Planes, trains and weddings...

Big dress in a bigger car.


A long stretch looks likely for both.


Emma Smith and Ali Graham display their head wear.

impossible songs



impossible songs

Planes, trains, weddings and...

Yesterday was a grim day for the most part. It started of well with me attending a very positive meeting in the Midlands and then on the way home buying a very comfy pair of Timberland shoes at a retail outlet. I was happy. After a quiet bite at Birmingham airport I boarded one of Flybe’s finest little blue and white jets. It left the stand a trifle late and then half way down the runway a few seconds before the full take off speed might be achieved, braked sharply. This gave all the passengers and staff a nasty shock and a few minutes of deep breathing and revisiting aspects of past lives followed. The rest the story is long and tedious, it involves over heating aircraft brakes, confused avionic systems, being towed a mile back up the runway and then spending three hours sitting in a plane going nowhere. This was followed by an hour in the terminal and then the slow realisation that the night would be spent in a hotel and not at home. I checked into the hotel about midnight and was up again at five to get my revised flight back to Edinburgh. I finally got home to collect a clean shirt at about ten this morning and headed over to work. All in all I’ve had about four hours sleep in the past thirty six. Thinking about last weekend has however kept me sane.

Wedding snaps are fun, here above are some I like.

Wedding of the century

Guy and Erin - married at Culross Abbey.
impossible songs



impossible songs

Wedding of the century

Erin and Guy’s wedding took place on the 15th and it was quite simply a wonderful day. The bride was (is) beautiful and the groom as smart as a new pin. I was in every way the very proud dad and really enjoyed each part of the ceremony and celebrations. Erin and Guy both have big and boisterous families and the reception and the subsequent party, disco and the drinking and blethering went on well into the wee small hours. Next morning (after a comatosed kind of sleep) those of us who’d stayed over in the hotel breakfasted and lunched together, relaxing and chatting after the previous day’s excitement. Erin and Guy are now jetting away to Thailand for a few weeks...

Complicated

impossible songs



impossible songs

Things are getting complicated. At the moment in order to get out of the house we have to check and feed the rabbit and guinea pig, feed the kittens, catch them and then put them in their pen (something that is getting increasingly difficult) as well as all the normal everyday early morning things you do. At all times, whatever we are doing we have to be careful not to let the kittens out. On the way home in the evening a Syrus search is carried out, generally at some local countryside spot. This involves dish clanging and a lot of trudging across fields and listening intently. Then once home the kittens need fed and cleaned out and the squeaky rodents need a salad prepared and laid out before them. Then they scratch you and the kittens eat your shoes.

Today is the day before my daughter’s wedding (gulp). Yesterday we had the rehearsal, which was fun; today some kilts were picked up, house and car cleaning done, a rodent pen constructed, shopping attempted and various odd jobs tackled. I also managed to complete my father of the bride speech; hopefully this short speech will come across as funny, neutral and sincere. I dare not however underestimate my own strange ability to be misunderstood by friends and family alike. I’m looking forward to the wedding the way that you’d look forward to a parachute jump, it’s going to be scary, exhilarating, great to look at, quick and (for the mean time) a once in a life time experience. The weather forecast is a bit iffy also, we shall see.

Why do nettle stings hurt for so long these days? I just need to look at a nettle now and red poppy mark appears on me and lasts half a day. Perhaps in my lifetime I had built up a high level of resistance to the native Fife nettle which does not now work in the strange sub-tropical landscapes and wide open spaces of West Lothian. I actually hate nettles, if they were insects they’d be wasps.

Four Symbols

impossible songs


impossible songs

Four Symbols

The truth is that I’ve never grown up, nor have I really wanted to. Despite my rather serious day job, my responsibilities, my relationships and my goals, a large part of me is still a stupid kid. I quite like the fact that I have this overage and under developed relationship with myself (which is not really unusual). I’ve had all the crisis times and questions, I’ve lost and ultimately gained, I’ve forgotten things and I’ve learned things. I’ve realised that most of life doesn’t really mean a whole lot, other than the moment that is now and how you feel and who you are with.

So I’m happy in where I currently am and with most of the things that are going on around me but I had to smile and extra smile when I heard today that Led Zeppelin will get together for a final (?) gig on 26th November. It’s that sweet song of youth, it’s memories and experiences you can still touch and feel, it’s reaching back to when everything is possible but nothing is quite ready. It’s 1970 again all the mystery of living still is just that. So what will you get for your £150? (As if money mattered). The broad and burnt out bridge back to yesterday, to a time when wrongs can be righted, vitality is natural and flowing, the sun is brighter and you could take a few strings of winning lottery numbers back as you travel in the Zeppelin time machine. Catch a glance through a glinting crack in space and time, a few minutes looking into a shattered mirror but with eyes part closed and tears misting the edges.

