Why I Don't Write Poems about The Sun

JB-Hifi in Hobart is not a place for reflection or solitude on a day off. They remain as a store conceptually bound to the premise that no second shall feel unfilled with thought or consideration. If the thumping, ceaseless rock music of Metallica doesn't get you, 1ne of the ever friendly staff or a barging woman in a stripey top desperate to see exactly what you are seeing will surely impinge on the notion of considering buying. Not for nothing is this paeon to modern corporate thinking down some stairs and hidden away in it's very own thumpingly loud bunker - it's it's own world, it's own universe carefully constructed. It's not for me, often, simply because the narrow CD laden corridors of doom and the thumping rock music just make me tired and flee. However, it is worthwhile if you can get in, get Series 4 of Weeds on DVD, and negotiate the indifferent shop girl behind the counter with the hooped ear-rings who thinks both you and your choices are feeble and inept. This 1ne even places a hand on her contemptous boney impossibly young hip, and ever so slowly crawls towards the cash register, as if disturbed from a beautiful dream where she is rich and famous and doesn't need to work and all scum is washed from the streets. Her make up is ineptly applied, but I'm not sure if that's a statement of personal identity - who can tell with Generation Y? There's a manual on the counter, I see it sometimes when I go in. It's a red folder - and the red cover is a luxurious type of red, the type you see on Hugh Hefners couch - marked customer service, in silver letters spread across the front with no concession to humour. I don't know if she's ever read it, or noticed it to be honest. She swipes my card and hands me my bag and resumes staring into the middle distance right through me, as a student with a patchy beard and his home allowance to spend shells out for the new M.I.A album. He must wait, of course, to pay for his soon to be returned CD. I feel that if I was a character at the end of 6ix Feet Under, as I take my final breaths and a white graphic appears soundtracked by Sia that strips my time on earth to a point totally devoid of meaning other than 2wo random years seperated by a dash, I will reflect on many hours spent idling in queues while Hobart shop girls burden themselves with my purchases. Or I'll shake an angry fist at whatever reality TV show irks me at the time, it's really up for grabs...

In contrast to the corporate honey pot that is JB-HiFi, Fullers Bookshop is an oasis of calm. There's almost too much time to think, too much time to ponder. They play soothing music, calming music for the soul. I'm staring at a blue sign up sheet next to 1ne of the windows. It's a sign up sheet for the Fullers bookclub. I have in my hand a book about the history and origins of Sesame Street, because the story behind that show is incredible, but it's not really Fullers book club material. They underline suspiciously the low levels of commitment required in this book club, which just puts me off. Why start a book club and not commit? There's a coffee shop over the music book shelves, in a valley of psychology books. There's 2wo old ducks dressed like Miss Marple sipping coffee and having a conversation in short clipped sentences that seems to invoke nothing but giggles from them. I've never been in a book club, because there used to be 1ne in Scotland that always put me off. They used to meet in our school library in Scotland - we would see them if our Mums were late getting ASDA shopping to pick us up - a rum bunch of bored single women, the odd slightly demented pervert looking man with egg shaped head and dirty coat, 2wo of our own librarians making cash on the side, and a beautiful blonde with shiny blue eyes who always looked desperately out of place in her beanbag, legs crossed, as if assigned to the group by court order. She used to have to sit there with a sad smile, and we would hear her make what I felt were distinctly intellectual points, only to be drowned out by a chorus of battiness, attention seeking and demented ramblings about Star Wars novels. It was less a book club, other than her, than a care in the community program. We only shared eye contact once, as the pervy man stood to read his poem about the sun in an exaggerated Raymond J Bartholomew voice, every word either rhyming with sun or spoon oddly enough. I smiled at her from behind the reference section, and she winced visibly in a comic way before refocusing on the group. She never came again, and I never found out what happened to her. The man who wrote the poem about the spoon turned up the following week in a wig like the 1ne Phil Collins wore in the Illegal Alien clip, but that's quite another story...

I don't sign up for the book club. The girl behind the counter tries to get me to join - she has thick librarian glasses, and a tooth that sparkles in the fading daylight, a twisted gnarler that looks like it would hurt every moment of the day. Her boss tells me the credit card function isn't working, and she smiles so apologetically it's painful. I pay for my books, and add it to my ever expanding pile of things I don't really need. I nearly leave the little pile behind at the pub. The table across from me is positively raucous, as a middle aged brunette excitedly and knowingly talks about cricket to a Male accountant who won't stop staring at her breasts whenever she gets drinks. Propped up on the edge of a stool is a middle aged man with a pressed shirt and a double chin who couldn't look more uncomfortable if a fat-o-gram just popped out of a cake. I think he's leaving this particular workforce and he doesn't look happy about it. Or maybe he is happy - his tie is certainly happy, a gregarious swirl of colours and patterns, a visual representation of the maxim about not having to be crazy to work here etc - and he just can't wait to get away from these people. Given my own personal endless fretting about the nature of mortality and the finite nature of time on earth - and I accept these are not issues for discussion in a Sandy Bay pub blaring Fox Sports News to everyone - there's something painfully sad about the farewell drinks, something I usually avert my eyes to. Could I discuss the closing of chapters in life at a bookclub? Maybe. I instead of now finish my beer and move on, walking past the farewelled employee as he stares with unblinking eyes at his scrawled on farewell card, which is large and boisterous and contains a brassy blonde on the cover doing brassy blonde things. His present sits on the edge of the table un-opened, and the cricket fan brunette, perhaps sensing a lull in the conversation, begins to tell a joke. It's a shame that I will never find out the outcome of the crashing plane suspiciously containing 1ne man from Ireland, 1ne man from England and 1ne from Scotland - and of course, no pilot, crew or other passengers - but it's something I'm willing to live with...

