Ho hum

My blogs are coming few and far between these days. I used to express my frustrations with life with words, now I just seem to retreat into eating and sleeping and the like. It’s probably not healthy.

I went to the doctor this morning, partly to see what had happened about the purported CT scan on my shins. I’d been to see an Orthopaedic surgeon last July about the problem (which has been ongoing for some two-and-a-half years), and was told I’d been put on the waiting list for a scan. I had never received any further letters, so I had decided (having limped and hirpled through a game of five-a-side football last week) that I needed to chase this up. Eight months might have been a little too long to wait, but I’m not sure how to gauge how long I should have, given the NHS’s waiting lists. Apparently a letter was sent to my address last year, but it never arrived; ironically, the consultant’s secretary wasn’t able to immediately tell us if a letter had been distributed because she was off work at the time with a broken arm. Apparently I’m now back on the waiting list for a CT scan, but I may have to have another consultation with the surgeon.

My work-mate John gave me an old mp3 player of his today; while I’ve got an iPhone (yes, I have joined the Dark Side) with its built in iPod, and two old Sony Walkman phones, they’re all a little bulky to listen to while at the gym. Yes, I’ve joined the gym again. I went seriously for about nine months when I was in my final year at university (dragged along by an insane Welshman who was determined to join the Marines when he graduated); I was at my slimmest then, playing football two or three times a week, going to the gym twice a week and not eating properly. My mind may be playing tricks on me, but I seem to recall being quite happy with my body image by May of 2003. I then joined the local gym after I’d moved back home and had already started to expand at about the same rate as my hair is currently reaching James May levels of improbability. The girl inducting me this time asked if it was a New Year’s Resolution; honestly, no it wasn’t. I had wanted to join the gym, but wasn’t sure I could justify the expense. I can just about manage two games of football a week as aerobic exercise, but I can’t do any running otherwise. I can’t afford a bike, and I hate swimming. But it was sitting at work about ten days ago feeling as if my gut was about to burst out of my shirt that I though I had to do something.

I’m not doing any treadmill stuff, but I now have a programme where I’ll do a couple of miles on the exercise bike, a couple of miles on the rowing machine and a couple of miles on the cross-trainer before doing some upper body muscle toning work. The question now is the perennial ‘will I stick with it?’ I can’t offer any answers unfortunately, but I’d like to think I will.

I’d spoken to the doctor about depression; both my parents and sister are on anti-depressants, so I’ve always thought there was a chance I might have some form of similar disorder. I think I’ve always managed to fend off periods of lowliness by focussing on what I need to do to fix it, and trying to ensure that happens. Right now however, I’m not sure that applies. I have plans in place, and I’m acting upon them in a very A-Team like way, but my goals are two-and-a-half years away and I’m all the way back here. I’m finding it hard to stay motivated at the moment. As I surmised my life in a Twitter-sized epigram recently, I need a holiday somewhere beautiful with someone lovely. I should be so lucky.

A Decade in the Life

I can see the logic behind it, but I hold no truck with the notion that the new decade/century/millennium should be celebrated when xx10 gives way to xx11; the logic is sound, but with the uncertainty surrounding when exactly Jesus was born and the Gregorian/Julian Calendar changeover, I stick with the simple 9s changing to 0s as the threshold of a new base. Besides, that’s human nature; we all want to see the numbers roll on, even on simple things like the car odometer or our watch marking the new hour.

2000
So, I saw in the new Millennium at a house party in the small town of Johnstone in the west of Scotland. My friend Kris, an important influence on my life, had invited me, having returned from university for the festive period. I took him up on this offer as basically I had no others and didn’t fancy spending the most significant New Year’s celebration of my life-time in the house with my mother, sister and the cats.

On the first day of this decade/century/millennium Kris and I somehow navigated our way from Johnstone to his girlfriend’s flat in Paisley, where we’d spend the rest of the day. His girlfriend, Kirsteen, was with her family, and so we broke out her Eddie Izzard video collection, which passed the time most satisfactorily.

I had something of a crush on Kirsteen; she was tall and slim, intelligent (an environmental chemistry graduate), creative (was studying art, where she met Kris), and loved Star Trek. She even had an ‘Original Series’ Science officer’s uniform. I think the 2^nd of January 2000 was the last time I ever saw here; shortly afterwards she and Kris broke up with the latter due to him being unwilling to continue a long-distance relationship. He’d later admit to me he regretted it.

In early 2000 I was 19, still studying Graphic Design at college, but I had applied to the University of Wolverhampton for a place on their photography degree course.

I moved into my new student accommodation in the knackered industrial town of Dudley in September 2000. I perhaps should have been placed in halls on the main campus in Wolverhampton, where the photography department was based, but fate decreed otherwise. Still, I met some interesting and some annoying people from both the Humanities and Art and Design schools, so it perhaps wasn’t a bad thing. I reawakened my dormant footballing career and started playing guitar with other people for the first time since I’d taken up the instrument two years previously. And I met someone who bent my heart somewhat.

Albums of the year

Badly Drawn Boy – The Hour of The Bewilderbeast
Coldplay – Parachutes
Doves – Lost Souls
Geneva – Weather Underground
Mansun – Little Kix
Oasis – Standing on the Shoulder of Giants
PJ Harvey – Stories from the City, Stories From The Sea
Radiohead – Kid A
Richard Ashcroft – Alone With Everyone
Soulwax – Much Against Everyone’s Advice
U2 – All That You Can’t Leave Behind

Films of the year

Almost Famous
Finding Forrester
Memento
Million Dollar Hotel
O Brother, Where Art Thou?
Snatch
Unbreakable
X-Men

2001

In comparison to the previous year, I can’t remember much about 2001. I suspect this is because it was fairly forgettable. In February I shaved off all my hair, which had reached my shoulder blades, and then spent the rest of the year growing it back. Around the same time, I photographed my first ever gig, Ash at the Little Civic in Wolverhampton. I completed my first year of studies and returned home for summer. Shortly before I was due to make the reverse journey again, my mother and I went on holiday to the Costa del Sol, her 21^st birthday to me. I’m not really a summer sun holiday type person (or at least I wasn’t back then), so I didn’t enjoy it as much as I should have, but the trip to Barcelona’s Camp Nou was well worth it.

I continued to live in halls in second year, rather than move into a house with friends, which seemed like a good idea at the time, but which soon transpired to be rather a large mistake when I found I was seconded next to a rather loud ganja smoking heavy-metal fan. I suppose I could have asked to have been moved, yet for some reason I didn’t. I don’t recollect getting a good night’s sleep that entire academic year.

Albums of the year

Aerosmith – Just Push Play
Ash – Free All Angels
Elbow – Asleep In The Back
King Adora – Vibrate You
Manic Street Preachers – Know Your Enemy
Muse – Origin of Symmetry
Natalie Imbruglia – White Lilies Island
New Order – Get Ready
Paul McCartney – Driving Rain
Ryan Adams – Gold
Super Furry Animals – Rings Around The World
Tenacious D – Tenacious D
Travis – The Invisible Band
Turin Brakes – The Optimist l.p.

Films of the year

Ali
Amélie
Donnie Darko
From Hell
Harry Potter and the Philosopher’s Stone
A Knight’s Tale
K-PAX
The Lord of the Rings: The Fellowship of the Ring
Monsters, Inc.
Shrek
Spirited Away
Zoolander

2002

As the academic year 2001-2002 drew to an inevitable anti-climax, I returned to Glasgow for the last time (for any length of time, for three years at least) to work the summer in the duty free shop in Glasgow airport. I let my mother talk me into getting streaks put in my hair (the first time I’d ever dyed my hair in any way), then I tinted it red, and shortly before I headed south for my third and final year at university, I attempted to conceal the bad dye jobs with another; jet black.

Dudley Campus had been shut down at the end of the previous session, so all of us had been relocated to the main site in Wolverhampton. I moved into a small terraced house in Whitmore Reans with my friends Bex, Rosie and Cherie, and embarked upon what would be the most enjoyable nine months of my life.

I got to know Mike, a friend of a friend, and we started playing music together. I found myself playing football in West Park every Wednesday afternoon with the football team set up by the Dudley Campus exiles. Academically, I was doing the best I’d done at university, and I was quite content.

Albums of the year

Badly Drawn Boy – About A Boy Soundtrack
Bruce Springsteen – The Rising
The Chemical Brothers – Come With Us
Coldplay – A Rush Of Blood To The Head
Doves – The Last Broadcast
Foo Fighters – One By One
Haven – Between The Senses
John Squire – Time Changes Everything
Oasis – Heathen Chemistry
Puressence – Planet Helpless
Red Hot Chili Peppers – By The Way
The Shining – True Skies
Suede – A New Morning

Films of the year

8 Mile
24 Hour Party People
28 Days Later
About a Boy
Adaptation
The Bourne Identity
Morvern Callar
One Hour Photo
Panic Room
Standing in the Shadows of Motown

2003

2003 was what footballers would describe as being a year of two halves. The first five or six months I was as happy as I can ever remember being; it was almost as giddily delirious a time as the pre-primary school times I can still see and feel so vividly. I got a tattoo, I joined a band, I was playing open mics, football for my university, I was enjoying my photography, I felt as socially adept as I’ve ever been, I finally bonded with someone I’d known for a while…even my grandfather dying of cancer in March didn’t set me back too much.

And then when I was arranging to have my graduation ceremony with my Art & Design classmates rather than the Humanities school, I found out I didn’t have enough credits to graduate at all. It transpired the new head of the photography department had failed my final negotiated project for reasons that remain unclear to me to this day. I attempted to resit the module over the summer, hampered by the department being shut for renovations. My emails to the lecturer went unanswered, my resubmission unmarked. Graduation week arrived, and having remained in Wolverhampton, I had offered to let some of my friends and class-mates crash in my house. The days when they went off to collect their diplomas broke my heart in a way I think I might finally have gotten over these six years later.

I didn’t know where I was going, but having spoken to a guidance counsellor, I discovered I only needed 15 credits, or a standard module, to gain my degree, rather than the 30 credit negotiated project I’d failed. I’m not sure who exactly had the brainwave, whether it was me or a friend, but I transferred to the school of humanities (which I was able to do as a mixed-discipline student), and enrolled in a dissertation module in English Literature. I chose to write my thesis on Harry Potter, something of a urine-extractory choice as I felt the university had taken the piss out of me. However, my despair was tempered by me achieving something I’d felt I’d never be able to do, namely pass my driving test.

I’d moved into a new house, just round the corner from the previous one, with my friends Mary, Bob and Chris, and had found a job entering data for a small company in the Heath Town area of the City. It wasn’t a great job, and I saw out the year being frustrated at work and academically, looking for photography work here and there, to no avail. In November I did a week’s work experience as a photographer with the Scotsman newspaper, who my father worked for, and around that period I signed up for the now defunct Stay Beautiful online messageboard, an inconsequential decision I thought at the time, but which has now gone down in the annals of mystory as something of a life-changing one.

Albums of the Year

The Beatles – Let It Be…Naked
Blur – Think Tank
Damien Rice – O
The Darkness – Permission To Land
Doves – Lost Sides
Elbow – Cast of Thousands
Johnny Marr + The Healers – Boomslang
Klaus Badelt & Hans Zimmer – The Pirates of the Carribbean: The Curse of the Black Pearl Soundtrack
Muse – Absolution
Travis – 12 Memories

Films of the Year

Haute Tension/Switchblade Romance

Kill Bill Vol. 1

Les Triplettes de Belleville
Lost in Translation

Love Actually

Pirates of the Caribbean: The Curse of the Black Pearl

The Lord of the Rings: The Return of the King

2004

At the start of the year, the band I’d formed with my contemporaries Smithy and Woodall made its first live appearance at a Battle of the Bands in the Varsity pub in Wolverhampton. We’d recruited Smithy’s brother Dave on bass, and another Dave on drums, both of whom had played with Smithy in a previous group. I don’t recall us being great, but we got through to the next round based on the number of our friends who voted for us. I’d bought a new guitar a week before our debut, a Gibson SG in heritage cherry which I subsequently named Scarlett, and which is still one of my cherished possessions to this day.

