Who needs an alarm clock?

Woken up by the Singing Postman again at 5.50am this morning. Flushing his loo, washing his hands with noisey, squealing taps and then banging and plodding around his flat. With the amount of shuffling and banging about he was making I thought he was perhaps going about his morning business with a blindfold on, maybe some Crystal Maze like mission set by his new girlfriend. Standing over the bathroom sink, flinching under the shaving blade with his blindfold on as his girlfriend frantically directs from the doorway. Stumbling through the living room, banging into his couch, chairs or his treasured karaoke machine, making his way to the kitchen where his morning coffee sits waiting on a worktop, his girlfriend directing from behind.
Ah, the girlfriend, now does she exist? A question that has confounded Ka and myself for at least a few weeks now. Something's certainly quietened him down in the past few months, yet we still hear him talking up in his flat. We can never make out what he's saying, of course, his voice muffled and dulled down through his floorboards making him sound like an adult from the Charlie Brown cartoons. We've never seen or heard anyone else entering or leaving his flat though, and surely he can't be on a phonecall for that long? All very mysterious. Perhaps he's just sitting talking to himself? Nothing wrong with that. Everyone talks to themselves occasionally. Nothing beats giving yourself a good talking to. I don't do it so much now that I have a wife... what were we talking about again?
Anyway, hopefully Ka and myself won't be bothering, or being bothered, by upstairs neighbours for much longer as our plans for moving somewhere bigger move up a gear. We had a jolly 'Home Report' man round yesterday, walking round, knocking on walls, opening and closing doors, flushing the toilet, measuring walls and slurping coffee. Presumably all things which have to be done to assess the value of your home. I'm not sure why he had to slurp the coffee mind you. Maybe he was testing the water quality in his caffeine or something... who knows. All well worth it's £300, I'm sure...

The woman in the back

After escaping from work early yesterday evening, Ka's Mum and Dad, Dougie and Grace, took us out. We were off into town and after a quick stop to buy some wine gums and jelly babies, were diving through the Glasgow traffic to the Theatre Royal to see the stage production of 'The Woman in Black'. A dark, chilling tale of a solicitor who gets inadvertantly cursed by an evil spirit, spawned from a client's family history.
'The Woman in Black' is an adaptation of Susan Hill's 1983 novel and has already been playing in London's West End for many years and is now on a Nation wide tour. An entertaining production with only three actors, two chairs, a door, a large wicker basket and an invisible dog which together served as the main players on stage to illustrate the ghostly tale. The actors were great in their roles and the audience watched with a quiet unease as the story unfolded with a few gentle scares along the way with appearances from the mysterious screaming woman in black.
As the story began, the elder of the main players walked out on to the stage and began reading quietly from a script. The audience of the theatre quietened down to a complete stillness as we all struggled to hear what was being murmured. As we strained to hear the words in the theatre's silence the audience began to wonder if we were actually supposed to be hearing the man's words. Ka took her bag of wine gums out from her pocket and very quietly started peeling the bag's glued top apart. Slowly, slowly, she prized the plastic bag open taking care to make as little noise as possible in the silence. The creaks of the old theatre seats and the odd, inescapable cough were the loudest noises in the large room as the man's words mumbled over us. Suddenly a loud voice yelled from the the back of the theatre shattering the concentrated silence into which the stage actor's mumbles had flowed. Many people jumped at the sudden loud shout from the rear of the stalls. Some screamed. One woman in particular, seated further behind us, screamed such a great, tremoring, 'oh my gawd!' that her voice broke out and above all the other noises of shock. Her screech seemed to echo louder than the actors, as the younger of the two actors strode from the back of the stalls to join his companion up on the stage. He talked as he walked but I think everyone was still suffering the aftereffects of the initial surprise to concentrate on his lines. I certainly could not stop myself from laughing for the first five minutes of the story, subtley trying to pinpoint from where the terrible screech had come from in the audience, perhaps waiting to catch a glimpse of a rather embarrassed lady slinking off to the loo. No one moved from their seat though and the woman remained anonymous . Her scream was so loud the woman must have, at the very least, spilt her jelly babies all over the place.

