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...

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...

Post 200 - A tale of existential loneliness Kanye West could write a crappy 808 track to

My late 80s move from the cosy confines of Penguin - the most pressing issue in Penguin in the late 80s was whether or not Claridees charged too much for their ice cream sundaes - to the wild moors of Ayrshire was a scary and uncomfortable prospect. Even though I was 10en, I was entirely required by Ayrshire law to have opinions on music, literature, art, sex and a million other subjects, and all of my opinions would of course instantly be dismissed as shite, and since my only musical opinion was that it was all downhill for Peter Combe since Toffee Apple, I had to mature very quickly. 10en year olds discussing oral sex with the casual air of a drunk Oliver Reed on an episode of Sin on Saturday was a mile away from Burnie, where my peer group would still be discussing such hot button issues as caterpiller or fort, you decide. The school I went to was absolutely horrible, a wasteland for lost souls who would pick on the merciless, with teachers hudded around bins on supervision duty counting the hours until they could get into their Skodas and drive home. The school policy for new children was an interesting one as well, as the new kid would sit in the staff room like a guest waiting to go on Parkinson, and then on cue would walk from the class room through an open plan hall to their assigned class room with everyone watching them make their walk. If someone had cued up that jaunty Parkinson music and I had a special anecdote about cricket, I'd have been set. I survived the initial weeks mostly by claiming I knew Alf from Home and Away and that Kylie Minogue wasn't that big in Australia - I'd never heard of the woman so I thought this was a good opinion to have. The only other advice I got was don't cry, which wasn't very helpful since my Burnie school was pretty much a hippy commune where we would talk about our feelings, and if we didn't feel like doing, say, maths, we could off and paint the 9x table. Didn't really work in Ayrshire - the first few weeks I was there, I was punched in the face by a 6ix year old with the head of a potato. I'd never been punched before, not least of all by a hard headed mutant spud child, and it was only the quick thinking of my next door neighbours kid in telling me not to cry that prevented me from passing out from sheer shock that someone had hit me - and spudregus wasn't even doing anything wrong, it was just how they played. I remember standing in the middle of the concrete, watching a violent game of British Bulldogs on one side of the quadrangle, while on the other girls and boys ran around playing a game of catch and grope, and there I stood in the middle, staring up at a grey sky, miles from home, thinking about how badly the place needed a caterpillar. David Byrne was obviously singing some kind of song in a big suit, or at least he was trying to, but a 6ix year old was giving him a nipple cripple, and he couldn't get in tune...

In the requirement to suddenly mature, I totally lost my identity as over emotional but intellectual boy. My Mums solution to the problem of my identity crisis was to dress me up in any kind of fashionable clothes I wanted and hang the expense. Now, my Dad, having been thoroughly lied to by an august and supposedly respectable Thatcherite era school board (I know, a Thatcher appointed board dishonest, I'm shocked too), didn't get the full time job we'd all moved to Scotland for him to pursue, so he had to trip and travel around bolthole schools on the fringes of West of Scotland society, teaching 14 year olds to keep their knickers on and boys that knifes were only a sometimes weapon. So I don't know how my Mum found the money for, say, my orange FILA boots or my vintage Scotland shell suit, but she always did. In a very real sense it was nice clothes shame about the self confidence though, as I traipsed through a series of social events in church halls listening to Stock Aitken and Waterman hits and trying to look suave and failing miserably. It was during one of these events that I had a really awkward social moment. For some reason, I had put a leather jacket on, and the circumstances are desperately vague, but for some reason we were in some sort of nightclub during the day, at least somewhere that was playing music. This would prove in my brain that in the middle of a desperate patch of homesickness I had friends, but I don't know that that sounds right. It's a little bit like the start to Weekend at Bernies 2 - you can't work out how that would possibly happen. I was trying to redeem myself socially, I know that because during the slow song at the end of our Irn Bru and winching disco, when Eternal Flame came on, I shut my eyes and sang along karaoke style, and when I opened them again everyone was staring at me. So as I was trying to look cool in a leather jacket Mum had no doubt bought at Oxfam but to keep my face straight she probably told me cost 200 pounds, one of my friends noticed that, on the inside of the jacket, there was a map. What a map was doing on the inside of a leather jacket god only knows, but it was like a sewn in map of Belgium in, which makes me think it was some kind of World War II genuine bomber jacket. Needless to say that my identity, if it was missing, was now Biggles, especially when my friend helpfully suggested that we go and get some goggles from the science lab to round off the outfit. The wind up, as it was, enabled my companions to start a conversation with some birds, and I had to walk home from wherever the hell it was, with nothing more than a can of Tizer and a complete sense of deflation. Meanwhile, a drunk at the Village shopping centre rolled over in the gutter with his pants around his ankles, singing Old Man River. Needless to say, that never happened in Penguin. Maybe if it was The Gambler...

