run a marathon, write a novel, get fit & go nuts

Arch of Triumph

2006-04-15T09:35:00.000+01:00

Well, thanks for the lovely comments, troops. Here's the much-advertised pic. Not plural, unfortunately. Just this one was any good. Some 31000 runners finished this race. Which is fab in terms of atmosphere and all. There's like an electric current running through the pack of runners (peloton?) at the start - though it's possibly true that towards the end it kind of fades to a low pulse that would struggle to light the display on your iPod. Fair play to the Parisians, they keep clapping and whooping, despite the fact that they saw the first runners passing two hours before.

Which is all marvellous. The one drawback of a race like this, and which is why I will hesitate before running another biggie again, is that when you finish, instead of being able to collapse in a pile somewhere and nurse your poor legs back to life, you immediately get stuck in a twenty minute queue to get medal/ water/ tshirt/ hooded black warmy-uppy thing/ out. Forget getting out; at one point I thought I was going to black out - wouldn't be surprised if a few folks did; saw a few tinfoiled casualties here and there. And anyway, when you do get out, you're faced with a massive throng of people's supporters clubs and family/ kebab sellers/ hotdog stands/ souvenir peddlars/ etc. Takes forever. Nightmare.

But! Let's not moan. I knew (roughly) what I was getting into. It's almost a week since I ran the thing - I'm more or less back to walking normally. I developed a rather worrying complaint in the right knee round about 32km which gave me the John Wayne stiff legged thing I talked about before.

I took a 1.4 litre (flashflow?) water pack thing with me, along with a bunch of these carbohydrate gel things and a blister pack of ibuprofen. Wee tip: these water packs are fantastic. You set your stopwatch timer to go off every ten minutes and you take a wee slurp. Keeps you perfectly hydrated and saves you having to rely on the water stations. I hate water stations - they're a fucking hazard. Everything's fine, everyone's running happily (or not) and enjoying running in the city of Paris. Then all of a sudden, the runners transform into a crazed mob, shouldering and elbowing people out of the way, insanely grabbing stuff, pushing others out the way - me first! me first! After that, for half a mile you're dodging banana skins and orange peel, and ducking the half consumed bottles that people lob over their shoulders when they're done. Saw a few guys get clobbered, saw a few people go over on the fruit.

Maybe that's just the French. The French don't do systems. Or, like the priorité à gauche, thing on the Place de l'Etoile round the Arc de Triomphe, they do crazy systems only the French would think up.

Oh yeah, my time was 4:08:08. Back to the training. I'll try for under 4h with the next marathon, Edinburgh. June 11. This one's for charity.

Four hours & change

2006-04-10T18:52:00.000+01:00

In some ways, the running was the easiest thing about the Paris Marathon. I do consider myself a 'people' person, but 35000 is pushing it. Especially when they're pushing you.

Four hours & some loose change it took me. Don't have the Chip Time yet. Still limping. Paris is a whole different proposition when your knees are yelping in pain.

I'll post some pix when I get home. Tonight, bistro du coin. Tomorrow Luxembourg. Merci pour les comments, Brian et Jon. A bien tot.

only 40 000 steps to go

2006-04-07T00:57:00.000+01:00

Last week I took a pedometer (no, I don't have sex with minors; call the dogs off) on my long run & I calculated that it takes me about 30000 steps to run just under 20 miles.

That's a lot of wear and tear.

So I reckon that when I'm done with The Paris Marathon (this Sunday, troops) I'll have knocked another 40000 steps worth of hi-tech rubber off my Asics runners.

Yes, I've just parachuted in to tell no-one in particular that I'm about to run my first marathon - the second one is in June. Still working on that damn novel, though.

airstrip one calling

2005-11-20T00:21:00.000Z

This wee blog's running on its last legs, but before it staggers to a complete standstill, asphyxiated in its own noxious fumes of inertia - just like the rest of the country - I'll send you to this scary little piece of news here to discover why we should all ditch our motors and get out and run.

And here's me thinking Orwell's vision of the future was written as a warning, not a fucking policy blueprint.

Allora. Non voglio scrivere più. Preferisco correre, scatenare qualcosa. Ma che cosa esattamente, e a dove vado, ancora non lo so.

Grazie per la lettura della mia storia. Spero che lo abbiate goduto. Forse scriverò ancora volta, ma in primo devo trovare le parole.

a different view of things

2005-11-04T16:24:00.000Z

what I love about running is its gathering
what I hate about Glasgow is its growl

what I love about travel is its ends
what I hate about rain is its front

what I love about a job is its work
what I hate about work is its toil

what I love about sleep is its dream
what I hate about clouds is their countenance

what I love about soup is its dice
what I hate about the cinema is its movie of the week

what I love about queues is their turn
what I hate about about friends is their chum

Aux jambes citoyens!

2005-10-31T20:57:00.000Z

Bravo !

Vous êtes inscrit, au Marathon de Paris du dimanche 9 avril 2006.

Inscription pour:
Nom : C
Prenom:
Montant : 60.00 Euros
Dossard : 2***1

Objectif: 3h45

Vous devez maintenant compléter votre inscription en envoyant votre certificat médical à A.S.O. Athlétisme - B.P. 182 - 92135 Issy Les Moulineaux Cedex.

N'oubliez pas de mentionner votre numéro de dossard.

En décembre, vous recevrez votre confirmation d'inscription indiquant la marche à suivre pour récupérer votre dossard, à Marathon Expo.

And I've booked the flight as well.

for the third and last time

2005-10-28T00:22:00.000+01:00

I'm doing a reading on Friday evening in a local twee-shop & I thought I might read my poems of the answers. Things are always better in threes so I made me another. Number three has a title.

"the road west and the unthought consequences"

Signals in the air tell me to evacuate,
which is excellent news;

this city hisses like radio static
and I'm remembering someone else's memories;

outside
it's warmer than anyone can imagine

and when it isn't raining (which is never)
there's still a cloud; sometimes there's a rainbow.

The trees shake out their dead
and pave the road west yellow.

I sometimes have conversations with the winds and the waves
that follow no real reason: drifting, searching, here -

I'll maybe chew my lips off
or speak with gravel in my mouth.

I know that one day the monkey will come down from the tree
and we will meet at the end of it all, when all is done.

Monkey, climb out of your tree
before the hurricane shakes you.

google oracle

2005-10-22T22:06:00.000+01:00

Inspired by Jon, I asked Google what "colin needs" and this - I kid you not - is what it told me. For crying out loud.

Colin needs a bath, Colin needs a bath
The Ould sod Colin needs your help.
Colin needs a bath, Colin needs your help

Colin needs a stable home life with better hygiene and routine.
Colin needs more consistent care and attention to emotional needs.
Colin needs Amy. Amy needs Colin. It should work out perfectly.

Carnival Colin needs bunting all sewn up.
Colin needs a team of committed people to pray for him.
From time to time, Colin needs teams of people to work on a mission with him.

Colin needs a cold cell.
Colin needs a lock for his door.
Colin needs to get busy. Colin needs a bath.

Colin needs his own name “Beaver”, “Trips”, “Cobra”
something, but not “The Champ” (no offence Colin)
Colin needs to ask the question, "In any case we might well ask how do we know if we have reached a point of worthiness or readiness to be included in the . . . ?

Colin needs to feel success in school.
Colin needs to quit repeating what I already said!
Colin is the master overclocker, right?

Conversely, Colin needs Cumberland to help him speak Gaelic so he can keep his job and Granny's house.
Poor Colin needs some shoes.
This is not enough for what Colin needs . . .

Mr Colin needs your help!
Colin needs to forget about his crazy dream of being a juggler and
Colin needs padding and the foam on this is quite soft and cushy.

Colin needs that wealth to rebuild his estates.
Is this one of the things Colin needs to undo, the belief that he is alone?
The fire brings Amy and Colin together in a time of chaos, when societal norms are briefly abandoned.

Colin needs to be more original, like he said he would.
Colin needs to get his life back to normal . . .
Colin needs some fast cash so he agrees to be the get-away driver on a bank heist for a trio of Afghani thugs.

Colin needs to have a walk after all the celluloid excitement.
But for his family's sake, Colin needs to focus on solving the mystery of his brother's disappearance.
Colin needs calming down or help going to sleep.

Colin needs her more than ever . . .

I swear to God. Google wrote this. But who the fuck is Amy?

Q & A

2005-10-20T20:58:00.000+01:00

For those of you averse to a bit of verse, look away now; I've been at the poyums again.

Yes, another "Poem of the Answers" workshop - same questions, different answers. It changes every time. I once explained to a group of students that part of the glory of writing (anything, not just poetry . . . but especially poetry) was that you didn't write it, so much as it wrote you. If you approach the practice of writing in the right manner, that is. You know, if you take it seriously, but have fun with it; concentrate on what you're doing, but keep your mind vague; be particular, but not get obsessive about detail. Etcetera. Do that and you find yourself writing things that you didn't quite know were in there. Sometimes, other people reading what you've written find things you didn't even know were in there.

Anyway, I thought it would be interesting to post the thing I wrote today & then put the questions that were used below.

In a room above the city by the park,
I am well-rested, on the edge
of something; precipitous.

A bright tomorrow, perhaps.
The memory of my past life as a future notion,
like someone looking for their own reflection.

I used to be amphibious. I remember
the air was thick like the ocean
and life was casual, comfortable.

Today, everyone's mourning
their dad or their dog or I don't know.
No clarity; uncertain how to answer.

Now, tell me -
what was the question?

Ahh. Yes. The questions. Allow us to become re-acquainted:

1. Where are you?
2. What are you wearing?
3. How do you feel right now?
4. What do you look like?
5. What can you see out the window?
6. Be quiet & very still . . . what exactly can you hear?
7. What does bacon frying in a hot pan suggest to you?
8. What does rubber smell like?
9. What does parsely taste like?
10. What does the sound of someone rubbing polystyrene do to you?
11. Imagine running your nails down a strip of sandpaper. How is that making you feel?
12. Think of your favourite colour. Now describe an object with that colour.
13. What's the weather like today?
14. What does the bottom of the ocean sound like?
15. Write down what occurs to you when you hear the word "serendipity".
16. Be honest here. What do you think of these questions?
17. What's your favourite kind of rain?
18. What's the last most important thing someone said to you before coming here today?
19. Think of the person you want to read this poem you are going to make from these questions. What would they say about your finished poem?
20. Three words to describe yourself.

Mode d'Emploi
Do not write in complete sentences.
Phrases are best: 3-5 words min.
At the end -
shuffle, add, delete, re-order etc.

The result is a poyum. Like it or no.

fry up

2005-10-20T10:14:00.000+01:00

Read this in last week's Observer. Stephen Fry was complaining about exactly the kind of poetry I posted in my previous entry . . .

His example of the worst excesses of "modern" poetry rather uncannily echoes my own.

cigaretted and drinked
loaded against yourself
you seem so yes bold
irreducible
but nuded and afterloved
you are not so strong
are you
after all

It's quite funny & he does have a point, but he also over-simplifies it a bit. But it does no harm every now & then to have some posh curmugeon with a prestige education moaning a bit about Peoughitrih. Keep the bally scruffs at arm's length, what?

poem of the answers

2005-10-14T12:35:00.000+01:00

Here's my effort from a writing workshop I conducted recently. The stimulus was a bunch of random questions. You make the poem by writing your answers on long strips of paper then at the end, shuffling them around and chopping them up, adding new bits etc until you get something like this:

Last night, I ran it all away and drank it back again –
my blood has been ionised and magnetised and spiked
like electricity, a sparkle;

somewhere there’s
a murmur of crows and a door creaks closed.

Domestic interior:
Saturday mornings with the radio on, coffee percolating; home
is a kitchen table, a plastic chair –
unsettled in life and mind,
the world a soft-focus black and white;

future spires and citadels, trees’ autumn leaves,
a glass half full, its empty half giving the open sky a come-on –
air thick with moisture
cold-pressed and condensed;
undecided, like a mouthful of hedge

co-ordinating earth tones,
womb sounds;
this planet is alive and thriving
in secret.

“I wish I had some room to move around in,
some space” – understand: progress, choice
smell like blood on all our hands.

I am today and tomorrow
uffish, intense, contrary
from my boots to my fillings.
Running like hell.

vengo della Scozia

2005-10-12T00:01:00.000+01:00

I just took my first class in Italian this evening. So far, so good - there are at least 4 belle regazze in the class. The professora isn't bad looking either (tho a bit too old for me). These things are important, believe me; keeps things lively. There are few things worse than being in a class full of earnest middle aged people armed to the teeth with stationery and stupid questions. It's a total beginners' class so it's all como stai, a dove vieni, come ti chiami, etc. (Scuse the spelling: I didn't take any notes.)

I had me a little mini-revelation earlier on, in a caffè, while I was working on my fiction. I was having a difficulty with the fact that most of the characters in my stories seem to be a version of me - which, if you've ever read a story where the main character is a stand-in for the author, is pretty wearing & wearying for everyone involved.

Now, every author goes through that difficulty - the thing is resolving it so that everything you write isn't autobiographical. Some writers do it better than others. You probably have an idea which ones - and they're not always the best ones, either.

Anyway, I thought about the kinds of personality that inhabit me, or which I can become in a given situation. Rodge did this with No Fireworks - I'm not giving anything away here to tell you that his character, Abe, is a terrible, possible Rodge 40 years from now. It's an ingenious conceit and the absolute crux of the alchemical transmogrification of raw experience into credible fiction.

So. I was thinking, what if - right? - what if I were to allow myself to be ME . . . only MORE SO. What if I were to TURN UP THE VOLUME. Why don't I invent a SUPERMAN me, a JAMES BOND me or a FEMALE VERSION of me or a ME TO THE HILT IN A KILT me.

Interesting, I thought.

Hmm, I hummed.

WHO, then, I said, WHO THE FUCK WOULD I BE?

Maybe I'd be . . . I don't know where this came out of, but it made complete sense at the time that I'd be an amalgam of Roberto Benigni, John Lurie and Tom Waits. With a side order of The Hulk. Just in case. I'm probably giving too much away here, now, but - frankly - who's reading? And, also, who really gives a fuck?

If you know yr Jim Jarmusch, you'll recognise this one. It's not my favourite movie by any means. In fact, given the choice, I think I'd rather watch Ghost Dog. There's something about that film, though, that I like - three characters being the expression of a single personality. I like it. It makes a lot of sense, even if this post doesn't.

I didn't stop there. I wondered - what if I were to narrow it down to ONE . . .

The end of it all - maybe cos I was thinking forward to the Italian class later - I decided I'd be ROBERTO BENIGNI. If I was to let my personality off its leash and run about the park and chase rabbits and bark at small children, I'd be EXACTLY the character Roberto Benigni plays in the Jim Jarmusch movie Night on Earth.

If you haven't seen it, he plays an unself-conscious & slightly lunatic taxi driver zooming about in a fucked Fiat in the dead of night in Rome wearing sunglasses and talking too loudly to himself. Later, he picks up a bishop and tells him a lewd, disgusting joke about a priest and a sheep. The bishop shows discomfort as the joke gets wilder and wilder, the driving erraticker and erraticker and finally the bishop's own heart ticker gives out and he pretty much dies in the taxi. After which Signor Benigni bundles him out and drives off, making the sign of the cross.

Now, while I'm no priest killer, nor could I find my way around Rome in a taxi, there's something impressively unhinged and uninhibited about the character that I like. It's like he's the opposite, perhaps, of my Roman Calvinist buttoned-up self. Given that I've been living in the emotional equivalent of the North Pole for the last four years, maybe there's a bit of a reaction to that, too.

After that I thought, well, I'm no Roberto Benigni. And anyway, he gets a bit annoying after a spell. His 20 minute spin in Night on Earth is about as much of him as I can stand. I'm glad I'm not an over-bearing Italian in a taxi wearing shades in the dead of night. But if I ever want to become that person, I can do so in fiction. This is the thing.

This is the thing.

The weather here is fucking dismal. It's been raining for a week & there hasn't been any sunshine for a month . . .

TAXIIIIIIIIIIII!!!!!

You know you're a runner when . . .

2005-10-09T14:16:00.000+01:00

. . . you just beat your personal best three times in one week and you want to make it a fourth.

. . . you don't realise your toes are clustered with scabby old blisters.

. . . you didn't notice your nipples were bleeding.

. . . the idea of running for an hour and a half in the rain doesn't put you off.

. . . even golfers say you're crazy for going out in that weather. I mean, golfers. They're the craziest people out there. Just look at the clothes.

. . . your body can't wait to go out running again.

Any that I've missed?

trio

2005-10-06T00:43:00.000+01:00

I listened to three albums today.

This one. Crazy, beautiful music that sounds like nothing on earth. Or nothing from Earth. There's two side to this LP: his quartet & the electric band Prime Time. If Ornette had come up with a catchy slogan - jazz to make girls dance, for example - and a slick marketing agenda his career might have taken an altogether different course. This music is still funkier than anything being made by people who use "funk" in their job descriptions.

This one. Utterly gorgeous. The music of wild open spaces. Textured, scientific, æthereal, deja vu. People hated their second album - ( ) - but I think they were judging by their own agendas. Watch a video, listen to music - here!

And this, long awaited, eagerly anticipated and ecstatically purchased one, which I've listened to over and over in an attempt to feel something for it. But the only thing I feel is, is that it?

A couple of tracks get me bouncy, the rest make me, well, indifferent. I don't know if I'm in the mood for a review here, just a moan. Maybe I need to be female.

*goes in search of last night's Buffy costume*

number slayer

2005-10-05T00:52:00.000+01:00

Never one to boast, I thought I'd reveal to no-one in particular & youse lot in general that I ran my first sub 20 minute 5k this evening.

It was on a treadmill, as opposed to a real run, but still.

Last week I did 4 miles in 28 mins which was a biggy for me then, but I had the under 20min 5k time in my sights. I suppose the aim is to get the 10k time down to around 45 mins, less if poss. Plans are in motion to book myself into a major European marathon in the first half of next year and if things continue the way they are in training then I'll be looking at a 3.30 time. Which would be cool.

Again, not boasting, but a guy I know but only see every few months remarked that I was looking amazingly fit this evening. In fact the word he used was "buff". At first I thought he was making a pass at me - cos the only time I've ever heard that word is when gay people compliment each other - but I looked in the mirror behind the bar and, realising that I was sporting a vampire-killer's stare, I understood immediately that I just looked Buffy.

That, and the blonde wig and fake tits I was wearing.

reasons to be cheerful

2005-10-03T00:23:00.000+01:00

One

Two

Three

To Be & To Have

2005-09-25T20:00:00.000+01:00

To be and to have: You are going to have to trust me on this one.

Have: This blog entry and the form it's in has a point.
Kind of.

Be: Yesterday I was at a picture house in Glasgow. They call it a Film Theatre, but they're just up themselves with that one. Doesn't make the fillums any better by calling a theatre.

Have: I've seen loads of films there over the years, but I've never been to the Parent & Child Saturday morning screening. I thought I'd be on my own - no popcorn munching talkative small people - since this week's film was a French documentary about a school in France, in French, with subtitles.

Be: I was wrong. I reckoned without Glasgow's middle classes.

Be & Have: Anyway, the film I seen was called Être et Avoir and is a marvellous inspiration for anybody in the teaching profession. The teacher's name is George Lopez - the embodiment of the Enlightenment ideal of what education is about, and the total fucking antithesis to the client-focussed, outcome-achieving, target-setting moronity that characterises the teaching profession in Scotland in the 21st century.

Be: If you ever thought that teaching could be about nurturing people, learning with them, loving what you do, loving the kids you work with . . . this is the one for you. I used to think like that before I really knew what went on in Scottish state secondary schools. Être et Avoir is a fucking revelation.

Have: I've been very unsettled since returning from my travels in the summer.

Be: Much of this is to do with my dissatisfaction with the country I call "home".

Have: I've long desired not to live here.

Be: There are many things about life in this country, this city, that I despise. There are many things I found on my travels that are in fucking short supply here.

Have: Now, with my life being a bit bendy and cartilaginous, I have the perfect opportunity to make that dream a reality. My brother has just realised his dream of living and working as a chef in Paris.

Be: He may not know it, but he's an inspiration.

Have: In many ways, I've had enough of living in this country. People have a tendency to fit you with little lead boots when they tell you that Glasgow has everything going for it, that it's the best city of its size in the UK, that it is compact and cultured and diverse and easy to get around.

Be: This is all true. But Glasgow is also a dangerous place, filled with mad sociopaths, violent alcoholics, knife weilding maniacs and more ugly people per head of population than any city I've ever been to. It is riddled with drugs addicts in the east, and smug bastards in the west. I want out.

Have: I've probably taken that too far, but you get the feeling tone behind the words, right. Maybe I need to chill out. Get out more. Get the most out of life. Go bungee jumping or salsa dancing or listen to more jazz or any of the other anodyne lifestyle options that are out there. Maybe that's it. Or, as I was advised yesterday, "Spend some more time with folks!"

Be: Yes! The crumbly old man with the shuffling gait and the face like a burst sofa who smelled like a kipper ashtray was right!

Have: Anyway, I had just come out of the picture house, high on teaching, fully self-satisfied & hypnotised, and was heading for a coffee & bun-flavoured lifestyle emporium when I was accosted. "Hy!" he shouted. "Hy!" again. I swerved the smelly old drunky, my mind fully focussed on the purchase of middle class luxury indulgences .

Be: I thought, "I'm in the clear!"

Have: I thought, "I've got away with it! I've escaped him with all of my spare change!"

Be: But I was wrong.

Have: "Spend some time wi people, ya daft lookin cunt!" was all he had to say.

Be: He was probably right, but I'm sure there are better ways.

get it round ye

2005-09-25T15:56:00.000+01:00

No hangover today, no excuses. But nobody telt me about the hills.

Got to Dumfries in plenty of time to register in the gorgeous Crichton campus, distant outpost of Glasgow University, where the half-marathon was to start from. Nice enough drive down, lots of bright green and dark grey combinations in the landscape. Rain never far away, fighting sunshine in the distance for dominance in the sky.

There were only a couple of hundred in this one. Again, no bagpipes or Mariachi bands to jig your jog at the mile markers, just the relentless slip-slap-slop of trainers on tarmac - music enough for me.

The route was a straightforward boomerang 6 and a bit miles in one direction, then 6 and a bit back through farmland and gently ululating (ai ai ai ai ai ai ai ai!!!!!) rural stuff, stiff southwesterlies and nasty rain smirrs.

I was surprised at my first mile to see 8.10 on the stopwatch - especially since the race had started at eleven o'clock. (Haw haw!) I wa even more surprised when, four miles later, I noticed I was maintaining that pace consistently with 32.50-something on the clock. The next four miles killed that, though, as we were taken up and down and round steep wee bastard hills, but by the time mile 9 came around I was back to about an 8 minute mile.

Which was pretty encouraging. I did the Glasgow half in 1.57, and had predicted this one at 1.50 just because I've been doing a lot of hardcore cardio training in the gym and figured I would take a few minutes off that time. Also, several thousand fewer people on the road with me meant that I would be setting my own pace the whole way, not having to walk at the start as I did in Glasgow.

But I was pretty damn pleased with my finishing time of 1.46. Seven minutes faster than my previous best. I horsed it the last two miles, which was encouraging too since on the Glasgow trot I was half baked by then.

Next half marathon's in Jedburgh on Halloween. Thinking about going as George Romero extra.

Dumfries

2005-09-24T23:47:00.000+01:00

Is a wee town not far from the border with England, about 2 car hours from Glasgow.

Is where Scottish poet-bard Robert Burns is buried in a big white tomb in a church that I visited in April this year.

Is a bit rubbish.

Has probably the shortest cycle path in the history of cycle paths.

Is pretty close to Lockerbie, where had an famous aircraft terror bomb in 1988.

Goes with Galloway.

But not Gorgeous George Galloway.

Rhymes with rum fleece, not dumb fries.

Is hosting a half-marathon road race the morra and I'm ®unning it.

Gaun ya . . .

Unrelated incitements

2005-09-20T22:56:00.000+01:00

1.
The BBC considers my language, my culture "Other".

This is not news . . .

2.
That the BBC still considers my language, my culture "Other" . . . well, that's a bit of a surprise, a bit sad. Other than what, for fuck's sake?

You have to wonder.

3.
This, sadly wasn't much of a surprise.

Scotland - Glasgow in particular - has been collecting world's worst accolades for decades . . . well, since Thatcher happened.

If you can't be arsed with hyperlinks, the Murdoch Times article says: "Scotland is the most violent country in the developed world, according to a United Nations report." Knife crime a speciality, especially against young men.

3.
This evening, after a particularly productive session at the gym (running faster for longer), I took the bus back to my temporary abode in Deadville, feeling relaxed and at peace with the universe.

Well, I say relaxed and at peace . . . but you have to know that my particular bit of the universe at that very moment was on the top deck of a double deck bus galumphing and juggernauting about on badly pitted roads at 60 miles an hour heading towards the ugliest town in Northern Europe (another accolade, awarded by me).

4.
The bus also contained junky scum in the dubious form of a blonde guy in his 30s with a crumpled face containing three black teeth. He was wearing a pink Pringle, jeans and a denim jacket. Very 80s, and the very embodiment of Thatcher's Dream. His hair, I swear, had highlights. Up close, three inches from my nose, his breath smelled of rancid spirits.

5.
I don't usually go around branding people "junky scum", by the way. Not without reason, anyway. Many of my students are recovering addicts with stories to tell; none of these stories are especially heartwarming, few of them are cosy affirmations of the human spirit, none of them nice. Things just happen to people, you know. Life, for many people, is less something that is lived, more something that happens to them, or befalls them. I don't judge; I try always to accept.

But there are limits.

