Prestwick Airport, May, 2008

No one wants to be at Prestwick Airport - the only place in the UK Elvis ever visited fact fans - at this time of the morning. Ayrshires small regional compact fly zone is deserted, apart from the odd bleary eyed staff member winding up the shutters on their small business, bags of Revels and bottles of fancy water not yet illuminated by the lights of commerce, the phrase pure dead brilliant, the airport marketing phrase, scrawled on the walls in big purple inspiring motto motif, diagonal and screamingly ironic. I'm tucking into some toast and reading a story about some celebrity or some single mother being judged in a glaringly lurid tabloid, and pushing the beans away from the toast like I was in charge of a detention centre and had to make tough inter family decisions. I'm here because in the hazy fog of mutual admiration the night before, I accepted a lift from a well wisher - she has spent most of the morning telling me about a glittering career in Scottish soap operas. Nice person, awful chatty, a little too into Bloc Party, but she's got me here nice and early, and there's a long time to kill. Rain spills down the glass door, and the world ceases to exist beyond my plate and a coffee pouring woman from lower Beith (I can pick the accent) with a blonde bob and the sense of perfect complacency that comes 5ive minutes before someone gets fired. The coffee stings my throat as the tabloid headlines grow more and more lurid. I'd get up and explore, but there's nothing to explore, not even a customs officer to gently poke with a stupid question just for the thrill of it. Eventually, a monstrous skinhead with tattooed knuckles and a bright yellow jacket slowly begins driving up and down the shiny floor cleaning it for the day ahead, up and down, staring at me each time he nears, suspiciously eyeing my toast and thinking about giving me the finger. I clutch my budget airline ticket closer to me out of concern, and press my hand to my pained forehead. I've had an entire morning to rush around, to get in an imperfect shower, to listen for a car horn to signal it was time to leave, to listen to tales of minor Scottish actors and their foibles at the catering tables, but now, there is perfect silence, the only sound my imperfect exaggerated whimpering at the cramp in my leg, the moaning of the cleaner as he goes about his day, and staff settling in at the check out desk, bitching about parties that sound glamourous but which seem to die once Debbie turns up to steal everyones boyfriend. I'd listen more, since everyone knows Debbie really, but the coffee is really troubling my throat, and the cleaner seems to really be revving up the polishing engine noise to drown it all out - did I go to school with him? He seems monstrously familiar...

My eyes eventually clear, although my brain is still fighting against the logic of the carpet pattern and how much I now know about Barbara Rafferty. The airport mildly fills up with travellers burdened by the knowledge that by definition their budget journey involves a whole lot of budget treatment. A customs officer with corpse like funereal intensity is pounding a scanner off her palm, clearly desperate to overplay someone having a toenail clipper, her tightly plastered make up almost cracking in anticipated glee. Some of them are soaked, some of them are arguing, some of them are diving into a breakfast the early start has deprived them of. I feel self conscious that I'm taking up a table with nothing more than coffee refills, but there's nowhere else to go. A confused German backpacker and his girlfriend, obeying the international laws of couples in public by clinging to each other any time someone even remotely looks at them flirtaciously, are staring at the train schedule on the board, confused as to where exactly Troon is. As I go to leave the restaurant, a boy, bewilderingly stressed out of his mind knocks over a plastic MacDonalds style beaker of coke, and loudly swears. He presses both hands to his head, as if this is the final insult his life can cope with, the spilling of a caffeinated beverage onto glistening grey floor. His Dad stares at him with bitter disbelief at the public show his son is putting on, but also with some sympathy, as if he knows what terrible stress has elevated a minor spillage into something worthy of such a theatrical and frankly camp over-reaction. Poignancy and Prestwick don't go together though - I leave behind the acrid coffee and the social commentary, pressing on through customs, through a tedious strip search that removes my jacket from the danger list, past the woman who doesn't seem to have moved a lot but sure likes smacking the scanner off her palm like the more menancing bad cop. In the fog of my confusion, I haven't noticed a stiffly shirted customs man has asked me if I'm alright. His reasoning is my sunken eyes staring at the garish floor, and I haven't heard him request, until now, that I also take off my jumper. He eyes me suspiciously, but I realise at the same moment as he does that even if I were some kind of terrorist, the resources and back up on offer to him are so scarce that all he could really do is fill in some paperwork quite angrily. I smile a little smile of acknowledgement, trying to pretend that one man with skinny arms is all that protects me from the big bad, and take off my jumper, folding it neatly and watching it disappear into the ether of the scanner. The first thing I see when I clear the small understaffed customs bar is a row of hideously fabriced seats, and a family all wearing cowboy hats. I slide past them, shooting them a smile of cultural superiority, and they return it in kind as they judge my choice of reading material. I stand by it though, I really think William Shatner has a lot of interesting things to say, but when you are in a cultural stand off of cowboy hats vs Shatner at this time of the morning, it's best to just let it go, like so many dimmed ambitions and dreams that the barmaid once held, her face falling with every beer poured, her eyes looking for meaning amidst the poker machines and people flirting with her so cheaply. I'd sympathise, but I have an Internet machine to race a Japanese girl to...

In a way then, getting onto the Internet at Prestwick seems strange - the amenities are so basic, it's strange the way something as fandangled as the Internet sits across from a skill tester and a Street Fighter arcade game, which only achingly ironic students seem to crowd around. A horrible rap tune pipes in as people stir in and out of the saloon style bar with beer that must taste sweet at this time of the morning, since it numbs the pain of the coffee. The Internet crackles and hums into life - if there's something quite sad and depressing about a frantic dash to get one of the two working computers, to push coins into the slot and work out the complicated coin to password system, then I don't want to be happy. Across the world, people in Australia are sending me e-mails, and a sports score flickers idly in the top corner of the screen, keypad typed numbers making me rise and fall with every update. The ironically detached students don't seem as ironically detached anymore, whooping it up in my ear as they begin to reconnect with a simpler gaming time. Someone is arguing over the cost of water in my other ear, while the Japanese girl paces up and down waiting for someone to get off the Internet, speaking in tongues into her headset, changing languages so effortlessly she'd be the height of maturity but for her Hello Kitty bag and desire to jump onto Yahoo and type sentences no longer than LOL. I'm sleepy, but I press on, as more and more people squeeze into the condensed space, shaking the rain from their coats, some of them angling to get into the queue since this airline has no assigned seats. Some of them, the younger ones, try and queue without looking like they are queueing, leaning against the barricade as if to ponder how that got there and gosh are we front of the queue. Segregation kicks in, the priority boarders smugly waving their tickets like currency, taking their time with their breakfast, sauntering through the crowds with no such herding concerns. The Japanese girl gives up on trying to stare me out, and wanders off the got a copy of the London Sun. I wonder if she can make out the true meaning of the word Phwoar, emblazoned on the front page in skywriting black type. I look at a large pink sign with white writing that says Grub is pure dead brilliant on it in big letters - the airport now acting as cultural stereotype. Some kids meanwhile are enlivening the gloom by pretending to be cars and narrating their movements like Murray Walker calling from Hockenheim in 1986. I admire them for their imagination, their conviction, and most of all for the way they enjoy just following old men around and calling them Volvos. Now that is funny. The students eventually disperse, leaving the old arcade game neglected in the corner. As they leave, one of them moans that Prestwick has gone down hill since they got rid of the Galaga game near the toilet. It's such an oddly specific point to pick with such a messed up place that I believe them, and find myself, against the odds, also wishing at this moment I could play Galaga, just for a moment...it's like ironic peer pressure...I have to shake it off...

