Bath time, Boris and Bowie

I'm still feeling guilty after Thursday night.
Sophie was in her luminous green bathtub, gifted to her by her Uncle Colin and Auntie Jillian, kicking and bobbing about the usual for seven o’clock on an evening. As it was Thursday it was my turn for bathing baby Sophie, as I’m generally never home in time Monday to Wednesday. Holding her small body semi afloat in the tub Sophie lay back, a looking around little uncertainly as usual, but generally content. Sophie’s big wide eyes gazed up at the ceiling taking the occasional break from the plaster to look up at me as I struggled to keep her at the same horizontal angle.
Sophie likes to moves around, you see. She likes to try and turn herself around in the shallow depth of water and explore it as she lies but then usually changes her mind at the last minute as the water hits the side of her big eyes and it’s usually at this moment she’ll start to freak out and moan for help. Generally speaking she does like the bath. Sophie certainly doesn’t cry and scream when in the water but she also doesn’t laugh and giggle, she merely lies back and looks around, sometimes with a look of wonder upon her face, as she sporadically kicks her legs out to splash the water over the end of the bath on to whom ever is bathing her. Her arms remain outstretched at either side, evidence of her uncertainty with the wet surroundings, occasionally jerking and moving as she sometimes grabs for the side of the bath or the hair on your arm with her small hands, which are topped off with her unclipped long nails. Sophie will usually be quite content until it’s time to leave the water, at which point she’ll then start screaming the place down.
Thursday was different, however. Sophie started screaming early.
Whilst holding Sophie with my left hand, her head cradled in the palm of my hand and my arm under her back, I reached down to grab one of her toy plastic fish with my other hand. These plastic fish only occasionally join Sophie in the bath. They are small, colourful plastic toys with a hole at the mouth where they will fill with or, if squeezed, release water from. Sophie sometimes likes getting the water squirted from the fish on to her tummy so, in order to keep her entertained, I reached for one of the fish with my right hand. Unfortunately, just as I did this, Sophie decided to take one of her exploratory turns and swivelled her head round on to it’s side in the palm of my left hand. Looking up I realised Sophie had moved and was inadvertently gulping water. Spinning my baby back round on to her back I accidentally forced Sophie to gulp down the water she’d taken into her mouth and after a rather heavy gulp, worthy of the best Scooby Doo impression after seeing another particularly scary ghost, her gulping mouth grimaced and an intense scream was released from within her. The crying and screaming refused to cease. No matter how much I tried to placate my wee daughter, she was not having it. Not even to put her pyjamas on. Ka trudged upstairs to investigate the intense screaming and ended up taking over. Sophie would not be pacified. Her father had tried to drown her and was no longer trustworthy. So that was me for the rest of the night. Riddled with guilt. Waved away with a frown and an impatient hand whenever I approached.
It’s quite worrying when Sophie goes into those fits of grief. A grimace will come over her face which will turn a pale shade of scarlet and Sophie will start shaking her head slowly from side to side as a loud scream slowly emits and grows from within her. It often reminds me of the lion in the opening credits of an MGM movie, except fiercer, louder and scarier.
Thankfully, Sophie seems to have forgotten the watery incident in the bathtub on Thursday evening and is now far more relaxed around me again after a Friday spent shopping with her Mum and Auntie Chris while I sat in the Central Quay office making up the promotional adverts for the week to come.
The estate agent dealing with the flat, (what are we calling them, “Your Maneuver”?), called today to inform me that our new tenant had now picked up the keys. Yes, finally. After six months the estate agent has finally found someone. Whether they’ll last or not is a different matter. Fingers crossed.
Ka and myself were back in the flat yesterday, giving it a little wipe down and taking photographs for an inventory, an itemized list of the flat’s fixtures and fittings.
That’s inventory, pronounced “invintory” rather than “invent-ory” as I have been inadvertently pronouncing it. Even though I know it is pronounced “invintory”, I somehow struggle to enunciate it this way. On more than one occasion during the conversation with Liz, the estate agent, I accidentally pronounced it “invent-ory”. This makes it sound like some form of waterway where you go to devise new creations.
Kelvin Okafor. Now there’s a guy that comes up with some fabulous creations. Ewan, my boss in the studio, showed me the BBC report on this guy yesterday. Okafor, an artist from Tottenham, draws with pencil and charcoal to create the most amazing photo realistic portraits you’ve ever seen. To look at them you’d think they were simply photographs against a plain white background they are that impressive. The report even said that a lot of his work is drawn from memory, which reminded me of another brilliant London artist, Stephen Wiltshire.