6.
What are your limits? Where do you draw the line? When do you stick your neck above the parapet?

What is the limit of your tolerance of other people and their ways, their attitudes, their beliefs, their actions? Have you ever thought about it? Really? Seriously?

7.
I hadn't really thought about it. Not seriously.

8.
My line wasn't crossed when the junky scumbag was throwing vague, non-specifc insults at every non-white person on the top deck. Even when the insults became specific, my line was a way off.

Pretend it's not happening and maybe it'll go away, I thought to myself. Then, magically, a fog of disapproving thinks bubbles popped up from the heads of the twenty or so people in front of me, obcsuring the view from the top deck as lots of Deadland dwellers tutted and huffed. Some thinks bubbles read: As long as I'm behind my wee line, I'm safe. Or Don't look round, don't talk, don't raise the alarm. And above all, don't confront. DON'T CONFRONT! Maybe one day all the bad people will go away, maybe one day all the racists will leave us alone and see the truth.

9.
Yes. Maybe one day when we're all not looking, when we're all rigidly staring at the front of the bus, they'll go away. They won't have gone far, though - they'll have taken over. Just look at the Home Office & much of the London media.

10.
I didn't cross my line when the insults became menacing. "You're in trouble, pal," he said to a young Asian guy with a mobile phone. In the west of Scotland, someone calls you pal, run.

11.
Even "I'll smash your face through that fucking window" said for no apparent reason to this kid with the phone, that still kept me on my side of the line.

12.
But when junky guy got up and moved and sat right next to the Asian guy, a little toe crept across my line. This guy's in danger, I think. I turn and keep and eye on things. I don't know what I can do. I'm a big shitebag all told. But I put my bag out of the way in case I need to move quickly.

13.
"What the fuck you staring at?" he says to me. "You want to face the other way? This has fucking nothing to do with you." The Asian guy is maybe 20. Scared.

"I'm fine here," I say. Or something. "I prefer to look this way."

Junky guy joins me, moves away from Asian guy, sits behind me. "You think you're funny? Who do you think you are talking to me like that? I'll smash your head off that window."

Etc.

14.
He's not happy.

"Listen, I've had enough," I say. "We've all had enough. Now off you go. OK? This is your stop." Is what I say. More or less.

15.
He's even less happy than he was a moment ago. He's out of his seat. His finger - I keep swatting his finger away from my face. I feel like grabbing it and breaking it. But I don't. I keep swatting him away. When he gets up I push him back down, when he leans in I push him away.

I look over at the Asian guy and he moves out of his seat. Sensible lad. Leaves me to it. Rest of the bus still haven't cross their lines yet. I feel like they're miles away.

16.
Sitting down now, the scumbag says "We'll see how funny you find this, ya cunt."

He takes something out of his pocket. Out of sight, but between the seat backs I see something metal. First, my imagination creates a knife, then it makes a single gaping wound in my face. I hear his victorious cawing and see placid passengers thanking themselves for staying out of it, watching me walk down the aisle of the bus, bleeding, into the arms of a waiting, indifferent Polis.

I'm wishing now I stayed out of it, below the parapet.

17.
I think: knife.

Suddenly terrified, I say "OK, it's cool. Right? Leave it."

It's not cool. Very much the opposite. He rages some more. I try apologising. I say sorry. "Sorry," I say. "OK? Sorry." What the fuck for?

Where's the knife. I've seen Police on the news with every kind imaginable. For some reason I think of a butterfly knife. He looks like an 80s martial arts fan. I wonder how he'll attack. He stands up, raging, a tower of repetitive garbage spewing from his mouth, but I'm too terrified to push him down again, thinking that this is what it will take to push him over his line into actual violence.

"Say sorry, Johnny," he says.

"Sorry, Johnny." First name terms. Where's that fucking knife? Is it his idea to achieve humiliation then slash me? Is that it? I am aware that rage clarifies drunkenness.

More abuse, then that's it. His stop. Off he goes, taking a swipe at Asian guy as he passes. Misses.

18.
I'm on my feet. I say, to no-one, "the guy had a knife." No-one says a word to me. I feel stupid. As he left, I didn't see a knife in his hand, only sunglases. I feel stupid. No-one says a word to me. The Asian guy doesn't say anything. It's all humiliating. We've all been humiliated. We let that fuck up degrade and humiliate the Asian guy for close to twenty minutes and none of us put our heads above the parapet.

My face feels drained of colour. I feel tears coming on, but it passes.

19.
I feel other. I feel this town, this place is other. Other than what, though.

I wonder.

20.
My favourite Tom Waits album begins It's dreamy weather we're on/ you waved your crooked wand. . .

Waiting for me, then, when I arrived home were two postcards from the woman of my dreams.

Hold that thought, there. Puncture the cliché. Imagine postcards being sent to you from Dreamland. Look at that postmark. As if Alice suddenly grabbed your hand as you were brushing your hair (or trimming your goat) in the mirror and hauled you through. Not only is she the person you always hoped you'd meet, but when you wake up next morning in Deadville . . . she sends you postcards from Dreamland. Real ones made of paper and everything!

Things are not all right with the world, not really, but I've heard Dreamland's nice this time of year.

the old napper/ sphincter interface problem

2005-09-11T19:23:00.000+01:00

Well, that race that I raced (late as usual) out of the house this morning to register for . . . isn't till next week. And I have no-one other than myself to blame for my calendrical (?) stupidity. I tanked the motor down the East Kilbride expressway, birled round the Raith roundabout, entered Strathclyde Park looking for parking signs, charity 10k signs, "late entries this way" signs. . . and saw only stuff for some regatta that was happening this weekend on the lake. Cue sound of single penny clattering around in empty pig-shaped container. The drive home was less frenzied, suffice to say.

Anyway, once home and still dressed for some kind of running occasion, I treated myself to a ten-miler. At least I think it was ten miles. My average (total guesswork, since I don't have a fancy GPS thingy) is about 9 minutes a mile. I ran for 90 minutes. I'm not great at sums, but I figure I have this one all worked out.

I went the EK 10k route. It's a circuit that more or less begins and ends near my dad's house. I intended to just do all over again when I got back but instead decided to go the trail route through the country park since it was such a nice day. Tell you, it's fantastic not to be running on concrete or in traffic or along paths but out among trees and plants and weird 80s science fiction/ horror style deserted industrial units. (I'm thinking about Hallowe'en III, esp here.)

Ah well. The rest of the day was spent in the sauna/ steam cabinet/ jubbly-bubbly bath thing, trying to un-jam my head from my arse. Lunch was an over-priced tempura bento with boring cucumber sushi & two humungous nutrition-free rice ball thingys. Rip off. (Glasgow people: avoid the bento option at Ichiban!) Dinner will be a gigot steak & some purple-sprouting broccoli, home-cooked by me and therefore perfectly delicious.

status report

2005-09-11T01:13:00.000+01:00

OK, so it's pretty clear that we're going through a period of intense un-creativity here. Until I get a place of my own and out of my dad's house, until I settle down in my new post at the college, until the second part-time job I've been offered comes to pass, until my head is clear of all the shit that exploded since I came back from Canada - I have no room in my head for blogging anything of any consequence. And that title - stupid as it always was - seems ever more ridiculous. I'm in the mood for change and open to suggestion.

The running continues, though. At least there's that. Running in a 10k tomorrow, aiming for a good bit under 50 minutes this time. 50 is my PB, achieved in Stirling this time last year (on a pretty flat course it has to be said). I almost did it the last 10k I ran (Helensburgh), but I was shiteing it a bit then because of my knee trouble. Fingers crossed.

I probably put some noses out of joint by the snobbish comments I made about listening to music while running. Well. Too bad. I can only really speak for myself and running to music doesn't work for me. Mind you, it's 1.30am and I'm drinking beer - who the fuck am I to give anybody advice about running?

full-on Glasgow half

2005-09-04T18:39:00.000+01:00

I must confess to having felt a wee bit apprehensive about the run today. Well, more than a wee bit if I'm honest.

Around May/ June I started getting some real pain in my left knee. Every time I went out running the pain would come after about 40 minutes, bad enough to make any further running impossible. It hadn't happened before on any of the 10k races I'd run, nor on the training for the two half-marathons I'd run earlier in the year, so I got a hold of the Chi Running book and set about working on the way that I run. (By the way, if you're a runner and you don't own this book, sort yourself out with a copy immediately. Amazon is as good a place as any.)

This involved working primarily on foot strike and posture - mostly in the arms, shoulders and back - as well as rhythm, breathing and even self-talk. Basically, Chi Running is about becoming more aware during the run of what everything - mind & body - is doing. It's amazing what's going on there when you're aware of it: from the position of your head; whether your shoulders are level and not bunched up; whether you're lifting your feet correctly; making sure to lean forward and not slump and slouch from the hips (which I have a tendency to do). This awareness also extends to the environment around you: checking out architecture and geography, what the weather's doing, who else is on the street with you, etc. You become much more alive to the moment.

If nothing else, it makes the run more interesting; you get more involved with it. I look at people with iPods & MP3 players and wonder what the fuck they get out of running - as soon as you put music on, you shut yourself off from the experience. It's like they wish they were doing something else.

Having sat on my high horse, I'd like to dismount disgracefully by getting to the nub of my confession here. I wasn't exactly race fit. Sure, I'd been doing lots of running, lots of cross-training in the gym - the rower's become a particular fave - and a fair bit of interval training on the tread. But I had done nothing like the distance required for the half-marathon. Back in February, in grim preparation for the Paris half, I remember boggy plods along wintry canal paths, struggling to get further than 20 minutes without having to limp for a bit to regain a bit of puff. But, every weekend for at least six weeks the dutiful 'long run' training session was logged.

Not this time. 7 miles at most, once, a few weeks ago, but mostly distances between 2 and 6 miles. I could have horsed the 10k, no probs. Probably should have stuck to that distance, got a personal best. Plus, yesterday my head was up my arse. Last night I had bold plans for sensible eating - a plate of pasta as a late lunch, then tuna steak and a stir fry of asparagus, ginger and mushrooms with more carb in the form of some sesame-tossed noodles for dinner around 9pm. I never intended to open the wine. It just . . . happened, somehow. Habit, maybe? And I didn't mean to stay up till 2am watching old videos. That just sort of happened too. Then, when I looked and the wine was finished . . . well, I couldn't really blame anybody else since I was the only idiot in the room.

So, potential knee trouble, under-prepared, insufficient rest, a bit of a hangover, and my usual 'oh-fuck-is-that-the-time' last minute dash out the door . . . I'd be amazed too if I told myself I got round that course - in that heat (25°C) - in under two hours (1:57 according to my watch). I didn't stop either, not once - previously I've tended to have a bit of a stroll at the water stations, but this time it just didn't seem necessary. I tell you, that book has a lot to do with it. Not that I felt I could've kept on running forever or anything - the last two miles were torture - but I pretty much kept the form and pace I started out with, brightening up slightly towards the end with the boost the crowd gives you. Mind you, at the starting area, the commentators, filling the air with endless drivelling horse manure, gave me a bit of a fright when they said, "All you half-marathoners will be getting mentally prepared now, thinking about your race strategy, how you're going to run the distance . . . " I thought, after a wee panic, people have race strategies?! If I have one, it doesn't get more complex than make sure the right foot follows the left one; repeat until finish line.

I know it probably seems it, but this isn't some kind of extended bullshit boast about 'ooh look at me and how crap I am and still I shine through'. No. Like everything else here, it's an extended note to self. About how much better I could have run if I'd bothered putting in the preparation, cutting the idiot self-sabotage.

oh yeah, and . . .

2005-09-02T14:05:00.000+01:00

. . . I'm running a half-marathon on Sunday.

Some of my favourite things

2005-09-02T14:00:00.000+01:00

Stuck for stuff to post & it's been a while, so here's a thing I wrote as part of a lesson for one of the creative writing classes I teach.

Warm Rain on a Hot Day

Sometimes, in this part of the world, you can have enough of the rain. The endless variety of it can keep you in conversations at work or in the supermarket for a while – the smirrs and dribbles and haars; whether it’s pishing or spitting, dreich or drab – but too much of a good thing can spoil you.

I don’t know why warm rain feels so good . . . perhaps because it’s such a rare event in this country that we automatically associate the sensation with exotic climates, like the Tropics or the Mediterranean. Rain in Scotland usually feels like needles, especially when borne on the sting of a strong wind. A bit like liquid acupuncture without the therapeutic value. It makes you screw up not only your face, but your whole body - inside and out. Scotland is full of people twisting themselves into gnarled shapes from the wind and the rain and the cold.

Warm rain, however, is like a balm. Not acupuncture, then, but a soft and sensual massage. In a warm shower, rather than feeling tensed and difficult, you feel relaxed and loose. And when it really rains, monsoon style, like it does in the Tropics or the Med, the kind of rain you want to dance around in and lose yourself to, you feel as if the air and the sky and the whole earth have been purged and cleansed of all stain. Five minutes later, the rain has stopped as suddenly as if it were a faucet. As the clouds part, you are already beginning to dry, purged and cleansed too, soothed by nature’s healing balm.

A Good Pen

It has to be black. It has to sit sung between forefinger and thumb, pressed gently against the middle finger. It can’t be too long or too short, too fat or too thin. The tip can be ballpoint or felt, but it has to have an easy, steady flow of ink to catch up with sudden bursts of inspiration, or tricky, too-absorbent paper. The best pens, for me, are Pentel Pilots with the fountain nib – none of the mess of a proper fountain pen, but all of the finesse.

A good pen won’t help you write better, but it can help you write more. If you enjoy the physical experience of writing, it’s likely to be one you’ll want to repeat. A good pen won’t make your ideas flow any faster, but if the pen is able to glide fluidly across the page, who’s to say it won’t help your mind relax and flow too. A good pen won’t make people read your writing if they don’t want to – you still need to come up with all those good words and put them in the best order – but your handwriting will look so attractive they won’t be able to resist.

Coffee and a Bun

Black coffee, dark roast, brewed in an Italian stove-top moka – if you’re having it at home – or, better yet, served in a reliable coffee shop somewhere nice by a pretty, dark-haired girl. She doesn’t have to be Italian – though it’s better if the coffee is – and she doesn’t have to flirt . . . but these things hurt neither the ego nor impair the flavour of the coffee.

The bun, well . . . I use the word bun to mean “muffin”, really. Lemon and poppyseed is good. As is oatmeal or bran with honey. I’ve had raspberry with cream cheese, apple and cinnamon, almond, chocolate, double chocolate chip and Jaffa. I’ve even had one with just about everything in the kitchen in it. But the best is blueberry. Full fat with a bit of bran for the texture. Fat, flaccid berries wilted from the cooking that ooze blue juice when you squeeze them with your tongue.

You taste the bun, first with the aroma of the coffee tantalising the senses. The bun should have a moist, rich, cakey texture that just dissolves when you roll it about in your mouth, and when you sip the coffee with your mouth still half-full . . . it’s a sensation not unlike being in love. Then, when your pretty Italian waitress asks if you’d like another cup . . . well, that’s an invitation impossible to refuse.

. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .

There. It would be interesting to hear some of yourn.

Returnitis

2005-08-23T09:57:00.000+01:00

Oh yeah, the world's turned upside down

Followers of this blog may have an inkling into the kinds of music that make earworms through my brain. Radiohead, for instance, have soundtracked these last few months and carved themselves into my hard wiring. June-August 2005 will for evermore sound like techno-wonk rock miserablists.

Today it's Talk Talk, a band I had a big crush on waaaaaay back when Messrs Yorke et al were still learning how to (de)tune their guitars. I've got Spirit of Eden on at the mo, to get some old familiar energy. I'll maybe pepper this post with lyrics as they come along.

Returnitis is a bit like tinnitus. A background noise that comes from within, a constant irritation that's sometimes at the fringe of your consciousness, sometimes at its centre. Makes it difficult to fully engage with the world around you. For some people it fades away; other people live with it forever.

I'm in a queer place right now and no mistake. Have been for months. Sfunny, you think you're dealing with shit, you think you're on top of your game, you think things are peachy-creamy . . . while all along you're kidding nobody but yourself, and everyone stands around waiting for the car you're waving at them from to crash the barriers. And crash them barriers did, the minute that plane touched Glasgow tarmac.

I have no true North. The hands on my clock are all bendy. The path I walk rises up and falls away. Since me & Other C - should probably call her X now, since she's not really my other anything - turned our backs on each other, we've both been kind of adrift. She at least can call the same place home. With me it's a bit more, uh, open to suggestion.

So I'm temp resident at my dad's place in the town where I grew up. The town, East Kilbride, is a grim place - on a bad day it can look grimmer than grim - but it's one of Scotland's better grim places (this person likes it anyway). It's a New Town - well, not any more since it was built in 1947, but the designation kind of stuck. "New Town" just means that it was designed and engineered by Socialist planners after the Second World War to house people after Glasgow's slums were cleared.

In East Kilbride, nothing is quite as it seems. Fields are car parks, castles are playparks, paths lead nowhere, signs don't signify. Giant, lugubrious propellers spin for quixotic cows in a clinical landscape of commercial real estate and protected raised bog. Maybe some of that is projection. Whadjy think?

The best thing about the town is that it's easy to get out and into the country. All the better reason to leave the town behind and go out walking on a clear day, something that's possible in Glasgow only with some kind of wheels at your disposal. In fact, since this is supposed to be a running blog and all, I'll tell you that I went on my first trail run yesterday morning. Must have been a good 10k, at least. It's fantastic to be running through trees and shaded glen; running up, down and sideways; jumping logs; breathing freshly minted air; being smacked continually on the napper by humblebums and flutterbys. The sounds the forest makes! What a racket! Whoever says the countryside is peaceful is kidding themselves.

Anyway, the route was so pretty and the air so fresh, and there were such marvellous things to be seen along the way that I came home, showered and went straight back out for a long walk with the camera.

Check it. One last lyric from the sublime Talk Talk:

I'm just content to relax/ than drown within myself

Maybe I'll believe that one day.

I just "de-planed"

2005-08-14T09:01:00.000+01:00

Deplane. Now, there's an odd NAm coinage for you. The Chambers has it, though - sans hyphen - so it must be all right. I wonder if you can de-train, too. Or de-bus. Imagine saying that to a Glasgow bus driver. Here pal, mind if I de-bus at these lights.

I'm listening to Kid A. How to Disappear Completely is playing and it somehow captures my mood this fine morning back in Old Europe. That there/ That's not me, he sings. I go/ Where I please. Then, rather weirdly, he floats down the Liffey. Which is in Dublin, not Glasgow. That line might have applied to Brian a couple of weeks ago, but he disappeared completely from there already. Anyway, Mr Yorke continues, In a little while/ I'll be gone/ The moment's already passed/ Yeah it's gone/ And I'm not here/ This isn't happening/ I'm not here/ I'm not here.

Well, that's jetlag for ya. I wonder if he was flying Air Transat when he wrote those lyrics.

Is this making any sense? If you're having trouble, go here for a taste of the truly strange then come back and tell me I still don't make sense.

I'm really on the blog to tell you about my latest airport scenario. It's not about the fidgety Canadian oaf with the leaky stereo headphones & shite taste in music who also, endearingly, had zero notion of personal space so spent the entire flight with his left leg and arm glued to mine, twitching without relent. No, not that. Nor is it about the snotty crew who spent the entire flight rolling their eyes any time anyone did anything. And it's not the story about the grumpy Scottish guy currently helping Police with their enquiries into the sudden brutal mid-flight de-planing of an oafish Canadian with leaky headphones and shite taste in music. Though that would have made a pretty good story.

No, this story concerns a different guy who tootled harmlessly around the streets of Toronto, tootling off his hangover - developed at leisure the previous evening in the generous company of Ms Glacia, no less - browsing in nice shops in Little Italy, Kensington Market, the downtown area, the arty bit of Queen Street and points in between. Tootling, when he should have been packing his bag. Moseying, when he really ought to have been calling a cab. Trundling back to his friends' house in a streetcar when it would have been better for him to be driving to the airport. Because you never know what can go wrong if you leave things till the last minute.

The flight I'm on leaves at 6.55pm. At 4.30 I'm still replying to emails. At 5pm, I'm in the shower. I've already packed, so that's OK. I've been left in charge of the house while my friends are at their cottage for the weekend, so everything is locked, drawn, bolted and unplugged - so that's fine too. I've got loads of time. I just need to call a cab. Suddenly, don't know how, it's 5.20. The woman at Yellow Cabs tells me straight away. I tell her urgent. She says ok. I wait. 5.25pm. No cab. I give it till 5.30. I say I need to leave already. She says we're on it. I say how long. She says, soon, exasperated.

At 5.40 I say bullshit and start walking. By this time I've posted the house key and can't get to a phone. My flight leaves in about an hour and I'm not even close. If YYZ is anything like Heathrow it will take an hour to get to the gate from check-in.

My friends' house is close to a main road, which is where I go stand and wave at lots of occupied taxis. A cab pulls over, front wheel rattling alarmingly. I think he stops because his cab's fucked, but no. He must smell the desperation, thinks I might be sweating money. Turns out he's on a call already, same street as my friends' house, but he's curious. As soon as I mention "airport" it's like a magic password. He cancels the call he's on making an excuse to his boss about his dodgy tires. Given the noise his wheels are making, his excuse is a convincing one. I wonder idly if I might be involved in one of these freak chains of events that will lead to a fast ugly death and a few column inches in tomorrow's Globe and Mail.

On the highway, the taxi driver - a chipper Somali dude with one eye on me, the other on the meter - seems to steer his vast, fucked cab across three lanes simultaneously. Every bump in the road launches the vehicle sideways and across. I am aware of other traffic keeping its distance. I don't have to say "step on it". I get ETA reports every 30 seconds.

I have resigned myself to humiliation at the check-in desk, a hefty chunk out of the savings and lots of awkward questions from smug people, possibly an expensive night in a hotel, and another couple of rides in the Death Cab for Cutie. As we approach the airport and decisions need to be made, I realise I don't even know what terminal my flight leaves from. My driver is kind of impressed.

It is 6.15. I have 40 minutes.

All I can say is, God Bless Canadians and their relaxed "anything goes, everything is possible, nothing is too much trouble" attitude. After I de-taxied, it took 5 seconds to check in, a couple of minutes shuffling at the security check, and a stroll to the gate via duty free. I really did have loads of time. They hadn't even started boarding, just pre-planing the kids and cripples. If this had happened in the UK, there would have been any number of officious bastards queuing to tell me it couldn't be done/ the flight was closed/ I was too late/ a new ticket would cost me $XYZ/ why was I late anyway and who do I think I am to be arriving here at this time, don't you know the rules.

I wonder what it is that makes me do this every time I get a plane. Like there's a danger signal that fails to go off when I look at my watch. Is it denial? Am I just stupid? Who knows. At least it gave me that extra hour or so tootling round Toronto.

Oh, and there is a debus. And detrain. No hyphens. And not NAm coinings either, according to the Big Dic. There's also debark, which means what you think it means, debride, which doesn't and who knows what decameron might mean and how he might feel about it. There's to debrief, of course, which is not the same as to debag.

Fnarr, fnarr. Hours of endless. But enough of this semantic detour. Ciao ciao, till de next time.

Things I learned in Vancouver about food

2005-08-06T03:04:00.000+01:00

OK. Number one. A roll is a bun; a bun is a roll. Like, cinnamon rolls and bacon & egg breakfast buns. Wrong, wrong, wrong. But to be fair, the rest of the world gets this wrong too. For the last time, troops: roll savoury, bun sweet!

Number two, while we're on the sweet savoury thing, chocolate chilli ice-cream is good for a lick. Maybe two licks. No more than two licks.

And, number three, garlic ice-cream - yes, garlic ice-cream - belongs with something else. Like lasagne meringue pie or salt pork custard tart.

Four. Vietnamese sandwiches don't arrive on a gravy boat, but have a kind of gravy in them. A kind of garlic gravy. Like ice-cream.

Five. Bubble tea isn't tea. And the bubbles aren't bubbles.

Six. Muffins for breakfast, no matter how tasty and delicious, will make you put on in a fortnight the same amount of weight it took you two months to lose in the gym and on the run.

Seven. A little piece of heaven. When Canadian grocers and butchers and delicatessens die, they go to Granville Island.

Number eight. Cooking for two, shop for one.

That also, number nine, goes for ordering in cafes & restaurants. Except when you order the tasting menu (with wines) in C Restaurant. Then you pay for four.

Ten. Despite their popularity and proliferation, you cannot get drunk in a Canadian coffee bar. You can get very, very edgy though - especially when you get a large coffee. Which is, like, for all intents and purposes, a pint. You can't even get drunk in a Canadian beer bar. Not unless you're really trying, or on the spirits.

Eleven. I had one server in a liquor store (that's an offy to you, pal) call spirits hard bar. "I'd like to buy a wee bottle of brandy. You got anything like that?" I said. "Sorry, we don't do hard bar," she said. Hard bar.

I have a friend who - number twelve, and this is the last - says that learning to cook is like learning a language. That food itself is a language. As you select ingredients, he reasons, so do you choose your vocabulary - according to taste, preference, season, etc. And the process of combining these ingredients is, he might say, analagous to combining words in a sentence; a meal might be a paragraph, or even a narrative.

All this is just to say that, it is my experience that when one cooks for others one should always be saying I love you, no matter who it is, and even if it's just a plate of crackers & cheese. Do this, and your life will be a richer, happier place. I betcha.

That's it for now. There's more this journey than just food, you understand. Just so as that's clear. I'll need a wee bit of time to digest it is all.

So, off to Montreal now. To be continued.

Stanley Park

2005-08-04T08:55:00.000+01:00

It's 10.5k round the outside, round the outside. And you can go into parts of it as well, but I didn't do that. I just went around the outside. I've been meaning to jog it, but today the heat here was infernal - despite the ocean breeze - so I just walked it.

