Narrow focus, focus that isn't narrow enough, and the sparkly bra strap dilemma

For the next two days, I will pretty much cease to exist to the outside world. It's one of the perks and perils of living alone during days off, the fact that for the next two days I'll be sitting reading a book about some bloke who nearly got killed trying to write it, listening to whatever music Iceland has to offer and sitting on the deck trying to decide what to throw out and keep from my clutter pile. The world outside my house will continue to go on, Barry Tosser will continue to fuss around next door, my work place will continue to be overgrown with the thickets of rigmarole and regulation, and my e-mail box will continue to pile up with jokes of a vaguely offensive air, insinuations that someone at work is having sex with that cricketer everyone loves and the flickering insults only friends can get away with. In truth, it's something of a dream, but I will go offline for two whole days, just sitting in the hammock doing nothing. I found a jotter with some of my old stories and writing in it, I can barely recognise when it's from, but if I analysed the mental ramblings inside it, that should kill a day, especially the haikus. Mental, you'd lock up your kids. Days like this take on the qualities of a distracted nervous dream, without a clock to watch, time doesn't really have a meaning. I've been trying to think in the last few days about my own dreams, not my literal dreams obviously. That's the last thing you want to read about I'd imagine, me dreaming about orange seagulls, or dislocated fragments of conversations with people you don't know that seem incredibly real. My only ambitions at the moment are the unsexy kind - making sure I don't get poisoned by the kebabs in the fridge, or just waking up at the moment feeling peaceful and contented would be enough to inspire feelings of great joy. Love? Romance? Not even on the radar. There will be time for more demanding thoughts, more challenging questions to ask myself as the year unfolds, but for now, there is perfect, beautiful stillness, no thoughts or pestering, just the bliss of disappearing, thoughtless, carefee, and hopeful that there's enough water and food in the fridge that I don't have to move a single muscle tomorrow. Unless the kebabs in the fridge really are poisonous, in which case, I suspect I might be moving quite a few muscles, and all the Icelandic mellow pop and contemplation time will be wasted...

Every shop I go into today is empty - no magic, no dreams, just wide empty spaces and distracted staff endlessly filling in their day from customer to piece of paper work. Big W is sparse and cavernous, with no one getting in the way at all. The only sound in the whole shop if someones tinkling tinny phone playing La Bamba softly, the recipient of the call uncomfortable and coy as she speaks, making sure no one is listening to her and she presses the mobile phone to her ear. Almost out of boredom, a staff member with fringey hair and a can do attitude is listening in, listening to her world, maybe trying to join it, but she shoots him a stare that would turn him to ash if she could manage it, and she walks off, leaving him to get back to the big pile of boxes he left behind when he gained his ambition. Even the escalator seems dead today, no children with ADD running around my kneecaps, although I do walk past the same girl three times, which makes it look like I'm stalking her. This girl has Jelena Jankovic disease - she could be attractive, she could be ugly, but you mentally can't make your mind up. The magic pen stall disappeared today, it's table where it's occupants would sit and change the words to popular songs to incorporate the words pen and magic now taken up by a depressed, pasty looking man in a baseball cap with downcast eyes selling window blinds, a shell of a man not looking to engage anyone in conversation about anything at all, let alone window blinds. He looks sometimes at his pile of notes, looks up, and then looks back at them as if they are his only lifeline to sanity. Luckily, he's undisturbed, window blinds low on the list of priorities of the shoppers. When I come back around, he's looking at a map and drumming his fingers off the edge of the desk. He looks broken by life, but I don't have time to contemplate him for too long. The same girl walks past me again, this time clutching a copy of a DVD in a Sanity Bag. She gives me a look which seems to suggest she doesn't find our continual meetings a co-incidence, and I'd concede she has a fair non verbal point, except for the fact that when I take a moment, I see there's no one else in the entire shopping centre but me, her and the clinically depressed blind seller. She walks off on click clacking heels with a strange look on her overpainted face, just as the blind seller physically leaps from his chair with a strange and bizarre glee. He grabs his sandwich and makes a sprint for the exit, barely remembering to lock up his cash as he heads for the exits, lunch, and a vague form of personal freedom....

There's a woman with tousled, coloured hair straight out of a can, a funny colour I've only seen on certain beaches at certain sunsets. She has a nose ring embedded into the size of her sharp angular nose, and a sparkly silver bra strap gently pokes it's head outside the confines of her singlet. She's working one of the skill testers with violent aggression, jawing with it with a bulldog faced intensity. I stop poking through the bargain DVDs to watch her for a moment, blinded by the bra strap, as she wraps her entire self worth and a giant meaty paw around the joystick, punching the glass casing, oblivious to everyone as she tries desperately to win herself a cuddly toy or a six pack of Cadbury Boost. Eventually she gives up, thumping the side of the glass with an enraged curse, and storming off unsteady high heels, and lest anyone think she had lost her dignity arguing with a skills tester machine, she tucks her bra strap back into her singlet with a strong push as she walks off, head held high. I hadn't even noticed there were skill testers around here, never mind becoming engaged in the struggle of bogan vs claw. Her face is pretty much the same as the kid who's pulling on him Mums skirt, desperately trying to get himself a Spongebob DVD, no other thing on the entire planet giving his life meaning at this very point. Weirdly it was in this very shopping centre I had a moment of self awareness, I was carrying on despairingly about a computer game, maybe a wrestling game or some sort of NBA game on the Playstation that was advertised and wasn't in the shop and I was throwing my arms around in the air and getting all I'm going to take out my green pen and write a furious letter to The Mercury about the decline in moral stan...and then I looked directly at the person I was ranting to, saw the absolute pity in their expression and just stopped, apologized, and walked out, never to collect the game. I realised such an obsessive and narrow single minded focus made me just as bad as a child, or the guy in our work who had the night vision goggles out when he was stalking the girl he worked with. Whatever dreams and aspirations I had for my life, it wasn't arguing with a plainly despairing geek in the middle of a badly lit shopping mall. The bogan meanwhile, having headed off for a smoke, has returned to the skill tester. She furiously works it, but still can't win a thing. She takes pained breaths as she battles, her despair absolute, until a small crowd of children end up behind her, nagging her to get out the way, trying to discourage her until she gives up, and they can effortlessly win a fluffy bunny...or maybe they were just looking at the sparkly bra strap...maybe she won the bra in a different skill tester...

