Three Minute Boy

I’ve got feck all to write about today. I’m lacking inspiration on a totally colossal scale. The usual round of jakeys, junkies and reprobates which punctuate these pages must be on their summer holidays. I’m suspecting there’s some kind of package deal on offer where they can presumably go to Spain for a fortnight and get bevvied in Spanish all day drinking dens before retiring to their self-catering skips.

Anyway, in honour of such creative downtime, I’ve decided to use this post as a ‘delurking day’ kind of post. I pour my thoughts out regularly into this blog but know next to nothing about most of my readers. In the spirit of information sharing, if you read this blog regularly then please leave a comment on this post to let me know.

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Cheeky wee turned on it’s head Wonderstuff reference there for anyone old enough to remember or care. Never was a man more appropriately named than Miles Hunt but that’s another story for another day (specifically a day when we are discussing the Livingston Forum gig circa 1992).

Anyway, lets get this post back on track. Many longer term observers of this blog will have noticed it change over the years from personal life stuff to observational humour, sometimes for the better, sometimes for worse. My Twitter account is pretty much in a similar vein. The beauty of Twitter and the iPhone of course is the ability to document crazy shit (and Leith is full of it) on the spot. Believe me, you’ll see things in the span of one walk along Junction Street that you wouldn’t see if you wandered the world like Grasshopper for a century or more. Most of what you see will leave you feeling morally and socially superior, and rightly so.

Every so often you strike comedy gold. A month or two back I was traversing said Junction Street when I found myself standing behind a lady in a mobility scooter at the crossing. She was larger than life and fully ‘accessorised’ with sovvy rings, Gypsy Rose Lee ear-rings and obligatory John Player kingsize.

I nearly laughed out loud when I saw a sticker on the back of her scooter reading ‘Classy Bitch’. Sheer brilliance. I would have snapped a photo with the phone but for the fact I was terrified of the consequences of being caught. With a beep of the green man and the high pitched whine of a battery operated engine this vision was gone from my life forever.

Or so I thought.

I always believed that comedy lightning never strikes twice. How wrong I was. Walking down Leith Walk this evening I spotted a mobility scooter parked outside one of the better known drinking establishments. On the front was a large plaque reading ‘Elvis Presley – The King of Rock and Roll’ complete with photo of Elvis in his full glory.

Brilliant I though. I’ll snap this one. “Too good to miss” I thought and said so to one of the guys standing at the pub door smoking.

“You hink that’s funny pal. Wait till ye see the back.” he said.

Round I walked. There it was. That same ‘Classy Bitch’ sticker. The holy grail of Leith mobility scooter related comedy. Comedy lightning had struck twice and I chuckled all the way home.

I may go to church on Sunday and thank God. I really am that happy.

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A provocative title, I’m sure you’ll agree. Cue a deluge of abuse from Pearly Kings and Queens in my comments page.

I’m not saying London always smells of jobbies. But it did yesterday. In the vicinity of London Victoria tube station to be precise. It smelled like the drains used to smell on Spanish package holidays in the 1980’s.

Ahh. Laaandaaahn Taaaan. I can’t fail to be attracted to it’s buzz and almost constant motion but by the end of a day or a few days there, I’m glad to get home to the more sedate city of Edinburgh. Yesterday I barely had time to take it all in as I arrived at Gatwick, got the train to Victoria and then got the tube to my meeting. One hour later, I did the whole thing in reverse. A thirteen hour round trip for a one hour meeting.

A trip of very little event as it turned out although I was mystified to see signs on tube station ticket machines stating that Scottish bank notes would not be accepted. I mean, I know that Scottish banks have been crumbling lately but that’s a bit harsh.

Us Scot’s have suffered from this phenomenon for years. of course. Cross the border into England and hand someone a Scottish tenner and the reaction is akin to that of Billy Bones when he received the Black Spot in Treasure Island. God forbid you hand then a Scottish £20 note or something even more leftfield like a Northern Irish fiver – you know, the plastic coated ones with the transparent stars on them.

