Does It Have To Be Bad?

I’ve steered away from writing about the forthcoming vote for Scottish independence because (a) I don’t consider myself to be an overtly political animal and (b) despite strong Scottish family blood a-swirling in my veins from my dad’s side of the parental tree I don’t really see how a nurtured Sassenach who’s lived in the heart of England all his life has any right to say yea or nay on the question of whether Scotland should be independent or not.

But it seems everyone has an opinion these days, especially those English politicians who’ve done eff all for Scotland over the years and up to this point haven’t cared a stuff about how it has fared. Geez, even J.K. Rowling has thrown a good wodge of her own money behind support for keeping Scotland forever yoked to the millstone of fake tradition that is British unity.

And I guess that paragraph hints at where my true personal leanings lie though I admit my arguments are purely emotional, possibly romantic, and wilfully have nothing to do with fiscal systems or the complicated bureaucracy of devolved governments.

To me Scotland has always been another country; always been its own country with its own identity and personality. The people, the landscape, the atmosphere are foreign. And I mean that as a massive positive. I like the idea of Scotland being truly independent. If for no other reason than the rather shallow pleasure I will get from the inevitable exoticization that will occur.

But that’s not the real point of this post. For me the central question is this: independent or not, does it have to be bad? All I’ve heard is various bad tempered politicians griping about what Scotland / England will lose if the yays for independence swing the day. And then other infantile politicians spitting their dummies and threatening to take their ball away and not play anymore if Scotland wants to be in charge of supplying their own kit. All blatantly ridiculous. It seems someone has to suffer no matter which way the vote goes and there’s going to be a lot of sulking.

But really? Does it have to be that way? Can’t Scotland have its independence and England and Scotland still work together for the benefit of both? Does it have to be miserable? Why can’t it just be good for everybody? Because at the end of the day life and trade will still need to continue. There will still be movement from across both sides of the border (even if it’s only the Queen digging out her passport before she enters Balmoral). We can all still play and work together.

As in any kind of relationship, a sense of independence is healthy and usually good for both sides. England needs to be less clingy and less possessive. That kind of behaviour always drives a partner away or into the arms of another.

Mother Russia

I don’t, I confess, have much in the way of political acumen so my grasp of the situation might be slightly awry but even I can see that the situation is at best tense and at worst explosive.

A country divided ideologically by the people who live there. One half wanting a split that defies geography, the other wanting to keep governance the way it is with a few tweaks for the better.

Foreign troops carrying out in-your-face manoeuvres on the sovereign soil of another nation; foreign soldiers right in the face of the native populace.

Centuries of bad feeling, grudges and old bloodshed threatening to bubble over into a whole new round of the same.

All the good – the partnership working, the shared achievements, the decades upon decades of neighbourliness which surely can’t all have been forced all of the time – on the brink of being swept away in a hysteria of media induced patriotism.

The politicians of the West giving forth disapproval and frowns, casting doubts on what is ostensibly a democratic process, voicing reservations about the abilities of the ordinary people on the street to know what it is they really want. David Cameron’s face is coming more and more to resemble the Lurpak butter man suffering from a bout of bowl bursting constipation.

But I can’t help thinking that it is really nothing to do with us or anybody else. Nothing at all.

If Scotland really wants to split from the Union and become part of Russia surely that’s their business?

D’ye ken, comrades?

Death By Beaver

When beavers were introduced to Knapdale, Mid-Argyll in May 2009 I cheered.

Being part Scottish I could only celebrate with my far-Northern cousins that finally, at last, their beaver needs were being met. It is a little known fact that there has long been a shortage of beaver in Scotland. Some blame the Highland Clearances, some the proliferation of Buckfast and deep fried Mars bars, most put it down to the hordes of midge flies that are attracted to anything warm and moist. After all an itchy beaver is an unhappy beaver.

However, as the classic beaver spurns any kind of fashionable depilation, it was agreed that a good full musky pelt would be ample protection against even the most determined of hormonally driven irritants and therefore the whine and nip of insistent little pests would be “nay bother” to the eager beavers waiting to set up home in the west coast of Scotland.