Stanley Park occupies almost the entire peninsula at the west end of Vancouver's downtown. It's bigger than Central Park in New York and, allegedly, has coyotes and all kindsa wildlife roaming around inside it. Scary or what.

There are many useful signs all the way around the park, some of them more useful than others. Here's an example of one:

You can see the rest of them by clicking here. The set's called Stanley Park XOX. Not that I was especially in love with the place - though as parks go, it's a goody - just that I was looking for something to photograph & this kinda suggested itself. I like the idea of the simultaneous and contradictory notions of forbidding and containing that these symbols signify, which rather conflicts with its internettiquette designation as "hugs & kisses". Especially given some of the signs you find here.

Like this one:

Not really sure what that sign's all about. With hair like that, I think the poor guy just needs a hug.

I met someone else who needs a hug today. Further round the island, near English Bay, where the beaches begin, there's a sign to cyclists to dismount & walk - as a coutesy to the pedestrians I suppose.

So, I'm walking along behind this guy, who's about my age, and these two cyclists come cruising by. Not aggressively or too quickly or anything, just calmly, getting in no-one's way. But not walking either.

The guy in front of me starts shouting the odds at them. I don't really hear his exact words, but I can tell he's not happy.

As I begin to overtake him he says to me, "Man, this city is really bad at following rules."

I say, "Good for the city, man. Good for them." cos I'm a limp-wristed pinko liberal commie crypto-anarchist.

And he says, "No. That's not a good thing. That's a bad thing." We could argue, but - you know - I'm 33, life's too fucking short.

As I walk away, a *thinks* bubble pops open above my head and it says "nutter". I look round and, though he's not aware of it, there's one above his head too and he's thinking "asshole".

Later on, I find Denman Street, which crosses the peninsula & takes you back to the Lost Lagoon and I complete the circle.

Whistler

2005-07-30T01:10:00.000+01:00

SnoMoron, the sign says, and I think how apt.

I'm in Whistler, an "activity village" in the mountains of British Columbia and all around me are active-looking people on bikes with tractor tyres, skateboards with suspension, and regular skis - tho there ain't no snow (sno?) nowhere. I wonder, judging by the number of them parked here, if places like Whistler exist to allow people in cities to justify their purchase of Sports Utility Vehicles. Well, of COURSE we NEEDED one . . . we go ta Whistler every year.

Unfortunately, the sign doesn't say SnoMoron. Shoddy typography hides a lazy pun: SnoMotion. Yawn. But it puts me in a quirky mood. I bet there's more signs like that here.

It's rather an unkind stereotype to label outdoorsy people in sportswear as unthinking thrillseekers living that unexamined life that Socrates warned us all about - especially the "extreme" lot, but more on them later. For now, I'm interested in how these people tend to resemble their transport. Outdoorsy sports people just don't walk like other people. They sort of prowl, like they have 4x4 legs, low-rider hips, maximum suspension. And everybody cruises, looking really pleased with themselves. Then there's the clothing. So much room. And hats. Hats in summer. You gotta wonder. Do you get convertible SUVs?

I have my hat on. My irony hat. I'm so detached and distant from this place I have to keep looking for my sour reflection in shop windows to check if I'm actually here.

OK. First irony alert. Whistler's really big on re-cycling. There are re-cycling bins everywhere, even ash-trays (ash-trays!) on every other lamp-post. In my hotel room there were at least three reminders to me about how I can help "save" the planet (put out the lights, put my bottles in the special re-cycling bag, and a subtle hint to use my towels more than once.) But the village itself is an environmentally unfriendly man-made creation that didn't exist at all until somebody put it here and invited the skiing, boarding, loafing baggy-brigade to roll up with their monster SUVs and carve ruts in the hillside and shit and piss in the rivers. And they fine you up to $2000 for dropping litter along the Village Stroll?

Last night, doing the inevitable "outraged Brit" flicker through the streams of endless advertising that North America (yes, Canada, you too) calls "television", I paused for long enough to catch a guy in sno-boarding costume say that he considered himself "over" the whole extreme sports thing. The way I understood it, he was saying he was past the idiotic thrill-seeking-for-the-sake-of-thrill-seeking thing, that he considered himself a connoiseur of mountain sports. An artist or philosopher, even. Not for him "extreme" sports, then, but "severe" sports. And then he went and demonstrated the difference with a "hey dude, look at me" performance the same as everyone else was doing on that mountain in those kind of clothes.

SnoMoron indeed.

So, stuck in Whistler for the day, I went looking for more bad signs. I wasn't disappointed.

Peak Performance Physical Therapy. Yep. Peak. It's up a mountain. It's a massage place, which makes you wish they'd called it "Peek", and then we could all watch.

The Old Spaghetti Factory is brand new. And it's a restaurant, not a factory. Who the fuck wants to eat in a factory?

Occitane en Provence is brazenly lying. Who are they trying to kid? Provence is miles away. Hundreds of miles away, even.

Guess. I don't have to. You're a rubbish over-priced global retail clothing outlet.

Fanatyk Co is irritatingly mis-spelled. "Extreme"-ly mis-spelled.

Most are just fucking dull, or pedestrian and literal. The worst kind of sign. Like Smile gifts. Or, and I kid you not, Rocks & Gems rock and gem shop. Then there's Memories activity adventures - Hey remember that time you broke all your limbs skate-cycleboarding down a mountain in Whistler?

Sadly, you can't buy a glacier in The Glacier Shop, not even a timeshare on one. Nor, thinking laterally here, can you get a sno-cone. It's a clothes shop. And not a very cool one.

Not quite sure what to make of Holey Shirts. Maybe the joke's just too fucking obvious.

Call me corny, but I like Skitch ("knicknacks and paddywacks"). I even like it enough to go in . . . and sure enough . . . it's kitch. Or just kitch enough. There's too much scented candle and crafted pine for my liking, but the shop is redeemed by a series of models (bi-wing aeroplane, helicopter, Harley) made out of Budweiser and Coke cans, and - the highlight - a collection of cocktail and shot glasses made from toy cars. I'm tempted to get one, for the sheer novelty, but I'm still in ironic detached mode. I am not (that) amused. I don't need a shot glass with wheels. I don't even need a shot glass. When has anyone ever needed a shot glass?

Castros Cuban Cigar Store makes me wince and spit and tut . . . and that's before I clock the missing apostrophe. Then I fume and foam and fulminate.

Never Stop Exploring seems to offer uncommonly sage advice, like it's some kind of subliminal imperative to the legions of baggy dullards here living life unexamined. Exploring, it seems to exhort, doesn't just mean riding a bike on a muddy trail somebody else carved out for you! Carve your own paths in life! But no. It just sells clothes.

Finally, I'm really curious to know what's particularly "extreme" about Spanky's Extreme Take-out apart from that name. I stroll in and check out the menu - pizza, hot dogs, burgers, ice cream. Nothing you could call extremely original, nor extremely appetising for that matter. The girls who work here aren't extemely good-looking (though there's some "severe" competition in the village) nor are they extremely competent - the order for the guy in front of me is taking ages. I consider asking, when it's my turn, what's "extreme" about their food but I remember I'm in Canada - the politest country on Earth - and that would be extreme bad manners on my part.

And then. Then it all clicks. I see the girl drop the extremely complicated "hey dude, look at me" hot-dog that she's assembling (tomato, cheese, mayo, chilli, onion, lettuce, etc) and I wonder if the whole "extreme" thing - and not just at Spanky's - isn't just extremely over-cooked.

Van Dusen Botanical Gardens

2005-07-28T06:18:00.000+01:00

I am sitting on a bench donated by the Evergreen Garden Club watching the world with an entry ticket go by. The bench is kinda brown, rather than evergreen, but plenty else here is green so I guess it's OK.

An orange shirted pre-nuptial photographer is trying too hard to make the bride-to-be laugh; she's trying too hard to laugh. That's a lot of humourless giggling. The groom-to-be isn't laughing at anything, just draping an arm, planting an arse where directed. He'll make somebody a good husband some day.

A Polish family with an All-Canadian teenage daughter conversing bi-lingually. Mum says eating too much food's a sin; daughter says it's OK to have a gross-out day every once in a while where you eat, like, a whole box of chocs all to yourself. I think they're both right - though it probably depends on the relationship you have with your priest - and the thought occurs that the Polish language is beautifully melodic. But probably not on a gross-out day, mouths crammed with kielbasa sausage and pickles.

A sausage-faced Lanarkshire woman, with a reduced-fat version of herself in tow, waddles up the slope towards me and says, in a perfect passive-aggressive Lanarkshire accent: "I think I need a seat" just as she passes the seat I'm sitting on. She pauses for effect - or for breath - then gathers herself with a huff and waddles on. There's plenty of room for two on the bench, though probably not two of her.

By the pond, an exuberant boy shouts at the cops! the cops! We're being followed by the cops! he says. And I wonder what he's talking about until I realise he's talking about the carp! the carp! in the pond. And, sure enough, they're following him. Which strikes me as a bit sinister for a moment before I realise they're not going to follow him very far.

Someone says, "Yeah, but you're not an old lady, so it doesn't count" and I spend the day searching for a context.

The Polish daughter passes again and she's pretty for about ten seconds before I imagine her on a gross-out day, ten years later, twenty-five stone, mouth full of cabbage.

". . . and you know what it is . . . every time she leaves him, she misses him."
"Right."
"And she gets lonely."
"Yeah. It's trying to find somebody."

Another person strolls past wearing bright orange. That's the third.

Tiny girl, big boyfriend -
photographing feet in a waterfall.

Dragonfly mating dance on a lilypad;
the sleepy old cops.

I meet:
Trout Lily
Sweet Olive
English Holly
& Winter Hazel

Trout Lily's my favourite, quite a kisser I bet.
Wild Ginger's a passionate red-head.
Creeping forget-me-not, a slimy stalker.
And the Weeping Beech . . . probably deserved eet.

I find Eddy's White Wonder Dogwood and wonder what they use to play 'fetch'.

For writing,
there's paperbark maple, Mexican papyrus.
And Whipple's Penstemon
might be useful - who knows.

Making poems from names,
like foamflower and fringe cup
sweet box
& tickseed.

Snakebranch spruce
Cushion spurge
Longleaf lungwort
& squill

Windflower
Sun Rose
& Golden Full Moon Maple

. . . . . . . . . . . .

Falling asleep in shady glades,
blissfully aware.

Plane (never again)

2005-07-26T19:20:00.000+01:00

The word is AirTransat.

Or is that two words?

Or is it a brand name? In fact, thinking about it, is a brand name a word. I mean, technically? Name . . . noun . . . etymologically, yes. Probably.

And, still thinking etymologically, what does this noun/ name AirTransat mean?

"Air" meaning lack of substance or bluster; affected style.
"Trans" meaning, of course, across.
"At" is an abbreviation for Atlantic.

Taken together the word/noun as a whole means: avoidavoidavoidavoidavoidavoidavoid and pay the extra hundred quid to fly Air Canada - it's worth it.

If you're going to travel for ten hours straight you'll probably want to know that the space you're going to occupy for that length of time wasn't designed by a narrow midget.

As a reward for checking in early, I was given a seat in the middle of a row between two very nice women. All the other passengers were jealous I'm convinced - given the frequency with which they came to visit us - of our position between the two toilets in the middle of the plane. Some of them were generous enough to leave the doors open for us, perhaps thinking that we might enjoy the fresh air, or a change of scenery since we didn't have a view out the window. Shut doors can be really boring to look at.

I'm told that the view coming in to Vancouver airport is stunning, but I had to take the word of the people coo-ing and ahh-ing, necks craned port and starboard. I caught a glimpse of a rusty container over some bald dude's napper as we taxied in to the terminal.

Even better was the chair-kicking hayseed behind me for the full duration. He had a really uncanny knack for divining when I was about to nod off then find an excuse to rummage about in my kidneys with his toecaps. Psychic. You might even call it magic. If he's any good with a pack of cards he should get his own TV show.

Best of all, however, was the improptu performances by the experimental pre-fives glee club singers exercising their tonsils at maximum volume in rotation, one after the other. Like a relay-race. One particular stunt-wailer about fifteen seats away seemed intent on shattering the inches thick cabin windows. Either that, or it wasn't a singer at all, but a sinner being visited by the One True Satan, Lord of all that is Terrible and Awful. One delightful wee tot 2 rows away picked up on this and joined in, you know, in that dry, forced, wretching "attention please" way that some kids endear themselves to you with.

I blame the parents. When I was a lad it was "Och, wheesht. It's not that bad" and you'd be happy with a comic and a lolly to lick.

Anyway. I'm here, experiencing joy.

If youse are wondering about Italy, I'm not blogging it cos the title wouldn't rhyme (honest, that's the real reason). If you're really curious, cliccare qui. It was beyond fantastic. Some things are better just left unblogged.

Train

2005-07-19T10:14:00.000+01:00

It took some 30 hours of travelling to get from southern Spain to northern Italy. Useful time to cogitate and ruminate and chew the year's cud. For all that visiting friends is one of the best ways to spend your free time, it still helps to gain a bit of solitude and distance.

Except I wasn't alone for a single second of the trip. And I don't mean the other travellers. There's a presence, very keenly felt. A real person one day, no doubt, but I don't know who. Not really. Not really. I am accompanied on this trip by the ghost of my desire, as I have been now for many months. And I think I'm going a little bit mad.

Some photos:

Here's me on the train to the French border. I'm in first class because the rest of the train's full and I bought the ticket only yesterday. It's beautifully cool - but not too cold, the way it can sometimes be in air conditioned spaces. There's a kid halfway down the carriage who won't stop talking until he gets off at Barcelona. It's OK though; I don't mind him. He's cool. Just wee and excited, rather than annoying and moany. When we find the Catalan coastline, he shouts "la playa! la playa!" everytime we see the beach. Adorable, and I envy his simple, unrestrained enthusiasm.

I've got a single solitary seat at the rear of the carriage. I nod off from time to time. Dreaming.

I'm Don Quixote off on his adventures, living an insane fiction, dreaming of his Dulcinea.

I get off in Port Bou, end of the line in Spain. My train to Italy leaves from Cerbere, on the other side of the Pyrennes. Port Bou is a pretty little village that descends from the hillside towards a neat little bay. It has a sleepy, dreamy quality to it. Or maybe that's just me. I have five hours to kill which I do by wandering around, buying a few small things and having a little light supper on the terrace of an over-priced restaurant by the sea.

I'd rather spend time here than in Cerbere, a dump of a place with absolutely no redeeming features whatsoever. I used to live down the road a bit in Girona and travelled this route many times - though usually by bus - to meet the girl I was in love with at the time. She lived in Perpignan. We had lunch here once. It was a beautiful time of my life - but life had other plans for us both. This is a part of the world I never thought I'd see again.

Weirdly, the memories I am having right now are future ones.

To get to Cerbere I have to take the regional train. In the station, swallows have fun chasing each other through the rafters. I try to stand at peace and enjoy the warmth of the air, but I'm tormented a bit. The train is late and it's the last one of the day. Trains are rarely late in Catalunya - the mentality here is more Teutonic than Latin. I speak to a couple of German guys and suggest that if the train doesn't turn up, we share a taxi. One of them used to live in Glasgow across the park from where I used to live. It doesn't mean anything, but we're both tickled and for a moment the whole world shrinks to the size of a neighbourhood.

The train turns up, full of backpackers. All sense of harmony with the world vanishes in the flash of a Eurail pass. A thousand identikit Ethan Hawkes looking for their Julie Delpy, or the other way round.

At Cerbere, the full extent of the horror is revealed as the train station becomes a George Romero movie with good-looking extras. The train for Italy leaves in an hour. There is a confusion of tanned arms and legs eddying around, a babble of accents; small girls with impossibly huge bags, lean Nordics, rangy north Americans, facelessly pretty girls everywhere. Nobody is ugly.

But on the train, I am the interloper among the Inter-railers. Now I'm the bogeyman. Some Freddie or Jason: the suspicious, sweating, older bearded guy in black. It doesn't help that the lights are off in the carriage, there is no air, and outside the temperature is still in the high twenties. I share a couchette with five shy Japanese girls. I feel their horror, but really I'm just the red herring in this movie. As the train sets off, the girl above me says "Good night" and nobody gets murdered.

I wake up as the train arrives in Nice. Which is nice. The girls have gone, leaving a palpable sense of relief in the air. Or maybe that's my feet. . .

I stare out the window watching the curve of the coast ("la plage! la plage!"), dreaming again. Present with my Dulcinea. A bit melancholy. Thoughtfully, I leave my camera as a gift for someone I will never meet.

I really ought to call Luca, but I'm confused about trains. One leaves at 9. My ticket costs 9 euros. That makes one euro change out of 10 o'clock. Or do I change at Cuneo?

I buy a coffee and a bun which I acquire by paying the tobacconist and presenting the receipt to the guy sweeping the floor. Somewhere the clocks are striking thirteen.

On the train, I sit across and down from the most beautiful girl I think I have ever seen in my life. She is wearing a short white skirt, a pink top. Her blonde hair is tied back loosely. She's about 18 or so. She looks across at me and smiles and my heart explodes through my chest, making a bit of a mess. I apologise to everyone, feel guilty about betraying Dulcinea - who, being the woman of my dreams, is lovelier by far - and sneak occasional glances in her direction for the duration of the trip.

The train fills up completely with French people on their holidays. The carriage is hot and cramped, but nobody complains. Everybody is cool.

Change at Cuneo and try not to perv this girl too much, but it's impossible. As night follows day, eyes of man follow belle ragazze. She's with her mother and brother. They're doing a crossword together and the brother sits incestuously close.

I remember nothing about the trip from Cuneo to Torino. Nothing.

Arriving, I buy a phonecard and call Luca who thinks I've missed all my trains. Ten minutes later, Roberto and he arrive and it's just fantastic. One more train to their car. The door jams on the train as we get off and the driver is a babe. In the UK, train drivers are grumbly old men with a paunch, a stoop and a bit of a limp.

Here, now, I am in my place. Everything else is in its place. The miracle of travel.

Spain

2005-07-18T07:41:00.000+01:00

Now it's raining outside like sex after an arguement.

Spain was:

geographical geometry.
dead fly cemetery,
stop signs and bunting.

teenage kicks,
boys throwing petards
for gob-smackingly gorgeous Rosalyn

owl spotting
and cycling into a wind that sprang from nowhere.

Dilini's 1001 Nights spice cupboard
full of potions and tinctures,
spells and incantations;
an almost mystical fish curry
& daal to die for.

Family Sunday lunch at Bar Portillo.
Saffron hued chicken & chickpea broth with morcilla.
Moorish, moreish.

Alicante hotter than the very jaws of hell.
THE JAWS OF HELL!
Concrete holiday suburbs.
Mad dogs & Englishmen basting
in the midday sun.
(Stick a fork in their ass & turn them over,
they're done.)

Don Quixote for a pillow.

With Gordon, putting the world to rights.

automobile, plane, automobile, automobile, train, train, train, train, automobile, train, train automobile and plane. Then two more trains.

2005-07-17T08:41:00.000+01:00

I've been trying to think of a way of distilling the last week in some bloggy form or other, but looks like it's going to be the old type-and-see-then-edit-furiously method.

First up, the news that I left my camera on a train in Ventimiglia. Some fucking cleaner must have thought it was Christmas. Think of all the useless crap you carry about with you that you'd just love to leave on a train - pens that don't work, fat notebooks full of the unrestrained haverings of your mind in its darkest moments, crap paperback novels you can never get past page 9 with, the jerky CD walkman you want to replace with an iPod, your evil temper, that person you've been with for too long & never got round to ditching. They should all be on trains somewhere, being dumped into a big black bag. Precious and pretty little cameras that light up your wee world occasionally and that let you see the odd little corners of existence that would otherwise pass you by . . . it almost makes me weep to think what horrible fate has fallen its way. What ham-fisted American in floral print pants, what grasping old Greek, what opportunist Londoner, what its currency might buy.

There was a little series of stop signs in Spain that I was kind of looking forward to working with. Some of wee Ben - easily the coolest four year old in the hottest part of Spain. A few urban rhythm shots of Alicante. Some faux serieux self portraits of your humble blogger here looking windswept and interesting on a beach in Port Bou. And a swiftly grabbed pic of Monaco from the window of that train. I guess we arrived in Italy sooner than I anticipated and left in a mad rush, more concerned about whether I'd put my toothbrush in the bag and - because I'd lost my other pair on the bastard aeroplane coming over - whether I had my sunglasses.

Typical. Worry about looking cool first, expensive hardware later.

On the other hand. Your psychoanalyst/ therapist/ priest might tell you that you had given your camera away. That sub-consciously you had wanted rid of it. For whatever reason! I don't buy this bollocks either, but it's an interesting hypothesis to work with for a bit.

. . . . . . . .

Nope. Can't think of a single reason.

Anyway, something occurred to me the other day that it might be kind of interesting to post some "imaginary" photographs - kind of word portraits of stuff I'd seen on the trip, but with the added bonus of being able to go places that a camera lens has no chance. Like, you can't take a picture of something - or someone - you wish was in the picture say, when you're having a meal on your own. You can't take a photo of a feeling. Or a flavour. By framing such a thing as a "photo", we perhaps engage more of our senses. We see it in our imaginations, but we also invoke scent, taste, touch. Photos - and maybe I'm wrong - tend to sterilise our other senses.

Sound like pretentious bollocks?

Maybe later. Got things to do. Ciao ciao.

tired & emotional

2005-07-16T19:07:00.000+01:00

Left Italy this morning feeling a bit weird and vulnerable having just spent the past week in the comany of the finest people I know. Returning to . . . fuck-knows-what. This* is what I scribbled in the journal as the train headed for Torino.

*I would apologise for the mystical/self-help tone in what follows, but you can fuck away off: this is what the blog is for. Normal cynical/ laconic service will resume just as soon as I've gone for a cathartic run to get the journey out of my legs and to reacquaint myself with Scotland's hyperborean gloam after all that Mediterranean sunshine.

Leaving Pinerolo enlivened, enriched and enlightened. Overwhelmed a bit. When you get yourself out of the way, often there is nothing left but a kind of energy. Often that energy is something you might call love. Unencumbered by ego, what might we achieve in life?

I'm thinking of EM Forster's "only connect", which reduces to a glib maxim one of life's fundamental truths: namely, that whatever we do in life that means anything - if anything ultimately does - then it is to connect. With the world around you, with other people, with whatever it is you think your self might be. As the Zen Buddhists will tell you, there is only the impossible, ephemeral, eternal moment. If we do not connect with it, then we are drawing plans in the dust.
We are most alive and aware when we answer the question "Who am I?" with "I am a part of something". When this is understood, one can never truly be alone.

2005-07-08T10:14:00.000+01:00

Back soon.

forget G8 - get Liter8

2005-07-06T09:29:00.000+01:00

Following on from yesterday's very lo-fi post about the arcane business of book-binding - here's one that connects the two very nicely.

actonseen is a new website set up by poet-artist nick-e melville and features the work of various wonderful people including Dorothy Alexander, Tom Leonard, nick-e himself and your humble author here, whose British Poetry Since 1945 images are on display. Here's my favourite, which is the last in the book. Go check it out and tell all your pals.

In the realm of the real, Mr Glass's wonderful novel - made of paper and everything - is finally available for public consumption as of today. Place your orders, tell all your pals, etc.

Here's one I made earlier.

2005-07-05T17:51:00.000+01:00

While people have been throwing things at policemen and the otherway around in Edinburgh, I've been stewing in my dad's attic making books.

First things first. Before we begin, select some suitable music. Ahh, this'll do nicely. Miam, miaaaaam!

Je ne te mangerez pas!

Next, we need a copy of QuarkXpress, a comfortable executive chair, and, er, plenty of space to work.

Tools. Check the Flickr page for more details. I'm not doing it twice.

Snip, snnnip. A handy guillotine.

If I was a real book artist, instead of just a piss-artist, I'd have a press. Instead, I've got MDF and bricks.

Who said "women's work"?

Peasy.

To be, or not to be. That is the bare bodkin.

It's a stitch up!

These six fellas are going to get dressed up tonight in a brand new jacket.

. . . But first, we need to measure them for size.

Then we start to tailor them up.

Ooowh! Suits you, sir.

Nearing the end of this process, now. We're going to glue those pieces of muslin cloth onto the three book blocks I've prepared.

Here there are, drying off in the sun.

A white sports coat, and a pink carnation . . .

Three amigos in their dashing new seersucker suits.

These two lucky fellas are off to Vancouver for their holidays. Wonder if they'll meet anybody nice.

shag tagged

2005-07-02T18:07:00.000+01:00

Tracy's asked for my six favourite songs. Being a bloke, I take this kinda thing too seriously for my own good so let's stick with stuff that's been on the decks recently.

There's usually a bit of a disclaimer before these lists, which seems to be part of the "tag" genre - unofficially anyway. Here's mine: I'm not really a song kinda guy. Most of my music is men making strange noises with saxophones and other instruments of mass disruption. But I do like the odd vocalist. As long as they're odd.

I'm going to have to pick a Tom Waits song, you understand. One Tom Waits song? Impossible.

1.
I adore the song Ana Fil Houb by Lili Boniche. He's a French Algerian singer who had a bit of a revival courtesy of Bill Laswell & the Buddha Bar guy. Ana Fil Houb is a luscious after-hours melange of Gypsy violin, Jewish klezmer clarinet, Latino congas, cocktail lounge piano and velvety vocals. No idea what the song's about but I already wrote myself purple about it on the other defunct blog. The song resounds with decadence, smoking sensuality and beautiful melancholy. It is the very opposite, in fact, of everything you will ever find in this grim outpost of Roman Calvinism they call Scotland. Here we have mere excess, crass sexuality, and personality disorders.