In June, I handed in my notice at the data entry place and moved to Birmingham as we’d decided to give the band a bit of a go. I found work doing more data entry, and despite making friends with my housemates, I wasn’t very happy. I did however complete my dissertation and gain my degree, graduating in September, and I’d had a pleasant three days at the V festival in Staffordshire with 3/4s of my bandmates. In addition, we drove through to Lincoln in a hire car to play a set in the pub our friend managed, perhaps the highlight of our brief career.

However, after a disagreement over pay and working conditions, I found myself out of a job a few weeks before Christmas. I saw in the New Year as miserable as I’d ever been and pining for someone, quite possibly as wrong a person as I could pine for.

Albums of the year

Ash – Meltdown
Embrace – Out Of Nothing
Foo Fighters – In Your Honour
John Squire – Marshall’s House
Manic Street Preachers – Lifeblood
The Music – Welcome to the North
U2 – How to Dismantle an Atomic Bomb

Films of the year

Anchorman: The Legend of Ron Burgundy

Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind

Howl’s Moving Castle

Million Dollar Baby

Night Watch

Shaun of the Dead

Team America: World Police
The Incredibles

2005

2005 didn’t get off to a great start with me being unemployed, and it would get worse when the four guys I was sharing a house with all moved out, having signed six-month contracts when I’d signed a year’s. The landlords seemed to find it difficult to attract new tenants, and so for a while there were only three of us in the house. I did manage to find a new job however, as an admin/receptionist with a charity. I was still looking for photography work, and this proved to be my undoing, as when I asked the HR manager to have an objective look at my CV, she cancelled my employment.

So, back to square one. Urgently needing money, I found myself work painting the floors of a storage building in Erdington, and before the week was out, another agency had landed me a post with a council social work department for much better money. Around the same time, my sister told me she was pregnant with her first child and I would shortly be an uncle.

So things were looking up, but my living conditions were still grim. New tenants had been found, but the atmosphere in the house was always a little frosty, and that’s no way to live. The band had started to lose momentum, and I felt at least two of the members weren’t that interested. Trips home for my gran’s funeral and my father’s fiftieth birthday had led to the surprising development of homesickness, and so when my house contract ended, I quit my band and my job, packed my stuff into a van and drove back to Glasgow.

For her fiftieth birthday, my mother had arranged a holiday for herself, family and some friends in Corfu. I hadn’t really wanted to go, for financial reasons, but I found my arm twisted, and it was enjoyable enough in the end. In September, my niece Rachael was born, healthy in almost every way other than having Albinism, which she hasn’t let hold her back in the slightest.

I had no more joy finding photography work, or indeed any form of work in Glasgow than I had in the West Midlands, and so for the second year in a row I was unemployed at Christmas and the New Year.

Albums of the year

Coldplay – X&Y
Doves – Some Cities
Editors – The Back Room
Elbow – Leaders of the Free World
Gorillaz – Demon Days
Kaiser Chiefs – Employment
New Order – Waiting For The Sirens’ Call
Oasis – Don’t Believe The Truth
Paul McCartney – Chaos and Creation In The Backyard
Sigur Ros – Takk…
Starsailor – On the Outside
The Tears – Here Come the Tears

Films of the Year

Batman Begins

Serenity

Sin City

Star Wars Episode III: Revenge of the Sith

The League of Gentlemen’s Apocalypse

Walk the Line

2006

A year best forgotten, if only because I can’t remember anything about it. I spent the entire year unemployed, save for a fruitless three weeks near the 2/3rds of the way through when I briefly worked for a high street music retailer, and I did have two unsuccessful interviews for medical illustrator positions. One of which was in Cardiff, and would have fulfilled me deeply I suspect.

Instead, I watched a baby grow and develop, spending almost as much time as her father (who had a full time job) did with her. I’d never been around an infant before (other than my sister, but I was only a baba myself then), so it was an eye-opening time for me.

Albums of the year

The Beatles – Love
Guillemots – Through The Window Pane
The Hold Steady – Boys And Girls In America
Hope of the States – Left
James Dean Bradfield – The Great Western
Muse – Black Holes & Revelations
Nicky Wire – I Killed The Zeitgeist

Films of the Year

Casino Royale
Dreamgirls
Pan’s Labyrinth

2007

2007 marked the start of an upward curve, although the year itself began with something of a down turn when my uncle died at just 54 years of age. Shortly afterwards however, I found myself in gainful employment once again, and I was able to frame a trip to London around the Muse concert at Wembley stadium I’d impetuously booked a ticket for the previous November. Things started to pick up in general now I’d found steady employment (in March I’ll have been in the same place for three years), and my confidence picked up to the point where towards the end of the year I found myself on my first date for a long time. However, in November, my gran Jean, my last grandparent (I had five due to my father’s father remarrying) died of what appeared to be little more than old age.

Albums of the year

Aqualung – Memory Man
Arcade Fire – Neon Bible
Ash – Twilight of the Innocents
Foo Fighters – Echoes, Silence, Patience & Grace
The Hedrons – One More Won’t Kill Us
Manic Street Preachers – Send Away The Tigers
The National – Boxer
Paul McCartney – Memory Almost Full
Radiohead – In Rainbows
Travis – The Boy With No Name

Films of the year

Control

Sunshine

The Simpsons Movie
(I will point out I didn’t see many films in 2007…)

2008

Quite probably the most exciting twelve months of my life, I seemed to pack a huge amount into this year…by my lowly standards obviously.

I’d set myself a target of finishing the protracted first draft of my novel by my 28^th birthday in February, which I achieved. I spent the Easter weekend being drunk in Dublin and in April, I travelled to the United States for friends Matt and Ru’s wedding in San Jose, CA. Over the three weeks I was o the other side of the Atlantic I saw San Francisco, Yosemite and spent six days in New York. In May I met some internet friends in Manchester, and two months later I was back in Lancashire for Paul McCartney’s gig at Anfield stadium in Liverpool. I bought myself a new digital SLR camera in July, and attended my first festival in four years when I dragged myself up to Inveraray for the Connect festival and almost repeated the journey in September when I made my way to the Isle of Mull for four days.

In November, I completed NaNoWriMo for the third time, played bass on a performance of Usher’s ‘You Got It Bad’ in front of 250 people at a Chinese Talent Contest in the Mitchell Theatre in Glasgow and spend a weekend in London, and took in my first FA Premier League game when I saw Tottenham beat Bolton 2-0 at White Hart Lane.

Most notably, I started a HNC in Architectural Technology on one day week release from work, which should open a few doors if and when I complete it in June 2010.

Albums of the year

The Charlatans – You Cross My Path
Coldplay – Viva la Vida, or Death and All His Friends
dEUS – Vantage Point
Elbow – Friend of Ours
The Fireman – Electric Arguments
Hans Zimmer & James Newton Howard – The Dark Knight Soundtrack
Metallica – Death Magnetic
Oasis – Dig Out Your Soul
Portishead – Third
Sigur Ros – Með Suð Í Eyrum Við Spilum Endalaust
Travis – Ode To J. Smith

Films of the year

Indiana Jones & the Kingdom of the Crystal Skull

Iron Man

Persepolis

The Bank Job

The Curious Case of Benjamin Button

The Dark Knight

Wall-E

2009

This last year hasn’t been quite as notable as its predecessor, mainly because of something of a watershed moment in my life when I realised I really should be putting some money aside to save up the deposit for a house. For most of 2009, a quarter of my wages has been going into a savings account, to help me achieve/purchase the things I need to help me get on. Last year I paid off what I owed for my digital SLR, cleared the outstanding balance on my credit card and bought a badly needed new laptop. Due to this reduction in my disposable income, I wasn’t able to go on the holidays I had intended to, though I still stole a couple of trips away. I ventured down to Cardiff for the Photomarathon contest, which I’d wanted to enter for several years, in June, and spent four days in London in September.

I’ve played some music on and off with Kevin, Fred and Andy, but we haven’t really been getting anywhere. I completed the first year of my HNC with no difficulty and moved onto the second part of the course. I took a few night classes, including one in portfolio preparation should I be able to apply for the Architecture degree course…I wrote a few short stories, completed NaNoWriMo again and took more photographs than I’ve ever done in my life. I took part in a Chinese dragon boat race, went on a RIB, took up cycling for a while before throwing my inept, £50 bike in the bin. I went a whole year without drinking. I think I’ve done more things, but I really should write them down in blogs more often, because I’ll forget them otherwise.

But of course there’s Kate, my sister’s second child and my younger niece, who was born in March and who is going to break hearts someday, mark my words.

And while I didn’t do quite as much in 2009 as I had the year before, I’ve been laying foundations. My decade ended not with a bang, but with a deep breath. Let’s see what 2010-2019 offers…

Albums of the year

Doves – Kingdom Of Rust
Manic Street Preachers – Journal for Plague Lovers
Mumford & Sons – Sigh No More
Muse – The Resistance

Films of the Year

Avatar

Sherlock Holmes

Star Trek

Album of the decade

Doves – Lost Souls

I’m not sure when I first became of Doves; I had a passing acquaintance with their previous incarnation Sub Sub thanks to their hit single ‘Ain’t No Love (Ain’t No Use)’ from 1993, but they weren’t an act I’d paid close attention to. Their metamorphosis from the dance act they were into the rock band they are now had completely passed me by. In my first year at university, I remember my friend Amy and some of her acquaintances trying to sell a spare ticket for the band’s gig in Wolverhampton, but I wasn’t particularly interested in going. And then something piqued my interest, because I bought their first album as Doves at Christmas. I’m not deliberately being vague here; normally I would have heard a single on the radio or something, but I genuinely can’t remember such an event happening. I do however quite clearly recall a spot for the album on television late one night; the brief snippets I heard of the songs intrigued me.

I confess it took me a while to get into it; it’s the classic slow-burning album, with melodies that take just long enough to unfold their buds and ingrain themselves on your memory without losing their appeal too quickly. The songs that made up what would be side B on an LP were immediate, bold and beguiling. The first ‘side’ took a little longer to surrender its charms to me; ‘Sea Song’ for instance didn’t appeal to me until I heard it used on a BBC trailer one night in 2005 and after that I was in love with it.

I wrestled with the question of why Doves were so different to so many of their contemporaries for most of the decade; while many rock bands seemed to be caught up with tight trousers, sharp hair, compression and ProTools, Doves seemed to grow their songs in a dark room somewhere in Manchester. Moody, atmospheric and probably the musically accomplished British band to emerge since Radiohead, their albums were the British music equivalent of the Mirror universe in Star Trek.

An interview around the release of their fourth album, Kingdom of Rust in 2009 shed some light on the matter; discussing the song ‘Jetstream’, which was conceived to play over the closing credits for Ridley Scott’s Bladerunner, the band admitted a cinematic influence on their music. Of course. It all made sense then and explained why their songs were so likely to crop up soundtracking programmes on the BBC (as I write this, Kingdom of Rust’s ‘Compulsion’ has just cropped up on Top Gear), and ultimately, why I love them so much.

Lost Souls was followed two years later by The Last Broadcast, an album almost, but not quite, its equal. The band themselves feel that the latter album is more optimistic, and I would agree; I do however, prefer the more downbeat, but no less scintillating mood of Lost Souls.