Beguiling and infuriating

Cameron has just won again. Online live Scrabble is proving to be a bit of an addiction. I'm going to have to finish it though especially since I cannot seem to win one game unless the online player vanishes for over 4 weeks.
Barry, Diana, Cameron and myself have been playing since Cameron first stumbled across it a few months ago in his wanderings round the world of facebook. A great online version of the classic game but with loads of help consisting of a rather helpful dictionary and a two letter word list which are great for when your in a tight spot. Barry entertains himself in games by coming up with words that sound very much like abuse or swear words whilst Cameron merely growls abuse when you gain 63 points by adding one letter on to one of his well thought out words and then advertise it on the facebook home page as your own impressive scrabble achievement. He still won the game though so I don't know what he's complaining about...
Cameron likes complaining though. He was complaining the other day about the end of Lost for instance, the tv series that has attracted, beguiled, confused, repelled and infuriated so many over the past six years.
Ka and myself had been devoted followers, looking forward to a revelatory ending on Friday night, staying in with a big bowl of crisps and a couple of beers to find out the answers. Some people do look for answers at the bottom of beer bottles and some may have been better off doing so. We certainly thought the writers had been at times anyway. However, it was a great ending to a great series, in my opinion, bringing a fitting conclusion to the stories of the crash survivors. Some dying on the mysterious island, some escaping with the help of a handily undrownable pilot, but all, apparently, ending up in the same afterlife storyline which had been running through the whole of season 6 in flashback form. The one thing that was not explained in the final episode was, of course, the island itself. How it came into being, why it had the powers it had, what the mystical tunnel was all about, how it was able to seemingly shift through time and space like some kind of geological time machine and where the hell the lighthouse popped up from? With these questions, and many others, still left unanswered, the ending to the series was never going to please everyone, especially Cameron.

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?

Where all the jakies go

Uncle Jim was up from London for the weekend so this proved the perfect excuse for a wee get-together in Glasgow. A rare get together for the majority of the family and a good opportunity for a catch up. Twelve of us at a round table in Lakota, munching mushrooms and doritos, struggling for elbow room when the main courses arrived. Afterwards we all headed down the street following suggestions from Uncle Ian for the Scotia Bar for a bit of folk and entertainment. We ended up opting for a bar, a little closer, central and easier on the feet. Not that most of us would have minded walking all the way down to the Scotia but for the women in high heels it may have been a bit of a challenge. Ka was also a little dubious about the whole Scotia Bar idea. Upon hearing our suggestion her eyes grew wide and she blurted "the one where all the jakies go?!".
On many a trip from EK in the Number 20 bus we've seen more than a few drunken 'characters' stumble off at Stockwell Street, falling straight through the black doors, disappearing into the ancient, dishevelled looking Scotia. I've still never had a drink in the place and suspect it's perfectly respectable inside. I imagine it to be like the Monty or the Auldhouse in EK with old fashioned furnishings, ancient dusty optics and beer taps, various pieces of antique farming equipment and weaponry adorning the walls and a man playing a mandolin in the corner. Perfect for the tourists. The brave, ignorant tourists with no sense of smell that is...
We ended up in the Drum and Monkey on St. Vincent Street, with it's comfy chairs, friendly atmosphere and helpful barstaff. The comfy chairs we couldn't get any of thanks to pushy middle aged Sex and the City wannabe middleaged women pushing Craig, innocently trying to save a few for his Mum and Aunties, out of the way. The atmosphere was ruined on more than one occasion by strong farts, people diving for cover, asking who did what and the barstaff being particularly unfriendly, especially when asked for a Pinot Grigio rather than the 'automatic' Sauvignon Blanc.
As the witching hour approached we all went our seperate ways around half eleven and headed for our various buses and trains, some of us a little drunker than others. Illustrated perfectly after we met our cousin Chris on the bus and I started calling him his brothers name halfway through the conversation. Chris, being Chris, ever polite just looked at me and chuckled, his mates looking at me as if I was a complete drunken dork (as if!). After my retreat upstairs to join the others at the front of the top deck we were then entertained on the way home by a couple getting it on up on the back seat of the bus. With a groan of warning Kenny alerted us to the quiet, bouncing couple up the back. Most of us politely attempted not to watch via the reflections in the rain drop covered windows as the bus lumbered up towards EK. After a brief attempt to start up a drunken rendition of 'The Back of the Bus Cannae Sing' and being given a shut up elbow by my lovely wife I considered that that is always the great thing about the night buses, you certainly get plenty of entertainment. Not all of it welcome though - just ask Chris.

