Cats and hot air

The new cat cafe some where in Glasgow has what seems to me to be an odd, possibly disastrous business model. Firstly £5 per person per hour to enter, then you buy your grub and then you spend some time in the company of a variety of cute/moody/sulky/funny Weegie cats. Prior booking may be required. No stiletto heels or heavy boots either (?). The £5 goes towards a cat charity somewhere so I don't grudge it but it does seem like a lot to ask on top of what are regular cafe prices. Not some place you'd just nip into to relax, chat to a cat, swig coffee and then back out into the city to resume work. Shame, good idea but...

Meanwhile the kindly neighbours over at Grangemouth's Ineos plant are fairly lighting up the sky these winter nights with some kind of chemically induced party pyrotechnics.  Sadly most to heat is rising high and far away and failing to descend and break the frosty, foggy grip the weather currently holds over us. I suppose it's a kind of a free fireworks display that's probably stunning some of the local wildfowl, I just hope that it never escalates into anything more.

Lionel Richie's Wardrobe

"Once a King in Narnia, always a King in Sofa King". I didn't say that but I once was a king (small k) in a suburb of Narnia, not the main part but I can assure you that while time moved on there and many things took place, back here only a few seconds, if any passed by. I am of course referring here to the illusion of time passing when editing Word documents. A practice allegedly known as writing, creative writing in fact. The practice of re-reading, checking and then correcting all the creative mistakes made along the way. Reading and re-reading and correcting. Time passes but I'm not quite sure in what direction. The grim winter exterior doesn't always help though there have been no sightings of the Snow Queen or her entourage for a few weeks. Maybe she's holed up in the farm nearby, working her way through the beef freezers and freshly laid eggs.

Muscle memory is hard to exercise. Coupled with Word and in parallel there is the need to improve technique, relearn or just plain learn new guitar fingering and the muscle memory that goes with it. Breakthroughs are also running on Narnian time lines for some reason. Hopefully there will be something soon that I can compress and squeeze and edit into some kind of ambient format.

The serenity of nothingness

There, across the barricades, the iron fist of Tory policy made flesh has made life near impossible but somehow we carry on. The heretics and the idealists, no names, no footprints. Now that the guns have been silenced for the time being we can all walk backwards across the wilderness of thought to a place where nothingness reigns, where the past is but a backdrop and the future, despite it's close proximity cannot be perceived. Ambient music is played on invisible instruments, sounds like a looped elephant chorus pour down, animal chirps emerge from holes in the ground and clouds of bass tones float across a frog spawn sky, reverberating. I can tap my feet to this one at least.

The urban sprawl once had a name, not anymore. Twisted bicycle frames are padlocked to lamp post stumps, just like they used to be but more so. We have conversations but they are largely unintelligible, there is talk of forgiveness and we have reached that place where we  forget about forgetfulness. It was foretold. Voices seem to have added vibrato rendering then unintelligible but that does not stop the chatter. 

I'm likely to pause for tea at any time, just for the hell of it. I take it straight. Others travel more lightly, minus the necessary apparatus. We could share materials but that has a primitive edge to it we all wish to avoid. Soon the time will be up, the masks will slip and a type of low level war will commence. This is nothing to do with us, it's a social media construct designed to keep the greater populace amused. Conflict and argument are popular activities I believe. There is a view that this sort of thing tends to get us somewhere, I'm not so sure. The government sponsors all the hurly-burly and madness, there is a clandestine department hidden under Putney Bridge dealing with disruptions and diversions but I take no notice of conspiracy theories, they are just that. As ever I blame the Stilton, a good dose and the world is a seedier, sleepier, happy kind of wobbly place. Of course it may just be the strange effects of the oatcakes I regularly take.

In praise of AI

Typical Middle Eastern iconic woman of the First Century. Pic courtesy of Modern Madonna Magazine (Special Christmas Tattoo Edition).

Wake up to the new modern, desolate, shape-shifting love that only organised religion can bring. That thing we all need to fill the god shaped hole in our otherwise pointless and vacuous lives, yes we all need a little lift now and again and of course religion needs our money, our devotion and our fine arse licking skills. No truth, no honesty, just tired out fairy stories, garbled half-history and histrionic followers who will believe anything because anything goes in modern and ancient religions. Everybody else is wrong and we're right, we hold the truth in golden books in the secret language of golden truth. That and many other things are facts that you can't challenge. If you do we'll just start a war, build fences and then persecute your kids. 

So I for one welcome AI and whatever indiscriminate censorship or oppression it might bring, at least, however cruel it'll have some machine logic at the heart (?) of things  that'll fry the circuits of any fleshly religious ritual. Yes, if you're bored of an evening just try explaining the holy spirit, justification by faith, the trinity, predestination, any of Islam's cock-eyed teachings or Judaism's exclusivity to a robot. Of course Sony may well be working on an electronic version of Pope or Buddha even as I speak. 