My cousins solution to this identity crisis, apart from getting me to toughen up by calling me a wee shite every time I saw him, was to get me to get me a girlfriend. It was pointless explaining I had a girlfriend of course - although that was another social disaster, as we barely even spoke and only kissed for a two pound fundraiser for Comic Relief. I went for a lift in his car once through the confusing traffic lights system of mid town Ayr, S Express booming out of overloaded speakers, when he suddenly came to a complete stop at the traffic lights and invited two sisters, one his age and one my age, to get in the car. They both had big 80s hair, were clones of each other in spite of the age difference, and were clad in the mandatory Ayrshire uniform of denim and ten tons of hairspray and attitude. Because we were in a relatively quiet period for serial killers and scare campaigns in the Daily Record, they were happy to accept the lift, and my cousin set about his usual patter to the older lassie, most of which involved him being about to sign S forms for Motherwell and buy a castle in Lanarkshire...meanwhile, in the back of the car with the suspect hydraulics, my date and I were engaged in the most uncomfortable conversation since R Kellys lawyer had to tell him just which tape had been leaked where...it got off to a good start as well, since we both liked Gloria Estefan. And who didn't? Her big hair covered her big Ayrshire eyes, and her Nolan sister make up job was glistening in the light as she made her big, 10en year old move with her killer question, what did I want to be when I grew up? Ah, that'd be the end of our budding relationship, because I didn't know who the hell I was, let alone what I wanted to be. I could tell my disinclination to talk about myself in any kind of meaningful way had upset her when she began looking out the window with a moody poetic but covered in concealer stare. For some reason, this would become a repetitive theme in my life in Ayrshire life, girls who seemed to know what they wanted to do pressing me into making big decisions while I sat around thinking about whether I preferred Salt or Pepa, in this case Nolan sister got out enough disdainful words to tell me she was going to cut hair, and I needed a plan...in the front of the car though, my cousin was having similar bad luck in the front of the car, since the older sister had begun a long and boring conversation about the relative merits of different hairsprays. Needless to say, we dropped them off at the next Poundstretchers, and last saw them approaching a group of harried looking biker types outside Krackers, trying to get themselves a smoke, and praying that the presence of matches and lighters near all that hairspray wouldn't prove combustible, which of course, the conversation certainly hadn't been...

Ultimately though, my identity would be forged, my reputation in fact would be forged, in the combat theatre of Platoon re-enactments that was the playground. There was a clear chance to establish my social status when I was challenged to my first fight with a younger but quite chunky kid called Chris, with a big dopey face and the rather ugly haircut of a boy who had just tried to outgrow his mullet but hadn't quite decided to part with all of it yet. When we were playing soccer, he had kicked me in the leg, quite accidentally, but much like being slapped in the face with a duelling glove, my honour had been challenged, so I pushed him in the mud. As fights go, it was like John Inman fighting Jessica Mauboy, hardly a heavyweight battle, but it was a fight, the first one I had ever had, and I had to step up to the plate. I didn't realise this of course, as when people started chanting eagerly for a fight I must admit I was keen to see one myself...oh, they mean me. I had no idea what to do, I had no inclination if I'm honest to smack a dopey kid in the head, especially one who's coconut shaped head would probably break my fist, I had no real inclination to punch someone so already down on their haunches in the mud - obviously with this much thinking time the crowd was getting agitated, with all the deliberation time I could have written a pros and cons list if I'm honest, and yet, obviously, so lost was I with my identity, so confused was I, that I did something horribly out of character in the swirling midst of peer pressure, and punched him in the head...well, what I actually did was try and do a bit of a phantom punch, by pressing my fist against his chin and pushing backwards gently. Was it deliberate though or was I just really unco and didn't know how to punch? Only God and that kid will know the truth...of course, trouble was, either way he wasn't versed in the whys and wherefores of the WWF and faking injury to get out of a difficult situation and when my blow bounced off the husk of the coconut, instead of going down so we could have a good laugh, he sat there bewildered, which simply meant someone kicked him in the head for real, you know, so he learned his lesson. And in the confusion, a mythology sprung up instantly about the fight, with 1/2 the school thinking I was some kind of prize fighter and the other 1/2 saying aren't you John Inman...nothing was settled at all...it was a very upsetting time....

To some though my identity was thus established - he wasn't a lover, he wasn't a fighter, he wasn't very cool, not good at sport, not sure about future plans...er...oh well, he's a good laugh...lets run with that...as for the rest, see you at post 500...that's the next milestone, right?

Questions of national identity would be an ecumenical matter

As much as I'm hoping, nay, actively trying to make 2009 a memorable year, I can't say from a fundamental standpoint a lot has, yet, changed. The automon still rules with a robotic brain, although I love that people are conned by vouchers as a gesture of thanks. Things are terrible, work is awful, but sweetening the deal at the end of the day you get a voucher to spend some money at Target. In a sense the greatest thing I learned from my Dad is not to stand up for people at work, because they always back down and don't support you, usually because they've been given a voucher. Someone at work doubts whether I can get on a horse, which in that festival of new year thinking makes you think you know what I'm going to get on a horse and show you, but which by, oh, mid February fizzles out to nothing, a shopping centre rocking horse if you are lucky. The person who made the judgement on my horse climbing abilities lost one of her dogs to the heavens when one of her other dogs got it's lead caught on the first dogs lead and choked it to death - she's amazing melancholy over it, so I don't have the heart to tell her the Sea Monkeys she got me died. It might all be too much. In 2009, I want to write more, but whether I do or not depends on the quality of cartoons on the Boomerang channel. I don't think anyone believed me either that I really did have dehydration - it is a pretty wussy disease, but Dr Feelgood gave me a certificate, so how can anyone dispute? I'm sure it was discussed around the Moro bars at lunchtime though. My e-mail inbox is piling up with nonsense in the middle of all this - restlessly struggling with in jokes, unfunny group e-mails, the odd Nigerian prince offering me a fortune, and very little in the way of poignancy and genuine news. Flippant e-mails - pop culture references, pictures of bikini clad girls pouting, but no real answers to pointed questions. And at the end of my day, the Irish girl we are working with, all curls and over acted injuries and blether at a million miles an hour, has decided to take issue with the TV programme Father Ted. I don't know how it's come up, but it's only fair, she has listened to me tell her Scotland is a vibrant upthrusting country (well some of it) that doesn't bear any resemblance to shortbread tins or Jimmy Shand records. It's fair enough that she sees Ireland as a country with wonderful hills and fantastic culture, bearing no resemblance to a priest based comedy from the mid 90s in which the word feck is used with gusto. In the midst of this mutual national identity stall setting, someone brought out a plate of lolly snakes, on a china plate with a neat pattern, and it's sheer hyprocisy for me to be berating those conned into believing all is well by a voucher, as I buy into the idea that work isn't so bad as soon as a red piece of chewy candy is slipped into my path. The Australian who works with us, quite without thinking, says a variant on to be sure, in an Irish accent, and our flightly friend quite forgets all about the candy, and verges on indignation...I don't blame her, but I'm caught up in my Popbitch e-mail and don't respond, although I hope no one brings up Dana...we could never have got out there...