Film of the Decade

Hot Fuzz

I’d never really watched Spaced; I’d seen a few episodes and hadn’t particularly enjoyed it. I didn’t have high hopes for Simon Pegg and Edgar Wright’s next project, the zom-rom-com Shaun of the Dead because I don’t care for the undead either. The year after it came out however, my then housemates rented it on DVD and I was converted; I thought it was brilliant. I actually became fixated with it somewhat, and I even bought both series of Spaced (although I’m still not keen on it). Thus, when their follow up film Hot Fuzz was released, I rolled up at the door of the Odeon at Atlantic Quay in Glasgow, keen to see how it matched up. People talk about ‘second album syndrome’, where a sophomore attempt is not as good, or keenly received as the first. This wasn’t the case with Hot Fuzz however; the cinematic equivalent of ‘Bohemian Rhapsody’, it was four or five narratives rolled into one, but excelled at all of them, from the fish out of water first act, to the murder mystery second act, to the cop/buddy movie climax. It’s not a cerebral, thought-provoking film, true, but it is simply, viscerally entertaining.

The films and music I’ve mentioned here don’t necessarily represent the best films and music over the previous ten years, because there’s a lot of stuff I haven’t seen or heard yet. I was concerned to note a tailing off in the amount of films and albums I can honestly say I enjoyed and would listen to/watch again. I’m curious as to whether this marks a post-digital decay in quality, or whether I’m just getting old and can’t understand this noisy crash-bang nonsense all the youngsters are listening to. In that vein, I give you my top ten most pernicious things to happen to culture in the last ten years…

1. The Strokes. Releasing their debut album Is This It in 2001, and representing the avant garde of the garage rock revival, soon every new band would soon, and more ominously, look like the Strokes. Bearing in mind that almost every band that has ever emerged in the wake of the vastly more successful band they’re slavishly copying has been terrible, this is not a good thing.

2. Ricky Gervais. First coming to public attention on the 11 o’clock Show in the late 90s ‘playing’ an obnoxious reporter, Gervais’ star reached its zenith following his and Stephen Merchant’s slow-burning The Office mocumentary. Wisely winding both The Office and its follow-up Extras after just two series of each, he has since moved into Hollywood films and become extraordinarily rich and feted. My issue is this; his comedy is the archetype of the ‘awkward’ type that has become predominant times, where someone insults a gay/disabled/black person accidentally and spends the remainder of the episode attempting to make amends. Presumably this brand of comedy flourished when it became socially unacceptable to directly insult gay/disabled/black people. In any case, it isn’t big and it isn’t clever. It does, sadly, seem to be lucrative.

3. Arctic Monkeys. An ‘internet phenomenon’, the AMs have cornered the market in new apparel for Regents. Critics constantly talk about the lyrical bent of Alex Turner, while never quite managing to appraise the John Lennon solo b-side quality of the music. An immensely boring band.

4. Simon Cowell. Oh, you know. And Nigel Lythgoe for that matter.

5. Dan Brown. Bit of an obvious choice, but deserved. Angels & Demons was a decent read but the Da Vinci Code, Richard Leigh and Michael Baigent’s The Holy Blood and the Holy Grail stapled to an American daytime soap plot, was truly terrible in parts. It also ensured that every other novel published for the remainder of the noughties would have titles like The Atlantis Codex and The Olympus Enigma and be about utterly fuck all. Still, lowest common denominator was the watch word of the wretched decade.

Aurora

The Shawshank Redemption was on TV last night. I didn’t watch it though; as it’s my joint-favourite film (along with Gattaca) I could probably recite the dialogue verbatim, and besides, I was playing FIFA 09…

However, there’s a scene in both the film and the magnificent Stephen King novella on which it’s based, where the notional protagonist Andy Dufresne escapes the eponymous prison  in which he’s incarcerated by crawling through a sewage pipe, crawling “to freedom through five hundred yards of shit-smelling foulness I can’t even imagine. Or maybe I just don’t want to”.

I can’t help but look upon Andy’s effluence-based egress from prison as a metaphor for my own life at the present time; I’m moving, finally, from childhood to adulthood, and the process is as painful and as demoralising as puberty was. Perhaps I should gotten both out of the way at the same time…

Up until the age of 27, I had no clear idea of what I was going to do with my life; I had acquired a degree in photography and was engaged in the Thesean task of working my way into the industry, in hope rather than expectation. The number of individuals employed in journalistic photography has dwindled as the industry has atrophied in recent years, and after three solid years of rejection letters, and of being in fact completely ignored, I had begun to wonder where my life was going. I had been without a job for two years and was struggling to identify any employable qualities in myself.

And then I found a job, with an organisation that were willing to fund further study, leading to a more useful vocational qualification. And I took them up on their offer.

Of course, I’m grateful to my employer for sponsoring me, and I appreciate it. But there has been a certain amount of sacrifice on my part, and it is beginning to wear me down a little; this is the river of shit I alluded to previously. I have no social life, due to work, college and revision, not knowing too many people round here, not getting the chance to meet anyone new and so on.

The last year putting a quarter of my wages aside to invest in the props I feel I need to fully achieve adulthood; I’ve already bought a new digital SLR (Nikon D300), new laptop and Photoshop Elements, finally paid off my outstanding credit card balance (never rose to more than £300, but you know), and I’m currently saving towards a car, a deposit for a house, and less importantly, a digital piano.

I’ve been living with my mother since my return from five years in the West Midlands; it’ll be five years come July. I’m not sure how much longer I can take it; I’m faintly aware how pathetic it is (while also observing how it’s more prevalent these days). I think it’s having an adverse impact on my sex life, as there’s no way I could bring a woman back here, to this house, to have my mother talk shit at her.

I feel the lack of a car is impinging my social life as well; there are a certain amount of things I’ve wanted to do in the last few years, and found it would be quicker and more efficient for me to buy a camel than try and get to where I need to go using public transport.

And so, all that considered, I feel as if I’m in a sewage pipe, crawling through x number of years of shit, pish and who knows what else. I’m not sure how much longer I have to go; the outline timetable suggests I should have achieved my goal of car and house deposit by mid 2011. Perhaps by that point I’ll be nearly finished my first year of the BArch course at GSA, or will be just about to start. Maybe I won’t be going on to a further course at all, but will be safely ensconced in a proper job.

I’m not sure what’s going to happen, but I have plans, and contingencies for those plans failing set in place, and hopefully someday sooner than later I’ll escape, and this will be me.

Utopia

Ok, hands up, I admit it; I’m a sci-fi geek.

I’m not quite sure when I first became aware of this terrible affliction, but the fact that as an seven/eight year old, I was obsessed with Transformers (the original and best imagining) and Ghostbusters is probably damning in itself. Then I discovered Star Trek.

I should assure you at this point that my appreciation of ST hasn’t, and probably will never develop in to full blown Trekkie-dom. Instead, I’m afflicted with the milder Trekker variant, in which the sufferer is less likely to live in his mother’s house past the age of 30 and be able to tell you the exact episode when the change of process used to manufacture Leonard Nimoy’s ear prosthetic applicances was first noticeable on screen.

In fact, I barely watch the televisual series at all; while I’ve probably seen the lion’s share of The Next Generation, Deep Space 9 and Voyager, I’ve not seen much of the Original Series, and Voyager never engaged my warp engine at all. No, I was always, and have always been a fan of the films, from the Motion Picture (sadly underrated in my opinion), through to the 2009’s fantastic reimagining of the franchise (here’s an indication of my trekkiness; when I heard a Romulan was to be the main villain in the film, set before the events covered in TOS, my immediate thought was ‘but the Federation didn’t encounter the Romulans until some time into TOS? How does that work?’, only to find time travel was involved). My favourite of the films so far was The Undiscovered Country, probably because it was the first film whose release I was aware of, but it is a fairly enjoyable, if daft romp.

That said, while the films are more action packed and swash-buckling than the series, which can all be a little pedestrian and cerebral at times, the TV incarnations do have their positives; Gene Roddenberry’s vision of an egalitarian, fraternal society dedicated to self-improvement is something explored in greater depth on the small screen, and it’s soemthing that’s piqued my interest as long as I can remember.

Roddenberry was a policeman and former pilot who began writing for television in the 1950s. He had a few early successes before pitching Star Trek to NBC in 1964. As an individual, he appears to have had several character flaws, but his ideas for Star Trek hint at at his being a progressive, open-minded person. TOS features several minorities in key roles, which was something of a bold step in a still strait-laced and tense United States; the Japanese Sulu, the Black, female Uhuru, the alien Spock, and latterly the Russian Chekov (introduced at the height of the Cold War) all gave Star Trek a bold and refreshing air of heterogeny. Roddenberry’s logic was that three hundred years in the future, humanity would no longer be hung up on such petty division. Indeed, on the casting of the bald Patrick Stewart as Captain Picard in the Next Generation tv series, a reporter pondered that surely by the 23rd century, mankind would have discovered a cure for hairloss; Roddenberry replied simply that they wouldn’t care.

He also said “(in) the 24th century there will be no hunger, there will be no greed, and all the children will know how to read”. I’ve mentioned in the past that I’d love to live in Star Trek’s view of the future, where human avarice has been all but eliminated and everyone is free to do with their life what they choose (ok, philosophical can of worms there, but I’m not getting involved in that one just now). If you want to spend your entire life sitting on your sofa playing guitar, that’s fine. If you want to join the Federation and explore the stars and push the boundaries of science, you can apply to the Academy. I think it’s a rather positive, beautiful vision.

And it’s much more appealing than Earth one-tenth of the way into the 21st century. I write this three days after BBC’s Question Time programme featured the British National Party leader, Nick Griffin, whose views on anyone who isn’t white and English are pretty rank. He was given a sound verbal shoeing by the audience and fellow panelists, and came across as something of an intellectual lightweight, but his alleged political validation due to his invitation to appear on the programme simply denotes a rise in far-right political groups across Europe. Fundamentalist behaviour shows no sign of abating, with the nominally Christian Westboro Baptist Church getting more and more vocal; even Atheism has taken to loitering around public places and challenging Theism to a punch-up.

The main element of humanity that drives me to despair, and has always done, is greed, or avarice, whatever you want to call it. In 2009 it’s still going sstrong, feeding off the human lives it destroys. I will stand up and declare myself a socialist, and someone who is particularly distrustful of the motives of capitalism, but I can see that in our current economic model, most people need to work in order to live, and everyone has a right to make a living. But there’s making a living, and there’s the increasingly desperate and ruthless pursuit of gold that we as a species seem so determined to embark upon. People are undercut, lies are told, health and safety is disregarded, individuals lives are destroyed purely because they happen to be in the way.

My username suggests my political outlook and yet mild apathy, but this issue infuriates me in a way party politics never can. I’m reminded of the time my gran, who was in her mid 70s at the time and probably already suffering from the psychosis and dementia that would manifest fully later on, was talked into changing her phone company by a cold-caller. I’m reminded of privatisation every time I try to use public transport in this era of reduced carbon emissions; my travel arrangements are dictated by McGills buses, Arriva, First and SPT. McGill’s operate to Paisley from my hometown, but not Glasgow. Arriva travel to both, but they don’t run to or from Glasgow after 7pm. First run to Paisley, via Glasgow, being twice as far, and the station’s a mile and a half from my house. SPT offer a travel card that would cover all three companies, but at a cost some 25% greater than simply buying an Arriva weekly ticket and a single rail ticket. Which would be fair enough, but Arriva buses have a habit of ‘being cancelled’ and operating to their own mystical timetables. McGill’s buses run the same route at the same time, so while in theory I’m afforded much more choice as a consumer, because buying a travel card that would allow me to patronise both companies is so much more expensive, I’m not at all. In addition, I offered to give my sister my Arriva weekly ticket on Friday as she was travelling to Paisley. She had to refuse, as Arriva don’t run pram/buggy/wheelchair accessible buses to our town, and she had the baby with her.

It’s this disinegnous horsecrap that tires and offends me. Capitalism dressed up as some great altruistic gesture, whereby we’re all granted access to much greater choice and free market economics and so on. This apparently generates savings for us as we’re allowed to choose exactly which company shafts us over. If more than one company operates in that particular sector of course.

