The confusing view from the bridge

I nearly broke my finger yesterday. I was struck by the space that was around me, the utter lack of people and the utter lack of movement around me in the middle of a supposed shopping centre, and in the middle of this, my finger slipped in a gap on one of the insidious metal rails that surround Eastlands like an invading army and it jarred against a screw as it tumbled into the abyss, bending it back, bringing my thoughts back to immediacy. I've never broken a bone in my body - and to be honest, I don't do anything that would encourage the action, but for a moment I thought perhaps I had snapped the streak, but life moved on quickly because the pain went away after an hour. Could I have sued? Perhaps, but I'm not wired that way, not wired to seek damages from minor incidental contact. If I did, my relationships would probably be incredibly litigious adventures. The space surrounding me was so jarring, and so poetic in one sense, that I didn't mind a little bit of physical pain appreciating it. The shops seemed to be running entirely on empty, my usual joustabout with an adventurous single mother swinging a pram violently not even an issue. It was lunchtime, and yet there was no illumination to the place, no buzz, just space, vast cavernous space, like a parting of the bogans. I appreciate space now I'm older, although I can still hear my mother yapping in my ear that I shouldn't be such an old man. I can't help it. Space is a precious commodity to me - time and space to think isn't easy to get. The entire weekend being taken up being 100ed different people around the visitors but none of them myself was exhausting. Some school girls were by the side of the road today, having ploughed their car into the back of a tree, they were fine, but they were milling around, giggling nervously and looking a bit shaken. I don't miss having to explain my actions to others, I can say that, because one of them, all puppy fat and dimply freckles, was on the phone as I drove past, probably telling her Mum what had happened. Mum and her sister were talking last night about whether I could look after a wee "wean" - I think I could, but they think if the child started crying, I'd lose it. I think I could handle it, but knowing my Mother she'll bring a child around tonight for me to look after, just to prove a point. Still, at this point, I don't have any responsibilities to anyone but myself, and I quite like this, but I still feel like I don't get enough space and time to relax. My holidays are entirely spent in the lounge rooms of Scottish family members who promise to keep in touch but never do, or listening to what the recycling man thinks of me buying extra papers that increase his workload. My sleep is fitful, my dreams so vivid and colourful that I wake myself up in the middle of them trying to struggle through some imagined problem in 3hree dimensions. So this is probably as relaxed and carefree as I can feel, wandering around the aisles of KMart with nary a care in the world. There's a big red ball on the floor, spiky and pumped up and proud, just sitting there waiting to be kicked. With what can only be described as a gleeful punt with more oomph than grace, I smashed it against my better judgement hard against a pile of Miley Cyrus pencil cases, completely involuntarily and childlike, but then the eerieness crept in. There were no staff around, no customers, no one to stop this silly moment. I looked around, as the shelves gleamed and sparkled without no stock on them, and I wondered if this was what a recession was meant to feel like, a solitary vigil for the lonely shopper, no longer a slave to credit card debt, indulged enough to knock Miley down off the shelf. Or if it was just so rare that there was no one around, no one that I needed to avoid or talk to, that my mind simply couldn't cope with it. Or I was just a bit sleepy and hadn't woken up right and didn't notice a bunch of people wondering what the hell I was doing nor the security camera whirring away in the background.....

Peace of mind has been my greatest achievement in life. Sure, it's not climbing a mountain, it's not rafting down some mighty river, it's not even winning a Fantasy American Football title against all odds, but it's taken a long time and I'm glad that I've got there. I've still lost something in the transition though. When I went to my hippie primary school being encouraged to be arty and paint and sing Peter Coombe songs when we felt like it, I was the life and soul of the party, and I've never been that way again. I used to sit in the back of Dads Torana and they would bet me I couldn't be quiet for 5ive minutes, and I could never manage it. Not a single time. Mind you, there wasn't a single time that Chocolate Brown bomb would not feel like it was about to plough off the road. Now I could, and I think that's a positive and a negative. In silence, I am uncomfortable, if other people are around me. Well, generally. I've been positively gleeful in large crowds of shoppers and disconsolate in solitude with one other person around me, and I can never quite reconcile my feelings to a consistent level, but I do OK. Tasmania is good for thinking time - it encourages creatitivity I find. Long walks around Kingston can be quite inspiring, even if it's just my consistent participation in a Truman Show style farce where every time I step across a driveway a car pulls out and nearly flattens me. So few in number are the people that anytime you see someone, you have enough time where they aren't faceless, they seem to mean something, to represent something, to have a facial movement of vivid colour. I spent ten hours in London one night and can't tell you a thing about it, but the old copper haired jogger that strolls around, crystal clear, her movements aching but defiant. Mind you, I know a 4our year old who sits on her couch, watches The Wiggles, and tells her Dad to go away because she needs some me time or some alone time, and suggest he goes and does something else while she has it. When I walk around Kingston, each individual little It's not really like that in my home town in Scotland, and it isn't even that there's a vast disparity in population or better shops or restaurants where people gather and hide in food loving groups. It's just different, you get ensared in a hydra of detail and dogma and strange routines that stifle all independent thought, Marys tights ripping and the two stringed pie queue taking so much time to figure out night becomes day becomes night again. The positive of course is that you have people in your immediate vicinity who, for instance if you are making a short film as happened in my street, pitch in with sandwiches and script ideas - the negative is that you might have a wonderful idea for a piece of writing and lose it out of your beanie clad head as soon as you get old about Wee Wullies potato patch. The lasagne still haunts me from last time - there were no fewer than 4our phone calls checking whether I liked a lasagne that was cooked for me. It's no surprise that I hold Ayr train station to my heart - not that anyone who's been there would find it's mix of standard Twix stocking vending machines, threatening ambience and surly staff to be especially beautiful or inspiring, but it is to me. I walked across a bridge about 10en at night on my last holiday, and I had a complete surge of self confidence that I was doing this, that I was out, that I had gone to event X or whatever and been braver than the masses who told me to step outside the front door was to encourage a jolly old stabbing. As I walked across this little bridge between platform 1 and 2, a voice, clear as day, Ayrshire as Big Irene calling the police, thundered that it could murder a Twix. I took a step back, nervously, and looked around, before it dawned on me that it was actually my own voice, my own thoughts so clear, if for no other reason than in the hurly burly of street based lore, it was the first clear and independent thought I'd have time to hear since the plane landed. And of course, the machine was out of Twixes, which just made my brain have incredibly dark thoughts as the train click clacked through Ayrshire and empty badly lit fields, devoid of all poetry, but packed with functionality and usefulness...

That train ride was one thing, a moment of intriguing solitary thought that manifested itself in the form of a need for chocolate, but the casino down here sucks the life out of me - hanging around there for hours will only give someone the will to write sub Cure style poetry, and no one needs that. The local shopping centre isn't much better, but I like the poster that I walk past at the moment, a slightly bewildered girl with a polished model school smile advertising junky horrible bangles. It's so gaudy, it stands out as I walk about, as much as the big EXCITE sign that flickers above Nandos without a hint of irony and detachment. I don't feel especially excited - the sign just isn't that convincing - as I wander past unemployment row, a little section of shops that include a fast food restaurant, a video shop and a bookmakers, which to me just makes me feel like I'm partying like it's 1999 - a sandwich, a bet on a horse, and a rental of Jaws, fantastic, now only 5 more hours to kill until the missus gets home. It's funny to me that the most definable song devoted to partying in a specific year refers to a year I was unemployed, overweight, largely miserable and spent a full year getting better at Frogger. Well I guess it wasn't all bad. A cleaner polishes a sign for the Miley Cyrus film as I move slowly through the alleyway, and when he wants to remove it, maybe he can call on me to kick a ball at it to knock it over. He looks weary, perhaps he has some interesting opinions on Miley Cyrus and the culture of celebrity in the modern age. Perhaps he never thinks at all, and speaks in monosyllabic sentences that all end in the word nerfuckin. Who am I to judge a man at his work? Someone told me that there's been a huge rise in car thefts around the Eastlands carpark, a concession to Scottish style sweeping paranoia I suspect, but I still make the time to lock my car as a significant arctic blast hurts my spine. My car radio is still on, thumping some happy Jennifer Lopez song as the DJ says something about picking everyone up and making them feel good - she could only manage it by turning the wind off or flying me to Vegas. The cleaner retreats from view, professionally checking out his work as he walks off, I presume whistling. Mustn't stereotype. The air is grey and the place seems dark. There's a car park full of cars and no one moving around them. As I step away from the car, a man asks if it's hot enough for me, inverting the script as always so it's a joke, since it's freezing, although his timing is sub Cooper. I judge all comedy by Tommy Cooper, and if not Cooper, certainly Monkhouse. I shrug a quite feeble smile, because I'm not fully aware of what he said at first, and because the jagged yellow diamonds on his jumper are hurting my eyes. I find in these situations sure is is usually a pretty good non commital phrase. He seems happy enough with that, and shuffles off at the speed of senility across the car park. I don't know why people talk to me, my face is pretty clear. Who knows what thought strand he has disrupted. I can't remember, and I turn off Lopez and shuffle off in an aimless direction. Outside Nandos, some kids gather and lean with their back against the window, but they look so old, I have to check twice that they aren't washed up already, finished off amidst the gloom, although I must admit I never noticed today the sign that says EXCITE is part of a much larger set of glaring garish signs. Underneath signs that say ENTERTAIN and ENJOY, the kids slump without anything to do, one of them even on second glance noticably older, past school age, and munching on a chicken Taco so slowly it seems like it has to last all day. Throw in a frogger addiction, a moody girlfriend and a need to check e-mails every 5ive seconds, and there I was, a decade ago, hanging outside with a bunch of naughty kids. I move away from the mirror of poignant reflection, because I feel the need to get a sandwich incredibly quickly - once again food intrudes on a perfectly well formed thought strand - and even though I'm held up by the news Sandwich White Female has apparently picked up which causes a gaggle of non serving bakers, I don't mind, I've got thinking to do...