So I end up after all this - books and DVD in tow - at the inapropriately named Welcome Stranger pub in Hobart. Oddly enough, the video jukebox is playing exactly the same songs as JB HiFi, although the place is deserted other than some stragglers playing pool badly, sending pool balls flying around the cavernous construct with careless abandon. 1ne girl outside almost vomits, but composes herself, gets into her Toyota Camry, and high 5ives her passanger as if she's accomplished a rich and rewarding feat. I saunter up the bar, where a small girl in a green shirt, no bigger than the glass she pours my beer into, asks me how my day has been, and whether it's cold outside. How to answer - glibly in both cases I should imagine. The strangest thing of all is I've stumbled into new friends, quite by accident. How to explain the strangeness of the new friend outing to a barmaid who says beer is "frothalicious"...I mean, new friends are strange things at my age, especially 1nes with kids and stories that I haven't heard before...I suspect though from the age of the barmaid that if I stick around we'll be talking about Twilight soon, so I move on. At least the Welcome Stranger gargoyle isn't here, Igor the uncommunicative from behind the bar, who they only let out of the cellar to ruin special occasions. I go back eventually to my new friends, just as a pool fight breaks out. Someone has nudged a black ball in with their elbow, and to the swooning sounds of some marble mouthed rapper, the protagonists swing blindly at each other, pulling each others semi expensive jumpers and flailing wildly as their screaming partners aren't sure whether to step in or try their mutually disgusting black and brown drink concoctions. We take it as a cue to leave, climbing into a taxi cab and heading home. As I put my foot and toe just outside the door, the music on the video screen makes a horrible hissing noise and sounds like it's about to break, and a single, aimless pensioner with a thick staticy cardigan and a moustache thick and hearty walks past mumbling to himself, a plastic cup full of coins, his eyes bereft of life, his shoulders slumped, as he walks like death to the poker machine, under which are his shoes, on top of which is his wallet...he may have settled in for the night, but for us, the night is well and truly over...

I sleep so soundly, I don't even think a marble mouthed rapper rapping at full speed with sick beats per minute is likely to wake me up...

Holiday Interlude - Tacos, Farewell, we hardly knew ye

My Facebook page is pretty much an irrelevance to my life these days. I'm sure the Farmville addicts and the people debating whether the new M.I.A album is rubbish or not have a wonderful time, but I've got valuable things to do. Sure most of them involve fantasy Basketball games, but there's no doubt that the novelty of finding old school friends and finding none of them invented a new formula of Coke and made millions has worn off. However, on a rainy Irvine day, it was worth enrichening the pockets of Zuckerberg a little bit just to click on and find out that Tacos had closed. It's a strange thing when you find out sad news from home delivered in a sort of Arial font typed as an update - coldly and without explanation or further analysis by someone who's profile picture is them wearing a silly hat and drinking from a beer bong. And because the person who typed it is likely to be asleep or sitting a pub somewhere in said silly hat and...Tacos Closed? That was it. No more words. No explanation. Was there a ! or an OMG on the end of that sentence? I'm guessing yes, since that's very much the style of this updater. Never short of an OMG. Tacos, for those who don't speak Hobartian, was the somewhat magical Hobart restaurant down in Salamanca famous for serving gigantic fishbowl margaritas and...well I'm sure they sold food as well, Tacos and wedges or something. Essentially, it was the starting point for many hens nights, bucks nights and works nights out where people would hi 5ive each other all week about what a massive night they would have, only for 1ne of the people to imbibe far too much and have to be carried home vomiting in funny maragita based colors and muttering about how they were fine. And now, it was gone, and no one had the grace to forewarn me. I tried to talk to my auntie about it, but she was watching 1ne of her programs, 1ne of those 1nes where embittered minor celebrities try and cook some crockenbush and learn a dance routine while eating a scorpion in a jungle house while running through a field of electric daggers and being given marks out of 10en by Amanda Holdan. How could she understand...I replied to this Facebook death notice but I had to wait, wait until Australia woke up from it's slumber...just alone, mourning a part of Hobart lost to time (and probably the Austrians...probably turn it into Schnitzels version 2...)...