2.
Into My Arms by Nick Cave. This beautiful, tender song with its gorgeous melody & spare plaintive arrangement (just piano, bass & vocal) kicks off Cave's (imho) best album. It's as gloomy a love song as you could ever hope to hear, full of Biblical references and angels and candles and journeys. And it contains the most glorious opening line of any song ever: I don't believe in an interventionist God/ but I know, darlin, that you do.

3.
Jacqueline by Franz Ferdinand. I actually prefer the scrambled juddering funk of Take Me Out, but this one get the vote for the lines: it's so much better on holiday/ that's why we only work when/ we need the money. Hear hear! Also, I like that the annoying-after-a-while strummy-croony opening bit contains a coded reference to a story about addled octogenarian poet-genius Ivor Cutler hitting on a chick a quarter his age in a library. Oh, and I played in a band with Alex once upon a time.

4.
First of the Gang to Die by Morrissey. I was never a Morrissey fan until I heard this; the Smiths were never part of my teenage soundtrack (we don't want to go there). This has a cracking sing-along (believe it) melody, rhythm guitars going full tilt throughout, and the lyric is a bonkers story about a Latino ned called "Hector". Again, a marvellous opener of a line in You have never been in love/ until you've seen the stars/ reflect in the reservoirs. Guess that's me out, then.

5.
Boum! by Charles Trenet. Nothing like a cheery Frenchman doing sheep impressions for putting you in a sunny mood. Brings back happy memories of the short lived but much loved chanson band called Jacques Attaques that my brother & I put together with my current flatmate & another guy we know to play songs by Serge Gainsbourge, Jacques Brel and other Francophone chanteurs. Contains the marvellous lines Mais... boum!/ Quand notre coeur fait boum/ Tout avec lui dit boum/ L'oiseau dit boum, c'est l'orage

6.
Right. Tom Waits. Aarrgh. So many. Chocolate Jesus. . . All the World is Green. . . Don't Go Into that Barn. . . Make it Rain. . . Heartattack & Vine. . . Reeperbahn. . . Raindogs. . . Picture in a Frame. . . Coney Island Baby. . . November. . . Clap Hands . . . Lucky Day . . . Phew. That's just the ones I can think of off the top of my head. I'm going to pick The Heart of Saturday Night which is kind of ironic cos I don't dig much of his early stuff, preferring the science project clattering swamp funk of his later stuff. I like this cos it's got a great melody. The story about a regular blue collar guy cruising for some quality downtime is a bit sentimental & Bruce Springsteen, but it remains one of the few Waits songs that I am able to sing along to. Very badly.

All men, you notice that?

And I alphabetised them.

I don't dislike female vocalists on principle. Frinstance, I like Eddie Reader's Songs of Robert Burns album if I'm on the whisky, Billie Holiday if I'm on the gin, Edith Piaf if I'm on the absinthe. But soul divas & chicks with guitars I got absolutely no use for - unless I'm on smack or horse tranquilisers.

OK, now I've got to tag someone else, though I think everyone has done this already. Glacia - how's about you?

the traffic in my head

2005-07-01T10:33:00.000+01:00

So I didn't get the job. Or, at least, not the job I applied for. They gave me another one instead; one which I hadn't applied for but had secretly (or not so secretly maybe) wanted. It's only part-time, but I'm sure it won't be long before my timetable's full again.

Isn't it weird how we rationalise disappointing news. When I was told I was unsuccessful for the post I'd applied for I was a bit annoyed. Angry even. After all, I'd been doing the job for about 18 months already & nobody seemed to have any issue with how I was doing it. But I think the anger was just my ego hurting a wee bit. Whoever made the decision, for whatever reason, made the correct one. If nothing else, it keeps things interesting.

I teach all kinds of things - film & television analysis, literature, presentation skills, interview skills, basic literacy, creative writing, screenwriting, developing personal effectiveness, editing & proofreading. Blah. All that. I love the diversity of it all. I don't know what exactly they were looking for - the position was in the media & communications department and by my own admission I'm not so crazy about all that advertising/ marketing/ public relations stuff. Maybe they wanted more of that.

In my teaching "career" (a fairly haphazard meander through ESOL, high school, special education and further education) two things deeply move me and motivate me: one is language. Down to the bare bones. Grammar, punctuation, clarity, understanding. All that. Literature not so much. The second thing I love about teaching is people. I love when teaching is a dialogue, a negotiation. When you literally drawn their own education out of the learners. That's the way it should be. I hate when I have to "deliver" a bunch of information and people sit in front of you taking notes.

I never really got that "e-ducing" experience teaching in high school, except for one small rural school I was at. The kids were really great - there was none of the insane, dysfunctional shit that goes on in most schools I've been at. You know, kids throwing chairs, open rebellion, everybody on dope, etc. These kids loved school and were there to learn. And so we talked. They were eager to talk. And through talking we learned about all kinds of stuff - me as well as them. One class in particular, we talked about the book we were reading, and how - even though it was written in the 1970s (cutbacks have left many schools with out of date & embarrassingly irrelevant texts) - this book still had something to say about who we were & the world we lived in.

The book in question was called "Z For Zachariah". A kind of post-Apocalyptic adventure story about a girl who seems to be the only survivor of a nuclear holocaust. She lives on a farm in a sheltered valley, and we are privvy to her thoughts as the world - via the radio - becomes increasingly silent and she gets on with the business of staying alive. Then a man in a radioactive protection suit comes trundling over the crest of her valley and everything turns ugly.

Great book. Probably more relevant politically during the Cold War, but still there were useful things to be discussed about those times. I told the class about the scary Government television announcements, the four minute warning, about people building bunkers in their back gardens, "The Morning After", and all the protect & survive shit we were fed in the 80s.

They were agog. What? Surely not? The government actually made people scared? Paranoid even? Why would they do that? The department had a copy of "When the Wind Blows" - a Raymond "The Snowman" Briggs animated - ahem - cartoon film of an elderly couple dying after the Bomb goes off, and - to give the book some resonance - I showed it to the class.

I have to tell you, here, by the way, that I showed them the final part of the film on September 10th, 2001.

I don't know what kind of experience those kids had at the time. But when I saw them again (on Spetember 12th) they all had a whole lot to talk about. This is what literature is for. Literature is valueless, meaningless, unless there is a perceived connection between our world and the world of the characters. Too much literature is conceived, read and taught in some airless, clinical void where kids' experiences are bagged and tagged and graded rather than allowed the space of their own existence. Schools are such places in my experience, and to work in one is to be a tiny irrelevant cog in a rusty old machine which looks a wee bit like this. (thanks Darth :)

There's probably a bunch of parents reading this thinking well thank the Lord that pinko liberal Guardian-reading limp-wristed anarchist freak isn't teaching in our schools any more. To which I say Amen.

The department where I'll be working is much more person-centred. I'll be teaching literacy and communication in the community to adults - some of them with learning difficulties, some with social & emotional difficulties, others not. This is much more where I want to be.

But where I am right now is another matter. Troops, I have to say that I'm in a very weird place right now - emotionally, psychologically, even geographically. I become officially homeless in a week, but that's OK because that's when I fly to Spain to hang out with Mr Wilkinson (hola, tio), then I go to Aosta in Italy to see jazz-punk-surf-klezmer-hardcore phenomenon Masada playing in a Roman amphitheatre in the foothils of the Alps where I'll also be in the company of two fantastic Italians Luca & Roberto (ciao compagni!).

After that it's Canada - everyone I speak to about this mentions the name of the country in hushed reverential tones, as if it's the Promised Land or some kind of liberal utopia. Maybe it is, but I bet they've got their fair share of bawbags, too. I'll be in Vancouver for a bit then Toronto. Maybe Montreal too, but we'll see how things go. There are a few wonderful people in Canada I'll be meeting up with too and . . . and . . . I'm so excited about it I can barely get to sleep at night. Or maybe that's just the traffic by my window. And that car alarm. And all those drunk people and their alfresco karaoke. And that street sweeper machine that goes past at 12.55am every night.

too damp to dazzle

2005-06-29T10:55:00.000+01:00

I'll make this one a bit cheerier than the last couple.

So the interview was yesterday. And despite the Kafka-esque idea of appearing before a panel of my superiors to apply for my own job I didn't wake up after uneasy dreams and discover I was an insect.

I had a five minute presentation to give on how I would deliver effective teaching in communications & media, plus a bit of a grilling by a panel of four very agreeable people whom I'd enjoyed working with since I started there. What could possibly go wrong?

In preparation, I think I spent more time nervously editing & reworking the presentation than actually usefully thinking about it. My wee brain seems to have lost the ability to think in straight lines. I'm developing one of these fuzzy, distracted brains that Professors and Scientists are worried that kids are going to get if they keep playing too many video games. Except I don't play video games. Hey, it's evolution! It's the future! I'm with the kids on this one.

My interview was at 2pm so I went over in the morning to Other C's flat to use the internet & printer & to practise my presentation to an empty flat rather than parade about the kitchen in my new-but-temporary place and wake up my flatmate. Fine, fine everything fine. Got the talk down to five minutes (not easy when you're as full of as much bullshit and bluster as I am) and trooped of home a happy, contented & confident man thinking I had time for a bit of toast, a cup of tea and look at the notes, and a quick run over my shirt with the iron. I had an hour.

Now I've got a habit of leaving things to the last possible minute. I mean l.a.s.t p.o.s.s.i.b.l.e m.i.n.u.t.e. I don't mean to, it's just the way my wee brain works. Missed a flight from Amsterdam last year because of that, and missed countless trains, pissed off hunners of pals. Getting anywhere on time for me is a constant miracle of luck and good fortune. Today, though, I was in control. Until, that is, I tried the mortice lock of my flat and my key kept turning and turning and turning and turning. Not opening. Just round and round and round.

I had, ironically or fortunately enough, everything I needed for the interview with me. I had my laptop with the presentation on it, a back up CD just in case, I had my qualifications which were in the filing cabinet I've not managed to move out of Other C's flat yet. I even had a couple of pounds for the bus fare in my pocket. The only trouble was, I was wearing what I had slept in. And my suit was behind a very locked - and seemingly very fucked - door, with my flatmate away out and his phone off.

The idea of doing the interview in my pyjamas kinda tickled me. In fact, after about 10 minutes of turning the key around and around and around it made me a bit hysterical. If nothing else, and even if I didny get the job because of it, it would be worth it for the story: did I ever tell you about the interview I did in my pyjamas?

Anyway, flatmate to the rescue. He got my panicked text message ("HELP! FUCK! AARGH! DOOR LOCK BROKE!") plus my breezily cool and nonchalant "I'm handling this" voicemail message and came over IN THE TOTAL NICK OF TIME with his mother in tow who ironed my shirt while I cooled off in the shower. The lock was fine, just that my key had chosen that precise moment to break off one of its wee prongs.

Made it to the interview with 10 minutes to spare. Felt like I'd been played, literally "played", by some tousle-headed God like in Jason & the Argonauts. Some bored Richard Burton or Maggie Smith look-alike deity who thought they'd fuck about with a mortal for a bit cos they don't have Playstations in Godland.

The temperatures ini this neck of the woods are getting above their station. As a Northern Latitude guy, I get all nervous when the sun comes out and weather forecasters start giddily declaring figures in the twenties several days running. Worse, in thse kind of temperatures I sweat horribly if I have to walk anywhere or move or pick up the phone or do anything that might generate calorific activity in my body. So, despite the cold shower, the fresh shirt, the air-conditioned taxi ride, and the shortest of walks up a flight of steps to the college I still arrived drenched.

And the interview went OK. Just OK.

My soggy answers were dazzling nobody.

Misanthropy in the UK (part deux)

2005-06-27T15:15:00.000+01:00

Phew. Feel like I need to make amends for yesterday's rant. Rather than castigate a particular group, I think this one should be aimed at Everybody.

I'd just come back from the park and, you'll have gathered, I was in a bit of a grump. Normally, I don't care much for sitting about in the park: for starters, the ground is usually mushy and gives you a damp, grass-stained arse after about 10 minutes; also, the sun is a shy beast in these latitudes and gets scared off dead easily so you spent your time alternately sweltering/shivering; then, as the sun goes away, the midgies come out to play and bite and suck and buzz in your ears and generally make life miserable. And if you have hay fever (as I do) the idea of sitting in amongst lots of flowers and plants and grass and green stuff is the equivalent of Dracula going sunbathing at high noon.

But the main reason I hate the park is that you can't get any peace if you're on your own. Kids kicking footballs 3 yards from your head, dogs snuffling in your ear or barking mad, idiot teenagers taunting each other at volume, sentimental drunks arguing about who said what or didny, trendy Wendies smugly "grooving" on ethnic percussion, rangy neds stripped to the waist shouting incomprehensibly, people doing stuff in bushes, pre-literate weans greeting, pissed off parents moaning viciously at very verbal pre-fives, five hundred games of football happening in a 100 meter radius and everyone taking it too seriously, frisbee throwers, roller bladers, keepy-uppers, down-and-outers, jakes, fakes, junkies and freaks - the entire park a heaving, staggering catastrophe in progress.

In someone else's story, I was the dude with the shiny red napper that couldny stop sneezing, the kill-joy loner with nae mates drowsily skimming pages of a book he didn't want to read, the apprentice Victor Meldrew, the grumpy-old-man in waiting, the sour cherry in a bowl of sugar plums.

Or, more likely, in someone else's story I wasn't even there.

Right. Glad that's out the way. I have the interview for my job tomorrow and I need to get in a more positive frame of mind. 2pm GMT. Wish me luck.

DISCLAIMER: the author wishes to bring to readers' attention the use of hyperbole for humorous effect in this post and the preceding. In other words, nae offence to embdy - just the lot ae ye.

Misanthropy in the UK

2005-06-26T18:59:00.000+01:00

Johnny Rotten had it all wrong. Everyone else is the Anti-christ.

I've been storing this up for a wee while so hang on to your hats and keep your finger on the ejector seat. This is going to be bilious.

Right. Where to begin.

Maybe with the Ugly Pageant that took place yesterday in Glasgow where all the stupidest and ugliest people in Northern Britain draped themselves in the Union Flag and the colour orange and got together to bang drums, toot whistles and get in the way of traffic. Oh, and piss and puke and stoat about drunkenly in the streets. And break glass everywhere. And taunt random passers-by. And sing hate songs. All with the stamp of approval of our authorities and given a massive Police escort to boot. Which, through local taxes, I have made a not insubstantial financial contribution.

I went for a run yesterday, having been already woken at 8am with the world's worst marching band honking & rattling past my window, and encountered masses of these people being corralled into Glasgow Green where they could piss and puke and sing their jolly hate-songs to each other all day long.

The tradition, the history, all that bollocks the people who organise this stuff trot out when they are called to justifiy this nonsense - I don't have any use for it, personally. But fair play. You want to relive martial glories of four centuries past . . . fine with me. Just do it some place where you don't embarrass and antagonise the rest of us, where you don't pollute the city streets with your beery piss, where you don't congest the traffic in the busiest parts of the city, where you can guarantee that any hate songs are kept firmly indoors where you can entertain each other into weary irrelevance.

For every step forward that Glasgow makes, for every great achievement, for every outstanding new building or project that declares this as a city of the 21st century - there's a bunch of stupid drunk people somewhere to drag it back into the dark ages. For every actor or screenwriter or artist or writer or musician that makes it onto the world stage and says Glasgow's all right - there's some fucking idiot with a flag and a can of Tennent's Super ready to piss on whatever reputation people have striven for.

It's fucked. And if you think I wave my own particular colour of flag here, there are many varieties of this ugly, narrow, ignorant kind of moronity and I have no use for any of it - the ones on the march yesterday are merely the most visible & audible. None of these people have any place or relevance in the 21st century. They are an embarrassment to the city and the very many good things that go on in it.

the classic Bad Wolf scenario

2005-06-21T16:22:00.000+01:00

Excuse the radio silence, troops. I've been offline. No easy broadband access: new flatmate's dial-up won't let me into Blogger.

I'll need to make this quick, but where to begin . . .

Maybe by declaring that official mourning has begun since the final Doctor Who aired on Saturday. An all too brief incarnation by Christopher Eccleston and easily the best thing on the box for the best part of three months. I'm not going to proselytise - leave that to the Daaaaaleks - just that, well, if you didn't get it, I ain't gonna convince you.

If you've been watching, you'll know all about (well, kind of) the Bad Wolf business, which is essentially another narrative dimension to the already multi-layered scripts. I had a bit of a bad wolf scenario myself on Sunday there. Managed to rouse myself early bells from grieving the late Doctor to get the train to Balloch for the final 10k in the Polaroid series. I'd already missed the middle two - one from a niggle I didn't want to become an injury, the other cos I was doing a poetry reading with the college - so I was mad keen to do this one, despite the thundery rainclouds gathering over Glasgow.

So what happened? The ig bad wolf came and called off all the trains. "Engineering works" he told me, the bastard.

The first train of the day would have got me into Balloch right on time. As it was, it would have had to get a bus, then a train. I tell you, as soon as you start mixing your public transports in this country & there's a deadline involved . . . better just stay home and rationalise.

I've been dogged (wolfed?) by them pesky engineering works too often already this year. First it was the train to Penzance for the start of the doomed cycle trip from Lands End - I was forced to hire a car, since part of the journey was by bus & they don't take bikes on the buses. Twice as expensive & a pain in the arse.

Then in Bristol, having decided to call into see my brother, a £7 train fare turned into an £80 taxi trip because there were engineering works . . .

And now - from nowhere, no advanced warning, no notice, nothing - the scuppering of the race on Sunday. Bet I would've won, too.

But is it a bad sign? Or is it just the railway companies' benign way of looking out for me? As it turned out, I went running anyway just as the thunderstorm passed over Glasgow and it was just about the most exhilirating run I've ever had in my puff. Whether it was the energy in the air from the storm, or my own early morning energy, or a combination . . . no idea. It was just fantastic. And after 40 minutes, my friendly knee niggle kicked in again. Would have been rubbish if that had happened on the race. I would have kept on hobbling and done something nasty to it. No doubt. Maybe not such a bad wolf, after all. Just like Rose said.

A bunch of Fanny's

2005-06-13T18:30:00.000+01:00

Just a quick one to update on the moral questionnaire posted below.

The correct answer, of course, was C.

Well, it kinda had to be, really, since that's me! :)

Also, because I have zero patience for businesses that don't sort out basic things like payment, and managers who fob the dirty work of dealing with annoyed customers onto stressed out waitresses instead of speaking to them directly.

Sorry, but I really don't think that it's OK to expect customers to pay £1.50 on top of the bill because the manager is trying to save a few pennies by not having a Racal machine to process credit/ debit cards. It's not the amount that bothers me, but the attitude of the guys running the place, and their assumption that I am the one who's obliged to guess in advance which method of payment might or might not be possible. Cash only? Cheques to the value of? Visa, but not Mastercard? Luncheon vouchers? Barter?

They should get one of those calendars up in the kitchen that reminds them it's the 21st century already.

I've every intention of paying for the meal, I'll drop the money in to them in a day or two. Or whenever.

moral dilemma

2005-06-11T10:52:00.000+01:00

OK. Here's the deal.

You go out with a friend for dinner at a small, independently run bistro in your neighbourhood. The food is so-so, not fantastic, but you enjoy it and your friend's company. End of the meal, you get the bill and offer your card only to be told that they don't accept cards of any kind. Cash or cheque only. They don't have the facilities, never have. If you'd been told this when you made your reservation you would have brought enough cash. As it is, you are directed to a cash machine on the opposite side of the street - but this machine charges you £1.75 to make a withdrawal. But why should you have to pay a surcharge to cover their incompetence? There is a cash machine further up the street which doesn't charge for withdrawing, but it's a 15 minute walk there and back.

When you point all this out, you are told that OK, they'll take your card, but as long as they can charge you the same as the stupid cash machine. wtf? And this information is being relayed to you from the kitchen by a single harrassed waitress, by the way, not the manager.

Do you:

a) take the 15 minute round trip to the machine at the end of the street & get the money?

b) go across the road & pay the surcharge on withdrawing your own money, but take it off the tip - even though it's not the waitress's fault?

c) go to the cash machine in your own time & deliver the money when it suits you? Say, the middle of next week?

d) fuck them. Their incompetence and unprofessionalism has soured the evening. Let them put it down to experience.

Thoughts?

British Poetry Since 1945

2005-06-05T10:09:00.000+01:00

Before I discovered the interenet and lost my mind, I had long been interested in making books. I made quite a few using the various techniques I learned - from cleverly folded single sheets and stitched pamphlets to more decorative Japanese style stitching, and also multiple folios bound in hardcovers. I usually designed and bound my own work, but I made a couple for others on occasion too. For me, it was all part of a single creative process taken to its logical conclusion - using typography and design to support the words on the page, giving the words a form, making a product. It's useful for a writer to know as much about the means of production I think. And this goes for learning the tricks and cyphers of the internet, too.

Anyway. Around the time of my mother's death in 2001, and for a while after, I was spending a bit of time at the family home, just going through stuff that had been collected in the room I used to share with my brother. I had collected a shit-load of books, photos, notes from uni, assorted crap sentimental or otherwise, and was - what's the word - consolidating it? Rationalising it? Chucking half of it out? I came across a quaint and curious volume of forgotten poetry that I (and possibly my brother) had used in English classes at school.

It was called British Poetry Since 1945 and it resonated with me on a number of levels: I was interested in poetry; 1945 was a long time ago and we had only recently entered a new century; I had recently joined the cadre of English teaching troops in a local high school and was still seeing shit like this in the book cupboard; plus, my mother and father were both born that year. A lot had happened since 1945.

The book was literally as dry as dust. As I browsed through it, the pages started falling out. It was a paperback - a Penguin, in fact, with rather a natty op-art cover - and the glue at the spine had all dried out so that when you turned each page it came away in your hand, perfectly intact.

One idea led to another and before I knew it was was scrunching, rolling and twisting up pages and scanning them into my dad's computer. I had no idea what that would look like, but as the first results came through I realised that these bits of rubbish, yellowed, dry old bits of paper made extraordinarily beautiful images. They seemed to hang in the void like little planets. I scanned them at a super-high resolution so that when you enlarged them you could see in minute detail the fibres of the paper.

Sometimes the shapes resembled something, like a relief map of Scotland, or a profile of the face of Mr Punch (from Punch & Judy), or a flying fish or a comma or something else. But the really wonderful thing was realising that, without thinking, I had been trying still to read the images as text. Sometime you couldn't see any words, but most of the time you could see whole or fragmented words and it was in these text fragments that the book finally came alive.

I scanned over 150 images from the book. I took the whole thing apart. I've still got the bag full of rubbish somewhere, I'm such a hoarder. My intention was to re-make the book and bind it in its original cover. You'd still approach it as British Poetry Since 1945, but inside you'd find my scanned images. Rubbish, in one sense, litter, used up & chucked away. But also this dead book had been rescued from irrelevance, preserved, re-imagined. I felt, however, as beautiful as they were, that the images on their own weren't enough, but when the text fragments found in each one were placed next to the image, the whole thing came alive. It became a book of poetry again. Language made fresh. New meanings made out of old ones. Found art, essentially.

The book I eventually made - I made only a handful, each one was half a day in the making - was submitted as part of my final masters portfolio, but it was more than just a clever act of re-appropriation, in my mind at least. The act of making something new and original out of some dusty old pages from the past was a powerfully symbolic one for me at that time in my life.

Seems appropriate that I'm returning to this book now. Again, another turning point in my life. Two Cs turn their backs on each other and form an X.

Chin up, Mother Brown.

Galline restitution

2005-05-31T23:49:00.000+01:00

Bugger me if that nonsense I posted a while back about "knee moments" isny right on the money. My (temporary lecturing) job has just been advertised as a permanent vacancy. Other stuff too, but youse don't need to know that, not now anyway.

On a more physical level, gravity has caused the knee trouble to head south, giving me tendon inflammation to worry about in time for the Clydebank 10k on Thursday. Change in running technique from over compensating for the knee. (I felt like I wanted to use the word "concomitant" in one of those sentences there. What do you think? That's a word that not enough people use enough of the time.) The troubles of an athlete, eh. I feel I've really made it as a runner now that I can use words like "tendon" and "inflammation" in my whining. Brilliant. Makes me sound serious or something. It's like using terms like "narrative development" and "character arc" talking to folk about fiction. Though it's hard to be heard sometimes when you head's so far up inside your arse.

My half hour (5k-ish) run this evening was a real struggle. I got to the bus stop on Govan Road in 9:20, which is the fastest ever, but I paid for it later, limping up the road for the last kilometer. I'm wondering (once again) if Clydebank's a good idea. I'll say this and say this and end up with a bastardn injury.

Don't suppose it helps that I was hung-over today from a weekend which consisted entirely of achieving drunkennes and recovering from drunkenness. Yesterday I made the classic error of not eating before going to the pub which makes the effects of the drink multiply exponentially as the night wears on, resulting, inevitably, in ugly scenes at the Taste of Punjab. Well, they were probably no uglier than usual but it's been a while since I've joined in.

Just a wee travel tip for anyone heading to Glasgow for their holibags: if being over-charged and short-changed for out-of-date meat derived snack food which would be bad for you even if it was any good, served by a humourless Sikh (nothing against Sikhs in general, just this guy) in a dowdy, dimly lit hole-in-the-wall emporium of grease in the middle of the night is your idea of adventure, then Taste of Punjab is definitely the place for you.

I got the hang-over I deserved.

There are two more weeks, not including this one, until the college empties of students - or learners as I must now learn to refer to them, in preparation for impending job interview. I can't get inside the mentality of a lot of the learners whose learning I assist and enable. All the work that's been done over the year, two teaching blocks passed already, you get to within sight of the finishing post two weeks away and, like, people are dropping out all over the place, throughout the various courses I teach on across the college. Another one told me today he didn't turn up for the assessment because he was out of there. A bright guy, you know, could do well, seemed keen. Offski. I don't get it.

