Post 296ix - the Cheese Sandwich Epic Part 1ne

The dying days of my time living in Ayrshire were not especially great times for me. In the corner of my bare room sat a pile of farewell presents that went up to the ceiling, but apart from my bed and my autographed poster of Texas the room was otherwise bare. Our living room nothing but storage crates and whichever person had chosen to drink with my Dad that particular night slumped against a wall, my Mums pile of un-necessary party sandwiches sitting uneaten on top of a wooden palate. I would sit there and wonder how this had all happened, why we were suddenly moving back to Tasmania. Sure, Kinnock had lost the election, and we were broke and Dad had no job other than the depressing slog of supply teacher work that kept the dole rolling in...while there was an obvious fiscal logic in living in Penguin again, I wondered what was to become of me, how this had happened at such a crucial juncture in my life. I had just scored 98 out of a 100ed in a science test, and the only person who beat me had cheated and slept with the teacher. I had just discovered a girl with big glasses but a fantastic smile really liked me, I had discovered that thanks to songs by The Prodigy my bad dancing was now completely in fashion, hell I had just discovered that after years of toiling badly on muddy soccer fields I was actually really good at ping pong and could beat even the most athletic of posers like I had years of experience as a young offender...even the drug dealer on the corner shook my hand on a daily basis these days, offering advice like a battle scarred warrior prince, albeit a very evil 1ne...and what did it all amount to? Nothing, 4our years of social climbing and absorbing the worst excesses of Ayrshire culture and what did I have to show for it? A 1/2lf eaten ham sandwich and 267even pounds from the garage sale of my posesssions. Cash. I took the meagre scraps of cash accumulated from selling my wrestling figures, and bought whatever my new evil scarred friend was selling that particular day. He even took some for himself, and we sat together for a while in blissful silence, and all I can remember him saying was birds, like chicks of course but more Scottish, really dig moody silences...what would he know I thought, a man in a coat suspiciously stained...what would he know...

When I first moved to Penguin I not only imagined it as I left it, a happy place where everyone made jam and had heaps of local pride, I spent a lot of time either walking to the Post Office and back or just sitting in the empty stands of the football oval unwittingly creating a persona for myself as a brooding intellectual trapped in a vice of small town mediocrity. The persona was over thought and worked out over several chocolate milkshakes and by sitting on the Hiscutt Park fort in warm Scottish coats over several windy days just glaring at happy children. I was genuinely homesick, and while my Dad was able to express his homesickness in tourettes style bursts of abuse at having to watch Hey Hey It's Saturday, I had no real outlet for my depression other than my long walks and my fashion being different to everyone else. No Mambo shirts or flanneling about for me, I had the good sense to look like the bass player from EMF, and who could ridicule that? Everyone apparently. My Mum took it upon herself to be concerned about me and my sour puss coupon, wondering what had happened to her happy On The Buses quoting son, at least in the moments I wasn't walking up and down the aisles of Cut Price Sams with his hands in his brightly coloured pockets picking faults in the ice cream range. Eventually I realised that the persona I was developing for myself was being ruined by the brightness of my Joe Bloggs stripey tops. It was hard to be Penguins version of James Dean wandering around in a top that screamed I was a member of The Smart Es. Luckily I was able to gather Vicki as not just a supporter and pash buddy but personal dresser, and after several nights sitting around on railway tracks about how terrible life was, I was all set to don the cloak of respectability, clamber aboard a silver Kergers coach and head into the big city, having worked out exactly when and where I could wag school by looking at my timetable, and working out when I could have a lime spider at Fitzgeralds...green drinks, I know Vicki, don't go well with moody...

I didn't end up starting well at school though - it was 1ne thing to be moody and distant, but it helps if people notice you to begin with, otherwise you just look like a twat hanging around the playground on your own. I wagged school and no 1ne really noticed. I sat in Fitzgeralds in the middle of the day eating freezing cold chips and trying to cadge cigarettes off waitresses, but they were too busy to notice, too busy yelling at flannel wearing slackers for stealing the spoons. Was that how to be cool in Burnie - theft of cutlery? I rolled my eyes and tried to be disdainful, I mean, was this it. I came from a place where I had a knife pulled on me, I was hardcore. What was the danger and edge in this place, a too aggressive from the Toyworld bear? Well, I wasn't really hardcore, but in my mind I was. I shouldn't have been so naive. There was a drug dealer in Burnie, he just wasn't so obvious as to hang around sharing his stash with the kids. And unlike in Kilwinning where a kid called Chris said he was on magic mushrooms and pretended he was a cat through a whole art lesson, some1ne actually did turn up to school on drugs, got expelled and then came back at night to torch the place. And everyone just told me how terrible Burnie was, without fail, when they weren't pointing and laughing at the moody twat trying to be Rob Newman by the side of a brick wall. I got confused and panicked - I was supposed to be the moody 1ne, and I was failing miserably. When I wagged on my 2nd day, it was raining, I was homesick, I wanted something to rail against, and when I walked down a street, the Toyworld Bear was telling some naughty kids that stole his catalogues to fuck off in a distinct break from established kayfabe....I wasn't Rob Newman at that point, but David Byrne...how DID I get here? And how fun is it to kick the Toyworld Bear up the arse? Heaps and heaps of fun...until he sees you later in a nightclub...

Anyway, just when my confusion was growing like Bernard Sumner in Bizarre Love Triangle, I had to spend an English class on my 3hrd day with the school nutcase. Her name was Brianna, and she came from a family of about 200ed up in the mountains of Natone. I hadn't seen the TV show Hee-Haw at that point, but it's always reminded me of her. She wasn't 1ne for words Brianna, more gurning and pulling maniacal faces. Later examination would discern to me that she was playing a role, somewhat akin to what I was doing, only with more gurning. Cruel fate had dictated that we be paired alphabetically in some sort of co-opted writing exercise. When I lived in Ayrshire, I prided myself on my writing, I really thought I could make a career of it with my clumsy pre teen sentences and 1/2lf formed heroines who's character arc was always unfolding with a tedious sense of inevitablity. I took it incredibly seriously, it was probably the 1ne thing in my life I did take seriously whatever the exercise, and I didn't want to be distracted by gurning. I laid down the law to Brianna, I might even have given her a handful of banana chips to go and throw at the seagulls or something, and set about whatever the task was for the day. After about 5ive minutes our class was in a hubbub, and I imagined that yes, you should all be hubbubbing, this truly is an excellent piece of work, until I looked up and saw that Brianna had gone and got my school bag and dumped it in the rubbish bin as a ploy to get my attention, which had wholly and solely been on the work. Before I could truly wonder what was going on, she walked up to another girl in the class and slapped her in a Goldfrappesque performance art piece, and a scrag fight was unfolding at the foot of my desk. The fight never got beyond prep slaps, but suddenly I had an anecdote, a hook to converse with, and since it basically involved someone being stupid I could look down my nose at, the school benny if you will, a posse of people were gathered around my desk at days end, ready to take in my Scottish wisdom, quotes from drug dealers about philosophy, and jokes stolen from UK TV shows the pre cable era would never show them...

I was on my way to the top of the social world...and that's when things started to go wrong...

The idea of primordial unity related to something existing in or persisting from the beginning

Miley Cyrus - "Party In The USA" (Official Music Video) HQ
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It's late on a Friday night, and I feel tragically old. I'm still too bitter that spoiled millionaire sportsmen don't care enough about me to win trophies, and find something quite sad and noble about it. It's my connection to the conversation this nursed grievance, and nurse it I shall. Outside the Victoria Tavern on unsteady legs, I see a girl sitting against a wall, a small elfin Pixie Lott looking girl with head slumped forward and panda eyed mascara streaming down her face. Her friends have long gone, disappearing I think in a click clack of heel in puddle motion towards Customs, while the girl lets off a flare of distress, in the form of the universally accepted Hobart girl sign that all is not well - a pair of silver heels with sparkles painted on taken off her feet and held aloft in the sky in her hands. She looks up at the stars with vacant eyes, and gently whimpers in the direction of a taxi driver. He has a large illuminated badge on his shirt, a neatly trimmed beard, and no intention at all of picking her up. It seems somewhat unchivalrous to have to step over her legs to continue the onward night, but there's nothing we can do to help her, since she's already being assisted by flak jacket wearing security and a bloke called Trevor. Trevor is the kind of man who believes Superman wears Trevor underpants, and runs his fingers through his fading blonde locks as he announces his name and with a firm grasp of the situation he lets the bouncers hold the girl up by the arms while he asks her repeatedly for her name. The security guard visibly rolls his eyes, but Trevor is undaunted, camply and gamely continuing his 1ne man quest to take a drunk girl and get a pash at the Observatory. The girl though throws her shoe in a last ditch bid for freedom, and in a flash runs off to join her friends, barefoot in a strange bogan Cinderella moment and sprinting towards the park. We stand agape for a moment, everyone except me, who's on unsteady legs and almost trips in all the commotion, and Trevor, who turns towards the bouncers and says it's obvious the girl was a lesbian, before disappearing himself into the night, a flurry of starched denim, misplaced confidence, and a swagger accquired from a rock band in a card game at a pub somewhere around 1984...