We started most of those 2002 nights, the weekend 1nes, at Irish Murphys, before they accquired some of the worst bouncers in human history, all thick necks and swagger like the extras from some horrendous low budget rap video. We would only venture into Tacos on special occasions. Special mostly meant someone insisted in having tea first. Special doesn't have the same meaning in Hobart. It can easily apply to some1ne is just wearing different shoes. I got my first ever hangover from a Tacos Maragita, a piercing screamer that stabbed me in the head and then came back for my wallet to make sure the job was done. I spent the following morning in a writers course writing extremely angry poems about death and hatred that everyone seemed to love. I think they were a bit disappointed the week after when I turned up with my novel filled with pop culture references and a plot twist that was oblique and obscure but made perfect sense to me. I like to think someone said "What happened to all the death" but I think I made that up. I also used to use it as a sort of reference point for taxi drivers if I had to ring 1ne up. Sometimes it's easy just to say the simplest word possible, not just when you are drunk, but to taxi control operators in general. Try piercing through a combination of radio crackle, tired ears and drunken stumbling vowels and say "I'm just outside the Victoria Tavern"...easier just to yell the word "TACOS!" and hang up the phone. Always worked. The 1ne time it didn't work, sadly, some1ne had the same idea. A man in a checked shirt had worked the same system, and he was above me in the social rankings. He had won a meat-tray at a different pub. His logic in a quickly settled disputed was that he needed to get home quicker than me to freeze the meat, and the taxi driver agreed and I had to wait in the cold for another 4ty5ive minutes just to get home. I was dreading some other inescapable piece of Hobart logic would mean some1ne else got a taxi ahead of me...maybe more checks on the shirt, or more knowledge of the best way past a traffic problem in Glenorchy. Suffice to say, to avoid further problems, I started just yelling "MURES" into confused taxi co-ordinators...

One of our nights had been planned for a long time. It was a flurry of e-mails, and youthful high spirits. Especially from me, who had emerged from the horrendous triangle of friendless years, and was now out and about. I was like Jay Z for a while, I ran this town, if by running a town you mean being able to co-ordinate 12elve people into a pub at an agreed time and getting them to have a socially acceptable night out, and doing it by e-mail. Yes, I certainly ran that town. As it unsurprisingly did before it became Hobarts most god awful pub, Irish Murphys was rocking, a band played aggressively in the corner - well, as aggressively as you can play Train and Maroon 5ive covers - and we were in the middle of the social vibe, dispensing japes to all and sundry. We accumulated an entourage of hangers on that night, and decided to go to Tacos to continue to revelry. It was hardly bacchanalia of course - I don't think you could soundtrack bacchanalia with covers of Drops Of Jupiter while a girl called Sharon talks about how everything is "frigged up" for 1ne thing - but it was a fantastic evening. People hooked up who are still together for all I know, and the band even came over to drink with us. We had an entire corner of the pub to our own party. As far I can tell, we never made it to the comedian set - why risk a night of being told the differences between men and women when you can sit and enjoy each other company and celebrate youthful stupidity? It was only on the way to Tacos that our now expanded group heard a suspiciously ominous thump and yelp. Someone had fallen over in the gutter and was now clutching 1/2 a high heel and a plethora of our attention...we had no idea who she was at all, we were confused, we were hungry and within sight of Tacos, I mean it was just right there, so we could probably do a runner if we wanted...

Her name was Alison. She was the height of a WNBA starting centre, which was handy if we wanted pickles from the top shelf, but bad for those lumbered with supporting her as she walked. She had straight black hair, thick red lipstick, and a pout that could stop a clock. She was knowlegable, intelligent, and drunk as a skunk. She had theories on George Bush that would make that same clock get up in a confused fog and call a taxi. She also worked in government, that much we all knew, dealing with traffic and traffic infringements - my joke about that being a fine job not getting a laugh. See, fine, fine...ah forget it. No one quite knew who she was a friend of a friend of, so no one knew who's responsibility it was to pick her up when she fell over. I was far more empathetic than I am now, but even I was growing weary and impatient of her stumbling, which I now realise is uncharitable, of course, but back then I had things to do...well I had nothing to do really, but the wedges looked good. We shuffled around in the fading daylight trying to work out who would take responsibility for her. She kicked over a chair in Tacos and that still didn't make anyone get up to help. The Tacos staff didn't seem to want to help - anytime we tried to catch their eye to get them to ring a taxi, they would disappear into the distance or find an unseen stain to clean up with Windex and a cloth from the Harold Holt era. I presume they had knew Alison, and were glad to palm her off, like an old CD to Cash Converters, onto some unsuspecting strangers. Eventually, after an hour of weaning Alison off the Maragitas and the nicotine and enduring a sort of life crisis discussion that seemed straight from the set of Dr Phil, Alison was able to attract the attention of Tacos staff, a lifeboat coming in to save her from the sea of self pity and doubt and Guinness up to the gills. However, all the training in customer support couldn't prepare our young badge wearing friend from the moment Alison looked deep into his eyes, said "no one gets me", and left, in a achingly poignant swish of denim and grace, like the final stanza of some semi-tragic poem...lucky she left when she did, it would have been less poetic 20ty seconds later, when someone fired up the Mariachi tape over the PA system...