When I lived in Penguin there was a girl who used to work in the milk bar, a tall skinny girl with freckly skin and a button nose and faintly brown hair who whenever anyone spoke to her would hold her hand up in the air and say she was only only working in the milk bar until her agent got her modelling work. She would wear figure hugging sparkling mini tops with words spelled out in tiny diamonds like cute and ambitious, and little tiny demin shorts that she wore arrogantly in spite of a giant bruise on her leg and she would always be slightly contemptous of the patrons, especially those who had to count out their change in coins or small children who would beckon her over from her slumber just to buy a Redskin split or a penny chew. The only time I saw her outside the milkbar she was sitting on one of Penguins never used train tracks cross legged and meditating, and I moved on deeply uncomfortable. The fact that she told us for five years she was working temporarily in the milk bar until her modelling career took off told us all we needed to know, although she was proudly telling her friends she modelled a bra in a Fitzgeralds catalogue one day and her friends were trying desperately to be supportive. Of course, I was probably dismissive of her for being in the same menial job all the time despite protestations her life would one day be better, but here I am more or less in the same situation. Above all though, I always remember time she was serving someone and she dropped a big plate on the floor, sending chips and bits of burger and mustard and the odd sesame seed scattering to the wind, and obviously crockery in dangerously jagged directions across the vinyl floor. She couldn't bring herself to clean it up for some reason, pride or breaking the modelling spell she was trying to cast, and it lay there for a long time, while she walked around it. Her boss, probably Alannah Hills Dad, came out to yell at her, but she held her hand up, shook her head, said she didn't sign up for this, and walked off out the back, to potter around in modelling self assured poses, while Mr Hill got on his hands and knees, cleaning up, and muttering under his breath...

Of course, she was also a massive fan of Sting, so she didn't have that much dignity or self respect...at least not musically...

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?

Post 199 - The Mythology of Swagger

My friend today posed the question via e-mail as to whether or not we've actually gone so old we've changed over to a retro radio station - my answer was maybe, but I didn't want to listen to Beyonce eight times a day. I sat around listening to Elastica records (yes, vinyl kids) all night last night as it was, so there's something to be said for letting a little retro into your heart. When I went to the corporate bakery today to get myself a tasty sandwich, there was a kid standing outside leaning up against the wall in what looked like vintage early 90s happy pants, all garish colours and questionable swirls where perhaps just some blank fabric should be. He looked happy enough, which I guess it what counts. There's a lot of bored looking children in ill fitting fabric hang around the coffee shops where I work, clingy white material leeching onto their already pasty unfit bodies, waving mobile phones in the air as they ponder who's a nice guy and who's a nerfuckhead. Such judgements do take me back, the social pecking order of the coffee shop similar to the lost conversations we used to have in Burnie swing park in the mid 90s - I'm sure we thought as we passed judgement on the overweight joggers and the couples having lunchtime affairs before they had to return to work and call home to make up some excuse about working late - and I'm sure we thought we were original and clever...there's a girl with a scrunched up face, as we would say in Scotland she had a hard paper round, a perfectly spherical head with eyes tightly bound into her skull, green hooded top huddled around her coarse rough skin, cigarette, coffee and child interchangable objects of her limited attention span, and she's sitting outside Gloria Jeans, perfectly still, not saying a word as I pass. I suspect that had I some kind of deformity that was obvious - for instance if I had my baseball cap on - I would have been the object of her unjustifiable moral superiority. Her child seems much more alive than her sloth like mother. The child clings to the bottom of her mothers faded jeans, and one day, if I haven't misjudged the situation, she will one day tell someone, a lover or a therapist, all about her faded dreams. Inside the coffee shop sits a huddled and shivering old woman, but although physically frail, her judgemental streak behoves her to have a blog of many paragraphs. She's looking almost physically ill at the surrounding parade of bogans and single mothers with coupons and vouchers crowding around her table, trying to steal packets of sugar. At one point, she sits and stares out the window just as I get some other Britpop band on my IPOD, not Sleeper I hope, and makes eye contact with me. I guess from her eye urgency she's just read something suitably disparaging about the younger generation in her copy of the Mercury and wants me to acknowledge her, but I suspect when she sees my IPOD she despairs and hurries back to finish the sentence about kids on the lawn or some such thing. So entranced is she in moral judgements, she misses several calls for her coffee, and a mutually judging slim hipped wisp of a girl standing hands on bony hips, pouting, repeating her name and the phrase skinny latte and cake over and over again into the ether, a clarion call for the ages that crosses generations and class divides effortlessly...