Three moments of real national identity for me as a Scot spring to mind. 1989, Irvine, Ayrshire, the wind violent and smell in the air suspiciously salty. It's a fair, possibly for Merrimas, although I'm not sure, I haven't been here long enough to pick up on all the local nuances. I'm surviving day to day in the popularity stakes just by knowing what's happening on Home and Away. I'm waiting for a friend of mine by the waltzers, a ride at the fair in which children cling precariously to the side of a violently rotating car pretending to have fun while they try and survive to the thumping strains of Sonia over the PA. Every so often a man in overalls or a greasy shirt will spin the car to provide more entertainment. The men in the greasy shirts preen their thick handlebar moustaches as they scan the crowd for late 80s girls, with frizzy perms and tight nylon skirts, hairdressers of the future with unjustified airs of superiority. It's freezing cold, entertainment is as rare as a genuinely cooked kebab, and we drink cans of Irn Bru by the truck load to try and make our brains come alive through the sheer power of fizz. Across from the waltzers is a terrible looking pub at the end of a large concrete pub, underneath a temporary structure that looks like it could collapse in high winds. Two friends argue in front of me - apparently one of them at the highest point of the ferris wheel undid the security bolt and they nearly fell out. A psychotic child stares at me from the carousel, munching wickedly on his fairyfloss, as one of his eyes goes to the shops and the other comes back with the change. I shift uncomfortably as he stares, and as one of the permed jet set, imprisoned in her tight denim prison with her hair sub Sharleen Spiteri, lustfully begins groping one of the Waltzer attendants - Sharon does Irvine style - and then, it rains. Thick anarchic rain, pounding off the ground in horrible chaotic blows, the pavement seeming to buckle under the torrent of water. No one apart from me moves though - the denim hairdresser is still fiddling away, the psychotic kid is still staring blankly into the evil distance, and the drinkers at the pub are wonderfully unmoved. I, being a relatively recent arrival with a (fading) permanent tan, did not respond as calmly to this impending flood in which all the Ayrshire shellsuits would go onto the ark two by two, and ran, ran for the hills. As I ran, and I'll be honest, I don't run especially gracefully, I ran straight past two girls growing into their bras, two girls who's casual air of disdain should have melted into serious concern because their hair dye was already running quicker than me, and one of them, the uglier of the two even though that's a real judgement call, questions my sexuality. I realise this is Scotland, and I had better start acting like it. So I called her a nasty name back in a rich and thick Ayrshire ned voice and almost made her cry. I wasn't proud of it, oh no, it was hardly a moment of Wildeian inspiration, but as a moment of sheer Scottishness, it was very hard to top...

A god forsaken school leadership camp, 1996. A rope swing idly sits in the middle of a small playground like an abandoned child. Suspiciously it is surrounded by large police style tape telling people to keep off. Since there's nothing else to do, much later there is a stampede towards it, the police tape scattered to the wind. Nothing is ever proven, but the lady who runs the place, a cross between Collette and a stroke, is not best pleased. I'm trying my new thing - irony. I must have read about it in a magazine when I was on my godforsaken holiday in Scotland that winter, when I was huddled in a freezing house with my rapidly mentally fading grandmother and friends I hadn't realised that had left me behind in their pursuit of birds. I want to espouse a theory, maybe a controversial popular culture opinion, but irony isn't working on these Tasmanian ears the way Loaded magazine seemed to make it sound like it would, and the only thing that's keeping me in the conversation is a rudimentary knowledge of Oasis. Teachers make speeches which bounce off our heads, and everyone is dreading the idea of a talent show in which middle aged men will do single entendres for a moment of laughter that will lead to a lifetime of disrespect. And at the back of the room, a ginger know it all is turning my accent against me. His freckles are positively bouncing in glee as he tries to get me to do a bit from an advert where someone says something humourous in a Scottish accent. No matter what I try and say, he turns it against me, like an effervescent fire fly with a Bernard Manning like grasp of race relations. He's been doing it since I got off the bus, and eventually I crack. I say the line, I don't want to, but lord knows I could do with the solitude, that rope swing won't rope swing by itself. Unless there's a strong breeze of course. He says the line was funnier in his head and walks off muttering. I roll my eyes, plotting hypothetical revenges that will never come to fruition. He's demeaned my national identity, and he's done it through the means of advertising - such an outrage will not go unpunished. Luckily though, I don't need to do very much. Long after the final memory of the geography teacher trying to do some what is the deal with globes I mean you spin them and they won't stop spinning I mean what is up with that stand up comedy has faded, I have to step over the same red headed step child who, after attending a party thrown in the room of our alleged cool girl, has had far too much to drink and is curled up in a painful ball underneath the rope swing. I feel a great deal of pride in my country at that point as he struggles against the poison running through him - we might be easily mockable in advertising, comedy sketches and every third episode of The Simpsons, but we can handle our drink without the need to pass out. Mostly. I'm so proud, a Corries song comes into my head, I feel a national superiority to all Tasmanians, especially when I realise that he's lost his pants...