No one should be up this late anyway, the wending and winding of a night without conclusion leading to pointless extra bought beers. The Observatory isn't somewhere I want to be anyway, thumping techno and overpriced drinks can't mask that there's no one here at this time, the pretence of a good time swept away quickly by how bored and restless everyone is. It's my own fault, the expectations of a great night having long ago faded away - all that was 1nce left to do was to throw shapes and pretend everything is going wonderfully well. Lately though, throwing shapes is likely to mean a thrown out hip. To be honest, a girl I don't want to see I have to make conversation with in 3hree weeks time and the revelation has thrown me so much I can't enjoy any Miley Cyrus in this kind of mood. Party In the USA sounds bitterly ironic on an empty dancefloor. My friend tries to chat up the Claudine Longet a-like in the corner. Where her friends are god only knows, although I did hear 1nce that nightclubs employ dance floor fillers on slow nights. He bounces back just as quickly as he went over, and says all she said was she doesn't like irony, and then stood with hands on hips waiting for him to fill in some invisible conversational blank. I shrug, because I do like irony, and Mileys distortingly large face on the big screen exhorting everyone to party while she dances around with dancers pretending to be her friends on a dancefloor so empty a cleaner is visible off to the left, so near closing time he's ready to sweep the fag ash off the floor and talk about punk kids, well, it's like rain on your wedding day. My taxi driver home likes quiet rides, the distinctive sounds of Bhangra music and he has a smiling picture on his windscreen, a very toothy and direct smile. I can't get his opinion on the subject of irony though, because I've got a mouthful of marbles and a heart full of regret, and only 5ive miles til hometime, where I can slump in my own unique posture until sun up...

Kingston and it's dystopian suburban landscape isn't the place to nurse a hangover, not 1ne mixed with sporting bitterness. The rain bounces in patterned monotony off the pavement, deflated balloons from the losing team sweep along in the melancholy, gathering in drains and puddles while winners drink in rain soaked back yards and play Mark Seymour until he goes out of fashion. A sort of ironic joke that cheers me up on a boring day if you will. I'm walking and whinging, the Scottish national past-time, and I walk past 5ive divvy vans and police cars are stacked by the side of the road. Inside the back of 1ne of them is a baseball capped youth with arms behind his back, fresh faced and in a hooded top that makes my old eyes hurt, a collection of configurated swirls and triangles too busy to quit. He's barely visible through the fog of tinted windows and my own inadequate eyesight, but I can't imagine what he's done to provoke this kind of vehicular presence, and I swear he visibly mouths help me as I walk past, but it might be a mis-interpreted curse word in which case I hope they throw away the key. I don't even know why I left the house, but I felt the need to and so here I am, walking aimlessly towards Big W in store bought shoes so old they are falling apart. An old man in a blue old man singlet at the counter is bailing up a young girl about lawn care, but she's not listening to him at all, looking over his wrinkled bare shoulder to check out the clock or her reflection in a shiny surface. Her mind might be on her own night out, her own search for Trevor, or heels in the air or a crowd of dancers throwing shapes in a random fashion...it's certainly not on lawn care, and the old man gives up with an angry thump of his giant fist on the counter, at which point the PA system begins to play Party in the USA and somehow my weekend feels circular, a suburban Ouroboros everyone else is just a fleeting part of...

The feelings of disappointment will fade in time, but at the moment they are all consuming, a sort of dull thud in my head, the strain of avoiding people in the future mixed with fatigue and a lack of will to get anything done. The kind of feeling where a stray chocolate wrapper can be the cause for melancholy reflection on how terrible life can be. At least that's how I did feel. My Dad had the presence of mind to make me laugh uncontrollably with 1ne of his senior moment antics, and everything just feels better. The fatigue is still there - when I walk home, the police cars are taking defiant girls and mouthy boys off to the cells, but I don't have the patience to pay attention. There's a middle age man with a tight T-shirt and a yappy dog on the end of a lead standing outside the general store as the last of the police cars screams uncontrollably down the road. He's shaking his head with moral disapproval so strong, it's Rebecca Wilsonesque, so hissy and clicked from the back of his tongue, even his dog looks sad and tries to escape. His meagre bag of single male groceries doesn't even extend to the purchase of desert, but his moral disapproval begins to unfurl with a rant about kids and where are their parents until he almost gets to the phrase in my day...I realise that I've looked at this weekend very negatively and could easily end up standing outside a general store looking for naughty kids to chastise before taking my individual jelly cups home for a party. I find at least some redemption to my horrible attitude in sticking my tongue at the guy in a fit of immaturity, and then leaving as the rain falls down, the sound of rain battering off the ground, the world not quite a better place, but at least something to cheer me up added to the suburban repetition of an ill starred weekend where it never stopped raining, and no one was nodding their heads like yeah, no matter the motivation...

Now, if I can hide in the house 3hree weeks from now, everything will be OK...

Just another beautiful Sunday in the city that's nothing like Middlesbrough

Hobarts Food Court in the middle of the shopping mall is deserted. It's early morning and aside from the odd stray and those pressed into service in the search for shoes sit miles apart at deserted tables. I had arrived into the shopping mall early, the car park deserted, travelling back to humanity in a lift under construction, where the lift voice gives Ground Floor a sexy elongated twist. I imagine lonely men hang on that voice for ages, as they buy their toothpaste and while away the hours until senility. My beverage of choice is a badly frozen coke that drips disdain for the laws of physics. Around me, small Asian teenagers fitfully pick at early morning concoctions simmering in vats, somehow becoming things of promise and disappointment at the same time, almost Buddhist in their complexity. The smell of stew overwhelms them as they rub their sleepy eyes and drink water by the gallon. 1ne girl is smiling a tired smile in my direction while she clutches a bottle of iced tea in her shaking hand, while a cleaner pushes around a cart smelling of Ammonia with no sense of direction, banging it into table legs and chairs and cursing the inventor of the trolley wheel loudly and furiously. It's an unromantic and desperate setting, as vendors arrive to unpack boxes and look busy ahead of a meagre Sunday trade. I've got Bomb The Bass on my IPOD and have shut out most of the worldly distractions. The only other person still eating when I throw my Coke away is a burly Samoan man - my racial profiling is only sound because he has a Samoan rugby top on - with a coke gripped tightly in his clenched fist. He sits his large frame entirely on the edge of his chair, ready to spring off it at the slightest ethnic slight, and I'm certainly not going to give him an opportunity to unfurl his tension on me. As I leave, his mobile phone rings - his ringtone is a Justin Timberlake song, 1ne of the camper 1nes, hard as that is to pick. He grunts Samoanly into the air, and says in a stern lifeless voice the phone belongs to his girlfriend. I believe him, but I feel sorry for the poor coke can, which suffers for the ringtone by being dispatched with a hefty rugby style kick into the bin, as the Samoan walks off steaming, which is more than can be said for the average dim sim coming out of stall no 5...

I take my drink away from the scene of the crime. I wander for a bit past a hot dog stand. I used to eat a hot dog every day from this particular establishment, and still don't quite no why. There's a girl with early morning hair and a black netball skirt draped over the counter of the hot dog stand like a trade show model would drape herself over the bonnet of a car, face down on her elbows smiling sweetly. I suspect she's simply decided to be wacky and outrageous, and she shoots me an arched eyebrow and a wink which suggests as much. I'm not in the mood for wacky and outrageous though, and when I walk off she's trying to show a bit of thigh to an elderly passing gentleman who's holding a pack of Band Aids and walking at a glacial pace. He doesn't even stop to look at the rogue thigh, or if he does, he's used more subtle perving techniques than the average passer by. He's very protective of his band aids though. He holds them in the palm of his hand and hisses angrily at any passer by who comes near him, his tight jeans, his slicked back poster boy for brylcreem hair, but most of all his Band Aids. The girl on the counter of the hot dog stand is undeterred at being turned down and continues to try and throw sexy shapes underneath an illuminated cartoon boy holding a hotdog who's smile and expression never changes. The old man with the Band Aids pushes a baseball cap tightly onto his head with all the care and style of a true Syrup patron trying to look young under a strobe light and begins muttering to his companion about what a terrible day he's had. She holds up her left hand, a wrinkled stop sign, and asks for the Band Aids. It breaks the old mans spirit to be nagged and dismissed, his face and standard of hair care visibly wilting, so he looks back for a glimpse of thigh, and then turns in the direction of the sexy lift, condemned to a life of Sunday shopping until death do them part...