Of course, my own moral compass is finely tuned and, if not non judgemental, at least self aware. After all, I spent most of the lobbying part of the funeral, the awkward 20enty minute mingling in the lobby of the funeral home where people come up to you and ask how you are doing and you try and place them mentally as the third cousin of or the person who went to school with while trying trying to focus on not making jokes, actually being in temporary fancying with a girl in slick black cocktail dress and blessed with great hairstyle. I mean the guy she was with hardly looked like a big shot, in his store bought white shirt and mad t...oh right, be sad. Professional to the end. The funeral directors of course do a decent job under difficult circumstances - they have to remain professional in the midst of human misery, but it can't help but feel like a business. Neatly cut sandwiches and an arm around the shoulder and then onto the next family. You don't want to be there of course getting the arm around the shoulder - even working with the automon is better than this. It's certainly no place for me to work some of my more flirtacious lines. In the midst of grief, or as one of the family sad surrounded by a bomb of sadness, our place is to hang at the back, just to be there, noted that we attended. I've even put on my best sadness suit, and one of the mourners has put on his grieving wig just for the occasion. People say nice things, people say things they always wanted to say, and a particular band is played far too many times, but the quality of music is scarcely going to be a consideration. Sad as the occasion is, I'm distracted by two people talking in front of me. The cinema tap on the shoulder or a hearty down in front seems in order, especially when they have a discussion about decor in the middle of one of the longer rememberances, and it's only later that I find out their daughter jumped off a cliff and perhaps their own take on grief is offset by discussing the colour of the walls. As for me, the stories about everyones relationships with the deceased make for interesting self reflective listening. Certainly my Dad never took me camping, although that was my choice. After all, what if somethings on TV and it's never shown again? I tell Dad later that since one of his favourite phrases to pre judgemental people forming opinions on him is you will not put me in a box, something I'll be sure to reference at his funeral, that finally, we put you in a box...of course, he laughs. We never went camping, and he caught my only fish for me, and sure he mostly had me to laugh at me, but parenting, well, it's all relative isn't it...

Reception afterwards is a vulture fest, the less genuine mourners tripping over each other for a free glass of juice and a crust bearing sandwich. Into my midst though bowls this tractor of a woman - tragically for lovers of a racial stereotypes she's Scottish, although I suspect the affectations are put on - with the sensitivity of a customs officer. She's camp, she swishes across the room like a fat wart riddled hurricane, a cyclonic bringer of conversational bilge. To this funeral, this show of grief, she's brought not only stories of her own son, but pictures. Pictures of her son that she decides to show everyone, not least of all the widow, before announcing to said same widow that if anyone asks, could she knock ten years off her age and pretend she's 40ty? Yes, many people at this funeral have come specifically to ask about you. When I'm twistered into her direction, she patronises me, looks down on me, just as I look down on her for her face and her manners and her clunky Amish nightmare shoes. She looks like a taller fatter Jimmy Krankie if Jimmy Krankie had a snout. We lose her in the hubbub of her own ignorance as she's standing at the back of a social circle already facing away from her, smiling as if they are really listening to her and her anecdote about her wonderful son. As I've established, I loathe small talk, so I huddle myself in the corner. I oft wonder about how I went from being her, not pig ignorant and ugly and pretending to be 16 at 30ty, but chatty, outgoing, and unaware I was boring people when I was pre 10en, to nursing a terror of being asked what I do and an egg sandwich in a corner of solitude. I know it was Ayrshire to blame - a ruthless place where you had to be 1000% right in all assertions before opening your mouth, less you be cut down by a cruel mob looking for the daily eedjit to pick on and push up against the crumbling school walls. Mind you, I don't think that alone is an excuse or reasoning. Our snouty friend comes from a place in Glasgow called Easterhouse, a Scottish in joke of a place which is something of a byword for how not to plan a town - and yet with full sincerity she claims her dad owns two racehorses. I suspect he had two clotheshorses, but not much more. I think it's perhaps a symptom of malcontented feelings, perhaps a sign of not having much to say about my own life. Such personal issues or feelings are not so prevalent in kids, as I watch as they communicate mostly by punching each other on the arm, throwing sandwiches at each other, pulling each others hair and kicking each other fair up the arse. If life was that simple for me, I would have attracted the attention of mini skirt girl with a fair boot up the arse, then punched out the pig ignorant plus 50 woman right in the snout...but to do that, I'd probably have attracted attention to myself, the last thing I want, so an egg sandwich and a nervous disposition it is, sitting next to Mums sister, who hates small talk even more than I do, and has an even more expressive face at the point of photo 48, the wonderful son in the garden frowning in a grey cardigan only a massive dullard or priest would wear...