Irvine, 2007. I'm on holiday, but I barely recognise my own country anymore. Single mothers with stretchmarks growing over tattoos stand outside the local ASDA swearing to each other while their children run amok, and a chewing gum pattern lines the pavement with a million little lost bits of Hubba Bubba and indifference. I don't feel anymore like I'm home as such, not least because as soon as I step off the plane everyone tells me how terrible the country is and it's all the fault of cheeky bloody weans and how lucky it is I don't live here anymore. It's grey and grim, just as I remember it, and a plastic bag poetically waxes and wanes through the air until coming to rest in a pile of litter set aside next to the shopping trolleys. Inside ASDA though, the world is, if not fantastic, at least clean. The shopping mall in Irvine is like an attractive middle child in a family of mingers, a lovely clean glittering monument between two decaying lumps of social rubble round which the bewildered wander hopelessly from drug deal to charity shop. I'm on my moral high horse inside the shop tutting at the decay, almost pressing my hand to my head and swooning at the deprivation, when I knock a whisky bottle off the shelf. It hangs agonizingly in the air for a moment and then lands hard on the ground. I look around and notice no one has seen me do it, and I can make a quick getaway if I can stop enjoying the subtle strains of Girl From Ipanema over the PA. Such a catchy song. I make my escape, only momentarilty guilty that some minimum wage trainee will have to sweep up the strands of glass. It will be character building. I go and get my French cakes and my mince pies and my exotic juice, and go back to check what has happened to my little accident of clumsiness. I look and see a baseball capped wee ned with eyes spinning like a poker machine scooping up the remains, and putting trying to put the liquid into a flask. It's a pretty pathetic sight, and eventually he's removed by staff security. I leave the store after a moments contemplation - not about social decay, about Kerry Katona on the front of Heat - and go to get the bus home. An old woman sees my Collingwood jacket and knows what it is. She begins a one sided conversation about how rubbish Ayrshire is, how rubbish Scotland is and how rubbish the rubbish is, waving her hands dismissively at anyone younger than fifty. However, as the bus pulls up, her friend gets off, and instead of getting on it, she hugs her friend and they disappear in the direction of cream buns and civil conversation. I think for a moment that places like this, places that are a monument to Thatcherite neglect and council indifference, still have genuinely good people in them, people who step round the junkies and the smashed up stores, and get on with their lives. Scotland though feels strange to me - I am from there, but the place, I don't get it all the time, but I do get the people, and I do get the notion of keep yer heid up...

I'm off to watch a Father Ted DVD...non judgementally of course...

My First Date

So today this girl has trapped me in conversation, and she's happy, over the top happy about everything. It works for her, and even though she's in her 40s she could with make up pass for mid 20s. She has a thick David Bowie in the late 90s (I think when ...Hours came out and he was always wearing his blue T-shirt and smoking?) shock of hair and with a natural inquisition that seems at last partially genuine, but she still alarms me because I'm not good with naturally peppy people and I never will be. We've got this family friend who is alarmingly happy and will give you hugs and she always says she has the same sense of humour as me which I don't believe to be true. Today as the female Bowie was going her usual routine of disarming friendliness and over the top laughter I was thinking about not just how to get her to put a sock in it, but also what would happen if she met our family friend - would they get out or would they forced to put on an ever more epic contest to decide who was enjoying the fondue more. I was a pretty happy child, and I was prone to excessive socialibilty, but nothing like this girl, who is still continuing to overly chuckle at a partial joke I made three minutes before. It says something about my workplace that I'm currently the happy one - as the rest of them bicker and argue, I'm the serene one looking at images of cute kittens on Google Image and trying at least partially to work through the animosity, but I've got nothing on this girl. The FemBow eventually leaves, and as a parting gift with a huge expectant smile on her fizzer she's demanding that I have a great day. Not a good day, a great day. As Ross Noble is want to say, thats just too much pressure. Great days are few and far between, and to be honest, she's thrown me with this, because a great day would mean that I wasn't working, that I was out with my friends, in the sunshine. As she leaves, she's looking over her shoulder for some kind of agreeable response, nearly putting her thumbs aloft like Paul McCartney, but I don't have anything other to say than a brief mumbled platitude and she looks a bit miffed. I know I should say you too, but her overbearing happiness has thrown me too much, and besides, I don't wish great days on just everyone...they are too few and far between to just randomly assign...and by sad definition, the days you think are great suck and you don't realise you are in a great day until it's gone...besides, I couldn't trust anyone with a FemBow haircut...or with foundation on her collar...