At a gig at Wembley Stadium a couple of years back, I handed a Scottish tenner to a bloke behind the bar. He turned to his boss and asked him “Do we accept Sterling?”.

Honestly………

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If you want to wipe out Ned-dom in one fell swoop, there is an easy solution. Bomb every fairground and amusement arcade in the country. That’s the conclusion I’ve drawn from last nights trip to the fairground at Leith Links.

Arriving prior to the 6 o’clock opening time, we decided to kill some time in the kids playground on the links only to find it full of more tracksuits than JJB sports – all sporting a Regal King Size, hooped ear-rings, the obligatory scruffy bairn and a collection of ’sovvy’ rings. Perhaps the most shocking aspect was that about 80% of them would legally qualify for a ‘half’ on the bus.

Throw in a liberal sprinkling of pit bulls and you’re half way to picturing the scene.

The fairground evokes strong memories for me. The ’shows’ in Port Seton were next to the outdoor swimming pool and you’d regularly trot over in nothing but your swimming trunks and a towel to the amusement arcade to play ‘Scramble’ or beg someone for their ‘last man’ on ‘Moon Cresta’. The arcades were great to be around in the early 80’s as video gaming took it’s first tentative steps from baby to toddler.

There was also the lure of the more expensive rides such as the ‘Waltzers’ and the terrifying looking ‘Dive Bomber’ where the metal bar holding you into your seat as you spun upside down at a terrifying rate would be unlikely to pass any kind of safety standard nowadays. All this with a backdrop of chip vans, candy floss and toffee apples.

I don’t seem to remember any neds either, although there must have been the equivalent. Maybe my memory has airbrushed out the unsavoury elements to leave me with a rose tinted view of the past. They say that happens as you get older.

No need for airbrushing to get rid of todays neds though. Just a big fucking humungomegaton bomb would sort it.

As long as it only wiped out the neds and left the ‘Gonks’ untouched. I always loved to try and win a ‘Gonk’.

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It’s been exactly ten days since I last posted here. Piss poor statistic I know, but ten is a nice round number.

So what’s been happening? Well, we are now just over 3 weeks away from the due date of the baby. That’s not a piss poor statistic. That’s quite  a scary fact. There are still a number of things to be done around our house. Added to that is the fact that our tenants vacated our rental flat recently, so it’s sitting empty in need of sprucing up and selling.

Unfortunately, in their haste to leave, they accidentally left a huge bag of prawns in the fridge. I could smell the prawns from the second floor landing of the common stair last night when I went up to the flat. Upon reaching the flat and opening the door, the smell hit me like a wave. Cue much ‘dry boaking’ and the escape through the door of a number of bluebottles. You know it’s bad when the flies can’t stand it.

I eventually managed to stop retching long enough to deal with the situation, however I felt fairly unwell for the rest of the night as the smell seemed to linger in my nose. Terrible experience.

Probably the biggest event in my life in recent days has been the death of my Grandmother on Saturday night. Whilst it was completely expected – she has been ill for some time – nothing quite prepares you for the finality of such events. After being told on Saturday afternoon that the end was near, I decided that I did not want to witness her last moments. Call me a coward but I was distinctly squeamish about the prospect of being present when someone so close drew their last breath.

I went home Saturday evening, visited the supermarket and upon returning home decided that I couldn’t stay away. I headed back up to the hospital at around 7pm and at 9.40pm she passed away within a few minutes of a single tear running down her cheek. Instead of being unsettling, I actually found the whole experience uplifting and I was glad I was there at the end. And so an era ends. A massive part of my childhood, gone forever.

In three weeks time (or thereabouts) another era begins, with the second child of a new generation.

The expression ‘one in, one out’ never seemed so true.

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Again, Twitter has inhibited my desire to write more frequently and freely on this blog. A lot of the more spontaneous situations I encounter tend to end up on there now instead of being stored up in my head and regurgitated on here later in the week.