So will it just be some old guys strutting around on a stage stirring up a nostalgic storm and an audience believing for once everything they see? Well I’m sure it will (and that’s not bad) but for a few short hours it would be the best place to be in, whatever time the clock in your heart is stuck at.

The slugs don't work

The House of the Evil Eyes, Culross, Fife - the ladder is
not always parked in that position I presume. The Crisp Hut
is located in the nearby car park, it promises and delivers gourmet
crisps cooked before your eyes and salted or dusted in a variety
of unexpected flavours.

impossible songs

impossible songs

The slugs don’t work.

Last Monday we spent a few hours searching for the cat in fields (in fact a series of fields) over by Winchburgh. The search was of course fruitless and during the trudge across the badlands I picked up a healthy splodge of dog shit on my boot. I only noticed this on my return a left the boots outside to mature or at least dry out. Then the next evening I spotted a clump of slugs all engaged on boot soul cleaning, a natural and no-pain solution to soiled footwear, or so I thought. After a few days however I realised that even slugs have their limit and now it looks like the lollipop stick solution will be required. Perhaps, while I gather my thoughts together the local frogs, squirrels or rodents might care to take a shot at the cleaning up operation.

Saturday night alive.

We had a pleasantly crowded house for Saturday supper this week: Ann and David (CBQ), Erin and Guy, Paul, Joe and Liv and us. There was a shed load of good food on the go prepared by Ali, we picked at it till two in the morning: crusty breads, herby oils, fish casserole, fresh vegetables, plum crumble and nice wine – and a wee drop shandy. The kittens stole the show by exhibiting a worrying amount of cuteness and remained aloof to the visit of a rabbit and guinea pig (Pippa and Milo) who are to be staying with us for the next three weeks. The meal was disturbed by the visit of another neighbour who has lost his cat and was looking for assistance; the Bermuda Triangle of cat disappearances in this area is getting wider and deeper and there are other more sinister overtones.

Church.

Sunday morning was spent in the chilly, stony and possibly ancient surroundings of Culross Abbey checking out the scene of next Saturday’ wedding and also confirming the “House of the Evil Eyes” actually did exist. I was trying to explain my childhood fascination with this strangely ocular building (featured in the Sunday Post, forty years ago I recall), at last night’s meal and not astoundingly nobody believed me. The proof is on this page somewhere.

Fighting couples and couplings:

Who would win a fight between...?

Fred Flintstone and Scooby Doo.
Marlyn Manson and Ozzie Osborne.
The Marx Brothers and the Three Stooges.
Predator and Optimus Prime.
The Shake and Vac lady and the Bisto mum.
Charles Darwin and Albert Einstein.
Bananarama and the Shangri-La’s.
Lenny Bruce and Bill Hicks.

Warhol steak bake

impossible songs

impossible songs

Andy Warhol’s plagiarant material steals the show every time, fame is a fragile game that must be played to the very end but I’m bored with it now.

Thursday and I’m at OOTB reviewing and slowly expiring in the heat of the cellar bar of the Cannons’ Gait. On a fairly average night the best and probably most shambolic were “Withered Hand” a boy/girl cello and guitar duo who stumbled through their songs, pulling in different directions and seeming quite under rehearsed but pleasantly unconcerned. I liked their extra indie style, their humour and lyrics and their attack, it beats the hell out of the introspective Nick Drake show and tell parade that many performers participate in. Sparrowhawk aka Spambourski were in fine and fully atmospheric form, they’ve cottoned onto something. Filthy Pedro was also fun, a refugee from Anglesey and the inventor of “Rock and Roll Points”, a bit like credit card points but awarded for mindless, bad and inappropriate behaviour. Rock on Pedro.

The week grinds to a halt with a visit to Livingstone to buy trainers for my daughter and a housecoat each. The sun is high in the sky and we munch a Gregg’s steak bake al fresco. A Brain Training Wii game is also purchased by Joe and we head back via the back roads doing our “find the cat, bowl clanging” routine and pushing “lost” posters through miscellaneous letter boxes. You always expect to see or meet some one when you do this but really it’s as if you are invisible, like H G Wells’ postman.