As I type my weary woes idly into an e-mail box, hoping that I don't make too many spelling errors as I try and communicate some form of excitement that I'm going to London, a girl sits in the seat next to me, with a big smile and a hearty handshake. I don't entirely stir, but she's unstoppable. Her name is Pandora, she's a plumpish girl, mid 20s, multi coloured hair, tight black clothing, slightly regrettable tattoo on her shoulder, oddly patterned tights, lipstick faint and neat. Her chat is disarming, in a posh midlands hockey girl accent, but none of it has any real meaning, words and sentences that add up to something less filling than the average Prestwick snack pie. I'm not sure why she's decided to latch onto me and drape herself over the chair chest first - the chat isn't chatting up, since it's flat and atonal, at least to me - and mostly about her. Except for a weird interval where she asks me about my dreams and bats her eyelashes in a disturbing way. I haven't asked for any of this, but since ignoring her won't work, I try monosyllabic responses, but she's still talking loudly, still smiling, still plump, her stomach flab struggling against the fabric of her clothes when she breathes. It takes a moment, but I realise this is to try and get me off the Internet. I didn't realise these two computers were so fiercely contested, I had no idea of the emperor status the two mythical boxes had. She gives up on me and begins her clipped charm on the other Male, his jumper so nondescript it's his biggest personality trait, and he falls for it - I'm not sure, but I think he likes the booty, and I think he went to get her a soda. She winks at me as if now queen of the world, but I shrug, tired although appreciative of how much it takes to conjure up even a small victory at this time in the morning. The Japanese girl has seen a change of Internet ownership, and stares fiercely ahead, tapping her foot on the ground. I wrap up my disconnected thoughts, press send, and hurry, well not hurry, priority boarders represent y'all, but certainly make my way to the airport boarding bit thingy, at which point the Japanese girl positively leaps into my chair, taking advantage of my two pounds 43 left over credit like she had just adopted one of my children after years of conceptual struggle. I get on the plane, never knowing if Pandora got her soda, unsure whether Shatner > Cowboys, or the Japanese girl found what she was looking for on Google, or the finale to a million of these little stories - for I have passed through Prestwick purgatory, and am now on my way to London, let heaven commence...

Obviously, after a short, and quite Pure Dead Brilliant, safety demonstration...

The Lollers, the Dreamers, and T (Shirts)

Today in Big W, there was this man standing directly in front of the exact DVD I wanted to look at - this is not an uncommon occurrence, after all, I can sometimes wait up to 5ive minutes in that store waiting to read the latest cricket memoir while a bogan family in acid wash uniform stand attentively deciding whether Sally Robbins was misunderstood or not - but after a moment I realised he was, to hopefully not use too indelicate a phrase, proper mental. He was standing on one foot, his tongue in a perma Gene Simmons tribute, clutching a Peter Brock DVD like a lost child and staring directly into one of the flourescent lights like it was calling home, with not a single eye movement or flicker of consciousness registering across his countenance. He had the same look of distracted brain numbness and shock I had the day I found out Kirsty MacColl does all the significant singing on Tracey Ullmanns They Don't Know About Us (or was it when I found out Paul McCartney was in the film clip?). He had a 5ive day stubbly growth, monobrow, a Bobby Charlton like middle parting slash combover, and I realised that his day was going to be spent in that pose listening to the syncopated hand claps of Izzys new single, with Peter Brock close to his chest, camel coat and jeans doing just about enough work to avoid a nudity incident. When I walked back, he was still there, although he had rolled his tongue back in. It seemed a rather ace way to kill a day in fairness, certainly beat working. I mean, he might have spent the same 3hree worrying seconds me and this bloke with a beard had when we mutually thought for a moment fat sweaty girl had her guts spilling out of her shirt (it was just a T-shirt...I think) and gone into shock. Either way, he seemed richly contented, unlike me, who was extremely disturbed to have a rendition of Toms Diner on the IPOD interrupted by a girl crying in the gardening section. I didn't know what had happened, but she was clutching a length of hosepipe and had the same intense stare as the other guy, but was in tears in that way girls are when they are pretending they aren't crying and are sniffing endlessly. I pretend not to see her, not least of all because she looks like a pity leech, looking for someone to wrap around the legs of and never let go, until eventually even your own most dramatic problems won't compare to her breaking a nail. She only listens to sad, sad songs I suspect, and I don't even stop to see what her T-shirt does. It's a trap - anyone stopping to see exactly what is written in the gold sparkles on the pink T-shirt is going to find a garden hose wrapped around their legs, be dragged out the back, and given a serious talking to about the state of your relationship. Eventually, you'd never call her back, and she'd be round with your favourite sandwich and asking why you didn't love her anymore. Trust me, it's the look of every drunk mis-understood girl in a queue outside Syrup nightclub, the ones looking for the second stanza to their lifes poetry. Either that, or they just got dumped in the hardware section of Big W, with fat sweaty girl looking on - I think that might make me cry as well...

Interestingly, the guy clutching the Peter Brock DVD simply made me think of inertia - and not the quality or lack of of a care in the community system - my own. Naturally I started 2009 with big skywriting hopes that this would be the best year ever, someone would say it as a question once I said it and I would reply in that jaunty way people do in musicals and thus it would be a fact and not just a resolution. But a month has passed, and I'm still the same person - I learned the end of Teenwolf has a man exposing himself in a hilarious blooper, the second verse of the Cheers theme song and I've been sick twice and sunburned. Other than that, the month has passed by in a blur of ennui, cold medications, afternoon naps, episodes of The Simpsons and more afternoon naps. Part of this though is really my fault, I'm not impressed enough by things to go out and investigate the world. When I'm in London looking at, say, Big Ben, I'm inclined to go wow, that's it, cool, where as my Dad will be reading the plaques and trying to harass taxi drivers into giving him a potted history of the place and generally being impressed. I've called him on this - he got too excited by my cousins offer of Jaffa cakes when we were in London. I had just turned off my Gwenno solo songs on the IPOD, and he was in the living going, wow, Jaffa Cakes, what a day, could life be any better, this biscuit filler has really put the topping on what was already an amazing start, I mean, te...I had to tell him to stop, I have to break him down to my level eventually or he'll be on the Wii leaping about on his bad knee. Now that I'm over 30ty, I'm a lot more conscious of time than I used to be. When I was a teenager, entire seasons would go where I would listen to one CD, be lucky if I saw anyone, and would live on Doritos and mac and cheese. Now, I've got this whole thing going on where I freak out anytime something comes on from 1992 - I just have to mention it was so 17teen years ago. My best friend, she's never left Tasmania, not even for a day, and there's nothing that would make her go outside of this whetted isle, not even to go and see Jessica Mauboy (she'd hate that if she ever read it). I was angry with her via e-mail today, angry at her lack of worldwide curiousity, but then I've come home, put on a Celtic shirt and slumped in front of the television, and eaten a big tub of Sara Lee. Another day lost, another day wasted, another day when I should be out playing soccer for Kingborough or sorting my piles of DVD into things that are Teenwolf and things that aren't...but there's a replay of the Superbowl on, so maybe after that...

The thing is ultimately I'm quite happy with peace and quiet - there are times it mounts up into terrifying piles of inertia and I look at the calendar and suddenly I feel like I need to lose 30kgs, write a novel and run up a mountain in the space of 24 hours just to feel like the year has meaning. My friend, the one drifting away from us, once complained that being in a serious relationship with his girlfriend was awful because he couldn't play golf on the Wii anymore. I think everyone has their little moments of discontent, and I am sucker for regret, old men looking at photographs of lost loves painfully aware theres nothing they can do about, then putting the photo down amidst a fog of senility and trying to eat the pool cue - well that's what happened in the Burnie home a lot when we used to visit. Silly old fools we would think, for we were better and would make something of our lives, no munching on the tip of something covered in blue chalk for us, no sirree bob. I know in Penguin many years ago, we had a VFL footballer come and do a talk and just before he got on stage he said to his manager sotto voce but within earshot of nosey old me, in the weariest voice imaginable that his whole life was shit, before putting on his stage voice and becoming Mr Charisma. Since then I've never been sure who's happy and who isn't. I know the last time I was really unhappy, as opposed to say grief stricken or looking unhappy until my parents would shut up - and it kinds of puts things into perspective a little bit. When I was on holiday in Scotland in 1995 - the awful holiday, you know the one by now, endless snow (he didn't do Informer), family fights, everyone I knew had moved on, went to a NYE party without me, oh yeah, that one - I felt so isolated and alone in my little room upstairs next to the cupboard with all the vinyl in it that I very nearly rang a chatline advertised on TV. I was thankfully not drunk enough to convince myself Mindy from Morton in the pink nightie with the frilly collar (most people in Morton seem to me to look like Confessions of a Window Cleaner extras, and have way too much green eye shadow) was my saviour, but it was an idea in my head for a while - and it wouldn't even have been for 4.95 a minute fun involving asking her if Mr Wall was in. Instead, I channelled my frustration into some positive action, rather than running up a big phone bill. I got off my butt, I went downstairs, I rang the tourist info...oh wait, is that an episode of The Simpsons...ha, Ralph has a flute up his nose, maybe I'll sort this terrible holiday out tomorrow...

