I can feel it coming in the Ayr tonight

I was born in a country that doesn't believe in beauty or positivity. Not for us the broad beaming optimism of the American citizen. We support a national football team pathologically addicted to failure, the descendents of Highlanders and Lowlanders always 1ne inept battle away from disastrous defeat at the hands of the English. We don't accept nice things. We believe in guilt, we believe that if life hands you lemons, you've deserved them for being a terrible person. It's in our DNA. My Mum and Dad went on a honeymoon to Ayr, a Scottish town described in Wikipedia as very flat. I'd imagine that was a bit like the honeymoon. I've wandered around Ayr many times during my trips of Scotland, trying to imagine what having a honeymoon there was like. Often I've stared at bus stops and pram pushing lunatics through drizzle covered glasses and wondered how anyone could feel luvved up in such a place. It must have difficult creating a romantic atmosphere. My friend went to Ayr 1nce and was sitting quite happily on the bus when a local ned decided to chat her up between slurps of Special Brew and social commentary on the ethnic population.

"Whit colours yer hair darling!" he said, with all the suave sophistication of a young Gerald Butler.

"It's auburn!" said my friend - suspecting he was the nutter on the bus who claimed to have a nuclear bomb in a tin can of baked beans, it was best to just say something.

"Aye! Aw burnt tae fuck!" he said, before giggling maniacally all the way back to Irvine. If he wasn't Gerald Butler, he was certainly Butler from On the Buses...

My Mum and Dad met at a holiday camp in Scotland. They both worked there. Dad was a chef - well, chef in the same way you can call Ke$ha a singer. Gordon Ramsay didn't have much to worry about, but when it came to feeding the masses beans and little sausages made of pork and newspaper, he was your man. I don't know what my Mum did. Made the beds and played soccer in those hilarious "men vs women" matches in the mud where single entendres were pumped through the PA system to the hilarity of campers. They've made it work somehow, with a patience and resolve I can never imagine. I can't even wait for the toast to pop up without tapping my foot never mind getting married. And spending a honeymoon in Ayr? I've seen the hotel they stayed in, you can see a bus stop from the window. I know, because on their romantic honeymoon of a life time, Mum saw her sister. And my Dad can't even go to the shops bar his feet hurt and he's fretting about missing something on TV. Mostly though, Ayr has a tense, pre violence air of calm stillness. Maybe that's the key to its romance and charm - time, space, cold, nothing to do but walk and talk. Work things out. Plan. I can't go 5ive minutes these days bar something’s beeping, paging or ringing. 1970s Ayrshire there was nothing to do or see but talk and do other things Mummy’s and Daddy’s like to do. You could also go and see Sidney Devine perform some hilarious musical numbers at the local theatre, but it's no wonder we're a fatalistic people when Mr Devine is head of the musical society. My Mum being the practical person she is and was, such solitude would have been perfect for her. She isn't 1ne for plans and dreams my Mum. She grew up in a house of 13teen kids, always waiting for the moment when their Mum had to pack up and take them away from their alcoholic stereotypical drunken father, straight from the pages of an archaic Dickensian novel. Dads family wasn't much better, all Acker Bilk records and dudgeon coated layers of judgemental scorn. Maybe Ayr, for all its faults, really was perfect for them after all...

I think the most romantic thing I've done in Ayr was buy a pair of mittens for Debbie - my robot obsessed, hipster indie girlfriend of the time. The lady behind the counter looked at me like I was effeminate for buying such a pair of woolly mittens with jolly sheep or something stitched into the fabric. There was no way that a boy loaded with cash buying gloves was going to pass in the rough as guts part of Ayr as some sort of Hugh Hefner figure. That's the other thing about Scottish people - anyone who says it's cold, they are to be suspected of being a big Jessie Willox. She never looked up from behind her eye shadow splattered eyes - never took her eyes off the gloves as she put them into 1ne of those clanging old fashioned cash registers...

"They're fur my girlfriend" I said, nervously, unconvincingly. This was obviously a mistake. Any Scottish person would say "Ma burd" - girlfriend? What was I thinking?