Hope in Mid Hope

impossible songs

Mid Hope - where are all the residents these days?



impossible songs

The search for Syrus carries on sporadically, determinedly, on the web and across the wide open and closed up spaces of West Lothian. We’ve had a sighting in the south over past Winchburgh; we’ve plodded across fields and down country lanes but found nothing. We’ve re-explored Mid Hope (as in the picture) and leafleted the scattered the dwellings that run across the estate. Now we know how big a place this is and how small a cat is in comparison. We also know a lot about the other cats lost in the area, many more than you’d think. Some disappear altogether, some return after a few days sporting and injury or two, some saunter back in and plop themselves on the couch as if nothing had happened. In our case it’s been one fruitless and frustrating search after another with no sign of the cat returning so far.

An alien finger in my Peri Peri

impossible songs

impossible songs

The Captain Beefheart mysteries

Hit that long lunar note and let it float, they say, others just freak out in a moon age day dream, oh yeah. I approve of both opposing positions and dead artists. Van Gogh’s art is in a weird style, to the uninitiated anyway. Meanwhile and coincidently an art exhibition takes place next door in the village hall, wine and Pringles flow freely and across the stained wooden floor; none of the artists present had a bandaged ear but we are in the strange position of having a village hall but not a village. The exhibit’s titles are many and various, some are more meaningful than others, some titles are better than the paintings.

Blips

History is all around, as is geography generally. Picasso breathes the same oxygen as all the others and his work is quite popular in Hollywood I understand. Perhaps his technique was more focused. Monet was an enigma and a skilled and popular gardener. Potato scones are also well liked around here, eaten raw with a little butter (?) or fried or grilled. My favourite chord sequence is Am, G, F, Em, G, Am, it can be played for hours without being boring for the player though not the listener I’m afraid.

Kittens attack innocent trees masquerading as house plants. Occasionally a dwarf giant is felled by their mighty claws. Squeals of surprise and stilted pain follow but the hard lesson is never learned. In the morning I shall vacuum up the fallen and part chewed leaves without ceremony but with silent respect, apart from the drone of the hoover.

Happiness is easy for Clive James to define but that is nothing to do with his nationality. Meanwhile I continue to empty the dishwasher and rub down the George Foreman in order to seek out my own tortuous route to happiness and self actualisation.

An alien finger in my Peri Peri (yawn!)

A bottle of Peri Peri sauce, purchased locally but we suspect it may contain a severed human finger in its darkest, secret heart. The question is, or should be, “at what point do we stop using the product?” Some might say use the sauce until the upright, rigid, dead digit appears in full view. Others may beg to differ and reject the sauce without any further ado, quite naturally. Some might enjoy, in a way they can’t explain, some subtle new aspect of the sauce’s flavour. Others may drain the bottle only to find small slivers of broken glass down at the bottom and wonder what the fuss was about but worry about consuming glass (a modern practice that many world religions are now against).

Almost peace in our time

The view from Creg-Ne-Baa in Freuchie, near Cupar.

impossible songs



impossible songs

Another busy week has passed, everyday crammed full with the ongoing cat search (exploring different, protracted and generally unsatisfactory lines), football, kids homework and exploits at their new secondary school, Transformers, Life on Mars, South Queensfery Comedy Nights, kittens in everything, Emma’s return from Sri Lanka, Paul on a mission to find Syrus, many meals and a few bottles of wine. I also spent a few anxious days tracking down my lost kilt, a particularly relevant item as we slide inexorably towards my oldest daughter’s wedding - now only a few weeks away. My precious Black Watch kilt had found a temporary home in a shop near the Hawes Inn, the reunion was almost emotional, thankfully quick and only cost £16.

Empty Headed

impossible songs



impossible songs

My head is empty.

Despite it being a busy and in many ways successful week our missing cat remains the primary concern and despite our natural optimism for all things, an air of gloom is prevailing. My own head feels strangely empty; I don’t think I’ve managed to have a single colourful thought or inspirational moment. Not having a head full of thoughts might seem like a good experience, like some deeper level of peace but actually it’s more like continually staring at a blank sheet of paper that you can neither move away from or write on or shade in. Of course like all things this will pass with either a happy ending or the realisation of an uncertain and sad outcome, we wait patiently. In the mean time the two kittens are sparring, running wild and growing bigger everyday. Their ongoing manic antics almost fill a certain gap.

Cover versions.

If you like live (recorded) music and ambling and rambling covers you could do worse than invest in The Saturday Sessions from the Dermot O’Leary Show. Forty four eclectic live pieces on one of those CD things from all sorts of interesting and naturally groovy acts, showing off and sounding pretty raw and no over dubs.

One lost cat

impossible songs



impossible songs

Syrus.

Sad to say our beloved cat Syrus has been missing for a full week now. We’ve searched all his known haunts but in the large wooded and agricultural lands that surround our house it’s not easy to cover all the possibilities. We’ve knocked doors, leafleted and used various cat web sites to advertise our loss but nothing has come of it so far. Losing your cat or your cat getting lost is not good.