That train, of course, would have pulled into another train station, and then I'd have wandered down the steps to a taxi, and the taxi driver would have told me a lurid story of urban decay and by the time I hit my home of residence, I'd hit the pillow hard, maybe stir myself a cup of tea, and wonder why my adventures were so solitary. Ultimately in Scotland, there's not just space, there's distance, the daily adventures of Tasmania and the regional goings on of Hobart mean more to me than anything growing in Billies garden. It's impossible to reconcile. My reference points just don't match up. Plus, no one goes to the pub, no one goes for drinks in Scotland because they've convinced themselves a chib to the head is one step beyond. In Hobart, there's no chibs, and apparently no chips, a kerfuffling mix of ages behind the bar of this Kingston eatery gather together, 4our of them taking drink orders, with no one on the food part. I've come to appreciate this dis-organisation as part of this places charm, the gap between the garlic butter and the meal now stretching on into infinity. I'm telling my Mum my theory about Scotland, and she's not sure, but she's not ringing her friends there anymore. As the light dims and the last icy bit of coke is drunk, we say goodbye, and on my drive home, I stop in at the local store, and sure enough, another new family has taken over, and everything has been re-arranged. It's the kind of thing that takes to long to explain in Scotland, but here, everyone I know will appreciate it when I text them later. Somewhere in Scotland, my family exist frozen in many ways, going about their days, oblivious to what I'm doing, the pain in my finger. If I still lived in Scotland this would be a massively different set of words, different in tone and outlook. My finger though, it really hurts, it makes typing difficult, and in the solitude of my own home, given all the time in the world to do whatever I want, whether it be lying in the hammock, drinking a lime spider, or lying in the hammock with a lime spider...

I choose entirely to sook about my finger injury....

Dreams and songs to sing and alright jobs that aren't a career

Hobart Airport, which I touched on a long time ago, is not the worlds most exotic location. In the newsagents you can be guaranteed to be called darling, and your bags are checked with a level of thoroughness that entirely depends on whether the scanner is in mid conversation about his big night at Syrup. Hobart Airport is thus peoples escape - in the morning light of a weekend, it buzzes if you look the right away, people excitedly planning weekend trips, arms around each other, maybe dressed in football gear, maybe just lost in their comfortable silence, fetching coffee from the shop that owns the coffeeopoly in this place, and maybe you'll see a celebrity or 2wo stuck in transit, with no other option but to file out with the populace in some perfectly dreamt up socialist ideal where no one is in premium economy no matter how many times Fifi Box advertises it on the little in house monitor. However, today there was no charm - it was Sunday afternoon fading into evening, the coffee shop lady barely said a word never mind served up a darl as she stirred the coffee, and the staff of this particular budget airline - in Tassie, there's only 2wo options really - were downcast, explaining a delay with the minimum of customer service. They are getting fired you see, cut back by a credit crunch which seems to be a con, maybe outsourced onto a like it or lump it contract that makes working behind the desk less than palatable. My cousin - who is adopted from Korea and sees no irony in saying Melbournes problem is it's full of Asians - is standing there demanding vouchers or some sort of compensation for her plight, a ballsy move given the hissing cobra like hostility of the boy behind the counter. His future may be uncertain, but nothing stops the Barbie doll next to him from radiating as best she can. She never smiles, her hair is cut into a perfect short bob style do, and she stares directly ahead at all times. Her smile is fixed in place, but meaningless. I would suggest another career selling Bicardi in Ayrshire nightclubs, for we all know that smile, that professional grimace, those of us who schlepped around nightclubs named after Tunnels in the early part of the 00s. I turn away from the fight brewing over vouchers just as my phone crackles with a pile of txt msgs, all about football. It seems to just compliment the sadness around me, this pixellated stream of mockery as my football teams season, so they say, is over after just 1ne game. There's no spark to the place as the staff sigh and idly do paperwork, the people waiting to fly home slump into chairs with resignation, the coffee lady continues to stir and sometimes look like senility has crept in as she seems to struggle with where she is, and the fixed smile continues to un-nerve. Her lipstick seems to be a homicidal kind of pink, and the only kink in the composed facade is how she uses her sturdy blue biro to scribble down notes, with such intensity, it almost smashes through the paper, almost smashing it to well manicured shreds...

A day earlier, my mind is wandering all over the place. When I moved to Tasmania, I adopted a family, that wasn't really my family, but since I had no one else other than Mum and Dad, they sort of did in a crisis. Today the real family has re-unioned, and I'm invited, sort of a necessary presence without being a necessary presence. Time has past to such a degree that I no longer have to entertain the children, my old function at these gatherings, but now if I was running around with the kids and helping them find easter eggs it'd be a little creepy. I'm not good at small talk, and I'm quite happy and content now to simply sit and wait for conversational culdesacs to find me. It's probably my own fault I hate mingling, I take it as one of my many quirks now rather than perhaps challenging myself to be a bit better in situations like this. Alas, like Grandpa Simpson, I've found the only seat with padding, and I refuse to give it up to engage in small talk about the economy. About an hour in, having exhausted my stock conversation of work, sport and Big Ms, a black sports car pulls up some trendy post Presets tune thumping through the doof doof speakers, and a woman gets out, the Tasmanian equivalent of Glaswegian pub legend Wee 1690. That is, she looks 16teen from the back and 90ty from the front. From what I gather through whispered fingers she's a black sheep, loose of morals around football clubs, and the smiles around her are insincere, as she reclines against the fence in teenage garb sucking on a beer and twirling her dyed blonde hair around her fingers. Maybe her job is alright, but not it's a career. Whether the judgemental coven of superiority is accurately discussing her or not, and her spiky belt is certainly manna from heaven for those condemning, the distraction allows me to pass moments, nay, a solid 1/4 of an hour simply munching on Doritos, sending txt mgs and stuffing around with my feet up on the table. Just for a moment, I think 1690 is eyeing me up, which is disconcerting until I realise it's just a lazy eye, I think - but such considerations are swept up as someone, mingling like the groom at a wedding having drunk just as much, takes the seat next to me and asks what I think of football...my mind spins as I wonder how deep to go, should I really say what I think of my teams coach...I mean, it's a convivial evening, talk of public lynchings seems out of place...

I wonder sometimes about journeys and dreams and the changes that seem to pass through everyone. I mean, it doesn't feel that long ago I would run around on freshly cut grass with a cricket bat at these functions while waiting for a lard dripping sandwich to be passed my way, any male who helped themselves to coleslaw judged as more flaming than the steak, and smart arsed kid suddenly facing a pent up older male steaming in to hurl a cricket ball at his head, the women relegated to the kitchen to carve up the cheesecake. Now, as I stare over the edge of the balcony abyss, I'm no longer that little kid running around with the Swannee haircut that cost 2wo bucks and got me a musk stick. In fact, as i look down and one of the kids has loaded up an empty sprite bottle with rocks and is preparing to throw it at the head of another cherub, I wonder why I miss such times at all. Childhood is nothing if not the theatre of cruelty. The only thing with childhood to me was the possibility to write your own little place in the social order. I'm set in stone now, the person who reclines in a chair and watches and waits for the taxi home. I'm sure I had more options at one stage before I learned to read people and judge exactly when I was boring them. When I would sit in the rumpus room and throw darts at the wall and throw pool balls into the corner pocket and hope no one got Monopoly out because it would lead to violence, I don't remember being indulged though. I mean, I was a pretty spoiled child, but I was in the background at these events while the adults took centre stage. Now, it's the kids who rule the roost, a conversational outlet for the terminally silent. If in doubt, the kids are brought up from their violent struggles downstairs to pose, to say something cute, to just lie on the ground and gurgle. Since I don't have kids, I don't have this outlet, although it is by choice. I mean, I couldn't look after a goldfish from the Irvine fair, so ya know. I live a life of personal consumption, one as simple as possible. As kids run around my feet, stealing Cheetos from a bowl, I don't feel as though I've missed anything, but maybe one day I will. Someone talks to me about setting me up with one of her single friends, perhaps inspired by my lack of children to break the ice, but in a perfect summation of my priorities sometimes, I'm not listening because the Doritos are gone, replaced by cheese balls. Besides which, do any of her single friends wear blue eye shadow? I would think not...

Taxi drivers, they aren't as gregarious as they once were. Kahlua in the bloodstream is not condusive to me talking openly anyway, and after some mis-steps the taxi driver, a Wilford Brimley a like with a stern BBC mid 60s announcing voice, turns up the radio to sing along while I dream out the window. Kahlua, incidentally, I only drank in Paris. I was trying to impress a girl at the bar who liked silicon and poetry, but when I asked for a Kahlua and milk it caused such bafflement the barman got out a bottle of kahlua and a carton of milk and put them on the bar and shrugged as if to say well you show me. I'm thinking how did I get here as I pass the Southern Outlet, wondering if anyone ever found the ring I lost by the side of the road one night. Nice ring it was too. I feel a sense of survival by the time I get home, the explorer who got through the bush without being knifed by too many natives. Were I more relaxed, I could cope with such occasions with a certain panache, but there's still a Sunday drive to the airport to cope with, another round of hold the baby. I'm sure 1690 headed straight for Syrup - I'm sure she wrapped her aging limbs around the pole and hoped to find true love as Dave Dobbyn pulsated from the console of the plainly bored DJ. Or maybe I've just fallen for the whispers. I like that this is part of my life in some ways though - these little interactions were a lot harder when they were all I had, this group was all the people I knew in Hobart. I have friends now, really good ones, who get me through life, and this is an adjunct, a time to pass and pause and eat Doritos, and more importanly, a good reason to turn off Lily Allen for a change and get out of the house. On the television, there's a footballer who I hate, being criticised again, his fate sealed, his place in history set in concrete. I turn off the TV, slump into my bed, consider whether I'm too hard on people who are genuinely nice and happy to feed me all the spicy chip based snacks I want, and after the album finishes, Ihave a long, lingering dream about starting a small business, oblivious to the charms of Hobarts nightlife, oblivious to the dreams of those out in the world, trying hard, enjoying the music, maybe with a fixed smile and a resolute disposition...