Anyway, two weeks' teaching left and summer to think about. Plans afoot. Running & writing feature largely. Running and writing and listening to Radiohead. I discovered Radiohead a couple of weeks ago, just after I posted that lyric from OK Computer. Other C has a few of their CDs. Curious, I put Kid A on the CD walkman & it never left. What the fuck was I doing when Radiohead happened? How did I miss them?

On the subject, though in a different league, here's a gratuitous-and-completely-unrelated-to-anything-else-on-this-page link to the grooviest tune on the planet right now: pay back that chicken. Do it. And the piggy. And the donkey. And the camel and the monkey. And that Japanese dancing dude who wants to be a Lenigrad Cowboy. Pay them all back.

Helensburgh 10k

2005-05-26T23:23:00.000+01:00

I don't know who Helen is, but her town's lovely.

Tonight was the first in the Polaroid 10k series of four races I signed up for. I mentioned before that I was looking to get and keep my time under 50 minutes. My target time for the 10k is 45 mins. I have no idea if I'm up for the kind of training that will require, but it seems eminently possible. I also mentioned that I've been having a bit of knee (left) trouble the last few times I've been out training, so I set out at a slower pace than I usually go at, shiteing it in case I had to hobble home halfway round.

My first couple of kilometers came in at about 5:30. By 5k I was at 26:30 so I must have levelled off somewhere at my 5 minute pace. Ish. All very precise, this.

The knee kind of flared up on a long downhill stretch between 5 & 6k, but I noticed that if I kept my weight forward and ran on the balls of my feet it eased off. So that's how I ran the whole race, pretty much. At 7k I was at about 36:30 and I wondered if I had it in me to finish in under 50 mins. So I legged it the last 3 kilometers fast as I could. I was amazed at how much energy I had, made me wish I had started faster.

In the end my time was 50:38, which I'm pretty pleased with. I was totally fucked, though. I don't know what happens to your psychology in races, but there's no way I could have kept up that kind of pace on a treadmill or on a jaunt round the Clyde. I was half-dead by the time I recognised that we were on the home strait, and fit for an ambulance in the final 200m. But again, something about the buzz at the finish gave me the spurs to put on some more speed.

Blah. So there. Gives me something to work on over the holiday weekend.

Next time, I won't get drunk on wine the night before like a numpty, then eat shite food all day. Maybe give myself a bit of a chance.

Knees up knees up, never get the breeze up

2005-05-24T23:10:00.000+01:00

Whiddyi no. Dinny get a blog post fae C fir weeks, then two come alang aw at once.

Scuse the spelling. I'm listening to a CD of some poetry by Tom Leonard, foremost poet and grumpy revolutionary of this parish. Here's a handy link to one of his most famous poems, with added audio & crib notes for school pupils. Who says blogs are useless?

Anyway. Out running again and a brisk jaunt round the Clyde. I don't have any groovy GPS gizmos to tell me how fast I'm going, or how far, or how things are in Glockamorra. Just a heart rate monitor that I use as a stopwatch. I used it to measure my heart rate about twice. Both times it told me that my max rate was 225, which I think is physically impossible. The third time I checked it out I noticed that it went crazy when I passed a mobile phone mast. As useful as a pencil with an outboard motor. Or a blog without crib notes.

I have no use for gizmos. Here's how I know if I'm on a good run: if I get to the bus stop by Real Radio on Govan Road before 10 minutes, I'm going ok. Sometimes I'm under, sometimes I'm over. Next, if I can get to the corner of George IV Bridge and Clyde Place by 20 minutes, I'm OK. Sometimes I'm under, sometimes I'm over. If I'm running the 10k route I need to be at the footbridge in the Green around 29 minutes, under the Kingston Bridge by 46, and home (or really at the big green junction box at the corner of Argyle Street & Kelvinhaugh St) by 53. Sometimes I'm under, sometimes I'm over.

This is as techincal as I get.

There are similar calculations for longer runs, like from Bowling, or along the canal path in Scaryhill. It's odd how easy it is to keep this nonsense in my head, though ultimately I wonder how useful it all is. I'm a bit suspicious of charts and graphs and plots and flow diagrams and schedules and shit like that. I have no head for that business. And anyway, it always makes me think of Adrian Mole and his chart of "Norwegian wood exports" or whatever it was - basically, measuring how long his willy was.

The knee started going a bit squiffy round about the 30 minute mark, which is sooner than my run at the weekend, though I was pushing it a bit today (George IV Bridge at 19:30). Not looking good. Maybe I'm being stupid, but I'm going to run in the 10k on Thursday & see how it goes. Could be ugly; then again, I'm not such a preening nidiot as to hobble round regardless and spend the rest of 2005 on crutches. Ca' canny. The Roman Calvinist in me, however, is outraged that I spent £36 on signing up for four races and demands that I run every single one. There are weans starving in Africa, after all, it tells me and I'll run on that wonky knee if it kills me.

There's a phrase I use for moments of transition - where one phase of your life joins with another. I call them knee moments. Thresholds are knee places, both entrance and exit. Both/ and. Interesting places to be, psychologically, emotionally. Semi-colons, my favourite punctuation: little knees.

There's something more to be had here, but frankly it's late and I'm howling at the moon and scrieving utter havers like . . . well, all of the above.

*in Dick Van Dyke mockney accent*

Oh my, what a rotten song
What a rotten song
What a rotten song

Oh my, what a rotten song
And what a rotten singer
Too-oo-oo-oo-oo-oo-oo

clever title pending

2005-05-22T02:26:00.001+01:00

OK, here goes.

I've been putting this off for long enough . . . well, that's not strickly true, you see, since I've been in a few times already and drafted a couple of entries, saved a couple, ditched a couple more. Who knows. Just haven't been in the mood for doing this thing right.

Haven't been out running much, either - though not through want of trying, it must be said. Just that when I run, I feel fucked after about 20 minutes and find it really difficult to continue. My run on Tuesday - 4 miles round the Clyde - was a disaster. I had distance in the legs, but not in the head. Today was a bit better, but three-quarters of the way round I felt pain in my left knee - a grinding, inflamed sort of pain that's hung around since. Fuck knows where that came from. I felt a bit of a twinge there on Tuesday, but nothing like this. It was pretty damn painful walking down the stairs in the tenement close, though walking on the flat is OK. Don't know what to do with it except neck some Ibuprofen & lay off for a bit.

I've signed up for the Polaroid 10k series in Dumbartonshire, which means 4 x 10k races over the next four weeks, three of them on a Thursday evening and one on a Sunday. It's a bit of a gamble cos I don't own a car & there's nowhere to change or leave your gear at these races. So pray for clear skies - I don't fancy hanging about soaking wet waiting for trains. My aim was to lower my time to below 50mins consistently, but I'll be happy getting round the course in under an hour I think, the way things have been going.

It's not all doom and gloom, though. I've been working on a small publication of life & creative writing by a group of adult literacy learners and that's finally coming together. It's called Inside I am . . . and features writing from about 25 adults from the East End of Glasgow, most of whom have learning disabilities. This is the cover image. And here's a contributor. And another. Marvellous people to work with. None of the ego bullshit that goes on in other clases I've taught. Just very open, giving, joyful individuals who enjoy each other's company. How often do you get to work in an environment like that, troops?

Should have the proof copy shortly, but the printers are arsebags and I'm not holding my breath. "Tomorrow-aye-no-problem" has already turned into "Friday-suit-you?-one-of-our-machines-blugh-bllugh-bllghhehgh" which is now "would-first-thing-Monday-be-all-right?"

A few other things literary happening in the past week or so. Nick Brooks launched his first novel on Thursday in a handsome hardback edition and the shop sold out their entire stock of the book in about 2 hours which probably has something to say, in various measure, about the store's lack of preparation, his agent's lack of foresight, and Nick's personal popularity.

Last Sunday was the Radical Book Fair and a belated plug for The Knuckle End on a hot afternoon late spring to a demure audience in the grand Assembly Rooms in George Street. A couple of my college students came along to check things out and also to interview the readers (Zoe, Will, Rodge and me) for their end of year assignment. I felt like a bit of an interloper to be honest, since I was the only member of this quartet who hadn't gone to the bother of writing a novel, despite all the handwringing & lip chewing on these pages.

Finally, to get this blog post over with, I'll tell you that I saw the new Star Wars already. It's po-faced mince but I was in need of a dark room and a sit down after the excesses of the after-launch party on Thursday. Unfortunately, I sat down next to a compulsive leg bouncer who set my chair vibrating like someone had their washing machine on spin cycle somewhere. Behind me was a chair kicker who kept dunting my back with varying degrees of severity every time he rearranged his seating position. I could hardly concentrate on the movie. Fortunately, I've been teaching assertiveness recently so it didn't take me too long before I asserted the two of them the fuck up. Which made me feel like a bit of a crazy nutter.

Talking of assertive nutters, wasn't George just gorgeous?

Fitter happier

2005-05-12T23:23:00.000+01:00

More productive
Comfortable
Not drinking too much
Regular excersise at the gym (3 days a week)
Getting on better with your associate employee contemporaries
At ease
Eating well (no more microwave dinners and saturated fats)
A patient better driver
A safer car (baby smiling in back seat)
Sleeping well (no bad dreams)
No paranoia
Careful to all animals (no washing spiders down the plughole)
Keep in contact with old friends (enjoy a drink now and then)
Will frequently check credit at (moral) bank (hole the wall)
Favours for favours
Fond but not in love
Charity standing orders
On Sunday ring road supermarket
No killing moths or putting boiling water on the ants
Car wash (also on sundays)
No longer afraid of the dark
Or midday shadows
Nothing so ridiculously teenage and desperate
Nothing so childish
At a better pace
Slower and more calculated
No chance of escape
Now self-employed
Concerned (but powerless)
An empowered and informed member of society (pragmatism not idealism)
Will not cry in public
Less chance of illness
Tyres that grip in the wet (shot of baby strapped in back seat)
A good memory
Still cries at a good film
Still kisses with saliva
No longer empty and frantic
Like a cat
Tied to a stick
That's driven into
Frozen winter shit (the ability to laugh at weakness)
Calm
Fitter, healthier and more productive
A pig
In a cage
On antibiotics

Radiohead.

Not C.

No words, no voice right now, try as I might. My harpie wields a club and bashes me with it.

Going through the motions

2005-05-03T23:20:00.000+01:00

Waiting for the Hitchhikers Guide to the Galaxy (the original TV series) to come on BBC2 but there's a bawfaced bore droning on about voting Nationalist in the General Election.

I'm trying to muster enthusiasm about the GE but it's pretty difficult. I've already made up my mind, ages ago, and nothing's really going to shift it. The more I see of the debased antics of the party leaders the less inclined I feel to bother voting at all. Seems any vote is an endorsement of the status quo.

Nothing to blog about as such. The trip to Gateshead to see Ornette Coleman was a blast. Hired a car and went with my pal the Jazz Poet who's a sax player and writer with similar taste in kinda out there music.

Since Ornette is a living God of Improvised Music, it seemed only appropriate that we stop orf at the Angel of the North. There's something uniquely British in the fact of driving something like 150 miles south to be welcomed to the North.

For the benefit of any non-UK readers out there, Scotland may appear to be in the north of the British Isles, but it is not in fact The North, which kind of begins just up a bit from Birmingham. Scotland is simply Scotland. The North stops at the Border where it stops being the North and starts being the Southern Uplands of Scotland. Here of course, you may travel northwards, as your compass directs you, but you will not be in the North. That lies to the South of you. Even if you are in North Ayrshire, North Lanarkshire or North Queensferry. John O'Groats is officially the northernmost point in mainland Britain, but, rather curiously, exists in a part of Scotland called Sutherland.

It's all topsy turvy. In fact all this tallk and the guy on the TV reminds me of a peculiar Glasgow expression:"He's got a face like the north end of a cow heading south".

Anyway, Ornette played at the Sage Gateshead which is a sexy big building on the river Tyne which holds three separate concert halls. Beautiful place. Just opened a few months ago. He was accompanied by two bass players (Tony Falanga and Greg Cohen, bowing and walking repectively) and his son Denardo on drums.

It's impossible to describe Ornette's music. If you're not into jazz but you've seen the David Cronenberg movie Naked Lunch, it's Ornette that plays the sax on that - a pretty good indication of what he's all about. You know, I'm not all that keen on jazz. To me, a lot of jazz sounds like a lot of other jazz, but it's pretty fair to say that Nothing sounds like Ornette. It's like an alien language. Miles Davis did that for the trumpet. Ornette just makes this beautiful sense out of the crazy chaos of his band. You listen to his band (remember, two basses & a set of drums, that's it) playing stuff that sounds like signals NASA guys have been trying to decipher for decades - Mr Coleman comes along and all of a sudden it all falls into place and not only is it tuneful, it's fast and funky and strange and sweet and as sophisticated and perfectly balanced and as beguiling to behold as a Swiss watch.

For an encore, he played Lonely Woman and made me delighted for all eternity. He'll probably never play here (in the UK) again. He's 75 this year and pretty frail. He's the last of a breed of true pioneers in modern music, up there with Miles and Schoenberg and Cage and indeed Stockhausen, who played in Glasgow last week.

We drove home along the A1 in near total darkness listening to crazy shit on Mixing It. A blessed day.

Ooh. Hitch is on. That theme tune. I'll edit this later. Maybe. Blah.

Phhrpht . . .

Cut to:

Int. Domestic living room, messy but comfortable - night.

A man in his early thirties with a goat beard sits hunched over an illuminated laptop screen expertly tapping the keys. Activity is sporadic, not fluent. On the other side of the tall narrow windows, neon light from a downstairs takeaway shop illuminates the opposing tenement building. Traffic swishes in the wet streets, a loose manhole cover rattles, a few lines of song echo in the empty streets.

This might be the future as imagined in BladeRunner, but with more rain and louder drunk people.

Our hero is no Harrison Ford, but rather better looking. His name is DICK RETARD and he stares blankly into the light, as if in search of a sign in the computer's bright void as he continues to tap his mysterious morse. The gleam of the display screen reflects enigmatically in his shiny red napper. RETARD'S expression is intense but weary. We sense a struggle: behind the blank expanse of that napper, in those heavy eyelids and drooping jowls, in the increasing use of the backspace key.

And then, with a swift snap of the laptop lid, this midnight seance is over. Indifferently, wearily, RETARD gets up, straightens out the hunch in his back and stiffly exits the room towards a comfortable oblivion.

FADE TO BLACK.

The last two weeks have been . . .

2005-05-01T00:12:00.000+01:00

- finishing the proofs of "Inside I am . . . " - a collection of life and creative writing from the east end of Glasgow.

- sitting in a darkened room looking at a projected full moon with several hundred odd sorts listening to the avuncular Karlheinz Stockhausen perform his strange music in multiple dimensions.

- visiting the Angel . . .

- taking a trip with the jazzpoet to see Ornette Coleman celebrate his 75th birthday in one of the grooviest concert halls in the UK.

- spent in Suspended Animation.

- flickr-ing.

- not blogging.

- apart from the music, pretty numb.

- losing the voice.

More glum reflections then we'll move on

2005-04-30T20:16:00.000+01:00

Since I got a pro account, courtesy of Glacia, all my online time has been spent flickr-ing. So, no blog for a bit.

Been kind of running out of steam with the blog recently. Raison d'etre unclear. The thing is to just keep doing it.

A couple of things came out of the (continuing) reflections on the LE-G trip. One was the realisation of my tendency towards le grand gesture, the name of this blog being a convenient illustration. The thing about it is, that you need to remember the microsteps. I was reading an interview with John Zorn where he says that he has no goals. He just gets up and does what he does, whether it's sitting composing for twelve hours or going out and recording or playing or listening to some tapes he's been given. One way or another it all connects and things happen. Here's what he says:

One of the beautiful things in my life is that I don’t really have any goals. I just work day by day and do my thing. I don’t dream about operas on the Metropolitan Opera stage, I don’t dream about that big philharmonic commission. I work with my materials that I have here at my hand with the musicians that are here and I’m very happy taking little baby steps one at a time.

Zorn is a composer, improviser & saxophonist who writes and plays highly original, fiercely uncompromising music that you would have a hard time cataloguing (and selling) in a high street music store. And yet he's one of the most successful musicians of his generation. No goals. I just work day by day and do my thing.

I imagine if he'd set out in the 1970s saying to himself, I'm going to sell a million records by the age of 30, firstly, playing the kind of music he does, he'd probably kill himself with frustration; that, or he'd quit with his mad hooting, honking genre-flummoxing cartoon-crazy stuff and start churning out the kind of mechanically-recovered bloodless guff that shifts in super-size portions across the planet. He would cease in every kind of way to be any kind of artist.

Some people have a problem with the word "artist". To me there's no point in getting all hung up on the word; it's all about self-knowledge (artist, businessman, teacher, doctor, administrator, whatever: know thyself) and the message behind Zorn's words is pretty clear: you get up in the morning and you do what you do. Not to do what you do is a denial of your nature.

A couple of years ago, rather than sell up and move, Zorn removed his kitchen to make way for more books and records, which tells you all you probably need to know about the man's nature and his priorities.

My problem is that I've got too many fucking goals. I gleaned an interesting nugget about POSE running technique from Mark which says - and I'm paraphrasing big style here - that when you look down you should only be able to see the tips of your toes; if you can see your feet stretching ahead of you, your steps are too long. Baby steps, one at a time.

For all that I try to convince myself to the contrary, I tend to think of things in terms of outcome, mostly, rather than process. Long views. Constantly peering into the crystal ball, rather than thinking about what's needed now, in the moment. The Lands End to John O'Groats trip was a grand gesture. Running a marathon is a grand gesture. Writing a novel is a grand gesture. In my head, when I think about achieving any of these grand gestures, it's like trying to leapfrog Everest.

More baby steps, less gesturing.

Reflections in the glassworks

2005-04-18T17:37:00.000+01:00

Those among you with keen eyes for a good thing may have spotted the amended Links link on the sidebar.

It points to Rodge's new blog, which will make for interesting reading since he's living through some pretty interesting times at the moment. Rodge Glass, to give the gentleman his full title, is a buddy from the MPhil I did at Glasgow Uni a couple of years ago, and one of the very few people on the course with the requisite - and elusive - combination of strong will & desire, business smarts, word talent and serious work ethic to actually get himself a publishing deal with his first novel.

Away on over and say hello.

The book's not out yet but you can buy it here or here. Tell your friends. All of them.

It's quite a year for Glasgow University writers. Debuts this year include: Nick Brooks, whose book My Name is Denise Forrester is out next month. Alison Miller, another of my contemporaries, has Demo released in November. Will Napier, who we published in The Knuckle End, had his first novel Summer of the Cicadas published a couple of months ago. As well as that, Laura Marney follows up her successful debut last year with Nobody Loves a Ginger Baby.

Whoof.

I have nothing but respect and admiration for the lot of them. But it makes me acutely aware of the lack of progress I've made towards my own writing goals. I can't seem to do anything to get into the right frame of mind to get writing - seriously - for myself.

What is it? Not driven enough? Not hungry enough? Not organised? Not disciplined? Too complacent? Too self-critical? Too lazy? Afraid of risk? Afraid of change?

You'll probably find that 90% of fiction writers say the same thing. Like the Jim Crace article I mentioned a while ago where he says something like 10% of his day is spent writing, the rest is spent managing the guilt . . .

I probably need to spend more time reflecting on where my life/ career is heading at the moment, and ask myself if I like the destination. Today's the first day back at work after the spring break. Feeling acutely the failure to achieve the end-to-end. Wasted a week. Spirits not high. Not deeply enthusiastic about my present calling, doomed endlessly to repeat myself into middle age and general irrelevance.

But enough of that. This is turning into one of those self-destructive navel explorations when it's meant really to be a celebration of the achievements of my friends.

Go out and order Rodge's book. It'll be out in time for your holidays - and a better way to spend a handful of hours than in the company of Mr Glass and his characters I cannot imagine.

Photies of the trip

2005-04-14T08:56:00.000+01:00

Bunting on the pier at Weston-sur-Mer. Who doesn't love a bit of bunting?

I left Weston with a bag of hammers.

This is the opera house at Cardiff Bay. The words are windows, which tickled me mightily.

The tide goes out for miles at Morecambe bay. This is the view from my B&B. I'm heading for them thar hills the morn's morn, hoping that icy north wind is going to turn around.

Morecambe bay - wham, bam, alacazam - under an orange-coloured sky.

This is Lancaster. Located on my map somewhere between Charles Dickens and Coronation Street.

The stupidly pretty village of Grassmere in the Lake District, where William Wordsworth and Mr Squirrel Nutkin used to drive around in a big old blue car pointing at daffodils. Or something.

Some boats on Derwent Water, Keswick. Hills too. Clouds, some trees, a duck.

Public art? Or the shortest cycle path on the planet.

St Michael's kirk in Dumfries. That big white-domed mausoleum is the resting place of Robert Burns.

That's your lot, my leetl chickens. Plenty of gorgeousness and luscious fuzzy greenery to be had in the British Isles, not all of it photogenic (though this guy's quite good at capturing it.) Nor indeed photographable while wobbling about on two wheels.

Leg up

2005-04-12T22:34:00.000+01:00

Some cyclists call it the LeJog, some the end to end. In my case it's more like the end to ended. Or Leg, for short (Land's End to Glasgow). I picked up some kind of knee strain setting off from Taunton on my third day, from the first push down on the pedal in too high a gear. Just a niggle, tho, and I thought a couple of days off the bike in Cardiff at my brother's house would see it OK. But another three days, 2 of them up hill and down dale into a headwind, and the pain's getting serious.

Well, that's my story and I'm sticking to it.

Truth? Well, mostly knee, but a bit unrealistic timeframe, a bit frustration at the shite weather and insane traffic, a bit too much gear on my back wheel, a bit too ambitious. All of the above. Call it a first draft. I'll tackle it again, in summer, with less shit and a stronger resolve. Maybe not this summer, tho who knows. I have other fish to fry this summer. (What's with the cliches, by the way? "Up hill, down dale"? "Other fish to fry"? Get a grip, boyo.)

It's been a curious kind of failure this trip. In terms of completing the end to end, well, it's absolute. That much was clear to me on the first day: no way was I going to manage 100 miles a day. Daft to even think it. In terms of getting out of the house and doing some serious miles on the bike, it's a lot better. In terms of "waking up from ordinary", providing myself with a challenge, getting out into the fuzzy stuff . . . you could look at the trip as a success.

Let's not kid ourselves, but. I guess I've learned about my limitations, physical as well as mental. To accept failure and not make forehead shaped indentations into the walls in my flat. Other stuff too.

I've not fallen in love with the British Isles the way I did with France when I spent a month cycling from Normady to Bilbao. Not that the British Isles are inherently "unloveable", they're far too familiar to me for that. Remarkable variety, though. In a couple of days cycling you can pass through wild coastline, beach resorts, moorland, arable farm land, any size settlement from village to city, plains, uplands, rivers, lakes. Where else do you get such diversity in such a concentrated space? And weather? Shit, it was snowing last Friday in Lancaster, and it was 18 degrees the Monday before. Rain, hail, winds from the north, the west, the south. Is this what people see when they visit the UK?

I don't know what I'm after here. Some kind of meaning? Maybe - epiphany alert - the meaning to all this is: there is no meaning to all this. I've said it before that the whole point of life is to be entertained a little, every now and again. To make that happen, well, first you've got bump against your limitations. And it can't hurt to shake up your complacencies. To break old habits. To get out into the fuzzy stuff. To experience a kind of failure different from the usual variety. To experience corporality and pain and remember/ re-learn how you deal with that.

And, quite possibly, to really understand that the journey is the end itself, not a means to an end. To reach John O'Groats - does that have any more meaning than not to reach John O'Groats? Say I had completed it, what would that mean? Well, it would mean I would have a sense of satisfaction, of closure, to think of it in terms of narrative. It would mean I was fit. It would mean I could say to anyone who'd stay put long enough for me to tell them that I'd done that. Would that change anything? Would I be respected any more for doing it? However, if I don't finish what I say I'm going to finish . . . what then? Would I be respected any less for not doing it?

Or what if I had developed a knee injury from trying to reach the end? That would certainly be meaningful and it's something to think about: it would mean, for instance, that I would most certainly not be fit to run. It would mean that work - teaching on the 5th & 6th floors of a crowded college building with shitty lifts - would be damn awkward. That's probably all the meaning that life offers, and I find that kind of reassuring.

It all depends on how you use the experience. We've all met travellers who've circumnavigated the globe, but in their heads they haven't left their backyards, nor been enriched or affected one whit by their experience. Yet, someone can make a journey to the other side of their town and return transformed . . .

With the cycle trip I see it like this. You're cold: you feel alive. You're wet through: you feel alive. You're tired: you enjoy your rest all the more and wake up the next day refreshed and alive. You feel pain and discomfort and frustration and fear: fuck it. You're still feeling. Life, I suppose, only has as much meaning as you are willing to allow it to have.

So much for Amateur Philosophy Hour. These last few days have been good fun, let's not forget. And as I write this word, "fun", I'm kind of recalling, like it's someone else that this happened to, swearing and spitting and screaming into the wind that kept trying to push me down all those hills for the last two days. But still fun. When was the last time you swore at some geography?

I'll go away now and work on my metaphors and return in a couple of days to describe some of the stuff out there. Meanwhile, here's a picture. Taken at Weston-super-Mare.

Some fucking illiterate idiot forgot the apostrophe in candyfloss.

More photies, soon. Meanwhile, if you're game, check out the self-portraits on the flickr site. I'm turning into a narcissist.

Which embarrassing bodily function are you?