Sometime later, a Facebook message pops up. It says "Tacos Closed! I know!" - I'm not sure how to debate this point, or what it all means, so I close the lap top, and read a book for several hours...goodbye Tacos...lest we forget...you are now closed...and I know...

The Incredulous Despair of the Conceptual Entity

Another day, another luggage carousel. Another swirling mass of faux Armani, clip locks and zip up bags, another group of people conjoined with me in an impatient mass around a swirling conveyor belt of clear social segregation. The haves swagger away with their cases, privileged that the gods of the luggage carousel saw fit to give them the serenity only an early appearance on the belt can bring, and the have nots stay impotently furious, craning their necks desperately to try and avert the nagging feeling maybe the airline lost their luggage as the crowd thins and then thins again. In my case, at least I get to stroll past the conveyor belt with hand luggage, with a nonchalance I don't really feel. I don't mind airports, and even with Prestwicks garish purple swirling letters splashed across the wall, tartan bunnet wearing figures painted on the toilet, and total lack of amenities, I don't mind sitting quietly on a bucket seat reading a paper. I think it's a mindset thing - I've spent so much of my time in airports feeling my body float away and losing track of time studying crowds, I'm just used to it. There is 1ne amenity though in Prestwick - a rather tacky and gaudy cart style market stall selling cheap retro soccer shirts. I say retro, it's a clear sign of old age when they approximate the culture from your youth and package it as retro. I'm sure I owned some of those T-shirts in their original incarnations. The cart pusher and I presume stall owner has 1ne deep and furrowed wrinkle on his face that runs from cheek to jaw, almost like a scar, a scar inflicted by doubt and time I guess. He pushes the cart until he is just about happy with it, then slumps for a moment, but as soon as any1ne watches him, he puffs out his chest as if pride will not allow him to be exposed to the world as tired or out of breath. It's a strange spectacle, every step obviously painful, but he hides it well, flirting with a passing hens party and cracking wise to the newsagent. As soon as they go though, he sucks deep on nothing but stale air conditioned air and a sense of showmanship that keeps himself from toppling over. I myself am exhausted, sucking Irn Bru through a stubborn suck resistant straw made of hardy raw materials. I think everything was just more resillient in the past - god knows when I'm 60ty, there's no way I'm lugging a cart full of T-shirts into an airport. I'll be in my slippers by the side of the road yelling at traffic for keeping me up...it seems, somehow, pre-ordained...

Down, up, down, up, then up again I go, through the tunnels, mazes and labyrinthal nature of Scottish signposted routes. There's a girl sitting on the train platform crying, surrounded by cases, her hair an impossible style, a sort of Deal or No Deal cut but double the length and harshly straight, as if done with set square and ruler. I feel it un-necessary to intrude, since I'm cold, caught up in my book, and her sobs are somehow un-natural, whooping, the kind only made by small children when they are trying to stop their Mum from yelling at them. The crying girl disappears visually into a nearby train carriage but I can still hear her until the very last second that the door on the train shuts and vanishes into the middle distance, in true Scottish tradition so much with the mighty shove and heave of trains of yore -the kind you saw in books with billowing steam and waving flat cap wearing passengers hanging out the windows incredulous life could be this amazing - but more with a squeak of the brakes and an almost apologetic shrug of despair. My own train is running inevitably late, producing even more apologies - nothing personal of course, these apologies come in yellow fonts on blue screens - and even more of my life is held hostage to time wasting, to fate, to solitude and drifting moments. It begins to rain, and a bewildered looking German with glasses thick and impenetrable, the kind that should have window wipers or belong on a mad scientist, begins to ask a pigeon English version of what time is the train coming. My mind is pretty much shut down by this point, so I mumble something about not really knowing, and splashes off like a sulky child none the wiser, his fogged up glasses almost leading him directly into a thick red metal pole. The train, as it happens, never comes, the apologies giving way to harsher messages, the soft screen tone of yellow and blue now replaced by a harsh black and grey message, that flashes hypnotically against an equally black and grey sky, more or less absolving said train company of responsibility - probably those damn leaves. I watch it for a while, because I feel as though something has broken down, mostly my resolve. I also feel it's the British way...hey, we tried apologizing...now it's your fault...