This is all just misdirected anger, because I understand fully what the underlying cause of all this behaviour is. There was a study in the Metro (only the best, validated sources used here) about it; it’s evolutionary, hardwired into our DNA. It’s self-preservation. Apprently humans that help other humans don’t prosper, which is a faintly disconcerting concept as it implies humanity’s default state of mind is ‘fuck ‘em, I’m alright’. Of course, not everyone’s like that; one of my best friends is an incredibly selfless, with a heart as big as Britain’s banker-instigated national debt, and I adore her for it. But surely we have to start treating people like human beings, and not target markets?

In the midst of writing this, I just flicked over to Twitter, and I’m not entirely surprised to see that the top trending topic is ’start making $60-100′. It comes from the same black hole of Hades as those spam pop ups that won’t let you close them, and those fake spyware adverts that prey on those people that aren’t particular computer savvy and just want to keep in touch with their family. They then have to spend money on getting their computer repaired, where they’ll no doubt get ripped off again.

This selfishness dismays me so much, mainly because I am so selfish myself. I’m actively trying not to be, but I find myself slipping back into my old ways. This is a kind of passive, defensive selfishness, which although still pernicious, is still more understandable than active selfishness, choosing to exploit other people for your own gain.

And as usual, all I’ve contributed is so many questions, and nothing even approaching an answer.

History

As the result of an on-going conversation I’ve been having with my second cousin, I decided to set up a group on Facebook for members of our family. We’ve become rather engorged and sprawling, and when we meet up for the obligatory wakes and funerals, three-quarters of us have no idea who the other eight-sixths actually are. It’s not helped by the age gap between the original six children; Meg was 20 years older than Jean, so their children are nominally a generation apart while still being nominally the same generation.

Anyway, I had a minor issue to iron out regarding Facebook and groups, and doing so, I discovered the group dedicated to my former university campus I’d joined a year or so ago. I haven’t really been paying it attention to be honest, despite my pilgrimage to said campus in June (most of it’s been demolished since, and only a couple of buildings remain), but I noticed the members of the group had added a cumulative total of sum 450 pictures, spanning a period from the early 90s to the end of days in 2002.

As I browsed the photographs, the overriding emotion I felt was of regret, but I’m not sure whose. Mine or theirs?

Now, I know what you’re thinking, pretentious claptrap, but as I looked at each photograph, I couldn’t help but feel a sense of squandered potential. Almost each and every picture featured an individual or group smiling at the camera, can of cheap lager clenched in their fist. At that age, when most of us would have been in our late teens-early twenties, we had our whole lives ahead of us, and an unlimited canvas to paint on. That’s what you can sense in the photographs. It’s almost enough to offset the fact that we all lived for three years in Dudley, a former industrial town that, being kind as kind can be, is somewhere you escape from, not somewhere you escape to.

It wasn’t really that great university either, one of the 90s Polytechnic expansion franchises.When I applied there, I was studying graphic design in Glasgow, and I decided I needed out. I was still living at home, sick of the rise of the ned and generally needing pastures new. My best friend had gone down to Wolverhampton the year before, and so I reasoned that my chronic shyness and predictably homesickness would be allayed by having someone I knew close to hand. And to an extent, that plan worked. I managed to more or less make it through three years at university and gain a degree in photography and English (more on that aspect in another blog I feel).

But when I look back, I’m not entirely convinced I’m happy about that chapter of my life. A few too many regrets outweigh the good memories perhaps. The wrong city perhaps. Wolverhampton isn’t a place I’m fond of, and I care for it a lot more than I do Dudley. I did meet some wonderful people there, and my experiences tempered my personality as I had intended…maybe a little too well. I think I may have lost a little bit of vital naivety there.

But back to the other alumni of Dudley campus; as around half the campus, including the union and the refectory is closed, and possible future reunion can hardly take place there. Which is curious. Can you have a reunion at all if the place you met no longer exists? Does that impinge on any kind of ongoing closure a return provides? I look at those photographs of all those students, and I wonder where they all are now, 10-15 years down the line, all in their mid-30s, married perhaps, with children and mortgages. It was a humanities campus, so many of them may be teaching or working for Social Services, or indeed have just been made redundant. Would they return to Dudley, more lined, heavier, with less hair, meet old friends, to see how far they’d come, if at all? Mourn the ones that have passed, remember the ones that never completed their course? This all sounds morbid, but I can’t think of a single person that’s graduated from my university and gone on to make their mark on the world. No actors, musicians, politicians, entrepreneurs of any real note, and most of the ones I could find attended the individual polytechnics that made up the university before they merged in the 90s. It seems to be an establishment that teaches people how to survive, and how to exist, and not necessarily to live. That’s up to them.
It’s a downbeat, probably erroneous and certainly obnoxious statement to make, but it’s the sense I got from those images. Hopefully I can look at them again in another ten years or so and remember the fleeting joy they just fail to capture. Perhaps, perhaps.

How Soon Is Now?

I write this on a rainy Saturday night in the West of Scotland. I’m listening to the Dark Knight Soundtrack and wondering what the rest of the world is doing. I’m missing human contact somewhat. It’s always amused me in an ironic way that I’m an individual prone to debilitating loneliness and yet I’ve displayed consistent inability to form meaningful relationships with other people my entire life.

I haven’t blogged in six weeks or so. In all honesty I haven’t really done much during the intervening period, so you’re not missing out on any historical records of great import. I suppose the two most interesting things that occurred during September were the Dragon Boat racing and the long weekend in London.

The former started with a text message from Mantak on a Saturday night. I was babysitting my two young nieces, and as they’d both been tucked up safely in bed, I was watching WALL•E when the phone buzzed. It had been off due to a low battery, and I’d only just turned it back on again, so when I read the message asking if anyone was interested in Dragon Boat racing at the Maryhill Locks in Glasgow the following day, I replied optimistically, suspecting that I’d have missed, figuratively and literally, the boat. Happily he responded in the affirmative, and I met up with my team mates at Glasgow Chinatown the following morning. Incidentally, I had planned on taking the train or bus up, only to find neither of them run before 9:30am on a Sunday. So, car it was.

The race itself was part of the Big Man festival, whose aims are to celebrate ‘Maryhill, its canal, and its people’. The eponymous Big Man is both the name of a bridge that will link North and South of the canal, and a Glaswegian term of near endearment for a gentleman of above average height. Maryhill is incidentally where the earlier series of Taggart were set, but like many parts of Glasgow, its reputation for violence is unfair and somewhat archaic. In any case, when we reached the dock that was the site of the competition, the sun had emerged and was beaming lazily down on proceedings.

The team I’d been invited to join had been entered by the Chinese Development Partnership, an organisation I know very little about other than they represent the Chinese-British of Glasgow and several of my friends and acquaintances are active in its social and sporting endeavours. Aside from Mantak, Vinny and Tony from Saturday afternoon football were there. I wasn’t the only white person either; three of the 18 of us were Caucasian.

CDP actually entered two teams; why I’m not entirely sure, but we watched from the riverbank the other teams’ opening heats. The second boat to go out capsized to voluminous ironic cheers from the spectators. The initial races let us size up our opponents; most appeared to be North Glasgow social work or housing organisations, although one team was a beauty salon and another was a construction company. One team were dressed as Vikings and another, somewhat fantastically, as Smurfs.

Our turn to race soon arrived. Aside from the odd row round a boating lake, I’ve never done much by way of water sport. I’ve never had the chance to go on any outward bound courses with school or my employers, which I regret somewhat, and so this was my first brush with paddling a boat of this type. I wasn’t alone; only three of our group had Dragon Boat raced before. I remarked on this, pointing out that if white people lost a Dragon boat race to a Chinese it would be disappointing, but the inverse would mean ritual suicide. I was rightly ignored. After our safety induction and instruction from a long-lost member of EastEnders‘ Wicks family, we were let loose on the water.

I lose count of how many heats our two teams raced in, but I know I was in the boat for all but one of them. I think it our team captain reasoned that I would add a bit of power, enough to offset the mass I would add, and I’m not sure his decision was sound. If I recall correctly our fastest time placed us fifth out of eleven teams overall. Which wasn’t great, but not that bad either.

The winners were the construction company. At the climax of one race against us, as they crossed the winning line victorious, they capsized. We cheered and laughed with Schadenfreude, although it shortly became apparent one of their crew had bashed his head and needed first aid and a hospital visit. A short while later, I was wandering along the bank when I passed them, sunning themselves and their wet clothing in an attempt to dry off. A quick glance at the physiques of what amounted to around half their team suggested that they were not exactly strangers to exercise. Somewhat surprisingly however, the Smurfs finished second, and no amount of woad could hide that some of the members of their team were.

Your humble narrator and the Chinese Ringo Starr.

Racing Smurfs

We then repaired to the Chinese restaurant on Sauchiehall Street for Dim Sum and karaoke. I’m nothing if not cultured, me. Unfortunately I had to leave early, faced with a 6:30am start the next morning as I was. Unfortunately as I’d parked on an incline, all the remaining petrol in the car’s tank had flowed out of reach of the fuel line. I had to then walk to the petrol station in Woodlands, fill the spare tank up, and return. Then I had to buy a bottle of water and melt the base off with a lighter because there was no nozzle on the spare tank to get the petrol into the car. I only spilt around 5% of it on the street and down my trousers, and only got home two-and-a-half hours after I’d tried to nip off early.

The following week was the September weekend, a perhaps curiously Scottish practice whereby your town or region bestows upon you a public holiday on both Friday and Monday, allowing you to spend some quality time with a motorway of your choice. Actually, I think the English have one in September. Nevertheless, I’d decided that I was going to go away for the four days as I’d been unable to afford a proper holiday this year. London was nearby but far enough away from home, and was reasonably cheap, in that the four days worked out cheaper than the Wolverhampton jaunt earlier in the year and very likely any destination in the North of Scotland. The flights themselves were cheap, and this does annoy me. I enjoy travelling, but I’m conscious about the pollutants this results being pumped into the atmosphere, but when your two main alternatives cost four times as much and take four times as long, it’s difficult to hang onto those particular principles.

One particular obstacle had been my elder niece’s birthday, falling as it does around the September weekend. Fortunately, as every other likely guest seemed to have plans for that particular Saturday, the party had been moved to the following weekend, meaning I had no obligations. Trouble was I was no longer feeling particularly enthused about a flight and train travel and a hotel and hot, sweaty city four hundred miles away…I suppose I was just a little run down from work and whatever because by the time I was standing on the south bank of the Thames at Greenwich, marvelling at a beautiful hemisphere of blue above and the comfortable warmth it had brought, I was feeling terrific.

Sky over London, Greenwich

Bloody tourists...

I was at Greenwich to visit the observatory, something that I’d meant to do at some point on my previous two meetings but hadn’t got round to. I’m fascinated by the whole concept of the meridian, and datelines, and Greenwich’s place in maritime history, and it’s in a fantastic location, so it’s a must see. I heartily recommend it. From there I took the tube to South Kensington, where I spent a few hours browsing the somewhat slightly disappointing Science, Natural History and Victoria & Albert museums while waiting to check into my accommodation and the evening’s reveries.

I was staying at the University of Westminster International Halls in North Lambeth; I’d stumbled across them while looking for hotels, and I thought their rates of £27 a night for a private room with shared toilet/shower was not to be sniffed at. It was very basic, no frills fare and was almost identical to the room I lived in during my first year at university, almost to the millimetre; same timber, same layout, same light fittings and carpet. I immediately felt at home.

It was apt I’d been thrown back in time to the opening weeks of university as that evening I was meeting up someone I met during those heady days nine years ago. Amy and I had been classmates on the BA photography course, although we didn’t really start to bond until our third year. We’ve remained in touch since, despite each losing contact with other friends from that period, mutual or otherwise. I’d mentioned I might be coming down to the big smoke at some point, and she said she’d love to meet up, and as ever she was true to her word. I met her and her partner Rachael (I’m going with this spelling as that’s the variant my niece’s is) at Oxford Circus, and we went for a drink in some dark and extremely slender subterranean bar in Little Portland Street, where I sipped a glass of water underneath a large portrait of Doves singer Jimi Goodwin, taken by Natalie Curtis, Ian Curtis’ daughter. We then went for a Chinese buffet on Shaftesbury Avenue, and I felt that this was somewhat magical, given that I’ve lead a sad and sheltered life. (Although it was really magical). Rachael had an early start on Saturday morning and a tube and train journey back to Amy’s house, so we all departed for our respective beds around 1opm.