Of course life will continue to roll on. Four hours after free juice and impossibly brave grandchildren, not to mention slightly harsh behind the back ridiculing of someones kid for being, quote, too Huonville, I'm in the car home, soon back to my own personal space. I'm self conscious and stressed and physically exhausted so I collapse into my spa and fill it brim high with hot water. Some overpaid, overhyped millionaire footballer or tennis player is on telling me how terrible his life is so I can't watch sports on TV, I'm not in the mental mood. All today has reminded me of for some reason is the time I couldn't go to Aviemore on a school trip. I had the flu, and it was the first time in my life I had the house to myself when Mum and Dad were at work. My Mum made my Dad hold my legs on the Puffy Billy train when I sat on the window sill, so you can imagine how this was a big day. I got to eat popcorn when I wanted, which was often, but mostly I stayed in bed, obviously due to being ill. The Aviemore circumstances I'll have to go into another time, but I suspect I would have lost an eyebrow on the mini bus up there. I distinctly remember I was watching a VHS of Paramount City when a football thundered off the window. For a moment my pre teen self thought I was being bricked or robbed, and I lay on the floor, face down, completely terrified that any minute now someone was going to steal my VHS player, unplayed copy of Paramount City and all. A big boy, maybe about 16teen, with a thick black jumper bounded into the back garden, took a look in the window, and grabbed his ball and walked off, gallas as all hell. Yesterday made me feel like that all over again, like I had some mythical swagger and it was all laid bare and exposed as pretence - like a ball had clattered off my window when I had no one to help me. Death has that effect on me, as a great leveller. What was interesting though was much later Debbie, when we shared a bag of Revels on the little brick circle we used to sit and hold hands on, after I had told her that story and she said I was a big jessie, told me that the boy who had swaggered into my garden in fact worked at ICI, and was made to cry on his first day by a particularly nasty prank which involved a worker pretending to have his finger severed. She told me confidence was all relative, and she didn't care what anyone thought of her, and she would have confronted any burgulars. I didn't doubt her, but her words floated into the early 90s Ayrshire air, not least of all because she had just knocked the last Malteser in the bag, a far greater concern to me than any dramatic thoughts or implications for my future self...

That's the things with these posts, they pose as philosophical musings, but they always come back to lollies or fizzy drinks...

Better be quick as you lie, she thinks you care, why don't you prove her right

I had time to kill this morning, which is frightening in Rosny. I once was in New Norfolk at about 7:30 in the morning, dumped off by a lift from a car which drove off into the sunset with the driver laughing as I stood shivering and bewildered in the middle of the road, and I remember feeling like the loneliest man in the world, even with a breakfast burrito for company. There's no such problems in early morning Rosny as the shopkeepers unfurl their day one lifted up shutter door at a time. In the context that I have assigned these individuals a character, a personality based on brief interactions, that when panda eyed girl beams as she buys herself a coffee it can be a little disconcerting, a human face on another wise imagined stereotype. A girl at one of the relatively trendier clothes stores is fighting with her shutter door, and can't quite get it up all the way forcing her to limbo under it awkwardly. Single men shuffle awkwardly around the edges of Coles, confused as to why certain chocolate blocks are on the other side of the store from the rest of the confectionery, and hoping that their answers to the question of how their day is can be amusing enough to buy them a casual flirting token from one of the cuter checkout chicks. This happens every day, a set routine in which a new day, which begins with such promise, will generally turn out to be something just as boring as yesterday, unless you have a broken door shutter, which I guess counts as a break in routine. Just before I go to work, a stack of trollys almost hits me and my coffee, and I'm not sure which will suffer more. I shoot the trolly boy a suitably angry glance, but then I feel ridiculous, like an old man telling kids off for their 8 track rock and roll music. I know that I shouldn't care, it wasn't his fault, but this is my world, the tiny annoyance enough to play on my mind, the grievance mine to nurse and grow. As I shuffle off with my head down, Panda eyed girl is loud on her mobile phone, she's telling me and whoever is on the line just how good the some she got last night was, and such is the glee that the some she got was good - and lets face it, if the some is good you should be speaking about it - that I ended up so glad for her I wanted to tell someone else. It was at least something memorable for her to recount, something more memorable than an encounter with a bewildered Bad Boy Bubby style trolley boy, and I'm sure her blog will reflect that at least the last 48 hours had some meaning for her...

The radio at work, a sturdy blue ghetto blaster with authentic 80s cred, is spewing some awful nonsense, a work experience DJ with a horrible fake laugh is responding to even the most basic phone in call like he's heard the one about three muftis going into a bar, and then he throws to Beyonce...or Katy Perry...or something else mundane enough to fill in another three minutes until he can speak again. To my right, a fill in of our own is on her moral high horse. She doesn't just sit on the moral high horse, or even just ride the moral high horse, she brushes it's tail and feeds it sugar lumps. I don't even listen - her librarian glasses and her uprighteous upbringing mean there can't be a connection. When I tell her the Sea Monkeys she got me for my birthday have died, she says she's going to cry. Well I cried when I broke the leg off my Ju-Jitsu Heman when I was 7even, so it could all be relative I suppose. To my left, my computer spews forth e-mails of differing lengths, including quite a detailed one from one of my friends, a questioning, stall setting e-mail that asks me to set out details of my life quite specifically. I don't reply to it - the three line ones about cricket seem a lot easier to deal with today. My head hurts not from the parade of pushy troublemakers, morality jockeys or stress, although maybe it's in trying to pick which songs to keep on my IPOD (Ming Royale or Lauren Laverne?) or maybe it's walking really close to blue eye shadow girl today. Why is someone telling me a story about a real horse? Do I look like I care...there's a paper mountain eating away at my free time, and a 1/2 eaten sandwi...and all the while, in a presentation folder on top of my copy of the Herald Sun, featuring the inconsequential blatherings of some gangsters wife who wants to kill someone else or eat a pie or god knows what, is a copy of a speech to be given at tomorrows funeral, a liftime of accomplishments neatly laid out on single spaced A4 paper, to be delivered in iambic rhythm tomorrow with enough pauses for rememberance and laughter typed into the delivery...the most important and poignant speech the man who died will ever get, and he never heard it...no wonder my head hurts...it's weighed down by poignancy, and it's not for the Sea Monkeys...