"Aye, very guid" she said, in the manner of the distinctly unimpressed. I think she had correlated that the gloves fit my hands perfectly. I have titchy hands - built for typing, not for fighting.

"They are!" I said, before taking the gloves in the angry manner of the unimpressed. She took a slurp of her Diet Coke and said "Hope she likes them!" before tittering.

Stung by the assertion that I didn't have a girlfriend - when I so totally did - I went through quite the phase of wooing Debbie with dates and presents. I don't know why I did this, but I thought I probably should make an effort. We caught the bus to Ayr to go ice skating. I wanted to go to a rave at Ayr Pavilion, but was promptly told "they were shite", an assertion time and Youtube has proven correct in every possible way. Debbie was in a huff anyway. As far as I can remember her and 1ne of her friends Lindsay had had an argument about something, maybe Lindsays use of drugs. Talk about adult situations. All I wanted to do was take "ma burd" out and buy her a coke, and now I was in some scene from The Basketball Diaries. Heroin addict? Lindsay? She hadn't even progressed beyond mixing cough syrup and Irn Bru and calling it a cocktail! I pressed my face to the glass window of the no 52 A bus and watched the world pass by...

"Are ye listening tae me!" said Debbie, pouting, and adopting the position of a teapot.

Aye. I was listening. But I was also thinking - Paris. Rome. Sydney. Great romantic cities. And I was in Ayr. Bloody Ayr. Staring out the window at a psychopathic skinhead in a psychotically coloured bomber jacked giving me the finger. He maintained it all the way through, until our bus was out of sight. I don't know if you've ever ice skated in a bad mood. It's similar to ice skating in a good mood, but somehow even more pointless. I tried to make some sort of joke up in my head - Torvill and Moaner? Torvill and Whine? Torvill and...ah forget it - and as I marched around the ice in sullen icy silence, I wondered if this was what relationships were like. Grim marches around ice rinks while Adamski and Beats International played constantly on the PA system and a woman who looked like Yuliya Dovhal screamed at the skaters to keep skating and not mooch around the sidelines. Maybe Yuliya was the 1ne I was meant to be with. She certainly had a good pair of lungs. Nice hips. We got the bus home in equally sullen silence. I think it was Lao Tzu who said ambition has one heel nailed in well, though she stretch her fingers to touch the heavens. I had 1ne heel nailed in gum, and if I stretched I could touch some Artline pen graffiti that told me Brendan was a homo. The bus even threatened to break down at 1ne point as it swept an arc around a close and cul-de-sac so perilous it nearly threw an old woman off with it, her tenacity in clinging onto that silver pole truly extolling the spirit of the blitz. The bus driver threw every1ne off in Dreghorn, leaving us a long walk home in the rain. My orange FILA boots got coated in drizzle and her mittens looked inviting to wear in the cold - shopkeepers be damned, my hands were cold. I got to her door quicker than I expected, turned away to walk home and hopefully not got mugged, and she grabbed my arm by the fold in the elbow...

"Thanks for a great day!" she then said, out of the grey, in beaming sincerity. She kissed me on the cheek and skipped away happily. I never figured out Scotland. It was truly a strange place. I went home and put it all in a journal that has long been discarded, put on some Sinitta to fall asleep - and woke up with a phone number given to me at the ice skating rink that I never rang. What would be the point - I'm Scottish, it would never have worked out...