Pulp Friction

impossible songs - flintstones fans.



impossible songs

Yes we have no Pop-Tarts.

In my regular sorties to swoop, hunt, gather and pillage in the supermarkets and of course be baffled by the choices and offers, I’ve also been noticing the disappearance or non-availability of certain key products. Supermarkets sell the illusion of choice and variety but actually fail to offer it. Some items have all but disappeared from the shelves or now come in other, foreign forms. You can’t just blame the product life cycle theorists or supply and demand. It is of course the Food Police hemming us into brands and products we only think we want. The confectionary and crisp aisle seem to suffer the worst and I also have concerns about their cereal stocking policies. This vague, bad but still living feeling is the result of trolley denting in Asda, Tesco and Morrisons. Trips to the Coop and Sainsburys are to stressful even to count in these, the wobbliest of statistics.

The appliance of science.

Why is there no cooking pot that, by using centrifugal force spins the contents so that they don’t stick to the pot during cooking? I have studied this medium at various theme parks: Alton Towers, Disneyland, Busch Gardens, Universal Studios to name but four and not counting Codona’s fun fairs of the sixties. Answers on a postcard please...

Happy Trails.

Without the Flintstones there would be no Red Hot Chilli Peppers, king ribs and dinosaur chicken bits or Simpsons. They are the spiritual source and traceable ancestor of many fine and misguided media creations and whacky barometers of modern life. Fred, Barney, Wilma, Betty, the Water Buffalos and Dino (so brilliantly named after a red Italian flop of a sports car) have changed all of our lives. I’m now trying hard to think what exactly Top Cat and his gang might have influenced. (Top Cat, Brains, Fancy, Choo-choo, Benny and Spook were their names).

Ugh.

Davy Crocket: A man who killed a bear at only three (was that the time of day?) and then went on to become the King of the Wild Frontier, where ever that was or is. Born on a mountain top in Tennessee, no maternity wing or emergency room in those days. None of these things explain why his song is going around inside my head like a cartoon merry-go-round this morning.

Contractually obliged blogging

impossible songs



impossible songs

The 2nd Ferry Fringe Open Mike event ran last night in South Queensferry’s Stags Head Hotel (the Stag). A little delay on the PA , a little twiddle on the controls, some tangled leads, a couple of shandys and few willing performers and a surprisingly enthusiastic audience, some local and some refugees from the huge cruise liner currently parked under the Forth Bridge. We’re all sold on song down here and we’ll repeat the event next month, around the 20th at the same venue.

The cat (the big adult one) has yet again gone awol. I spent the early evening hunting for him in what I think are his favourite haunts, how do you ever know these things? So it’s five days and counting since he dropped a mouse on the kitchen floor as I looked down at his grinning cat face - it's 6.30 am and I'm still in my pyjamas.

Dress down Friday. I’m now working on a site that offers the odd (for me) option of a dress down Friday. This means that if you turn up in your automatic choice of school uniform as it were, you look a bit of a chump. Suddenly I’m having to rethink my meagre wardrobe to see how it can cope with this cultural change. Thankfully there’s little if any sartorial effort made by my fellow workers, well the male ones anyway and there’s only three hundred and twenty working Fridays left for me to fret over.

In between brewing large amounts of Bolognese sauce and other magic potions for the weekend, hoovering and daydreaming I’m musing over the possibility of building a kit guitar from, err... a kit. The idea being to obtain a unique and well put together plank and all the accessories that I can then finish and customise in my own eccentric style and then brag to various musos about. I’m not wholly enthusiastic about the Airfix and Mechano aspects of this but the design and finish bit has a certain appeal. Something to pass onto the grandchildren so they can shove the neck through a 4x12 at the high school dance.

Pimp my Jaffa Cake

impossible songs




impossible songs

Soft biscuits

Should a Jaffa Cake be soft, giving and forgiving all over or should it be crisp at the edges and softer in the middle? The orangey bit should be the same in both cases, jammy. Big, modern soft cookie/doughy biscuits are odd, any biscuit without a crunch is really more of a cake, of course that begs the question, are Jaffa Cakes biscuits or, as their name suggests cakes? If you like them crisp (as close to crunchy as a Jaffa Cake gets) then they are probably biscuits. Of course none of this matters in the least. My personal favourites are digestives, in a jam sandwich.

Scotland’s weather is the same as it is everywhere else.