I'm in Harris Scarfe. 1nce Fitzgeralds, a jewelled hubbub of Xmas decorations, strangely piled up toys and things with horribly incorrect price tags - look ma! A kettle for 4c - it's now just a glorified cavernous warehouse, sale signs stuck to the floor and middle aged mothers swishing cougar like through the rack of affordable but fashionable jumpers. 1ne of them, glammed up to the 9nes, proudly holds up a kimono style nightgown, audibly saying Ta-Da in the direction of some confused Indian students who had hopped in for batteries. Do they say Ta-Da in India or is it just her shimmering middle aged silver eyeliner that has confused them, who could say, but they are entranced at the gaudy display regardless. She hams it up of course, saying in the direction of no-1ne in particular I'll take it, and then putting her hands on her hips like Anne Maree Cooksley would have done on the fringes of a Price Is Right set, straddling the showcase. Trouble is of course, there's no staff to ring up the purchase. So we all form 1ne elongated queue, the Indians at the back arguing about why he didn't just buy batteries at the garage, me, rocked by an ice cream headache as the Frozen Coke kicks in like anarchy at a rock festival, the silver woman, who I realise has a tattoo on her hand in Japanese writing that bends and twists and sags through her wrinkles, that unfortunately I stare at a little bit too long until she catches me and almost, but thankfully doesn't, engage me in conversation about. At the head of the queue are a party of elderly English grumblers, all tweed, grey hair and walking canes, hunting the biggest game of all - a shopkeep. The senior member of the hunting party leans on his elbow at the counter like they he's propping up the bar and says it was never like this in Middlesbrough. As I like at the queue and a red faced puffy girl in tight black pants sprinting from the remnants of homeware to serve us, I can only, albeit quietly, concur...

The lift back to the car is sadly voiced by an aggressive, sullen German sounding woman who sighs audibly at the arrival on Car Park Level 3hree. I only share the disembodied voices disappointment because my car is still there intact and not taken by urchins for scrap - the insurance payout is surprisingly tasty. I left most of my melancholy behind at lunch anyway, picking and nibbling at a cold chicken parma while 2wo bogans broke up behind me and a barmaid of a nervous disposition let out an audible obsencity when she dropped a glass. My mood is not especially bouyant on this particular Sunday anyway - sports are not your friend my son and neither are the encroaching black eyes of middle age. A barmaid who missed her calling to play a panto dwarf makes amiable mid lunch conversation as she wipes the crumbs from a previous occupant off the table with a sweeping motion of her jaycloth. She tells me about her life, as if I asked, as the crumbs, when I look closer, aren't swept at all, but huddled in the corner like naughty schoolchildren late back from lunch. I haven't been so penned into a corner since I was offered a screenplay by a crazy man on a bus. She isn't in a particularly cheerful mood either, all bangs and curls and incomplete sentences that end in that Australian way where it sounds like a definitive statement is somehow also a question. She isn't happy with her life, she isn't happy with her jaycloth, her chunky bangles clang off the edge of a table as the steam from my chips threatens to fog up her glasses. Most of all she isn't happy about Hobart. She begins tearing the place to shreds as she wipes nothing in particular. I think about my morning and wonder if this is what I sound like to my particular sounding boards, but in the end I say nothing other than to tell her Hobart has it's flaws, but it's nothing like Middlesbrough, and she disappears into the kitchen confused as the bogans eat a make up chip, reconciled as quickly as they broke up, the issue of what the lead singer of Nickelbacks real name is finally and utterably settled...

I would like to go to Middlesbrough 1ne day for what it's worth...if I'm stuck in a queue, I'll know they are lying...

Lunchtime in Hell

He sits in a cafe cubicle crammed into the tiny allotted space, legs on the chair, sucking a milkshake from a straw, a tense silence in the air. His food is a mass of congealed flavours on a plate with some generic happy go lucky title chalked on am menu, the word "surprise" or "special" tacked onto the end. Rosny doesn't the ambiance of Paris, it has blank eyed coffee drinking bogans swearing loudly, so he shuts them out by pulling his hood so tightly over his head it shuts out a hangover and means he can't see left or right, just straight ahead. The waitress, hair coiled, lips pursed, the venomous eyes of a cobra not offset by the wacky badge of the day, she doesn't look at him of course as she brings the food to him, her own dreams left behind long ago some time about the 3hrd kid or 2nd year uni...her story is unimportant to him since he can't wait to pick fitfully at his bacon because it means he no longer needs to talk. Since he can't formulate or articulate concerns of meaning or anything or value from his sentences, he tells a well worn story about a comedian who sat at the bar at the end of a performance, how depressed he was, how pained his expression. He strings the anecdote out as long as he possibly can, maybe throwing in a voice here or a patently untrue fact there. He's not entirely sure if anyone is listening to his story, but it's his story to cling to in times of trouble. And when he's poured the anecdote out he's able to forget all his troubles, pull his hood even more tightly over his ears, and try and figure out from the receptors in his memory bank exactly which bits of his meal are meat and which bits are bread related. As the whirring and soothing tones of a generic rock band - if you can pick individiual members of the Script you are some kind of genius - fill the air he's able to relax for just a moment, triumphantly holding his food up on the end of a fork for his paramour to bite off, completely and fatally forgetting in the mania the Script have caused that is completely angry with him...

She's a mass of different coloured fabrics, her skin the colour of emaciation, her lipstick stressed and worried. Her hair is immaculate though, her food thin and weak, her coffee untouched. The waitress keeps hovering with a refill that proves unncessary in the wash up. She's leaning precariously over a plate of beans, almost getting her best Big W top in the saucy mess. She wants to talk about something, and she wants to talk about it now. Anxiously, she wants to know why he didn't want to meet her after work on Friday, why he went somewhere else, out with the boys or out with the girls, or out with the boys to meet girls out with the girls. She's trying desperately to pierce his well worn stock of distracting stories and recaps of events she's been through before. She won't let him off the hook, tapping a store bought shoe off the ground impatiently. When she mentions something about him being rude, she almost leaps off the chair, saying it so loudly that well rehearsed composure melts away even more easily than the stick of butter they've been generously apportioned for their toast. Even the Script sound uncomfortable listening to the conversation. An old man from a Jewish stereotype catalogue at the table next to them starts talking loudly to his wife about The Nut in Stanley, and he winces, non verbally communicating that she's making a scene. She sits back down - she takes a bean and stares at it for an age, hoping to find some kind of inspiration. They sit for an age silently, oblivious to anything but their own problems and the poorly constructed meal in front of them. Like an attention starved child he pulls and chews on the toggle of his Reebok hooded top, hoping for a smile, an acknowledgement, anything to make this cheaply affordable meal and painfully constructed conversation more palatable, but it fails, and he shakes his head and resumes eating without ever 1nce answering the question...

She tries herself to steer the conversation onto blanker, easier to digest topics - she will 1ne day I'm sure see the ironic connection between steering the conversation to easier to digest topics while choking on inedible gristle, but it will have to be pointed out to her, since an earlier attempt to explain a rather complex and involved Nun joke with a punchline about kicking a habit had left her expressionless - but it's all gone, and she trails off a story about going to Allans birthday party and eating far too much cake. At which point, he perks up. It's established through the rapid fire volley of phony anxiety he expresses that he knows no Allan, and is keen to gain for himself some sort of moral foothold. If he can disappear endlessly, he says jabbing another wise innocent piece of egg westward the way Jon Snow used to tell our family with a pointer Labor had lost to Margaret Thatcher. She's sure she told him about Allan - a nice man with a nice beard and sensible shoes...well travelled...she's sure she did. They exchange the mutual non communicative sign for we'll finish this conversation later, as the waitress shatters the poignancy of the moment with a loud call to see who wants coffee. She bellows it like a Foghorn, overshadowing whatever generic rock band - maybe it's Lifehouse, is that a band - is tootling over the PA system. The Jewish stereotype takes all the oy glavin coffee he can neurotically drink while complaining about how cold it is. Neither of them take the opportunity to use his obvious qualities as a comedy foil. She takes a coffee, he doesn't, and for all I know, there they could have sat, in mutual silence for the rest of eternity, or until the toast tasted good, whatever came first...