The Day The Clown Blinked

So I've sat most of today, absolutely loathing this girl at work who, nominally, is my friend but at work we just don't get on because she asks a lot of open ended sarcastic questions that imply you are failing at your job. Actually what I've done today for large parts is just endlessly watch this video two guys made about Penguin. I didn't watch it for any other reason than it gave me a break from working on my epic 2001 Youtube playlist, but also because it's kind of interesting to see things as they really are, not as my tiny blonde permanent tanned 8ight year old mind would like them to be. For some reason no one seems to have made one about Kilwinning, the place I went to school, which is fair enough I suppose, but I wouldn't mind some sort of visual representation of the place for the sake of accuracy. This visual representation would explain something to me - why when I sketch mentally about the place, I'm always miserable, and it's grey, and I'm depressed and getting an Indian burn or talking to pimped out drug dealers, and yet when it came time to leave and move back to Penguin, where in my mind at least I was happier than at any time in my life, I cried like a baby. I don't think is a logical path to take - it may have had something to do with sophistication though. You see the thinking in Scotland was, and probably still is, somewhat dismissive of outsiders. I love Scotland, I should say that because I've made it sound otherwise, but certainly you wouldn't want to stand out. I went to school with a kid called Martin who looked a bit like AC Slater from Saved By The Bell is he had a flattop haircut. He was quietly spoken with a slight stammer that did nothing to knock his confidence. We were queuing for Yorkie bars in the grim countenance that passed for our recess snack hut, a cupboard from which harassed middle aged women would tell you exactly what they thought of your coupons. Since I was a nervous, slightly fidgety child I would often impart stories with exaggerated punchlines or over impressive social boasts, but in that case, I definitely had a story to tell, that I had been invited to a party, at night, in Kilwinning, with girls and probably a scary movie. Maybe even punch! Martin barely even took his eyes off his Peppermint Aero to tell me it sounded shit, and then walked off. I think that's the difference between Scotland and Penguin. If I had played the party down, he'd have said I was an idiot for not looking forward to it and then walked off. In Penguin, you never had to worry about the deeper meaning of anything, you never had to worry about being put in your place. At least that's how I remember it, although I'm sure it's nonsense, the innocent thoughts of a child - I mean, if you fell off the flying fox, I'm sure someone was discussing what an idiot you were at the bakery the next day...

I can't remember the exact circumstances surrounding the party. The girl who was hosting was sort of an Elizabeth Berkeley clone if Elizabeth Berkeley had more acne, more untameable hair and fainted in the library once a month. That's my main memory of our party hostess, she was always fainting in ever more dramatic swoony circumstances. I think, in fact I know, she wanted to winch my best friend, and I was sort of surplus to requirements in the whole situation. But hey, I'd brought punch, what was he bringing? There's a possibility it was a Halloween party, which would explain the movie, but if you think I'm going into details of my one and only halloween costume, we'll just move on right away. The punch is my most significant memory though, not just because it's a rare example of me mixing a drink that didn't have the word spider in it, as the implications were that at this party, we would all have our first drink of alcohol. Never happened of course - I didn't drink until I was 18teen, which should tell you the quality of my punch, for the most part if sat bobbing quietly in the corner acting as a conversational makeweight during awkward lustful one way glances. Anytime the conversation was muted, it was all hey, punch is in the corner. Her house was a vague collection of wicker furniture from that shop at the end of the Irvine mall that stank of cane seats and drunken staff, and family photos where she was always smiling with a suspicious nervous grin. Her best friend was called Sarah, and she had an upturned nose, which, had I been more musically cognescant, would have resulted in some sort of immature Billy Joel parody. She didn't like me because during one of our classes, taught by my Dad incidentally, we all had to on a pink card write something nice about everyone else in the room and I, and I swear this was innocent taking the piss out of the exercise move, said she had a nice nose. So she wasn't talking to me outside of university style lectures about respecting other people, I was in a cane chair probably being yelled at for continually mentioning the punch, Elizabeth Faint was no doubt fussing over ordives and trying to get my best friend to pash her, and my best friend was no doubt lapping up the attention with a pretty smug smirk and then whispering to me that the whole night was completely terrible and we should run away and leave. As far as parties went, it was hardly the Hooligan X rave at the Ayr Pavillion. Our host tried to get the party started with a tape of her favourite rave tunes, and it chewed up, crumbling in her hands. It would have been prudent to leave, but my Mum wasn't picking me up for another four hours so I had to sit back down, either that or get a pen and try and unpick the cassette. Did I mention I made punch?

