoid cancer and this was the keystone of my strategy. I feel badly let down by the governing powers and I am considering voting Conservative and going on a Port, sweet cured bacon and Stilton diet, at least till 6th May.

It's about time there was a news blackout or a total ban on the publishing of government funded research resulting in "helpful theories", "pointless and stupid ideas" and "patronising advice given from the assumed heights of good sense but with no brains", one fine day we'll all just die from having too much of what was good for us.

As time goes whizzing by...

...and green buses wait for the arrival of their missing cargo the clouds gather as clouds do. Elections, Popes and pop songs come and go and who can tell what difference the really make to the man, woman or animal in the street? Anyway I'll do my duty as a good, upright citizen and vote but not for the Pope or any pop songs. Four weeks of impotent media hell and fiery hailstones are about to break over us all, so wispy, blue and undiscovered islands of remote lonely pleasure with no TV or newspapers beckon. Could this private bus take me part way there?

Seafield daily photos

Speeding through Seafield on the way to the horse racing event at Musselborough yesterday, everything nicely distorted by the car wobbles and my hand wobbles. A wonky pub and bins appear out of the corner of my eye.

Sheds, yards and car dealerships that I'm never likely to visit. Good luck to them all, some day crowds of people will come.

Some battered piece of beach, the Fourth of Fifth and faraway Fife and a broody sky that eventually delivered some broody rain on the race track.

Cars for sale if you can be bothered to shop around, any colour of silver you like available for £100 down.

In real life this fence is pretty straight but as the camera never tells fibs who knows? Meanwhile back at the racing we made some cash but lost more. It was great fun and a valuable social experience and information gathering exercise. Nice beer too but the plastic pint mugs have some serious design flaws. .

New Dr Who a nobhead?

Artist's impression of an impression of shopping for Cheesy Pasta on acid. Note repetitive and demented bar code motif.

Many things seem to have happened in the last 24 hours but it would be tedious but blogger friendly to list them. So after a few Fife based rendezvous involving seed potatoes, a mattress and depositing Easter Eggs with various grandchildren the Saturday rain came as is the custom. This resulted in a garage clear out and a long and winding up struggle with a stubborn two stroke engine that refused to start. After the almost total collapse of my upper body muscles it finally did and ran like a Swiss watch, well a rather petulant Swiss watch as I looked on almost grinning and definitely sweating.

Next as dusk and more rain was falling civil war broke out between me, a honeysuckle resembling Jack's beanstalk, 3 large posts and a newly acquired trellis. Newly acquired things tend to bring unplanned challenges that act as fierce time bandits marauding across the weekend scape. This was no exception but it was claw-hammer time and I was destined to be beaten back albeit with the conflict ending with me having a bright idea, but the plant world won the day.

A new Dr Who person appeared in the lounge just as a fish based tea was being served, he seems ok and will no doubt carve a niche for himself with the ladies. I did fall asleep midway through his timely performance but woke up to see the tumultuous CGI ending and a nicely compiled series of plot spoilers to wet the viewers by now highly confused appetites, we'll see. The borrowed bow-tie does make him look like a bit of a nob head though.

Indifferent Friday

How can anyone resist an emporium such as this? Howard's Storage World (I had to add the apostrophe) Livingstone gets 10/10 from me. I didn't bother to go in however in case the dream was shattered by cheap reality.

It was a peculiar experience yesterday to travel over to the heart of our great county, the town of Livingstone, and see the many melting glacial deposits lying part frozen across roads and piled on verges and car parks. We seem to live in a Brig a Doon area where we get mists, frosts and mud slides but avoid the extremes of the weather, well last week's passed us by. Perhaps in this Holy Week we are simply avoiding the wrath of God with our good natures or maybe he in his weather controlling wisdom is completely indifferent to us. That's the thing, you never really know. Whatever ever way I quite like the pointless extremes of Easter, chocolate shapes and big eyed rabbits and a cultural mish mash of 21st Century trash that we adapt to suit whatever takes our marketing fancy - and you get a few days away from work.

