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 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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Every so often though, something comes along which makes my blood boil so much that I feel compelled to post. Today I noticed that despite cancelling my Vodafone account and moving to O2 at the start of March, Vodafone are still taking money from my account. The minute I realised this I was hit with the immediate dread at the prospect of trying to claw the money back.

You see, they don’t make it easy for you do they.

“Oh yes Mr Palmer, have a phone, take it away today. Brilliant. Just sign here and that’s you.”

Aye. All well and good until they cock something up and you end up having to answer about 40 multiple choice questions armed only with your telephone keypad and ever dwindling patience. Eventually, if you are lucky (usually after being on hold for about an hour), you’ll get through to some disinterested dickhead who even if he actually understands what your issue is and how to resolve it will no doubt be lacking the necessary authority to do so. He’ll then put you through to another department, again with a 30 minute wait. Once through to that department you will again no doubt have to furnish them with your account details and tell them the whole story again.

In order to avoid this, I decided to pop into the Vodafone shop at lunchtime. You know what happened? The bloke behind the counter phoned the same number I would have and sat in the same queue. Meanwhile, I’m left looking at him like a total turnip.

Needless to say, after 25 minutes of him waiting (unanswered) on the phone, I had to get back to work. His tip to me – “Here’s the number. Give them a phone”. Brilliant pal.

Remember the days when you could just phone a company and someone would answer?

To top it all, I bought a Lothian Buses bus pass on my way back from the Vodafone shop. They stung me £45 for something which they only charged me £37 a few months back.

Thieves and Vagabonds everywhere.

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First port of call was the endless array of Russian spammers who think that I (as forum administrator) won’t be suspicious in the slightest of around 400 registrations on a Scottish non-league football site from users with .ru email addresses. Hmmm. No brainer.

I decided to leave them a message on the forum using Google Translate:-

Я на вас душ спам, Виагра продаже bawbags. Вы никогда не получите прошлом мне и зарегистрироваться в нашем форуме. Понятно?

Now class. Notice anything odd?

Я на вас душ спам, Виагра продаже bawbags. Вы никогда не получите прошлом мне и зарегистрироваться в нашем форуме. Понятно?

That’s right. There is apparently no word in the Russian language for bawbags. Which is a huge oversight really, given about a dozen of the aforementioned bawbags try and register with the official Spartans forum each day.

Second target of my anger today. The tram pricks. As usual, they surpass themselves. A note was left in our stair last week outlining the work being carried out from Monday onwards. Fair enough. We read it and there was no mention of not parking in our street. In fact, reference was specifically made to maintaining local access.

Today, whilst working from home, I nipped out to buy some lunch only to find our car surrounded by police cones with notices in front of it outlining the fact that any vehicles ‘parked illegally’ will be towed. Better move it thinks I and proceeds to drive to Leith Links to dispose of the vehicle in a less controversial spot.

Except of course, they’ve obviously been out ahead of me and painted double yellow lines just about everywhere. In fact, the roads around Leith Links are so yellow that half a dozen Munchkins would not look out of place. I ended up driving round for about fifteen minutes (essentially because everywhere is diverted so you can’t just go direct to where you want to go in Leith at the moment)

Brilliant. I love trams.

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Anyway (and stop reading now if you don’t appreciate toilet humour), in I go and find a free cubicle. So far so good.

So I’m sitting there and I become very aware of the guy in the next cubicle. It would be difficult not to. He sounds like he’s giving birth to a baby elephant. All grunting and straining. Poor bloke sounds like he’s in labour.

All of a sudden, over the top of his wounded animal cries, I hear Boston’s “More than a Feeling” blaring away. The ringtone on my neighbours mobile phone. It goes for ages before he answers it.

Next thing I know, he’s having a full blown business meeting on the phone in the bogs at Queen Street station. What’s more, it sounded pre-arranged. He’s gone to the bog in the full knowledge that a client or supplier is going to be getting on the blower to him any minute.

Made me think twice about phoning anyone again. You never know what they’ll be up to. To be fair, after all his grunting it sounded like he needed to be phoning an ambulance rather than taking an incoming business call.

Fast forward a day, and I am sitting in the living room at daft o’clock watching “Bullseye” on Virgin TV. It’s a new, revamped version hosted by Dave Spikey of ‘Phoenix Nights’ fame.

Poor old Dave. He puts up a brave fight but the programme is dead in the water. You can only sound so excited about a pair of contestants winning £108 between them before being eliminated. I’m sure back in 1981 that was a lot of money, but these days that won’t cover their rail fares to appear on the show.

Funniest moment had to be the lady who, when asked to spell cafeteria, offered up the amusing C-A-T-H-E-T-E-R-I-A. There’s on to have you clutching your urinary tract (if possible). Maybe the only cafe she’s been in was run by a woman called Cath. You never know I suppose.

Needless to say, she was eliminated early doors.

On to the red/black board. “Keep out of the black and into the red, you get nothing in this game for two in a bed.”

The prizes on offer on the special prize board looked like an Argos fire sale. I half expected a job lot of Elizabeth Duke jewellery. Instead, we were treated to such delights as a frying pan set, a retro atari console and a hoover. The prizes had “straight onto eBay” written all over them.

Embarrassing.

The special prize by the way was a “games room set”. A blue baize pool table, a cheap table football game and a bloody awful “American 50s Diner” style juke box.