Many years ago I was in this pub - this particular pub, let's just call it Irish Murphys - was in it's most festive autumnal years, long before the dickheads started manning the door with all the social charm of Cardinal Richelieu, when you could quite safely get a drink without getting beat up for wearing a silly hat. I can't remember why I was late - I was probably waiting on Kingston Pizza, that would explain a lot. When I got into the pub without incident, apart from the thick dense smokey fog which eminated from the tired and trite rock band asking if anyone knew this one a lot, I took a sharp left and sat down to join my friends. At the table, two people sat opposite each other like contestants on Mastermind, staring intently into each other eyes...well, the girl was staring into his eyes. The boy was cowering, completely cowering in his section of the wooden bench. His shoulders were slumped, his neatly pressed hooped jumper just about pulled over his head. For someone normally so, well, blokey, a combination of barely suppressed lust, an abundance of alcohol and perhaps the mood induced when a pub band of limited ability have a crack at Smoke On The Water had rendered his tough talk to be a redunant axiom of macho posturing...or to put it slightly more Irish Murphys style, he was full of shit. She sat gazing into his whimpering eyes, the spell only broken when she introduced me to her friend, a quite horrendous ginger nightmare with a dangling silver cross who looked at me like a bug that had run from under the fridge. The feeling was very much mutual, although the bugs under my fridge probably don't say everything is nerfuckinshit every 5ive seconds...so there they sat, her trying to make conversation, him straight batting everything with wide eyed terror and one word grunts, me trying not to throttle Ginger, her trying to impress another one of my friends with tales of Warrane life and limb, the band trying to impress anyone with some of their best chords...and then my friend, in a moment of drunken inspiration, decided to break the ice with a passionate exhortation...to me. I figured he thought if he went round the room he could build up to finally talking to his best girl...when he said, with all drunken sincerity that out of all his friends, I was definitely in the top 12, I realised that the art of telling people how you really was perhaps best left to the fine folks at Hallmark...certainly not to the barflies of Irish Murphys that's for sure...they just tell you how bad you look in your silly hat then pour you a Guinness that's sloppy...thats when they say it non verbally...

Of course, I can hardly talk, I'm hardly running up to blue eye shadow girl with chocolates, I'm hardly sprinting round to Mum and Dads to listen to tales of walks on the beach and hours on the treadmill. I'm not one for over expressions or telling people what they mean to me, I mean, I had a farewell to the sea monkeys, but you know what I mean. I can do it when I need to though. My gran, my only real grandparent, was pretty much bedridden for the last few years of her life, a sensible woman driven mad by the ravages of time, an overactive imagination that had her thinking ice cream van drivers were plotting against her, and so little to do that she would stand by the side of her door all night long waiting to spring on anyone using the toilet. She would slow flashes of great insight at times, which rendered her more eccentric moments even more saddening. She knew exactly why she hated Glasgow Rangers, and who the Prime Minister was, and when a doctor came around to test her mental faculties and asked her to remember three words at the start of the assessment that she had to repeat at the end, she not only remembered them, she put them into a short story. Her room was sparse and clean when I went back to Scotland in 2001 on holiday, the first holiday I had in Scotland without the agonising pain of wanting to live there. We made sure we spent at least an hour a day talking to her, maybe making her a weak cup of tea or nodding at some of her more eccentric ideas and plots being made outside her window. It was pretty obvious to all of us though that this holiday was going to be the last one where she alive, such was her physical frailty, and at the end of the holiday, we had one last cup of tea on the edge of the bed - she asked about how great Henrik Larsson, a soccer player, was, and I said he was pretty great. After about an hour, it was time for me to vacate her house, to go to the airport. Without thinking, when I got up from my little wooden seat, I said goodbye Gran, and I realised that I had said with real emphasis, a really meaningful goodbye. As drizzle danced down her window in formation, she said goodbye back, and it was more poignant than a flowery one hour speech. It was a classicly understated West Of Scotland goodbye - a far better farewell than when one of her daughters, just before she died, told her that the roll she had bought at the bakery for her was a lovely looking roll, only to be told curtly in that case, I won't eat it but you can enter it in a beauty contest...

Did I mention Panda Eyed Girl got some? She would want you to know...

