The rules and regulations of Ayrshire society

Someones calling me darling - I'm listening to Ayria on my IPOD, and I'm drifting into a slightly hungover state, idly choosing between different brands of bottled water sprung from the same tap, settling on the familiarity of one I've tried before, hearing my Dad in my head going me for my stupidity. She's calling me darling like she knows me, smiling at me, telling me where the two dollar coin I dropped is, asking me what I want to order, I don't know, and she drops the pretence, she's tapping her pen and losing patience, and I still don't know, but I'm standing my ground. There's no one else in the queue, her queue, but she's still awkward, folded, impractically impatient, not even filling in the silence with some idle dusting. In the end, I order pancakes, and out the corner of my eye, I see her fade, tired, sick of everything, peering over glasses, sick of taking orders, tired of her job, the same expression I give every day. I take my order number and go, leaving her to pound on the desk as I probably do. I walk into the open air and take a seat, uncomfortable that the Jam Factory is a place that mixes such tired impatient grumpiness with Jordin Sparks music, poorly spaced tables and faintly undercooked pasta. The table waitress almost falls over trying to squeeze herself through tiny gaps between the tables, and all around me, people are discussing art, literature, pretencious holidays that take up entire seasons...we're talking about Dale Thomas and how much I hate him at the moment. I'm uncomfortable, and I leave quickly. On the way back, a woman is taking pictures of the seagulls. She smiles and tells me how wonderful Hobart is - I summon up the local pride to lie, to say it sure is, but I'm confused, I don't say it convincingly, and she stops our brief interaction to go back to adjusting her cheap brandless sunglasses. I get back into my car, turn up Robyn really loud, and run away, more comfortable in my house, more comfortable in my spa, waiting for the day to fade to black...

Where I come from, Ayrshire in Scotland, it's a place I genuinely fear for - it's slipping into a Wisconsin Death Trip style madness that is hard to recover from. The paths are littered with a million pieces of chewing gum, covering the road like a pattern or design. My home town has given up, a once prosperous new town, a place for Glaswegians to live and work and get out of the city now decaying, Thatcherite neglect lasting and neverending. Half finished buildings linger in the distance, a proud and prosperous shopping mall surrounded by derelict charity shops and travel agents where the girls are hot from a distance. The people are genuinely going insane, clinging to a bizarre and cult like series of rules and regulations that outsiders could never understand. My Mum is there at the moment, and she just suffered from the eternal struggle of outsider vs system - she didn't have her exact one pound fifteen for the bus, because the system dictates everyone must have the exact change, and got into a massive fight with the bus driver. She couldn't tell what was a five p piece, and what wasn't, but she still has a Scottish accent, so she just looked mental trying to work it out. My auntie, her sister, then forgot her pensioner pass, and she copped a mouthful as well, turning from the defender of the system . On the bus, there's a special seat for pensioners, and you have to have a pass to sit in it, and without the pass, the system cracks and bubbles, and random strangers will bicker as to who is a pensioner who gets the magic seat and who doesn't. My Mum pointed out that actually the seat was for disabled passengers, but she received blank stares. If you don't know any of this incredibly convoluted system, you are likely to get on the bus, sit in the special pensioner seat, and try and pay with a ten pound note, and be hissed and jeered by the insane masses. And by the time the system breaks you, by the time you know all of this, they cancel a service, as they did with the number 26A to Kilmarnock when I was there, or worse, change a driver, and the madness begins anew...

The cancellation of the 26A to Kilmarnock, it caused absolute carnage. It made the bus into town more crowded, and changed the route to go outside more pubs, picking up more drunks - a Rangers supporter got on, and talked about how he was going to walk to Manchester for charity only to be told he was usually so drunk he couldn't walk across the road. And that was before I saw the man in the wedding dress. There are good people in my home town, but defeat is definitely in the air. As we hurtled along the bus route, I watched the single mother flirting with the bus driver for the umpteenth time, and I looked out the sticker covered window and saw a girl, no older than fifteen, strung out of her mind on drugs, sitting on the pavement being absolutely berated by her boyfriend, who was about twice her age and twice the width. We made brief, meaningless eye contact, and then the bus moved on, leaving her to continue to deal with her fate. Outside the once prosperous shopping bit where I used to walk with my Dad, there's now just one shop, one shop holding up the inevitable demolition of the whole centre, as it crumbles into condemnation. The one shop is owned by a Pakistani man, he had a petition on the counter, one that said he'd always been there for the local community, and now we had to save him. He has his Kit Kats under the counter, sick of them being stolen by the wasteful hands of the smack addicts. Good people go about their day there, his harassed staff, the friendly cleaner, but they are broken down by the hopelessness. I went up there to get the Sunday Post, and was almost bowled over by a giant black dog, a real one not some sort of poetic metaphor about despair. The staff there said that was Mickie, and he had the run of the place. Mickie looked like he was about to bite a kid on a bike, but they were laughing. "Oh that Mickie," they said as one, "such a good dog!" - a girl in a TATU T-shirt rolled out of the bushes, looked at the dog, and had a panic attack, and hid behind a pole. I did much the same, at least without the TATU T, until the dog had passed. The dog was a local, and I no longer was, so he had the right of way...

In the bakery in the mall in my home town, a small and bizarre windowless place that tests your very limits of patience and sheer desire to eat a tasty cake with a syrupy strawberry on top, there's two queues, one that snakes longingly and endlessly towards the hot food, the sausage rolls, the bridies and the pasties, and then, midway through your jaunt towards the pastries, a second queue forms, snaking off to the right towards the cakes. There is absolutely no way on Gods earth that the cake people and the sausage roll people could ever, I don't know, maybe go 10 metres to the side and get something off a different shelf. No way in hell. They operate in different worlds. Now, when I went in there to get myself a fudgy donut, I didn't know this, and it caused genuine anarchy. An old woman in a grey coat tapped me on the shoulder and said "whit queue ye in son?", as if dealing with an escaped mental patient. What queue was I in? The queue for the bakery I thought? I said I didn't understand, and she showed me pity, and pointed out the system, one queue for cakes, one for pastries. I understood, and luckily was just in time to make my corner turn and head for the cake department. The old woman beamed at me paternally, as if she just taught me to ride a bike. However, I still wondered, what would possibly happen if someone wanted a sausage roll and a cake, in some of sort of bakery attempt to balance ying with yang (I didn't say that to her, she was probably racist, and mentioning Chinese names would make her uncomfortable). As I took a bite into my fudge filled treat, I saw her lingering with her shopping, and I asked her. "Naebody ever gets the two things on the same dae!" she said, decisively. But what if..."Naebody!" she said, and that was that. The system dictated that no one would do that, and I regret that I didn't have time to try it before I flew back to Tasmania. I shivered awkwardly at her mad, decisively crazy eyes, and moved on, as she watched me disappear slowly from her view...

I still love the place though...it just scares me...and don't question the bus timetables...for gods sake...