I leave them to it in the end, of course I do, I have to, I have inconsequential things to do, a pile of them. A book to pick up, glasses to repair, hell to escape from. I tip my waitress, and she genuinely beams, or at least I think she does, I have long forgotten the sarcastic way Ayrshire vixens used to smirk at me in nightclubs. Maybe my tip was too cheap. I see the 2wo of them later towing a small child with them, a Yo Gabba Gabba toy under her arm, her face painted silver like a cat. She looks at me and smiles, making a pawing motion with her hand. I smile back, even though I'm not fond of children, be they sharing my love of poster paints or not. They pile in together like circus clowns in a tiny car, and off they drive, the small child continuing to paw in my direction until a plume of black smoke and the thumping sounds of Jay Z signal the end to my observations, like the jarring noise of a stop button being thumped on an old timee tape recorder, but with more mentions of "Hova". I realise I have no adult concerns - I've just had my birthday, but it signalled nothing. I have no child to paint and preen, no adult themes to dissect, no frosted relationship to pick at. My concerns at this exact moment are getting a Jane Bussmann book home to read, how I can get a Peter Combe song out of my head, a bad loss in a game of Fantasy NFL and why my sports team continue to let me down, when they represent me - ME - in this world! How dare Leon Davis not run hard enough for me...such is the lack of my adult responsibility as I stand there, I might as well have my face painted like a cat. The thought makes me giggle, I pop a suitably immature flavour of jellybean into my mouth, and walk off into the day, humming the 3hrd verse of Newspaper Mama as I go...

And the modern name for Nyasaland....that's been bugging me all day...

Bonfire of the Calamaties

I never fitted in during my 4our year stay in Ayrshire. I found the line between horseplay and outright bullying to be too hard to distinguish at times, and I was always a little bit too optimistic that, say, a bus would be on time to truly adapt to the Ayrshire mentality, a sort of anti Buddhist Zen based around mantras that ended in curse words. What I did like was the extra space to go wandering around and exploring, the early 90tys being replete in Ayrshire with buildings jam packed with boxes and places to investigate, failed Thatcher era enterprises left to rot and gather dust with motivational posters left on the wall and folders full of training tips piled on the ground. Monolithic new town office blocks on the edge of town were the perfect place to sit and while away a few pre invention of the Internet hours before sunset, typing stories no one would ever read on computers or reading soccer magazines in which a plooky faced Scottish wean with a rockstar haircut was always proclaimed as the saviour of our national game. I tried to explain the solitude thing to Debbie but she was too interested in whether any of the corporations had secretly invented a robot yet and the conversation would dissipate in a flurry of aggressive kisses and chocolate eating. By the time I had abandoned the weekend explorations and developed a kinship with the community - it took my 3hree years to get angry about the way buses were never on time, or that the local ASDA was out of cheese on a frequent basis - I was back to Penguin to live, where my negativity was out of place but found a home in, oddly enough, the cellars of abandonded Penguin businesses, only they were filled with people smoking and talking and cursing getting old and how much Nirvana were selling out. My Ayrshire affectations of disdain for life held up well against this backdrop, but my anger was false, and since there were no buses in Penguin really, I ran out of ammunition somewhere by November...

When I broke up with Debbie, I threw myself vigorously into killing time by reworking my friendships with the local populace. After all, I had the time and money to spend again, they put a security guard on my favourite building who was demanding bribes, and they cancelled the Sunday bus run into town - bloody Thatcher. I hadn't noticed in my time living in Ayrshire that 1ne street was so utterly different to another, like a seperate country with different rusted up cars in the driveways as flagposts and gateways. My retreat had lead to a lack of door chapping from the local children, so like a politician on the verge of being booted out I had to wander around the doors of my street seeing if kids wanted to come out and play, a board game sometimes a sweetener in the deal. I wasn't popular at first - I didn't support the right soccer team, I was a little too wordy and flowery in my conversations, and I had been out of sight for a long time, a blur in a Joe Bloggs top sighted on a minibus here and there, but essentially non communicative and out of touch since I had petitioned to get John McCarthy out. I had to carefully negotiate my way back in polite society, 1ne stubborn Scottish face at a time. Doing this had been good for me, not because I really wanted friends especially, but it was good to have a project, and in time I was fitting in a bit more comfortably. My new found maturity had lead Debbie to consider a long distance relationship, and I was also included in the local bonfire hunt and gather for Fireworks night. Sadly the role of "The Guy", the local wean strapped into a shopping trolley and pushed around as part of a door to door hunt for superflous funds was taken by a smaller child called Nicky - in fairness, he added a wonderful Cassevetes improvisational style to the role, plus he fitted in the trolley - but at least I got to carry the fund raising tin, and sometimes I got given a blackjack out of the mixed lolly jar. In truth, it was as much as I could have hoped for...

There was a local rumour that our local gang - the BYT, oft graffitied, never sighted outside of the odd bookie raid in Dreghorn and the rarely sighted letter to the editor about how they were cruel to walls - had co-opted the spacious inside of our big giant mile wide uncleared thorn bush to stash drugs, porn and, if Nicky was to be believed, a fearsome squadron of dobermans guarding all the made up items. As a result, we had to move the location of our bonfire lest the BYT make an MESS, which incidentally was a gang in Kilwinning not quite as fearsome. Our bonfire took on mythical proportions early on in it's embyronic development - well, it made the local paper - due to it's size and scale and threat that the 200 aerosol cans in the middle would make the whole thing explode and send local businesses scurrying for cover. The photographer was other worldly attractive but so bored it was painful. Our photo was suitably moody and dystopian - anarchic wide eyed children in the middle of a page which also featured an article about old women being mugged on trains - a black and white shot of a pile of twigs and papers where no one smiled and we look like a Joy Division test shot. Well setting fire to the whole district was the plan anyway, after initial enthusiasm it just ended up being a large garbage tip style pile of junk on which local hobos ended up throwing magazines and broken couches onto instead of lugging their rubbish to nearby towns that smelled bad. Our local burst of publicity meant that we had to lie to ourselves that we would created something Arthur Brown would be fearful off. Then, the day of the bonfire, it started raining, softly at first, then drizzling, then bucketing down at a million miles an hour, leaving a largeish crowd standing in the rain wondering how they would get home, and our pile of garbage and twigs lay unlit and smelly until a man from the council came and took it away, stealing a couch for himself. It was also the last time for about 2wo years I saw Debbie, standing in the rain with hand on tracksuited hip, telling a local reporter she knew the bonfire had no chance of catching light, and that in the future bonfires would all be built by robot...

Since I never really fitted in in my time in Ayrshire - or if I did, I was too busy creating clumsy poetic metaphors about relationships and bonfires to care - so the only real evidence I have that I was ever part of any kind of communal group is a yellow local paper article where I look like Ian Curtis, standing next to a pile of twigs. Sadly the fate of Mrs McGlashan and her horrific train memoir is not known, nor is the fate of Nicky, and whether or not anyone from a gang picked up their stash of rained upon Playboys. It does count as at least some evidence I was there though, that I was living in those times and dressing in that way. I think 1ne of the office blocks is still standing, brown and decaying and now filled up with matching shirted workers who file in and out in a never changing formation while the building cracks and fades like the ambition of a middle manager determined to make work fun. I found on 1ne of my trips back to Ayrshire, in the spot where the bonfire was built, the arm of a rocking chair and thought maybe it had sat on the ground all that time, but some kids were playing soccer around my legs and I had to get out of the way, since the only other option was to gather them around and begin a grandfatherly story about how this was 1nce all fields, and in this day and age an old man gathering children around is frowned upon. As it happened, there was a think piece in the local paper that suggested people were getting mugged for their bonfire money. Our money at least went on sweets, a different kind of theft. See things change...they always do, at times you are up and times you are down...sure as the sun will set tonight. I always remember that. It was scribbled on the office walls of an abandoned Ayrshire office block. It wasn't quite as good as you don't have to be crazy to work here but it helps, but the font was suspiciously close to the security guards handwriting on his forms, suggesting a hidden melancholy and depth of thought a long way from his staccato sentences asking for 5ive pounds or threatening an eviction...

The locked away nostalgia of a fading past is a comfort when you run out things to do in the present day don't you find...