The beavers were duly released and allowed to run free and to this day thrive and prosper in Knapdale, Mid-Argyll.

It is a story worthy of the BBC’s Springwatch. A conservation success story to be shouted from the rooftops although we are yet to see Chris Packham get to grips with a beaver live on telly despite Michaela Strachan’s best attempts to the contrary.

All should be well. Beavers and beaver jokes have been resurrected in the British Isles to the glory of all.

And then comes the disturbing news today that a man in Belarus has been killed by beaver. The beaver population in Belarus is an eye-watering 80,000. I’m not sure what ratio that is to the male human population but surely there is enough beaver to go around.

Details are currently sketchy but it seems the man had attempted to capture the beaver in order to have his photograph taken with it.

Well truly, what man has not savoured the adolescent dream of being photographed running his fingers through the quivering fur of a beautiful, perfectly formed beaver?

It seems this particular beaver was having none of it though. It didn’t want to be tied down. It didn’t want to be posed. It didn’t want to be stroked. It wanted to be left alone and photo-shoots be damned. It was plainly the wrong time of the month. The beaver was not in season. The beaver bit and bit hard.

The poor man consequently died of his injuries.

Although “death by beaver” may sound to some a glamorous way to go I suspect my Scottish brethren are now twitching nervously beneath their sporrans and analysing growing beaver numbers in the Knapdale area with a sense of gnawing trepidation. Prime air-time on Springwatch is all very well but with a beaver population explosion on the cards it is only a matter of time before there is bloodshed in the Scottish bush.

After all, an angry beaver with teeth is not something you want erecting a dam at close quarters in your kilt.

Tossing My Bionic Caber

I’m a cheapskate.

No, really. I am.

I drink water at work so I don’t have to contribute to the tea kitty. Not only that, I buy a 1ltr bottle of water from the local newsagent, drink it, and then hijack the water cooler in the staffroom (paid for by one of the other operators who share my work’s building) and refill it from there every day after.

I tell you this as a precursor to the main subject of my post.

Because yesterday, it occurred to me that it was time for me to buy a new bottle of water. Not so much for the water but for the bottle. Because mine was starting to look green around the rim. Not only that, despite emptying it out and refilling it, I noticed that there was precipitate in it.

Small furry occurrences of matter that hung in suspension around the mid-point of the bottle.

So I decided that my immune system had been exercised enough and trotted off to acquire a new bottle of aqua vitae (narrowly avoiding Cap’n Jack Sparrow in the queue at the newsagents).

I settled on a bottle of Highland Spring.

I took it back to the office whereupon I was so bored by my surroundings that I distracted myself by reading the label on the bottle.

“Drawn from Organic Land”.

That is what it said under the product’s name. It’s obviously a major selling point, this organic land.

But what exactly is it?

See, I figured that all land is organic by default. Or is this a subtle way of telling me that Highland Spring Ltd haven’t just collected up the run-off from a landfill site to the northwest of Birmingham and bottled up the resulting sump?

What is non-organic land? Concrete? Plastic? Bacofoil? The main arena at the NEC? Are there whole fields comprised of polyester and Kevlar that I have missed on my many travels around this (not so green and pleasant) land?

Do these places feature natural springs whose water might be confused with that drawn from real, mud and soil, land? You know; old school terra firma, made the old fashioned way by nature and the slow laws of geology?

Because, given a choice, I’d quite like to try some “bionic water” (my phrase and, yes, I am going to copyright it) drawn from non-organic land. It’s the type of thing that could well turn somebody into Spiderman or Swamp Thing provided it contained the right amount of genetically modified contaminates and unintentional ingredient X’s.

And that would be pretty cool, you must admit.

I could wreak havoc on the masses, not to mention the misses in my office. I’d have an excuse never to come into work again. I could become a crime fighter or even a master criminal. I could be on the telly every night.

Aqua vitae indeed.

It would also be a far more permanent and exciting way of alleviating my terminal boredom than by reading the label on a sodding water bottle.

So How Would You Sign “Another Whisky Please?”

Working Men’s Clubs are funny things. I think I’ve only ever been to about 4 in my entire life and up until last Friday they were solely to attend private parties or functions, hence the patrons stuffing their faces with cake alongside my own were not what anyone would in any way term “regulars”. They were all interlopers like me.