Having survived the attack of the visitors though, I'm picking a nice nap as the finale of my Saturday...

Porky The Puppy and Bandits at 12 O'Clock

Cyber Hair in Kingston - where I get my hair cut, and when I say cut, I mean shorn like page 6ix of the army handbook and when I say hair, I mean my own singular hair and when I type like this I feel like I'm doing a Foghorn Leghorn impression - is a vacuum of intellectual thought. The people in there are very nice, very pleasant, but speak in strange hairdresser formed sentences, all about weekends and travel and weekend travel. I think it's just page one of the hairdresser handbook, until you can form a question which will lead to leisure time discussions, no scissors for you. I must admit, I keep myself from laughing - much like yesterday when I was having a serious conversation with someone while She Bangs by Ricky Martin was on in the background - every time a difficult conversation tangent, say, football, is fobbed off with oh my boyfriend knows all about it and then silence. Should I say hows your boyfriend? Is that weird? I never know what to do when the boyfriends love of Essendon is brought up. So many handbooks apparently, army, hairdresser, the reactive...I miss the good old days of Swannie in Penguin, a good old fashioned hairdresser. Actually, what am I talking about, he nearly cut my ear off once and used to play old Scottish records from the 50tys, it was shit in there. The musk sticks weren't that great. I've mentioned before the heady winter of 1996 when I thought I had an intellectual soulmate in my hippy hairdresser in Burnie until she buggered off to live in a caravan with her boyfriend and suddenly sounded like the kind of person impressed with a souped up Rav 4 and her Tolstoy quotations were suddenly less impressive and felt like shtick taken from the back of a book in the library. Oh fickle fate, how you mock me as the tram lines are shorn into my head. It's why my conversation is less than animated with the hairdressers, I don't want to get involved, I don't want to lose my heart, or my ear. However, my own mother has the last word on interactive snipping. Once she got caught up in a conversation about family - the family of my Mother made up more or less of 13teen redoubtable Glaswegian children, all brooded over by my quite fearsome Granny, and my Grandad, auditioning successfully for the role of most drunken Glasgow stereotype of 1954. Times were tough, in fact so tough I used to ask my Mum why she never wrote one of those poor is me books, and the reason is her family would say she was soft, and she was the youngest of the kids and the most spoiled, at least comparitively. The last broken biscuit in the tin made you a spoiled wee brat in 1963. Having brought up her family, the blonde in the hairdressers - I should point out, one of my best friends types, if you can have a type, because he couldn't care less about conversation while I would just despair I suspect - let the wind whistle through her head and asked if it was a problem having so many brothers and sisters running into her room and pinching all her stuff. She didn't have the heart to tell her that to pinch her stuff would have required simply rolling over in bed and reaching out and grabbing it since the "weans" were all pushed into one room. Such a revelation of a spoiled only child might inspire a head to the hand, a mock swoon and some sort of oh my god the deprivation motion, but to the hairdresser, it took several minutes to process the logic of such conditions, and even then, Mum said it didn't really sink in that Mums family didn't live like Von Trapps in some fabulous mock tudor mansion, but in a tenement in Pollok, crammed together, trying not to get on each other nerves - unless it was on purpose, and they wanted to tell Mums sister that on her first day at school, she was going to be left at the school and collected by the parental unit after 14 years continuous hard labor...

So as you can imagine, in moments where time is passing and no one is speaking, this story is sometimes trotted for a good laugh. However, it dawned on me recently that I was also guilty of such a faux pas. In fact, mines was far worse. It was the electrifying summer of 1991 - our nation was gripped by anti English feeling, Debbie had left me to pursue more ambitious boyfriends, the sensational anti English band Foolish Hit was peddling their single Smash The English Way down the mall, and I was gripped by the idea that I could, if encouraged, become a film maker and asked, nay, demanded that I be bought a video camera. My mother, having seen my enthusiasm for becoming a keyboard player wane decided not to spend any money on something I was only going to use to film men being hit in the groin with footballs. In all seriousness, I asked her if her life had ever been as difficult as mines was. Yes, poor cockney urchin you, with your pockets out-turned to the world. Now, I suspect there was a subtext to this, that even after 3hree years I felt alienated in the land of Ayrshire, that I was single and alone and...there was no subtext, I was just spoiled. Indulged in fact by parents struggling to keep their heads above the financial mess they were in while Dad scrubbed around Ayrshires lowest schools teaching Maths on short term contracts. That said, ambition such as wanting to be a film maker or, as I suspect was really the ambition, filming man being hit with football in groin to win prizes from Jeremy Beadle on You've Been Framed, tended to die on the vine one way or another in early 90s Ayrshire. Kilwinning did tend to thrive on exaggeration, everyone was having sex and hanging around the Horden Pavillion and listening to Altern 8 at fabulous illegal raves - no one was at home scared and alone or fitfully standing outside Tescos waiting for a date that never came. So it's strange to me that all this illuminated thought and creative thinking was never put on paper. Had someone been sat in the lunch room while we drank our Coke and ate our polo mints with a notepad, they'd have got a hell of a script for a teen movie, as kids from Beith made themselves weekend superstars and hardened criminals when all they had done was watch TV and hide from the world. I could have shot it on my JVC. Oh wait, I don't have one....Mummmmmmmmmmmmmmm...

There's a guy in Rosny who works I think in the phone store. He's the one I wrote about before, the one who smokes outside the shopping centre with his girlfriend, too cool for his environment, looking scathing of contemporary culture, nary a centimetre of quiff out of place. It'd be a great photo if I could take a photo of them both pouting and looking like they loathe everything about their environment underneath the big sign that touts how fabulous the place is. At least that's what I thought, but now I wonder. The other morning they were both all hands and touchy feely with each other, and when someone, I don't think it was me, walked past, he instantly stopped and stood like a nervous teenager being busted by his Mum. It was strange - and now they've put him in this big corporate T-shirt that he has to walk around in, it's neon and has a big question about phones it, and yesterday he had a jacket on over it and was walking around with his head down looking pretty forlorn. So now, he just seems less cool - about as nervy and fitful and dorky as I feel most days, just with better hair. The thing is, most of my secondary school years in Ayrshire were like that - you could only get away with people thinking you were cool for moments, a week at the most, before the mob would tear you down, challenge your exaggerated stories, and leave you sat at the edge of the lunch table wondering what just happened. Such ruthlesness would not only apply to people like me who were claiming to be part of some horrific urban decay while clad head to toe in designer clothes, but also those who claimed voracious and constant sex lives and then crumbled in the face of girls they liked. This was the most ruthless of all our torments, and as much as the boy we were tormenting would claim it was different because he liked her and she wasn't cheap like all those other girls, the illusion would drop to the floor and shatter. I never got used to this kind of banter, or outright slander, I never learned to lie particularly well in these situations. I came from a school in Burnie which was run by hippies more or less - you were encouraged to paint, to draw, to eat Saveloys and drink Big Ms when you felt like it, and to spend afternoons staring at the clouds. My imagination could conjure up what a could looked like - look Sarah, it's a sheep...again - but not a convincing story where I had sex with a slapper fae Kilbirnie who sold me E outside a rave while The Shamen played in the background...but I didn't have a video camera, does anyone want to hear that story...

I told my Dad once that I had made up a disease called suitcase syndrome, that I was going to use it, the fact we moved countries 3hree times in 10en years as my excuse for failing in life. I can't remember what he said, because we were in London and he more interested in perving on a jogger. My Mum wouldn't buy this though - she came from probably the last hardy generation, and any time Billy Connolly comes on talking about his difficult childhood she pulls this disgusted face and shakes her head. As much as we would talk around our lunch table at school about how tough our lives were, all we were doing was whinging on and on and making sure no one got the last whinge in. There were no illusions in 60s Glasgow, everything was just shite, and that was how it was, and you just got on with it. Of course, what sounds shite to me - 13teen in a room for gods sake - Mum shrugs off as just life. I could have got multiple whinges out of that one alone. Outside Big W today, there was an old man and woman arguing - I know what about, because while I was idly flicking through Porky The Puppy and sending my friend a txt about Britney this old boy with thick glasses and an accent that could command a reich of indeterminate number was yelling at this girl about the price of textas. He was vicious, cruel, cutting...while his wife stood, lip trembling, eyebrow raised to heavens. The girl didn't give a toss of course, maybe she was thinking about Britney as well. However he seems very pleased with sticking to the man...via yelling at a girl about textas. Outside the store, the wife, a sort of Lillian Frank type with more make up, is giving him both barrels. She has him pinned up against the skill tester telling him to go and apologize and she'll show him what tough is and yelling at a little girl like that how could he. Like he's been sentenced to wear an orange T, the man shuffles from foot to foot awkwardly and sulks, and I laugh at his plight as my IPOD fades to a dull hiss. The trouble with all illusions is they fade - illusions of hardness, coolness, toughness, that you live in horrible times, virility, being a film maker, that one country is a panacea to anothers woes...and all that's left is gritty Scottish realism...lifes shite, business as usual...

I might even make a film about it one day...