A short story about 1ne sided conversations and 21ne year old Milk Bars

I have in recent weeks become a victim of cloying mawkish nostalgia. As I've mentioned before I am terrible at small talk, but I am completely comfortable reciting random events and things from the 80tys in a haphazard fashion around bored 30ty somethings just to pass the time. The mere mention of Cut Price Sams or a Tick Tock biscut in the right hands is golden. I was at a party last night where, to be frank, discussing such matters became all that was keeping me sane, since I was deployed at the party in a numbers filling capacity and deprived briefly of football by a go nowhere conversation about office politics and staplers. I wondered if I would ever again go to a party where crazy things happened and alcohol was plentiful rather than the swirling breeze of conversational mediocrity enveloping the room. I ended up cornered by a guy called Tony who was in computer software who told me about his car, and his business trips. I was polite and amiable, but really my mind was elsewhere. Sadly Tony wasn't really interested in even the most basic of nostalgic conversational twists - be them biscuit related, flavoured milk related or even band related - and prattled on even after I had left, trapping the cutest girl at the party in his conversational web when she briefly left her friends for a moment to dip into punch. Since no one was looking I was able to slip out of the party early and join the smokers. Not that I was smoking, they just seemed much happier to be out there, and eventually I left, to wander in a manner which my Mum suggests will 1ne day get me beat up into Hobart to get a cab home. My taxi driver looked like a squashed Red Symons, and he wasn't interested in hearing about Cut Price Sams either. All he wanted to talk about was how poor radio stations were in Tasmania, and how he was going to report the plumbing van that cut him off earlier in the day to the police. I went to make my usual joke about Sting, but stopped myself, because not for the first time I had realised that whatever I said was irrelevant to the 1ne sided conversation I was trapped in, and resumed nodding and grunting when required, until I could slip inside my house, and yell at bored millionaires to kick a football a bit better...

Sarah - my girlfriend in Grade 2wo - and I only ever kissed twice in our crayon swapping and hand hold relationship. Oddly, 1nce was for charity, which made our relationship less like boyfriend and girlfriend and more like a dodgy stall at a fete. She does remain in my life the single best listener I ever knew, a thoughtful studious girl who would notice minute details in peoples mood and immediately empathise with them without saying a word. I on the other hand was an excitable and boisterous talker, often on surrealist tangents alternately too deep and too dumb for Grade 2wo, or any audience if I'm honest. Our break up - amiable, mutual, very basically she didn't ring me 1ne weekend and that was that - deprived me of someone to listen to me although to be fair, over a cheese sandwich under the caterpillar we still had the odd conversation, but she was helping a girl get over the theft of her Superman bag, so it was more like an appointment. Our final conversation was outside a milk bar in upper Burnie when she signed my bicentennial medal and wished me well in Scotland, which was nice of her because she had her own concerns. She wanted to go out with a guy with Brad - now Brad had gone from 1ne of my sworn enemies, after not inviting me to his birthday party in Prep, to a solid friend who had written a rather over long message on my medal of great merit, but slightly obsessive tone - and I was happy that in my absence, she had found someone. However, to my eternal discredit, I was more interested in my pack of footy cards than reciprocating her years of patient listening as she shared some nervousness about asking Brad out, something which in more mature years I feel disappointed in myself about, and we parted swiftly, her getting in her mothers Tarago, me cursing the lack of a Bryan Taylor to finish off my collection and heading off for a weekend that involved in a friends cupboard while his Dad came round with an axe to chop the Mother into little bits. Ah, if only I had someone to talk to about it...

As it happened, my own birthday party fell roughly around the time of our breakup. My Mum and Dad were usually both lame and fantastic in hosting these parties. They would, for me, ruin an excellent spread of saveloys and store bought cupcakes by playing a record that they used to embarrass me with. It was a vinyl record with my name inserted in the appropriate parts, sung by a space alien about how amazing it was to be 1ne year older. Sarah came to my party, and she was welcome to do so, since her expertise at Pin the Tail on the Donkey was admired as far away as Riana or Natone. She was polite and picked fitfully at the cupcakes, but didn't say much to be honest. Fitful picking at the cupcakes probably said a lot to be honest, but I was too busy trying to win an obviously rigged dancing competition. I got trapped in a conversation though with 1ne of the aunties, in that Tasmanian she isn't really your auntie but just call her that kind of way. She was quite an elegant lady, a chain smoker and cafe owner who often sat at the edge of parties with my Mum dissing whoever had the temerity to be arrogant or talk themselves up. She wanted to give me 5ive dollars in a card, but I had to earn that card by listening endlessly to her stories about cafes and how well she was doing. I'm sure there were easier to earn 5ive dollars than listening to someone ramble on, but at least it lead to a wonderful mutual private joke between me and Sarah that lasted the rest of the year, since whenever she was talking to someone I would walk past and say I hope there's 5ive dollars in this for you. I tried to explain this to the cute girl at the party last night in the hope that I wouldn't learn what RAM actually stood for and escaping the web of tedium, but it was in vain, for she was only interested in fitfully picking at the last remains of the mini pizzas and slumping in her chair looking for the exits. I concluded she was the kind of girl who would be too cool to dance, and I never want to end up with someone like that, and so I left her as quickly as I could, her expression unchanging and blank, as bland and plain as the topping on the mini pizza and our conversation just as unrewarding...

The cloying part - I certainly myself don't mind a chat about old life - has been that I have a friend who is now just sending me e-mails telling me modern life is rubbish and everything in the 80tys was fantastic. These e-mails come thick and fast and rubber stamped with surety that this is fact. I tend to reply with glib non commital answers and move on to other topics, because I certainly don't want to think my heyday is past - that the best I could achieve in life was my days playing with my He-Man figures and getting my hair ruffled by middle aged check out chicks at Cut Price Sams. I still sincerely hope that my best days are all in front of me, that some relevation in the future will make everything worthwhile and make sense. That I'll find a better listener than Sarah or a more perfect milk bar that 1ne in Upper Burnie. I've tried to decompress my life by throwing a whole heap of things out, I've tried to broaden my horizons recently, but I'm still restless and hopeful that good things are coming my way. My friend on the other hand might as well not be alive, spending her days napping and locked in the house drumming her fingers idly on the kitchen table waiting for her pre-fulfilled destiny as the communities crazy cat lady. I think, were I not averse to her gloom, I could be a better friend, that I could listen more and take her with me to parties of little consequence. 1nes that meander onward, and she might meet some1ne who shares her interest in computers and all would be good. Then I think that she would find something to complain about regadless, and slink back to bed for a mid afternoon nap, to have the most cloying mawkish dream imaginable about primary school and Penguin, 1ne that makes the most horrific of Hallmark films feel like they haven't hit their sugary quotient anywhere near enough...

I personally blame the Tick Tock biscuits for that dream...poison they are...

Corporate Bookshops Still Suck

My local bookstore is evil and amiable now - licked with a corporate coat of paint and reset as some sort of hippie enclave with leopard skin seats on which you can sit and read the books while staff mill around you, but no pressure man. Today, it was playing Deep Forest over the PA system. Deep Forest! What manner of evil possesses a man to dust off that gem. There's no intellectual heart in the centre of this new bookish world, heightened by the fact that the man who used to work in the old book store, so windswept and interested as he listened to his IPOD of classical music, has now been recast as a man with a corporate smile, his beard neatly trimmed, his access to Google unfettered. In fact today I heard him recite a review for a particular book as if that sinister office out the back contained a smiling American corporate trainer. 1ne that specialised in horrible games you have to play in the first hour where you talk about the person next to you and what makes them smile. I would put down my purchase and ask what happened to you, but I suspect he'd be dragged into that office and re-educated. Alas it's either this - taking my chances in a deep forest of books and children - or fight my grey haired nemesis in KMart to get to a copy of whichever non fiction book has taken my fancy at the time. KMarts intellectual properties have taken a strong battering with being stocked shelf to shelf with books by a footballers wife who has taken photos of people and called it a book, the same way last night I put 6ix party sausage rolls in the microwave and called it a meal. Yes, get me and my incredible ability to metaphorically represent 1ne event in comparison to another, like some regular Danny Bhoy. At least it's enclave from sales pressure, overly familiar sandwich waitresses, women with curly grey hair, pensive Chinese bracelet saleswomen and various temptresses in different colours of eye shadow, either clutsy or distant, depending on the shop that I stand outside...