I didn’t have any real plan or itinerary for the following three days. I had a list of places that might be interesting to look at and photograph and the tube station nearest, but not much else. So, on Saturday morning at 8am, I walked from North Lambeth to the Barbican via the Southbank and St. Paul’s. I paid a brief visit to the Museum of London and the Barbican centre, although I can’t claim to be particularly enamoured. I thought the architecture around the Barbican was especially fuck ugly, to quote Shaun of the Dead.

Barbican Centre

Back on the tube, I looked at my list of destinations and decided that Notting Hill Gate would be my next stop. I knew nothing of the area other than what I’d learned from the Hugh Grant film (not very much, according to Junior Simpson), and that Dire Straits had a song that name-checked Portobello Road. I didn’t realise the market featured in Notting Hill was the Portobello Road one, and I also didn’t realise that the main market day was Saturday, and had I turned up the next day, there might not have been anything there.

It was an experience. The first section of the road, nearest Notting Hill Gate, where George Orwell once lived, is relatively sedate. Then you hit the real market section, which is some sort of reasonably controlled chaos, an veritable panoply of primary colours, brass and leather. It took me the best part of an hour to find my way to the northernmost end of the street, where I caught the tube back towards Hyde Park.

I'm not surprised you see no ships, you fool.

What a load of old balls.

Peppers

Some people would settle for a mole on their back. Other people have to go one better, don't they?

I adore Hyde Park. So many landmarks that I’ve grown up with, touching from a distance, have sadly disappointed when I’ve finally seen them in the flesh/steel/concrete, but Hyde Park (and Kensington Gardens for that matter) is everything I’d dreamed it to be. Again, my mental construct of London is informed by Douglas Adams here; Hyde Park is mentioned in his sublime novel So Long And Thanks For All The Fish, and I think I fell for the park as I fell for the character of Fenchurch. If I’m in London for any concerted period of time and I feel fed up, that’s where I go, and that’s where I went. I had an ice cream and I sat on the grass and watched people on boats out on the Serpentine, and I perhaps caught the scent of that sense of stillness that continues to evade me.

7/7 Monument

Speaker's Corner

After a while I walked back to Oxford Street via the 7/7 monument and Speaker’s Corner, wandered about Regent Street for a while, and then went back to the hotel-thing. I did think about going to the IMAX cinema nearby, but I decided to go to bed instead and rest my weary feet. It was 7pm.

An hour and a half later, I was giddily walking around the noble gas petting zoo that is Piccadilly Circus snapping taxis and tourists with my compact Canon. I walked to Leicester Square and Covent Garden, where I watched a street performer. Then I walked all the way back to Piccadilly, caught the tube to Embankment and walked to the Houses of Parliament. I then somehow got from there back to North Lambeth, and I’m not entirely sure how. I know I didn’t get the tube, and it would be very uncharacteristic of me to walk under Waterloo station at half eleven at night. It’s all a bit strange, and it’s only a few hundred yards. Still.

Sunday was another uncharted day, full of nothing and lazy possibility. I decided my main goal was to see Regent’s Park/Primrose Hill, and I was able to catch a Bakerloo train straight from North Lambeth to Regent’s Park station. Unfortunately, a large swathe of the park was fenced off for preparation for some art display, so I carried on to Primrose Hill, which was very pleasant. Once I’d reached the top of it. It’s a location mentioned in one of my favourite Blur songs, ‘For Tomorrow’, as well as being featured visually in almost every rom-com ever set in London. It’s easy to see why; there’s a relaxed, cheerful ambience to the place on a Sunday morning, and you’re furnished with a great view of London and the south of England. I dallied a while.

Take a drive to Primrose Hill/It's windy there, and the view's so nice

I walked back to Baker Street via the illustrious suburb of St. John’s Wood, and caught the tube to Oxford Circus. I’d read in Time Out that there was some form of street festival happening in Regents Street, and I was keen on seeing what was afoot (Baker Street reference there). It hadn’t quite lurched into life by the time I got there, so I walked to Covent Garden again to visit the transport museum. When I found out I would have to pay £11 to get in, I turned on my heel and caught the tube to South Kensington. I’d mentioned my dissatisfaction with the Natural History Museum’s lack of dinosaurs and other ‘mad animal shit’, I think my exact words were to Rachael and Amy, and they informed me there was an entire wing I’d overlooked. So I went to see that.

"Release the flying monkeys!"

This is all so much covering old ground, but I was killing time to an extent. Amy had seemingly felt guilty about the quantity of her company she’d been able to afford on Friday and had offered to come back into town on Sunday so we could both visit the Imperial War Museum. She was moving house, and running somewhat late, so I decided to pop over to Trafalgar Square for a spell. There was an event on there, ‘London Week of Peace’, and several musical acts were performing on a stage at the square’s southernmost side.

I milled for a while, and was just about to leave when I happened to spot Holly from the Forever Delayed forum sitting at the base of the fourth plinth, a curious coincidence. I talked to her and her companions for a while (although mostly Holly as knowing someone vaguely through the internets is easier for my shyness to tolerate than someone I don’t know at all), just slightly longer than the amount of time it took me to realise we were sitting directly below Anthony Gormley’s One & Other project. As it was, we couldn’t see anything, and the music from the stage meant we couldn’t hear anything either.

Shortly afterwards I met Amy at Marylebone Station and we caught the Bakerloo directly to North Lambeth and the Imperial War Museum. It might seem like a slightly dispiriting way to spend a sunny Sunday afternoon, but Amy and I share an interest in the Holocaust, and there is a comprehensive exhibit on the subject there. We spent two hours looking at the displays, although I left a little earlier than Amy. We talked about what we’d seen on the way to Covent Garden for a drink. A lot of the time the Holocaust is too big for me to process; it will be for many people. What happened to the Jewish, homosexual, disabled and political subservients of Germany, as well as untold millions in Poland and Russia as a direct result of the Third Reich is just unthinkable. And I know that’s a horrible sort of weasely, bland word, but it’s apt. Perhaps we’re desensitized to it as well. At my most cyncical I feel humanity is determined to act like murderous vermin most of the time. It’s always the small stories that make it more real to me. Oskar Schindler, a philandering businessman bankrupted himself and risked death to save 1,200 Jewish factory workers. Albert Göring, brother of Hermann, who spent the war undermining his sibling’s government. The White Rose, who tried to stir Munich and Germany into rebellion against Hitler, despite knowing what their ultimate fates would be. I realise there’s something faintly pathetic about highlighting these examples, these flowers of compassion in a desert of arid complicity, but they are the keystones that help us attempt to understand why some humans went out of their way to persecute while others sacrificed their own lives for others. It would have been easier for Oskar Schindler, Albert Göring, Sophie Scholl, Hans Scholl, Alex Schmorell, Willi Graf, Christophe Probst, Traute Lafrenz and Kurt Huber to simply do nothing, or at least be more circumspect about how they went about their activities. But they didn’t, and for anyone that’s ever beheld the truth in whosoever uttered the words ‘For evil to triumph, all that is required is for good men to do nothing’, we must thank them. I couldn’t help but think of my second cousin Sarah, who I’ve got to know over the last two years. Her father was part of the kindertransport, the mass migration of Jewish refugee children from Germany in 1938 that settled in Britain, and fortunately his mother made it to the U.K. as well. I found it blackly ironic that many people lost family due to the Nazis, while I’ve gained kin.

The remainder of the evening was less ominous. Following a drink and lengthy conversation in a pub near Covent Garden, we repaired to a bar in Leicester Square for an hour or so before public transport dictated her departure. Which is a shame, as I could talk the hind legs off Amy given half the chance. She really is rather wonderful.

And slowly Sunday turned into Monday, but I didn’t notice because I was in bed asleep at the time. I dozed in bed for a while, then got up and checked out. Looked at buying a day travelcard, didn’t because it was still on peak, so I walked from North Lambeth to Oxford Street to find and photograph a building that had been on the cover of AJ the previous month.

I had two more places I desperately wanted to visit before I caught the plane home, and they were both in Highgate, which lies in Zone 4 of the underground map, meaning a slightly more expensive ticket. My destinations on this morning were Highgate North (Northern Heights) tube station. Unfortunately, there wasn’t much to see when I emerged from the extant station on the Northern Line below it. A little disappointed I pressed on to Highgate East cemetery.

Most people that pay their £3 to stroll through the graveyard possibly do so to see the grave of Karl Marx (paying to see your grave, how do you like them apples Carlito?), but I wanted to pay my respects to an author I’ve already mentioned twice in this blog, Douglas Noel Adams. Twelve years after I first read his wonderful novel version of his own radio series The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy, he remains, I feel, my favourite writer. If you haven’t read h2g2 as its blissfully abbreviated, you should, and then you should read the four sequels, and the two novels about Dirk Gently, the holistic detective. They’re simply marvellous, elegant, intelligent, funny, cynical, essential and many other adjectives that Douglas Adams would know and I don’t. If he hadn’t been such a lazy arse he might have created more wonderful gubbins for the world to bury its nose in and burble in delight, but he didn’t, and he died of a heart attack at just 49. I felt it important to see his place of rest, as Highgate Cemetery is due to be demolished to make way for a new bypass.

Douglas Adams' gravestone. Fittingly, there's a mouldy towel behind it, packed with nutrients.

I was on the home straight by the time I caught a bus back into Oxford Circus and milled around for a while (I can do this at a professional level) before heading to St. Pancras and the train to Luton. I managed to survive EasyJet’s vigourously stupid check-in procedure, and was in my own bed by nine. And that was London.

So what are my findings? I think I may well have exhausted the capital as a mine of geographic interest. From now on, I suspect I’ll only visit to see people and events. It’s still a vibrant, exciting city although as I get older the sight of large throngs of people fills me with ever-decreasing dread. Did anything interesting happen? Not overly. Amy was the only person I was able to meet as everyone else I knew in that area was busy. However, a man did pull up in a car in Greenwich and offer me a watch. He said “I work for Rolls Royce, and I’ve just been given this watch. I don’t need it, do you want it?’ I told him I didn’t, pointed to my own watch, and walked off. I think it might have been some sort of scam, somehow. I’d been in the city for little more than half an hour, and it had just turned 9am. And I walked past Julian Barrett from the Mighty Boosh on the corner of Oxford Street and Tottenham Court Road. I freely admit I was staring at him, in that ‘he looks familiar, do I know him, oh I know it looks like him off the telly, hang about, it is him off the telly’ way. From a close quarters examination, he’s not very good at shaving. And I saw what nearly developed into a physical altercation between a father of a young boy and two middle-aged dogwalkers, as he berated them for smoking in his child’s vicinity without due care and attention.

The most important thing that came out of my trip was a boost in my photography abilities. I had a little bit of a disaster towards the end of my degree that resulted in me having to resit a module to pass it, and I don’t think my confidence has ever quite recovered. I find I’m prone to letting photography slip away from me, and not fighting to improve as I should do. I bought a fairly expensive camera last year, but found I’m too nervous to take it certain places in case someone stole it. I decided that I was going to insure my camera, take it to London and I was going to take the pictures I wanted to take. And I got about 97% of them. I’d love to have taken a few long exposures of Piccadilly Circus just to cross them off the list, but I genuinely feel as if I’ve crossed a plataeua that’s been holding me back. As with my writing and my music making, my mental appreciation of the art of photography has improved markedly over the last five years, but as with the former two subjects, I need to pull my socks up as regards technique. But I’m feeling stronger and more confident.