Time moved slowly. Conversation picked up slightly, although in my case any incremental increase in attention was noticable only because I had a theory that Altern 8 were the greatest band in the world shot down, and because really I didn't need to be there in that living room, they could have managed quite happily without me. Except they did need me, because I was the only one making conversation. Which is how the Lorna incident happened. Someone finally cued some sort of ravey dancey hands in the air like you just don't care track up without the tape dying, and things were going a little better. Still no one drank the punch though. The upturned nose girl still wasn't having any - she preferred Marti Pellow. I was in the middle of some sort of early 90s discourse on the nature of music when all the girls went into the kitchen while I was in mid sentence. I was used to this, I didn't even miss a syllable, but then the hostess was back out into the living room asking me if I would go out with Lorna. Lorna? Who was Lorna? I hadn't even noticed Lorna, and this was a party of five (not that party of five) people. Was she the girl with the Halloween silver face paint on? What does she look like? Why is she hiding in the kitchen? Am I still going out with Debbie? Why is no one drinking the punch? Of course, this was a complex question asked at a strange and awkward time, so I had to respectfully decline the blind date, or my friend did it for me because that was his manner, and then there was just chaos and pandemonium as a silver swish ran out of the kitchen, into the street and burst into tears on the front lawn. I've never made a girl cry since, or had before, and I hadn't done much to provoke the situation, but the party ground entirely to a halt as the girls ran down the road to try and soothe her hurt feelings. My friend, in his infinite wisdom, didn't counsel me to go and be nice to Lorna and score a sympathy pash, but raided through the collection of blank tapes round the base of the TV to try and find embarrassing home movies of the girl who was hosting the party. We found a lot of episodes of Alias Smith and Jones, but dirt, no dice. When the girls returned, without Lorna, I was subjected to a lot of long boring relationship talk, even though I effectively had done nothing wrong and was, I think, spoken for. I tried valiantly to escape with a few pointed remarks about the decline of Stock Aitken and Waterman, but it always came back to my flippant cruelty. Mum was three hours away, my friend was smirking, and there was I, pinned with my back to the rattan, knees pressed up against my chin, listening to a well rehearsed talk that I would become incredibly familiar with over the years. It felt very much like growing up, or it would have, if it wasn't for how I was dressed...

Naturally, the Lorna incident was, as is the nature of early teenage parties, a big deal for an hour of fraught tension and variations of what a bastard I was until the next round of ordives came out. Everything eventually calmed down, and upturned nose girl began a controversial discourse on her first experience with cocaine. With that nose? Anyway, in the midst of our conversation, we had forgotten that the Steven King film IT had been put on the TV. IT of course has nothing to do with computers, it was a film about a killer clown or some such gubbins that I was too cool to think was scary. In fact we took intermittent breaks from our little mini kievs and discussions about the future (I stole most of my ideas from Debbie) that included the words massive a lot. If you've seen IT, the movie not the industry (yes you've done that joke get on with it) you will know that at a certain point, something happens where a photo in a book winks and then begins to bleed. I say something happens, because whatever happened, we weren't really paying attention or expecting it and I'm not ashamed to say it scared the crap out of us. Four people who had spent a tedious amount of time having psuedo intellectual conversations about rave music and inter personal relationships to the soundtrack of a ticking clock had just been reduced to the same scared kids who had hid behind the couch a few years earlier during Gremlins (or was that just me?)...at which point, we had to face the uncomfortable realisation that the girl with the upturned nose had, for whatever reason, jumped into my lap at the moment of film fright impact. We looked at each other, then at her, then at me, then at the punch bowl, and then back at each other, and then she had to slowly unpeel herself with as much dignity as she could, and go back to her wicker chair. No one spoke for a long time - we were embarrassed about the leaping and the screaming and the unpeeling and the shifting and the scary clowning...in fact it felt like no one spoke for hours, everyone staring at family photos and the ceiling and the ground...as far me, I had made a girl cry and had another girl jump into my lap and I had a vague realisation that this was the peak of my attractiveness. My friend had even lost his smirk, so upset was he that he had lost his cool. The Elizabeth Berkeley was just glad she didn't faint, and upturned nose girl was mortified that her righteous proto feminist demeanour had faded under pressure. Someone though eventually had to say something, I mean, Mum wasn't coming for another hour...

...and you can probably guess what I said, and how it went...still, it's their fault, they could at least have tried it...