It was expected I would be bigger but my heaven wasn't what I wanted and my stories weren't cool enough

I've mentioned a couple of times that midday at Rosny isn't neccesarily a time when the poet - and if I'm not a poet, it's only because I get distracted somewhere around Nantucket - will find their inspiration. The surf shop is now closed, and the book store has closed, been stripped of fittings and even it's sign, so now it looks like one of those dodgy lock up garages from my youth in Ayrshire. If I peer in the slots will I see unsold piles of Monster Munch (a sort of Cheeto like snack) and Vimto piled up to the the ceiling? Perhaps, although no one seems keen to break in and find out, which makes it a lot less like the garages in Ayrshire, which were just hives of activity. For some reason today, I'm trapped in quite the contrasting pincer movement. The left pincer has an old man and woman - he in thrall to the cardigan, she in a pair of very Colbertesque glasses (that's Stephen, not Leigh) - simply walking down the stairs towards the taxi rank just holding hands. I don't know why I find this really sweet, but for some reason, it's just really lovely, especially since I just presumed she was helping the old boy down the stairs but then they throw in a bit of arm swinging and it's just really sweet. The right pincer has a gaggle of mid teen kids, trendy, superior, swearing loudly, 3hree boys not a drop of hair gel wasted, one girl, one of the boys behind her miming to punch her in the head as she begins berating her boyfriend about his physio appointment. Ah, implied violence, always a rich source of comedy, according to the boy who did it, because he's cracking up laughing. She has a Kathy Bates vibe to her, she seems determined to turn a relatively minor incident into a screeching, berating drama, and he's not helping, because he's alternately limping and then not limping, so perhaps her suspicions about the validity of his physiotherapy are telling. I leave them swearing, just as an old woman debates in her immaculately made up brain whether to step in and tell them off for their bad language, but decides to get a can of Red Bull instead. I can't see this girl and this boy walking around holding hands even 6ix months from now, and as they disappear from my view, the boy who mimed the punch tries to flip his sunglasses onto his face, loses all composure as he fails and they tumble to the ground, and then picks them up desperately to try and look cool as the girl from the make up counter - always happy to sell you all the make up the MAC can make - looks at him and smiles a sympathy smile. The old man and woman meanwhile walk serenly to Big W, without needing to say a word, and quite happily stare at the piles of Ryan Reynolds DVDs without a care in the world - well, apart from the fact they are buying Ryan Reynolds DVDs. Or maybe it's just me that cares...

Those garage forecourts in Ayrshire are my real childhood incidentally - the big one in Irvine was a big BP where my Auntie of fighting about the light switch fame would fill up with petrol. It had a big locked bit of it with piles of Monster Munch and Twix-s and Twirls and all the cool kids would claim that on a weekend they'd break into it with their girlfriends - who suspiciously they couldn't name - and sit stand have a feast and totally pash on. I dismissed this as conjecture and nonsense instantly, although I think it was disappointing to Debbie that we never did this break and munch on a dreary Sunday. Sundays were a hard day to kill in our relationship sometimes, and she'd get restless. I think my distinct lack of ambition was always disappointing Debbie, and maybe if I'd kicked a few doors down and just handed her a Turkey Twizzler once in a while, who knows where we'd all be? It was also the first place I saw a pornographic magazine, that particular garage. With my 10en year old brain I did used to wonder why the boobs were on display so prominently, but the Monster Munch needed a triple combination lock to get at. Debbie thought it was an E lab they had out the back. I suspected this was nonsense, but maybe she was right. On the way to see St Mirren, in the post 1990 era when we had a car that actually went, the post banana era as our family called it because we bought a big yellow car that never left our garage due to a variety of faults, we would pull into this garage, and as my Dad filled up the petrol, I would scan the forecourt for stories, for interesting families, even someone with cheeks like a baboon to pull faces at. Every so often, just as the clouds were starting to swoop dangerously close to me and that curious Ayrshire smell would roll in, you would see 2wo people just starting a relationship. You could tell, they were inevitably young, he had a nice car, and when he would leave to get Petrol and Irn Bru, she would adjust her bra and check her teeth. For a while, I thought that's all relationships were like that. As long as she kept her teeth clean and he kept the supplies of fizzy drinks up, everything would be OK. And sometimes, just as the camera pulled back to reveal her true identity, she would smile and wave and you'd wave back, and they'd drive away in some dramatic high speed way while you went with your Dad to watch poor quality soccer in dreary old Paisley. At least, you would if Dad had got the orange juice, he wasn't the most reliable shopper, and I was staring into the distance, or intently at the padlocked store of treats with a little voice in my head chanting go for it, so what chance did I have? It felt like that was my weekend, and that I'd just be in that cycle for the rest of my life, but what did I know...one day, we pulled out of that garage forecourt, and the view over my shoulder got smaller and smaller, the Monster Munch never viewed again...

Not that I was any better at holding hands mind you. I went to schools where holding hands was considered suspicious and because I moved countries, the leap to such things was never obvious. I went from Burnie and girl germs to oral sex discussions from Ayrshire 10en year olds, and then back to Burnie where everyone had caught up to Ayrshire levels of filth. Almost. I never got the gradual step. I can't remember whether I held hands in any of my relationships and certainly never went so far as to swing arms. Debbie was too much of a chatterbox to believe in comfortable silences, and my own parents are too hyperactive for that as well. They are silent during, like, The Bill on ABC, but they'll generally have a Saturday night argument. I used to think they were on the verge of getting divorced all the time, especially when we had to get Mum from outside Mitre 10en that time, but it's just them. They just had a big argument because they were talking about if they were re-incarnated where would they want to be born and Dad claimed he wanted to be American and Mum said he hates Americans which is true apart from Muhammad Ali and John McEnroe. No Scottish couple I know exists truly in comfortable silence. If there's silence in a Scottish relationship, it gives you time to think of grievances. About as close as I got to being in a hand holding comfortable silence relationship was with my netball playing girlfriend although it was really difficult to discern when the silences were comfortable and when they were uncomfortable. The most comfortable silence, oddly, was whenever one of her bogan netball team-mates would fight or scratch with their life partner - it was a netball team, so I couldn't definitively say boyfriend - in the Creek Road carpark. They would screech and holler and skirts would blow in the wind, and there would be noise and sound and fury and all of it was just skywriting that blew away in the wind as soon as a gust came. So we'd stand, maybe 60m away, pausing before we got in her car at the Putters Golf Centre, and we'd just watch and shoot each other these really lovely glances as if to say, phew, thank God we aren't like that, and it was quite sweet - until we got in the car, then we'd tear each other to pieces over who ate the last piece of chicken. Incidentally, I told her about the Monster Munch one day, and she said she would have broken in...I'm beginning to think that when I find a girl who will finally tell me that she wouldn't have kicked the door down and deprived a local business of it's chippy goodness, maybe that's when all those verses in the Valentines cards might finally make sense. Ah, but I'm always attracted to criminals. And blue eye shadow. So many strange elements...

In my mailbox, there's a membership pack from my football team - it's most striking feature is a chirpy over the top letter which promises endless glory and determination from the team. It's nonsense, they've been rubbish since people knew what Monster Munch was. There's that little part of you that always wonders if you could have played elite sport if you'd tried, but by the time I was about 12elve, I knew I wouldn't manage it. As I put the letter up on top of my little wooden table structure on which my laptop sits, I find an old photo from the Cross in Irvine from the 1920s or something. It looks quite sparse and tatty, there's Rangers scarfs in every shop window, and a little girl shooting the 20s equivalent of the finger, but it looks distinctly like the Cross I knew growing up. I love old photos, and I'd love to know where they all hung out, not that they look like an especially fun crowd. Everything about the photo just looks it came from incredibly tough times, while my boss today, the automon, was trying to quote from a book about resillience and teach us about hardship while we ploughed into hot cross buns, and she did it without irony. I know nothing at all about hardship - I think a failed relationship and not getting a Twirl counts as a setback. If I could, I would stopped her, grabbed the old man and woman, and let them speak at the meeting. They seemed to have coped with whatever hardships they had and just kept on walking, holding hands, with nary an argument about physiotherapy or a mimed punch. That said, I quite like arguing, and once, at one of those Ayrshire garages, my Mum drove off and left me, and I stood there in the cold for about an hour. I thought that this was it, and I thought she wasn't coming back, and I shivered for ages in my little pacamac, wondering what would become of me, as a couple smirked and laughed at me as they got into their late 80s super car, and drove off for a dirty weekend to Largs. And filled with angst, I went straight up to the stock room, I kicked the door open, and...there was nothing inside but pornography and swimsuit magazines in box after box. I was young, I only wanted Monster Munch, and turned around to see a horrified guy in a business suit looking at me. I tried to look cool and said something like wrong door. Eventually I walked home, trying to come up with a story where I sounded cool and I never quite around to it. Tonight when I got home, and turn up Those Dancing Days really loudly, there's Bridget from Gruen Transfer back on TV, which is always lovely, and my wind wanders off not just because she's on, but because I find it strange that I've found loveliness from such simplicity as hand holding, but also confused my mind with regrets from 20ty years ago, and yet, at no point today did I think about my own life, or what the hell I'm meant to be do...oh sorry, Bridget is talking...

Oh well, off to sleep, where I've never been a viking...yet...

PS. Sorry, but Bridget is lovely. And big thankyou to Doc for my 3hird ever award, and since it's for charm, I refused to swear in this post. In fact, the word poppycock hit the cutting room floor, just in case...

