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’ve become far too fond of posting my thoughts immediately through Twitter, which whilst useful, leads to bitesize snippets of my day to day existence in 140 characters or less. Not much room for descriptive posting unfortunately and I think my writing has suffered from it.

So here I am. First post of the New Year. 2010 in all it’s glory. 2009 was a good year. The birth of our second child saw to that. 2010 should be equally momentous. We plan to sell our flat and move to a ‘proper’ house with a garden and such like. In many ways we’re loath to leave our lovely Georgian flat with it’s fireplace from the 1790′s and it’s ornate arches. It’s been such a beautiful house to live in but it’s fast becoming impractical being 3 floors up in a tenement.

Anyway, my resolutions for 2010 look something like this:-

• Spend as much time with the family as possible. After all, you never get that time back.
• Sell the flat and buy a house with a garden (and preferably a garage to store our ever increasing amount of stuff in).
• Get my knees fixed. I’m now crippled to the stage whereby I can’t even kneel down for any length of time. The issues with my knees are hindering my ability to do even basic tasks at times.
• Update this blog more often. Ideally, I’d like to update 2 or 3 times a week.

Whether I’ll keep these resolutions or procrastinate as usual, only time will tell.

Happy New Year.

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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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Three weeks paterntity leave didn’t really inspire me to post here or anywhere else really. I felt acutely aware that I had to squeeze as much out of the available time as possible. However, the routine is now back to normal or as normal as it ever can be with two kids under two years old.

I must be blissed out because I don’t even feel the need to rant about trams today, even after a months abstinence from tram bashing.

We spent a few days of my paternity leave at Crieff Hydro. If you’ve never been you should go. We had decent enough weather to enjoy the facilities and had a really great time. The best way to describe the place is like being in the modern equivalent of an Agatha Christie novel, where everyone lives in this massive hotel with huge grounds where ‘one’ can play tennis and partake of other civilised pursuits. Collar and no denims is the dress code for dinner. Odd but curiously like a 1930′s health spa.

Anyway, normal service is resumed. Back down to London working next week and another trip on the overnight train. Thing is, the thought of the shoogly, noisy cabin doesn’t particularly concern me this time around. I’m so tired these days, I reckon I’d sleep through an airstrike.

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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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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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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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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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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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