Wednesday 26 May 2010

Dead squirrel bodies

After a fantastic weekend of blistering heat the sun is holding out over Scotland. Last years summer lasted the whole of two weeks at the most. Could this be our short summer? Fast and fleeting like the life of the little squirrel I passed over on my way to work today. Slightly adjusting the path of the car, making sure either of it's tyres did not disturb the small furry motionless body I wondered where the squirrel had been heading at his time of death. Yes, I know, I should have stopped and tried to somehow move the body to the pavement or at least the side of the road but like so many others that had presumably done so before me, I drove on. I had more important things to do, like get to work on time.
Some of these animals have a death wish anyway. We were heading home in a taxi at the weekend after a BBQ in Chapelton, speeding along, when all of a sudden the driver swerved us into the middle of the road. As the approaching headlights lit up our faces through the windscreen and our lives flashed before our eyes the driver muttered something about narrowly avoiding a passing hedgehog.
Foxes are experts are getting run over too, especially on the expressway. Most of them ending up as flattened piles of mush on the tarmac. Dogs are different though. You run over a dog and they're more than likely to get up and dart away, perhaps with half a leg missing. Not unlike Bullet from 'The Scheme'.
I had been in quite a good mood last night until Ka and myself sat and watched this horrendous programme. A documentary series following a small number of families in a Kilmarnock housing scheme. Possibly the worst advert for life in Scotland ever. Hopefully it was not being transmitted outside Scotland as anyone watching it with little knowledge of our beloved country, it's districts and its people would most probably be horrified in a way that Rab C. Nesbitt could have only hinted at. Zombie like girls hooking each other in the street, stoned, indecipherable young guys slobbering their thoughts in between getting their neighbours daughters pregnant, police visits, court visits, families going on holiday and leaving children to fend for themselves, couples knocking each other about and pet dogs (the aforementioned Bullet) getting run over and left to suffer in the streets (gawd, that squirrel is going to haunt me now!). For the past week now, since the first episode of the series went out I've been listening to folk in the work laughing about it, and the people it follows, so I started watching it under the impression I would get some sort of laugh out of it. Unfortunately I was utterly depressed by the end of it and felt like immediately emigrating. No wonder so many Scots end up leaving. To get away from the people arguing around blind relatives smashing bottles over each others heads? As the credits rolled on this programme a BBC voiceover informed us that future episodes of the series had now been cancelled due to ongoing police investigations... In other words they've all been arrested.
Saying that, my Dad calls our area a 'scheme'. He might be right. There's a neighbour who sings Take That over and over upstairs on drunken nights in with mates, a neighbour living downstairs who likes to walk around the street naked, a bunch of wheelie bin thieves who burn the plastic for the fumes, a couple of six year olds who constantly cycle up and down our lawn while their Mum sits and drinks wine at her front door, a woman who parks her car by hitting it off others and a recently discovered transvestite living further down the street. There's also a bloke who noses at all of this and drives by dead squirrel bodies. Maybe I should put a call in to BBC Scotland?

1 comment:

Miriam Vaswani said...

I'm getting a bit homesick now.