Downhill Hairpins on the Sewerage Road

Oh unevocative twisty road, where will you take me today? Not very far is the answer it seems, as I'm encased in traffic, glued into it as the Southern Outlet grinds to a halt with all the tedious inevitability you would expect from a Monday. In my car, there is no real glamour, just the faint breeze of the air conditioner, and the odd muted mumble from the radio. The local radio DJs are chattering about Tasmania not getting a new sports channel, and they are about to launch a comedy sketch on the subject which fills me with dread. Everything else in the car is still, and leaves plenty of time to think. There's no distracting view after all on the Outlet, no majestic city scape unless you like trees. Lots and lots of dead trees that all blend into one big supertree. And gravel, gotta love some gravel. We're high on a hill, but no bird hears our song, not today, not since we're all waking up to another week. A curmudgeon in a Camry tries to scoot down the emergency lane in a frantic dash for freedom, the kind drug users make mid high when they freak out and have to run out of the room, but he's forced into a humiliating climb down when no one lets him back in, and he sits impotent and stuck in the lane flicking his indicator. A man making such a dash for freedom truly learns how trapped he is. Mind, all I'm doing with my free thought time is remembering old episodes of Cheers, and remembering the volume of e-mails that I have to reply to. There are no intellectual thoughts floating through my head, no debates of philosophy, and no landscape on this road that encourages it. The impotent Camry driver after 5ive minutes pulls out of the lane, a feeble wave after sneaking back onto the road as a truck more or less lets him in. The radio DJs wrap up their sketch with a laugh so hollow and so grim and so forced, I want to open the window to perfectly animate the grey landscape, since I think it will make birds scatter frightened in formation from the tops of the dead trees. And in the car in front of me, a girl licking a big lollipop is grinning an illuminating smile as she looks at me, waving with the friendliness of an innocent child who is yet to uncover what a little bastard she can be. I suspect that perhaps I will be on this road forever at this point - trapped, somewhere between curmugeonly cutting off chaps, and little girls who's eyes are flickering from left to right in animation that can only suggest an overabundance of red cordial is swimming through her bloodstream. Her stash, as it were, would be great to share, but in these times, asking a little girl for a drink of her cordial might be considered a little distasteful, so I put my eyes back to the front, and resume the difficult process of no longer caring about anything...

Time, I've wasted a lot of it in my life. My Dad and I - and I apologize if I've said this before - once sat for 5ive hours in Melbourne Airport together between 1 am and 6am, just us, no one else in the whole airport, waiting for a connecting flight to Hobart. Well, it was just us, and this big big girl who looked Slavic in a tight orange top who for a while looked like the saddest girl you'd ever find, since no one came to pick her up, and then her family as one sprinted down the stairs and took her away almost on their shoulders like they were about to throw her in a volcano. Joyfully of course. I thought perhaps this would be incredibly boring, and was dreading it, but I liked the solitude, and it would have been more solitudianal (?) if Dad hadn't decided to declare his Fruit and Nut to Customs and not wasted hours on end answering Cadbury questions. I loved watching all the businesses shut up really late, I loved that slow meaningful moment between the girl with the ringlets shutting up Gloria Jeans and the cleaners staggering into view, hell, I loved our skeezy pilot strutting through the airport on his own out into the night sky with the unjustified air of superiority, a sort of Russell Brand with the ability to fly a plane and wear his pants a bit too high. My Dad and I don't talk - not in the conventional his Dad and him way where they literally don't talk you know because of that whole his Dads a complete git thing - I mean we talk, but not about anything that matters. We talk about Liverpool and Manchester United, not life and meaning. Perhaps it would have been a good time to do so - no one was around, there was cavernous empty space, the drone of the vacuum was still an hour away, and I don't think he was probed by a rubber glove trying to find a Bounty Bar...but of course, we didn't, I ran off to go on the Internet, and he sat and had a boring evening, time passing ever so slowly as he sat with his arms folded nodding off to sleep. I distinctly remember the time between 2:21 and 2:28 seemed to take an absolute year to pass for some reason, and had some enterprising Serbian family tired of hoisting their mighty assed child and been prepared to carry someone less taxing, I'd have volunteered, just to get out of there. In fact, I was trying to calculate whether I could get a taxi into Melbourne and get Maccas and ended up not doing it because drawing on the desk to work it all out passed much more time. Dad took it in stride though, passing the time working out the sheer pointlessness of a cryptic crossword. Eventually a coffee shop had the good grace to open at 4 in the morning, and we shuffled in to talk entirely about sport, and not how bored and cold we were watching the world wake up from tedium...

Eventually I get out of the traffic, through some nifty driving, sleight of hand, and everyone turning off to head in far more interesting directions. The Mercury clock seems to be on autopilot, jumping from time to time, moment to moment, although possibly I'm just distracted and don't know how much time has passed between snatches of radio conversation and people meandering across my path on their way to their own workplaces. I know a guy who once played a flight simulator for 16teen hours, putting it on autopilot when he needed food, just so he could say to girls he flew from Australia to, I don't know, the UAE and it was sort of true. That's true dedication to wasting time. My own contribution to killing time comes in KMart, where I hop from foot to foot bored staring at piles of DVDs, not looking at them, not reading the back of them, just sort of looking through them in the middle of a deserted shop. Given I started this year desperate to not only read The Kreutzer Sonata but write my own version, and now I'm staring at the back of several poorly made Hollywood potboilers in garish fonts while a man in a baseball cap is screaming at his son something about how he never listens to anything he says and yes, it feels like I'm wasting time today. Tolstoy, from my limited reading of the subject, he pities humanity for its pleasures, so he'd be ecstatic seeing the miserable face of the yellee, head down and sad little face dragging along the ground as he gets further and further away from his intended Wrestlemania game. There's a chill in the air that has nothing to do with the over amplified air conditioning as he wanders off idly and quite alone. Eventually the Seiko watch wrapped around my wrist, the watch which is just far too big for me and looks ridiculous but makes a satisfying click every time a second passes, tells me time in this urban sprawl is up, and I shuffle off, desperately hoping the woman at the door doesn't bit me a cheerful thankyou. For some reason, she makes it sound like she thinks I've stolen something, but I'm sure she doesn't mean it. She stands there all day after all, back against the wall, middle aged turkey neck out, and I'm sure time passes so slowly, she thinks she's flying a flight simulator straight to Dubai...

The drive home is a lot easier, once I weave my way like Frogger round 2wo buses and a somewhat bewildered hot rod driver who is doing 20ks under the speed limit in vast contrast to the proclamations of his own bumper stickers. I think on the way home of Burnie, mid 80s, when school would just take the afternoon off and let the kids waste time however they felt like it. It was fantastic, we would bolt down the hill, and lie in the middle of the football oval, staring at the clouds, waving at Dave the guy who cut the grass, and then staring at the clouds again. Sometimes you would have a girlfriend, and your relationship would go to the next level and you would pick what shape the cloud was together, other times you'd sit and stare at the cloud and pretend that someone was talking to you and ruining the moment. Of course, it was fantastic, just the kind of thing I need to be doing more of now. There didn't seem to be any need to get up and muck around on the monkey bars - except it was the domain of Pippa of course - and entire seasons could change and still the most severe argument anyone could have was whether the cloud was a pig or a sheep. The monkey bars, that was where the pressure was, not just to impress Pippa, but it required skill, it was a form of showing off, as much pressure as slow dancing or trying to paint a dog. When you looked up, you would see endless queues of boys gathered around there, waiting for the chance to swing and show off. For some reason, this all came back to me in the car park of Channel Court today. As I stared up at the sky, clutching my little bag of groceries and my single man shopping persona, a boy on a skateboard tried desperately to impress his own Pippa, and fell on his arse, skidding around the ground and coming to an undignified halt against the tyre of a 4Wd. No matter how much time I waste, the patterns of life continue to revolve around me. I want to tell him to relax, lie down on the football oval, and wait for someone to pass him a note that says so and so really likes you, tick this box if you like them back, but his Pippa has already walked off to buy pegs at Chickenfeed, and he checks his pockets, making sure that he hasn't lost his wallet, along with his dignity...

And the good thing is, all of this saved a long blog post about defragmenting my hard drive...

From 8am to 8pm, he's up and running, everything else is solitude

It's 8ight in the morning - I'm wandering around with an unsteady shuffle, the wheel clamps I have for shoes are still getting adjusted to, so I'm still a little bit shy of my full Rob De Castella walking pace that I normally break into. There's another shop shutting, although there end of lease sale sign is in chalk rather than the standard piece of paper stuck to the shutter doors. I barely notice though, flicking through Kenickie songs on the IPOD and trying to find a sane prediction in the tabloid newspaper I choose to read. My walk becomes more unsteady as the clamp digs deep into my cut, which makes me feel old, even before a gaggle of trendy youngsters sweep by in formation talking about how Grade 12elve Maths is an evil curse on humanity. Or they say it's fucked, one of the 2wo. Outside Boost Juice, the workers are congregating, sour surly promotions models not fully awake, not wasting any of their energy on smiling and paying their customers attention. Someone has The Presets on really loudly, in a vain attempt at motivation, perhaps the slightly older promotions model who appears to be the nominal boss. She has a I want to give a pep talk face, the kind you see on the front of employment brochures with a re-assuring smile who stabs you in the back eventually. The blonde promotions model looks ready to kill as she stirs the magical concoction. She takes a glance at the radio, and then shakes her head with bitter morning angst. Obviously not a fan. Of anything really. I wonder what it would take to motivate her - money, fame, the misfortunate of someone poor. I'd explain the concept of schadenfreude to her, but it would be wasted. She stares entirely down as she stirs, never taking her eyes off the juice, plotting to destroy humanity with every twist. I move on, just as the boss moves in for a pre-emptive pep talk. As the Presets thump and grind ever more loudly, and the boss crawls into view for a chat about juice, her eyes just for a moment flash with real, genuine anger, and I'm very glad I'm not the unwitting customer lurching into view, with a big smile and a genuine heart, not to mention an obvious love of a big hooped jumper, who is about to quite innocently and excitedly ask for a delicious cup of juice...