In other realms of the Jayniverse, not much has been happening. I’ve started back at college, and I’ve enrolled in a nightcourse that might help me get onto a degree course in architecture should that avenue open up for me. However, it looks very likely that my place of employment will face budget limitations under whoever should win the General Election next year, so it’s currently not even guaranteed I’ll have a job. In the past, I would have let this crush me, but my construction training is equipping me well, and I’ve started putting in place the foundations of a contingency plan should the worst happen.

Rachael celebrated her fourth birthday last week. She continues to develop well, despite the ongoing concern about her vision, and she’s just started her last year of nursery. Little sister Kate is laughing, has teeth coming through, and despite not being able to sit up as well as Rachael could at six months, seems to be a little steadier on her feet.

It's my party, and I'll disappear upstairs to play Nintendo if I want to...

Kate-o-Monkey

I’ve been dabbling with music again. I bought a new bass and some recording software for the princely sum of £60, and last night Fred, Kev, Andy, Daniel and I convened in a rehearsal room in Finnieston to try and make some music. It didn’t go well, and we need to have a talk about what we want to achieve from the ‘band’.

New bass. Named Tina, after Tina Fey.

Frustratingly, I seem to spend my life in a permanant rage, but I never write any of it down, and thus am learning nothing from it all. That said, my ire seems to be mainly directed at traffic control, the proliferation of which in the West of Scotland has rendered the clutch and manual gearbox useless. Driving around Glasgow these days is like solving a Rubik’s Cube puzzle. There’s a lot of lateral shifting and near misses, and some people can do it. I can’t. It drives me, literally, insane.

And, harking back to my comments about the holocaust, people in general have started to seriously sicken me in recent times. Your average human’s outlook on life seems to be set to ‘me, me, me, what I think, what I want & nothing else matters’. You can see it in th way people park, in the way they walk, in the way they go on national radio and broadcast their opinions. For instance. It’s the whole ‘I’m alright, Jack’ attitude that gets me down. The increasing rise of misandry upsets me. I’m aware this all makes me sound like a misanthrope, and I used to counter this by saying it all came from a deep love of humanity and frustration at its inane, violent farrago, but I’m not sure any more. I suppose you can’t really parcel people up like that. Some are nitwits, and some are wonderful.

It’s taken me a few hours to write this. I’ve bed and a short story to finish. I shall call again in November, time permitting. But for your consideration, some photographs…

The part of Glasgow that reminds me of Hollywood.

Busy, busy bee

It occurs to me that when I first started blogging on my old Live Journal account some six years ago, I could write two, sometimes three entries an evening. They wouldn’t be particularly in-depth missives, but I would be expressing myself.

Today, I appear to be updating my journal at a rate of one new entry a month. This concerns me somewhat, mainly because I feel its symptomatic of an ongoing descent into creative apathy that’s already been marked by the drying up of my musical font.

This, however, is despite any number of stimuli that invoke my ire and the more argumentative part of my brain. I have been following current affairs a little more closely over the summer months, and the creative arts and sport continue to provide heat for the cauldron that is my spleen, but for some reason I’m unable to transcribe it all. I do wonder why this is; perhaps I’ve just become more acutely aware that any nonsense I peddle in this little blog is of no great consequence to anyone.

That said…there has been no end of drivel spouted by media outlets that really should know better. You probably know of my disdain for televisual and newspaper reportage, certainly in the United Kingdom, and they’ve had no shortage of subjects to toothlessly make a pig’s ear of covering. Since my last blog in July, we’ve had more swine flu, the US’s fear of Universal Health Care, the release of the Lockerbie bomber and so on. But as I know next to nothing about these subjects, I’m going to instead turn my critical gaze to the European Champions League play-off tie between Celtic and Arsenal.

For those of you that don’t follow football closely (I’m thinking mainly of Summer, the only person that seems to actually read this), the UEFA Champions League is a continental football competition involving 32 teams that finished in the top 4/3/2 of their domestic league (depending on the relative strength of said leagues). It’s not very easily to summarise in précis, so instead, follow this link.

One play-off match pitted the team that finished fourth in the English Premier League against the team that finished second in the Scottish Premier League, with the winner going through to the embarrassment of riches that is the group stages (each of the 32 teams collects up to $20m over the course of the six group games, just for being there). There can’t be too many sport teams in the world that would turn their nose up at $20m, and so every one of the ten ties would be keenly contested.

Of course there was an added frisson to a Scottish and English team meeting at this stage; while the two nations make up part of the United Kingdom, they’ve never had an entirely easy relationship. From warfare to politics to regicide to sport, whenever the twain should meet, something that doesn’t unentirely resemble fireworks is bound to follow.

I say this because in recent years, it’s been my observation that the British media has tended to consider facts less, and instead enter into a competition to see who can best impersonate a hysterical parent looking for a lost child in Disney World. For example, Arsenal beat Celtic 5-1 on aggregate over the two legs, leading to much aggrandising about the gulf in footballing ability between the two respective nations. Sadly, such articles have neglected to include the faintest harmony of common sense.

For instance, I got the impression from the general tone of the post-match analysis that this was somehow a confrontation between equals. Not so. Celtic and Arsenal may have similar-sized supports, but in terms of spending power, that’s where the comparisons must diverge.

The two nations of England and Scotland, although historically close in many regards, have developed in vastly different ways over the last century or so. While England’s population has continued to grow, mainly due to increased immigration and static levels of emigration, Scotland’s has decreased. The English Premier League, backed by Rupert Murdoch’s Sky Sports contributions, has become one of the richest sporting organisations in the world. English clubs buy the world’s best talent, from promising 14 year-olds to semi-legendary veterans, and habitually stroll through the Champions League stages to the latter stages, grossing more money.

(Which more often than not goes to servicing the huge debts and overdrafts these clubs have racked up, if not more multi-million pound footballers).

In contrast, with the collapse of the Irish broadcaster Setanta, the modicum of TV money that was trickling into the Scottish game has long since dried up. A new deal was struck with ESPN/Sky, at a fraction of what the previous contract rates were. The Scottish Premier League (SPL) champions, Rangers, have seen their spending power curbed by their bank for a relatively meagre £25m or so debt, despite them gaining automatic access to the Champions League group stages. Any money earned from these endeavours will likely go to paying off creditors. Such is the way of the Scottish, and English games. While the former suffers cascading quality issues based on a feedback loop (less money=fewer quality players=fewer tickets sold & lower money from TV rights=less money=fewer quality players and so on), while the English game aims for the stratosphere. At least until the money runs out, which has surely got to happen sometime, but which doesn’t appear to be on the horizon, despite the economic downturn.

The bottom line is that of the two teams that walked out at the Emirates Stadium in North London last night, one had spent in the region of £60m on their starting XI. This didn’t include the number of star names that were being rested. The other team’s first XI cost less than half that, and was more or less their strongest selection. It’s absurdly pointless to draw any direct comparisons between the two teams, or indeed two teams from each country, as the Scottish side just cannot compete with their English counterparts any longer. This isn’t just on the basis of the calibre of individual player being produced north and south of the border; England’s population being some ten/eleven times greater than Scotland’s, that’s bound to occur. It’s simply that the English teams can supplement these players with the best of the world’s young talent.

It’s not a level playing field, so I would graciously ask the media in this country to stop pretending that it is. It does you no favours.

In other news…

I took a couple of weeks off work this month and did precisely nothing. Well, not exactly. I went to see Camera Obscura and Lloyd Cole at Kilmarnock’s Edition festival with my good friend Alan. I bought several CDs (Pulp’s His ‘n’ Hers, The Cardigans’ First Band on the Moon, Paul McCartney’s McCartney II, Spinal Tap’s album and a compilation of Bond Themes. I’ve read a couple of books, most notably Marjane Satrapi’s Persepolis, and another couple arrived from Amazon today, namely J.G. Ballard’s Hello America and Vermilion Sands. I’ve invested in a Gorillapod for my camera. I’ve sifted through, organised and tidied up both my mp3 collection and my college notes from last year. I’ve enrolled for this year’s session, and I’ve more or less finished a couple of short stories I’ve been writing. I’ve even been practicing guitar solos again.

However. I still feel as if I’m going nowhere and doing nothing. I barely leave the house these days other than to go to work or play football. I want to take up a new hobby, take more photographs, start playing golf, form a band. I want to finish editing my first novel and start making some serious inroads into the second. I just need to keep my head up, and keep ploughing my way through.

My last little irritation’; September sees the release of the Beatles Rock Band game. It’s the latest in the franchise, and apparently sees a huge amount of attention to detail go into the crafting of the tracks, the visuals, the sound, everything. Even the controllers; the full band pack comes with two guitars, bass and drums, faithfully recreating the great band’s instruments to the finest detail. Well, apart from the fact the bass controller is RIGHT-FUCKING-HANDED. Now, I know as part of the left-handed minority in the world, we’re generally not considered worth a fuck by any multi-national company wherever cost-cutting measures can be implemented (Gibson and Rickenbacker have recently ceased production of left-handed guitars, various IT companies insist on making mouses that are ergonomically designed for right-handers only), but I mean, really! Paul McCartney’s possibly the most famous left-hander in the world (Barrack Obama may be the most famous man in the world who’s left-handed, but I digress), would it really hurt to make the bass controller truly accurate of his instrument? True, the game’s market may be made up primarily of right-handers, but here’s the kicker; why aren’t they burdened with having to turn the instrument upside down for a change? If I want to play Rock Band, or Guitar Hero, it’s what I have to do.

This isn’t a very good blog. Normal service may be resumed at some point. Or it may never.

Back to the Old House

What do Romulus, the fabled founder of the Eternal City and I have in common? Give up? We were both raised by Wolves. Oh yes, his might have been of the Lupine variety while mine was a knackered West Midlands industrial town, but they’re one and the same don’t you know?

When I was 19, I had the notion I was withering away to nothing, and made the rather spur of the moment decision to apply for a university course. I ended up enrolling at the University of Wolverhampton for two reasons; one was that my good friend Kris was already there, and I could therefore count on one face I knew, and secondly I was able to pick a mixed-module course. I’d been unable to decide whether I wanted to study English literature or Photography, and Wolves’ approach of “hey, fuck it! Do whatever you like man!” let me major in the latter and still keep my hand in at the latter.

As September 2000 approached, it became apparent I’d been billeted in the University’s Dudley campus (where the English base was) and not Wolverhampton itself (where photography was located). I’ve still never got to the bottom of why this should happen, but I know it happened to one person in the year above and the year below.

This meant I spent my first two years at University living in the even more knackered West Midlands industrial town of Dudley, which had its positives and its negatives. It was five or six miles away from the School of Art & Design, where most of my lectures were based, requiring an hour and a half round trip three times a week. I could never work out why it took so bloody long to make such a short trip, but I guess it’s just one of those things.

At the end of my second year, Dudley campus was shut down by the University, and we were all transferred to the main Wolverhampton campus. What followed was possibly the happiest nine months of my life. It was truly idyllic. It ended up going horrifically wrong, but it was wonderful while it lasted.

Here’s a photograph of me in May 2003, just before it did go all pear-shaped. I was genuinely happy then.

Anyway, shortly after this I passed my driving test and then a year further on I finally completed my degree. The rest is history.

And now the archaeology.

For the last few years I’ve been posting on a forum called Forever Delayed. I’ve made a few good friends there (Jeanette, Tim and Hamilton Kev), but I’d taken a break from posting over the last eight months or so, partly to concentrate on college work and partly because I’d grown a little tired of the place. I resumed posting around a month ago, and was pleasantly surprised to receive a somewhat last-minute invitation to her twentieth anniversary renewal of wedding vows by Finn, one of the board’s…well, the matriarch I suppose. I was delighted to accept, especially as the ceremony was to take place in Finn’s home town of…Wolverhampton. I was returning to my home-from-home.

Of course, nothing in my life goes smoothly. I got a room in the hotel where the renewals were taking place, but they charged me double (Finn sorted that for me). Virgin were playing equally dumb when I enquired about purchasing a train ticket from them. There’s something about the rail infrastructure in this country that is not unlike a Mason attempting to board the Hogwarts Express through hand gestures alone. I bought the tickets online. They were cheap, but the drawback was my train down left Glasgow at 4:30. In the morning.