There used to be (and I think still is) a leisure centre in Irvine called The Magnum. At one point in the early 90s it was Scotlands #1 tourist attraction, mainly on account of it's wonderful space age waterslides, or flumes as they were called. I spent many a childhood day soaking wet on some poorly carpeted stairs shivering behind an equally cold skinny pasty white Irvinite as we slowly climbed to the top of the magic staircase for the right to jump on a piece of carpeting and go down the slide which was incredibly unsafe but immense fun. Sometimes a kid would just stop going down the waterslide and sit there to cause trouble so you would crash into him, and sometimes a kid would go down with the carpeting and smack their head off the top of the pipe. Good times. The Magnum was the place to hang out - we never had, say, a diner or a cafe or a milk bar to go to, the nearest equivalent was a chip shop called Mamas where you couldn't breathe due to the squashed nature of the tables and the fumes and stench that came off Mama herself. Plus you would make a twat of your early teenage self trying to flirt with some Ayrshire slapper with streaked blonde hair who was clearly not interested in you or your theories about The Soupdragons, and then you'd drop your chips on the floor and she'd tut. The Magnum was a bit of a late 80s wonderland in comparison, and there always seemed to be bits of it that were sealed off and mysterious, little conference rooms or little offices full of sports equipment or the cinema where it was always showing My Girl...it smelled of chlorine and smelly feet to be honest, but it also smelled of the future, and everyone was really proud of it. It was exciting for me to be there because when I lived in Penguin, if someone came to visit, there was nothing to show them or take them see. Well, there was a Mitre 10, a ludicrously dangerous flying fox and a machine that crushed flakes into ice cream...anyone lucky enough to come and visit me in Scotland though, we had somewhere magical to take them, a world of disgruntled lifeguards, fuzzy yellow balls that you weren't quite sure which sport they belonged too, and an ice skating rink that always had a doctor on it tending to someone...this was the future...this was the early 90s...it was the sound of now (truly the Soupdragons of leisure centres)...

So you can imagine how alarmed I was when my best friend, Tony, told me that the Magnum was yesterdays venue. Tony sort of slummed it being my best friend - I don't mean that in a bad way, but he was definitely cooler than me, well, he knew a few more bands than I did. If there was one thing I learned from Tony, it was the power of reading an opinion in a magazine and passing it off as my own. Tony also taught me the value of not wearing a shell suit when no one else did, so he was a good friend. As far as Tony was concerned the reason we didn't have girlfriends was because we weren't being intellectual enough, we were being kids spending far too much time jumping on pieces of carpet and having a swim rather than young adults talking about important issues. There was a much trendier place next to The Magnum that we had to try he said, the Harbor Arts Centre, in particular their little bar and bistro part that served salad with their meals and weren't fussy who they sold shandies too. It was, as Tony put it, the kind of place that hummed and crackled with intellectual debate and discourse to which I said what about The Soupdragons and he said would you not mention to the girls about The Soupdragons. Now, this was the first time girls had come up, and Tony had procured us, gasp, dates. Real dates with real girls, from a school that wasn't our own, and they were a year older than us. This was a problem for me because I was kinda sorta going out with Debbie, the optimistic girl who thought the future was going to be nothing but robots. What I had failed to grasp was that my presence at the date was simply to furnish his paramours friend with someone to talk to while they chatted about art and literature and I said and The Soupdragons and his response was unprintable. This I didn't really understand, I'd never come across the concept before, but it was patiently explained to me the whole wingman concept, and then I patiently explained it to Debbie who patiently told me to get fucked and I said well I won't go and she said no fine go and I said well OK if you are sure and she said The Soupdragons suck and I said how dare you....it was a rough week. It rained all week and Debbie wasn't talking to me and the way the date was being talked up, it just seemed like really high pressure. Tony even bought a book to read, some high concept French story, and I was absolutely amazed at the fact that we were properly adult dating at age 12...I would have pointed this out to Tony, but for the fact he was practicing his thoughts on Alfred Sisley and his contribution to modern art...looking up only to tut at me putting a sticker in my Panini album...

Of course, the date was a complete disaster, as is pretty much everything in life that's hyped to the extent this date was. The Harbor Arts Centre really didn't have much intellectual discourse - Henry Kellys Going For Gold was on the TV in the corner and the patrons were absolutely rapt, so we figured that the nature of the conversation wasn't so much The Left Bank as the Left Behind, and the girls weren't exactly the intellectual stimulation that had been so promised in Tonys brochure. My date, so to speak, was a girl called Kathryn with a funny sharp upturned nose (she's been living in an upturned worl...sorry, that joke always makes me laugh) who said absolutely nothing to me and sucked her coke tersely through a straight (boo) straw. To try and break the ice I told Kathryn my Bono story and she said who's Bono and I said he's a singer and she said like Jason Donovan and I said, well, technically...Tonys date was a 6"7 amazon called Mary Anne, with Pantene hair and a big grey coat and weary opinions on the state of the government that came straight from The Guardian word for word. She complained about the seat, she complained about Henry Kelly, and mostly she complained about our opinions, which weren't nearly intellectual enough. The only thing she liked was the sound of her own voice, and by the time she started complaining about the quality of the mini beets I figured it was time to get the bus home. Tony stuck it out to the end in his pursuit of intellectual boob, while Kathryn tuned out many hours earlier, many long hours earlier, once the steady supply of free coke ran out. The only four person breakthrough we had sitting in our little wooden corner was when (you guessed it) The Soupdragons came on the jukebox and we could talk about them...I wondered why we had put so much effort into pretense when if we'd just talked about, you know, stuff that was normal, we'd probably all have got on. I never saw those girls again, so the whole thing plays like a bit of a fevered dream, but I do know Kathryn shook my hand at the end of the date (that's never good) and we all walked off in four different directions, me to my strange local video shop to buy a big packet of Strawberry Hearts, and when I got home, I spoke to Debbie for about four hours on the phone, and she told me that anyone who didn't like the Soupdragons was an idiot, and that we should hang out the next day, on the swings, talking about life and how close the government was to building robots...