You can tell a lot about a place by the "Greggs Density Factor" (GDF), how many of the mighty steak-bake suppliers there are per mall, town or high street. The Wallmart bit in Livi has 3 at about 200 metres apart giving it a GDF of 66.6, Dunfermline scores 333.3 and Broxburn comes in at at 600.0, says a lot about our eating habits and dietary needs. Further research is required on this one. I myself went for a regular latte, a Mexican chicken roll and a sugary tart containing some unknown fruit substance and more sugar. Still tastes better that anything Costa or Starbucks can conjure up but I can feel the arteries thickening in my chest wall. Time for another slice of Easter egg.

Big Pants

Small picture of big pants but not the kind I mean.

How is it that a small man such as me has to wear large pants? What a strangely sized world we live in or what a strangely sized person I am or am I buying pants at the wrong places?.

If I was younger I'd become a Steampunk for Easter. However that seems a pointless thing to do at my age and nothing whatsoever to do with Easter. It won't happen.

A young man comfortable within his own space, sense of self and with his big pants .

Avoiding the wrong hell

The inner sanctum and heart of Dunfermline Abbey. Optimistically built in spiritually better days some might say. (The spellcheck wants to make Dunfermline "downfallen" oddly enough).

As alternative holy week lumbers on and the confectionery industry applaud and German priests quake I offer the following advice for the seasonal searching masses and lost souls everywhere:

"In mathematical terms, if it were to be assumed that the existence of some god is certain, and if there are a number (n) of inconsistent faiths one could believe in, each with a corresponding Hell and no way to tell which one, if any, were true a priori, the probability of having chosen to practice the correct religion (through upbringing or by making Pascal's Wager) cannot be greater than 1/n. Therefore, if there are only two inconsistent faiths, then the probability that a believer of either faith is correct is 1 in 2 (50% or 1/2). Four inconsistent faiths result in the probability dropping to 1 in 4 (25% or 1/4). If there are five mutually exclusive faiths, then there is only a 1 in 5 (20% or 1/5) chance that the correct religion would be chosen and its believer would go to that religion's Heaven rather than to its Hell. In practice, there are hundreds of religions in existence, which makes it less than a 1% chance that the true religion would be chosen."

The problem of "avoiding the wrong hell" is an acute one for those earnestly seeking the truth. Good luck to you all, the odds are against you.

Back at the ranch it was fish finger sandwiches, what a marvellous warm feast to savour as we look out at the ongoing results of global warming and the start of British summer time.

The door to the afterlife

Archaeologists have unearthed a 3,500-year-old door to the afterlife from the tomb of a high-ranking Egyptian official near Karnak temple in Luxor.

Easter egg torture

Free the Chocolate Three: Half eaten eggs and bunny, all in the name of a religious festival.

Monday night, incessant sideways rain and the memory of a headache and a cold avoided. Even in this weather the football training is carrying on outside . That’s the Scots for you, we are a tough, stupid and determined breed. We walk our Huskies in the rain and listen to the blues on the radio, as the rain falls. We carry on struggling and though we seldom succeed we never lose the belief that one day we will win out completely and then the rain will stop.

The rain is drumming along with Albert King’s drumming, drumming the blues. It must be quite easy to be a blues drummer out of all the drumming genres and styles. Economic and blissfully alcoholic I’d imagine.

Imaginarium

This weekend has been a confused mass of fantasy viewing that, along with the sadistic habit of seasonal clock changing left me dazed and confused and tired. Friday gave us LOST, a nose dive into the predictable and bizarre; Saturday meant Tim Burton's 3D Alice in Wonderland at movies, almost wonderful; this was followed by Terry Gilliam's Imaginarium of Doctor Parnassus on DVD; Sunday was the Australian Grand Prix on the TV and latterly on the way to the football in the car via the radio. It may be odd to lump movies in with sporting events but it's all shadows and colours running across glass in one form or another.

Apart from the expected experience of not scoring enough points in the Ozzy GP, Gilliam's opus was the most disturbing encounter. I want to love his stuff quite badly, I really do, it's weird, ingenious, mad and artistically unique but the constant barrage of dwarfs, rickety constructions, face slaps, mumbled lines and convoluted plots are hard to take in and follow. It's like reading a battered paperback novel whilst riding on a 1950s Leyland Tiger bus down a bumpy farm road at twilight - and every film of his is a bit like that. Maybe I need to watch it again and write down the amount of sad souls being culled so I can maintain a proper count. Here comes the chicken pie...