I've never been publically dumped that I can remember. My girlfriend dumped me in Primary 6ix for being weird, if that counts, but I've not had to break up with anyone in, say, the hardware section of a popular chain store. I imagine it would really change the way I saw a big bag of lawn fertiliser. I'm sure my girlfriend of the time after a particularly hard fought loss to Cripps (oh how we hated Cripps, the team name of Cripps Master Bakers was certainly turned into innuendo at our house) told me to get lost in front of everyone, but she had ATARI, I wasn't going anywhere. As I walk out the shop I can still hear Snuffleuphagus in the hardware section trying to breathe, a kindly staff member with more pens than brain cells tentatively offering assistance. My chesty cough nearly drags me involuntarily into their little world, but I get away with it and avoid her gaze and move on. Outside, a Dad with a leather jacket and a wispy beard that Creedence would sneer at is telling his kids to walk like him. That's oddly specific parenting I think, not with him or near him or where he's going, but like him - this cracks me up, not just because it's obviously a mistake, but because he was a distinct limp. At the back of this ragtag Bogan Bunch, a sitcom waiting to happen, is a small child not interested in affecting an injury to his upper thigh just to join in. He's in a dream, not listening, and not a bad dream like the tongue loller, but a good dream. He's staring transfixed at the world around him, eyes bright and bouncy, T-shirt optimistic, stride pattern galloping, smile genuine. I'm impressed by the fact that at his age, Rosny shopping mall seems like a bloody good place to just have a wander in. His Dad, naturally a keen man in tune with his kids feelings, is yelling at him for not keeping up, bless, but the kid could care less how much he's copping it, such in the amazement he has that, gasp, the girl in Payless shoes had pink hair yesterday and now has black hair! Fantastic! There is no debate about the fabric of time passing for him, no need to dial bored housewives who may vary from photographic evidence, no heartbreak, no despair, and no need to clutch a DVD and invite passers by to guess at your condition. There is only a handful of Skittles, a dreamers smile, and no idea that one day, if stereotypes are right, Dad will beat all that optimism out of him as soon as the footy is over...

I would summate more, but Barca TV is on, that should take care of February...

Stomach churning burgers, stomach churning bullying, and Regurgitator what was all that about

So my Dad isn't very happy with me at the moment - we were talking this morning about genealogy because my Mum is very into finding out stuff about the crazy Scottish relatives from yore who worked building ships or selling fruit or showing ankle based porn in dingy Glaswegian movie theatres. Dads family is intriguingly mental, and off hand, as a reasoning for this kind of madness I mentioned maybe at some point in his family history someone married a cat, and he's taken offense to this. Still, this is a family with a sister who claimed that her husbands brother was a doctor when in fact he was a clippie on a Glaswegian tram - a learned profession I'm sure, but punching a hole on a ticket requires less effort than doing it in my thorax - as was discovered when he had to make up a story on the run to one of Mums friends one day about part time work and a decline in the number of sick and infirm in Easterhouse being on the decline. Damn polio being cured, it knocked his stocks down. Mum and Dad were round, interrupting a particularly intense mid morning game of were Regurgitator any good or not, and some of my most wonderful self pity. I think they were just making sure I was going to work to be honest. They have this huge A Current Affair driven fear I might get sacked along with the rest of my generation and were laying quite a heavy trip on me in return for some flippant observational conversation about the decline of RC Cola. That's why I actively encouraged the discussion on Dads crazy family, just so I didn't feel imperilled or like I needed to pick up my hula hoop skills and move onto the professional circuit just to keep my house, and just to lift my morbid spirit. Like priests who used to visit peoples homes just to see a bit of Charlies Angels, Mum and Dad used to visit for these chats I suspect to catch a bit of AUSTAR but they have their own box now, so at least their motives are pure and nagging and nosey based, the way it should be. I've got this friend who lives in his own island within his own house, a basement flat, and he's not much younger than me, and he only talks to his parents like a flatmate would to a landlord. He's got Bananaphone as his ring tone, and he makes sure his punk music is on really loud all day when he's lying in the basement staring out the window, just as a big sign that no one should disturb him, least of all me. I used to wonder what he made of the world and the circumstances by which he spent every weekend grunting at his parents then essentially sleeping for two days, but he seems contented. My parents at least give me a sense of where I've come from, even if that is just telling me how crap people from Scotland who play sport are or just that they discovered Billy Connolly at about the same time they discovered The Zombies. If we hadn't all moved to Australia together, maybe I'd have adapted by now, and become fully Australian, I could understand why everyone goes mad about The Castle (I so don't get it, but you guys wouldn't get Absolutely where as I found Stoneybridges bid for the Olympics so amazing...ha, Maigret has a bicycle - class). And of course, they remind me, as Scottish parents do, of past failures. A 21 k an hour shot at the speed gun soccer tester at Hampden when my shoe fell off? Thanks Dad. Without them, I'd have no link to my past. I could make up my own past, one sexy and exciting with loads of chicks and drugs and less time being offered drugs by school kids in car parks...but I'm stuck with who I am, and 2wo permanent reminders. I cant even make anything up on here, the moral guilt would weigh on me far too much...

The bus stop where I used to get the bus to secondary school in Scotland - as you would obviously expect, if I was waiting at a bus stop for a train, that'd be a bit mental - was no place for the faint hearted. Opinions were a dangerous currency, a relatively simple expression of appreciation for the comedy stylings of Paramount City or a fondess for Jesus Jones could be a critical mis-step if the wrong people didn't like it or them. My opinions on Amy Grant were kept very much under wraps. We would stand quietly in snow, intermittent sunshine and what we hoped was rain, plastic bags billowing around our feet, the occasional suspiciously unsupervised child bouncing on the nearby swing, monobrow swinging in fierce moral judgement. The bus, on which, scandalous gossipy barrier crossing or hiding from bullies aside boys sat downstairs and girls sat upstairs, was an old converted tour bus, not for a band or anything, that would have been great, but for old dears to bus around places like Troon with their cameras learning about the fascinating local history of wee Willie MacPhee. Naturally as younger students, we had heard terrible stories about the bus pecking order, that we would be dragged up the back and have our pants removed by larger kids who were closer to the dole queue (this was early 90s Scotland, we still had poll tax and Thatcher and dem bastid English as convenient excuses to fail in life) than us. One had a massive pair of glasses and looked like someone the casting crew of Deliverance would reject for being a bit mental sat up the back, a big walloper in a multi coloured jumper with mad glasses and a conversely unthreatening squeaky teen voice, but just on reputation, he was pretty frightening. My next door neighbour, wary of these opinions, and not realising the threats were all implied and not backed up, got freaked and spent every day on the bus up the front standing next to the bus driver for protection, jumping up and down excitedly and asking the bus driver to go faster like a pure maddie (that's Scottish code for like someone a bit insane, not the missing child). He ended up quite picked on for this, some people threw straws at him in a hilarious implication that he was sucking up the bus drivers arse (I thought it was a Stevie Nicks reference, but that's libellous) and once someone, it would have been amusing if it was the multicoloured hypnomutant, tried to drag him physically away from the bus drivers side. As he was dragged away, against his will, he hit his head on the corner of one of the poles connecting the top of the bus to the bottom, and basically was knocked out. As the dragger distanced himself from the fray (not the band), someone up the back made some sort of MASH reference, like someone call Hawkeye, and was duly rounded on for his out of date reference, while my neighbour, by now ignored by the masses picking on the Klinger fan, stumbled around on the sparkly bus floor among the gum and the discarded tickets totally unaware of what was happening. Needless to say, ten seconds later, even with heavy concussion, he picked himself up, surveyed the situation of rampant taunting, and went straight back to talking to the bus driver as if nothing had happened. As a wise man would say, you have to admire his spirit...