It's lunchtime. My shoes are a bit better, and I've cheered up a bit. I'm in Big W, milling around the cheap CDs pile - at some point, I need to go and complain about the fact that they still haven't got my DVD, but I'm distracted by the fact I haven't seen Panda Eyed Girl or Fat Sweaty Girl for 2wo weeks and I'm wondering if they've been flicked. A married couple are having an animated discussion about a sign above the Mens Gallery - she's very vocal while he's a mile away, reading the back of a Jean Claude Van Damme DVD hoping that he can drown her out simply by reading fascinating facts about muscles loudly in his head. There's an old boy in the shop - I've seen him before, he has an unusally strange single whisker growing out of his chin and he walks in a strange shuffling gait. I wonder how tight his shoes are. He seems to have a nice line in blue shirts though, and every single time I've seen him, he heads straight to the book section, where there's a particular book in the sports section, a motivational book written by a sports coach with a suitably fancy overblown title. Three times the old boy has lurched towards the book, touched it with the awe of a man handling a religious text, read a single page, then wandered off with a big smile on his face towards the crayon district. I'd read the page myself if I could, but I don't think it will have the same effect on me. Not much motivates me these days - maybe the odd trip to Melbourne - I don't think the printed word is going to do it. Still, it clearly motivated Whisker Whiskerson, because his gait is now very positive and his mood seems positively springy. I just hope he doesn't go and get some juice to go with his new mindset. I feel like getting the book and handing it over to the harassed husband. His wife, having seen off the Mens Gallery, is now loudly proclaiming she expects every shop in the place is going to be shut within 12elve months, and he is gripping onto the DVD in his hand like a handrail on a rollercoaster. As I walk past, he shoots me a glance that either seeks empathy or my opinion on the relative merits of the Jean Claude Van Damme collection, but I can't spare the time for either, as I have a pressing meeting due with a Chocolate Royal, and when he sees I'm not getting involved, he turns back to his private hell, gripping even more tightly onto the DVD as his wife begins to turn her attention to lousy punk kids, getting in the old favourite about military service by the time I'm past cheap socks going cheap...

Outside Gloria Jeans, I always feel uncomforable, as it's part of the smoking and taxi district. On seats nailed to the wall entirely to stop people taking them home and putting them on E-bay, exhausted OAPs and gaggles of people who's life has ended at 20ty due to the lack of hope slump with bags of as many groceries as they can afford scattered around their aching feet. They wait for the religious like significance of being chosen by a taxi driver, but they are in for a fair wait, as the taxi drivers are smoking with the Woolworth workers, and they don't seem in the mood to smoke quickly. They don't talk though, they just enjoy, the taxi drivers enjoy the superiority of making the punters wait, the Woolies trio enjoying the way they get away from the public and the old woman who wants home delivery, the only animation in the enjoyment a middle aged Woolie with a bad perm who takes the time to adjust it every 5ive seconds as though the Queen is coming for tea. As the smoke wafts up into the clouds, a fight breaks out near me. A woman is storming 3hree steps in front of her husband, shouting over her shoulder as his bedraggled sub Murdunna poor person frame walks behind bewildered as to what he's done. She's overacting, I can tell, for I have thrown that particular shape many times before, and by the 2nd sentence, the anger has dissipated and the shouting is just for effect. She yells incomprehensible sentences as she swings her imitation handbag, her stomach heaving as she spits out the faux venom, his beard trailing along the ground as he takes the abuse. The sandwich eaters stop munching their bread and filling as they watch, enjoying a free piece of theatre. The woman obliges, yelling something about the man driving her to crystals. Whether it is meth or new age healing is discussed at some length by the munchers, as they disappear, the man shuffling away from our view, a refugee from bedraggle rock as his sandals squeak softly across the ground. A man in a shirt and tie sighs sadly as they go, muttering something about how he was enjoying the argument. His sneer is unpleasant, and I would give him the benefit of the doubt and say I misheard, but there's no way he could be enjoying his sandwich. Judging by the quality of the curried egg and the way he's looking at it, I'm thinking any distraction from taking a 5.95 hit on such a poor quality lunch is to be entirely appreciated...

I feel bad for the guy at my local Coles who seems to always get stuck with taking the rubbish out. He's been doing it for so long, he must either be really happy doing it, or he still thinks one day if he takes the rubbish out really well he'll climb the corporate ladder. There must be a perk to it I can't see - at least when I got to put the trolleys away, I could make extra cash by collecting the 20c pieces. I presume he volunteered once, and that's now his task. He seems quite jovial about it, and he takes some time to help an old lady find jam. Late night shopping is one of those things that I didn't really take into account when I moved out of home. Our queue ambles at a less than lightning pace, the woman in front of me seemingly fighting deep veined thrombosis as she swings her legs from side to side, buying the odd combination of lasagne and a Flintsones pencil case. My own basket seems sparse when I study it, and I know I've forgotten about 12elve things, but I can't be bothered snaking to the back of the queue just to get some Red Eye. It's one of the minor annoyances that plague my day. I'm healthy and happy, so something has to bug me. The lady with the Flintsones pencil case has no such troubles, and dramatically throws her hands to head and says the word soap with such deliberate emphasis you'd think she'd left her baby behind. She has the kind of bogan look that suggests that naming a baby Soap isn't out of the question. Minor celebrities wink at me from the magazine stand, and our queue continues to amble, as the checkout girl waves milk over the scanner with a regal flourish of the wrist that does nothing for her efficiency. By the time I get home, and slump in my hammock, I'm exhausted. I don't have the energy to turn off a tedious documentary about Australian Rules Football which purports to be candid but just sounds and looks ridiculous. With all the motivation of a Boost Juice employee, although with about 1/8th the lip gloss, I curl up and go to sleep, and have a perfectly lovely dream about Lily Allen that just makes all the day fade away to nothing...

It all comes back in the morning though when I wake up, go to grab a Red Eye and...

Shoving away from my ethnicity to talk on e-mail about Anthony Rocca

My Mum currently has her friend over - tomorrow they are going to Sydney, and today they are sitting in the living room of Mums house eating 2wo dollar coconut and jam biscuits and talking about things like operations, death - Mums friend is the Scottish one I wrote about before who lost her husband, and in the sad way, not the way my own father gets lost sometimes trying to find the light bulbs in Woolworths. She still isn't over it and no doubt at some point an "auld" record will go in the CD player as rememberance. Anyway they rang me up today to discuss a load of old nonsense and remind me that in these dire economic times the purchase of the AFL Prospectus for 29.95 is false economy, but interestingly they had a conversation about Scotland. Mum isn't going to Scotland anymore, maybe never again, after she had a hugeish fight with her sister about, well, the correct way to turn off a lightswitch, and now considers jaunts to Sydney to be a preferable way to pass the holiday times. The phrase naebody wants ye seems to come up all the time at the moment. I've spent most of the post phone call moments today trying to work out how this happened. When we first moved here, we didn't leave the house for 1ne week because of homesickness, and I found just the act of, I don't know, opening the fridge to be depressing. The fridge, and I'm serious about this, had a different type of bread in it, and I was almost inconsolable. I remember it vividly, like some horrible war wound, just because the John Marshall driven food van didn't come round Penguin. On account of he was Scottish and probably oblivious to our plight. It's strange to me that a man with his Tom Selleck moustache and friendly demeanour didn't use his loaves and chat up lines to pick up more. Maybe he did, and our street was full of mingers. Anyway, I remember going to bed that night, afflicted with the residue of jet lag, and just crying, crying for hours because I wanted to go home. If I had known that my Dad has been on Radio 4our spruiking the benefits of living in a safe place like Penguin instead of an Ayrshire bear bit, I would have ripped his neatly trimmed beard off. And yet here we are, not even wanting to spend 6ix weeks in the place, and Mums friends sisters are basically telling Mums friend they don't want her under the guise of, oh, Paisleys a bit ropey and no one can face the place. Reconciling the join between not being able to face the world because how dare the good people at Penguin bakery not have a Pan loaf. Incidentally, I told Vicki this once, but she was a bit stoned, and went on a rant about bread that seemed to last about 5ive hours - I was drunk on Blue Heaven Big M, so forgive any time related exaggeration...

I may have mentioned before, and if I have I apologize, there's a leisure centre - which makes it sound quite Gordon Brittas, but go with it - called The Magnum in my home town. Now, I believe it's closing down due to funding problems, but in its late 80s hey day it was a majestic beacon of North Ayrshire prosperity. It had everything a late 80s Ayrshire male could want. Big water slides, girls in swim suits, an ice skating rink, girls in swim suits, and a ball swamp which allowed your friends to giggle because they could ask Sharon behind the counter when the ball swamp was open and be really immature. When they couldn't inflate the big pink elephant one day, that was the greatest moment ever, people were buying mobile phones just to let everyone know 6ix really pissed off people from Girdle Toll were kicking a lump of pink vinyl on the ground and cursing every kind of elephant ever made. As they did so, and we all watched, someone put on What A Wonderful World faintly in the background and they just absolutely spat it. What they won't put on the plaque though when they tear it down is that it was where I lost my desire to move back to Scotland and raise a brood of wee weans with a girl from Girvan who worked in a travel agents until she got her chartered accountants degree. That's the good thing about Ayrshire, our goals are admirably specific. Anyway, it was 5ive a side soccer, Friday night, a badly carpeted pitch, rain on the ground, chill in the air, and my friends had invited me along - and they were chatting in the corner about something, I don't know, a girl they knew from school or something, and they made this incredibly specific reference to her, some really in nickname, and they all laughed, and I thought, huh, why don't I know about that. It was no big revelation, I wasn't jogging through Broomlands and got mugged, no one said go home foreigner, it was just a simple moment, and 3hree seconds later, nothing was the same. They did nothing wrong, I did nothing wrong - well, there was that whole I didn't drink thing they found a bit 1993, but I remember just feeling really awkward. At that moment, I thought about fleeing back to Burnie for the news with Steve Titmus and the security of the tennis courts in Burnie, where I could hit a ball off a wall in perfect solitude. It obviously got a lot worse by the time I was left alone in a house where I had to look after my paranoid Grandma who would vacuum at precisely the moments the opening credits of the TV shows I wanted to watch would start. She never vaccummed when The Cows with Eddie Izzard was on - sadist. That, though, was the big problem, and long after the Dyson was turned on, it was the little problem that still rankled...