LOST goes even more crazy

Globalism
Satan shall "deceive the nations which are in the four quarters of the earth," and shall "gather them together" to encircle and attack Israel.
-- Rev. 20: 7-9

The expansion of the European Union; NAFTA and global economics; a U.S. economy flirting with socialism and the election of an internationalist president in Obama. Don't bother buying any long winded or overly thick books or plan a trip anywhere near the Middle East.

Anyway moving swiftly on to the completely unbelievable last night's LOST teetered straight into Crazy town by delivering the line we'd all expected since fairly early on in the first series namely "this island is in fact Hell". Well of course that may or may not be the case and we'll debate that for years to come whatever the final ending. Even that desperate revelation was overshadowed by the spectacle of Jacob holding an impromptu hog roast after the ship wreck. Yum.

Continuous improvement...

...is of course a myth and beyond the reach of any human endeavour. You can try and you can succeed and that cycle will continue for so long. Then, when you least expect it you will fail, probably in a spectacular manner. Rust never sleeps and neither does sudden unintended acceleration.

Meanwhile life is quiet in this particular parallel universe, my diet of questionable foods mixed with the real good stuff i.e. pasta, artichokes, sun dried tomatoes, oils, various herbs and spices continues unchecked. I feel fine. As for alcohol I do rub in a small amount now and then. It all leads to growing old gracefully by indulging in this physical and fiscal continuous improvement.

Nice picture, dead lady. Sadly.

Roll Over Beethoven

I'm gonna write a little letter,
Gonna mail it to my local DJ.
Yeah an' it's a jumpin' little record
I want my jockey to play.
Roll Over Beethoven, I gotta hear it again today.

It's that last line that sums up what you either feel or don't feel; "gotta hear it again today". It's the sweet song of youth, loving music and needing to hear it again and again and knowing every word and squiggly note. Now when it comes to even good modern music the urge to hear it again seldom occurs, lift muzak abounds and too much of anything isn't good. Music should excite, enthral and make the hair on the back of your neck bristle and fire the imagination. Somehow I need to get back to Beethoven and roll over.

Baby Care

Now I see clearly again thanks to a decent signage regime.

What with a new baby on the way, a long shopping list and me with my bad leg there was little alternative left than to visit the peaceful environs on the shore of the Lake of IKEA in the province of Costco, Tramland. And so it came to pass that I achieved a lifetime's ambition when in a good natured queue at the buffet style cafe of HM Prison IKEA. I observed a young member of staff behind the food counter about to go on a break but filling a bowl of thin chips and ladling them over with the legendary elixir of tan meatball sauce before heading off behind the lines of shining Hobarts. Transfixed by the sight I said to the other girl serving "I'll have whatever she's having", and I did.

Earlier in the day the bonfire failed to light thanks to too much green wood and not enough dry wood. Prior to that debacle I had the unhappy task of dispatching a distressed pheasant. One short sharp blow...

Gaga

Lady Gaga turns the a-ok hand in front of her eye (representing the Illuminati’s “All-Seeing Eye”) into a gun pointed towards the viewer … the masses eating all of the poison served to them.

I'm becoming increasingly bewildered by things in general (everything I see and everything they do) and the works and motives of Ms L Gaga in particular, on one level total tosh on another clever, probing and sharp as Aleister Crowley's stick pin. We never had this kind of trouble with Michael Jackson or Madge, it was nice and simple back then. Now the deep and dark secrets are all revealed here if you be bothered to watch a 9 minute video and read a long blog with comments. Diet Coke anyone? Helps the attention span I believe (they've gotten to me).

Traffic management and trip hazards

Welcome to Queen Margret Hospital, mind your toes and shins though.

A handy trap for the unwitting pedestrian or small animals and children with no road or pavement sense. Clearly there was the germ of an idea here once, to prevent drivers from irresponsibly parking on pavements - they do this because the car parks are perpetually overcrowded and clogged up with all the organisation of a 1970s scrapyard. A few months after their costly installation they are now abandoned, sticking up like part pulled wire and plastic teeth ready to impale the unaware or the careless. Should you slip or trip over any of these mini anti personal mines there are many ambulance chasing lawyers who will be happy to take up your case with Fife Health Board and the NHS - and they'll not ask for a fee. Ironically the A&E is only a few hundred yards away.