2005-04-07T00:33:00.000+01:00

Just like the rest of you I'm sure, I don't go in for these daft blog trinkets (which country/ TV gameshow host/ mechanically recovered meat derivative snack product are you?) - well, not very often, much, really - but I have the late nite fidgety fidge and this is too near the mark it hurts to admit, so here, via Jacqueline . . .

You're Inherit the Wind!

by Jerome Lawrence and Robert E. Lee

To you, the learning process is inherently about controversy. If people aren't having their minds stretched, how could they possibly be learning? This makes you a good but unpopular teacher, and the people around you are ready to make it a federal case. All you're asking them to do is evolve a little. But they would like you to be more creative. You would make an excellent lawyer, even though people think you love monkeys.

So there.

I was brought up nice & polite and told to say wind instead of fart. Inherit the Fart. Sums up my teaching style: a lot of pungent hot air.

I'm not sure which one of these guys I'm supposed to be. Am I'm the guy weilding the book shouting: "HAVE YOUSE EVEN SEEN ONE OF THESE, NEVER MIND READ ONE?" Or the guy leaning on the first guy's shoulder, grimly worrying, "If they never do their assignments on time, does that mean they hate me?" Or am I the guy under the first guy's oxter with the bow-tie and the ping pong bat thinking, "If I smack that gobby little princess across the mouth with this, is that assault?"

Incidentally, I'm also Ireland. It told me I know and enjoy at least fifteen ways of cooking a potato. How does it know that?

Time to get back on the damn bike.

Take the Book Quiz
at the Blue Pyramid.

E2E update

2005-04-06T13:59:00.001+01:00

Not really sure where to go with this. Maybe it's an idea to transcribe the journal I've been keeping since the end of my first night's cycling, but then again, maybe that's too much info to be getting on with in one sitting.

I'm in an internet place in Cardiff. It's not exactly en route, if you know your British geography, but my brother lives here & since I was passing within a goblin's toenail of the place (I stopped last night just across the Severn estuary in Taunton) I felt that it would be silly not to pop in and say hello. Which kind of banjaxes the plan to make John O'Groats in two weeks by bicycle, but hey.

It's good to see my brother. Haven't seen each other since Christmas and even then we barely spoke. Plus he & his girlfriend are going to up-sticks to Paris in the summer so this is as good a time to visit as any.

If I'm starting to sound like I'm rationalising a bit too much here, let me tell you about my last couple of days.

Drove down overnight from Glasgow in a rented car with the bike and all my gear (tent, sleeping bag, sleeping mat, clothes & other camping shit) and got to Timx's place around 11am. Spent the day with Timx, had a wee nap, a few beers, and a bit of a blether etc. Next morning Timx gave me a lift to Land's End where we said cheerio & I went on my merry way.

The weather started off overcast, but not threatening rain; breezy, but not too windy; mild, but not too cold . . . kind of perfect for cycling. On the way down, I'd been observing with increasing dread, to Timx's increasing mirth, the kind of hills you get in Cornwall: long, slow climbs and plenty of them. You barely notice them in a car, but on a bike with luggage loaded on the back they grind you down bit by bit.

Things got off to an annoying start - my trip computer which was working fine up to this point decided not to do anything it was supposed to: no speed, no distance. Just the time . . . The first ten miles to Penzance were twisty, turny, winding country roads but quiet and a good warm up for the legs. Onto the A30 - the only road that really points north - and it's a different world entirely. Being a Sunday it was probably a bit quieter than any other day. But, I imagine, only a bit. I was still getting used to the weight on the back of the bike, how it affects balance & co-ordination, all that. But with any and every species of traffic whoring past my elbow at speeds upwards of the maximum road limit of 60mph it was, to understate the case a jot, quite stressful.

The hills were the major nuisance, though. Those interminable gradients, just stretching ahead of you and always a wee bridge crossing above you at the crest, like a lid.

The first half dozen or so, fine. In fact it's quite good using all the gears I never have any need for in Glasgow. The next half dozen still kind of OK, but you're not exactly delighted; you're starting to tire. After that it's a gradual decline into a grimly pessimistic mindset. These long hills don't just grind your muscles to blob, but your resolve too.

Of course, there is a downside too - every hill has one, right - and this kind of provides a bit of yin energy as you coast for about a mile and a half before the next upward slog.

The tipping point was at a place called (rather oddly) Indian Queens (neither takeaways nor Oriental royalty much in evidence). In a car you'd be up and over in a minute and a half. When I got to the top I was nearly in tears of relief, legs screaming, sweat oozing and nipping into my eyes, fucking lorries blundering inches away from the handlebars . . . and one more element yet to be added to the experience.

Let me tell you that the excitement of playing Death Race 2000 on a bike in heavy traffic is nothing - nothing - compared to playing it in fog. For 20-odd miles. With nothing but a pair of (admittedly quite red) bags and a silly wee rear light keeping the traffic behind you from thinking you're just some funny shaped fresh air. Oh, and rain too. Some crosswinds. More hills. And all the time expecting to be rear-ended by a white van man picking his nose or a SUV family in the middle of a row about who's having the last egg sandwich or a chavved-up purple hatchback with tinted windows and golden bumpers doing a ton or a fat trucker hunting the dash for his Embassy Regal or a sales guy checking his map or a middle aged caravan couple fighting the same crosswinds as me.

I was aiming at a wee place called Launceston, which is right on the Cornish border - the last town essentially before Devon. In an ideal world (fewer hills, less weight) I'd have gone an extra 20 miles to Okehampton. I made it to Launceston with night chasing my back wheel, not a campsite for miles, and the allure of several bed & breakast places on offer. The first place I asked at had a bath.

Do you blame me?

Day 2 was a lot better. Had a browse around the attractions of Launceston (twisty-windey wee streets at odd angles, lots of shops that look like the set of a Sunday night TV drama set in the 1950s) and reminded myself why I wanted to spend a fortnight cycling: to see places like this, of course.

I was on my way by 10.15. It was a varied day: some Death Race 3000 on the dual carriageways of the A30; some tractor baiting on the B-roads; some white-knuckle descents with my front brakes screaming louder than my nerves; some flat bits; and what fetl like a Sysyphean ascent up the highest hill in fucking Devon.

No-one tells you it's hilly in Devon.

It's hilly in Devon. There. You've been telt.

Campsites seem pretty fucking scarce, which is a bit irritating considering I'm hauling a not inconsiderable amount of camping gear that so far hasn't seen the light of day. It's the weight that kills me on those hills. Forget Time, it's Gravity that's the Dreaded Enemy. Nothing makes you feel more like a diddy than going up a hill in first gear: legs spinning at a trazillion miles an hour while barely managing to achieve walking pace.

I tell you, if I manage any kind of distance on this doomed trip I'll have legs like tree trunks. (Do you get hairy trees?)

What I'm enjoying most about the trip is (apart frommy first day) the extreme good humour I'm in when I finish cycling for the day. I don't know what it is. Something about totally killing yourself for 70-80 miles then relaxing. I feel glad to be wherever I am. Glad to be (still) alive. To feel fitter and healthy and hungry and curious about the place I'm in. To be walking and employing different muscles. To be seeing stuff I haven't seen before.

Cycling is ever a management of discomfort. Of relentless effort. Of self-talk to get you over the hills, or death-talk as the lorries squeeze you closer to the edge of the road. Of "just five more miles . . . then rest."

There's no space for the mind to play around in, no room for imagination to roam. It's the road and the body. Your mind is always in your body. Your legs, your arse, your ankles, your wrists, your fleshy bit by the thumb that goes kind of numb when you hold on too tightly; your napper as it goes hot and red from the sun, the factor 20 having been sweated out and into your eyes on the upswing of another gradient; your arms as they go stiff from steering; your shoulders as they go hunchback-shaped from hunching over handlebars.

But when you get to the end of the road and the thought that you don't have to cycle another inch for 14 or 15 more hours . . . then, well, that feeling is just great. And that's what I'm doing this for, I remember. That feeling. The goal is never enough on its own. I realise that 2 weeks is a tall order for me. I'm not as fit as I need to be for that. 3 weeks, yes: I always thought I'd need 3 weeks. But I don't have 3 weeks.

The plan then, after Cardiff, is to take the train somewhere north a bit and take it from there. I'd like to cycle the Lake District & the whole of Scotland, as long as I continue to enjoy the ride. That's the thing.

Bye bye bicycle

2005-03-31T23:42:00.000+01:00

There's less than 24 hours before the wheels are set in motion for my end-to-end cycle trip. Er, literally: I've finally hired a car to drive overnight to Cornwall. The plan is to stay awake long enough to have breakfast at the seaside somewhere south of Plymouth & watch the sun come up. Have a nap, drop the car off, then meet up with timx for a Cornish pasty & a pint and a blether. Then, first thing Sunday morning, I'll tootle down to Land's End to start pedalling my way up the British Isles. Marvellous. Can't wait.

I got the bike back from the shop where it was getting some much needed TLC. The back wheel was buggered - roads are a mess in Glasgow - so that had to be replaced. I also had new tires (made with kevlar, the same stuff they make bulletproof vests from!) put on, so that should keep the punctures at bay - in theory at least. It's toned & lubed & running smoother than it has for yonks. Just like its luscious owner :D

What else. Need to pick up my front panniers from the other cycle shop (I like to take turn about) tomorrow & fit them (allow 5 hours +/- for mechanical ineptitude). Need to pack. Pick up some supplies for the road down. Blah blah blah. No-one needs to know all this pish.

It's going to be good. I've not given this anything like the amount of thought that I gave the trip across France in 2000 - and that was pretty ad-hoc. My philosophy is kind of, well, the more you nail things down - you know that anal retentive itinerary business, Day 1: Exeter, Day 2: Oxterwhiffton, Day 3: Slingsby Arsebag, etc. - the more you do that, the more frustration you build in to the trip. Things can always go wrong, so why encourage them? The fun of travel is finding out. If you go knowing your route already, you're not really travelling; you might as well stay at home. There's any number of websites out there that describe the perfect route - which is fine - but what they mean is perfect for them, at that time.

Haven't given much of a thought to the weather, but you can't worry about stuff like that. Can do nothing about it anyway, except have the GoreTex at the ready. The bike & the gear are more important. There's a Billy Connolly line that I love where he's talking about the (unremittingly rubbish) British/Scottish weather and he says: there's no such thing as bad weather, just the wrong clothes. I've got some pretty decent kit that's more than up to the job.

Paramount, though, is the attitude you take on the road with you. I was getting all excited the other night talking to a couple of pals about the trip & for the first time in aaaages I remembered what it's like to be alone on the road with nothing but the miles ahead of you. It's amazing. It transforms you. You exist in complete equilibrium with the world and yourself. Your body and its vital functions are being used to capacity & you start to listen to your body more closely, you become more tuned in to yourself: do you need fat or carb; do you need water now; animal or vegetable protein; sugar; whatever. Your imagination goes places it wouldn't normally go. You remember things you thought you'd forgotten. You understand things more clearly because your only distractions now are maintaining your speed and balance and momentum, not flicking through the infinity of naught on TV (except the new Dr Who ;) ), or staying up all night going fidgety fidge on the laptop, or worrying about a difficulty at work. The really important stuff becomes clear like never before. It's like meditation. Silence. Solitude. Bliss. Waking up from ordinary.

I've wanted to do this for a long time, but life always kept getting in the way. Some people have marvelled at this and have expressed how pleased they are that I'm finally fulfilling a long-held ambition. Which is very lovely to hear and yes it's good finally to be doing it, but more often than not they say something along the lines of "you'll look back on this as a great achievement" which, while it may be true, is looking at it the wrong way round. I'm not doing this to have done it. I'm doing it to experience doing it. That's a bit different.

I'm taking the camera & a notebook: my only recreation other than the cycling. No blog for a fortnight - unless the miraculous happens and I find a campsite with a broadband connected computer. I'll fill youse in when I get back.

Tootle pip.

One of these days I gotta get organizized

2005-03-29T00:41:00.000+01:00

Wonder Boys is on right now. Probably one of the best films about writing I think I've seen. Drags a bit at the end, but it's worth it to see Frances McDormand and that white Citroen again.

My organisational skills today showed themselves to be as deranged and disordered as ever. For the last few weeks I've been going around telling everyone who will listen that I'm cycling from Land's End to John O'Groats starting this weekend. I've no route, no idea if I'll manage it, no back-up plan, no exit strategy - and at the moment of writing, no real idea how I'm going to get to Land's End.

My idea originally was to get the train - there's a direct line from Glasgow to Penzance - but it turns out that the line is being worked on meaning that the journey will take 13 hours and involve 3 changes. In a word: Fuck. That.

So, the only other alternative is to hire a car. Which of course I've not done yet. No idea what it'll cost, if I'll get a one way deal to Penzance, if my antediluvian four foot square driver's licence is still valid without a photo . . .

There's got to be an easier way to go about things than this constant crisis management, lurching from one desperate scenario to the other.

What's that line Travis says in Taxi Driver?

Picture posting in progress

2005-03-26T12:19:00.000Z

THere's some pix below from my edinburgh trip on Wednesday - I'm trying to get them on one post but I'm an idjit and can't. Have to go out now & do some shopping so I'll work on them later.

c

Plaisir (et douleur) du chocolat

2005-03-26T11:59:00.000Z

One for Jon. This is the take-away counter at Plaisir du Chocolat on Canongate. I got a chocolate basket of mixed truffles for Other C & a slice of almond & chocolate tarte pour moi (a mere £11, something in the neighbourhood of $20).

Then, like a fud, left the bag on the train having had nary a sniff.

I bet it would never have happened to Johnny Depp.

2005-03-26T11:57:00.000Z

A Scottish health food shop.

2005-03-26T11:54:00.000Z

The white oval is a skylight on the ceiling of the office behind the window.

2005-03-26T11:53:00.000Z

This is a kind of magic eye mirror zoetrope kind of thing. Some dice look like they're jumping up and down.

2005-03-26T11:44:00.000Z

This is the main atrium type area of the National Museum of Scotland reflected in the pendulum of a huge weird clock.

Two wheels good, four wheels bad

2005-03-26T10:58:00.000Z

Did the Glasgow - Edinburgh - Glasgow thing on the bike yesterday which is one way to spend Good Friday, certainly.

The only drawback with the route I took - the A89, for any lurking anoraks - is that you have to spend time in places like Coatbridge & Airdrie (the Central Belt's twin capitals of sectarianism & the abuse of cheap booze), Blackridge (which welcomes its visitors to "a handgun free village" - ?!), Armadale (where even the valleys are tooled up), and Bathgate - not once, but twice in one day. There's about 45 miles between Glasgow & Embra and I reckon about 8 of them are actually rural. You get the feeling that the flat middle of Scotland is being kept in check by a concrete corset.

No photos, tho. Couldn't be bothered. It's not just taking the camera, it's the whole mindset that puts you in - you know, having to look for likely photographable subjects etc. I just wanted to get through the whole thing in one piece. What is it, by the way, about dudes in vans? I know the White Van Man phenomenon has been commented into cliche, but my gosh do those boys like to live on the edge. I had one guy try to take me out on a roundabout, then harry me up the exhaust pipe of the bus in front. (wait a minute, I just said "harry me up the exhaust pipe" . . . any Googlers in the audience?)

The second worst are the haulage guys carting rubble around in big filthy trucks at 100mph on wee winding roads. Or old grandpaws in Nissans who can't find the brake. Or minicab drivers. Or neds shouting "hawwwww" out the window, trailing a cannabis smokescreen. Or anybody in a car, really. My philosophy is to treat anybody in a vehicle as the Enemy and a potential murderer until they show me I can trust them. Until I get in a car, of course, then I can't wait to get the lycra-wearing, slow-moving, wobbly impediments out my fucking way so's I can do 90 in a Twenty's Plenty zone.

Anyway, I promised some reflections on Wednesday's trip to Embra so here goes. Most are from the Museum of Scotland.

Things are getting astronomical in Edinburgh these days . . .

You have to push to get in.

Some munchkins on a school trip.

Any ideas what the full word is? (hint: it's not "sporran" or "porridge")

More arty-farty nonsense. This is a brass handrail at the entrance. Don't know what that big orange doughnut's all about, though.

A window at the front of the new Scotch Parly building reflects European & Scottish flags.

A capital day out

2005-03-24T23:42:00.000Z

I'm still in love with my camera to the extent that it's taking over my life. The hunt for the elusive curvy letters of the alphabet shows no sign of abating and I'm about to reach the stage where I will kill for an ambiguous P.

Or even an amphibious one. Little known fact about C, and one which should really be in the 100 things: my favourite word when I was about 10 was amphibious. I thought that something which was equally at home in water as on land was just too cool. Don't ask why. It's a 10 year old boy thing.

Yesterday I went through to our nation's capital, fair Embra, with some of the HNC students. It was a trip organised for all of them, but only a small fraction came. Which made things manageable in terms of sitting together on the train, but was a tad disappointing. My colleague who organised it has a series of little rituals on these trips to Edinburgh: we write a poem about someone in the class on the train then read it out over a glass of hot wine at Deacon Brodie's pub in the afternoon with a cigar from the international newsagent's on the Royal Mile; we visit the poetry library and find cool stuff to read; and we check out the Writers' Museum and all the mad shit they've got there fetishising Robert Burns, Water Scott & RL Stevenson. (Sample fetish object: a key that looks like one that Scott might have been given.)

All in all a grand day out. It's nice to chat with the students; if nothing else it's a chance for them to see that I'm not the scary ogre I pretend to be in college, and for them to sound more intelligent & grown up than they usually do . . . kidding.

You won't be at all surprised to hear that I brought my camera. My theme for the trip was "reflected surfaces". Who knows why. I just picked that. Maybe I read about it somewhere. I'm not flickr-ing them cos most of them are rubbish, but I'll post them here out of curiosity more than anything.

Well, maybe later. Having trouble with the stupid picture posting software. Blehh.

Tomorrow, being a holiday - joy - I cycle to Embra & back. That's about 90 miles. If I can do that I can do LeJog. Then in the evening, I'm taking part in a literary reading at Tchai Ovna. I think a bit of Retail Therapy is what we all need. My acting class finished today so I'm looking forward to performing some of my own work . . .

JJ'S EX FLEW INTO XTC

2005-03-21T22:42:00.000Z

I'm writing this more out of a sense of duty than a genuine desire to share anything with the world, essentially since it's been a week since I posted and I want to keep you guys friendly.

I've been mad busy with the photos, though, getting the most out of my new toy. It's still bafflingly complex to me; I don't need even half the things it can do - I mean, manual override? I thought he was a Spanish footballer. Never mind all the techno-gizmos - I can barely muster the concentration required to keep the thing from shaking all over the place when I point and shoot at something I kind of vaguely fancy.

Anyway. I'm working on an accidental alphabet of Glasgow. Harder than you think. No actual letters, just shapes in the environment suggestive of letters. I did something similar as a fully paid up, bona fide writer for an exhibition at the Lighthouse called Fieldtrip a year and a half ago. If you're keen, click on the link there & go to Route 1 at the bottom of the page: Kilmartin Glen to Glencoe. That was mine.

I was employed to be a guide to the area, its history/ geography/ geology/ built environment etc. on a journey with some architecture students. It's an amazing part of Scotland, just crammed full of good stuff dating back thousands of years. It's just crazy how much stuff there is round Kilmartin. Read Neal Ascherson's Stone Voices, probably the most erudite, readable and all round enjoyable statement of where we are as a nation to be published this century - he uses Kilmartin Glen as a jumping off point to discuss various aspects of the state of Scotland.

However, on Fieldtrip my job was to tie all that shit together with my "unique" writerly sensibility - the guides on the other routes included a photographer, an architect, a visual artist, a historian - and deliver some sort of outcome whereby my group would 'interpret' their journey. I did a rekkie with Other C about a month before the actual gig and had a blinding epiphany, with my (very analogue Pentax K-1000) camera at 8am after a 3 hour car journey and a flask full of espresso-strength coffee, that the way to go about it was to make an alphabet of the environment.

I realised instantly that it was a stroke of genius, and danced with glee around the car park at the end of the Crinan Canal, clapping myself on the back, letters jumping out of the landscape everywhere I looked. A jaggy stretch of wall was a W, a telegraph pole was a T, that bend in the river yonder turned into a Y. It tied the man-made with the land-made, the literal & obvious (the H of a fire hydrant) with the obscure & largely interpretative (a river meander seen from the crest of a hill could be an S); it provided a system where the built environment could be read in the same way as the natural environment - if there was such a thing. The thing about the "wilderness" in Scotland is that it's so deeply marked (tamed, even) by humans, a fact particularly evident, especially since Scotland was once covered by forest, in the lack of trees. The ubiquity of sheep invoked the Clearances. Everything became a potential statement.

So. You get the idea. I'm up to something similar with Glasgow, except the context is a little different & not nearly as political. It's become just another mad, semi-autistic boy-hobby. Not as easy as you might think either. Doing this kind of thing makes you look at your world a bit more carefully, makes you notice things you'd otherwise be blind to, encourages you to look up and around instead of always at that bit of pavement just in front of your feet.

And one of the things you realise is just how full your world is of straight lines. This may seem like no epiphany at all, not news, a no-brainer. You live in a city, Sherlock - whidjy expect? Yeah, sure. OK. But still. Makes you long to get out into the country or the seaside where things are a little bit fuzzier; where your mind doesn't feel locked into those straight lines, regular patterns, predictable forms. It makes the quest for a B or an S or an R or any of the curvy letters take on some kind of Grail like stature.

So far I've got a pair of Js, an E, an F, a C, an i, a W, an O, an L, an N, a couple of Ts, 2 Xs and a doubtful S . . .

Anyone for Scrabble?

You see, eye see-c

2005-03-14T22:31:00.000Z

Ok, so I've got a new toy. Very sexy, high gadget factor, fucking really complex and *not* (my willy's bigger than yours) cheap.

I don't even know how to work the thing yet, but that hasn't stopped me going out into the world and terrorising it with my shaky grasp of composition and framing. Hey, what the heck - it's digital, it's delightful, it's democratic . . . it's de future.

I've also been fiddling with Flickr, which - I'm learning - is where you can post your digitised photo albums for the world to admire. Marvellous. More time to be wasted watching blue bars increase in length (my willy's still bigger than yours) by increments of micro-millimeters (they're inches, honest).

Well, at least it saves your pals & relations having to lie to your face about how great your photos are. Send them the link and they can email you if the pictures, or the mood, moves them.

A link will appear on the sidebar in due course but don't hold your breath.

Of hares and hounds and heffalumps

2005-03-14T18:48:00.000Z

It was the Balloch to Clydebank half marathon yesterday and an experience rather different from cruising the wide boulevards of Paris with a teeming horde of thousands. You don't get views like this in Paris, for starters.

This event, it would seem, is when the running calendar comes out of hibernation and all the hares and hounds from clubs up and down the country gather on the shores of Loch Lomond to stretch their skinny frames along the roads of East Dumbartonshire. It is not a fun run. There are no men in drag, no clowns, no Big Birds, no dudes in kilts running for charity. No bagpipes. Not even a samba band. This was Serious.

The bus to Balloch was filled with all these rangy runner dudes with 26-mile stares and conversation limited to talk of shoes and personal bests and all that tiresome guy behaviour. Fucking spare me. I hate when guys get like that. "I'm faster than you. I can afford better shoes than you. I know more about the science of running than everyone within earshot." All it's ever about is "haw, show's yer willy - bet ye my willy's bigger than yours." And we all know about the ones that shout about it loudest . . .

There were only about 500 (less, even) at the starting line and to be honest, that was the last time I saw them, since by the time I'd stopped choking on their dust there was already about 5 miles between us. Not that I was last, exactly, but I was probably last-abouts - even though I managed to knock 3 minutes off last week's time, heaving my bun-licious bulk across the line in 1:51.

It's strangely disspiriting running a lonely race like that (save your hankies, troops) - Other C was laid out with a cold - even though it's not really being fair on myself to compare my run with a bunch of club runners who've been doing it more seriously, for longer. Still. When you're pounding away watching arse after arse bounding on ahead of you. Well, you get kinda sick of the view of sweaty lycra arses.

See if I get any Google hits for that last paragraph :)

Anyway, thanks to a 10 minute ice bath with packs of the stuff strapped to my thighs & knees when I returned, & a half hour steam & sauna later on, the Tin Man is banished all to hell.

9671st

2005-03-11T11:33:00.000Z

Results posted on the offical Paris half marathon site reveal that me & Other C (a couple of places below) finished kind of in the middle of the field. There were almost 20 000 entries (less than I thought, must have got mixed up with the full marathon). They confirmed the time that we recorded too, which is cool.

Other news: the Tin Man has departed, thankfully, so I should be fit for Sunday's Balloch to Clydebank half. Lots of stretching, cycling and some gym work saw him off. Bad news is that Other C is down with a cold so is unlikely to participate. Our numbers were like 250-something. Rather fewer than were running last week. I'm trying to think of it as a long training run, even though I'll probably kill myself in the process. That ice bath Jon mentioned sounds like a groovy idea . . .

From Seine to insane

2005-03-08T23:41:00.000Z

I don't think I mentioned this, but we've signed up to run a second half marathon next weekend. It's from Balloch to Clydebank - and I'm still doing the Tin Man shuffle.

WHAT HAVE I DONE!

There was going to be a third one the week after that, in Girvan, but Other C put her foot down and demanded a lie-in that week. She can be reassuringly sensible, Other C. It's demented behaviour, really, this running. Giving up your weekends to put yourself through physical & mental torture all the while promising yourself an old age filled with rubber-toed walking sticks, plastic kneecaps and visits to the osteopath.

Why do we do it?