My one and only problem on the bus - tedious minor bullying, once being driven past our stop by a Rangers supporter as a punishment for singing Celtic songs and dumped in Dreghorn, and once being thrown off for standing up in the bag rack aside - was a less than Frazier-Ali battle with a kid who sat in front of me called James. James was a nice enough kid - nice in that way were everyone thinks you are gay. All I can remember about him was that after a big wrestling show on Sky Sports, he would come into school with who won and who lost neatly written in his school book so he could remember who to talk about. He was about one year older than me, but he looked like someone in his 20s, he carried himself in that way, and I kind of think he was one of those people who ended up teaching drama. And he always wore a green jacket, even in summer. Like I say, really nice guy. One day he got into an argument with my best friend - lets say it was about wrestling - and they were about to start a quite girly slap fight. My best friend was a fellow doomed intellectual with far more personality and confidence than me, who my auntie just referred to as that wee fat smug hing. I didn't mean to get involved as we hurtled homeward through several poverty burdened Ayrshire towns, but I must have done something, maybe raised a hand or had a pop at Hulk Hogan or said green jackets were so 1988 - something happened. In what was surely the girliest move of the early 90s outside of Big Fun, he grabbed my finger, and my jabbing finger at that, and bent it backwards. I'd say he bent it like Beckham, but it was 1991, so I guess he bent it like, er, Dziekanowski? Taken aback by this sub nipple cripple disarming of my opinion, I slumped into my not sure what fabric it was seat, because it really did hurt, clutching my finger like an errant shoplifter in the Arabian justice system. To the surprise of anyone though, especially those who had expected my meek reaction would give them plenty of time to make a moral judgement, I got up swinging, landing punches so weak you could serve them at a Grade 8 social and giggle at how rebellious you were, but looking mighty impressive as I did. Especially because one connected. One out of 12eve isn't bad. Given I had a reputation as a Bananarama fan not a fighter, everyone was stunned, and had I followed it up with a knockout blow, I would have been marked as someone to mess with, but in the maelstrom of confusion, I let humanity settle in - or was I just shagged out, I can't remember - and when I looked, the primary look on James face wasn't hurt (my left cross has never recovered from such a slight) but confusion and dismay...

I think he spent about 3hree weeks getting slagged off for me beating him up, if landing one punch while he slap fended counts as a smackdown, until my lustre and moment faded when there was a cheating scandal in the girls card school and everyone had to take a side as to whethere 3hree Kings beat 2 Queens and 2 Jacks or something like that. I think proving my lack of killer instinct, I ended up apologizing to him, and he looked a bit wary, and since he never apologized for dipping into the pool of Grade 2wo tricks when he was on the attack, we never got back to the matey lets all talk about wrestling footing we were previously on. Bullying was never very me - I might not like a lot of people, but I can't bring myself to pick on them physically. Aw mooth and nae shell suit I am. When we did the tour of the Celtic Football Club stadium, Celtic Park, Dad and I wandering around through a big load of trophies and vaguely Catholic propaganda with, strangely, 2wo Port Adelaide fans. It was a belter of a day, pure dead brilliant as it says at Prestwick Airport. Two carers had brought along a Rainman like figure called Eddie. Eddie was a shuffing, shambling man who would loudly interject the tour guide not with references to his excellent driving but with the similarly repetitive drone that he wanted a cigarette. No matter what they showed Eddie, European trophies, old soccer jumpers, seats in the upper deck, it just wasn't as impressive to him as a Benson and Hedges cigarette next to a Bic lighter. Like the singing of Connie Talbot, what was cute at first rapidly became annoying after the 5ifth interruption, and his carers had to take him away. Eventually the tour ended with the exchanging of more vaguely Catholic propaganda, and Dad wandered off to get a dangerously undercooked hot dog from the British fat (it's different to American fat) lady in the van. As I looked around to try and hide from the Port Adelaide fans, I glanced over to a car to where, and this is speculative, it appeared as though one of the carers had just struck Eddie upside the head, and nobody had said oompala. Without absolute proof other than Eddie was holding his head and everyone staring like something major had just happened, I couldn't go and intervene, but his face, for whatever reason, reminded me of the look just after I'd hit James. Stunned bewilderment rather than pain, confusion, naivety and just a hint of embarrassment. I could have read this all wrong, it was hot, I was still recovering from the British fat lady calling me darling, Eddie might have been still looking for a cigarette, but he definitely looked upset. I appreciate it's why I can't be a bully - especially to the mentally infirm - the moral guilt gets to my stomach like an unwrapped Parkhead burger. They drove off in their little van, Eddie in the back, sadly not driving away given I suspect he's an excellent driver, to god knows where, leaving me to be tapped on the shoulder by my Dad who had a surprise for me - another hamburger...oh, terrific...

Naturally, given our relationship, I didn't speak to Dad about this, he was too busy saying I was a twat in that special way...at least no one in my family married a cat..oh, no, wait...

Stress lessened by cordial, increased by sunburn, lessened by MGMT

I don't think it's an oversight to say a bottle of slightly mutated mango cordial is saving my life right now. It's proving an outlet at work when I feel lousy, due to my illness obviously, not due to emotional problems because sandwich white female hasn't been at work the last few days and I've had to eat, god help me, sausage rolls with extra burnt bits, an excuse to go out the back and say I need a cordial break. I'm far from superstitious, but I know this isn't the first time I've relied on an inanimate object to get me through tough times - although cordial isn't an inanimate object, since it's a liquid, but shut up, you don't know me, throw my hands up in blatant posturing etc - as my tonsil surgery when I was 5ive was entirely brightened up by having a Ju Jitsu Heman figure purchased for me to stop my whinging. His karate chopping hand and amusingly sculpted beard certainly kept me sane when the doctor was going to drain my ears in a hilarious operational mix up that's for sure. When Dad, having driven for 2wo hours after work to see me politely asked how I felt I'm rumoured to have pulled a face and screamed how do you think I feel, but I suspect that's my Dads mythology kicking in. After all, he loves a good moan, and if he's sick, all the better. He even has a favourite brand of grape for you to bring him. My friend, the one with the husband who uses her credit card to buy fat girl porn, is sending me e-mails making that my support of Britney Spears through the dark times is some sort of tremendously cool statement of individuality I should be proud of. Well, buying fat girl porn on a credit card is a statement of individuality. I hadn't thought about it - I certainly don't feel like any kind of radical free thinker, especially given my lunch routine is now so predictable a girl in a hat jumps out from the shadows to provide my daily rations like Jesus without the fish. Certainly dizzy from the heat, reliant on cordial to prop me up and in a job that requires the mental capacity of a promotions model to do, I can hardly claim to be charting my own course, but it's nice people think of me in that way from time to time. Certainly, in times of stress, simple thinking and taking a moment to enjoy the simple things in life like an appreciative if flawed e-mail or a glass of sparkling cordial can just about get me through the day as long as I don't end up sounding like some kind of hippy with a tattoo of the sun on my foot.