A more complete view of some of the pathetic and wasteful efforts in traffic management on the grounds of the Queen Margret Hospital in Dunfermline.

Most times it's the seemingly small and insignificant things that tip you over the edge. Those tiny but irritating pieces of bad human design and shoddy or disrespectful behaviour that confirm all the views you have but wish you didn't have to hold on to.

Initially the premise is: Human life and society are broken things but with time, intelligence and invention they can be repaired.

I'd like to offer an alternative view: Human life and society are broken things that cannot be fixed, their brokenness is an integral part of their being. So get over it, put down the spanners, the super glue and the booklets about retuning out of tune pianos...and live your life but be careful where you tread. If you feel guilty about this counsel of apparent despair, don't, your efforts didn't ever make any real difference anyway.

Extreme Brain Freeze

Inside this beaker there is the coldest place on Earth. One careless suck on the over sized straw and the extreme cold transfers itself to the very centre of the brain. That special, deep and indistinct area often represented in sci-fi films as some golden, sparkly, flashing place, somewhere between the soul and the soft machine you might say. I did survive the deep chill but I then suffered (or enjoyed, not sure which) a short but vivid out of body experience, more about that some other day. The upshot of the freeze effect being that I can now no longer take myself or significant parts of my life seriously anymore. It is curtain up on another act in the ongoing performances of the theatre of the absurd.

Greenock Daily Photo

Skylines full of cranes etc.

The old buoys of Greenock and Campbeltown.

Today I was mostly in Greenock and Port Glasgow enjoying the splendour of the Clyde and the nearby urban road systems in the almost warm Scottish Spring air. I may have had a nice sausage and egg MacMuffin and Latte in a local non-local eatery.

There's nothing quite like losing 4 hours of your life watching your laptop tie itself into pathetic knots of self imposed Windows torture installing updates all across the sad little screen. The whole tedious update process illustrates perfectly what is wrong with computers and living with them. No other household item should or would behave like this; fridges don't stop chilling to get updated, cars don't pull over onto the hard shoulder for a refresh, TVs don't freeze whilst a bar of % information drags itself across the screen (OK I know Freeview boxes do this). It is just wrong. So I've a laptop like a sick puppy that's getting a red hot poker quietly inserted somewhere whilst I stand back, fume and share the pain.

Meanwhile more conclusive proof that Banks, their managers and their advertising agencies have neither a sense of shame or irony and that they do not understand how the public view their recent antics. How else could RBS use taxpayers money to show a TV commercial containing the following lines:

"Since 2004 RBS has taught 400,000 school children about money management".

Might have been an idea to include a few senior RBS managers on that particular course whilst you were at it, in fact why not collar a few of those "trained up" school kids and offer them a job right now? You couldn't make it up. I'm not sure which is worse their ice cream van bank or their seaplane bank, both seen buzzing the highlands whilst cloth capped ethnically appropriate crofters sing the Banks' praises to the tune of some torrid Gaelic lament.

Burn down Asda

Every week three Scottish pubs close down and have their windows replaced with compressed Amazonian timber products. Thanks to this initiative we are all living longer lives, eating less pies and being exposed to less germs and puffs of tobacco smoke. Meanwhile different coloured supermarkets are offering bewildered ex-pub goers the opportunity to get quietly comatosed at home in front Steven Fry or River City on the telly. About a tenner's worth of red wine does the trick and a few days later it's Monday and you can start to plan the next weekend.

Scotland's problems are pretty obvious but not easy to face up to - the burning desire to spend 48 hours a week numb and detached being the main one requiring treatment. While they like to talk about social mobility and brilliant careers and possible economic answers none of our political parties can fathom out the dilemma of what to do with a part population of 2.5 million people who don't really give a shit anymore. Perhaps they should close a few supermarkets.

Ingredients and Umbrellas

umbrellas...

I don't know how to cook but I am content that other people do and continue to cook, at times feeding me and improving in their techniques and expertise whilst I experiment with bonfire building methods, listening and trying on sunglasses in petrol stations.