Wiltshire draws whole cityscapes, intricately detailed, all from memory. Recently Wiltshire was on the news once more after drawing the view of London city from the top of the Shard.
At 800ft high the triangular Shard is Europe’s newest and tallest building. Designed by Italian architect Renzo Piano, the Shard is part of a £2 billion redevelopment in its area of South London. The tall, triangular glass building is filled with offices, luxury apartments and restaurants and sure to be another major tourist attraction after its grand opening yesterday. Boris Johnson, with yet another of his fantastic, colourful, speeches described it as “the tip of a cocktail stick emerging through the skin of a super colossal pickled onion”. That’s one hec of a cocktail stick. Bigger than the one I seen in Edinburgh when U2 brought the Popmart tour to Murrayfield. They had an olive though, not a pickled onion, not to mention the giant mirrorball lemon on stage. The band must have been having some sort of mid life creative crisis back in ‘97.

Something David Bowie has presumably been suffering for the past decade after being away from the music scene for so long. You could argue that it’s not exactly “mid-life”, (that may have been Tin Machine) but on the Tuesday morning of January 8th on the dawn of his 66th birthday news broke that he had released a surprise single to the world. I heard the single “Where are we now?”, on the Chris Evans Breakfast Show in the car on the way into work. The slow, melancholic music was not what I had expected as a “comeback” single but, as the weeks have gone on, it’s grown on me none the less. Throughout the song Bowie reflects back on his Berlin days, where he escaped to in an effort to battle his drug addiction and whilst doing so produced ‘Heroes’, ‘Low’ and ‘Lodger’ hanging out with Brian Eno and sharing an apartment with Iggy Pop, surely a strange choice for a flatmate when you’re trying to get off the drugs.
Anyway, it’s now 5.30pm on Saturday evening. Ka is out for Agnes’ retirement shindig, in which they’ll be dining in luxury at Jamie Oliver’s George Square restaurant. Just as they’ll be tucking into their main course and sipping their wine, served up by the finest chefs and waiting staff in the land in the splendour and convivial surroundings of the tv chef’s Glasgow restaurant branch I’ll be taking Sophie back up to the luminous green bathtub. Wish me luck.

Coloured hexagons and dashings of ELO

Music moguls everywhere and somewhere have voted Muse's 'The Resistence' album's sleeve artwork the best of its kind from 2009. Designed by London firm, La Boca, the cover depicts a sole figure standing on a bright platform leading straight to the planet Earth breaking through a strange landscape of coloured, interlocking hexagons suspended in space. A fantastic cover illustrating the weird and wonderful epic themes of the music on the album itself. The parents got me this album for Chrimbo and I've only had around three or four listens so far. Like U2 and Coldplay, to name but a few, Muse always get a bit of a slagging in the press for being pretentious with their lyrics and themes but Muse never fail to make a pulsing, energetic album this time with lots of dashings of dance and ELO and even a suspiciously similar version of the Doctor Who theme tune in the track 'Uprising'. Just in time for the new Doctor Matt Smith getting onboard the TARDIS.
Jenny Saville's fantastic painting on the Manic Street Preacher's 'Journal for Plague Lovers' came a close second in the vote with Fever Ray's artwork in third place. Fever Ray's artwork was designed by Martin (Mander) Ander who came from a graffiti art background as did Robert Del Naja (3D) of Massive Attack who also appears in the top ten for the design work on their latest EP album, 'Splitting the Atom'. 3D's work is always exciting, weird, challenging and crazy to look at, just as his band's music is to listen to.
LaRoux's cover also appeared in the list and immediately makes you think of classic photographic album covers such as David Bowie's 'Heroes'. Obviously La Roux ripped off Bowie's hairstyle from the same cover for her whole look and it's probably not the only thing 'ripped off' either.
It's nice to see that CD artwork still get's recognised with some respect in this downloading age and makes you realise just how great it would be if these works were still widely available as proper vinyl sized cases.

Strange Overtones

David Byrne and Brian Eno have once again collaborated on a joint project and are releasing a new album and singles. They are also touring with it. No UK dates yet but hopefully they will cross the pond. You can find out more here.
Byrne is, you may already know, one of my all time favourites and Eno is definately a favourite producer (he made U2, amongst others, the success they are today) so looking forward to hearing the new material. 'My Life in the Bush of Ghosts' was their last collaboration together back in 1981 which was recently remastered and rereleased. My Uncle Tom bought it last year not long after it's rerelease much to Aunt Linda's indifference as she did not particularly appreciate it. Personally I always thought it was wonderful, but like most of Eno's music, not everyones' cup of tea. Eno's music is often quite strange, moody and experimental which is probably why I like it. He done a project with U2 back in '95 called 'Original Soundtracks 1' where the band and Eno called themselves collectively, The Passengers. This album was fantastic and definately not deserving of the slating it got on release. I think people just expected another U2 album with a few twists, very different to the fascinating music that they actually got. It's probably the most experimental music U2 has ever produced, thanks to Eno. It's definately their most abstract piece of work anyway. They should do more of it! Same with Bowie and Eno. They produced some brilliant music together. It's a crying shame they never got round to making Outside Part 2!