Hopefully, I’ll still manage to find the odd wee gem to comment about on here. In fact, I need to look no further than this morning. I was passing the Central Bar at the foot of Leith Walk when some wild eyed denizen of the all night bars approached me tapping his wrist (presumably where a watch would be if he hadn’t pawned it for Buckfast).

“What’s the time pal?”

“Ten to eight”, I replied.

<pregnant pause>

“In the morning”, I kindly elaborate.

The new baby is fast approaching. Launch is imminent. With only about 5 weeks to go, things are starting to fall into place. The one thing which ultimately needs to fall into place though is selling the house and buying somewhere more suitable for two kids. A third floor tenement flat is not the place to be living. The house is big enough, but it’s too many steps up from the ground.

Unfortunately, the market is poor and the house still needs some final work before it can go on the market. Hopefully we’ll get it on somewhere around August time.

In some ways, I’ll be loathe to leave Leith and all it’s little quirks. I like it’s ability to bring all levels of society together on one flat playing field. You can eat in a Michelin star restaurant but you may have to step over a junkie to get in the door.

Other aspects I won’t miss though. Particularly the cretins who think it’s funny to kick the wing mirror off your car as they return from the pub on a Saturday night or run a key down the side of your car.

This past weekend was spent doing some really nice stuff. On Saturday, my wife stayed at home sorting through and tidying stuff in the house whilst I took Sam to the beach at Portobello. Good fun building sandcastles although what is it with kids and their magnetic attraction to water. I couldn’t take my eyes off him for two seconds without him making his happy little way down to a ’stream’ of water running into the sea. For anyone born in Scotland in the 1970’s, it’s difficult not to associate such streams with effluent, particularly as Scottish beaches of that era regularly had sewerage streams into the sea or sewerage pipes which spilled out their contents half way down the beach.

Portobello beach was rocking though. On a walk along the promenade it was possible to see Mr Whippy ice-creams and jaded amusement arcades – symbols of Scottish beach resorts past – alongside more modern seaside pursuits such as beach volleyball and even some dude lifting weights.

On Sunday, we all went to East Links Children’s Park which was magic fun. Sam’s expression as the miniature train pulled away with a ‘choo choo’ was priceless. Sheer excitement. It was blisteringly hot though. We’ve all come home with more than a hint of colour about us. The heat eminating from my body last night was unbelievable.

Nothing else to report really, although I have developed an unhealthy fascination with North Korea lately and have just had a book about life there delivered from Amazon. I’m eternally fascinated with the idea of the last truly Communist state on the planet, where everyone has food and accommodation supplied by the state, people disappear overnight (rounded up by secret police) and the entire city of Pyongyang is woken up every morning at 7am by patriotic songs blaring out through loudspeakers.

Same thing happens in Leith, only it’s the drilling that wakes you at 7am.

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I totally made this post title up in an effort to see what bizarre keyword searches I get on the back of it. In the last month, the most common search term for finding my site is “Bumfluff Moustache”, with “Be alert, Britain needs lerts” a close second. I have a particular fondness for the latter, having chuckled about it since I saw it carved into a desk in “Dempy” Dempsters maths class in second year at high school.

There’s a man who deserved a medal. That poor bastard got mentally and physically battered by the pupils every day of his working life. He must have woken up in the morning and let out a silent scream to himself before regaining his composure, slapping down his comb-over with brylcream and heading into the abuse filled halls of Preston Lodge High School.

It’s 20 years this month since I left school. 20 years. That’s a long time. Such a landmark has got me reminiscing about that golden 6 years from 1983-1989. Predictably enough, I remember the “culture” more than the education.

Kids are probably all banging drugs down their necks like it’s going out of fashion. In our day though, glue sniffing was the big thing, along with “buzzing” Soft and Gentle deodorant from KP crisp bags. Not that I did either. I was too busy getting a kicking from the selection of village idiots who often made up your classmates in first and second year at high school.