My taxi driver is an avuncular fellow. He has one of those clingy student beards that seem unfinished and patchy, and I somehow envisage if he was telling a story, he would thump you on the back gregariously and let out a throaty laugh at his own wit. Funny though - those people are the most sour of drunks. He has picked me up from the UK countryside before apparently, although I don't remember him. He also likes debate, I can tell. Say 1ne thing, even polite agreement, and he'll twist it round to show he's a reasonable man. I was able to gather all this because on the way home, he stopped to help a fellow taxi driver directions, and they sat on the hard shoulder next to a petrol station swapping war stories, as rain danced on the ground in pretty patterns, and his radio station seemed perpetually set on M People. I'm not sure how you search for the hero inside yourself at 8 in the morning on a garage forecourt, but maybe I'm just too hard boiled. He thumps his taxi driving friend on the back, hard enough to make him wince, and walks back towards the taxi with the broad smile of the perpetually lunatic or over-caffinated. He's instantly off on a rant about how McDonalds workers get ahead in life simply by virtue of working at McDonalds or something. I myself have my nose pressed against the splash stained window, staring out at a million fields, all soaked in drizzle. For some reason, when I drive through Irvine, I'm obsessed by what's not there...where are all the kids? Where are all the people playing...even in bright sunshine, I don't think I've anyone playing anything. Swing parks unswung, fields unfielded, school playgrounds uncluttered by frisbees. I don't have a summation of this, and certainly if I shared it with Patchbeard, he'd turn it around and say the fields were full of kids and I was an idiot for even thinking it...his girlfriend, he says, is very fond of Irvine. I suppress the tempation to consider that this Canadian girlfriend may be some sort of conceptual entity, a mere figment and story telling device by which to make further points about immigration and the government. I'm just suspicious I guess, as I am with anyone in life who, like he, is going to quit their job...tomorrow, I promise. I suspect even if she is a conceptual entity however, she would be unimpressed and despondent at his lack of knowledge of how to go around a roundabout...maybe they teach it at McDonalds...

The man next door where I'm staying 1nce had a big husky and a small yappy dog that only shut up when the big dog yelped at it in a display of husky power. Beyond that, I can't tell you why we're talking in the driveway, in the rain, but he knows a lot about me. I love when people know you from fragmented moments of your past - and I realise there is a certain symmetery to the conversation. After all, I know him as the man with the dogs, he knows me as that boy that ate a lot of Creme Eggs. It's true, he did have dogs, and i did eat lot of Creme Eggs, but the fullness and richness of our days - the twists and turns of our rapidly passing into history lives - isn't prevalent in our rainy time consuming conversation. I presume he then went into his house and spoke to his wife about how much I'd changed. Well it'd be weird if I still looked 8ight. I shouldn't scoff, he's being polite, and anyone with a quiff so rich probably deserves some attention. I leave him with a promise to catch up before I leave that we both know will never be fulfilled and fumble with a key that clangs against the lock of the door in a strangely metallic and painfully teeth grinding way. Eventually, I make my fingers work properly, make them grip the key tightly enough to break the fortress wall, and go into the empty house. It's empty because my auntie has decided that I should be fed only on chips and gristle - I blame her, when really it's my own doing - and walk slowly up the stairs and throw myself on the bed with an overdramatic flourish. It has taken me about an hour to get from the airport to here, but I can't sleep because I'm tired, and I stare at the ceiling, and try and count the raindrops bashing off the window sill. Outside, some children actually are playing, leaping into puddles like they can smash them through force of will. I drift off to sleep to the gentle hum of the rain, and have a dream about a Canadian girlfriend with long blonde Melanie Adams like hair, who has just left me for some1ne who can make a Hash Brown properly. She's patiently explaining that's it's not you, it's me, and how could she turn down a McDonalds graduate. It seems even in my dreams, the irrefutable logic held within most arguments against myself seems utterly water-tight...

Still, it's her loss. She missed out on sharing my Creme Eggs...

When She Sang About Angels, and the Taxi Driver was late

Strange as it sounds, I'm very much a product of my home town - cynical, jaded, tired, suspicious, likely to splurge on a ridiculously tacky item just because Pop Star X wore it - despite the lack of time I've spent there in my life. I had, until this holiday, never been out in it. Why would I bother - as soon as you get off the plane, there's a disquiet in the air. I have an uncle who literally won't cross the road to go to the pub lest the baddies out there get him and steal his wallet. So there he sits, fearful, with a chicken madras and a can of Stella, waiting for death. I could slap him. People try and create a menace in Hobart - the nadir was the front page in the Mercury which suggested gangs were slapping random Syrup patrons, to which I sent in a reply letter suggesting that those patrons presumably were just angry when Syrup DJs decided once again it was Dave Dobbyn O'Clock. I even sent it in crazy old man writing to the paper green pen. No dice. I don't know that I like my home town that much. I mean, I do, but there's something quite disconsolate about Irvine. There's letters missing in the facade of the Maritime Museum, the leisure centre is frail and crumbling, far from it's glory days during which denim clad temptresses with 80s Sharleen Spiteri haircuts would turn down paramours without even saying a word and excitable kids would learn just how to turn a pit of plastic balls into a bullies paradise. I stood there for a while just sort of staring. It's hard to explain how I feel about Irvine - I think it's a bit like seeing your old girlfriends on Facebook, being excited to see them again, then finding they lack front teeth and spend all their posts randomly attacking nonsensical targets like E-Bay and Youtube all day long like old women at bus stops. You can't help but remember when that person was...fun. Attractive. The centre of your universe. You can't help but be pained that no matter what you do, there's an entire chapter, entire events, you simply can't place yourself in or around. Things are just...different. Of course, this is purely an example, and in no way a reflection of actual events. Oh no...