And you know what? When we did, that was a great day...

Edward Woodwardstock

A carton of milk just aint what it used to be - so I'm standing in my least favourite corporate bakery milling around the sandwich department with limited change in my hand, pondering my existence, stepping away from the surly teenagers with the sunken eyes sitting around a table picking from their rich stock of homosexual insults that they direct at customers (I think they looked like it was a "Nerferkinpoofta" day), and at this point, an old boy, big of gut and flannel, decides to announce to everyone that a carton of milk just aint what it used to be. Why this is is never explained - taste, texture, size, price, drought affected cows - but his wife decisively and instinctively agrees. My rough age guestimate has them being young in the 40s, when there was a war on and milk was surely powdered and rationed? I can't see that being something they will be saying too loudly - although of course, it's never about milk, it's about my day was better than your day no matter how many buzzbombs, rickets or rations were inflicted, and even though he's clearly free to digest entire cakes and buy flannel from the clearly unaffected by the drought flannel sheep (who must be working overtime to clad him in his tent), times are tough in his world, a world that's passed him by, for he references the front page of the Mercury, where a nightclub has been closed down due to (alleged) violence. Ah, I think, in between a mental calculation of my favourite Pussycat Doll (probably Kimberley), now we get to it, any minute now, lousy punk kids who don't appreciate the price of milk will be referenced, and the any minute only takes two seconds - he sprays, then pays, weighed down by the fading quality of his days, enormous nostalgic yearnings for 2c milk, and of course, by the giant chip on his shoulder that he will eat later. As he leaves 20 seconds before his arse does, his wife dutifully muttering her agreements, one of the sunken eyed teens calls him a "gaywad" - hmmm, that's a new one I think, partially curious to hear them go through their entire repetoire. I tell this to the girl at my work, the impossibly young one who still believes in the fantastic vibes of Isobar (for it was the club that is no more) and she says he's, quote, a "gay dick"...young people today, so verbose, so cutting...

It's a minor bugbear of mine - the notion that my day was better than you day. No, I often find myself saying, even as I proudly wear my Kim Wilde T-shirt, you were just young, of course it was better. A lot of "my day" was rubbish, wasted in shell suit wearing anxiety that I wasn't cool enough, a lot of go nowhere parties and time spent worrying or talking things of absolutely no consequence. And then - there was woodwork. More importantly, woodwork was just a concept around which the pointlessness would rotate. The single greatest argument I can mount that my day was largely rubbish (should I feel the need, after all, in my day I got to pash Vicki, and there was no debate The KLF were the greatest band in the world, so that's my up) is that I must have spent hour upon hour in school woodwork. Now, I know that woodwork of itself isn't pointless, after all, if you need a nice round thing to put the kettle on made of wood, it's brilliant. But it was such a pointless hour in my life, since what possible reason could a skinny Scot have to ever do woowork, especially as I was so rubbish at it I chiselled my finger about four times, and particularly since our second year teacher, all moustache and pencil, was really into his woodwork and there was nothing I could do to get out of it, I actually had to make something, rendering the time even more pointless. For my Mum, I made a jewellery box - our next door neighbours son was really good at woodwork (not so good at knowing when to shush up) and he made a fantastic jewellery box with split levels, a fancy lid and a tiny midget helper who would hand the jewels over. My Mum though, she was sure to put the neighbours gas at a peep, and she did, proudly showing my jewellery box and saying it had a special security system...that was her way of saying one end was glued and the other end was nailed down and so you couldn't actually open it. I spent a year chiselling and handcrafting a varnished block of wood. To do this, I chiselled my finger four times, stood in a draughty open plan hall freezing my woodblock off, and when I wasn't creating the worlds most ornate block of wood, I was being groped by a psycho girl called Kerri-Anne with teeth the size of skis...ah, my day, how glorious thy were...