Friday, however, was different.

Friday was set apart by an invitation by my Sign Language tutor that invited us (his class) to come along during the evening and meet some Deaf people in a proper social environment. To be honest, there are a number of such opportunities that we can choose from – some later in the month to attend a proper Deaf Club in Coventry and others in Solihull – but this one attracted me because of (a) the proximity – it was in walking distance from my house – and (b) I have my second formal assessment tomorrow night and I figured the extra practise would be no bad thing.

So I’m walking to the Working Men’s club and I’ll be honest, my vision of the clientele and the whole ambience was of a very quiet snug (akin to the one in The Rovers Return), half full of men and women of a certain age sporting a certain hardy Northern-esque look, a dog or two asleep at the foot of the bar and a barman who spends the entire night giving non-locals pokey looks from his permanent place in front of the optics rack.

But what I got in actual fact was a lounge bar very like something out of Coronation Street, sparsely populated by people of a certain age who could quite easily get roles as extras in Heartbeat, a single dog (a hearing dog for the Deaf funnily enough) and a barman who gave me pokey looks as soon as I stepped foot inside the bar,

In fact his first words to me were, “How did you get in here?”

This made me think that maybe (a) I’d somehow slipped through the minefield and the barbed wire gun emplacements without seeing them or (b) I’d broken both my legs without noticing it or (c) he was confusing me with some bad-ass whippet owner he’d barred from the premises in another life.

As it was I could only answer sheepishly that the guy on the door had let me in after I’d paid a 50p entrance fee (and no sexual favours asked for).

As soon as I explained I’d come to meet the Deaf group though he relaxed, served me my whisky (though he diluted it with unasked for coke – plainly he thought I was a wuss; plainly I was because I accepted it without complaint) and left me alone for the rest of the night.

Naturally, being at heart a saddo, I was the only one from my class who’d bothered to turn up; everyone else is obviously saving themselves for the relative cool of the Deaf club in Coventry.

So it was just me, 5 Deaf people and a hearing dog. And a raffle that I couldn’t enter because I wasn’t a member,

I was at 42 by far the youngest person in the entire building.

As for the Sign Language... seeing it at work in a social context highlighted to me just how little I know and how paltry my level of expertise is. Making Signs is only half of it – having an instant visual recognition of other people’s Signs is the very important other half and that lack of immediacy really tripped me up on several occasions.

Thankfully one of the Deaf people there – a sprightly 84 year old named Billy – could talk (he’d lost his hearing due to being caught in a bomb blast in Glasgow during WWII when he was 10) and though he Signed simultaneously, if it wasn’t for his vocal narrative I would have spent much of the night staring into my whisky and coke feeling that everyone else was talking about me but not to me in a language that was whistling way over my head.

As it was, they were a very friendly group and made generous allowances for my ham-fisted level of expertise. I also learnt what a small world it is: Billy had been a soldier at the barracks during the same period and in the same street in Glasgow where my dad grew up as a boy. A big hello to everybody reading this from Maryhill.

The biggest thing I learnt though was how many different types of Deafness there are, how many different levels and experiences, how people’s Signing is not uniform but is as varied as their handwriting and just how distracting a jukebox can be when you are trying to concentrate and you are the only person who can hear it.

All useful fodder for the novel I am currently writing which features a Deaf character... though whether it will help me pass my formal assessment tomorrow remains to be seen.

And certainly not heard.

William Wallace Has Stolen Our Presents

I have in the past gloated about the ease by which one can perform online shopping, the effortlessness of one-click ordering which at this seasonal time of the year means one doesn’t have to wade through the insulated body fat and BO of thousands of fellow Christmas shoppers as they fight to grab the last Toy Story 3 DVD from off the shelves.

But it has its drawbacks. Particularly in a wussy country like the UK which describes moderate snow fall as “unprecedented” and “unexpected” despite there having being snow in some form or other for every one of my 41 years in this country and the weather forecasters actually getting their predictions uncannily accurate for this year (anyone would think there is some kind of science behind this meteorology shit).