Poor old Bully.

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We’ve been in Ireland visiting family. It was good to get away and see everybody. Unfortunately, the ludicrous weather hit Ireland as hard as it hit parts of England and our plans had to be changed to avoid becoming victims of travel chaos. As a result of the snow, my wife and son stayed behind in Ireland and will now return Saturday, whilst I decided to travel home yesterday on my own and get back to work, saving three days valuable holiday in the process.

Everything went OK yesterday. I got the 8.20 train from Kilkenny to Dublin and by the time I reached the Irish capital, there wasn’t any snow to be seen, not even at the sides of the road. Everything was looking good. I got to the airport at 10.45 ish which was about 5 hours too early but hey, I can fill my time.

I got on the flight and all was looking good. Not a bit of snow in sight. Five minutes later however and the snow was honking down, blizzard style. Visibility was down to a few yards at best I’d say. Nightmare. It was looking like we’d be denied and to be honest, I didn’t fancy the almighty scramble to try and book a seat on the following days flight. There were people on my flight who had been cancelled from the previous day and by all accounts, Ryanair had just punted them back into the terminal with no clear instruction as to what to do and no assistance.

The pilot came on the intercom and said that as soon as the wings were defrosted, we would be taking off. Ryanair are notoriously savage when it comes to cancelling flights and I could see them giving it another 20 minutes and then goodnight Vienna. Or Dublin.

Two hours we sat there. Two fucking hours. On a runway. Two hours before a bloke came along in a cherry picker and scooshed the wings down with anti-freeze. I wouldn’t have minded but the snow had stopped and the ice was melting by itself at this stage. Eventually we got home about two and a quarter hours late.

I shouldn’t complain. Some people had flights cancelled, delayed massively or diverted. I just wonder why, in a part of the world where winter is hardly a surprise, we should still struggle with such a simple thing as snow. The UK and Ireland collapsed under the weight of it whilst countries such as Russia and Canada don’t raise an eyebrow if it’s under a couple of feet deep.

We need to give them a shout and find out exactly what their secret is. I’ll bet my right bollock that it isn’t anything overly complicated.

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I know that tonight, I will also be harassed by the “Record PM” guys and the “Charity Muggers”, now known by the slang term “Chuggers” who will try and convince me to set up a monthly direct debit to <insert name of charity here>.

Now I’m not against donating to charity or in fact taking advantage of the special offers presented on the flyers, however the amount of zig-zagging I’m having to do to avoid getting trapped in a conversation with these people is having a significant effect on the wear and tear on my shoes. Please take me back to the time when all you had to avoid was the Hare Krishna’s. They would press you for 2 minutes of your time but a polite refusal and a quick “Gouranga” and they let you go on your way. Now I have to compete with some annoying, full of beans, bouncy student prick who urges me to “smile” or says “Oh, come on, you must have a couple of minutes”.

From what I’ve read, most of them seem to revel in the title of “Chugger” and the challenges the job brings. Usually they are young, most only in their late teens or early 20′s.

Just as well they are young though, because if they had gone to school in the 1980′s (like I did), they would be aware that a “Chugger” was a completely different thing altogether in those days.

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What I don’t like is when two fat businessmen sit on the other side of the table and decide to treat your personal space as an extension of their office, making and receiving very loud phone calls (including conference calls), spreading project plans out all over the table and basically acting like the comfort and privacy of all those around them don’t matter as long as they can conduct their business.

I’ve worked on trains, laptop out and bashing away on the keys, but that’s a hell of a difference from what these guys were doing. Funnily enough, although I shared a train with them for about three hours, I couldn’t ascertain what they did or who they worked for. They spoke entirely in abbreviations, jargon and (most beloved of the modern business world) cryptic department names such as ‘Global Service Management’ or ‘Infrastructure Rationalisation Services’.

What a lot of bollocks. Cheers guys. I had been looking forward to reading my book all the way home but in the end I found your chat about ‘Dave’ freeing up resources much more captivating than E.P.F. Lynch’s World War One diary from the trenches.

Speaking of muppets, I see that Karen Matthews and Michael Donovan have been convicted of imprisoning Shannon Matthews, Karen’s daughter, in an attempt to ‘do a Madeleine McCann’ and earn a £50,000 reward.

I say, throw away the key on the mother, but the lad Donovan is quite clearly dolly dimple. I read a quote from his previous employer today in the paper. Basically, he sent him out to fill the van with £20 worth of petrol but half an hour later found Donovan driving the van around the car park repeatedly.

When asked what he was doing, Donovan informed his boss that the van only required £18.48 worth of petrol. Basically, he was driving around until he could free up another £1.52 worth of petrol space at which point he would go and top it up.

It’s school he needs sending to, not jail.

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Read the story on the BBC News web site

I remember a few years ago when fire gripped the old town and the fire brigade fought all night and into the next day to stop the fire reaching the Royal Mile, where it would have spread uncontrollably through the old medieval buildings. It seems that greed and bungs to certain people may finally manage what the fire failed to do and put paid to Edinburgh’s world heritage status.

One thing confuses the hell out of me though. How can any proposed replacement for St James Centre be any worse than the current building. It’s a concrete and metal eyesore, resplendent with it’s “Bridge to nowhere”.

Get it knocked.

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