Essentially though, the pointlessness boils down to first year woodwork, and my teacher from the wilds of Ayrshire Mr Donald. Mr Donald looked like Roy Kinnear with glasses, a portly gentleman in love with his camel coat and his pipe. On day one of woodwork, he pretty much decided that we were all hopeless cases and completely worthless and so he and his camel coat and his pipe would leave us after about ten minutes, sometimes three. Sometimes if we were lucky, he would leave us a wordsearch (usually on woodwork, but sometimes on pipes) or put on a nominal video and call it a lesson plan. In the whole year I suggest we saw him for a good ten minutes in total. Certainly didn't make any small boxes. At first, this was fantastic, a great way to relax, throw things, read a book, maybe set up a small market stall and sell some dodgy videos - in truth, for first year kids coming up from Primary school, such freedom was amazing. However like all people powered systems of government and responsibility, it was actually horrible. Entire classes were free to isolate and pick on one kid at a time for an entire hour free of adult supervision - and what can 24 kids do for an hour anyway? By the time we had persuaded the smallest kid in the class that it would be hilariously fun to throw him over a table, dwarf tossing style, disquiet around the back blocks suggested we had gone too far. The smarter and cooler kids (and me) began to back away from the anarchy, keeping our heads down for fear of isolation. It also wasn't long though before someone actually realised that not only were we young, dumb and full of sugar, but unsupervised, we could do so much more than actually throw dwarves across a table and play "what did Jamie steal for us today" - no, unsupervised, we could, as a group, take off, go and explore our surroundings, maybe go to the shops, or maybe go to the forbidden pub and try out laughably fake ID while real hard man who hadn't had a job since the miners strike called us rude names. And nothing says "of age" in a pub like school uniform anyway. Or, said a particularly plucky youth who's name escapes me...we could go...he whispered conspiritorally...we could...he gave it a big, big build up...go and get chips from the fish and chip shop. No, it wasn't worth the build up, so we just headed for the shopping centre instead.

The one thing you most need to know about Scotland is that a lot of our time is spent being Catholic or Protestant. That's not to say that you have to go to church, but once you have picked a religion, that's pretty much it, you are on "a side" and will spend your life fighting that corner. So there we were, twenty early teened Catholics (we lost a few who were too keen to find "hatrack" in the wordsearch) in clearly visible school uniform milling around one of the most psychopathic anti Catholic towns in Ayrshire eating chips and looking incredibly unmenacing. If we were a posse we were S Club 7. Naturally, we attracted verbal disquiet as we loitered from dole bludging elderly denim alcoholics waving their fingers and calling us names that all seemed to contain the word Pope. We thanked them for their support in kind, and continued eating our chips. It was such a pointless thing to do, posturing rebellion instead of doing something active, but at the time, I mean, we had skipped school, well, skipped a wordsearch and a video that starred Edward Woodward (the videos had the vaguest tie ins with wood), and now instead of scoring drugs and playing pinball, as a group we were eating chips and watching a girl called Margaret demonstrate that she could do a handstand without showing her knickers (she failed). As we devoured the last stringy piece of haddock, we finally got confronted by a Protestant, a boy who's name was Neil. Neil was fourteen going on 50, he had a craggy stubbly face, and eyes that touched in the middle. He was clearly distressed about something in the world...oh, it was us. "Yafuckacafflicfuckabastards" he said, taking only one second to say it. There were enough of us to take on one Neil, but he was big of bicep and aggressive of spittle, so we were wary of his temper. Especially when he pulled out a knife (my "that's not a knife" reference had lost some juice by 1991) and repeated his insult. Now, I don't know if you've ever had a knife pulled on you, but even with a 19-1 (we had lost Margaret to a tailor at this point since she needed her skirt mended) advantage we still felt very, very uneasy as Neil stood, knife in one hand, finger raised on the other, one eye going to the shops, the other coming home with the change. And then, with lightning speed and vision, I...did nothing, but out of the bookies came Neils Mum, who gave him a swift clip round the ear, told him to get in the car, and told us to take no notice of him. Despite our flicking him the finger behind his back and abusing him as he was dragged off, we hurried a little shaken back to woodwork, just in time to see one of those left behind yell "Bingo" as he completed his wordsearch...it was good to be home. Incidentally, we did so little work in year 1, the year 2 teacher read us a list of 142 things we should have done in year 1, we had done 3...our answer to most of his list was "probably did a wordsearch on it".

As I finish telling this story to the girl at my work, she tells me Neil is a "gay stabber"...in my day, we'd have come up for far more imaginative insults...kids today...no appreciation for milk or the early 90s...

The rules and regulations of Ayrshire society

Someones calling me darling - I'm listening to Ayria on my IPOD, and I'm drifting into a slightly hungover state, idly choosing between different brands of bottled water sprung from the same tap, settling on the familiarity of one I've tried before, hearing my Dad in my head going me for my stupidity. She's calling me darling like she knows me, smiling at me, telling me where the two dollar coin I dropped is, asking me what I want to order, I don't know, and she drops the pretence, she's tapping her pen and losing patience, and I still don't know, but I'm standing my ground. There's no one else in the queue, her queue, but she's still awkward, folded, impractically impatient, not even filling in the silence with some idle dusting. In the end, I order pancakes, and out the corner of my eye, I see her fade, tired, sick of everything, peering over glasses, sick of taking orders, tired of her job, the same expression I give every day. I take my order number and go, leaving her to pound on the desk as I probably do. I walk into the open air and take a seat, uncomfortable that the Jam Factory is a place that mixes such tired impatient grumpiness with Jordin Sparks music, poorly spaced tables and faintly undercooked pasta. The table waitress almost falls over trying to squeeze herself through tiny gaps between the tables, and all around me, people are discussing art, literature, pretencious holidays that take up entire seasons...we're talking about Dale Thomas and how much I hate him at the moment. I'm uncomfortable, and I leave quickly. On the way back, a woman is taking pictures of the seagulls. She smiles and tells me how wonderful Hobart is - I summon up the local pride to lie, to say it sure is, but I'm confused, I don't say it convincingly, and she stops our brief interaction to go back to adjusting her cheap brandless sunglasses. I get back into my car, turn up Robyn really loud, and run away, more comfortable in my house, more comfortable in my spa, waiting for the day to fade to black...

