What’s that all about? Looks like it’s going to be another weekend of shutting the door and huddling round the radiator at Chez Palmer. I had harboured ambitions of catching a bit of footy at the weekend, however just about every game in the country has been called off. With the weather set to continue and a fixture list which puts my team away from home in the coming weeks, it may well be that next match I encounter live in person will be Cardiff City v Peterborough in early February, the ticket for which I bought earlier in the week after discovering that I will spend a week working in the Welsh capital.

The kids are going stir crazy with the weather as well. When you live in a third floor tenement flat, you feel an obligation to take the nippers out once in a while for a bit of fresh air and a run around but it’s not really been possible in this weather. At times, it’s been a struggle to keep your feet. Hopefully Sam will have had a trip to the swimming pool today though.

We are eight days into 2010 and already I am now regretting not having started one of those projects such as a ‘project 365′ photo style log or something like that. I suppose I could probably start one now but a year in my life running from 8th January – 8th January reeks of being slow off the mark. I think my aim instead this year will be to do a bit more writing, including this blog. Last January I had a short story published in the Scottish Book Trust’s “Days Like This” book and I’d like to do something else along those lines. Maybe a course in creative writing beckons.

2010 is my oyster. Apparently.

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Temperatures are so low that our central heating is overwhelmed and just can’t take the edge off the cold. Our central heating is no slouch either. Cast iron, school style radiators which pump out a ridiculous amount of heat and retain it for a considerable amount of time as well. As the first person up and into the shower every day, I am treated to the full blast of the barely heated air.

Add to that the fact that the TV and internet news channels are completely overflowing with footage of stranded planes and people kipping in their cars, interspersed with the odd snowman or Robin Redbreast for ‘light relief’. We get the point. It’s getting boring. You can’t go anywhere without slipping and sliding and nearly falling on your arse. As well as that, the bottom of my jeans are almost permanently sodden with icy water, so you can see how the whole thing starts to become old very quickly.

We’re not a snowy country. We’re a grey and miserable country. Let’s get back to the status quo.

By the way, mention Francis Rossi and you are dead. He’s even more tedious than three weeks of snow.

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I’m finding that Twitter is stealing most of my good material from the blog these days. Whereas before I’d store up all the foolery which I saw around me then blurt it out in one fell swoop, the combination of an iPhone and Twitter allows me to post about it that very second. Like I did when I somewhat disturbingly walked through an old gentleman’s fart cloud in Grays of George Street this afternoon. It’s closing down you know. Grays that it. Where will old men buy dimmer switches and have a sly fart then?

We are off on holiday next week. Our first real extended break as a family of four. Bloody hell. Seems odd to say that really. Four. Two times more than the two we started as. We are off first of all to stay in a ‘yurt’ (a Mongolian style tent) just outside York for four nights then on to the Lake District for a week. We’ve rented a cottage there. It has no washing machine. This lack of Hotpoint may not prove to be one of our better decisions but we’ll see how it goes.

We’ve got the first flat on the market (not the one we live in) and our flat is currently getting the finishing touches applied to it. Hopefully we can get them both sold quickly and purchase somewhere with a garden and not up three flights of stairs. Don’t get me wrong, I love living in town but it’s getting to the point where the nippers need a garden and a small slabbed yard isn’t cutting it.

Back to the blog and it’s not only Twitter which has resulted in me being a bit short on observations lately. I just don’t seem to meet the loonies I used to on my walk to work in the morning. Except one that is. The guy, who looks a bit like Charles I who walks to the top of Broughton Street every morning, looks around the corner and then turns on his heel, bolting back up Queen Street. I’d love to know his story.

I’ll endeavour to find out shall I?

Until later. Peace etc etc

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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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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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The cast list

Assistant 1: Middle aged lady, serving the customers.

Assistant 2: Another member of staff, standing on the shop floor, having a cup of tea and clearly contemplating a fag break.

Customer: An elderly lady with a walking stick purchasing cigarettes.

The conversation

Assistant 1: What can ah get ye?

Customer: 20 of my fags.

Assistant 1: What do you smoke

Assistant 2: It’s 20 Rothmans. Christ, dinnae ask here what she smokes, she cannae mind her name half the time.

Assistant 2 (to customer): Here Betty, could you no find a brush this morning?

Customer: Aye. Enough o your cheek.

Assistant 2: Whit part o’ yer heid did ye yase it on? Yer teeth?

Customer: Ah’ll gie ye teeth.

Assistant 2: The day might be the day you meet the man o’ yer dreams. Wi hair like that, you’ll terrorise him.

Customer: I wouldnae swap my cat for yin o’ thae fuckers.

Assistant 1 (to me): Just the pint of milk son?

All true but all names changed to protect the innocent.