There's got to be some kind of aberrant pathology at work here. I could unpick it on this blog I suppose, unravel the psychology of running or something, but I hear warning bells. The very idea of unpicking & unravelling stuff puts me in mind of a little 'experiment' I did when I was wee. I blagged a clock off my Aunty Baxit and decided it would be a good idea to dismantle it - to see how it worked.

I had a great time loosening screws, uncoiling springs, fiddling with cogs and all that. Very interesting: I found out that clocks use cogs and screws and springs. With the results of my experiment littering every spare inch of carpet in my bedroom I proudly showed what I'd done to my Dad who took one look at the chaos and said, sagely:

"Well, that's all very well, but have you thought about how you're going to put it back together again?"

Kind of ruined the party for me. His is the kind of brain that understands car engines and complex electronics and golf handicaps. Mine isn't. I don't do systems. You can't intuit or emote the workings of a clock. Fancy words don't tell the time.

I've been a bit reluctant to unpick things ever since. (Apart from my nose.)

Here, anyone who's interested - I fixed the link for the 100 Things on the sidebar. I reworked it a bit but it's fundamentally the same, more or less. I'm still me. Still C. Before I start unpicking at least.

Hip, hip - courez!

2005-03-07T17:49:00.000Z

Ran the Paris half-marathon yesterday in 1hour 54mins.

I think it's fair to say me & Other C are pretty pleased with ourselves about that. We kept the walking breaks to just over a minute at each water station, and my goodness did we need them. I forgot the weird in-the-zone feeling you get with other runners around you - and so MANY of them! I have no idea how many - read somewhere that the half-marathon attracts like 30 000 entries . . . nothing but people in front of you and behind you, streching for miles. It's quite a buzz, let me assure you. An event.

There's just something extra you get from running with other people. But what though? Is there some massive motivational energy that charges the air? Is it something simpler like - hey, if that old bastard can do it, so can I? There's just no question of slacking off. You lock into this relentless groove of rhythmical pounding, onwards and on, whether you like it or not. Even when your legs are screaming at you to fucking stop this madness, to sit down, to walk a bit, to do anything but run any more you just keep going.

Well, I'm paying for it now. I've been walking around the college today like the Tin Man from the Wizard of Oz. Forget the stairs, just walking in a straight line without my thighs buckling is an achievement.

The weekend started off with a question mark over the race since Paris was covered in snow when we arrived on Friday night - in fact it delayed our flight for over an hour. Then on Saturday the temperature kind of hovered around zero. Even as we took our place in the starting area, the snow started again. It was quite beautiful. The air light with anticipation, warm in the midst of so many bodies - then watching the snow falling between the trees in the Bois de Vincennes.

My French isn't really up to much, unfortunately, so I didn't get much of the banter going on around me. But I do understand the word pardon. Which is just as well because that's all I heard for the first hour or so - lots of wiry wee Frenchmen fizzing past us in a mad rush. The starting zones are supposed to be staggered (a funny term - it's usually the end where you see most of the staggering) but me & Other C somehow ended up in the superfast zone - lots (& lots & lots) of seasoned runners aiming at being in the showers a good half an hour before the rest of us.

The route wasn't exactly a sightseeing tour. We started off in a park on the outskirts of the city by the zoo heading into town towards the Bastille area, then along Rue Rivoli past the hotel de ville - a political manoevre methinks, since Paris is bidding for Les Jeux Olympiques in 2012 - then down to the Seine, a left turn at Pont Neuf and along by the Louvre and back out of town to the park again.

But you're not really checking out the view, to be honest; it's more the vibe. Lots of firemen sitting on their stretched out ladders barking at us through their megaphones. Somehow, "allez, allez!" and "bon courage!" sound more enthusiastic (and are said more enthusiastically) than the English "Come on!" and the stupidly redundant "Keep going!" - like you've a mind not to.

The sideshow stuff was quite entertaining too. Bands playing groovy & hummable music (brass band versions Kylie's "Can't get you out of my head" and "Misirlou"), comedy mariachi dudes with stick on Zapata 'taches, punk brass band dressed as nuns, sassy samba chicks with big drums shaking their arses & wiggling their tits.

No will-to-live-sapping bagpipes you get in Scotchland, I'm glad to report, although there was an incident with an offensive accordeon on the train to the airport. Usually, accordeons are like cat-nip for me. At the sound of one, a mere note, my world is transformed into a place of sunshine and joy. It takes a lot for me to get angry at an accordeon as long as it's not playing Scottish country dance music. In France, I'd have though it was impossible.

Not so.

We got the express train from Les Halles to the airport. 30 minutes. A busker got on and for 20 of them, give or take, played the same 20 bars of Under the Bridges of Paris, over and over and over and over and over and over and over and over and over and over and over and over and over and over and over. And nothing else. Badly.

When the hat went round I didn't know whether to laugh or throw her & her accordeon out of a shut window.

There was also a (anyone know the collective noun for Spanish young people? A gaggle? A babble? A stupidity? An incitement to murder?) XXXX of Spanish young people next to us having a conversation. Which is the same sound as a roomful of sincere but very cross mental health patients having an argument. One of them asked which stop to get off at for Terminal 2. We suggested the stop on the map that that said "Terminal 2". When we got to the stop for Terminal 1, half of them got up to leave, insisting, seriously, vigorously, with the kind of logic that only Spanish people seem to possess, that Terminal 2 is really Terminal 1 and that this is the stop they should be getting off at.

As Manuel said to Basil, ¿Que?

Spanish people, some bad accordeon, no drink, no bun, and an express train back to the UK. The only thing missing from this scenario to create my idea of Hell is some bagpipes and a proselytising nun.

Enough already.

Insane in the meme brain

2005-03-01T01:55:00.000Z

I don't usually go for these mad meme things, but this one seems kind of harmless & I'm being tormented by insomnia again. This from Darth.

so you have 5 minutes to pack and meet at the dock for the boat that will take you & your beloved to the deserted island for a weekend . . . besides a bathing suit, you can bring. . .

1) One music CD i want to wake up listening to . . .

Something that can contain large open spaces. Erik Satie's pieces for piano played by Reinbert de Leuww. Eno's Atmospheres & Soundtracks. Anything by Sigur Ros.

I'd miss the boat cos I'd be standing there dithering.

2) One book i want to spend lazy afternoons reading . . .

Something dumb, unliterary, undemanding and utterly riveting. A
John Grisham, some breezeblock-sized airport thriller, the new Harry Potter.

3) One movie I want to watch as the sun goes down . . .

Something with the poetry of the wee hours about it. Tous Les Matins du Monde, maybe. That or a Before Sunrise/ After Sunset double bill.

4) One MP3 song *not* on the above CD i want to play (and sing along to) endlessly on repeat . . .

Something bouncy & tuneful, energetic and a bit intense. Pretty Vacant by The Sex Pistols or Take Me Out by Franz Ferdinand. I'd have to arm wrestle Other C for the Sex Pistols.

5) One snack food i want to eat, whenever i want, with no-one telling me how many calories are in it.

Blueberry muffins from Montgomery's coffee shop in Radnor Street. Best in town. A guilty indulgence that's become a bi-weekly imperative.

OK. That's that but I spot some flaws.

Nice to think that the docks in question are in some exotic location - five minutes from here is the Clyde. You might get a lift on the Waverley if you hang about till June. Or jump aboard the Pride O' The Clyde - but that only goes as far as Braehead Shopping Centre . . . The docks are gone, but there's a shipyard down a bit towards Clydebank. The only desert island you're going to reach from there is fucking Millport - which isn't exactly a desert, despite all the sand - and it's not even that deserted, though it is a wee bit quiet this time of year, mind.

Very unglam whichever way you hold it to the light.

Copy, paste, pass it on. Tell Darth I sent you.

No half measures

2005-02-27T17:52:00.000Z

My legs are killing me.

Just back from my weekend long run. After watching Other C set off in a blaze of late-winter/ early-morning copper sunshine last week, I was mad keen to get my arse out running.

It was my first run in 10 days and Jesus, does it hurt to take that much time off. It probably didn't help much to have gone to the gym the day before. I didn't do any CV apart from a 10 minute warm-up on the rower, but I spent an hour & a half going round the Nautilus gear for a full body workout. Mistake? Maybe.

It's 12 & a half miles from the beginning of the cycle path @ Bowling to Speirs Wharf. Add another half a mile from the train station, and another mile or two from Speirs Wharf to the Kelvin Hall steam & sauna and we're talking well over the half marathon distance.

Actual running time: 1h 51mins. Plus a lot of walking. Especially near the end.

I think I'm going to be limping tomorrow. Don't think I've stretched anything, or pulled anything or over-worked anything. Just feel used up. As long as I'm fit for the Paris half next Sunday. That's all that matters.

It was a beautiful day. Cold, but not too cold. Bright, but not brilliantly sunny. Cloudy, but not overcast. Rain was only a murmur in the air. Today's run was . . .

. . . dog walkers and Sunday cyclists

. . . anglers out along the canal path

. . . a black swan taking flight, its wing tips barely lifted above the surface of the water

. . . a bored looking teenager throwing a tennis ball for a madly enthusiastic black mongrel

. . . a posse of neds in identikit leisurewear wielding lengths of wood aggressively at a posse of neds in identikit leisurewear wielding lengths of wood aggressively at a posse of neds . . . like an urban Escher picture

. . . the solitary idiot ned with a motorized scooter thinking he was the bollocks. You know the scooters I mean - those things that look like a skateboard with a steering wheel. Except this one had an outboard motor at the back . . .

. . . grown up neds with powerful sounding quad bikes doing quaddy stuff on waste ground. The pair of jealous onlookers.

. . . the older guy with a confident & jaunty gait saying, cryptically, "There's got to be an easier way of doing this, eh?"

. . . the young guy jogging with his knees all the way up to his eyebrows

. . . the "serious" skinny runner guy with the stupidly luminous banana & peach coloured shorts & vest

. . . the old dude in the blue mac cycling barely faster than me running

. . . kids & dads on bikes, wobbling all over the place

. . . the smell of fresh bread baking through Maryhill & thinking of coffee & bun at the end of the road at Montgomery's coffee shop.

Anyway. That's the end of that. Now, I'm off to shovel as much sushi down my craw as I can manage without getting the boke. Sayanara, troops.

A campfire, some beans

2005-02-24T23:36:00.000Z

Back at work (joy) & pretty much over the cold thing. It snowed a bit in the British Isles and a nation ground to a standstill. Amazingly, Scotland missed most of it.

Met up with some writer friends last night at a reading given by this gentleman & company as part of the Aye Write! literary festival in Glasgow. It's going to be an incredible year for Rodge. Hope his book sells by the truckload. Certainly deserves to.

Lots of people I was at uni with are selling their books this year. It's all very exciting. As well as Rodge, there's Nick, Laura and Will Napier - though he was a few years before me & I've only met him once.

Feeling increasingly detached from all that, though. Probably because I'm not writing & seem to have lost all enthusiasm for writing. Which I know is kind of bullshit, but doesn't seem to make me want to do anything about it. Or it does, but I don't know how to. Feels like years are slipping past and I've got my feet firmly wedged in their concrete boots.

The trick is: you've got to want it. When you figure out what it is you want, everything else falls into place. You find the energy, the time, the people to help you along the way.

I kind of feel that it's going to fall into place one day. That one day I'll know what I'm for. Kind of like quitting smoking - one day it felt like the right thing to do & I did it and that was it. It was the right time for it, even though it was something I'd wanted to do for years and years.

One day. Sounds so fatalistic. There's a book out just now called Another Bullshit Night in Suck City, I think, that rang a little warning bell. It's about a guy's reunion with his long-lost father who went AWOL & mad with the drink, full of belief that he was going to be the next big thing in literature. Until 25 years later he washed up on his son's shore & gifted him with this story. The irony is of course that he didn't write the story; he was the story.

Maybe there's a certain honesty about that kind of behaviour that you don't get with a lot of writers. Maybe sometimes you've just got to hang up that dream.

There's a Tom Waits lyric I love from The Black Rider, goes:

Well, when I was a boy my daddy sat me on his knee
And he told me many things
He said to me: Son, there's a lotta things in this world
That you're gonna have no use for.
And when you get blue,
and you've lost all your dreams
There's nothin like a campfire
And a can a beans.

I'm cycling Land's End to John O'Groats this Easter. Just me & the road North. Some clarity. Some balance. Some distance. A campfire, some beans . . .

Talking stock

2005-02-22T08:49:00.000Z

Another day in the house. Weirdly, I feel worse than I did yesterday - a bit phlegmy & dizzy. Too much info? Hey, I'm fishing for sympathy. I find it really hard to lie in bed without being unconscious, my mind starts flipping cartwheels, so I always get up and footer around the house doing trivial little tasks like making beef stock and not really relaxing.

I don't know if I'll be doing that today. I want to stay put for a while, get better & re-read Stanislavski's An Actor Prepares. Yesterday, I boiled a pot full of bones for about 8 hours. It looked like something out of a scary fairy tale, the kind of thing you'd find a cackling witch clacking her heels and rubbing her warty hands over, chucking in the odd bat wing or beetle brow or ginger baby. Unfortunately, I couldn't get bat wings or beetle brows in my local butcher - just regular old cow knees - despite being in the West End. Maybe I should have tried Delizique. Ginger babies, being Glasgow, are in great abundance, but you go to jail for a long time for plopping them into boiling stock pots.

Anyway. An hour of roasting, 8 hours of simmering - not boiling, Anthony Bourdain (my reference du jour for things culinary) says you NEVER BOIL STOCK - and a fair amount of skimming of scum and gunge and goo and gloop and I had about a litre of stock at the end. Which tasted, well, slap me if you saw this coming - it tasted like boiled beef bones.

I was hoping for better so I thought I'd go the extra mile and make demi-glace, which is like this super-concentrated, shiny, densely flavoured stock that you add to give your (red meat) sauces a kick in the animelles. Anyway, to my litre of tasty (but runny) beef juice I poured in about half a bottle of red wine & some shallots, and simmered & skimmed for another hour or more.

And the result? Well, I'm pretty sure I made a decent demi-glace. But after all that procedure I got exactly 0.25litres of this rich, meaty, tart, pungent, caramelly, gelatinous purple-black liquid (a state it keeps only when warm) which tastes so powerful it will kick your animelles into the park - even if you're female & don't have any, it'll make you grow them first just so it can kick you there later.

But you know, even though I've got this powerful, really useful I'm sure, STUFF, it's stuff I HAVE ABSOLUTELY NO IDEA WHAT TO DO WITH other than tell everybody about it.

Open to suggestion.

Sudan 1, UK nil

2005-02-21T11:55:00.000Z

I'm off work with a cold, which is a bummer since I don't get paid for being sick. But there was no way I could have done my usual Monday shift feeling like this. Would just have made it worse.

Been feeling like shit all weekend. Had to miss my long run yesterday & felt pangs of envy as Other C set off to run a full half-marathon distance from Bowling to Speirs Wharf. Add another mile or two to get back to the flat from there & it's over the required distance, but she made it back in under 2 hours. Which is seriously impressive, imho.

I've got to the stage where it frustrates me not to be able to go out running. With God having turned down the thermostat on the British Isles these last few days I'm in no hurry to go out & get sweaty in zero temps. Looking out the window I see it's started snowing. Joy.

So I'm catching up on the blogging & making stock. Picked up some beef bones from the butcher's on Saturday. Made chicken stock on Saturday with a bag of chicken wings I got from Beveridge's on Byres Road & some cheap drumsticks from Asda. Had it simmering for about 8 hours with some roasted root veg & some herbs. It takes a bit of time, but it's not labour intensive or anything. And it tastes amazing & costs about the same as a couple of packets of shitty stock cubes. The beef bones were free, but I'm not sure what the quality is like. They look pretty knuckly: lots of (flavourless) cartilage, but unsure how much marrow. They're roasting at the moment; just need to go through in a minute & get the veg on too.

. . .

Relief. The bones look good. Had to stop myself getting down on all fours and having a gnaw. Stirring the stock there and listening to the BBC telling us more scary food stories. Once again, a nation looks at what's wriggling at the end of its fork and panics. This time it's cancerous Worcestershire sauce which has been found to contain some science-fiction ingredient called Sudan 1 which is - and I quote from the government's own website - "a red dye that is used for colouring solvents, oils, waxes, petrol, and shoe and floor polishes". Just let that sink in a bit . . . petrol . . . floor polishes . . . solvents . . . But the nippy sauce is just the tip - hundreds of products are contaminated.

I tell you, forget Orwell - Britain in the 21st century is becoming more & more like living in a Ray Bradbury short story.

I had to fish through the rubbish bag for the tube of tomato puree I used to roast the bones with before I started panicking. Fortunately, it says in about 20 languages that it contains just tomato and salt . . . but, hang on, what if it's made with genetically-modifed tomatoes? Will I grow a hamster's ear on my back? And if it's not GM, what kind of pesticides did they use? The tube is made of metal - what if it's corroded? Is there metal residue leeching into the tomato paste? And there's an unnaturally long shelf-life (2006!) printed on it - what else is in there? What are they putting in there that they aren't obliged to list? And it says at the bottom to use within 4 weeks after opening - this stuff's been kicking about the fridge for about 2 months! Is it Fair Trade? Am I exploiting Italian tomato growers? Do I need to see my priest as well as my gastroenterologist? Not to mention my oncologist, my epidemiologist, my therapist and my grocer.

And let's not even think about the cow bones simmering in my stock pot. BSE? CJD? Foot & mouth?

I think I need a lie down.

Gone Gonzo

2005-02-21T09:12:00.000Z

Hunter S Thomson was found dead last night, killed by a bullet from his own gun. Poor bastard.

I went through a phase of reading his stuff. Liked the collected "journalism" in Great Shark Hunt, though it read more like jazzed up autobiography. Had plenty of laughs. Enjoyed the Hells Angels book too. Fear & Loathing in Las Vegas was the one that hooked me, like everyone else I suppose. That Ralph Steadman cover just speaks to you. You know you are going to love what you'll find in here, it says. One of the best drug novels there is.

But, same as the Beats, you grow out of this stuff. I lost interest after reading his collected journalism published after the 70s. He became a caricature of himself I think. Much of the attraction in Thompson's early work & in the writing of many of the Beats (and this stuff is for boys, more than girls I think) lies in thinking as you read: "Hey, they really meant it! They wrote it like they lived it!" Until the point when you think, "OK, so what. You're just acting out. But what are you actually saying? What's in this for me? Are you going to give me something I can use?"

And you grow old while these guys keep blasting their shotguns at a world that's getting further and further out of range. Next thing you know, you're waiting for the paperback editions of (respected mainstream British journalists) Jon Snow & Andrew Marr's biographies.

Many so-called dangerous writers prove in the long run to be dangerous mostly to themselves.

Swamp running; bun munching

2005-02-14T18:09:00.000Z

Did the Bowling run with Claire again yesterday. It's about 11miles on the flat from Bowling back home. The route follows a cyclepath most of the way - but fortunately we managed to get rid of him & find our own way.

The main problem with the run yesterday was the slippery muddy-boggy bits all along the path for the first few miles. You see, it's been raining in Scotland kind of off and on for about 10 billion years, so you do find the odd bit of surface water here and there. In fact, the whole thing was less like a Sunday jog than some kind of Neanderthal swamp-Olympics event.

In fact, that's something the organisers of the London 2012 Olympic bid would do well to take note of. They should introduce swamp-running as a new event - it's the one thing us billy bunters in Scotland would have any chance of winning. Just imagine! Think of all the training that gets done in make-shift car parks on boggy brownfield sites across the country; every weekend hunners of fat punters trying to get to their cars before their chips get soaked through with the rain. You could even spice it up a bit by throwing in a couple of grumpy pit-bulls who haven't had a good feed since scoffing the contents of that pram parked outside the Drumchapel Lidl last Tuesday.

I'm one to talk, mind. I'm not so bad on the fried food products, though I'm partial to a grease-pumped mystery-meat roll from the college canteen, or some baked goods from that shouty French chick in the Gordon Street Bradfords. As has been confessed here on previous ocassions, I'm battling a bit of a bun addiction. A losing battle, as it happens, which is why I'm still muntering around at 190lbs, give or take, despite all the running & gymming - in fact, sometimes I think it's the only reason I run & gym. The thing is that bun is essentially good: bun only bad when it's consumed daily. Or worse - and I should really make an appointment with my priest about this - twice daily. As Jon says, I've got handles where I don't need lifting.

I've even got poor Claire in on the act. I popped over to her practice today with a festively packaged raspberry & white chocolate muffin from Tapa. Forget love-hearts: love me, love my furry arteries I say.

I don't think she's addicted yet. But if anyone knows of the Glasgow chapter of Bun Munchers Confidential, I'd be glad of their number.

Ahh, too late. Mood pickled.

2005-02-11T01:34:00.001Z

I'm listening to Les Baxter music right now & it's making me want to wear a powder puff blue crimpolene suit with a fucking huge collar and sip Martini in a Swiss hotel in the 70s.

As if running & writing (ha!) & reviewing restaurants weren't enough to be getting on with I've taken up acting classes.

I'm starting from scratch, never having done any acting except some nonsense at high school in El Paso. (We did some mad creation myth thing & I was one of the heads of a snake. I never really learned my lines & the whole thing was a shambles.)

One of our tasks is to keep a journal or logbook to document our experiences along the acting road. So, surprise surprise, I'm doing it as a blog. You can read it here. Go on. Off you go.

Now I'm listening to Lili Boniche and I'm dancing something Latin around a fucked old ballroom with a rose in my teeth and a sad luck dame on my arm and all the band are junked out except the singer who's in a funny mood cos I just stole his woman.

Angst and anxiousness on the bike on the way home. Taxi driver wanting to occupy exactly the same piece of road as I was, necessitating some frantic pedalling & some pretty ferocious language. Folks, I have a lot of anger and hostilty saved up against the world and it's earning interest. And my guess is I'm not the only one. It's all about spending it usefully, don't you think. Getting something for it.

Maybe I should by a cycle helmet.

It's still dark out there in Northern Britain, but not as dark as it used to be.

Now I'm listening to Karaim from Bar Kokhba (one for you Luca, compagno) and that tells me it's bed time. Bedtime with a prayer in my ear. Better bolt before the profane rhythms of Peliyot come along & pickle this mood.

Just in Crace

2005-02-07T18:21:00.000Z

Jeez. Apologies for the delay getting back online. Really haven't had the time to be writing on here. At the moment, I'm behind with deadlines for restaurant reviews (got three outstanding, due last week) and ever more restaurants to visit.

Also, I'm teaching more classes & therefore prepping more, plus I'm running more & more to be fit for the Paris half, and add to that a new evening class in acting I took up recently . . .

It's all just time and totally manageable but time management is not my strongest suit.

This article on writing by Jim Crace was brought to my attention this morning by a colleague. Basically, it's some advice he's written to aspiring authors who have sought his counsel on the various ways and machinations of editors & publishers, hoping that by phoning him up they'll circumvent the whole process. That's not very well expressed, but I'm tired.

One interesting point he makes is a simple error that a lot of beginner writers make: that of redundancy.

But, really, you must not allow your sentences to be weighed down with unnecessary and unproductive ballast. Every writer has a damaging idiosyncrasy,and that is yours. You remind me of a young author I met when I was an Arts Council writer-in-residence many years ago. She'd written a strong and heartfelt story about the ugly break-up of an appalling marriage, but she, too, was overfond of stating the bleeding obvious. ("The black and white magpies flew across the countryside" was one of hers. Black and white, indeed. The countryside!) As evidence that the warring couple in her story could hardly bear each other's company, she had described how the husband would always find some excuse to escape into the garden, to do a bit of weeding, perhaps, to mow the lawn, to tidy the shed, to burn some weeds, instead of bickering with his wife. "In the last months of their marriage, there was always a bonfire at the bottom of the garden, emitting smoke," she wrote. A tender image, don't you think? But hardly a rigorous or revealing one. Lazy writing. A bonfire emitting yogurt, or black and white magpies, would have been more engaging for the reader, even if a little silly. Engaging the reader is the essence of good writing, I suggested, and gave the example of a testing metaphor from a book I was reading at the time, Logan Pearsall Smith's Trivia. It required some sophisticated responses from the reader before its meaning could be appreciated. Smith wrote about "that Stonehenge circle of elderly disapproving Faces - Faces of the Uncles and Schoolmasters and Tutors who frowned on my youth", requiring me to conflate those two sets of cold, fixed, stony expressions. I would never be able to see an uncle or a megalith in the same way again. That's literature.

I could furnish you with lots of examples like this.

And I can see a lifetime of excuse making in this quotation:

Thomas Mann defined a good writer as "somebody for whom writing is more difficult than it is for other people". And that's because a good writer does not want to compromise.
In another letter, he excuses his rude behaviour on the telephone with another hopeful by apologising & explaining that . . .
I pretended to you that I was in the middle of a difficult paragraph but that was just intended to stir your guilt and scare you off. Successful writers are only rarely in the middle of difficult paragraphs. Most of our time is spent prevaricating and whining and managing the guilt.
. . . which I found oddly comforting, since my entire writing career to date has consisted mainly of prevaricating and whining & not managing the guilt. But there is hope! Hallelujah! One day, when I learn to manage the guilt, I'll finally be ready!

Time to pay my priest a visit, book an appointment at the hairshirt tailor's, glue tacks to the laptop keyboard.

let it snow, let it snow, let it snow

2005-01-18T10:32:00.000Z

. . . then let's all wade through a world of sludge.

I got a consignment of winter running togs from this place last night and decided to got out for a quick hop round the Clyde after work. Made the decision before looking out the window. . . so, by the time I hit the streets I was wrapped in the fluffy comfort of a blizzard. Which was kind of, umm, cool. Never run in a blizzard before.

Ok, ok, so it probably wasn't technically a blizzard. Just some snow. Like when people get a bit of a cold they say they have the flu. Or they have a headache and they complain of a migraine. You get the idea.