When I was 8eight, I got badly sunburned during an athletics carnival. I was in the genetically superior yellow house, whipped into a Soviet style frenzy of patriotism and devotion to my colour through the power of one coloured skivvy being handed out from a pile by a surly janitor at random as opposed to another coloured skivvy. We would sit on the hill all day and cheer nominally for our house, at least in theory, because after an hour it felt like it a grass based internment camp, although at least our interest lasted an hour, it was 10en minutes in secondary school before I was working the moves on the more lithe javelin throwers and then going to the shops to buy a chocolate milk. The fact I couldn't move and was essentially was engrossed in egg and spoon warfare meant that one of my rare salad days in athletics - alas I soon discovered cynicism and cake - when I could run properly without looking like a benny ended in skin reddening horror. Even though I won my race, and would later run in front of the Queen (the real one, not our camp PE teacher) that wasn't what everyone remembered about me from that day. I certainly think that the trauma of being turned into a lobster stymied my thoughts of athletic glory, as the visual representation of the phrase if you can't stand the heat get out of the internment camp marked off by ropes and strict teachers wanting to now where you are going. When I went home that night, my Mum immediately plunged me into a cold bath and said nothing, just shaking her head and saving her lectures on wearing a hat for another day. My girlfriend at the time, Sarah, my girlfriend in that you like pencil cases me too lets get married kind of way, wasn't so terribly stoic in the face of my burnt visage. She took one look at me and asked in a manner which bespoke over theatrical text speak if I was going to die. It probably seems a more relevant question now in the skin cancer era, all we knew back then was those birds telling us to slip slop slap sure could hold a tune. Although she was ahead of her time, I felt our relationship never really recovered from a superficial moment. If she couldn't love me in times of crisis when I had a big red bawface, then all the mutual pencil case appreciation in the world couldn't dig us out of the hole. Considering that in the space of roughly a week I had my first memorable experience with genuine pain, not to mention an outright question about my own mortality, been thrown physically into an ice bath and ended up with my first heartbreak (pretty apathetic as it was - we just stopped meeting in the pipe at recess), it was a pretty effective mental lesson that I should cover up in the sun lest bad things happen. Of course, it never sunk in, and to this day I still lumber home, burned to bits, my Mum still lectures me, and I'm still plunging into ice baths...form an orderly queue ladies...

Interestingly, this was my first brush with honest to goodness adult stress. Sure, I hadn't managed to find an egg on an Easter egg hunt, there was that whole debacle when Wide World Of Sports wasn't on one week because some junk called Live Aid was on, and I had probably thrown a hissy fit or two about football cards, but being plunged into singles life and being something of a playground outcast on account of my giant red face was a stressful week - I mean, even Peter Gilligans recap of local football getting the axe for the lead singer of Ultravox wouldn't compare. It was worse than comedy tennis. I couldn't help but feel it was my fault somehow. If only I had stayed pristine and faintly tanned, I'd still be in the pencil case relationship. I had a friend called Nick - somewhere in Risdon now if lore and reputation held up - who was a bit of a scammer, a wheeler dealer. He also told it like it was - and if you needed a man to parody a popular song with a reference to bogeys or snot, he was your go to guy, a Weird Al of the nose and nose related products. He was firm though as we queued for Bubble O Bills in the assembly hall that my social standing was fading and by the way what did I think of his new song, Snot In The First Degree? Amusing as the song parody was, I still wasn't convinced that simply being red made me the social equivalent of comedy tennis, but I took it on board. I shone as hard as I possibly could at Footy Maths - cop that Pilkington - and I tried to impress new ladies with some impressively hard tugs of their pigtails, but I still felt a frost, which while cooling towards my sunburn did little to warm my ill begotten socially adrift heart. As it happened, a girl who's name is lost to history, a Lauren or a Karen or some generic mid 80s Burnie name, fell over and showed most of the playground her knickers, and eventually an entire generation of people would say I was there on the fateful day as she stumbled for loose change and dignity on a bare patch of neatly mowed grass. As my woe passed and she became the story of the day, I was left realising that I didn't understand the game, couldn't play the game, and tried to affect an air that since I didn't understand social rules or playground lore, I would be above them. I wish I had stuck to that, but of course, for the rest of my school days I was always one bout of sunburn away from stress and nervousness...heh, Snot in the First Degree, that's killer material, the inmates must love him...

The stressful day continues - I have to have a nanna nap just to take the pain from my eyes, which I think was a Smiths B Side in the 80s. The trendy radio DJs are blethering empty sentences about tennis, while when I drive home a fight nearly breaks out when a motorbike rides in the same lane as a car, and they exchange jabbing fingers through the window until the motorbike rider has a Harley Davidson cliche seminar to attend and wheels away with his beard fluttering in the breeze. If I lived at home still, Dad would have made me a tasty cup of tea and Mum would have asked an abundance of gently probing but ultimately annoying questions until I could steer the conversation towards great comedy moments. Alas, I come home to an empty house, but there are outlets. Not least of which, the opportunity to make a delicious lime spider, rock in the hammock listening to now apparently acceptable music, the chance to yell at a football manager who doesn't know what a clown I think he is, and shoo a dog out of my front yard with comedy one sided intensity. That is, I'm intense, the dog couldn't give a shit, which is good for my lawn I guess. Most of all though, an advert comes on television - a radio station promo which flashes up the names of three allegedly trendy bands and then the station logo, as some sort of socially acceptable look at us we can name the same 3hree bands as everyone else banner hung over the rafters. Which is how I find myself holding a 1/2 drunk lime spider, doped up on Codril and whatever the hell that blue pill was in the basket (no, it wasn't that one) in my cupboard, screaming at the TV obscenities about MGMT, a band who's noodling I find inoffensive and meh at most stages, but for some reason, and it is my theories wars start because a dictator didn't have his juice in the morning, it has inspired a solitary hulk smash rampage against the machine that had it been recorded would have amused all and sundry with it's over use of the word noodlings (it's been twice in this blog post and it's amused me). For some reason though, it's a cathartic yelling, and I feel immediately better and am able to get some rest. My Mum, if she was here, apart from calling me a twat, would call me on a strange character trait - she always thinks any time I'm angry, it's an act, and soon I'll just get over whats bothering me and carry on with my day. She never really believed my huffs, even after a stint at acting class. Naturally, this comes into my head as I stand in my living room puffed but happy, having unloaded both barrels on an inoffensive advert. Is that all it takes for me to get over stress? A good yell and a lime drink? I'm quite happy if that's the case, I'm quite pleased with myself...

I'm just glad it wasn't the ESPN ad and a mention of Beyonce...I don't want to test the theory to it's outer limits...

The Codril Files (tales of self and only self)

My newsagent where I work is a very interesting man. He has slicked back hair, a weirdly trimmed little pirate moustache and is perpetually on the look out for naughty kids reading his magazines. He puts signs up to discourage the handling of the merchandise, backed up with intense and moody glances in the direction of anyone even looking at Tractor monthly without the skillz to pay the billz, and when his wife, a miserable looking woman who wears an 80s style tracksuit even on 40ty degree days, is in the shop staring blankly into the distance, the place for some reason fills up with naughty kids like it's recess. What's interesting about him though is his niceties are entirely based around how much money you spend in his store. Having spent a moment reading my paper and seeing how many discreet ways they could describe a female tennis player as fat without saying it - sturdy seems to get a work out - he goes to engage in basic social chat until he realises I've bought an import magazine at an expensive price at which point we're brothers in arms, and he's asking about my long weekend. Because I'm sick - a cold on top of hay fever on top of natural male pity - these minor annoyances pile up on me today. Not just the overfriendliness of the businessman who can put a 20enty in his till, but a girl at a different bakers who corrects what I call a ham and cheese square, holding her hand up and calling them a Danish with a self correcting tip of the hat. I should walk away, but every step today hurts, lacerated with the feeling that no one is suffering like I am, the problems of the world paling into comparison with mildly tingling sinuses. So meekly, I hold my own hands up and say, oh yeah, a Danish, silly me. How could I not know my pastries? And this is all it takes - after all, I had started the year with a feeling of maturation, a self reliance and assurance, dare I say, a new resolution. And all it's taken to unravel it today, to turn me into the petulant nervy kid who wouldn't look out of place on the Wiggles car in the centre is a cold and a dismissive going nowhere in her life baker. So caught up am I in lifes tiny quarrels, I nearly hip and shoulder a parent with a teething child on her shoulder who's gotten too close to me in a searching examination of the apple strudels. As I apologize, the kid shoots me a look - and far be it for me to assign emotions to small children - which seems to be the kind of look that I imagine one wounded soldier shoots another wounded soldier in a war hospital. The kind of look that says, I know your face is indicating you have troubles, but buddy, let me tell you, unless you are teething, you don't know that half of it. Either that or the kid had gas. I was loaded up on Codral, for all I know I was trying to order a jam donut...