A whole heap of presents that Karen and I have ordered through Amazon and other online shopping companies are currently stuck in a post office distribution warehouse in Fife. This despite them being ordered in the last week of November so they’d be dispatched – ha ha ha – in plenty of time for Christmas.

It is now 10 days to go until the big day and things are getting down to the wire. The parcels show no sign of moving. I hear rumours of the postal service being so inundated it’ll take them weeks to work through the backlog (‘cos this level of post during the Christmas period is undoubtedly unprecedented too, right?) plus as most Post Office’s these days are down to one delivery per day anything that doesn’t get delivered for that day gets taken back to the PO and left for the next day where the same thing happens over and over again... or so I’ve been told.

Now, short of invading Scotland and grabbing our parcels ourselves there is little we can do. Karen has emailed Amazon but, to be honest, once the parcels have left their distribution centre they are in the hands of the Post Office gods who in turn are at the mercy of the weather.

And there’s more snow on the way apparently – end of this week and all through Christmas.

The kids have been primed that they might not get all their presents on the day this year. They seem fine with it but, let’s be honest, getting an IOU instead of a brand spanking new PlayStation game just isn’t the same thing.

And I daresay this scenario will be a very common one up and down the country this year. We won’t be alone in our present want.

It’s saddening. Very saddening.

But mostly it’s annoying. Annoying that it takes so little for the various services of this country to breakdown and grind to a complete and utter halt.

But I guess I should be used to it by now because, let’s face it, such breakdowns in service in themselves are hardly what anyone could describe as unprecedented. The wind blows from an unexpected direction in the UK and everyone wails and takes to their beds to recover from the immense shock.

I strongly suspect that lying at the bottom of all these abandoned parcels is a very special package indeed. Something this country has long mislaid and long forgotten is missing. It’s backbone.

If William Wallace wanted to invade now he could just wait for a light drizzle of snow and walk it.

And if he can bring my presents with him when he comes he’ll be sure to receive a right royal welcome at my house.

Birk & Nagra

The screaming you heard over the weekend wasn’t the climax of a witch’s sabbat but the sound of my wife wrestling money out of my wallet to take us to see Burke And Hare at the local cinema...

I love going to the cinema but when times are tight it is usually the first luxury to fall by the wayside.

So was it money well spent?

On the whole I’d say yes. The film is a comedy in the Ealing vein but is also gritty and a mite grim. Difficult for it to be otherwise given the subject matter – dead bodies, corpses, anatomical science and murder (to be said with both r’s rolling furiously like in an episode of Taggart) – and the historical ending of the story leaves little room for it to mutate into a chick flick: William Burke was roundly hanged, dissected and his skeleton put on view for all to see in the Edinburgh University Museum. Apparently it is still there.

But comedy it was and by God it was a who’s who of British comedians. Practically everyone was there with the notable exceptions of Ricky Gervais and Jim Davidson. So there’s 2 reasons at least to go and see it. Almost the entire cast of Spaced appears in the film and there was even Ronnie Corbett to boot though Karen and I both think the tiny little chap is recovering from a stroke given his slightly slurred delivery of his lines... but then again he was playing a Scotsman so the slurring could have been entirely deliberate.

As for the all important eye candy... well, there’s little to appeal to the ladies. Much as I like Simon Pegg and Andy Serkis they are hardly a pair of Adonis’s (Adoni?) and having them waddle around dressed in the cast-offs from Oliver Twist is hardly going to boost their sex appeal. For the lads there was Isla Fisher who I’m sure debuted on our screens in Home & Away. What can I say? She’s pretty enough but does nothing for me. So little in fact Burke and Hare could have carted me off to the butcher’s slab and I wouldn’t have noticed. Possibly it’s a testament to how much I adored Spaced but Jessica Hynes did far more for me. Even though she spent much of the film spilling her impressive bosom into a bowl of porridge and cheap ale. I guess that says a lot about what floats my boat.