My favourite thing about going home now has not become seeing everyone, or rather seeing everyone and having them point out on the way up the road how shit everything is, it's that I don't have to go to work. That I can sleep and get the bus into town when I want and stroll around ASDA for ages watching everyone go about their day, that sense of exploration that comes with the freedom of being a tourist. My patriotism really no longer goes any further than sporting events - I can't claim I argue the Proclaimers are better than the Veronicas, but on the tram through Sydney to the World Cup rugby about 5ive years ago a group of Scottish fans, including me, sang an awful lot of songs about the Yenglish, a rousing chorus of we only drink Irn Bru, and other such like nonsense that was hilarious at the time, only punctuated by someone sort of saying we should go back home - he said it in a friendly way, but I of course took it as I don't have a clue where home is supposed to be. The last time I was out in Glasgow, I sounded more Ayrshire than ever, or so I thought, and everyone kept asking me about Rolf Harris, and bizarrely, Reggie from Big Brother. Some guy just kept saying once he found out I was visiting from Hobart that Reggie was the most amazing chick in the world and everyone he was with was looking at him like he was mental. He then began telling me how shit Glasgow was, and we had an argument for ages because I was telling him that not everything in Hobart was great, and used Syrup as my example, and he refused to accept a club that played Dave Dobbyn 6ix times a night could be anything but wonderful, and continued the argument while I was awestruck in a giant warehouse style club looking around going this is fantastic. I guess no one is ever happy. And even more than that, after millions of people telling me that a night out in Glasgow was tantamount to walking around to walking around demanding to be stabbed, I had a fantastically pleasant evening. My cousins mate than invited me up to a pub in Govan to watch the Celtic vs Rangers game, and instantly, my auntie said if I went up there I'd get stabbed. The main problem with Scotland is everyone has convinced themselves walking down the road will get them stabbed. We don't have that problem in Tasmania. Sure, there's an annoying woman in a white T-shirt who is trying to sell me herbal supplements every time I walk through Eastlands and who calls me mate a bit too much. If she's concealing a weapon, she's concealing it very well I must say...

Dad told me tonight that when he was teaching, he smashed through two people and scored this glorious try and I said he was talking nonsense and he sort of clammed up as if he'd just sold nude photos of a prominent politician and then realised it was a check out girl. Given that I'd spent my day having a 200ed e-mail conversation about mid 00s Collingwood players, made a bet with my friend that I could get more signed celebrity photos than her, then txted my friend to tell him Gruen was back on, which was a very Australian kind of day, sitting with Scottish people was the other side of the coin. It's sort of the same, we just use the word eedjit a lot more. When I left, they were sitting with some home made whisky talking about Ferguslie Park and old teachers. I wasn't in the mood for Scottish nostalgia though - especially since it was going down a path where what was going to be trotted out was the story about me trying to throw a javelin. I jump in my hammock when I get home and put Lily Allen and Nelly Furtado on the IPOD and enjoy the solitude. A world away, my auntie is sitting in her own solitude - self imposed, but somewhat sad, for the sake of a million petty arguments about light switches and recycling and fridges, she's desperately lonely, and no one really wants to visit her except her weird friend who swears all the time and wears big Nana Mouskouri glasses and who has OCD about whether people - ie me - liked her lasagne. Whether I liked the lasagne became a 3hree act play. It's all such a drama. So maybe I won't go back next time, and I'm a bit sad about that, as the disconnect between the kid who stood in the kitchen and cried and the person in the hammock now trying to work out whether the liking of Lily Allen is fancying or musical appreciation is irreconcilable. Incidentally, my cousin, the one I don't like, has sent me a lovely thankyou card because I sent him a present for his new baby. In the photo, the new baby looks so innocent and playful, that such questions as where do I fit in, well, you hope he figures it out better than I did. Because it took me ages to realise this is actually my home now, and if I'd done it a bit quicker, it would have saved a lot of grief...

I think it's musical by the way...I think...

Don't cry, it just ricochets, into another day, another decade, another piece of paper stuck to the wall

My cousin - the one I don't get on with - and I had this fight when I was 5ive, I was watching an imaginary TV and he turned it off. The fight was pretty intense for 5ive year olds and as a result, we began a lifetime of mutual anipathy and distrust. Or so people tell me anyway, since I don't remember this intoxicating argument and usually yawn when it's trotted out over a cask of Coolabah wine late in the evening when the older relatives have gone to bed. He, on the other hand, takes it personally when it is brought up, as a sore point so sore no cream could salve it, not even the big grey jar that sat in our family bathroom cupboard for years which ended up being so mythologised I was going to take it to show and tell and say it could cure alzheimers. They are flying down in 2wo weeks for a family re-union I'm expected to go to, and I'm not sure I can be bothered. It's one of those occasions I'm certain I'll dread - and late in the evening, someone, maybe his wife, will poke the issue of why we don't get on with a stick. I think not getting on with people though is perfectly fine. Once, in a Troon bowling alley, one of my other cousins gloated so triumphantly about knocking down a set of pins with a black ball that I temporarily felt like fleeing to another family. He's not himself these days though my cousin, rattled by being in a relationship that doesn't seem to be all that fantastic so the moral responsibility falls on me not to cause trouble - his wife, a princess on a throne, depriving the relationship of fun in an OCD like drive to the top, the child they have already burdened with being a burden. He used to do nothing but grin and stroll around in an intoxicated mix of superiority and confidence, but the grin is long gone, or so they tell me. And over a beer in the back garden in 2wo weeks, I'll be sure not to acknowledge it, because what is the point of a family re-union but to pretend everything is fine. Actually, I'm quite looking forward to it. Turn off my imaginary TV will you. And at some point, we'll look at each other and make a vague kind of see you later no really motion, and it won't mean anything, it will be as unmemorable as the coleslaw on offer. I wonder sometimes where I fit into my own family - but I won't mention it. I'll leave the message behind, be good, and talk about sports...like always, if I mention obscure cricketers and keep my head down, I'll be OK...

The reason I bring this is up is because I'm really wary of easy nostalgia, so at least in this case with my cousin I don't need to look back on some sort of magical golden age where we were bestest buds. It's staggering to me to look at photos of, say, my first real love Sarah or that girl I never asked out Pippa that I really liked, and see that they were just kids and I had no teeth and a big gummy innocent smile, or that the fort I used to jump off was tiny and low to the ground. In my mind, there's this stridently wonderful memory of jumping around Kilwinning discos to thumping rave music like Altern 8, off my head on what was probably Tic Tacs, but I suspect it was nothing like that. In fact, I'm pretty sure that I didn't dance because I can't, and that the music was actually tinny and unfathomable. I've got this friend who just sends me e-mails all day with 80s celebrities in them, and that's how we communicate. She sends me the words Darryl and Braithwaite and 6ix e-mails later that's that subject covered. In the case of my cousin, there's no golden summer where we magically bonded. What I do have though is a home movie where at least we both look happy. It's a grainy tape where I've got this bad haircut and am cutting a message for my Grandma and everything looks fantastically 80s like it's been recreated for a TV show. He was the closest thing I had to a friend, as much from location as anything else, since he was the only relation I had that lived with me in Penguin and yet I can't remember a positive thing about our time together. There must be something, I said today to my friend, attempting a bit of a pour my heart out e-mail. She e-mailed back whatever happened to Tony Barber. Thanks. There must be something though, I even flicked through the pages of 4our4our2wo at lunch not really reading the glossy article about Robinho, just letting time slip through my mind as I tried to come up with something, anything, and believe me, I'm normally an ace when it comes to conjuring up a positive memory or 2wo. I mean, I've convinced myself the world would be a better place of Kim Wilde was still hot, and the Egg Flip Big M was still the nations favourite drink. It was a bit sad that I had absolutely nothing from our relationship to fall back on - then I got distracted by Holly Valance on my IPOD, and I had to let the moment fall to the floor, fully aware that I'd get back to thinking about it one day. Or maybe not. Certainly Egg Flip Big Ms, now that's a subject I'm passionate about, you are probably lucky I don't blog about it every day...

The book shop, by the way, closed today, a little printed out note stuck to the shutter doors. It was apparently open for 20nine years, which is my whole lifetime, some little ambitious thriving turn of the 80s business man with raw powerful corporate plans set up shop one day and now they've been driven out by something as basic and crappy as high rent. It's just a little piece of social history in an otherwise unremarkable setting, although in the dash for powdered milk, muffins and hockey sticks, I think I'm the only person to notice. There's a screaming kid in a blue Kangaroos beanie who definitely doesn't notice, he's screaming his head off about football over and over again. What I find interesting is when he says to his Mum something about something that happened on Saturday - I can't decode hyperbole at this decibel with an IPOD on at this background - and realise that he's basically indulging in nostalgia at a young age. OK, it's nostalgia for 2wo days ago, but still. His mother looks terribly aged, and she doesn't seem to share the enthusiasm for all our yesteryears as she patiently pushes a trolley around. My Mum has this big thing at the moment for saving, and when she came round for tea the other day she used a book I bought for 29.95 as some sort of conversational jumping point about the economic crisis - my mother will sometimes drop buzzwords in over tea and biscuits, although I still haven't heard her say bromance and Twitter - and I was able to nudge her out the door...sorry, parlay her conversational thrust by pointing out the decline of the bookstore. I even got up to the poor Classical music loving IPOD man reduced to the indignity of casual clothes, but she's on a diet, so her eyes were dancing around the array of chocolate biscuits in my cupboard. I find it interesting that this is where my mind takes me - straight to nostalgia from 2wo days ago. I had a hangover, remember that, what a great day, Mum wanted a Tim Tam...this amuses me endlessly that me and Mum unwittingly acted out a similar conversation to the Mum and kid in the mall, except I was the weary and tired one and she was the excited chattering child munching on something she shouldn't. Who can I share this with? My cousin? My friend who will e-mail me the words Jo Beth Taylor? The kid obviously doesn't care, and he charges off into the distance, screaming something about Corey Jones as his mother trudges off one ugh boot step at a time...