A long time ago, maybe 1994, like I say though a long time ago - after all 2009 is to 1994 as 94 was to 1979 - I was loaded with self pity, and worse, self absorption, the kind of teenager who blamed a failure to do maths homework on some anti me cosmic plan rather than, you know, the fact that I didn't lift it out of my sparkly Adidas bag and do it. In fact, Dad had a hernia that year, and I bemoaned having to go to hospital with him - although our relationship wasn't exactly a sparkling Adidas grab bag of delights that year anyway. Still, he deserved better than his only son and heir, having established that he wasn't going to die, going down two floors of Burnie hospital to watch golf with a nurse just because there was nothing else to say. The nurse, an Alisa Kleybanova lookalike in an ill fitting skirt called Cheryl with huge beefy arms bulging in her uniform, was probably assigned to do some counselling in these situations, to seek out the perpetually bewildered and talk to them in case they were nervous or upset - and at a distance, I did look concerned and as someone who needed a pep talk but none of that had to do with the patient, more my divorce from my AMIGA - but I don't think she truly believed in her spiel. In fact, I believe I ended up counselling her, for she seemed to not believe in her vocation, that what she said would make any kind of difference. Her eyes were deeply troubled, the kind of eyes you see on an aging stripper which suggest that life has an ultimate futility to it, and I believe at the end of our talk she disappeared into a cancer ward with a little bit of reluctance, and it didn't seem like good news. Of course, I wasn't listening, after all I was the only one with problems wasn't I, so I don't think I did her any good. About as supportive as I got with anyone during that whole period was making some kind of joke akin to my Dad was being hauled off the cruxification as we carried him down the corridor to his bed, his arms around Mum and Is shoulders. We laughed so much he nearly split his stitches, a very Scottish form of re-assurance. Of course, it was a rare joyless moment in an otherwise mirthless year - I mean, I know it was a joyless year, I was watching golf, how low can you sink? - and in the end was almost had a massive fist fight based entirely on my ownership of a Sports Illustrated Swimsuit issue and using it as evidence of an unfocused morally decaying and you didn't stick to picking up your bricks mind. It seemed as good a way as any I suppose for him to try and get through to me, picking up a possession at random and using it as some sort of metaphorical and emotional weapon. And all I could do in my tiny room that afternoon, as we stood cheek to jowl exchanging opinions on a newly varnished floor, was hysterically, manically laugh. If I had stitches, they would have well and truly burst and there wasn't a sacreligious joke in earshot. It was mostly because had he just reached to the left instead of the right - zigged instead of zagged - he'd have picked up and been waving a Garfield compendium and using it as reasoning as to why I was a bad son. I'm not sure he would have had the empirical evidence to back this up, although there were times I didn't eat all my Lasagne, and I know I didn't like Mondays...

I've got a friend who recently picked up on Facebook. Either that, or she just posted a lot of updates about it, and her concern that a stranger was wandering around her kitchen in the morning picking at her muesli (not a euphemism). My Mum - when she isn't referencing Myface as a social networking tool - calls the Internet a load of liars all talking to each other, so this is mere conjecture that she actually did, and certainly I have no issue with people picking up. I'm glad I haven't picked up in such a blatant Syrup way though since I got this house, mostly because I suspect the ardour that would last in the back of a taxi may be cooled by my giant Britney poster that plays a tune when you push a button. I also don't much fancy that sense of awkwardness the next morning, the oh you still here North West Coast charm that we weave so well. I got into a big debate about how strange it is that you can now broadcast such concerns on the Internet for a worldwide audience. Of course, I sat quietly, since I had abandoned Myface a long time ago simply because of a horrible picture, and also because I didn't want to be all, hey, I've got a blog, I'm quite 2004! I know there was a girl at school called Jennifer, the one who tried to save me, who in her attempts to save everyone would leave no story untold, with an especially strident tale of a hobo who turned up to their door, and how her family had let him in, dusted him off and let him start his life all over again. We largely suspected this was nonsense, especially when the story began getting more and more elaborate, until it was a leper and a serial killer that she had saved and not the original homeless man with a scruffy beard and a pocket full of miracles. The story obviously had nothing to do with the littlest leper, and everything to do with how wonderful she was, just as posting coy I picked up what do I do posts on Myface is telling people you got some without the need for explanation. I know in my experience, there aren't many people who genuinely keep themselves to themselves, their world is theirs to tell everyone about, unique and exciting entirely to them. I know that when I next see the girl who picked up on Myface, there will be an awkward and meaningless conversation until I ask her about it. It's what she wants, the chance to espouse all about it, the chance to be the most important person in the pub. All I will have in response is some tedious work stories and a recap of the evenings TV. Maybe I should take in a hobo, that would ensure all eyes, very much, on me...

At 3am, I'm up and marching down my hall, embitterred that I can't get to sleep. On television a perky American is marching up and down on a treadmill, as full of life as I am of cold and pain. When I check my e-mail - to make sure that I don't hurt anymore through the power of active movement and to drown out, hopefully, the drums pounding in my head (and they are real drums, there's a party next door). The world continues to move on. Dads sister for instance, is missing. This isn't unique for Dads family, they don't talk to each other after all, but we haven't heard from her for about 3hree years, when she ran off with Rangers reserve goalkeeper. She goes to nightclubs at 50ty and still has no sense of maturity, partying and picking up, which is fair enough. Out of boredom, I try and find her on Google, but can't, only finding that my old school in Kilwinning has been knocked down. I don't take it personally. I just wonder where all the drug dealers went. When I went to school there, there weren't many moments where I was alone, as it was always overcrowded and strangers could more or less walk through the canteen as they pleased. One of the few times I was on my own, I was sitting eating gruel through a straw, and a man I didn't recognise holding a large plank of wood asked me where Chris was. Maths I said, for such occurences, grudge wielding wood holders looking to inflict damage on passers by. When I look at the website, dedicated to remembering the school, they make it sound like a wonderland, a magical palace of learning. Of course, the website has nothing to do with the school, it's teachers broadcasting to the world how wonderful they are for making the website and for teaching their with such wonderful attitudes. They give themselves touching little quotes about how wonderful they are, and in the end, I switch the computer off. They have their own little world to construct and I have mine. Mines mostly involves at this point in time lying stock still on the carpet, complaining and whinging, waiting for the pills to kick in, feeling like the last person on earth, and fully aware that all of my senses are dimmed, including my ability to come up with a cogent sentence or two...

At least I didn't buy a treadmill though, I wasn't that bad...

The dumb shall inherit the beer pump (Dave Sears Vocal On Time Mix)

My friend sits quietly on his oak panelled stool, while I nurse my drink and a strangely passionate three drink grudge against the Murdoch newspaper that I didn't have before I started the process of inebriation. I'm not sure what the sport is flickering on the television in the corner, but there is an intense close up of someone almost in tears at the way the sport is going, a miserable figure attaching her lifes worth to men in shorts and athletic apparel going through the motions. Our barmaid is hairdresser pretty. She has a blonde fringe interfering with her vision, and white nails that aggressively long and pointy. I suspect if I said that they were white she would correct me and tell me they were a certain and particular shade with a fancy name and make white sound like the simplistic naive answer you would expect from a non nail expert. My friend out of unrequited casual afternoon lust begins a conversation with her, and she begins sketching out an unprompted monologue about passing time until the end of the year when she go to beauty school. There's no sparkle in her eyes though, no life, no intelligence to the conversation, it seems to come from a teleprompter - either this is rehearsed fend off patter, as friendly as possible without personal engagement or she's not that bright. I get distracted trying to find a light in her eyes, I'm sure that I myself look a bit dumb, I've already been somehow conned into entering a surfboard competition entirely based on a sales pitch and everything looking more amazing after a few drinks without pondering exactly why I would possibly want a surfboard. She swishes off with our glasses in hand, and my friend, a think from the hips man, is impressed. I can't say I agree, although it is a judgement call - there's every possibility that she could return acerbic comments towards me, if she listened in to what I'm talking about, jock sports, the decline of print journalism which makes me sound like someone who writes in green pen to newspapers, and long winded ideas for going to America with a knapsack on my back. However, I suspect things are a lot more prosaic. She's simply too dumb to be upset by things, and I've devoted any kind of vague intellectualism I have and turned it inwards on myself, restlessly analysing decisions. Even today, I'm upset at something I said when I was drunk, and castigated myself for it. My nails, for what it is worth, are chewed and not the greatest, but I wouldn't mind somedays swapping, say, a knowledge of literature for a day of happiness entirely based on my nails or hair being perfect...when I go to leave, she's cleaning a glass with a repetitive casual attitude, washing it over and over again, staring straight ahead, not even blinking. I wonder if it hides a wistful attitude, a melancholy, something, but as a character study, it's flawed, because I'm drunk, she's in a world of impenetrable self focus, and there's a kebab to chew on somewhere down the line...given that I'm amount to take a risk on a 1/2 cooked kebab at this time of night suggest our intellectual disparity is, sadly, not as wide as this musing would suggest...