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An Irish guy who I used to work with once told me that the Scots were the most divided, beligerent people he had ever encountered. In his words, “the east hates the west, the Catholics hate the Protestants, the north and south hate the central belt and there are people on the islands who refuse to speak English”. I took that as high praise indeed from an Irishman, given their history of not being able to get along with fellow countrymen who essentially believe in the same God.

Lets face it, Scotland for all it’s beauty and culture is essentially a craggy outcrop in the middle of the freezing atlantic. To survive here for thousands of years we needed to be a wee bit spiky.

That aside, I couldn’t believe my ears this morning when I heard that the Leith/Edinburgh rivalry (conflict ?)had been sparked back into life by Forth Ports decision to rename Leith Docks to Edinburgh Harbour. Some bloke has even written a folk song about it. You can hear that folk song here.

To be fair, the song is absolutely murder. The bloke who wrote it should be thrown in Leith Docks, I mean Edinburgh Harbour, I mean Leith Docks.

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We listened to Jesus Jones, EMF and Faith No More. Where did they all go?

I am the same age now as my parents were when I was a teenager. They seemed really old back then, yet I still feel really young even though I’m 40 in a couple of years. Whilst we are on the subject of 1991, I’m already 11 years older than Kurt Cobain ever made it to, yet he still seems strangely older than me. Getting older is certainly more than a bit of an odd experience.

Nothing really much has happened since the last time I posted. It’s all a bit work – home – work – home at the minute. I’m just grateful there is a work element to that. A lot of people don’t have that luxury at the moment. On the family front, Sam has come on somewhat and can now find and point out the hidden ‘Pontypines’ in his ‘In the Night Garden’ book. A useful life skill no doubt.

Monday this week saw the two year anniversary of my Grandad’s death. It’s another sobering thought that 2 years have passed so quickly. Visiting the cemetery on Sunday, I realised that more than half of the grief of the last two years has actually just been anger at the way he was treated in his latter days and the lack of care.

For the past two years I’ve been unable to separate the man from the manner of his death and I’ve continued to be angry as a result. I have to be reasonable about it. He was 88 years old. A good age by any standard. Hardly cut down in his prime. It’s time to remember the man and forget the traumas of the hospital and social services. He had a good life and the bad bit at the end was only a miniscule part of it.

Speaking of graves, Edinburgh City Council seem to be digging their own. Princes Street closed, buses rerouted everywhere, traffic grinding to a halt yet no work going on. The German contractors have said “Nein” and it’s all ground to a halt. Oh dear. I’ve got a feeling they need to sort it out soon or there will be hell to pay.

I watch and wait.

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Four hours of sleep was all I got last night as the tram workers decided to drop off a squad of workies and their associated tools and materials at 6am, stirring the young lad from his sleep and as a result waking us all up from that point onwards. I’m starting to wonder if it will ever end. They are never done digging up bits of Leith and to be honest, it’s starting to rankle.

On the subject of digging up things, I couldn’t help but notice that there is a bloody great hole at the edge of Princes Mall (or the Waverley Market for those of us over a certain age – by the way, does anyone actually shop there any more?). When I say a bloody great hole that’s exactly what I mean. It’s like a huge shaft into the bowels of the earth, with concrete walls. I half expect some Jules Verne style tunneling machine to come plowing out of it like some mechanical cross between a mole and a corkscrew. Possibly with Doug McClure at the helm.

Remember Doug McClure? The guy was never done finding lost civilisations full of savages and Pterodactyls. He always seemed to wear a white crew neck jumper as well. One of the savages was guaranteed to be totally shaggable, a real Raquel Welch sort, and would help Doug escape (sometimes if he was lucky he would get his leg over as well).

Back to Princes street though, I’m dying to know what the story is with the big hole. Answers on a postcard. First prize of a trip to Nigeria’s “Slavery and the Jackson Five” theme park.

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You see so many wee scumbags in Leith but this kid looked like a good kid. Just neglected.

Back to scumbags though. The other night I was walking up the Kirkgate (having just been to LIDL) when this bloke came hurtling round the corner at Woollies like the hounds were on his tail. He was one messed up looking dude. His running style was just mental and was probably not helped by the fact that he was trying to straighten his baseball cap with one hand whilst holding a roll up in the other.

For a second, I expected to see the Polis coming after him, full pelt and shouting. I was almost tempted to trip him up just in case. I mean, he was running like he’d nabbed an OAP’s handbag.

Hi running style, as I’ve previously mentioned, was totally wierd. He ran like you’d expect a shop mannequin to run. Like some junked puppet. A pinnochio in Adidas in training for the Junkie Olympics.

He shot past me and carried on towards the banana flats. I don’t know why he was running or who was chasing him, but I’d bet a “tenner bag” was involved somewhere in the equation.

“Love Leith?” as the sign says. Well, it’s never dull.

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