Miles McClagan - 7 Things

So obviously Collingwood lost, which was a shame, but I'm over it, it frees up a lot of time on weekends. I have been amazingly lazy today, I've sat around watching Bill Bailey DVDs and eating Milky Ways on the couch. I was even bored enough to consider going back to Yahoo Chat, but I'm never that bored. Besides, they still owe me for my work for them the Yahoo people, so I've sat it out since then. Sundays are always slipping through my fingers, I work really hard all week (comparitively) to get to the weekend, but all I've done with my weekend is go to JBHIFI and watch Collingwood. I've been stuffing around on Youtube, watching old videos, and I rang my Mum in Scotland, just to find out the news in Scotland. Not much she said. Well, I said, can't you just tell me something interesting and she said no, I'm not being your narrative device, come up with something on your own. So really I got nothing. I don't even have a pet, and I'm sure you don't want to hear about one of Dads friends trying to be my friend and down with the kids and talking to me about Sneaky Sound System (of all the sound systems, easily the sneakiest!) - see, i really got nothing...if only I had a dog...

So my neighbour is out at the moment, watering his garden. He's not my favourite person in the world. Apparently, the old people who owned this house used to have him round all the time for wine and games of Go Fish, and when I moved in he tried to continue the relationship and of course, I wasn't having any of it, so he got a bit weird. I've become convinced over the two years I've lived in this house that something other than red wine drinking was going on - looking at him and his bearded face and open necked shirt, I think they might have been swingers. One day, when I was watering the garden, he actually came over and moved the hose onto a different set of flowers when I wasn't looking, just because he had made that decision. When I went over and changed the channel on his TV with a universal remote control, he seemed unimpressed weirdly. For some reason, I have about 6 universal remote controls in my drawer, and I have no idea where they have all come from (1). Also, when I bashed my car off the driveway gates when I was backing out one day, he sprinted from his house, waving his arms around like a mime artist and pointing at my busted tail-light. I was like, I know, I'm not stupid, I'm not Anna Nicole Smith, I am cognescent of the fact I've dinged my car, but he continued waving his arms around like a mad thing, and then leapt dementedly over my small brick wall to get himself between the car and the road, just so he could jab his finger at the broken light. I drove off and left him standing in my driveway screaming after me something about "the RACT fuck". He hasn't spoken to me since my failure to acknowledge that I knew that he knew that I had hit my car, but he's always got really weird things outside his house for sale, like one stove would be normal, but why is he selling different stoves outside his house week in week out? And he was selling bags of manure last week? Incidentally, at the garage sale we had before we moved back to Scotland, I made 1800 dollars and sold one kid a beanbag that I stuffed things in, like toys and carrots, just so he could have a nice surprise when he got home(2). My neighbour is now putting things in his van - I think he's looking into my living room, probably got his eye on my stove...

The best neighbours we've had were the ones we had in Scotland. In Scotland, we lived in this really claustrophobic circular street where everbody always knows your name, and they're always glad you came (as long as you don't nick their parking spot). They (our neighbours) were great, even though they could talk and talk and talk. When we moved out, they ended up with this really large brown haired woman in our old house, who they rather touchingly hated on principle. She bagged out the wallpaper in my room - my bedroom had a soccer theme and was in the colours of my soccer team St Mirren, with black and white wallpaper (3) and she hated that. Out neighbours just totally ripped into her for bagging it out, and a big street feud was born. Our street was always having feuds though - we had this woman called Big Irene, her husband only had about 3 fingers and was always massively drunk and threatening to batter people while staggering around the swing park, he tried to kick one of my friends off his bike once and fell over in the sandpit and was still lying there two days later, and she was always sticking her bib into everything. She went across the road once to ask a bloke putting a garden gnome in front of his door if he had a permit to put it up. The blokes not unreasonable response was to threaten to shove his garden gnome where the sun doesn't shine. I remember when my home town got cable TV - we were one of the first trial towns in Scotland to get it, and we got it for free for the first two months. Incidentally, when we used a screwdriver to turn one of the screws four turns to the left, we got every channel in Europe for free. Big Irene was outraged (who told her!) and she was threatening to tell everyone on the council about this scandalous use of the box until someone threatened to then tell her off to the council for her husband urinating on the mini bus. She still lives there, and last time I was home she brought me round a big bag of Tunnocks Tea Cakes, oranges and Cream Eggs, like I was four. I think she was just "daein her nosey", and she surely remembered I was allergic to oranges (4), but her gesture was uncharacteristically nice. I think she liked me...that's even more worrying...

When we moved back to Penguin we lost that sense of claustrophobic street living, and life was pretty dull. We lived in a house that wasn't really near anything - apart from some train tracks and a bakery that you couldn't see in because the window was just covered in awards and certificates. The guy in the bakery would always tell you the Queen opened his bakery, but I think that was complete rubbish. He had some really attractive staff, so I was quite proud to say they were our neighbours, even though technically our neighbours were on the other side, a family of Mormon adhering Koreans who's kids wore suits and who's mother I saw once sitting mournfully on the Penguin swings, drunk out of her mind, singing Chers If I Could Turn Back Time. I've never won an award for my cooking, although I did win one share of the Wynyard Hotel in a poker game when a friend of mine made it up as a prize when he was stoned (5). The bakery made the worlds best lamingtons (I don't really trust pink lamingtons, I have a natural suspicion of them for some reason, and am likely to ask for brown ones only (6)), and it was where my school bus would drop me off, right out the front of the bakery. My current best friend used to get off there too, and sometimes she would see me but was too shy to talk to me (isn't that sweet?). Our school bus was always full of trouble and incident - one time, I was sitting on the bus and threw a Push Pop at someone and got thrown off by the bus driver. However, what I do know is that my first kiss (as in proper pash, not just kisschasy), if you think my neighbour was the bakery, was actually out the back of my neighbours house. It was with a girl called Vicki, a blonde girl who was 16 to my 14, and the circumstances of our intense pash are lost to time. She worked at the bakery, and she kissed way, way, way harder than me - I guess I wasn't as hungry as she was, she was seriously intense, but hey, it was a good pash. Incidentally, that line, about her kissing harder than me, that's from a song by Tracey Bonham called Kisses, and that's my favourite ever song (7). I don't know what happened to Vicki, I didn't see her much after that, in fact the last time I saw her, she was pashing another boy called Joe, but she looked at me and winked as she was doing so. I now think that perhaps had I stayed in Penguin and not lived in Burnie, maybe me and Vicki would be the power couple of Penguin...she was certainly ambitious, she wanted to go and become the guitarist in Guns and Roses, and let's face it, the way that bands gone, she probably was at one stage...

However, the main question of this freeform jumble of thoughts is.... So...how did I do? Good? Bad? Indifferent?