I remember when I was little I was considered something of a child prodigy, not a firestarter (stop doing that joke) but someone so adept of the 9ine times table that it appeared quite scary to lesser mortals. Before all the self consciousness, hormones and poor choices of jackets came in, I was quite the hip young thing around Penguin, a hot prospect heading to NASA, or at least a highly paid office job managing disinterested uni drop outs. Interesting, this has come up with my friend when he wasn't talking to hairdresser pretty. He's trying to motivate a 40ty year old public service worker who like a tempremental actor needs to know what his motivation is before he fills in a form. I used to sit in the library reading 2wo books over and over again, the first a Betsy Byars book about aliens and chocolate or some such nonsense, and the second a cricket book with a particularly vivid and articulate passage about a big riot in the West Indies, wonderfully written imagery on every page about crazy people with stumps attacking the police. I thought this was amazing and I used to show it to people and try and point it out as evidence of a much broader world than we were used to in our condensed world of catch and kiss and wooden forts, but most children at our school would return serve with evidence that they went to Devonport to see a market on the weekend as proof of ambitious and restless yearning within their own souls and an understanding of the world. They didn't understand my point. In fairness, this is a one dimenisional sketched out pattern of those days. I would no doubt have been a restless 6ix year old pining for a deeper meaning to life, and then put my jacket on back to front and inside out so when I put the hood up it went over my face. I was an expert on the complexities of the BBC Micro who couldn't tie his shoelaces. My brains were clearly all in my head. My Dads sister, a relentlessly strange woman who now has a locked up living room, tried to push her children to my intellectual level, which was even stranger. When I said I liked something, like a band, she was ask her kids if they liked them, the implication being only their opinions had validity. In moments of quite reflection or when Mum digs out those undeletable VHS tapes from my childhood I cringe and call myself a weird kid, but the world around me was stranger still. There was a woman in the milk bar who would always buy three jam donuts and a chocolate milk, never anything else, always in some kind of weird meshy silver jumper and who was always in a massive rush to get them. I was fascinated by her, but no one else seemed to be, everyone else just let her get her food and get out. When I told my friends about her, they would shrug and play marbles. There was evidence of a wider world mounting up for me, but before then, just one quick game of marbles, just before recess, to try and win that shiny glass one, I'm sure, would not be a sign of intellectual complacency...

When I moved to Scotland, the stupidest kid I went to school with was a 6"4 lump of granite and idiocy called Lee. He had a blonde bowl cut like Gareth from the Office, would wear a black leather jacket on hot days, and would finish every sentence with some kind of cliched over friendly statement like ma man or big pal. There was no second level to him - he was just thick. He came from a town called Beith, and such was his despairing lack of curiousity about anything that wasn't taking twos from your can or calling you over just to say hello, that really you just would have thought someone took his brain out and put in a tape recorder. One day I was watching my soccer team, St Mirren, play in the pouring rain, and he came and sat behind me, asking all these questions with ma man at the end, and after about an hour of this relentless questioning, our goalkeeper dropped the ball in his own net, and he laughed really loudly, genuine belly shaking hilarity, until I told him to fuck off and he was genuinely crushed, leaving the ground and never having any designs on my drink ever again. For some reason, the hairdresser pretty girl behind the bar reminds me of her. There's males at the bar, a Davo, a Stevo, a Wayno, patriotically displaying their o based nicknames on matching T-shirts, are talking to her, and I suspect taking the piss, and the look on her face suggests she knows this but can't work out why. My friend begins telling a long winded story about turning down a stripper on a bucks night who was angling for a lap dance - he says with typically blokey regret, but truthfully, it was probably the right thing to do. It's unlikely she'd respect you in the morning. However, the coda to the story is that it's two years old, time passing rapidly with every beer, us all getting as old as our stories. That said, I'm glad at how simple and unpressured this night is, appreciating that I have friends that I don't have to make a lot of effort with anymore. I briefly catch sight of a slightly desperate and erratically bobbing pensioner playing poker machines upstairs, shaking her plastic cup trying to find a few more coins to try and win her cigarette money back, teeth and mouth hissing together as she stares at the screen. My natural curiousity doesn't always extend to such desperate circumstances as the poker machine player at 1am, so I turn away from the poignancy, go back to my drink, and back into the safer realms of conversation about female tennis players, a world where you can't really go wrong...

There aren't enough people out tonight to make things interesting. The entire bar is filled up with sporting teams in matching tops, males having a warm up drink before they go and puff out their chests, solitary drinkers determined not to go home, men with bad news to deliver to harried spouses without the inclination to bring it up. In lucid moments I can be put off by pubs, by the way everyone thinks they are cooler than they are, or some old boy in the corner is warming up his opinionated vocal chords to become lord of the bar, but these feelings are only fleeting. I've mentioned before that I can't sit in a pub on my own, I feel a bit lonely and pathetic, so if no one is around, I have to leave and walk around the block. When I did this before entering the establishment, I had to walk through Salamanca. I haven't talked a lot about Salamanca, our market of many buskers, but as I walk through, I'm nearly brained by a busker who is throwing one of those little reels on a string and loses control for a second. I shoot him a look that is so theatrical I'm sure he can only relate to it as a performer, as it's hardly threatening, but he goes back to performing with a nervousness that I find suprising. Having run out of things to say much later, I consider bringing this up, but resist, thinking I'll get back to it one day, over another beer, watching another male sign up for the surfboard, hoodwinked by flirtacious banter. When everyone goes to the Observatory later, a cavernous school disco hyped up into a nightclub with video screens and the hint of over trendiness, I go home, unsure that Rihanna at 3hree in the morning larger than life in pixels will be good for my mental state. I leave my friends behind, leave them to come with their own ending to the evening as I pour myself into a taxi driven by a female taxi driver who I suspect spends each new engagement on edge at this time of night. Luckily, all I am is mildly drunk, although when I go to say my address, I say in an alien, drunken, slurred voice, one that catches me by complete surprise. Naturally, this precludes me from any further conversation, and probably her from initiating. It makes me think of her judgements of me, and my own intellect, given that remembering the name of my street seems to have been a struggle. I just about get home with pride intact, slump to sleep, and think if hairdresser pretty or Lee could see me now, slumped in my bed, they may be disposed to ponder whether I had any right to consider myself so much smarter than them...

Well, not really, one would be cleaning a glass and the other would be after my Coke...