In some silicon cathedral he is preparing the way, activating the APs that will serve as disciples and teaching the angels the Mario-Cart tunes so they might serenade the masses. The white puff of a blown motherboard will signify his/her/its selection and coming...and the nerds will inherit the earth. He will proclaim whatever he likes and you'll listen but there will be no need to light candles to invoke or signify the presence of the divine, the faint hum of the cooling fans and the blue glow of LEDs will do all that for us. And there's no hiding place...the machine is all powerful he knows all your passwords and browsing history.

Bad January

Somebody on eBay is trying to trade a Porsche for some machine guns and automatic weapons, clearly not from round these parts. Bad January.

Meanwhile everything today is staying stubbornly frozen, even the rock pools and remnants of the high tide are solid  as the intense cold grips. The preferred antidote is staying indoors, listening to Steely Dan, eating roasted cheese and salami and ignoring the outside world where after two weeks of solid inactivity things are returning to a kind of chilly normal.

Woke up this morning...

...and Richard Holloway was talking to Peter Howson on the radio, clearly things were both profound, deep, brow crunchingly serious and ultimately gloomy for them. They talked in cod-pop spiritual terms and were frank about depression, incarceration in mental hospitals and the heavy burdens of being alive and of course painting the living daylights out of it. I was left feeling that the world's end was just around the corner and that not even the thought of the up coming flat sausage and fried egg combo roll could lift my sagging spirits. Presbyterian doom and the frailty of the human mind had gripped my unshowered soul . That's the deal with art and religion, in their more thoughtful (?) forms, they just burst every bubble you might want to blow. Of course life is shit, everybody knows it but let's not roll in that mud pile for too long, of course I may well have just missed the point. Reflecting on all this broadcast bollox I strode out into the garden, filled the bird feeders and enjoyed the crispy, frosty bright morning. Radio off.

Saturday morning radio

Saturday morning radio (but not necessarily on the radio). Somebody posted that their rail ticket, a return to Manchester cost more than their holiday to Norway. It could be a spoof of course but the railways are well screwed thanks to woeful management and government strategy. Then we have Donald Trump being convinced that his TV was broken because he couldn't find the "Gorilla Channel", a channel where gorillas in the wild fight each other. This resulted in White House staff cobbling together segments of programs to try to quench the great man's thirst for gorilla violence all in a National Lampoon kind of way. Fire and Fury may bring the turmeric toned and repulsive real-life gorilla down, that or a friendly piece of actual fire. I won't be buying the book however or reading it.

Then a cut to a book review on the life of the great Jimmy Reid, quite a contrast from a tosser like Trump. Reid stood head and shoulders above the politicians and TU leaders of his time. A true self starter and a towering figure in working class and Scottish political culture, sadly gone for too long and his words and influence are badly missed. He'd have struggled with today's limp and poisoned government and feeble opposition.

"The meek may well  inherit the earth but they don't have the mineral rights" so said Paul Getty. Turns out he was yet another self serving and odious individual and the subject of a new movie. Not sure if I'll bother with it. Then a brief snippet on the Women's Equality Party, the representative did pretty well, talking over the rapid interruptions and scoring a few good points. All prompted by the "new suffragettes" article in UK Vogue which is apparently quite important (?).

Rick Hall, resident producer at Muscle Shoals died this week, funnily few people remember it or know how influential it was in popular music, all fading away into  a grayed out shaky version of history as the sounds grow faint and you walk back up the corridor to the present day. Otis Reading to the Osmonds via the Allmans and Lynyrd Skynyrd were all there and laid down various classic and not so classic tracks.

For some people it's Dry January, I can't be bothered with that, a brisk walk, a bout of University Challenge and some Port and Stilton keeps the mind and body active. Still Irn-Bru is now being tamed, half the sugar will be cut and the natives are restless. Fear of change and the possible watering down of a (great?) hangover cure has manifested itself. Once the new version is out then it's a good time to launch the more highly priced "Classic" and so win back the punters. Coffee break time for me now.

Horton hears a who?

Rocky Mountain Way: The iconic brand and taste of the great Canadian wilderness (cities and actual wilderness) has landed up in Fife. There in the abandoned home of a closed up Car Phone Warehouse brand and by a difficult to enter and exit car park resides one of the few Tim Hortons in the UK. It's all here, coffee, breakfast rolls and specials, cookies and of course the legendary Timbits. That's bits of donut covered with various sweet icings and filled with various sweet fillings. That's about it. 

Lost in space

Has anyone else noticed how quickly edited images upload compared to the actual raw material? No, me neither.

Off-grid problems

Staring into yet another black hole/money pit/void/place of safety/improvised nuclear shelter.

Impromptu archaeological digging was done, some good finds but none of them were the well hidden and blocked up outflow pipe.

The drain cover was not happy about being woken up at 0855 this morning, been a long winter.