My book purchasing style is fairly straightforward, in that no thought goes into what I buy, I just buy something because I want to learn about it and am seduced by bylines and appreciative quotes. What's weird is that for a long time I was terrified of learning. I worked with this girl who would loiter around the office for ages, just leaning hip on metal against a filing cabinet. She was a largeish girl, with her hair in a ponytail, very serious about herself and her work, and she would literally pounce on any conversation that revolved around someone trying to teach someone else how to do something. She was a perfect comedy character, because she had invented her own catchphrase. She would leap less than gracefully from her leaning on the lampost position in a swish of powerful movement, all in the hips, and would say that she would love to learn, elongating the r and the n into infinity, the way the actress that played Phoebe in Neighbours would when she was on English Have a Go. You really had no choice but to involve her in your discussion, and she wouldn't say anything, she would not frantically and try and take everything in, like a big sponge in black pants. She had a Hello Kitty notebook that she would then jot everything down in, in a flowing cursive font only she could decipher. Eventually she left in a fit of pique because someone made a joke about how many Tick Tock biscuits she was eating from the tin. From then on I've been relentlessly suspicious of the office Tigger, the person who's first day is spent bouncing around looking for things to do. They end up disillusioned like everyone else, eating biscuits or Doritos and cursing the lack of things to do. Some of them even make a little toy pig out of erasers at meetings, and when they do that, well, it really is the end. The Hello Kitty notebook goes in the bin, the learning ceases, and like Mecca, everyone ends up facing the clock and praying...

The book store is packed today. It's also small, so every nuance of Deep Forest can penetrate my brain wherever I go, and whenever small children run through the tiny space between me and the books they charge into my leg. I feel this great desire to start shaking my fist in an angry way in their direction, but so far I haven't done this. I will get there eventually, the same day I take to wearing slippers and a housecoat to the bus stop. There's a woman at the back of the store, with a Bea Arthur haircut and 1ne of those jumpers you must inherit at a certain age. It's not quite Jenny Kee, but it's on the way, and somehow it's still dull. If I can restrain myself from shaking an angry fist at children, her opinions are not restrained by social mores. After careful thought and ponderance, she yells out to no one in particular the trouble with this book store is there's far too much David Horowitz and it's completely stupid. I don't know who David Horowitz is, maybe the kids like him, but she's absolutely certain of this, repeating it as a Rainman style statement of fact until pretty much everyone is looking at her, and listening to her solo show on the problem with the bookstore. Even Deep Forest take a break from their mid 90tys musings to listen in. She's painted herself into a corner of course, as so vehement is her criticism of the bookstore, so loud has she been, that she has to leave, for she has spat out this opinion in such a hissy way that to back down and buy the book in her hand would seem like a meek surrender to the corporate world. Or at least the pleasant Irish girl behind the counter might not be so pleasant for a change. She slinks out in the end, and a small child comes from the humour section chasing a runaway balloon and almost cannons into her kneecaps. I swear at this moment, I look over and see a man behind the counter ready to explode at the corporate world he's found himself enslaved in, but he holds it together, typing in random words into Google, trapped in a pressed blue shirt listening to Deep Forest until the end of time...

It gets too much for me in the end, and I too leave, replaced in my spot by a family entirely in denim who demand a giant volume of Footrot Flats is picked out of a glass case and sold to them. My Dad, who is in Melbourne with my Mum - and incidentally who I've been worried about for 2wo days because they had a row at the airport about how long my Dad spends "dotering" about the place, and what can I say, he loves to loiter - has sent me a txt msg telling me that he's bought me some books from a 2nd hand book store in Melbourne that I apparently would just love, run by a Greek man with joy in his heart and a love of books that he just has to share in the world. Well, that's what I interpret the message as, my Dad isn't a good txter and mis-spells books and my name, but I imagine he's sent me some sort of metaphorical grass is greener txt, the kind of thing that resonates weirdly when you are feeling down and tired and need a change of scenery. Thanks Dad, you normally just bring me back a Macaroon bar, not a manifestly clear representation of how things in other places that aren't here, aren't a lost afternoon between bits of work, are really excellent, while you get to loiter your little old heart out. I smile at my own 30+ angst. I wonder what I would have written about when I was young and carefree, how I would have interpreted the world and all it's foibles. I think I would thought nothing of book stores, been more accepting of other people crashing into my legs and reaching over me to pick and maul at the latest ramblings of Buzz Aldrin or Kathy Lette. The Chinese woman at the bracelet table still sits there, staring outwardly. I think for a moment she raised an eyebrow in my direction, a shared moment of mutual stress, as if she knows that I know that she's putting on an act, that the slightest fault could make her stamp her feet. I don't stick around to find out though - I'm tired, I'm hungry, and really, I don't want to learn....

I'm sure though that Deep Forests first line is pass the sausage over the Tarago...how does that sell books?

The day of Tuts and Sausage Rolls

My local corporate bakery is having a strange promotion at the moment. They've decked their store out in a Mexican theme, but have placed on the counter a cactus of frighteningly deep green and stuck a bright sticker that says pinata on it - the sticker is bright orange and hurts your eyes if you stare at it for too long. It's 1ne of those things that's annoying me, the mislabelled item that stares back at me every day while I buy my increasingly expensive sandwich. However it has been a good foil for me to queue jump, as the odd elderly patron searching for a stray muffin from the sample tray will stare it like it's a magic eye puzzle. I can see their elderly brain taxed as they restrain themselves from talking to strangers about the poorly labelled slight on Mexican culture. I mean if they affixed a sticker to a set of bagpipes that said haggis, I know I'd be offended. As they stare though, they miss their call to be served, and that's where I step in, sliding up to the counter quickly before they know what's happened. At least, that's what I imagined happened today, because the alternate theory is the old woman in front of me had some kind of hypnotic seizure, because she was absolutely still for about 5ive minutes, not even a fibre on her camel coat twitching as she stood in the queue. The Danishes she was staring at aren't that good, believe me. After I while I was genuinely concerned, and thought about poking her with a stick to see if she was alive, until a current of excitement brought her back to life and she yelled out the word sausage roll with a ferocity that the taste of pastry and meat fermenting before her didn't really deserve. She looked genuinely at her food based outburst of Tourettes and paid with her head down and her eyes never looking at her server, an amiable blonde girl who pretends nothing has gone wrong. I suspect from the servers glazed expression and lack of intellect she has mixed the cactus and the pinata just as she's mixed the old womans sandwich on the cash register with a 90ty item, but that's just an assumption...

My local cash converters is showing signs of deep malaise. The pile of VHS tapes that was 1nce so mighty and proud is now flimsy and weak, a corner pile of 7even tapes that reveal that even in an economic decline no 1ne wants tapes with Billy Blanks on the cover. The staff have even relaxed their what are you looking at you scruffy herbert habit of massing around the edge of the desk and staring, as if relaxed by the failing health of the store. Come 1ne come all they say now, we will continue our conversation and allow you to peruse our falling quality merchandise. Although to be honest, there is a certain wonderful comic irony that I can at least appreciate in the street where Cash Converters is. A cheesecake shop in which a rather surly and portly Samoan girl works in splendid isolation is now next door to a 24our gym, with American slogans painted on it to encourage the vapid and lazy to enter. I would be the perfect target for these motivational slogans were I not too vapid and lazy to be lured by cheap American slogans. Disheartened by the lack of VHS tapes, I wander blinking into the fading light unburdened by any purchases, as a girl who clearly got the memo from the Murdoch Papers that big is in emerges from the gym eating a giant bag of Doritos, quite proudly rejecting the thumping techno pounding within the gym in favour of a snack based product. Outside KFC, which lacks the irony of being near anything healthy, an argument breaks out. 2wo girls in matching tops lash out at each other over issues of race, sexual morality and gender identity. Sure these complicated issues are discussed with several short swear words interlocked in the middle of the argument, but you get the jist. Eventually, both are held back by larger, rougher looking girls in bomber jackets and restrained from the mutually weak slaps they are exchanging by force. I don't suspect their fight stemmed from disappointment at the lack of VHS tapes in Cash Converters. That, I suspect, is uniquely my concern...

There's an elderly Chinese woman sitting at a table in a space 1nce occupied by people selling flying magical pens. This woman has shown no signs of their showmanship during her rental of this space - the people selling the magical flying pens would leap to their feet whenever they saw a customer, just to transform their pen into a flying object. Sometimes they would work up clever lyrics to a popular song and put the word pen in the song. It was wasted on me, because I hate song parodies, but I appreciated their effort. In contrast, the elderly Chinese woman sits monastically and stoically at her desk, barely moving an eyebrow and sitting perfectly still all day long. Affixed to her desk is a sticker that says DIY bracelets, and with all the affixing and staring that's going on today, I think she's a Chinese cousin of the woman in the bakery to be honest. She's moved so little during her rental of the table and space combo that must be on sale from Centre Management that I genuinely feel that DIY Bracelets is something that goes on around her. You literally make your own bracelet and take it away while she sits staring outwardly, never moving, not even for a second, an immobile presence in a slough of frenzied meaningless activity. Sadly, my image of her was blown when the aforementioned affixed sticker plunged to the floor due to poor application of blutack, and she let out a gigantic tut, and stamped her heel on the floor like a moody teenager, before settling back down into her continued 1ne woman vigil. Ever viligant. Ever staring. Ever on guard of the little bits that make up a bracelet. Ever ready to snap like a twig at the slightest inconvenience...