I didn't last long, I have to say. The thermal fleecy top thing worked amazingly well & it's amazing how quickly you get warmed up. But my forehead went numb after 10 minutes and my eyeballs kept getting flaked with ice & anyway I was starting to get soaked so I wrapped it after 20. If I remember to wear the gore-tex next time & it's not slippery underfoot I'm definitely going out in the snow again - if for no other reason than the feeling of exhiliration & relief you get when you stand under a warm shower at the end. Fantastic.

Blog's been being neglected a bit recently. Really lacking motivation. Was reading the "Non-Runner's Marathon Trainer" last night & there's some really useful psych-talk in that. For instance, using the phrase ". . . but it doesn't matter" when you're feeling a bit 'motivationally challenged'. Like you look out the window & it's pishing with rain & you think "I'll get wet. . . but - hey - it doesn't matter!" Or "I've had a hard day at work & I'm pretty bummed . . . but it doesn't matter!" And the idea is that you get off your arse & go out running anyway & are glad that you did & consequently feel better about everything.

That's the theory. Today's blanketing of Glasgow with a million tons of liquefying ice will certainly provide a challenge to the utter lack of motivation I feel when I look at it. Just like it doesn't rain here, but it pisses on you - we don't get "snow", per se, but a sinister encroachment of icy 'B' movie sludge that takes about 5 seconds to find the one tiny, minuscule chink in your shoes' defences and gets your feet soaking for the rest of the day.

And then you say, "My feet are all wet . . . but it doesn't matter!"

God, I'm such a grump. ("I'm grumpy . . . but it doesn't matter!") I'll need to do something to pull myself out of this malaise. Positive psych-talk is the key.

Matrix Resolutions

2005-01-09T23:52:00.000Z

So it's been a while. I seem to have turned into a grumpy old Eeyore of a man over the last few weeks. Misery's the river of the world and we've all got blisters from rowing.

Anyway, back to business.

Paris half marathon is in 8 weeks, I was reminded today. Spent the last 4 days doing stuff in the gym & have subsequently "over-trained" my right plantar fascia (the sticky-up rod-like thing - careful, now - that runs through yr foot) making it kinda painful to walk. Fuck.

8 weeks to train to go 13 & a bit miles without needing either ambulance or taxi to finish. Ach. Easy peasy. Just need to go out running more. . . Not terribly motivated, I have to admit. There's some storm action sweeping over the island this and every evening so far of 2005: pishing rain, hail, strong winds. None of it life-threatening or anything (yet) but hardly encouraging for getting out and about and running in it. I've not run at all this year, except for some tread & x-trainer nonsense. I've seen people out running in the streets (nutters) but I'm such a fair weather anything kind of person. I'd rather drink tea and eat bun. Which is why I'm a stone overweight & never get anything done.

The best news so far about 2005 is that our ration of daylight hours, here in north Britain, is increasing. I think last time I checked sunrise was 0845 & sunset 1603. Next Friday it'll be 0840 and 1611. Which is still depressing, but an improvement & giver of hope. When I started work as a school teacher one January in a previous life, I used to drive to work and observe gleefully the point at which the sun would show its cheery wee face above the horizon and look you in the eye with a wink. It made winter mornings slightly bearable; it gave me a sensation of calm & connectedness to the planet's rhythms, an inner harmony with the cosmos: a feeling shattered, of course, the instant I came into contact at the school entrance with the monstrous teeming mass of hormone-crazed stress-inducers that I was employed to teach.

I don't think the sun has appeared yet in Glasgow this year. If it has, it might just have been a rumour. The sun in Glasgow doesn't actually rise; it just kind of turns up - reluctantly, and usually late. If I was the sun's boss I'd fire it and give the job to the moon.

So. Resolutions. Haven't thought about it. Made a resolution to myself about half a year ago that I was going to do two things & blog the progress. Kind of losing the way with both of them & the blog. Maybe should resolve to focus energy & effort more strongly on achieving one or both of them, rather than chew my lip & wring my hands about my stagnating frame of mind. Besides, the lip's starting to bleed & my hands are becoming arthritic - can't keep that up for long, maybe I'll wring someone else's hands, chew someone else's lip . . .

rip it up and start again

2005-01-01T13:49:00.000Z

new year, new direction. . .

Hairy Mary

2004-12-30T01:35:00.000Z

Back home and into the lovin' arms of Glasgow where it's 5 degrees in the shade, the days are getting longer and the outlook is damp.

No pictures, well just the one that was taken for us. We're still totally analogue with the camera and it usually takes me & Other C a combined effort of about 2 years faffing and fannying about before either of us deposits or collects the film from processing. But to give you an idea of what Prague looks like - if you imagine getting a bunch of Disney animators together with a bunch of traditional craftsmen from Americaland and telling them to make what they think Old Europe looks like, you pretty much get the centre of Prague.

Anyway. Pictures. Here we are, me & Claire on holiday. I'm the one in the tartan leggings; the chick kinda does look like Claire, if you squint a bit. The other two were a pair of opportunistic tourist touts who were trying to sell us some crystalware.

Got very fed up with the vacant commercialism of the place. Had been warned, but wasn't expecting the viral infestation of shops selling cheap shite and goulash everywhere you walked. The question that never really leaves your mind as you walk around these places, whether it's some Costa del Sol tourist dive, around Picadilly Circus in Londonland, down the Royal Mile in Embra, etc - is: WHO BUYS THIS CRAP? Tawdry mugs, flimsy t-shirts, little glass flowers for chrissakes, baubly things that light up, baubly things that go ding, framed wooden diaramas of some peasant (no, not pleasant) idyll, knicknacks of all heft and hue and none of it no good to no-one.

Here's a story that might appeal to Jon in Michican, since it's kind of about chocolate. I once went to the city of Lourdes, place of Catholic pilgrimage in the French Pyrennes. I was on a month long bicycle jaunt across France to Bilbao & the Guggenheim Museum - my lapsed & latent Timhood had nothing to do with it. Much. I was curious. You grow up as a fledgling Tim hearing all the time about the Virgin Mary & how she appeared to wee Bernadette & how the water there cured the crippled and the lame for ever after: it's all part of the mythology of the Tim faith. Better than that, I once had a flatmate who'd been there once and had teased me with the promise that nowhere on Earth was there as much cheap, shoddy, god-awful, touristy, gimmicky shite as in Lourdes.

Anyway, I was kind of in the neighbourhood, on the bike, deleriously happy not to be in the UK, loving every bit of France, heading down the west coast of France from Bordeaux and, singing songs to myself, one of which was the Tom Waits number, Chocolate Jesus. Goes like this:

When the weather gets rough
And it’s whiskey in the shade
It’s best to wrap your savior
Up in cellophane
He flows like the big muddy
But that’s ok
Pour him over ice cream
For a nice parfait

The temptation was too much to resist. I decided to go to Lourdes and look for a chocolate Jesus. If there was one place on Earth where I'd find a statue of Christ made of chocolate, surely it would be in Lourdes. . .

There's a whole other story here about how I got there - massive bike failure about 20 miles out of town, carpal tunnel syndrome turning the laptop tappers into numb little sausages making repair a near impossibility, big thunderstorm, the campsite that was run by a pious-but-friendly old madame who was the French reincarnation of my Nana, blabbity blah blah. I could wax poetic about the nuns; the nurses; the nun nurses; the incongruous plague of Irish & Italian Tims in this wee French mountain town with the awesome peaks of the Pyrennes standing sentinel; waiting unshaved and still covered in bike grease in the queue for the healing holy water the next day, feeling like a cheap fraud & lousy cynic.

I could tell you all this, but you want to hear if I found my chocolate Jesus. . .

Well, I tried. I really tried. I was in every shop, every kind of shop. Twice. I even asked a few people but they acted like they thought I was weird - even though it was perfectly OK to sell a portrait of the Virgin framed by little flowers which light up and twinkle, or a holographic crucified Christ who winks when you turn it this way and that. . . Plenty of bizarre rubbish: candles the size of logs; build-your-own matchstick sets of the Basilica; lighters, pens, pencils, pencil erasers, and mobile phone covers with holy images on them; dishcloths with the Lord's Prayer . . . frightening.

But no chocolate Jesus.

There was a consolation prize, however, which sweetened the quest & gives it a nice denouement. I eventually realised, like a dimwit, that Lourdes was Mary's town. Obvious when you think about it since it was her 'apparition' that kicked off this whole racket. But I hadn't been thinking, just looking. I just figured since the town was about Catholicism, then Jesus would be involved somewhere. But no. Apart from that hologram & a million crucifixes Jesus didn't get a look in - Mary was the star.

So just when I was getting ready to call off the search I came across a little bag of mints bearing the image of the Virgin on the cellophane bag. Not only that, but her image was embossed on the individual mints themselves. Joy joy joy! No chocolate Jesus, but I'd found the next best thing: in Mary land, what better than Mary Mints.

Another song started going through my head. Long long ago in the UK, there used to be a type of boiled sweet called Murray Mints which had a murderously catchy jingle that went Murray Mints, Murray Mints/ Too good to hurry mints. I spent the remainer of the journey trying to think of a suitable, unblasphemous rhyme for my new find.

Well, that wasn't so hrad

2004-12-27T10:17:00.000Z

More running this morning. Thought I'd start on the New Year's resolutions a week early. To be honest, I never thought I really actually go out running while we were here, not on holiday - I brought the gear "just in case". But since the weather has been so warm and the city so lovely, what better way to get around to the bits you'd otherwise never see.

That was the spirit in which I headed off yesterday - found a straight road running east and kept going till I thought it was time to head back. Nothing exceptional - just lots of opulent looking residences dangling off the periphery of the city centre. I guess they're a bit like Glasgow tenement flats, but with candy coloured curlicues.

This morning I went up to the Castle (or hrad as it in Czech; on a related tangent, there's a bookshop here called the Anagram) - it's kind of at the end of a 45degree slope which runs from the river for about 3/4 of a mile. Makes Garnethill Street in Glasgow look like a bump in the road but it takes you up to some pretty spectacular views of the city.

Well, it didn't kill me and I live to blog the tale.

It's good to run. Really good. If I'm going to get round the Paris half-marathon - there's something like 8 or 9 weeks' training time - without injuring myself, I'll need to keep this up.

No snow in Prague

2004-12-26T10:54:00.000Z

Merry Christmas, troops.

Staying here for the weekend until Tuesday. Magnificently luscious art deco-y building. Converted theatre. You have your breakfast about 20ft above the stage on top of a metal & glass box - tres ingenious.

No snow. In fact, against all expectations, it's actually warmer here than in Glasgow. Less rain, tho, which is never a bad thing.

Went out for a run this morning, under bleary skies. This city is kind of everything you think a central European, former Communist city is going to look like - but infinitely more lovely. It's all gothic spires and moonlight, fairy tale architecture - just like everyone you've ever known who's been here has told you. And just occasionally - tantalisingly - you'll get the odd nightmare juxtaposition of Soviet era concrete in the middle of it all. Fab.

There's probably more to be said on this, but not right now.

Prague

2004-12-23T13:49:00.000Z

Off to Prague with a hangover the size of Poland. Feels like Germany's just invaded my head.

Sunday into Monday

2004-12-19T23:53:00.000Z

Nothing much to blog about but need to put something up to move on from the Blunkett business.

I remember when Blair's lot were voted in - I was in France at the time; didn't get a chance to vote, but whooped for joy. All I had known until that time were the Tories - a thoroughly rotten shower of bastards, through and through. Thugs and dandies the lot of them. Like the rest of Britain, I thought we might see a change when the Labour government were elected . . . but no. Our Labour Prime Minister was a post-Thatcherite who out-Thatchered Thatcher; a messianical bureaucrat with a God-complex, blind to his faults as a human being. And as his handmaid in the Home Office, we (eventually) got an actual blind man who became the most illiberal European politician since Hitler. Talk about the blind leading the blind. One suspects that the rest of the Cabinet have had their eyes willingly put out. I mean, who becomes a Labour politician to wage war on people in the third world, for fucksake?

One shudders to imagine what kind of 'holocaust-ic' parallel universe we might be living in if Dear David Blunkett had ever made it to the Prime Minister's office. Not that it was ever likely, but it makes you think. Though not that hard, right enough: America's got a Blunkett in the White House. And who ever thought the UK would have any kind of use for a President like Bush II?

Maybe I'm the blind one.

God, this is depressing stuff. Watching Western democracy, right now, being smashed in the face, again and again, by Bush & Blair's giant jackboot - and all I can fucking do is moan a bit on the web.

Someone downstairs is slamming the same door again and again and again. There's no rhythm to it, you get me - it's just happening rather a lot. Very irritating. There's a metaphor in there somewhere. Maybe they've set up an illict mignight metaphor factory. No voices, no anger - just doors slamming all through the night, through everyone's dreams.

The only voices I hear are the midnight drunks rolling out across the town as they're evicted from the pubs. Songs - usually songs of ancient tribal allegiance (Irish, Loyalist) and mutual hatred. Songs that perpetuate the outmoded politics & ideologies that keep the scum scummy, red herring conflicts that keep us wide of the mark and ignorant of the true agendas that shape our world. It's these politics & ideologies that pit brother against brother instead of ruled against ruler, subject against monarch, voter against our "democratically elected" lying, law breaking, warmongering leaders. That's where the real fight is.

Feels like that door is going to go on slamming into eternity. Wonder whose face is on the other side.

Listless list list

2004-12-14T21:36:00.000Z

Every blog person on the planet is mad about lists right now. I thought I'd join in the "fun" and make a List of Things I'm Going to Make a List About.

1. Big Classic French dishes in the Larousse Gastronomique I can cook. We can tick off boeuf bourguignon.

2. Other cool French things. After "food" I get a bit stuck.

3. Cities in the world where I'd go and live as a tax exile. Could be short. They're all in France.

4. Cities in Europe I've been miserable in. We can notch up Glasgow, London, Stockholm, Pamplona, Girona, Ankara, Wlocklawek, Amsterdam, Frankfurt, Perpignan.
5. Punchable British pop stars. Could be a long fucking list. Elton John anyone?
6. I wouldn't be you even if you paid me what you earn. Kind of similar to above but can include every other mediocre celebrity on the planet.
7. Words to use more often. Another biggie. There are whole sections of Roget's Thesaurus ('happiness', 'joy','optimism') that will fill this one up pretty quick.
8. Things to do less of. Jesus fecken Christ, where to start?
9. Things I'd tell my priest if I had a priest. Similar to above but begins with 'incorrigible and shameless blasphemy'.
10. Important life skills to acquire. Budgeting, the art of conversation, lying, forward planning, punctuality, being able to do mental arithmetic with 2 digit numbers or higher.
11. Lifestyle related indulgences to become jaded of before I die. Those coke parties, that Porsche.
12. Regrets to acquire that will poison my old age. If only I had drank more cheap wine. I wish I had eaten more buns. Why didn't I watch more TV? I'm so glad I never found out if I could write a novel that anyone would want to read.
13. Music I could live my life happily never getting into. Elvis Costello. Elvis. Paul Weller. Morrissey. Anything that wears blue jeans as a matter of principle. Anything even vaguely Celtic.
14. Disgustingly overrated "big" films I'd gleefully souse in acid. Moulin Rouge. List stops and ends with Moulin Rouge. Oh, fuck it. Maybe Forrest Gump too, for old time's sake.
15. Favourite negating words.
16. Strategies for coping with spending half your life in Northern Europe in near total darkness. Drink, swear, moan, eat bun, blog, make lots of fucking really pointless lists . . .

gypsy hacks and insomniacs

2004-12-14T01:35:00.000Z

I always eh, considered myself kind of a pioneer of the palette - a restaurateur, if you will. I've wined, dined, sipped and supped in some of the most demonstrably beamer epitomable bistros in the Greater Glasgow metropolitan region. - Tom Waits, kind of

Got my assignment today for this year's Eating & Drinking Guide at The List magazine. Last year I reviewed restaurants in the Indian section (eating 2 curries a week for about 6 weeks - this is really why I took up running) but this time around I've been 'promoted' to the Scottish restaurants, which are, imho, some of the best in town. Like this one. And this one, though the word on the street is that they're trying too hard with the fusion shit in the kitchen & neglecting to get the meals out on time.

And not forgetting this lot who took an hour to take our order, looked down their noses at us all night, served us incompetently, then charged us for a bottle of wine we didn't drink and a coffee that was returned.

Some of the restaurants on the beat are a bit more formal than I'm usually comfortable with (I'm more of a brasserie/ bistro kind of diner) but in the interests of journalism and the edification of List readers I think I can live with that. In fact I just got Anthony Bourdain's new cook book, essentially a recipe book of stuff from his brasserie. It's utterly glorious. Can't wait to get into some of that good stuff.

42,000ft Name Drop

2004-12-13T08:24:00.000Z

It's stupidly late on a Monday morning & I am listening to Frank's Wild Years, eating toast with lemon curd and doing, of all things, the blog.

Spent a weekend with the Mother In Law (or at least she would be if me & my girl was the marrying kind) in deepest, darkest Surrey: London's back-yard. She's a woman of uncommon & frequently overwhelming generosity so I'm going to have to get back on the treadmill or the unforgiving tarmac to work some of it off. We had a little early Christmas dinner (with a pair of roast ducks instead of turkey) to ourselves with lots of presents to open. She reallyreally overdoes the generosity. My inner Calvinist gets all twisted about it and mopes around in a fug of guilt. I think she has a Surrey equivalent which causes this extravagant gush of giving within her.

Anyway, I'm not complaining. Lovelee weekend. Even managed to squeeze in a couple of 5 milers in the mornings. Saturday through a crispy foggy sunny forest - Surrey is packed with Army bases so there was a constant plop-plop-boom of target practise for Iraq. You had to be careful too not to stray into Ministry of Defence land. Or it would be plop-plop-oops.

And as for the name dropping of the title for this post? Well, on the flight on the way down to Heathrow we sat next to Kim and Aggie from How Clean is Your House? - a bizarre home cleanliness TV show that I'm sure would have Calvin's approval.

On the way up, we shared the flight with this man. (I'm not a fan.)

Nothing really to do with anything except there was an interesting story in the Sunday Herald (local rag) yesterday about local literary genius, muralist and the guy who taught me creative writing, Alasdair Gray. I urge you to buy all his books but if you can buy only one make it The Book Of Prefaces. It's the best all-round introduction to literature in English you'll find. Especially if you buy the beautiful hardback.

Well, Im off to teach editing & prooffreading skils. Spot the deliberate mistakes? First five correct answers win a prize.

Get On Up (like a guilt machine)

2004-12-07T22:08:00.000Z

Back into the gym tonight and a huffy plod to the Kingston Bridge & back as penance for last night's curry & three pints of Guinness. Feel that sting from the lash of guilt. The Mgt (that's short for Midget, the miniature white shirted gym Nazi that runs the place) put in a bunch of new machines to replace the previous malfunctioning outsized impedimenta that was cluttering up the corners, so now there's a reek of factory fresh plastic in with the BO. De-lish.

There's a whole bank of cross training machines now - you know, those things that make you go like a red-faced fud with a shoogly hip doing "Agadoo" at a disco for 3 year olds. Previously, there had been just the one and people used to secretly queue. Not that there was a line or anything, but there would be a whole bunch of people nearby on the rowers and the spinners not really trying, all craning round to see if it was free yet. Then, as soon as the smug bitch hogging the thing finally disembarked, guaranteed they would all leap to their feet and do a kind of repressed sprint, trying not to make it look like they were in a race. After that you'd get everyone sort of shamefacedly stretching in the middle of the gym or clustering in Abs Corner or looking really interested in the MTV.

Cross trainers. Unbelievably popular machines - especially with pumpkin-hipped madames, which in a sick kind of way makes for an entertaining evening if MTV's on as well (which it always is). It's a similar kind of experience to watching a film about gorillas or chimps or something, some nature programme about the social life of animals then going into work the next day & teaching a class of engineers or teenagers. One sort of informs the other.

I'll go to Hell for saying such things.

In fact, I'm already paying for my three weeks of sloth by putting on 2kilos. And it's not even Christmas yet.

Talking of which, ladies and gentlemen, the award for Bun of the Month for December goes to Stollen.

If you've never had a Stollen before, it's like a stale Italian panettone that's been sat on by a Wagnerian soprano. Inside it's got marzipan & raisins & candied peel & there's a layer of icing sugar on top as thick as the hoarfrost on a Chistmas morning. A Teutonic wonderland of a bun.

You'll find it in Lidl - that paradise of cut-price continental delicasies - for £1.50, and there's, like, a ton of it; it's massive. Lasts all week. If you've got a Lidl near you, go get one. Fuck mince pies.

The smell of Calvinism

2004-12-05T23:53:00.000Z

Hold the front page, troops: I went for a run this evening.

Just to the Green and back - not quite a full 10k, but not a kick in the arse off it. About an hour's worth of solid running in the sodium-streetlamp-glare-yellow running shirt. Been running less and less, writing less and less; the whole point of this blog becoming less and less clear. Feeling guilty, as usual - doesny fucking take very much, let's be honest. Tom Shields calls it "Roman Calvinism" which sums it up for me perfectly. A bastard union of Catholicism and Calvinism.

Even as a Tim (that's local patois for Roman Catholic, my foreign friends) a degree of Calvinist ethics percolates into your working & family culture, presumably because its pervasive and noisome influence is so at large within our society that it's difficult to keep it in check, or within the strict domain of the dour bastards that started it (i.e. Calvinists & Protestants). It's everywhere & it's fucking us all up.

The very marvellous writer from the North East, Bill Duncan, has a book out just now which has been devised as an antedote to all these "Little Books". You know the kind: the impossibly simplistic & vapid nuggets of nonsense that litter the point of sale displays at bookshops & greetings card shops. "The Little Book of Calm/ Love/ Hugs/ Shite/ Whatever".

Anyway, Duncan's is called "The Wee Book of Calvin" and you can buy it here.

The overwhelming moral of the story: happiness is overrated. That notion of the elite? It exists to reinforce the idea that no matter what you do, no matter how hard you try, you'll never be good enough. The book is essentially a collection of aphorisms with all the linguistic terseness of a haiku, but accompanied by the sting of the back of your granny's hand against your cheek when she caught you with your hand in the biscuit barrel. Or the shiny diamond clarity of a Zen koan, but with a reek of whisky on the breath. A poem, but followed by a punch in the jaw because that's what you get for reading poetry.

In other words, it's an anti-self help book. Here's a couple of examples.

It does a bairn good tae be denied.

Let the laddie play wi the knife. He'll learn.

The bonniest flooer oft wilts the quickest.

If it didnae hurt it wisnae worth daein.

A glower says mair than a smile.

Look at the seed. The death o the plant is stored in that.

The look on that bairn's face? Skelp it oot him.

Maybe the Scots is getting in the way of total comprehension. I like to think of them as similar in form to Ezra Pound's imagistic poems (Duncan himself may refer to Pound in his essays, but I can't remember). Like this one.

IN A STATION OF THE METRO

The apparition of these faces in the crowd;
Petals on a wet black bough.

Also, it's easy to miss the irony, I think, for those furth of these shores. These aphorisms are so overstated as to be funny - but no so funny that you don't wince with total recognition. Many are genuine phrases that we all grew up with, that we continue to tell each other & our kids. You also have to laugh in wonder at the brutally inventive ways we've all found to put each other down & confound each other's emotional, spiritual & material progress in life.

Mind you, I say 'laugh', but as the Wee Book reminds us . . .

Hard tae tell the difference atween laughin an greetin.

The book's really great. It's seasonal affect disorder season right now: sun's up at 8.35 am and down again 6 hours later but the Wee Book sorts you right out - you can use it to cheer yourself up. Whenever I get frustrated about the writing I find a word of comfort in the Wee Book:

Nae need for art: God made aathing ye need.

Or if I'm feeling that I could maybe improve myself by way of exercise or eating better or drinking less or giving to charity or looking after my elderly relatives a bit more I find:

Yer nae better than you should be.

If I dare to think I could move beyond the state I'm in, the job I do, the place I live, to one day publish a book, or write something that will touch people I find . . .

Hope is the dream o a foolish man.

Or . . .

Better tae bide still than rise an faa.

And if I should, against all the odds, succeed . . .

Congratulations? Yer only as guid as yer last failure.

Better after all to grasp one of the few certainties that life offers:

Dinnae expect onything and ye'll no be disappointed.

So. Word to the wise, troops. Forget about reiki and angels and crystals and exercise and happiness. Find your inner Calvinist here.

The last three weeks have been . . .

2004-12-04T22:44:00.000Z

. . . reading What Should I Do With My Life by Po Bronson.

. . . drunk with nice people and terrible service at the Stravaigin restaurant on Gibson Street.

. . . baking banana muffins for breakfast the next day with raisins and flaked almonds and watching I Heart Huckabees at the GFT with a hangover.

. . . watching the first series of Twin Peaks on DVD.

. . . rainy wet.

. . . cycling East to Carntyne and Shettleston in heavy fog playing tig in the traffic with the buses and the White Van Men.

. . . Strange Anne.

. . . not writing.

. . . not writing, thank fuck.

. . . that leg of Harris lamb slow roasted with rosemary and crushed garlic, served with roasted pasrnips and killer gravy.

. . . a package of red noses from the Clown Doctors.

. . . in the creative writing classes with the kids, looking at everybody's imaginary photos, making them see their imaginary photos.

. . . voice and identity workshops with everybody else.

. . . booking a hotel & dinner at VinCaffe for Christmas in Edinburgh.

. . . Eva and Victoria at the Ramshorn; From the Calton to Catalonia at the Tramway.

. . . listening to lots and lots of Tom Waits songs maudlin drunk and lonely.

For I am a rain dog too.