Germaine Greer was on the radio talking like some old friend about how her father had returned home after the war: broken, drinking heavily and silent. "We never had a decent conversation" she said, " he remained silent in order to protect us from what he had seen and done, like many men who return from war". Germaine went on of course to discuss her feminist writings, failed marriage and various other things she had experienced. I was however not listening to any of that, I was hanging onto and mulling over "broken, drinking heavily and silent". Words that seemed in a vague and yet precise way to be some recipe for the make up of my own long gone father (mentioned in this old post), who went to war and paid the price for the next 30 years of his life. Sometimes I think I am gathering together the elements of some wonderful recipe of understanding, as these ingredients appear, change and come together. Then I remember that I cannot cook and cannot be bothered to cook. I am trying to feed and entertain ghosts, ghosts best left silent and hungry.

...and ingredients

My other Ferrari is a car

More months of agony, tension and ultimate failure are headed my way. The last red Italian sports car I owned was a Fiat Uno, this time it's serious, personal and slightly less real and not so rusty. Fantasy F1 time has come around - Saturday practices and Sunday sweat sessions will follow.

Broc & Croc

The use of some elusive vegetables and badly dissolving stock cubes has resulted in a new Anglo (?) Australian recipe guaranteed to promote good health and long life:

2 x Ham stock cubes, M&S Broccoli, S&M Cauliflower, regular carrots, chopped, diced, sliced, splayed and dehydrated onions, water and heat. Optional crocodile or alligator steaks to taste and mystery spices.

Heat and eat, easy as a pie in soup form and the fast food franchise is currently available, post a comment and send a cheque for £25,000 and away you jolly well go.

Starbucks want your guns

Good news: You can now openly carry a gun in Starbucks, where State laws allow. Must remember that the next time I'm in Dunfermline and needing a warm grande latte and an overpriced lemon muffin.

Security

It's hard to imagine that when commercial air travel first became popular anybody could have thought that it would turn into the current muddle of security measures, queues and pointless shopping experiences that it has become. What strikes you as you stand in line to be searched, scanned and prodded is the magnificent and stupid industry and futility of it all. Huge squads of sweaty shirt sleeved operators maintain the conveyor systems, shift the trays, stare into flickering screens and then worst of all search and tickle the poor lost beeping sod with a steel pin in his ankle or some loose change in his pocket.

In the crawl to get through to the lounge passengers adopt battery chicken facial expressions, yawn and stare into space, invariably arriving at the rollers and trays slightly surprised and despite numerous other travel experiences quite blank in the mind. They forget to take out their laptops, remove chunky belts, discard liquids or take off their jackets and then like scolded children obey the relentless last minute reminders to contain your paltry little collection of belongings in a plastic tray. Only once you have passed through the great electronic portal will you be allowed to experience the dubious privilege of flight - as a highly valued passenger, a potential target and more importantly a credit card holder.

There is of course no answer, we must be kept afraid and so the great white tide of terror has won by clubbing us into deathly obedience like wide-eyed seal pups. Our lives have become ruled by unbalanced risk assessments that see half empty and dull provincial flights to Southampton or Wick in the same light as those to Newark or Chicago and every poor Muslim traveller or olive skinned student is a threat. In the silent war that has been declared on life in the west we've only to look at our current set of overblown tactics and unfortunate reactions to know that we've lost it already.

Meanwhile outside the airport as concrete defence systems are set up to baffle attacks from Panzer Tanks or low flying Kamikaze pilots, ordinary travellers struggle to pass through these monuments to construction company profits and so enter the shrine of the travel gods. So do we feel safe, fly happier and sleep any more soundly? Not really, it's only a mater of time until some extremist pulls his rusty and flaming Hyundai into a branch of the Co-op or Morrison's. At that point it's time to get out and buy an island, any island.

Onto another matter altogether: "There were songs in that guitar"...hmmm.

I'm writing this watching "It might get loud" again.

We were promised space hoppers

Me and the required and cliched imaginary friend playing in the streets of Rosyth in 1963.

Despite the tone of the image above I can look back on a happy childhood, I can also look back on a bloody awful one as well, it all depends of what type of psychotic episode I'm having or subjecting myself to. I take full responsibility for all that happens in real time, the past is another matter altogether.