Getting old and eating chicken wraps

When the wind blows painfully through the trees and Rosny is boiled down to it's essence on quiet days where securing the last parking space can seem like a perpetual Tetris like battle to the death, it can be a painful sight. At Big W yesterday, no one was touching the Godfather DVDs or books about painting, but the thongs on the rack seemed to be attracting a crowd of shoppers with no end in sight. The floors that were crowded with Xmas shoppers are now sparse and blank, the excitable casual staff sent back to the holding pen of non employment, and the special offers go through and around a ten percent discount on spangly mesh tops that are two or three sizes too small for the intended wearer. There's some sort of flimsy pulsing electro pop tinned in over the PA system that is supposed to represent the apex of popular culture right now but which sounds like some sort of reheated sub Fischerspooner nonsense. No one remembers Fischerspooner of course, which just makes me feel old. At least with no one around I can get to have a look at the DVDs without some kid headbutting the back of my kneecaps. One of the presets of someone dying, one of the emotional defaults, is a commitment that life will be lived more fully, that you won't let the little things bother you and learn a far greater ideology than being unable to calm down if someone headbutts your kneecaps or cuts you off in traffic. It doesn't last of course - bit like new year, by February I've already wasted too much of it watching TV - with me. Today I am trying to be calm and engage with the world around me but as soon as some bogan chick in a tight tracksuit stands directly in front of the Weeds DVDs I know I'll be back to forgetting lifes sobering lessons again. As I wander round to the book section which is now mercifully free of Jill and Jenny bogan discussing whether their mutant offspring likes one cricketer over another, an entire row of self help books glisten in their solitude, trapped in the back of the store screaming to get out and let their helpful ideas flow like wine. One of the workers - neither panda eyed girl nor fat sweaty girl - is staring intently at the cover of one such book, so intently that it seems as though a motivational idea has struck her, although there's every chance she was just lost and confused and trying to get her trolley to move. She pauses for a moment, but the idea, whatever it was, is lost in a hubbub as a small child runs around her legs to get to a Ben 10 book or one of those horrible Garry Lyon footy tales. She puts the book down sadly and continues to push her trolley of books around pointlessly as my friend that I'm meeting for lunch is in mid soliloquy about how many bogans are around us and the way Tasmania is crumbling economically. His self righteous tone drowns out the song that's playing as we make our U turn back past the thong stall...it's not the Reynolds Girls...is it?

My friend is a more nervous exaggerated version of me. By which I don't mean he's peppering the conversation with stories about Bros - no one is like me in that sense. I mean his natural disposition is to look away from direct eye contact, into the middle distance. I'm nervous with small talk, but I've never been this bad. I feel like I keep making conversational false starts every time I make up even the most basic reference to American Football. Maybe around some girls while James played at school discos from yore. Either that or he's really enjoying his wrap.There's a girl who works at this particular shop, Muffin Break, who's made entirely of dough. She's very nice, very thorough in her work, but she's made entirely of dough, with a perpetual sense of lifes toil drawn across her face. Maybe it's working with the girl with the strange eyebrows. I toil myself selecting something to eat and she's being ultra friendly, like a greeter at an American chain store you see in a movie, and she takes my friends dis-assessment of their quiches with a personally offended wince. When she tells me they are out of toasted sandwiches it's said with such utter poignancy it's like the end of Gone With The Wind. My friend doesn't notice, he's back to checking his phone for friendly messages from famous cricketers. In spite of his nervousness, his falling apart around the one girl he really loved, and his perpetual nerdy stammer, he's actually got about twenty times more friends than all of us, and like a lot of people is a lot nicer than I am. One of the consequences though of having friends for a long time is they are frozen entirely in youth, when you first saw them, what they first did when you knew them. I express surprise that my friend is now an avid Michael Palin documentary watcher but I remember that he is nearing forty, which is kind of startling, although I don't know anyone who's such a big fan of Micky P they'd shell out for a 19 disc set like he did. Hey, I got the autograph of Duncan from The Bill, what would I know. Many times I've had a panic attack at night wondering about the rapid dissolute passage of time, and now it's not only here, but it's beckoning me to watch Nat Geo instead of VH1 on my cable box. I think in some ways, maturity should be my friend a bit more - I should accept the WWF isn't going to call to ask me to write wrestling shows. That said, I'm surprised at any time he's bold enough to offer an opinion, even if it's just on quiche or the musical stylings of Andre Rieu. He said something strange though on the way to get our wrap, he rejected a cafe on the grounds it was an old persons cafe, a youthful statement of defiance as unlikely as if he started wearing an earring and saying everything was irie. In the end, once he has decided Muffin Break is hip and trendy enough to accomodate, and after we've both eaten a wrap each and there's nothing left to say, we sit in blissful mature silence, on our own, while the doughy girl watches attentively for the ultimate franchise accolade - two people walking away saying that was pretty good...