Virtual dominoes and the giant iPad

Well, it's over. So what the hell happens now? Is Cameron going to force Brown out? Hmmm, that didn't sound right...
I haven't sat and watched so many politicians and tv political pundits since 1997 when a grinning bloke from Edinburgh victoriously took to the stage.
After making the polling station at quarter to ten I arrived home, sat and watched at least two and a half hours worth, flicking between the BBC channels, the STV channel and Channel 4's alternative election night. The BBC had the two main channels dedicated with Jackie Bird craning her neck at us as usual and on One David Dimbleby, the BBC's head teacher, and the English broadcasters on Two. A rather lovely replacement to Peter Snow, Emily Maitlis, used a fantastic, full height iPad to illustrate what was going on with the latest results, using her touch screen to zap maps, graphs and stats up in various colourful guises. Jeremy Vine jumped about a digital map of Britain like a weatherman in Tron and then played a game of virtual dominoes, each piece representing a fallen MP. What a fantastic job it must be to help liven up these programmes. How to make political elections understandable to the masses - use virtual dominoes and giant iPads! All this while Jeremy Paxman shouted at MPs around his table up in the box like balcony of the studio, like a solo Statler and Waldorf.
Some of the television panelists were also outraged and raving about how disgraceful and disorganised it all was. Crowds of disgruntled folk being turned away from polling stations as they had turned up too late in the day or obvioulsy could not have got out of bed early enough. The commentators made it sound like all hell was breaking loose, with reports of the police being called in, people tearing their hair out, polling stations forcing their doors locked, jamming complaining voters' flailing arms or toes in the process, angry mobs shouting what for (literally). The view would then switch from the studio to a gloomy looking street in Sheffield where a long line of bored looking people stood morosely wondering why they were being filmed. A bloke in the background holding up a piece of card scibbled in felt pen, 'Hello Mum'. Then switching his card to another which read, 'I decided against the libs'.

The views of a DiMaggios waitress

Election Day at last, and not a moment too soon. I won't be getting to the local polling station till late tonight though. Hopefully the lingering MPs will have all gone home by that point or gone to a more central voting station. It's all well and good going along and showing your support for one of these people by scribbling an X in a box but actually standing and listening to someone explain to you why you've made that decision or why you've made the wrong one is something I can't really be bothered with. I'd rather dive into the booth, sign with an X and hurriedly make like a tree.
On Saturday night Chaz and myself sat in the Atrium, having a beer listening to a female waitress from New Jersey harp on about what she thought of the election and the voting system. The waitress had come over from a DiMaggios across the road but was under the impression she was the sole speaker at some sort of political rally. In one short break I commented some form of response, making some sort of vague comparison on American politics and the waitress simply looked at me, as if insulted.
"Are you, a scot, talking to me about American politics?".
I wondered what gave her the right to voice what she thought of our politics, in her lengthy one way conversation, and why we were not permitted to talk about the American equivalent. As I huffily returned to my drink I continued to listen to the waitress, wishing her back to America as she talked on. I'm sure there's plenty of DiMaggios over the Atlantic! Better watch what I say there, I'm verging on the immigration concerns of Gillian Duffy.