By a happy coincidence, my mother happened to be starting work at 4am, so I cadged a lift. Trouble was, she dropped me off at 3:30am and the station didn’t open for another half hour, so I had to brave the dregs of Glasgow’s inebriated Friday night revellers as they ate chips, pissed in the gutter and argued with policemen. Fortunately, once aboard the train, everything went smoothly. I read my book: Cloud Atlas by David Mitchell, and grabbed seven or so winks.

There’s not a great deal to do in Wolverhampton at that time in the morning. To be frank, there’s not a great deal to do in Wolverhampton at any time. I wandered around the Mander centre and read a little bit more of Cloud Atlas in the little garden in front of St. Peter’s cathedral. I walked down to West Park and strolled and watched the organic, haphazard games of football that break out before reading a little more of the book. Thankfully Tim texted to rescue me from this litany of mundanity, and the two of us repaired to the hotel.

Jump cut here.

Everything goes a little fuzzy. I have a headache. I can’t sleep in the two hours I have between checking into the room and the ceremony starting. I get a text from Kevin and meet him in West Park to give he and Rachael directions to the hotel. I pick up Ibuprofen and toothpaste from the corner shop on the way back.

Another cut. I shower, shave and dress, and before I know it, it’s four o’clock, and I’m getting messages asking if I’ve fallen asleep.

The Ceremony.

I sit with Rachael, Kevin, Jeanette and Tim near the back. A wonderful choir sings ‘May It Be’, from the Lord of the Rings, and later, ‘Hallelujah’. It’s a touching, funny, and perhaps a little surprisingly religious affair. When the beaming couple do renew their vows, we can’t quite hear the words, but we hear the laughter. It’s as it should be, but so often isn’t.

The Food.

Oh, there was a lot of food. And I ate some of it. But then there was…

Everything after.

From eight o’clock through to one those of us that posted on FD socialised mainly among ourselves, and mostly in the car park, where the smokers could disease themselves further. I’m not sure what topics we all conversed about, but I know football didn’t come up at all between Rachael, Kevin and I. Somewhat ashamedly, I let my shyness best me once again, aided by my observing temperance at the moment (seven months on Sunday), and I stuck to the four people I knew and trusted best. It wasn’t until Rachael and Kevin departed that I came out of my shell a little. Those of us staying in the hotel eventually drifted away from the dance floor at 1am, when they turned the houselights up. Shortly afterwards, someone was knocked down on the street outside my room. I just pulled my duvet over me. This kind of thing happened all the time in Wolverhampton.

Day Two

Sunday morning arrived in a haze of drizzle. I showered and checked out at 9:45am, and made my way, via my two former residences in the city, to the Remus to Wolves’ Romulus, Dudley. I caught, as tradition dictates, a 558 bus, which trundled its way through Sedgley and Gornal and past the Beacon Home for the Blind, which always reminds me of ‘Last of the Gang to Die’ by Morrissey, before reaching the old university campus itself.

Former house 1: (2002-2003)

Former house 2: (2003-2004)

Half of it hasn’t changed much, other than grow even more dilapidated. The two small towers of rooms remain, as does the annexe of kitchens between them. However, the admin buildings, the refectory, the union/sports and the library have all been demolished, with housing built in their stead. I shot some photos before a security guard, employed presumably by the town’s college, who now own the premises, asked me in so many words if I wouldn’t mind fucking off. So I did. I walked into Dudley town centre, and the only difference I could see in five years was that the Litten Tree pub was now a post office.

(This is the tower block across the road from Dudley campus. I stared at this building over a two year period. I voted in a general election in its lobby. But it was only last year I found out that it’s featured in the gatefold sleeve of Led Zeppelin’s fourth album. Astonishing.)

So I caught the bus back to Wolverhampton, and went to the cinema near New Cross hospital, where I watched Harry Potter and the Half-Blood Prince. It was a fair enough film. Visually, I think it’s fantastic, but I just can’t get into the plot, perhaps because I’ve read the books.

Back into the city centre for some dinner. I’d rather daftly booked a ticket for the 7:30pm train back to Glasgow, thinking there might have been some hi-jinks on the Sunday. I’d backed a lame duck there. I ate in the Varsity and saw at least three faces I recognised, although they didn’t seem to have the faintest idea who I was. I read my book in the station’s waiting room as the rain intensified, smashed against the glazing and gained slow ingress through a faulty skylight.

Boarding my train, I found someone in my seat. Or at least the seat my e-ticket said was mine. I didn’t make a fuss though, mainly because I’m pathologically incapable of doing so. I went to stand in the little ante-room train carriages have at each end when the inspector/train manager passed me. “Don’t want to sit in your seat?” she asked. “There’s someone in it,” I told her. Indeed, my seat was the window seat, and both it and the aisle seat were occupied. She stuck her head round the door and had a look, before coming back and gesturing for me to sit in the next carriage. Which was first class.

Now that isn’t as great as it sounds. On British trains, first class is a bit quieter and there’s a bit more room, otherwise not much difference at all. But I was able to finish Cloud Atlas in peace. And I have to say I rather enjoyed it. The book that is.

The train rolled into Glasgow at 23:30, and I thought I’d arranged for my mother to meet me, reasoning that a tenner’s worth of petrol is better than twenty quid’s worth of taxi. She had other ideas and didn’t turn up. Taxi it was…

I need a holiday…

…was what I kept telling myself. After all, since taking 15 of my 20 allocated days annual leave to travel to the U.S. last April, and excepting ten days off at Christmas and some public holidays, I’ve been working continuously, attending college on day release with all its attendant studying, I’ve completed three night classes and I still managed to find time to fit in NaNoWriMo in November. Thus, I’m a bit worn down. I definitely need a break away from my obligations and the ongoing framework that is my first five year plan. However, as my finances are all tied up in investments, I don’t have a great deal of money to pay for a ’sunshine break’ as the Sun would undoubtedly dub it. Staying in the U.K. is slightly cheaper (although only just), so it looks as if my two weeks off booked in August will be spent recreating John Lennon and Yoko Ono’s bed-in.

However, in the meantime, I had some unfinished business. Three years ago, I’d applied for, and was accepted for interview for a medical illustrator job at the University Hospital of Wales in Cardiff. I didn’t get the post in the end, but while looking at photographs of Cardiff on Flickr, I found mention of an interesting competition called Photomarathon, its premise in precis being that each entrant should take 12 pictures of 12 topics over 12 hours. I was intrigued, and was delighted to find that the 2007 competition was to be held simultaneously in Cardiff and Glasgow, meaning I could compete from the comfort of my own home city. Unfortunately, it transpired that the contest was due to take place the same weekend I travelled down to London for the Muse concert at Wembley stadium. And in 2008, the competition didn’t take place at all. So when idly checking the Photomarathon website one evening to see it was scheduled to take place in Cardiff (only) on 20th June, I paid my £15 and entered. I would think about travel and accommodation later…

Around six months previously, I’d somehow let myself get talked into buying tickets* to see Oasis at Murrayfield Stadium. Now I love Oasis, but having seen them on their arena tour in November, I wasn’t much fussed about seeing them, or not as they case might be, in an enormo-dome. But I paid my £50 (£50!!) for the gig, which was to take place on the Wednesday before Photomarathon. So, it made sense to me to take the day off work for the gig, then the day after to recover. And when my cheap flights and hostel dictated a three night stay in Cardiff, I took the Friday and Monday off work as well. After all, I had leave to spare. Six days off work, it promised to be divine.

Tuesday evening’s now customary game of five a side signalled the end of my working week. It was a decent game, though it was incredibly hot and I just can’t handle any physical exertion in high temperature. The next day I was actually due in to work, for a health check that had originally been booked for a different time, but which had ended up being moved to Wednesday morning. I wasn’t enamoured with having to come into the office on my day off, even if I didn’t have to lift a finger, but it simply made things more convenient that way.

My check up, which was rather cursory, went ok. My cholesterol levels are still slightly below the level of concern, and the physician noted I was a little over-weight. “Pre-obese” were her actual words. I know I’ve put on a little weight in the last few years (two and a half stone), but I still don’t think I’m anywhere near being obese. In any case, the body mass index is fundamentally flawed as it assumes all body weight is pure fat. Muscle however is heavier than fat; thus, all your ripped boxers, rugby players and so on are normally considered obese by dint of their BMI. I’m not saying I’m an Adonis, but I think I do have a fair bit of muscle, especially given the amount of cycling and football I’ve done so far this year. Anyway, she said my stress levels and diet were ok, and as I don’t drink or smoke, I’ve given myself a bit of leeway in that respect. She gave me a few pointers on how to improve my breathing (you think I’d have got the hang of it by now), and I was out of the office by ten.

After a brief sojourn to Glasgow to get a 35mm film developed, I returned home to prepare for the trip to Edinburgh for the Oasis gig. As I’ve stopped drinking for the year, and as I hate public transport, I had offered to drive my sister, her fiance and my friend Kevin through for the gig. It would only take an hour or so, and would be preferable to spending god knows how long on trains with drunken eejits. We eventually parked up at the Park and Ride facility at Riccarton, and a 20 minute bus journey later we were at Murrayfield. Originally, I had a seating ticket, but as Kevin had a spare general admission ‘brief’, as your tabloid newspaper would have it, we ended up swapping and trying to sell the seated ticket, with no luck. I offered to swap back, but Kevin wasn’t having it.

The gig itself was something of a disappointment. Perhaps I just wasn’t up for it, and maybe it’s because I’m not a fan of the band’s latest album, but I really couldn’t muster any enthusiasm. Watching Chris Sharrock drum again was a pleasure, as much as watching Zakk Starkey had been, but it never really took off for me. And I’m a big Oasis fan, unfortunately. I say unfortunately, as if you tell someone you like the music of said band, they automatically assume you’re some kind of unreconstructed neanderthal with a penchant for alcoholism, sexism and any other kind of ‘ism’ you care to think of. Doubly unfortunately, this is because a lot of Oasis fans are unreconstructed neanderthals with penchants for alcoholism, sexism and so on. Being in a stadium with 60,000 of them wasn’t a pleasurable experience. I simply enjoy the music, I’m not into the whole urinating in people’s garden and getting involved in fist fights while the band are playing.

Afterwards, it took as a while to negotiate Gorgie Road, but we got back home, dropping Kevin off in Hamilton fairly smartly. Fortunately I had a long lie on Thursday morning. I was due to play fives with the guys from work, but the game didn’t kick off until 12:30pm, so I could rise from my pit at my leisure. The game itself was fairly non-descript and so was the ensuing afternoon/evening. In fact, it was so non-descript, it may have merged with Wednesday. Nevertheless, one of these two days I got my film developed and bought two cheap, second-hand Xbox games. I didn’t get much chance to play them though, as I had an early start ahead of me. Cardiff beckoned in the morning.

Cardiff, the capital city of the principality of Wales, first entered my consciousness in earnest in the summer of 1992. During a trip to Ingliston Market in Edinburgh, I bought (or my mother bought for me) a Cardiff City away shirt from season 1991-1992, essentially this, but in yellow with a blue collar. This was shortly after the genesis of my football shirt-collecting interest, and I often wonder what happened to said kit. The city become more prevalent to my thoughts in 2003-2004 as I became friendly with Matt and Kate, who were both studying in Cardiff, through LiveJournal, and when my two ex-university friends Sally and Amy (I have recently decided to start calling them The Sally Amy) moved there. In addition, my favourite band the Manic Street Preachers originate from just north of the city and have often used it as a base for recording and rehearsing. Their 2005 album Lifeblood features the song ‘Cardiff Afterlife’, and the singer James Dean Bradfield’s solo album was titled The Great Western, a nod to the railway company that founded the Cardiff to London trainline, and whose name still adorns Cardiff Central Station. And of course there was the lost employment opportunity, something that provoked a tangible sense of regret every time a sense memory passed through my mind.