When I get home, I flick through my diaries to see if there was a time where me and my cousin - and I say diaries, I have 2wo, one from 97 which is so detailed and benny, and a 1/2 arsed one from 99 which was supposed to be the memoirs of a failed relationship but didn't get beyond wasn't ATARI great, so no change there - got on. I have this wonderful memory of a girl in Girvan - and I will say about Girvan, it's more renowed for chibbings than poetic sepia toned memories - who I talked to on a roundabout when I was about 11ven. There was a big private joke about something in Girvan called Auld Stumpy, a jail I think from memory, and when we saw a guy with a wooden leg walk past, even a joke writer on Friends could come up with something amusing about his sense of comic timing to walk by at that moment. I don't know her name, and it wasn't even a flirtacious conversation, but it was a good day, and I know she got the bus home to Dreghorn because she said the bus driver was an old perve, and when she got on the bus she rolled her eyes as if to say see I told you as a toothless hai...and obviously, I don't need my diary to remember all this, and yet I can't think of one positive moment with one of my closest relatives. I close my diary at this point, for it is a little sad. Still, I can't take it back now, and while I'm sure the logical and mature end to this would be to create some magical moment for the ages at the family re-union, but it simply can't be done. Back in the present, one of my other friends sounds grumpy on the phone as be gets upset about the story that on Friday night he burned everyone and snobbed them on the way past the table. I want to tell him not to lose friends over something so trivial, and I almost go to say something about not getting so worked up about turning off an imaginary TV, but of course, I don't. I'm too busy laughing at several jokes about Auld Stumpy, and his fury dissipates down the phone line, until it's a distant buzz in my ear...

Now, the Egg Flip Big M...

Just do your thing, we'll see how it goes, but what if your thing isn't that good to begin with

When I lived in Mount Stuart - many years ago when Beaverloop still had hopes of being a huge band and I still had hopes of a bright intellectual future and it was a time when you couldn't openly say You're The Voice was a great song - we lived with this girl who turned out to be a fat robber. There was supposed to be a big cooking roster but essentially we lived off charity ice creams that never went to charity and KFC from the takeaway store down the bottom of the hill. One night, Ronnie Biggs decided that she was going to cook us tea, and she made a casserole that she slaved over for a long time. Given her questionable character, I suspect it was salted with the tears of orphans, but anyway, she made a big production about this casserole, even doing the chef thing where you whip the top off the tray with a dramatic flourish. Needless to say, while in cooking the first bite was with the eye, unfortunately the second bite was with the mouth, and it was bloody awful. It tasted like the food equivalent of a bands B Side collection, scraped together from off cuts and things found on the floor and, dare I say it, things she took for herself. We retreated to my bedroom, and since my bedroom backed onto a balcony, went outside into the cold and tried to throw it to birds and stray wolves, but even they didn't want it. To put that in context, we threw a Spiderman ball out the window once and went outside three seconds later and it was gone, so it wasn't an especially picky crowd of fossickers and gatherers. The birds flew away to feast on the scraps of KFC, and the wolves went back to howling outside Steves Kebab House. Naturally, since everyone went from the dinner table and came back with clean plates six seconds later - oh my hand written diary in 1997 was nothing if not time accurate - the girl realised her meal was awful, and was legitimately crushed. I sat and ruminated that night in my Arial Black handwriting that her problem, well, among her many problems including social psychosis and theft and the fact she nicked a copy of Jagged Little Pill was that she tried. It's there in black and white, the lazy ironists handwriting. How dare someone try. It seems jarring to me when I read it back now, but it was an awful casserole, but in the middle of a diary entirely with lists of favourite singles, and references I no longer get, to come up with something that sort of sums up that whole year, well, I wasn't expecting it. I didn't really try very hard at anything that year except keeping a diary and making sure I didn't get robbed again. It was that kind of house though...if the orphans had got their ice creams it could have been worse...

Last night we were drinking outside the once majestic Irish Murphys, which is now just this horrendous awful place with bullying bouncers and everyone standing around this one keg shaped table bumping into each other. I realise when I say this, were I 18een I'd probably find the place fascinating and charming, but I'm a bit jaded with the whole thing now. One of my friends just totally snobbed us out, and that got some discussion going. I've got this other friend who whenever he sees this one girl just goes into full on oh why didn't I ask her out damn it damn life weird mode, and it's just not edifying as a spectacle. He's talking about cards on the table - shouldn't it be cards on the Internet, with the amount of offices wasting time playing solitaire - and I'm the one who always ends up saying don't do it you crazy fool like some wizened old geezer in a western movie trying to tell the young kids not to, I don't know, tackle the black horsed posse. I swear some nights I'm this close to saying consarnit and growing an old mans beard like crazy old varmits of yore. The thing is, I've decided from now on to say go for it, because what the hell, it's going to be a complete debacle, but it's better than being unsure and bending my ear about it. There's a guy standing outside the pub in a Manchester shirt who looks like he's hoping to pick up entirely on the basis of some neatly trimmed eyebrows, and a woman the very definition of the phrase mutton dressed as mutton who's, and I will say I don't know the context, bawling and shouting all over the place that her son slept with her daughter, which I believe is some of the alternate wording to You're The Voice. I must admit, the start of every evening is my favourite part, when the night crackles with possibilities, and you are still sober enough to just be happy to see your friends. I feel like sometimes, just going out is a form of trying in itself, and you hope by having done so, the night doesn't end up being trying. My friend has moved the card analogy onto one about, I don't know, ships that sail in the night or bands that never reform or some such nonsense, while the well groomed eyebrows of Top Manc have moved on to some other bar to stand outside wistfully and with mystery. For him and mutton girl, the night is young, the drinks are cheap, and who knows what tonight will bring. I suspect hangovers, where as I, on current pace, will simply end up with a busted eardrum...

My sports team never seem to try - well they never seem to win, which may be a different thing, and once again fail miserably. I like, well, I guess tolerate, the association people have with me and my sports team. When they play, people think of me, which is nice, but it would be nicer if they were any good, and not awful and reduce a crowded bar to about 4our people with their awful efforts. Naturally, since sports are on, there's no girls in bar, which might account for the fact that everyone files out in orderly fashion, there were rumours that maybe girls were spotted in a direction near the taxi rank. Shirts and collars are turned up as the Males leave, the barmaids tired already of being hit on as they ferry undercooked chips hither and tither. There's a grim looking Maori undertaker type picking up stools and making sure that all fun is orderly and timely and not too rambunctious. I get a rum induced flashback whenever he walks around, to the way teachers used to police school discos at Kilwinning and make sure winching never got into anything more flagrant. His is a thankless job, but his personality and his perfectly round head which screams intimidation, at least from a technical standpoint, make him well suited to the task of bouncering. A band plays some cover versions no one is listening to. The lead singer has dreams of being a rock star, but all he got was this lousy gig. It doesn't stop him trying though, he throws shapes to the large crowd in his mind as he digs out, sigh, a Train cover, you know the one, the one all pub bands do. In the corner, two guys, one with a sleazy look on his face, the other a rather shifty looking wingman, are sizing up one of the barmaids. Our favourite barmaid, and it's for different reasons across the group, the hairdresser one with the zomg things are shiny outlook, isn't on tonight, but this duo are planning an all out whats your sign assault on some poor girl who isn't even aware they exist. I kind of like the effort going on all around me, people really trying, people really determined to make this cold Friday night a memorable evening. I can't shake the little flickering box in the corner though where my so called personal sports representatives are floundering aimlessly. How could they do this to me I wonder, for all of 5ive seconds. They didn't try, so why should I bother worrying. In fact, without any trace of irony, and with many traces of rum, I'm soon throwing myself around a dance floor, quite happily, the little embittered sports fan on my shoulder shut down by loud noise, pride in my own dance steps however misguided, and by natures natural emboldener, more rum than the human body can handle...

About 7even years ago, I was watching the same sports team in much the same manner, and while my friends were getting banned from Montgomeries for life for abuse of the karaoke system, I was on the phone to dad calling them the c word down the phone and missed the whole thing. Popular culture swept me up a long time ago, and I'm ready to move on from it, unless Lily Allen is after a date to the Brits. I feel sometimes like the victim of repetitive cycles and patterns. What I plan to do is change them, not put my life in the hands of sports teams and bands and self consciousness, but to try harder. Obviously, this means more aimless nights in Syrup, where I don't go last night, due not to sports but because, well, it's Syrup, it's not especially great, and I can't dance anyway. You see the trouble is, I come from the "aye we see you" country - Scotland isn't a country that encourages bold statements of individuality. What it is great at and why I love it because it's cynical and hard and tough and yet I hate it for the same reasons. It's probably because I'm Scottish that I tip the taxi driver entirely for not talking to me, and don't see much point in pretending the Syrup is a panacea or some sort of dancing emporium. My friend - having lost all his cards apparently, or put them back in his pocket - charges over there like a bull, he can't wait to shimmy the night away to Dave Dobbyn. As much as I'd like a more positive outlook on life, well one that was less everything is bloody awful, I still think I'm allowed to think Syrup really aint that great. The DJ in there who looks like he's about to jump out the window puts me off. There's just this contrary battle in my head when I'm in there - the DJ puts me off because he hates being there, the dancers annoy me because they are throwing massive shapes around a strippers pole and it looks frankly awful, and I'm somewhere in between doing the Tassie two step with not enough detached irony to make it work but not enough effort to make it worth even being there. That said, I am determined to make it work a bit more - the breadth of my experiences is getting wider, in the space of about 6ix months I've been to both the best thing and worst thing I've ever been to, and I'm not judgemental to the Syrup queue jostlers...I wish them well as my taxi speeds off home, in perfect, beautiful silence...

And later, I make myself a casserole, so that was good...I'm also not a thief...2-0 to me I'd say...