Many years ago I was in a Hobart burger cafe - the one that did the worlds greatest cheeseburgers, which I think closed down to become a sushi restaurant where you could get your sushi delivered to you on a toy train that stopped off at your table. The atmosphere in this restaurant was pretty rough and ready, with coarsely skinned Greek women and men who you hoped tied their hair back in the kitchen arguing passionately over a tomato. Whenever I sat at the window of that particular cafe, I used to look out into Hobart and think of all the little dreams I had, all the youthful plans I had, maybe an attractive girl or two would walk past. Sometimes you would see a regular couple walk past, an old man and woman walking past, and sometimes they'd wave, and then you'd only see him say, or only her, and you'd wonder what happened to the other person you saw. You'd sit and ponder the ravages of time and if you should maybe, just maybe, be doing something with your life other than sitting munching on a cheeseburger and looking out a window, but your thoughts would be interrupted by a loud slanging match which made you learn the Greek word for dickhead and then they'd turn their radio up really loud and a plate would smash. There was always this girl that used to come in all the time while I was chomping on my burger and curling up in a mummy and daddy please don't fight position - she was about 20 foot tall with big bunched up blonde hair and an assortment of army surplus clothing outfits that she would wear because nothing else fitted her. I think she had something wrong with her, maybe some sort of terrible illness, because whenever someone asked how she was, instead of just saying good, she'd launch into a series of Hallmark style one day at a time every days a bonus just greatful for sunshine phrases that really stood out from the usual grunting around the place. One day though, after a while of this kind of Oprah speak, I turned around and actually looked at her, and she wasn't saying these things with any kind of smile, any kind of belief, she was just saying them with her braces and her big baggy jumper all over the place, and her eyes staring up at the ceiling fan. Whatever questions she was asking herself about her life, the answers weren't being found easily. She would take her 1/2 serve of chips and wander off sadly, ducking under the doorframe as she went, which should have been a point of deep reflection for me - just like when I was 10 and I was shamelessly manipulated by a Children In Need special about a miracle Mum caring for a kid with no legs - but obviously, such deep discernment and appreciation for the nature of life and what I had were only fleeting thoughts. When I was 10, it was lost in the rush to get back to my Amstrad, with the giantess it was in the rush to get the last bus home, and now, it's lost in the rush to find out news about minor celebrities...I wish it was to get back to my Amstrad...the Fruit Machine game was amazing...

Of course, difficult questions about where we are going, what we are doing, the complexities of death, and indeed the aging process and so on are questions for the greatest minds in history, not some benny in a Manchester City 1997 Kappa top trying to chew through a ham and tomato wrap or who later tried to have a sneaky read of the Popbitch book in Angus and Robertson only to be near a kid who can't stop breaking wind. There's not many philosophers or thinkers around these parts, no real intellectual role models. Even the people with the Magic Pens have gone, and they used to spend their time putting the words magic and pens into popular songs. My friend eventually wanders off, obviously nervously, towards his car, while Mum texts me to say she has to go to dinner at the house with the grief circle, which sounds awful, and impossible to bear. Little of consequence happens - someone sends me a Miley Cyrus song on e-mail which could be a virus, the automon launches into an impassioned speech about not having kids, a drunk doctor and a woman with lemon streaks in her hair whinge on and on...all little tiny things of absolutely no consequence that will fade from memory by tomorrow. My Dad and my Uncle come to visit much later, standing as men of the world with beers in hand talking about the state of the world, all their hatreds and disgusts mulled over with the assistance of Boags, my Dad being a particularly verbose and wordy man, he takes control of the conversation, while I attend to them with sausages and the giving of my time. As an answer to lifes big questions, quality time with other meaningful people should be something of an answer, but it still feels uncomfortable, like something grander should be coming. Then, out of the corner of my eye, I see Barry Tosser, my horrendous neighbour, sitting in his lounge chair, telling his wife in tremendous detail about a growth he's had cut out of his perfectly round head, and thats when lifes answers are easy...

Whatever you do, don't be a tosser...

The Unfinished Anecdote of Apricot Grove

My treadmill, should any would be burgulars be out there, is through quirk of fate in my living room. If I get on it and forget to close the curtains, which I sometimes do and then can't be bothered getting off because my treadmill is telling me it's on "Pyrenees" setting and who wants to go back to base camp, sometimes a walker will, well, walk past obviously. Usually a Kingston walker will glow not just with health but sheer smugness. One yesterday, a blonde woman in a blue tracksuit, was so smug it was no wonder she had to walk off the excess. So I'm excercising for no other reason than to get to that level of smugness that they are, self evident health without the need for injections. I'm standing around on it most days watching some like an S Club 7 concert on DVD from 2000, or a Catatonia VHS tape, and the singers equally glow with smug good health, although the bit in Popbitch which says Rachel Stevens has webbed feet makes me feel better. Everything is basically as it should be, an unremarkable Saturday in Suburbia with only the prospect of some gentle shopping and a Liverpool FA Cup tie between now and going back to work. There is always the hammock to jump into I suppose, sleep through this. Just as I'm contemplating the wonder of a pointless weekend with nothing to do but throw Doritos at the TV, when Dad rings, and tells me that a family friend has died. It's the guy with the big red face who, at Xmas, we looked at his much younger photos while he flinched with poignant embarrassment. So it's off to a grief circle at his now emptier house to sit around and look uncomfortably at shoes in the face of other peoples loss. Not easy. In a situation like this, all you can do is wait to be called upon, to wait to be engaged in conversation, because you don't know, even asking for juice might spark some sort of desperate memory that encapsulate the loss. In the midst of this upset, someone asks me a question about work, and suddenly I'm an absolute conversational dervish out of necessity. Every detail, every story, just anything to make the silence go away - but you can't. You can't dominate, it's not your family, it's not your scene...and I'd give anything to go back to my unopened Dorito packet...

