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...