Hynes also has the best laugh-out-loud scene in the film – as she and her on-screen husband, Serkis, are rogering each other with a fury that would possibly cause a tsunami off the coast of Skye they come up with their master plan – to move away from murder and into funeral parlours (the reason being people bring their dead bodies to you rather you having to engineer them yourself: genius). To be honest if I was going at Jessica Hynes like a threshing machine on moonshine the last thing I’d be thinking about would be funeral parlours ...but if I were to have Andy Serkis’s rubber lips flapping over me like Mr Ed reciting the alphabet then thinking about funeral parlours might be a very welcome diversion.

Anyway, my opinion aside, the film was not well patronaged when Karen and I went to see it and much as I’d like to see the film get a wider audience for patriotic reasons I can see that its appeal is limited. I don’t think the humour or the accents will travel well. Which is a shame.

And as for the title of this post: Birk & Nagra are a well established firm of chemists in Leamington Spa and, because my mind works like that, they are all I can think of when I see the names Burke and Hare. Any other association between the 2 is purely coincidental. Ahem.

The Kilt

A conversation at work this morning has got me thinking about the kilt (which apparently is the correct plural of kilt not kilts).

Being part Scottish I feel that I have the right to wear one. In fact I’m pretty sure there’s a Blake tartan draped over a shop window display in Aviemore even as I type.

But I’ve never actually got round to donning one.

I mean, it’s pretty hard to find an appropriate occasion when you’re living and working in the English Midlands.

The perfect opportunity arose back in 1976 (or thereabouts) when my Auntie Josie married my Uncle Tam in Glasgow and all the men wore the kilt to the ceremony and the reception. I had the chance to experience the swirl of my own bagpipes amongst the impressive company of my whisky drinking peers... but alas being 7 years old and brought up a Sassenach I bottled it and stuck to ma troosers.

Now, some years later, I regret that youthful decision as opportunities to wrap up my nether regions in a nice rough bit of tartan are as scarce on the ground as tax rebates from Gordon Brown (Broon).

But maybe I should just think ‘outside the sporran’ and get a kilt to sate my own personal sense of satisfaction and actively engineer occasions to wear it? A work’s do? My mother’s birthday? Christmas? My son’s parent’s evening at school? All viable occasions I’m sure you’ll agree.

Life is too short to wait. Sometimes you’ve just got to give things a bit of a prod.

So. My questions are thus: is there an item of national dress (yours or another nation’s) that you’ve always had a secret hankering to wear? What is it and have you ever?

Ranking Frank

Thursday evening telly has received something of a boost lately with the return of Mock The Week. Produced by the same guys that gave the UK Whose Line Is It Anyway? it builds on a similar format to pit various comedians against each other in rounds designed to test their improv skills, stand-up abilities and ad-libbed responses to topical news stories.

It’s effing hilarious and I have yet to watch a single episode where I wasn’t howling out loud with unstoppable belly laughter. That’s no mean feat on a Thursday night; the fag end of the working week.

For me the stand alone star of the show is the formidable Frankie Boyle (though I love Hugh Dennis’s unassumingly dry wit too). With a Glaswegian accent as brutal as a head-butt in your kisser Frankie Boyle is beyond sharp. The man is viciously serrated at an atomic level (but in a good way).

Quite honestly, Frankie Boyle could split a surgical laser beam lengthways with a single quip. One wrong word and Frankie’s tongue could slice off the top of your head like Sylar from Heroes performing an ad hoc lobotomy.

The man is blisteringly funny. But even better he’s blisteringly intelligent. Week after week I watch in awe as he pulls topical news stories out of the air and reconnects them in ways that seem so damned obvious once he’s done it. After I’ve finished laughing my guts up the same thought constantly reoccurs in my head: why the hell didn’t I think of that?

The man is quick. 0 to 187mph in under 2 seconds. I actually feel sorry for the other guys he’s pitted against. They look clumsy and amateurish by comparison. It’s like racing a Bugatti against a Skoda. No contest.

Best of all the man is real. There’s utterly no bullshit with Frankie. He tells it like it is; he’d rather kick you in the teeth with the truth than sprinkle a load of Canderel lies over your tongue.

The man is absolute comedy royalty.

In fact forget Forest Whittaker as Idi Amin: Frankie Boyle is the last king of Scotland!


P.S. This is my 200th post. Huzzah!