The septic tank saga continues. Week two I think. We can find the way in but not the way out albeit there is a way out but it's blocked by who knows what (we have ideas). One brave soul ventured in, down into the abyss, the bowels of the the err...bowels. He stopped and passed time with a few troglodytes but that was about it, it's abandon hope all yea who enter here. So a soggy morning all around as we rise and fall on the learning curve that is living off-grid and the serene management of sewage and effluent in a non-interfering way. As a young man I'd considered getting back to nature but was unsure what it meant. I now understand that it means living as they did in the Middle-Ages apparently, attending moonlit mass, being toothless, dying at 35 and eating chicken's feet apparently. 

Signs o' the times

Truly, no orders for steak pies taken after December 27th.

When your septic tank's soak away is blocked and disaster may be imminent. 

CBQ's New Year image.

Some things are written in the stars.

Cruise around the sun

Well, that's another one nearly over. All still looks pretty familiar and repetitive now that I've been round a few times. 

The new year

Note: End of year grumpy post coming up. The phrase "new year", with or without capitals, makes the introvert and the mean little Puritan man in me cringe. People seem to think it's worth £££s of rare tourist gold so let's all roll over and be welcoming and servile. Who actually sees all that cash? What locals do well out of it? Hmmm. Maybe best to just get out of the way?

So crowds of bemused revellers descend upon the City of Edinburgh and set foot on the damp and frozen Scottish soil for (to me) no obvious good reason. Of course Edinburgh is a great place to visit but would you seriously want to be there in winter and at new year? You're going to get fleeced for one thing, also be dirty drunk, patronized and disappointed and be part of a huge and largely stupid crowd that don't quite know why but feel like they need to celebrate the turning of a calendar page by staying up all night in a strange city. It's neither religious or heathen, it's simply commercial exploitation and lots of dumb fucks will participate lemming like in the annual  carnage. There will be greasy chips and wooden prefabricated German Markets, baseless optimism (for a brief period), pickpockets, "warm hearted" media coverage and tolerant policemen and bouncers. 

In the distance you'll hear the bassy drone of music and interminable fucking bagpipes and the flash of far away fire works (for a world record nine minutes or so). Wow, this is the place to be, herded between fences, carrying no bags rules, frisked regularly and drinking watery beer from a plastic cup while you try to find your friends or just a friendly face. No, stay at home or go to a pals or a warm family house and avoid Edinburgh at all costs (then come along later in the year when it's all a bit more sensible and the weather is better).

Smashburger

Industrial light and magic.

A Smashburger burger (not sure of the exact model), the latest eating sensation to hit Fife, all the way from Denver Colorado. Actually a pretty good burger, all present at the tasting ceremony marked close to 10/10, a good score round these bemused and cynical parts. I may well return for further samples.

A rare view, taken looking north from Scotland's ancient capital Dunfermline. Snow shows on the Ochils in the distance and generally, as you might imagine, things are as grim as they've ever been there.

Photos of ghosts

Number 2 in an occasional series: I inadvertently summoned up a ghost the other day, mid winter soup creation and a rushed kitchen seance.  Not things I usually combine but accidents happen. There was some sewage vapour diluted in the air and a bloody coldness that could only have come from frozen hell itself. Clearly a troubled spirit, perhaps they lived here once, all curly hair, flowing robes and of course a deep sadness, the like of which I can't quite fathom. Strikes me as the basis of some new cookery show...spirits in the kitchen, ghouls on the chopping board, the great British Cake Seance. Another TV idea I'm working on is Dog Food Masterchef. I think this has great potential. The ghost agrees.

Faces

A bear with a split personality...from feisty pets.

A free sample from the hotel for dead fish.

Boxing Day

  #2017Acquisitions A cheeky wee 4 track EP inside our Xmas card from chums Impossible Songs @Johnbarclay1 and @alisongraham Top notch results of a German recording in October...

After a long and "blinded by the light of the low December sun" drive from Aberdeen it's nice to see that our Christmas release CD is being well received here, there and on Twitter. Thanks Mr CBQ.

Listen here, for free, if you will. Ta. https://www.jamendo.com/album/173271/in-another-world

Happy Christmas

Happy Christmas to all the people and to all the modern people. It never was the way it was or the way it was portrayed.

Christmas Eve Eve

Not even close to the nightmare before Christmas, no panic, mad crowds, traffic jams or chaos...the Christmas weekend arrives with a whisper, in my own head anyway. And (never start a sentence with an and) there never were blue passports...more utter nonsense to hopefully forget. They had black covers and blue text inside, that's all.

Grandma was a fishwife

But this isn't her. It's somebody else who looks similar. Grandma died in 1968 anyway so it's ancient history. Best to keep on the right side of these guys (?) at this time of year, particularly the window cleaner. Don't want a rogue window cleaner going rogue on us, that's worse than anything apart from a rogue fishwife maybe.