The ups and downs of an emotionally questionable Friday

There are times Hobart, even as a veteran of living here, can feel like an elaborate parody of a Tasmanian stereotype - like people are putting on a show to deter mainlanders from moving here. After all, where else at a comedy gig would you have a woman with a Michael Jackson face clutching a dalmatian, a baby as part of the show, an hour devoted to defaming a restaurant that may or may not have served cockroach based rice, and heckles that don't seem to go anywhere all in one venue. Of course, this was all before me as I pulled into the last car park in town, just me and some sort of American Beauty style floating plastic bag together at the end of the world. When I drive I'm happy until I have to park, and when I park in Hobart, there's usually bewildered pedestrians with absolutely no desire to get out of my way, and trapped in my little hurricane of aggravation (thanks Sal) I'm held up by a chubby child in ill fitting clothes munching on an ice cream walking across the path of my car daring me to hit them or die trying. When I get the car, she's still there, still chubby, still licking the top of a Cornetto, now holding up a four wheel drive in her disdain for the laws of physical danger. In the cold night air, a love fest breaks out at the traffic lights, three or four couples gathering around the button. Inevitably, because it's traffic lights, each male in the couple must hit the button aggressively in a show of impatient take charge bravado, even though I've already hit the button. I've never thought I was attractive, the photographic evidence is too strong to fight, but I'm still male and I'm still on my own, and in a strange display of peacock feathering pride, a male runs up to his paramour who is three steps ahead of him at the lights, and puts his hands straight down her pants and gives her a sloppy kiss just so everyone knows she's taken, Hobarts very special form of branding. I would make some sort of caveman reference, but the moment passes as I lose them in a difficult AJC/low battery IPOD moment of tension. In my attempt to squeeze the final verse of Skywriting in on a limited time scale in regards to battery, distance to venue and the fact I'm so unfit I could be made to go to a health spa, I don't have time to notice that my own slow saunter has held up a car turning the corner and the driver is tapping impatiently. If I was only younger and licking the top of a Cornetto, I could probably get away with a disdainful dumb glance but for some reason I walk faster and get out of the way. I don't know why this, it causes me to think for some reason about how fantastic it was when you could just get away with things just because you were a dumb kid and some interesting questions on the maturation policy...although again, this passes as soon as I receive the incredibly mature Xmas gift from my friend of a Hannah Montana jigsaw...so I'm a dichotomy in a Cuba tracksuit, it's too late for me, save yourself...

I was probably in the wrong headspace for a night of Geordie based improvised but also suspiciously rehearsed comedy anyway. An old lady had a heart attack outside Sanity and as they treated her they fenced her off like they were doing roadworks, while pairs of middle aged women in tracksuits and low priced Millers tops nudged each other and stood and watched like there was a cost sale at Suzanne Grae or some kind of new tourist attraction. As they loaded her onto a stretcher even the promotions models as Boost Juice were in animated discussion about the incident. Hell of a way to go, clutching an Andre Rieu DVD while a blonde girl who plainly hates humanity, two harlots with a story for their bridge club and some idiot who's been weirded out by his latest encounter with sandwich white female - she was cleaning the fridge and actually got my sandwich for me yesterday, and then got upset she didn't remember the water - stand around in transfixed gawpery. Not to mention being fenced off with little yellow bits of plastic up around you. The moral implications of standing around watching a revival attempt seem a little too heavy to deal with in the remaining 18teen minutes of my lunch break, and so I move on. Still, it weighs on me a little bit. I've mentioned before when I was in kindergarten a kid died in suspicious circumstances on some train tracks and I put my hand up and asked if he'd be back for maths. Now, I'm a little more in tune with the passing of time and life. I wander through Big W and flick through the 8ight dollar DVDs, endless piles of DVDs from wrestlers celebrated through the medium of documentary footage from their glory days and the odd funny story. Normally such a collection of endless nostalgia would be appealing at such a low low price, but I don't buy any, moving on just as a man in a red T-shirt with a rebellious beard and his chunky thighed girlfriend push a pram in prime bargain position. He holds up a DVD from Jake the Snake Roberts, pointing at the price, but she puts her hand on his arm and says they can't afford it in the current climate. Well it has been windy late...oh, she means the economic climate. While I know what she means, burdened as I am with the debt of too many T-shirts bought on credit card from a London store called 2 Many T-shirts (damn you and your trendy catalogues), but it seems as though the purchase of an 8.99 DVD won't hurt the economy that much, although red T-shirt man is convinced by the argument, and the snake has to slither back into the display cabinet. I can't help but notice she seems to have bought an awful lot of delicious chocolate for herself, but she had a child, and could probably argue she's done more for the fate of the world and is entitled to Dairy Milk in oversized blocks. Maybe she's right, but she's never been on the front of a phone book, so I'd say we're even...

The trendy radio DJs are exhorting everyone to celebrate the weekend by taking their pants off, impractical for me since I'm driving and since their trendy blather has inspired me only to put the IPOD on in breach of several road rules as I drive home. It seems another lifetime ago I used to sit in the back of Dads little brown Torana car - so inept as a motor vehicle the gearstick came off in his hand once and we had to push it into school - and bombard him with stupid questions like if we drove at 60ks an hour how far would we get in an hour and what colour would the sky be when we got there. Once I had my arm out the window and was holding a short story I'd got an A for and the wind took it from my grip and it blew over the railing and floated down over the cliff on the road to Penguin, where perhaps it was read by environmentalists. I do remember feeling a sense of loss though, and somehow playing with my Whiplash He-Man figure didn't feel quite right that night. OK, so I was a dark child. Even my He-Man figures were telling me to cheer up at times. Every day I go up and down the same road in and out of town, weaving in and out of traffic like an obstacle course, but always yelling at someone for being too slow. My Mum always tells me this is stupid, that life is too precious to worry about the mere slow witted response time of a Nissan Micra driver, but it's my grievance and I'll nurse it as I see fit. I rush into my house when I get home, doing a quick turn around as I go, reading several e-mails as I go. Most of them are about dream team AFL football, grown men concerned about games where footballers kicking a ball gets you points. I feel re-assured that after a day of what a sombre voiced movie voice over guy would describe as adult themes, you know, death, economy, stalking...there's some room in the day for absolute silliness as a fight has broken out about a simple game that seems so immature if Pippa the girl I really liked in Primary School was here she'd tut about stupid boy games and then I'd pull her pigtails. I'm so happy with something so silly breaking out across my e-mail box, I celebrate it with the drinking of chocolate milk and the playing of over elaborately constructed pop songs from the late 1990s. Ah, S Club Seven, where are you now...

Ross Noble seems grumpy on stage. Even though his localised references are on target, he seems tired. He seems distracted. He's constantly interrupted from his stories by witless hecklers, and for some reason, while it's still funny, I feel I've seen it all before - but to blame this on Ross would not be fair. Well the grumpiness is his fault. It's me, I'm tired, I'm distracted by a girl in brown chords determined to knee my knee out of her alleged personal space, by being lap danced by an imprisoned large denim posterior shuffling to it's seat, by the aforementioned lady with the Michael Jackson face and the dalmatian, by the baby, by the heat strangling me into sleep, by a particularly strange game of is that belly or T-shirt that we play with a girl in the stalls, and obviously to complete everything full circle, Ross's own apparent grumpiness. I don't the defamed restaurant will be too pleased either to be associated with cockroaches in their rice being brought up in comedic conversation. Down two rows from me a conversation begins about debt, an anxious friend bringing up their woes to a disinclined and going through the motions female in a black T-shirt who is offering only basic empathy, the words scattering with empty meaning across the theatre. A heckler tries to make an elongated joke about tobacco companies and Ross, and that seems to finally break his spirit. I make it home just in time to miss a text message and see an advert for some witless TV show with Justin Melvey, an ad for a ringtone that always make me sad, and get upset with how messy my house is. Just before I pulled into my house, I saw a girl sitting by the side of the road, with a thousand yard death stare, obviously drugged, her pale skin lit up by the dimly pathetic lights my car allegedly lights up the night with. She rolls over onto her back just as I pass, then gets up and runs away, real life illuminated in the middle of surbubia. When I get inside the first thing I see is my giant poster from the TV show Charmed, which doesn't seem the appropriate image on a day of silliness and seriousness. It's such an up and down day, so much maturity, so many adult situations, and yet, so many things there were childish...I'm sure there's some sort of implication to it all, some sort of message in there, something to work through...

Then I forget it all, yell at Jelena Dokic for beating a prettier girl at tennis, and go to sleep, ready to do it all again tomorrow...