It's been an exhausting day. I'm too tired to debate the whys and wherefores of what sport coaches should have done by e-mail any longer, nor can I stand the musings of Guy Sebastian for a second longer. I don't really want to peruse the newly installed corporate bookstore for fear of being seduced by it's comfortable couches and pleasant Irish sales staff who may or may not be Irish to begin with. I don't feel like wandering around KMart and running into my curly haired nemesis or lurking around Big W just to see what night out eyed Panda Eyed girl will talk about next. I feel as flat and listless as most of the people walking around - the 1nes who haven't taken their kids "oop north" to Burnie for a vacation, a treat as it were. I wonder if Maggies Bazaar is up there. I end up in a local hospitable cafe, full of people who used to work in other hospitable cafes before it was bought out by a fat bloke in a T-shirt who never bothers to shave. The girl behind the counter is as terrible as me at small talk, but given that her boss is stirring a coffee nearby, she is obliged to give it a go. Like Moe from the Simpsons asking about them current events, she pushes herself to give it a go, a line of purple eye shadow inelegantly applied to her as she asks with stuttering Steady Eddie steps how my day was. I shrug ineffectually, because I never know to answer that question, and we stand for an age because she's so caught up in the silence and scrambling for something to say she forgets what I've asked for, and in a panic, loses her grip on my change, and sends it scattering to the 4our corners to the cafe. Age shall not weary me, nor the years condemn, but I won't scramble on the floor for a 5cent piece. I smile politely and take my RedEye to my next adventure, while she stands frozen on the spot apologizing non verbally, which I presume is the standard pose for the day, as I txt some nonsense excuse about a party that's a world away, because it helps to get in early...

Given her clumsiness, awkwardness, ineptitude at small talk...she could have been perfect for me...in another world...

Fathers Day - a Retrospective

My Dad and I spend every single Fathers Day in Kingston McDonalds, bright and early in an approximation of clean clothes, eating tediously compiled food prepared by pasty skinned children earning a minimum wage toiling to provide me with breakfast that looks nothing like the picture. The man who illuminates the Mcdonalds burgers is up there with the artisan who drew Michael Jacksons face on every frame of the 96 Brit Awards after the white light on silicon face made Jacko look like a dancing skull. It's not the food though, it's a tradition, and my Dad looks forward to it, and I guess I do too. Every year we get a little older and the people behind the counter get a little younger, and he picks over a copy of The Mercury just to curse all the people who got their letter printed instead of him. He sent 1ne 1nce to the Scottish broadcaster "Dougie" Donnelly in the early 90tys after "Dougie" had suggested that a player on Dads (and my) soccer team was a thug. He questioned the professional integrity of the broadcaster, and 2wo days later, got back a handwritten letter that was 10en pages long, refuting the claims, which to me just suggested "Dougie" had too much time on his hands. Still, "Dougie" was proactive, the Mercury didn't publish Dads letter. He mentions it every Fathers Day without fail, especially if some right wing philosophy slips through the editorial net. Someone wrote in and said the rain in Tasmania was not worth complaining about because it was cleansing. Well, didn't he go on about that, wondering what kind of idiot would write...my musings on my Dad as I study his furrowed teacherly brow are interrupted by the pleasant vocal tones of Misty. Misty is of course amazingly young and straight from a McDonalds recruitment poster. She has in her hands Dads coffee, which has taken so long to boil that if I was a talented and gifted comedian of Stewart Lee calibre I could come up with sort of cogent relationship between how long the coffee has taken to brew and an unrelated incident that also took a long time. Not that Dad would laugh anyway, he's buried in the obituaries of the paper - in itself a joke of some kind waiting to be developed, but Misty is impatient to serve the general public and the coffee is cooling in her perfectly formed young hands, and I must break my thoughts to take it from her, smile, and let her get on with the service standards she was born to spread...

My Dad incidentally logs onto the Internet and checks the obituaries in the Paisley Daily Express to see if his own Dad has died. They haven't spoken for 30ty years, and I think it was something to a christening shawl and yet at the same time nothing to do with the christening shawl at all. Like of lot of men of his age - him, the bloke across the road from us in Scotland, Rolf Harris on TV-AM - the most palpable frustration he ever showed that he and his Dad don't talk came when Mike and The Mechanics brought out "The Living Years", and he, like Rolf, burst into tears when he heard it. His Dad was typically brutal as most Dads of the era - certainly the 1nes who bob up in books that clutter up the shelves of my local bookstore - seemingly were. My only memories of my Grandad are very formative, of him bringing round piles of "Kevin The Kitten" books for me to read 1ne day or something like that. I've never spoken to my Grandad, never sat in a dimly lit fast food emporium with him picking him on errors of grammar. I'm not comfortable with small talk, but I'd like to ask my Grandad what it's like to live a life where pettiness and jealousy and stupid fights dominate your landscapes - a life lived in triviality, a life lived in arguments and petulance, where you know bowls scores from 1965 but not your own Grandchildrens birthdays. And he might have a perfectly good reason for the falling out that I don't know about, and he might say, well, it's fine to say I've lived in triviality, but what about you, you woke up today and threw a DVD box across the room violently because BMX Bandits was jumpy when you put it in. And I would say you are a 90ty year old man, what do you know about BMX Bandits? But we won't have that discussion obviously. And since I'm a place surrounded by cherubic children smiling up genuinely at their fathers - the plastic clown almost ruining it with his cheesy insincere Glitteresque smirk - I find it kind of sad. It also makes my decision when I was 6ix to adopt Whiplash from the He-Man cartoons as a potential alternate Grandfather seem somehow viable...

Dad always gets the same thing every year. In addition to a side order of political hectoring, he always gets a sausage and egg McMuffin without cheese. Every year, sausage and egg McMuffin, no cheese. Every year. Every single year. I have to go and get this mythical food source, because sausage and egg McMuffins pre cooked come with cheese, and Dads has to be specially made. Every year. So normally I'm standing in the queue for ages while snot nosed kids in tracksuits elbow their portly father in the ribs and wonder what's taking the Scottish eedjit in the fancily patterned jumper so long. I shrug meekly every year as if to apologize for my Fathers culinary taste. This time however, basic things are going horribly wrong. Coffee isn't brewed, hotcakes aren't hot, and as for things with no cheese...trying to piece all this together is a boychild, no bigger than a large coke, just as pale as Misty but a lot more ginger. His badge says Andy, his face says a swear word, and his mouth says standard McDonalds issue words of apology. Behind him brown shirted drones throw things in blenders and cookers and stoves and out the window in the desperate hope that somehow they will conjure up a muffin. Oddly, the 1ne thing on my tray while this chaos is going around me is a Sausage and Egg McMuffin without cheese. That was apparently the easy bit this year. It's ready to go, it's ready to be eaten, it's not as good as the picture but it's ready to be devoured anyway. I should if I was a fair and equitable son tell him that this year it was my order that held us up, that left him sitting on his own for ages while I hopped from foot to foot praying Kingston opens a Starbucks soon. Well, not that, maybe a nice independent coffee store with tasty pastries. But of course, I don't tell him that, when I get back to the table I obviously roll my eyes, throw the muffin in his direction and mutter darkly about people who don't like cheese. Misty meanwhile is throwing incredibly vile and unprofessional shapes in the kitchen as she takes charge and tries to fix the coffee and chip chaos that threatens to tear an entire world apart. She almost, almost, uses the c word, but it's a dreaded and awful insult to label someone in a time of crisis as "the cook" so she restrains herself, and tries to find out just where the hell my coffee is, my own personal fetcher laid bare by the strains of a Fathers day queue, a creation ripe for novelisation or a terrible Wayne Hope sitcom...