Of course, 6ix shots of Tequila and a short and affordable cab ride can make anything seem exciting. Which is how I came to be standing on the wooden floor of Irvines version of Syrup. Well it seemed exciting at the time. I'm painfully aware of my limitations in the nightclub setting of course. I can't dance, I'm now probably far too old to like the music i like, never mind try and shake a limb or two to it, I'm painfully shy, and my stock in trade, jaded witticisms, simply rise to the ceiling and fall flat on the floor, unable to be heard over the thumping beats of David Guetta vs The Egg. At least Syrup is small, Irvines equivalent is positively cavernous, entire hens parties get wrapped and encased in the ebb and flow of the smoke machine, like ships going off into doomed horizons, never to be seen again, only the shiny glimpse of the fattest girls psuedo-ironic fairy wand guiding rescue efforts. As my friend is showing off her new boyfriend - and he's all aftershave and studied indifference, imported beers and shiny shoes, textbook stuff really, I've seen too many people like him to care and make conversation about Miley Cyrus - I study the DJ for a while. The 1nes in my nightclub of choice in Hobart, the Syrup massive, stare bored out the window and couldn't look less impressed in their Red Herring shirts, the DJs in Irvine are all excitable, middle aged cruise ship DJs run aground. This 1ne has a whistle, an honest to goodness whistle, and his hands in the air - I hate that he cares. I sink a shot of what could be fairy liquid for all I know, and out of the cavernous wooden floor, through the smoke and haze, 2wo girls carry the bride to be under - all hair dye and regret - each arm, as she slumps on the verge of unsciousness. She is somewhat inevitably shoeless, and as she is lead through the nightclub, through the smoke, as her tiara crashes hopelessly to the ground like some doomed in flight object heading for earth, and as we part in the traditional Scottish ach thats a shame guard of honor, the DJ chooses just that moment to launch his most excited WOO yet, and fire up some Beyonce...it just wouldn't have been the same if it was Dave Dobbyn...

Those missing letters on the Maritime Museum really bug me you know - although the locals for what its worth seem more intent on discussing why the Polish workers haven't built their bridge yet, thus condemning the whole town to...well, an extra 1ne minute going round a roundabout more than usual, but still...my hangover is somewhat subdued from last night. It's getting dark by know, although I am old, that might be fading eyesight. The wind has whipped up by now. Eventually, I sit down and wait for the bus home - the bus home is now a combination of 3hree buses home, combined by mergers and budget cuts. I'm watching a man who should know better kick an ATM. Not just kick it, but positively Jackie Chan it in a way that makes his Nike swoosh fly through the air, his spittle flecked anger towards this harmless giver of cash positively frightening. I study him for a moment, as his cheeks pinken and purple, his eyes cast to the skies as if his world has crumpled. His beard even seems to redden, under the kind of burden that only the failure to get cash from a stationery object can bring, his Tommy Hilfiger jumper almost wrenched from his body in a flurry of arms, limbs, pin numbers and discarded Irn Bru bottles. The old woman in the queue behind him spins hard on her heels and walks away, tutting at no 1ne in particular. I don't especially feel the need to get involved, and I bury my head in the paper, re-reading again a nonsensical story about a woman who lost her keys and needed help to find them. The man in question walks away after a while, and a cheeky 50ty pound note pops its head out of the slot for a moment, winks, and then retreats back into the ATM. I'd tell him, but ya know. I'm not nearly awake enough to engage in the hustle and bustle of getting on the bus first, the rabble and froth and bubble by which men fake limps and women pretend nearby kids are their own simply to get on the bus first and a seat up the back where they can stretch out. My indifference earns me a seat next to a computer nerd with thick glasses and braces she could only have welded on, and it's then as I try and stretch out I see a high heel stuck at a jaunty angle in the gutter...