I've mentioned before, I'm pretty terrified of dying - as much as anything it's the little tiny bits of life left behind I can't stand. At one point when I stepped outside the grief circle, I went to get some plastic chairs and his cigarettes were on the table. There's also a cruise voucher he got for Xmas which sits on the top of the television, unused, unboarded. Such little things upset me far more than people crying or doing awkward reminiscing. In my case, someone would find an IPOD full of songs - would they know what most of them meant to me - a case full of soccer programmes and an unfixed sundeck in need of a paint. What does that say about me? Man he was lazy but he sure loved his S Club? Unlike me, the guy who died had a well kept garden, and there's undone work all over the place, unpicked apricots and tomatoes lying to the side waiting to be bagged up. At least in my case a quick mow will do it in regards to the garden. My brain isn't really working I must admit, the widow is propped up in an armchair fussing about nothing, biscuits or some such nonsense, the tale of his life recounted with jocularity or upset depending on who turns up at the door. My Mum shows a Mrs Doyle like determination to help, making sandwiches and tea with aplomb, and my Dad has several ice breaking tales of high school paranoia he can fall back on, not to mention a teacher like tendency to say the words yes and I know in a tender tone when things go wrong, but all I can fall back on is schtick, and it's not really called for in this situation. So I'm pretty useless I guess, no matter how much mere attendance can be re-assuring. I certainly could make a sandwich, but it'd be one of my own special sandwiches, like when I was a kid and make a Coco Pop and butter sandwich. Ultimately this day is nothing to do with me really, so I wait patiently, and do what little I can to help. The next door neighbour at the house is a keen racist, having previously made a distinctly UnPC comment about a black guy who filmed me and her in one of his documentaries. I can see her out the window, tending to her own garden, getting really angry when she can't pull a carrot out of the ground. She swears at it and comes back with a rake, to try and dig it out. Her frustration is very funny, since the neatness of her little old lady dress and the thinness of her frame don't match her overuse of her favourite swear word, which must be burning the ears of the poor carrot. Of course, it's not the time to bring it up - in normal circumstances I could run with this as a conversational outlet, get some laughs and move on, but it's not possible of course. Not least because in these circumstances, I'm generally thinking quite melancholy thoughts about what happens when the racist dies, who will sit in her house and tend to her garden, and what little bits of, well, possibly Nazi memorabilia will she leave behind to be poignant in the face of those traipsing through her house looking for things to nick...

Eventually in a gap in the pregnant pause, I'm off to do something useful. I go and get some wine from the local store. There's a woman in there with thick horn rimmed glasses pretending to be some sort of wine expert, and she's reading labels and vintages on eight dollar bottles of wine like she's Stuart MacGill. Her pink tracksuit is hurting my eyes, so I move on, confused with my own knowledge of wine. Pink MacGill leaves after a while, muttering to no one in particular about the lack of quality in the wine department and how Adelaide wines aren't as nice as French wines. She leaves masked in bewilderment when she realises that her wine expertise can't help her manage the automatic doors, which stands nonplussed to her efforts to get it to open up. Much like a first date with a Tasmanian male, I idle in my car, listening to a radio station, but not really keen to return if I'm honest, not sure what to say.. My local store now has tables set outside it, newly minted wicker furniture outside one of the worlds least glamourous shops, set up just in case anyone has a deathwish to take their girlfriend on a date to the local store to dine al fresco, you know, if Beirut is all booked up. On the wall is an empty tin of baby food to put cigarettes into, the furniture balancing on uneven cracked concrete, while bogan mutant children circle outside on scooters and over inflated egos. The teenage girl with red hair of an oddly dyed shade and a dress of a colour which is surely a one off throws me not just with her psychedelic colour clash but also with a look which is either lustful or means she's about to mug me. If it's the latter, I don't know what she thinks she's going to get out of me - unless she's so desperate for a scouring pad, she's willing to mug for it. She doesn't seem the domestic type to be honest - no dish pan hands. I leave them to their standing and posing, as they huddle for warmth around the smouldering cigarette embers fading to nothing in the baby food tin. Eventually, the red headed girl fades to nothing in my rear view mirror, as I drive off in a bewildered trance, nip home to check my e-mails, and in the circumstances with the trivia of everyday life is made to feel meaningless, I can even make it through an ESPN ad without feeling sick at the smug tone, and the misguided abilities of the Australian cricket selectors glitters like ephemera in the background of my mind...

When I return, things are difficult. Time moves slowly and with difficultly, like Waiting For Godot with more vol-au-vents. Kids come in, grandkids, children who don't know what to do or who to blame for losing their Grandad. I pull my plastic bucket seat out of the way and move aside. The guy who died, I saw him, oh, three times a year if I was lucky? It doesn't mean it's not upsetting, but taking front and centre stage pounding the ground would just be over-reacting and grandstanding. Things thus unfold to me like quite a sombre play, if for no other reason than a life complicated and uneven always seems to be reduced in the end to three or four anecdotes, some of them unfinished, all of them suddenly poignant. My contribution would be the time he fell asleep when he was driving us home and nearly ploughed into a tr...and then I look over into the kitchen, where his son is. His son, a much better person than I am if the standard is being nice to people, is so utterly bereft of any movement, energy and is just encased in sadness, that it renders though incapable. He's standing next to the mans brother, and they shuffle from side to side, foot to foot, just staring blankly ahead, sometimes at the unpicked apricot tree, sometimes at the beer in the fridge that was his dads, now being drunk by strangers and well wishers, and sometimes just at the ground. No one can say anyhing, no one can do anything, and eventually, the only thing you can do is look away, maybe towards a mountain of my Mums mountainous pile of quickly crafted sandwiches, maybe start a conversation with an interloper about cricket, a specialist subject for me, maybe even wonder what the Grandkid is watching on TV...just anything, but don't intrude on that scene...

Maybe by doing that, I actually did help a little bit...

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...