Big doors swing on little hinges

This morning, my door fell off. Well, almost. I arrived at work in my wee clio, clambered out as per usual and just as I went to shut the door it seemed to slip, closely followed by it banging off the car's body and bouncing back at me. Mary and Margaret, two of the smoking women from the office, (when I say 'smoking women' I mean they are smokers...) were out on one of their smoking breaks (funnily enough) and immediately started heckling me from the front of the building. A bit like a louder Statler and Waldorf, except female. The top hinge of the door was bust. After visiting the garage I learned it's actually the pin that holds the hinge. Will most probably have to stay off the road now while I wait for my garage appointment. The door does stay closed whilst driving but is not fixed properly in it's rightful place thus the noise of the wind and the nearby traffic seem strangely loud whilst travelling and you feel the need to hold the door in place as you drive... reminds me of a go-cart we built as kids when I had to constantly hammer one wheel as I flew down the hill to keep the wheel from flying off as it was not secured properly. Thankfully the clio has not lost any wheels in such a fashion so I won't be needing my hammer for a while yet.
The little incident made me face a few facts about life. My clio is getting old. It's over ten years old now. Many would have traded it in years ago but I've grown kind of attached to it over the past six years or so. Purchasing it off my former boss in Birmingham, it was my only trustworthy companion in the wilderness of the West Midlands and of course it came with me back up to Scotland and found another new owner and driver in Ka. I'm hoping it will live on for another year or so at least but you never can tell what's round the corner can you. Especially if it's Ka that reversing round them (joke!).
Talking of my time in the West Midlands, I was telling folk in the office how we used to sing Britney Spears songs in David Bowie voices - the way he would sing them - in the office I worked in down south. Shirley Ann was quite impressed at my Bowie impression of 'Hit Me Baby One More Time'. Felix (my immediate boss [he moves very fast!] in S&UN) and Shirley Ann had been watching the Life on Mars tv series recently on DVD which got us on to the subject of Bowie. Shirley Ann was shocked to find out from Barry that the line 'Mickey Mouse has grown up a cow' was a true lyric to Bowie's 'Life on Mars?'. She had no idea it was part of the real lyrics. Mickey Mouse - the saviour of kids entertainment when he was born, something pure and honest that was exploited and used to make the money, cashing in, becoming the 'cash cow' for Disney. Humanity losing it's purity and morals and Bowie looking for somewhere else, somewhere for hope and a better life. That's what I always took the song to mean anyway. It's also about a girl realising she's gay apparently. "But her mummy is yelling, "No!"
And her daddy has told her to go".
'Life on Mars' was brilliant television, pity it's all over. We've now got the 'Ashes to Ashes' spin off with the lovely Keeley Hawes. Looking forward to a second season of that - whenever that will be. 'Ashes to Ashes' was another great Bowie song. But then again I think they're all pretty damn good. Apart from anything on the 'Tonight' album. He's been very quiet of late. Come on Bowie - get another album out!
Listening to the Vampire Weekend and 'Accelerate' the latest REM. 'Accelerate' is definately their best and most exciting album in a while with some great tracks (well, all of them are great in fact). The 'return to form' is an often over used expression but in this case I reckon it's spot on. Ka's been listening to her Alphabeat album. I got her tickets two weeks ago to go and see them in November. I keep insisting that she doesn't need to take me. I don't mind if she takes one of her friends. Unfortunately there doesn't seem to be many other takers...

Brilliant Adventure

Ended up in the Casino on wednesday night after a few drinks in Bunker and then the Garage. Colin is leaving for a new life in Warrington so we had to go somewhere for a few drinks to send him off! Afterwards, Chaz and myself headed for the casino. It's very easy to see how people get hooked on gambling. Chaz was teaching me the ways of the roulette table whilst trying to sell the Floor Manager a car, surprisingly enough. He failed with the car selling but did make a little money himself at the table and managed to teach me a thing or two on the rules of the table. Managed to make some money out of it - not a lot but the night out was paid for. It all just seems so strange to me that you make money from placing counters on a game table. But I suppose that's how these places pull you in. The occasional dabble is good fun though. We eventually dragged ourselves away from the spinning roulette and walked out into the early morning light getting home at five in the morning.
Next morning I read the interesting article From Sunday's Mail on Sunday on the god like music maestro that is David Bowie. In the piece Bowie himself picked out 12 tracks for the free CD to accompany the article and wrote about each song explaining why he chose them as favourites. The article is now online. Click here to read it.
Talking of 'Loving the Alien' its the final episode of the current series of Doctor Who tomorrow night. Will Tennant regenerate? We all flamin' hope not! The guy's a brilliant actor and a brilliant Doctor. He did take a little getting used to after Eccleston's grumpier approach to the character but not long. Personally I think he'll survive. Don't know how but that's up to Russell T Davies (I do have a few theories knocking about though). Colin came up with the best theory on Wednesday night - the TARDIS itself would stop the regeneration and come to his rescue! Again, don't know how.
Before that however, there are paintings to be hung and preparations for next weekends trip to Balado.