Outside the nightclub, I'm suffering from smoke inhalation. 1ne brave member of the hens party has managed to retrieve a shoe from the wreckage, and she holds it aloft triumphantly, the high heel shimmering in the moonlight. I smile meekly in appreciation, because I'm bewildered and unsure of where I am. The fairy liquid is kicking in after all. My friend is bouncing around in a hyperactive new relationships are boss kind of way, and I'm eating a chip that I believe was dug out of a labyrinthe pit of pure grease at some point in 1984 and left to sit on a bed of oil ever since. I'm sitting in the gutter eating this chip, studying it in fascination, because anything is better than eating it. Even the DJ has left by know - we watched him leave, he seemed smaller somehow, as if he had assumed a character before, and without his whistle and ability to yell he was without soul or purpose. He slumped over his record crate as he loaded into his van and launched the most mournful sigh imaginable into the night air. I sympathise to some extent with people who spend just a brief moment of exaltation as a wacky character then go back to, I don't know, a typing pool - I used to live with a girl who was the Chickenfeed Chicken, and when the costume was hung on the rack, it was so lifeless it was sad. I presume he had to go home to prepare for his stint at Hospital Radio. We waited a long time for a taxi as it happens, until the hens part left, leaving behind the infamous shoe in the gutter, departing in a swirl of casual vomit, glitter, floods of tears and 1ne of the worst attempts to pash a stranger I've seen. The DJ left, driving his mini van crammed with so many records I don't even know how he could see. Hell, even my friend left in the end, pashing her new boyfriend as if she'd just discovered the joys of tongues. And so there I was, alone, under street light, surrounded by the flotsam and jetsam of a night out, under a neon sign that flickered horrendously loudly in my ears, eating a chip that could mostly be described as ambivalent to the notion of taste, with a sticker attached to my shoe for the nightclub that couldn't have been more gaudy, with a taxi on my way that I had no idea that I would be picked up by a taxi driver with a neck the size of Ecuador, who seemed oddly addicted to CDs of impossibly beautiful female singers that didn't match his SICK FUCK tattoo on his knuckles...

Understanding home? I couldn't get in a taxi without feeling dizzy and confused...no wonder my head still hurts...

When we can't decide, we hope that you'll on my side (Or why I went away for a while this time...)

It's 10 am, in a Scottish branch of 1ne of those horrible adjunct supermarket cafes that dot the landscape, blight it in many ways, enhance it in others. Sure, they are soul-less, manned by embittered plooky face plump lassies who hiss your order by elongating the final syllable of the word, but hey, the coffees cheap. It is what it is. I find the strangest thing about going back to Scotland is that the little differences, after a long time away, jar more than the obvious 1nes. Sure, there may be a bewildering series of new roads to travail and stranges rules and regulations to decipher such as the 2 queue system in the bakery, but alcohol sold in the supermarket? Wee women in coats pushing trollies THAT quickly? Mind spin. My coffee, well, it's swirling, frothing, spinning and dancing in milky patterns around in my mind. I wonder if I concentrate just hard enough, I can make a dolphin appear in it's swirling patterns, like a Magic Eye picture. If I could, I'd probably sit in this faux cane chair forever. I'd probably fall in love with 1ne of the plooky face plump lassies and we'd raise plooky faced wee weans and argue about money every Saturday night over a Chicken Madras while Ant & Dec comedically bicker on our TV screens. Who knows what might have been right? I've got Smoosh on the IPOD, for no discernible reason. Across my shoulder, a youth in a red hooded top is blanking out his girlfriend, herself being all bad hair weave and over ambitious gestures arguing about money I presume. I tend to find in Scotland, the girls are very over dramatic with their gestures, clipping the end of their words, throwing their hands up in the air trying to communicate to emotionally stunted boys with lifeless eyes who are too busy thinking about football or boxing or something...I lifelessly watch him for a moment, stirring my coffee in opposite circles simply to break the monotony. I know life will go on of course, I could stare into the middle distance forever, stirring coffee, making patterns, hitting the repeat button on my Smoosh album until I got tenure of the faux cane chair in some sort of retirement ceremony. I could sit all day wondering why so many Scottish girls are so angry...but once We Our Own Lies finishes, I sadly know time is up...a rented suit waits for no man...

The girl in the rented suit shop asks where my accent is from. I wish I had the heart to flirt today, but my eyes are hurt and scrunched, and she's only being shop polite. I smile a thin smile and say Tasmania. I know what's coming of course - after a month, I can usually tell, it's all in the phrasing. She somewhat unsurprisingly has a cousin that lives in Tasmania. I think after a while this is akin to a hairdresser pretending to be interested in what you are doing on the weekend. My hairdresser in Burnie was interested, but not today, no need for 15 year old unrequited love stories today. And besides, maybe she does, or maybe she needs a tangent, something to kill time between DJ Havana Brown songs and measuring the inside pant leg of strangers. Moreover, this is her store, her domain, not a chain, and that at least is something to cherish. That DJ Havana Brown CD - that's her choice, the magazine she reads...that's all her. My suit will later sit crumpled and disrespected over a stairway bannister which seems a little bit of an ungreatful way to cherish the precious nature of individual choice, but I think my tip said it all. I'll stare at it for a while, because that means I don't have to put it on. I've got an aversion to trying suits on. My Mum will sometimes buy me a big buttoned and well intentioned jumper. I'll stare at the button and make some joke about old man cardigans, anything that means I don't have to parade around in the outfit. Today, I'll probably have spent most of my day talking to my auntie about volcanic ash. I know this is easy conversation, but my heart really isn't in it. There's a girl at work now who about 6ix times now has asked if I watch Dancing With The Stars. After the 4th time I said yes just to stop her asking, and now am able to tune her out easily and think about other things rather than having to explain myself. I'm a people pleaser. My auntie isn't really into notions of individual choice in the sphere of retail. She just hates Iceland and all the ash it spews forth. It's then I realise I haven't really listened to a conversation properly all day, and have had other things on my mind. In fact, it's just then I glance into the mirror and see the same lifeless eyes as the boy in the red top had earlier. If only it was a day for smiling, I'd have laughed at the grim co-incidence all day, then patted myself on the back for not saying it was grim irony, and mis-using the word...