No gardening for almost a month, the rain has not let up, the plum tree has collapsed and our grand plans (whatever they were) for taming the wild jungle a few feet from this window has not materialised into any tangible form. Well I guess there’s still 2008. No, I am not obsessed with weather, time travel, hand washing or avoiding wet (dunked) biscuits, not in the least.

Heroes and Vulcans

Wednesday night is good for the time being because “Heroes” is on. More unfathomable American time paradox and superhuman tosh in the genre of Lost or Smallville but it keeps those of us of a certain age amused for at least 45 minutes, never easy with an attention span like mine.

Flexible structures

impossible songs



impossible songs

Climate change and the quest for a decent protest.

It’s not easy to make your mark in the world today without either falling flat on your face or flat upon your back (James Thurber: The bear who could take it or leave it). All good causes sometimes seem like lost causes and you have to think very carefully about what cause you take up and how you support it. My problem is that I tend to easily see and appreciate everybody’s point of view: Air travel is good; people can quickly and cheaply travel around the world for business or pleasure. Air travel is bad; great lumbering aircraft pollute the skies, burn fossil fuels and encourage no-brain tourists to pollute beauty spots. I haven’t the heart or conviction to complain about either position, I like to hope that one may cancel out the other in some piece of mathematical perfection and all parties will at least for a short period be satisfied. The thing is all our lifestyles and ideals have ratcheted up to some kind of unreasonable point now where it is difficult to remain comfortable on this splintered and unmaintained fence, where most of the time I want to be. I suppose it’s true to say that you can never really win an argument with somebody stupider or more blinkered than you, if they can’t get what your point is or they can’t accept it because they can’t grasp it what do you do? Pitch a tent at their airport or stun them with tasers?

Back to work.

Today I returned to work after two weeks of meandering, pottering, and walking with my hands behind my back and whistling. Doing nothing in particular, reading Harry Potter aloud, sitting outside pubs, scooping up kittens and kitten poo, nose to tail on motorways and lost a mile from your hotel, theme parks and sunny spots and rain battering onto your umbrella, home cooking and far away cooking, Pot Noodles and the greenest of salads, sheep and goats and paddling in a lake. So the summer has gone until the next Indian Summer and the bluebirds have ceased in their song, the house martins are tetchy and the thistles and plums are growing in all directions. The power and destructive capacity for nature is impressive: Flood, sun burn, cold nights and showers of meteors, what a marvellous climate we enjoy in this small corner of the universe. Life is seldom dull and going back to work wasn’t so bad, it allows another strand of purpose to unravel and then weave itself into some other unexpected pattern. Just glad I’ve avoided the M40 today unlike some of my colleagues.

Away from it all

impossible songs

impossible songs

A few days away.

Alton Towers and the Lake District - a short tour.

My Alton Towers visit was a better than the last one (10 years ago?), a bright sunny day, the park not too busy and the rides themselves were pretty good with queues almost bearable. It’s hard of course not to feel like a ripped-off captive in any theme park. Food and drink prices are extortionate, the actual quality is low and few of the attractions match the plastic and glossy blurb that describe them in brochures or web sites. A bit like most ordinary life really but to be honest I quite enjoyed the whole illusion of meaningful distraction and the prices scam.

High on a hill in Staffordshire there is a golf club and hotel with magnificent, open views across rolling hills and farm land, I stayed there for two nights and it was clean and pleasant and good value. Sadly however none of the helpful staff there had even the vaguest command of the English language, for a short time I was an outsider. We got by on gestures and pointing and a lot of Monty Python style “slow” talk. Do words matter?

The Lake District was a warm cataclysm of brainless traffic non-stop from the M6 to Windermere and Ambleside. Two places that must have been fantastic 60 years ago but are now held hostage by trippers and coaches and dirty money in a mess of street furniture and confused one way systems. After an hour of slowly boiling anger and going nowhere I turned up the road for Coniston and by complete chance discovered a quiet, decent spot on the waterside by Coniston Hall. The stumpy Cumbrian hills that pass for mountains here in the UK were green and magnificent in the August sun, the air was clean and the beer pretty normal but nice. The start of a brief but valuable 24 chill out began. Next day normal service resumed, grey skies masked and choked the peace and the impending rain filled my sails and blew me home across the border.

Patience and timing

Endless waiting and getting nowhere. I seem to spend a disproportionate amount of time waiting for other people. Clearly my own sense of timing in other things is wrong and I am therefore unable to work to the button to mesh neatly with whatever should be happening next. This means I am wasting a huge chunk of my own time. It also means that other people don’t share my sense of appropriate “earliness”. If everybody did then they would be in sync with my time and I wouldn’t waste so much waiting on them. A dilemma only I can solve.