Truth is, my relationship with my Dad is what it is. Explaining every nuance is tiring, explaining how we got here, why we sit here, it'd take too long. My relationship isn't necessarily unique, or special, any more interesting to a casual observer than Mistys relationship with sanity or the ginger kids relationship with his virginity - I'm making an assumption of course. However what is interesting to me is that each year, we add a layer to the experience, some sort of private joke or dis-interested sigh is added to the mix, and in the car back to my place I'm able to say how his silly desire to not eat cheese (don't tell him) caused a perfectly pleasant young girl to lose her mind. Somewhere in a council flat in Paisley an old man sits in his chair watching Grandstand or Sky Plus, deprived of this interaction by circumstances so pointless it's frightening. And 1ne day, we just won't go - either he'll be too old or I'll have kids or a commitment and then 1ne of us won't be around forever, and that's that - our seat up the back near the demented grinning clown will be taken by another family who choose speed over culinary excellence. Maybe it'll be a young father struggling to calm his child down, or a father who can't find the words to tell his son he loves him, or a father and daughter that sit in perfect contentment. So I treasure the time we do have together, cheese or no cheese. Being Scottish, this happiness and treasured memory is shared by me slagging off his driving schools and wishing I was adopted, and him saying I am adopted and I was the silliest child in the Romanian orphanage, but hey, that's just us. I save the deep and meaningfuls for quiet time in between ripping open packs of Football cards on the floor, and trying to brush the taste of Mcdonalds out of my mouth intermittently, while at the same time yelling at my inept useless football team with flecks of Colgate bouncing off the bathroom mirror...

If someone was around to sing Magic Moments, I'd hit them for being ironic...

Nightclub Part 2wo - Don't Believe the Hype

Walking around the streets of Ayrshire at night was never an advisable option - not for any real reason that the newspapers would try and scare you with. Certainly it was relatively innocuous physically to do so in the early 90tys since heroin generally left our local jakies tired and listless and in a slightly quaint way you could take their wallets quite easily, as opposed to what happens these days. Truthfully it was our changing weather that always got me, as I would be in the middle of quite an amiable stroll in the sunshine through the Village or The Mall or even The Forum complex, the 1ne where middle aged women would bank their life savings on opening a tiny cramped stall where you could buy birthday cards in bulk, the next everyone was fleeing with an "I Wuv U" card held over their head in a weak attempt to block out the monsoon from above. Sometimes, since it was the early 90tys, someone walking past would blame the rain on The English, since it was in vogue, especially with local buskers. Sometimes people would even pay for the card. It rained heavily at the bus stop after my first ever trip to a nightclub when I was 12elve, the mini bus home to my circular street late and irregular as it was. I didn't stay for more than an hour at the club, but it left a lasting impression on my young brain - maybe it was damage from the smoke machine. Having seen a kid in bike shorts crying in the corner and been warned off from a dodgy poker game by a bouncer who took more a paternal interest in me than my own Dad did for most of 1990ty, I was already feeling a little thrown before the rains came. My Mum was about to turn 40ty, and in the tide of confusion that was my first exposure to strobe lighting, crying children in bike shorts and unattainable girls with big hair and denim jackets dancing idly to the latest chart tune, I was pleased in spite of the rain that I had armed myself for her birthday party with a story of some depth that made me look at least a little bit cool - and most of all I had something to take back to Debbie that would impress her, or at least, ensure that I got a word in edge ways for 1nce in the time we spent together pondering the universe and why people hit each other with sticks...

Debbie, my robot obsessed girlfriend of the time, was a tough person to take an anecdote back to, since in that typically Scottish way an anecdote was always followed up with a much better story, and she would sit expectantly on the edge of our circular brick dating spot bouncing up and down to get her story out. My nightclub story, especially the seedy blocked off poker den downstairs, had captured her interest. I embellished the story purely for the occassion and she listened intently to every word, without 1nce mentioning robots or suggesting a mid story break for a Wispa chocolate bar. She didn't mean any harm with her interruptions, she was just excitable, a conversational whirlwind in a shellsuit who kissed hard and talked even harder. She was oddly quiet though throughout my story, and at the end sloped off home with nary a flimsy theory about the future to be shared, shell suit sparking as she did so. For some reason, she had taken deep envy to the fact that I had crossed the hallowed halls into a nightclub. Since I was considerate, I tried in later conversations to back pedal the hype a little bit - I mean, it was still only a slightly a step up from a school disco, and the girls dancing weren't that cool, and the poker den was more sleazy than exciting, and anyway, the Cokes cost 5ive bucks, I mean, really...it was too late though, and when she emerged eating a Caramac some days later, she decided firmly and decisively that she wanted to go to the nightclub herself and have a night out. Since essentially our relationship had boiled down to nothing more than vigorous snogging and conversations that went nowhere, I had a few reservations about what was clearly a date. That said, I was happy to take her, just to cheer her up. I didn't realise at the time that her friend Kathyrn was claiming to have gone through a Christopher Mayhew style drug experience and Debbie was feeling a bit mardy that she was missing out on the alleged wild side of Ayrshire life even before I had managed to slip under the velvet rope of a mid rung nightclub that doubled as a bingo hall on Tuesdays. Still, her mood was strange - I mean, if she wanted drugs, the drug dealer was literally across the grass from us. Hell, we waved to him most days as he rode around on his bike. Women, so secretive...

It took a lot of planning to co-ordinate our schedules into line to go to the nightclub again. The planning seemed to take forever, and I swear at 1ne point I was sitting on my front step drawing a map in crayon. Sadly, when we went back to the nightclub on a much less interesting evening. The DJ was openly bored, the much vaunted poker den was sealed off and dark, with not a paternal bouncer in sight. The entire dance floor was taken up by just 2wo residents. One was a pinch faced Kate O'Mara lookalike in a brown dress sipping gin by the bucketful with one elbow slipping precariously off the bar and a smile on her face as she descended ever closer to the floor. In the middle of the dancefloor, a man with a mullet and tight jeans dad danced to the latest rave music being spun by the ever more bored DJ, who changed the vinyl records as if it caused him physical pain. The dad dancer wasn't quite making a move on Kate O'Mara, but he was dancing entirely from the arms, swimming almost across the tiled dancefloor while strobe lighting illuminated his wiry rock star thin frame, a portrait of awkwardness in pink and yellow no cooler than that average geography teacher. In truth, he was no more awkward than me - having spun a tale of poker dens, dancing cool older kids peddling the fizziest illegal drinks money could buy and a suspicious queue to the toilets, it was socially deflating for me to deliver a scene from a banking convention when 2wo of the tellers got a little tipsy after dark. Debbie looked at me, I looked at her, then we both looked at Kate O'Mara fell on the floor while some early work by The Shamen or something played. There was a natural and understandable disappointment that the wonderful scenarios that played out in Debbies head as to what she might see had been so viciously undermined by the desperation unfolding in front of us. By the time the DJ in the flattest most monotone voice imaginable told everyone to keep it vibey, I was pretty much feeling depressy, and the DJ, getting no response from anyone sober, conscious or otherwise, left a mass of dead air hanging while he changed records, and looked a tad ponderous as the man on the dancefloor just kept on moving his arms, even in the absence of any kind of tune...

The music simply never restarted, the DJ having apparently gone out the bag for a cheeky ciggy, and no one really noticed anyway, the Dad dancer kept on dancing, Kate O'Mara ended up face down on the floor with lipstick across her face, and apart from a flamboyant bouncer and a barmaid with a massive fringe, we were undisturbed for at least 15teen awkwardly difficult minutes. I'm not good at conversation at the best of times, and I had nothing to say other than vague apologies that the night was not going well. The only thing for it was to dip into my faux leather wallet and buy a round of drinks that weren't overpriced cokes. I tried to do it in a suave way, but had no idea of any kind of beer brand or anything like that, and ended up ordering some nonsensical turn of the decade Czech beer that cost far more than a mere McEwans. Sadly this cost me at least 1ne Amstrad game that week, but that's love for you. So at least we had beers, and plenty of time before the bus came to just sit and talk. Well sit and stare at the ceiling fan anyway. It was a relief to get out of there, although I maintain to this day had we just stuck it out for another hour the poker school would have begun, since I sensed that downstairs they were starting to turn on lights and lay out drinks on velvet tables. We walked out into a flickering sun, with nowhere really to go, and not much to do, the faint taste of Czech beer making my breath curdle. When we got on the minibus though after an age of shifting uneasily from foot to foot, Debbie, being far more alert to people than I was, had seen Kathryn sitting on the backseat and rushed up to her in a flurry of curls and clacking heels. She then preceded to make up the most amazing story about what had happened - fights, vomit, pogo dancing, alcohol, gambling...it was such bewildering nonsense that all I could do was sit quietly on my seat, stare out the window at a passer by draped in a Celtic flag, and wonder why people lied to each other just to impress, and thought, hey, I'll never be like that, I'll always stay true to nerdy, bowl cut Fila boot wearing me...

That was until I moved to Burnie, but that, as they say, is a completely different Shamen song...