Another coffee, another morning, not long after. This shop is somehow even more corporate than yesterdays, unglamourous, right in the heart of Paisley, tracksuit wearing mothers taking a break their most important clientele. 1ne of the kids is throwing spoons around like javelins. No one stops him, no one even moves, and he learns to run the world through pure anarchy and noise - bit like PETA in kid form. This coffee is far more acidic, for some reason, pure early morning airport, like a practice coffee. It's gluggy. I haven't had 1ne like that since the 1ne I had at a Manchester Truck Stop just before I went to Switzerland that was just glug with 2wo sugars. I'm flicking through the paper, but it's nothing but faux controversies and sad eyed celebrities emerging from rehab blinking into the light and calling their publicist. I was glad to get out of the front of the car I was in. Why they thought I'd be the one to make conversation, today of all days, I'm not quite sure. I hate being in the front of someone elses car, so tantalisingly close to the radio but never given permission to turn it on. When that person what is driving the car - as they say in London - is flicking through their own struggling roladex of conversational topics only to settle on hows work, the desire to hit the volume and tune out even if it's only Train on the CD player is hard to fight. How is work? It seemed like a strange question - after 8eight weeks, I couldn't even answer. I was still trying to remember after my 2nd cup of glug. This 1ne didn't have sugar in it, I thought I'd try my glug pure. The Scottish way. My family of course don't speak, and I hadn't really noticed them coming in. 1ne audiciously has a glazed donut, which is weird, because I hadn't seen donuts for sale. And I'd really like a donut. On such incidents, war can be declared you know. Of course, on the day of a funeral, how can you possibly wonder about sprinkles, you can't really kick up a fuss. But damn it all, if I'd like someone to to clock little Jimmy Javelin over the head. Hell, I'd do it myself, if the reward was a donut, but such is fate, of course, the procession must move on...

My leg is pressed up against the radiator in the community centre, 1ne of those old sharp 1nes of whitest white and sharpest sharp. I would complain, but it's a funeral, it's not like it's allowed. I have a keen eye now at funerals for the truly upset and the sandwich stealing hangers on. I also know in all 3hree funerals I've been too, I've stared mostly out of the window and taken no real active interest in what's going on. I can't cope with it, I hate it. I hate people saying somehow playing a badly muzaked version of their favourite song and making a pile of sandwiches was what they would have wanted. Clearly, what they would have wanted was not to die...but I digress. My auntie is doing a tour de force of the room telling everyone she hasn't cried yet, which seems faintly wrong, and I've had so many sandwiches I suspect people are nudging each other wondering who I am. My uncle, if he hadn't died, would have eaten a lot of sandwiches, amongst stories of urban Glaswegian deprivation only partially true. I miss him. I'm sure it was a lovely service of course, probably shouldn't have let my leg burn or stared out the window quite so much - and in a moment of quiet reflection on the sandwich table covered dance floor of whichever Coatbridge association this reception centre truly represents, while resisting the chance to engage the group in a morale boosting game of darts, a girl comes up to me. She's always fancied me, I thought she was my cousin when she wasn't, and had it been the 1980tys, we probably could have got her and I a sitcom deal such was the hilarity. Her Mum joins her, and they engage in some nudging conversation which is somehow meant to indicate she'd dump her boyfriend for me. At least that's what I think - no one is QUITE that keen to engage in nostalgia for how she used to laugh at my jokes. I probably was meant to re-ciprocate this conversation, but I don't have the energy. As is the modern way, we promise to be friends on Facebook, and her and her Mum seem oddly excited by the prospect. It's all quietly disconcerting. Someone takes a photo of me, almost without me noticing, and there in someones camera I rest, a million miles away, my expression glazed, my sandwich 1/2 eaten, and a moment frozen in time forever. They'll probably stick it on my summation in death cork board 1ne day, and a circle will be created. Maybe someone will note it on Twitter, in a far more succinct fashion than I can...

I walk back to the car, put on Smoosh, and fall asleep for roughly 3hree days. The fate of the suit, sadly, remains unrecorded...