Where I come from, Ayrshire in Scotland, it's a place I genuinely fear for - it's slipping into a Wisconsin Death Trip style madness that is hard to recover from. The paths are littered with a million pieces of chewing gum, covering the road like a pattern or design. My home town has given up, a once prosperous new town, a place for Glaswegians to live and work and get out of the city now decaying, Thatcherite neglect lasting and neverending. Half finished buildings linger in the distance, a proud and prosperous shopping mall surrounded by derelict charity shops and travel agents where the girls are hot from a distance. The people are genuinely going insane, clinging to a bizarre and cult like series of rules and regulations that outsiders could never understand. My Mum is there at the moment, and she just suffered from the eternal struggle of outsider vs system - she didn't have her exact one pound fifteen for the bus, because the system dictates everyone must have the exact change, and got into a massive fight with the bus driver. She couldn't tell what was a five p piece, and what wasn't, but she still has a Scottish accent, so she just looked mental trying to work it out. My auntie, her sister, then forgot her pensioner pass, and she copped a mouthful as well, turning from the defender of the system . On the bus, there's a special seat for pensioners, and you have to have a pass to sit in it, and without the pass, the system cracks and bubbles, and random strangers will bicker as to who is a pensioner who gets the magic seat and who doesn't. My Mum pointed out that actually the seat was for disabled passengers, but she received blank stares. If you don't know any of this incredibly convoluted system, you are likely to get on the bus, sit in the special pensioner seat, and try and pay with a ten pound note, and be hissed and jeered by the insane masses. And by the time the system breaks you, by the time you know all of this, they cancel a service, as they did with the number 26A to Kilmarnock when I was there, or worse, change a driver, and the madness begins anew...

The cancellation of the 26A to Kilmarnock, it caused absolute carnage. It made the bus into town more crowded, and changed the route to go outside more pubs, picking up more drunks - a Rangers supporter got on, and talked about how he was going to walk to Manchester for charity only to be told he was usually so drunk he couldn't walk across the road. And that was before I saw the man in the wedding dress. There are good people in my home town, but defeat is definitely in the air. As we hurtled along the bus route, I watched the single mother flirting with the bus driver for the umpteenth time, and I looked out the sticker covered window and saw a girl, no older than fifteen, strung out of her mind on drugs, sitting on the pavement being absolutely berated by her boyfriend, who was about twice her age and twice the width. We made brief, meaningless eye contact, and then the bus moved on, leaving her to continue to deal with her fate. Outside the once prosperous shopping bit where I used to walk with my Dad, there's now just one shop, one shop holding up the inevitable demolition of the whole centre, as it crumbles into condemnation. The one shop is owned by a Pakistani man, he had a petition on the counter, one that said he'd always been there for the local community, and now we had to save him. He has his Kit Kats under the counter, sick of them being stolen by the wasteful hands of the smack addicts. Good people go about their day there, his harassed staff, the friendly cleaner, but they are broken down by the hopelessness. I went up there to get the Sunday Post, and was almost bowled over by a giant black dog, a real one not some sort of poetic metaphor about despair. The staff there said that was Mickie, and he had the run of the place. Mickie looked like he was about to bite a kid on a bike, but they were laughing. "Oh that Mickie," they said as one, "such a good dog!" - a girl in a TATU T-shirt rolled out of the bushes, looked at the dog, and had a panic attack, and hid behind a pole. I did much the same, at least without the TATU T, until the dog had passed. The dog was a local, and I no longer was, so he had the right of way...

In the bakery in the mall in my home town, a small and bizarre windowless place that tests your very limits of patience and sheer desire to eat a tasty cake with a syrupy strawberry on top, there's two queues, one that snakes longingly and endlessly towards the hot food, the sausage rolls, the bridies and the pasties, and then, midway through your jaunt towards the pastries, a second queue forms, snaking off to the right towards the cakes. There is absolutely no way on Gods earth that the cake people and the sausage roll people could ever, I don't know, maybe go 10 metres to the side and get something off a different shelf. No way in hell. They operate in different worlds. Now, when I went in there to get myself a fudgy donut, I didn't know this, and it caused genuine anarchy. An old woman in a grey coat tapped me on the shoulder and said "whit queue ye in son?", as if dealing with an escaped mental patient. What queue was I in? The queue for the bakery I thought? I said I didn't understand, and she showed me pity, and pointed out the system, one queue for cakes, one for pastries. I understood, and luckily was just in time to make my corner turn and head for the cake department. The old woman beamed at me paternally, as if she just taught me to ride a bike. However, I still wondered, what would possibly happen if someone wanted a sausage roll and a cake, in some of sort of bakery attempt to balance ying with yang (I didn't say that to her, she was probably racist, and mentioning Chinese names would make her uncomfortable). As I took a bite into my fudge filled treat, I saw her lingering with her shopping, and I asked her. "Naebody ever gets the two things on the same dae!" she said, decisively. But what if..."Naebody!" she said, and that was that. The system dictated that no one would do that, and I regret that I didn't have time to try it before I flew back to Tasmania. I shivered awkwardly at her mad, decisively crazy eyes, and moved on, as she watched me disappear slowly from her view...

I still love the place though...it just scares me...and don't question the bus timetables...for gods sake...