Today I've mostly been listening to 99 Red Balloons by a girl with hairy oxters and eating soup (I'm eating the soup not the girl). The soup and a healing visit to Dobbies cafe was a necessary part of my football recovery programme.

In the mean time I've seen the future, proving for once that I am not totally preoccupied with either myself or my childhood, the one spent serenely in what was then an unspoilt Fife - a few steps only from the raw and bleeding Eden. Anyway the future looks like this, invest all of your money now and get over the whole banking fiasco thing. Apart from all the obvious human rights, environmental and financial issues involved, any company called Build Your Dream cannot be completely wrong - tell that to Shoeless Johnston/Jackson.

King Burger

There probably is only one true King in the Scottish Kingdom of currently available burger food types. It is of course the mighty Angus and at £4.50 it is the size of your face, the right size for any self respecting burger. Angus tastes best purchased at the drive through (no fries, though they are good they serve to distract from the main event and the ketchup is in a sachet) and eaten in one square go, edges to centre swallowing each of the three tomato slices whole and then allow to sediment to settle by the application of a chilled strawberry shake. Nice.

My first ever "full face" burger was purchased in Walcott Street in Bath in 1985 from a garishly painted Hero Burger shop. Up until then it had been only puny Bird's Eye efforts or nondescript greasy plain cheeseburgers for me, served up from mobile vendors. Little did I realise that my life was about to change and that my stunted and chemically reduced horizons were about to broaden. As I recall the Bath monster had peppered mayo and lettuce and I ate it walking down the street, it was wrapped in greaseproof paper and I was heading for the Saracen's Head pub on a Saturday afternoon, Joni Mitchell was on my Walkman. It was the perfect Road to Damascus experience for me and I have never looked back, finally I had found a burger that ticked every box. On my return to Ecosse from exile in Bath I was denied this experience for a few years until branded fast food outlets started to creep back across the border to what is indeed their true spiritual homeland. Angus I salute you.

This week's irrelevant play list:

Them Crooked Vultures - the Album of the same name.
Norman Lamont - the soundscapes album.
Madison Violet - No fool for trying.
Ukelilli - includes the Derren Brown song etc.
Impossible Songs - the wedding album (various ever changing artistes).
Captain Beefheart - Safe as Milk.
The Beatles - Abbey Road (again).

Frankie's daily photo

The depressing spectre of our local F&Bs rising like some welcoming Godzilla of Burgerdom from a barren wasteland of pot-holed car park black-top. It pretends it's in New York, an impressive but wildly incorrect claim as it sits next to a first division Tesco in South Queensferry. From this vibrant and wind swept location it dispenses beer, fries, lattes, burgers and various other pieces of saturated fat and sugary liquid substances - all with token pieces of exhausted salad. A welcome feeding station for hungry Chavs and lost travellers alike. In it's defence I've had grub there a few times and lived to tell the tale and I paid the bill in full and probably left a tip of some sort. Across the road lies the great sleeping bulk of Burger King, a totally different proposition altogether.

Ukelilli

Lilli serenades me whilst mistaking me for David Tennant, an easy mistake to make.

She sings, she plays, she writes songs about Dr Who, Derren Brown and obsessive compulsive urges: Ukelilli. The good lady uke jockey played at Mr I's Secret CDs last night along with a rash of other gifted performers. Ms. U however did inject a welcome degree of humour and pathos into the evening with her offbeat songs and North American humour. As for the ukulele I'm not convinced about it as an instrument, any thing with less or more than six strings baffles me a bit, I've never gone much on 4, 5, 7 or 8 string guitars at all and the uke always sounds a bit out of tune - it's all an acquired taste I guess - and Eddie Izzard likes her and the shrunken head guitar it seems.

District 9 P.S.

Watching District 9 is not recommended if you happen to have a morbid fear of losing your fingernails under extraordinary circumstances or you cant easily watch shaky camera work. You may also struggle if you are unfamiliar with 60's space exploration terminology i.e. command module or if you dislike the popular South African accent and regular to excessive use of the word "fook". End of broadcast.

Meanwhile back in the safer realm of TV we are up to Series 6 Episode 3 of the mighty, magnificent and increasingly baffling LOST, or as a friend described it; "the ongoing dream of the Golden Labrador featured in the first series." That explanation certainly helps me make some sense of it all.