It’s funny, looking back now, I can see that many of the more troubled kids at our school weren’t just nasty by nature. Many of them obviously came from fairly poverty stricken backgrounds. I remember one guy in particular who stank of piss and shit all of the time. Even first thing in the morning when you’d have imagined he’d be at his cleanest. I feel sorry for him now really. Poor sod never stood a chance. Not a bar of soap in the house. You’d think he’d have nicked some, but he eventually got locked up for stealing chicken wire, not soap.

Of course, the younger, less idealistic me just thought he was a smelly prick.

School was a good time overall though. No real concerns other than what you’d get up to after school and what Spectrum games you could copy off your mates using the somewhat primitive method of connecting two tape recorders together with whatever cabling you could find. It was all about getting the volume right if I remember correctly. Spectrum games were so tempramental that I swear I had games that would only work on a Wednesday.

As you get older of course, life throws bigger challenges your way such as paying the mortgage and feeding your kids. I’ve also noticed grey is creeping into my stubble. I’m a couple of days growth away from looking like Roy Keane. Except less mental. You don’t think about having a beard, let alone one with grey creeping into it when you are 17.

20 years. I remember walking out of school on my last day like it was yesterday. I don’t feel any different now from how I did then. Of course, if I take 30 seconds to think about it, I’m really a million miles removed from that rubber-heid who left school at the end of may 1989.

I sat down the other day and read the Sunday Times Magazine 20th anniversary coverage of 1989 as one of the most important years of the 20th Century. Loads happened then. With the exception of the Berlin Wall coming down and Tianamen Square, most of it passed right over my head. I was too busy out spending my £340 monthly salary from the Royal Bank in those days. What did strike me was how bloody old fashioned all the clothes and people looked in the photos. Did we really dress like that then?

You all did. I’m pretty sure I didn’t.

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Me Audioboo-ing about the ‘boadies’. Do I sound like Taggart?

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For a long time now, I’ve occassionally noticed an old man sitting at the bus stop in the mornings. Quite clearly beyond retirement age, he assumes his position in the bus shelter and watches the world go by.

Over the last few weeks, it’s started to dawn on me that he isn’t actually heading anywhere. He’s not checking the bus times or looking at his watch. In the course of the last few weeks, I’ve also realised that at some point or other, every bus service which stops at this bus stop has passed him by without him making a move to get on the bus.

I suspect he is going nowhere. Just killing time in the bus shelter watching the world go by. Perhaps he wants to stay a part of the working world for a little longer. I don’t know whether to admire him or feel sorry for him.

In other news, it appears that archeologists have recovered 18 medieval bodies from the big holeright outside our front door. I knew they had been busy but 18 bodies? Our street is giving up it’s dead like Dennis Nilsen’s drains. The photo in this post was taken by my wife and shows a skull and some bones which made an appearance about two weeks ago.

Read the full story courtesy of the BBC here.

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I spend a lot of time on this blog railing against one perceived grievance or another. Most of it is purely for comedic value. Whilst I often claim to be ’shaking with rage’, I very rarely am. Until last night that is.

Living where we do, we have experienced major disruption at the hands of the new Tram Network. Not being able to park your car in your street may sound trivial. Build that up over a period of 9 months though. Then add the fact that the having the car outside the house is critical for us with a small child and add the further fact that the guys undertaking the work for the trams arrive on site at 6am every morning and have a shouted conversation the length of the street then you can probably see how the annoyance builds up.

Imagine my rage then when I stumbled round the corner from Lidl last night to see a fully constructed, replica tram at the top of my street full of ‘dignitaries’ quaffing champagne and patting themselves on the back for a sterling job well done. That’s champagne. Not tram pain. Tram pain is for those of us who have to live with the consequences of their decisions.

- Cheers lads. Mine’s a pint of Best.
- Oh, sorry Mr Palmer. I’m afraid you are not invited. Your name’s not down so you’re not getting in.

I’m starting to feel this is becoming the tram blog so I’ll hastily change the subject.

Chimpanzees on Segways.

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