The flight down to this companion city, sparring partner, caretaker of vanquished dream was due to leave Glasgow Airport at 7am, so I made sure I was there by half past five. The flight is as dull as most until the plane, having flown south of the airport banks back north to approach the runway and you get to see the sumptuous Welsh countryside unfold below you, that you begin to appreciate this is a country that’s inspired music and lyrics in its citizens for centuries.

The trip from the airport to the city centre is no less idyllic. First a bus takes you through winding country lanes to Rhoose Station, a small unmanned halt overlooking the Bristol Channel, that in the glorious, lazy sunshine of the two occasions I’ve caught a train there help fuel the fantasy that you’ve somehow stepped back in time to a more peaceful age. The train journey to Cardiff is relaxed and indolent and most soothing, which helps your brain acclimatise to the bilingual signs on view.

It was perhaps nine o’clock in the morning when I got to Central Station, and I had a full, if unplanned day ahead of me. The only person I know that still lives in Cardiff, Sally, was at work, so I had to amuse myself. This I did by purchasing a 99p roll of film and visiting Cardiff Castle. This killed an hour or so, but I can’t fake an interest in medieval history; it’s just too far outside the timespan I’m interested in, which tends to bookend 1900 until the present day. Fortunately, there is a sight in central Cardiff more attuned to my tastes; the Millennium Stadium. Constructed in 1997-1999, the stadium replaced the previous 50,000 odd capacity ground on the same footprint, although its axis was rotated 90 degrees. It’s the second biggest stadium in Britain, and the only one with a fully-retractable roof. As I’m an architecture student that has a particular interest in sports arenas, I had to take the tour. Our guided jaunt through the endless corridors (used to great effect shooting Dr. Who) took just under an hour and was as distinctly under-whelming as all the other stadium tours I’ve ever been on. Still, it was nice to see behind the scenes, especially as the crew continued the clean up from Take That’s gig there the night before.

After killing some more time, I repaired to the hostel that would be my home for the next three evenings. I’d always avoided the dorm room experience of hostels, mainly because I’m a little shy, but I’d convinced myself this was a good idea because it was a third of the price of what a hotel would cost. The first night however was a nightmare. I’d checked in fairly early, around 5:30pm as I was a little tired from the flight and wandering around, so I thought I’d retire to bed with a book. I didn’t count on the noisy teenage boys in the two dorm rooms either side of me. My despairing texts to twitter at the time sum up my mood nicely I think. “Judging by the noise they’re making, the teenagers next door are attempting to gang rape an elephant.”, followed shortly afterwards by “I think the elephant’s winning.” Somewhat irritatingly, it transpired I was sharing my own dorm with two noisy middle aged men, one of whom would utter “uh” every 27 seconds for no apparent reason. So I didn’t get a good night’s sleep at all, but I drifted off at some point.

The next day, Saturday, was the long-awaited Photomarathon day, and I finally started to feel excited and nervous about the task ahead. The journey on the number 8 bus from Crwys Road to the Millennium Centre seemed to take an age, but I finally arrived shortly after 9am. Although the contest didn’t start until 10am, registration opened at 8:30, and I wanted to get down early before the crowds arrived, as much to allow my head to clear afterwards as anything. I was presented with my entry card, my roll of 24 exposure 400 ISO film, and I had a shiny orange wristband strapped on my arm, for reasons that remain a little unclear. Having messaged Sally on Facebook the week before, it transpired she was also entering, and she arrived shortly after I had. We spoke for a while as we awaited the start of the competition, and the foyer of the centre filled up with more and more excited amateur/professional/brilliant/god-awful photographers. After all the necessary small print was spelled out by the organisers, we were given our first four topics and released into the wild. Sally, who seemed to be taking it a lot more seriously than I’d anticipated disappeared on her own vision quest, leaving me to meander around Cardiff with my supplied bus ticket.

The first four topics then:

Entry Number/Colour
Contained
Roll With It
Chip

For these images, I headed into Cardiff City Centre, and ended up buying half a dozen eggs, a potato peeler, a bowl, some Oasis juice, ten blank CDs for props, and I also paid a quick trip to the Central library and Bute Park, making it back to the Bay for 2pm and the release of the second batch of topics. These were:

Crunch
Age
Black & White
Social Networking

For these shots, I decided to stay in the Bay area and use only what I could source locally, mainly because my feet, knees and back had started to ache. For these shots, I used an apple, the price sticker from my bowl, and some of the local landmarks, and had enough time to have a sandwich from Subway and lose my entry card. Luckily I was furnished with a spare and the last four topics:

Spillage
Missing
Dressed To Impress
Winner

I decided to get on a bus, hoping that inspiration would come to me. So, I jumped onto the first one that came my way, a number 1, which providently took me to the Tesco superstore off Western Avenue, where I was able to buy more props (tin of spinach, tin opener, ‘Congratulation’ card) before heading back to the bay to shoot them all, completing my 12 topics/shots at just after nine. I then took my aching feet back to the Heath where I found the hostel thankfully bereft of annoying teenagers and I slept peacefully through until 8am.

Most of Sunday and Monday could be written off. I had nothing to do and no-one to do it with; Sally had travelled to Swansea, my attempt at meeting up with my one-time best friend and former uni housemate Bex had faltered due to a truculent two-year old, and so I spent most of those two days reading various incarnations of the Independent, popping into various museums/visitors centres, going on a high speed boat trip that didn’t enthrall me in the slightest, and taking the tourist bus around the city. Fortunately, having ascertained I would be in town until at least five pm, Amy offered to babysit me for a while as she was in Cardiff for the day. She took me to a pub in St. Fagans, and then to Barry Island where we sat on the sea front, her eating chips and me eating a 99 cone. It was rather blissful; apparently Barry’s a bit of a run-down town, but I quite liked it. Very pretty for a run down town.

I met Amy on the first day of University, which terrifyingly means I’ve known her for nine years now, and carried a rather pathetic, under-nourished torch for her for nearly a decade as well. What exactly do I feel for Amy, I hear you ask. Well…

Like Facebook or Dorian Gray might say, it’s complicated. It goes like this; a man (or a man child) that might possibly be on the autistic spectrum, who doesn’t really understand other human beings, and whose libido is like an itinerant, absent uncle, knows a rather sweet, kind-hearted, witty, intelligent, talented and driven individual who happens to press more of his buttons than anyone he’s ever met, and whose company he enjoys immensely. Sometimes he wishes they were closer, because he likes the sense of possibility he experiences when he’s around her, but he’s realistic enough to know better.

It’s a strange one. I sometimes feel I should cut my losses and cut Amy and everything to do with her out of my life to see if that would make things easier, but I think that would be a spectacularly stupid thing to do. I don’t have the social skills to spurn offers of friendship because of pipe dreams. And so it will remain like this until I find my orangutan (see my heart-breaking, Ivor Novello-winning song of the same name for details, when I finally manage to write it).

And so Amy dropped me off at the airport, as she had three years previously, when I’d walked into the biggest security alert at British airports ever. I got back into Glasgow on Monday night at nine, and I was back at work twelve hours later. I might see if I can get down to Cardiff for the Photomarathon exhibition, to take place in July, although I’m a little sick of the sight of the town at the moment.

Pictures of the weekend can be found here.

I need to get those songs demoed before I forget them…

*People, at least in Britain, say they’ve ‘bought tickets’ for a gig/show/concert/play/sporting event, when they mean they’ve bought one ticket. Not entirely sure why. Or they do buy two tickets and find it impossible to shift the spare. Not sure why they do that either.

Here comes the summer…

I haven’t blogged in a while, which is mainly down to time and energy levels. It didn’t really occur to me that working full-time, studying architecture on day release and another three night classes over the course of the year, tied in with between 1-3 football games a week would make me feel as tired as it has, but it did. I’ve been neglecting music and photography and writing, although I’ve happily found enough time to read as I rattle from one destination to another on Glasgow’s painfully inadequate public transit infrastructure. In fact, if it weren’t for my constant inveterate rage at the world, humanity and every piece of technology ever invented, I think I’d have faded away to nothing a long time ago.

I did have the notion of writing a long and eloquent paean to my…erm, pain, but I feel so vexed, I’m just going to rant.

So, since my last post I’ve finished all the work required to pass the first year of my HNC in Architectural Technology; whether it’s of the standard required is another matter, but I’m 90% sure it’s fine. This should mean three months of not having to worry about when the next assessment is due in. This also means I don’t have squeeze a five day workload into four days at work, meaning the office should be a less stressful place for the next 12 weeks or so. I would have liked to go on a short holiday somewhere (I had planned on travelling across Switzerland, Germany and Austria, to the point where I enrolled in a German class to brush up my grasp of the language), but my finances mean I’m not likely to be able to afford such a trip. I’m saving up for a car and a deposit for some form of house, and such fripperies cannot be sanctioned I’m afraid.

And so I find myself returning home from work each evening, unable to raise the enthusiasm to do little more than browse the internet. It’s a slightly worrying state of affairs, given that I’m already likely to fret about how little talent I have without wasting the modicum of creative bent I do possess. I’m not sure what I can do about it however as I no longer have the vim I possessed in my teen and early 20s.

I touched on this with my friend Kevin the other evening, as we talked about Blur’s 1997 self-titled album. He commented that it was far superior to the Manic Street Preachers’ new release, while I contended that it was an unfair comparison, as the latter are in their 40s while the members of Blur had just entered their 30s when ‘Blur’ was recorded. It would appear that most pop/rock/contemporary musicians produce their best material in their 20s, and I can’t personally think of too many acts where this isn’t the case, although I invite suggestions. I did have a brief reminder of the passion of my youth this morning when I read a lovely piece by John Harris of the Guardian on Blur’s reformation this year. I’ve been a fan of Harris since I read his marvellous book ‘The Last Party’, and the article reminded me of what I loved about music and music criticism in the mid to late 90s; incisive, eloquent scribes writing wonderful copy about musicians that were producing great works of art in the midst of personal circumstances that would make your average person hide in a cupboard. I found that Q magazine, my preferred read, went downhill markedly around the turn of the century. I suspect this was due to the paucity of characters in the music industry during that period. Coldplay have been one of the biggest bands in the world for much of the 21st century so far, but it must be hard for music journalists to find an angle on writing about them. Aside from Chris Martin’s marriage to Gwyneth Paltrow, there’s not that much for the amateur psychologists, sociologists and philosophers that make up the music press to get their teeth into.

Hopefully though I’ll be able to find a bit of a creative spark over the summer. This coming Friday, I’m going down to Cardiff for four days, specifically to take part in the annual Photomarathon contest. I’ve wanted to enter since I first heard about it in 2006, but due to one circumstance or other, I’ve been unable to until this year. I had to buy a 35mm film camera especially, as I no longer had a functioning one of my own. I managed to pick up a Minolta XD-11 for £25 from the local camera shop, and I’m shooting a roll of film at the moment to make sure it’s working ok. I got a bit of a rush of inspiration the last time I went to Cardiff, so I’m hoping the same thing happens this time around. Oh, and I finally got around to buying a dedicated camera bag for my D300 and all its bits and pieces.

Turning to my other obsession, football, I can happily report all is more or less well. My team Rangers won the league and Scottish cup double, and I’ve been keeping my hand in with 2-3 games of five a side a week despite my ongoing shin problem. It hasn’t all been plain sailing though, I did almost get in a fight one night in Hamilton (over-reacting to being smacked in the face at point-blank range with the ball), and in two Saturday games at Townhead I’ve twisted my ankle and done something to my knee. I really shouldn’t have played the two games I did this week, but I got talked into it…

So, having seen Doves and Manic Street Preachers so far this year, I’m off to see Oasis at Murrayfield on Wednesday. I’m not so much a fan of the latest album, and I don’t think seeing them in a stadium setting will be great, but it should be a fun night out for all.

I think I’ll touch on the ranting in a further update.