Terminus

Thankyou mother! Thankyou for the lovely cold!

I feel fine actually, it's just that when I swallow, I feel like I've been eating hot gravel for a month.

No man-flu here, just frustration at not being able to have a drink until the inflamation in my throat goes down.

I trust you all had a decent Christmas? Mine was ok, a financial pleasure at least............... Oh, and a giant box of Daz washing powder! Apparently my brother and his girlfriend reckon I need it. Cheeky fuckers! I prefer liquid anyway, less mess and hassle plus it tastes better........... I've never been one to turn down freebies, so I'll find a use for it.

Ok, so as we wind our way through the tedious post-Christmas fallout and into the waiting arms of the New Year, I thought I'd be dead original and make a wee list. It went something like this....

Album of The Year - That Lucky Old Sun by Brian Wilson.

Blog of The Year - A straight fight between Cocktails & Records and Velo-Gubbed Legs. C&R takes it by two falls to a submission.

Commenter of The Year - It's probably Cocktails, but Kim Ayres put in a late spurt recently, so I'll give it to him for popping his head round the door when it seemed like I was not only talking to myself, but on the verge answering myself back.

Web-Comic of the Year - A new category, and it goes to the one and only 'Married To The Sea'. Read it over your Shreddies and feel fractionally better about being a chump with a shite job. Sometimes, 'fractionally better' is all it takes to get you out the door in the morning, so don't knock it!

Most Satisfying Thing in 2008 - Watching facebook and bebo die a death of a thousand cuts at the hands of spammers and viruses.

Moment of Truth- Realising I'd never be a touring folk singer.

Moment of Joy - I'm a Partick Thistle & Glasgow Tigers fan. I know nothing of such things......

Moment of Despair - Tigers 45 Monarchs 46 & Thistle 0 Airdrie 1 Both on the same day as I recollect...............

Still, I did learn a bit about gardening, thanks to my good friend Clairwil, as well as taking some of my best photos yet and getting the cheeky idea that I might be able to make a living out of it.

Ok, class dismissed! Single file and no running................

Clichéd Christmas Carping: Part 32(b)

I've heard it stated that Christmas is a cruel joke perpetrated upon the broke, the lonely, and the depressed. A plausible, but maudlin and slightly pretentious statement. Granted, it's a right old pain in the crotch, but since it's 'but once a year', it's one I can live with. Anyway, top things about Christmas: Christmas market in Argyll Street with it's neat little wooden stalls and amusing tat. (obviously stolen from Lapland New Forest...) German sausage sellers. Without them, I'd have died of hunger on many of my abortive Christmas shopping trips. The lights on the trees in Sauchiehall Street. Lovely! In fact, the plethora of Christmas lighting strung up over various bits of greenery at St Georges Cross and Cowcaddens. Beats the cack in George Square. Not that you'd know it was fucking christmas in my current place of work. Half-day on Christmas eve? Ha! Don't be so fucking silly! No, if you want to leave early, you need to make up the time apparently. How about I turn up at 4pm tomorrow and take 45 minute lunches for the next two months? If we're going to play silly buggers, I want to be the king of the castle! Buncha Crotch Pheasants! On top of this indignity, the cretins decide to pay us on the 23rd. Every other fucker on the planet seems to get their Christmas wage a good week before the 25th, you know, so that they can go and do their Christmas shopping........... Not the employees of the company I work for! Instead I have to fight the clock as well as the crowds in an insane after work dash, two days before the day we all celebrate the birth of the little babby Jimmy Christ, usually by getting wasted and buying each other the finest consumer durables China has to offer. Stereotypical Christmas bitches in no particular order: Endless queues? Check! Doddering fools? Check! Pile upon pile of worthless tat? Check! Pissy weather? Check! Shakin Bastard Stevens and Paul Fucking McCartney on the PA? Check! (x100000) Do my shopping earlier? Fuck off! I have neither the time nor the inclination to think about the annual orgy until I need to, it's just that a three mile trolley dash in the dark is about as much fun as listening to the Catholic church whingeing about a childrens party song. Next year, I do it all on-line................ All malignance aside, have yourselves a safe, sane and gently innebriated Christmas.

Low- Just Like Christmas

Aberdeen Man Lost At Sea

"I thought he was dead!" "Someone told me he was travelling the world in Sinclair C5!" "Really? I heard he was re-painting the Sistine Chapel with a toothbrush and a pot of Duluxe !" All wrong of course! I've been jumping through my arsehole for Jesus, if it's any of your business. Which it's not.

I have to admit, I'm fascinated by parochialism. That notion that nothing that happens anywhere else is of any importance, unless there are fellow Scots/Brits/Belgians etc involved. A prime example of it was seen today on a newsagent billboard for the Daily Record. "Scottish Victims of Nickell Murderer!" Ok, I know, it's just an angle, it's about flogging sub-literate printed bum wad to people who have trouble walking and talking at the same time. Thing is, this all comes from a newspaper that looks down it's nose at the very notion of Scottish independence as something tacky and small-minded, as something a little bit................parochial? Tonights music comes courtesy of Kinky Friedman, of Texas Jewboys fame.

Kinky for president!!

We Reserve The Right To Refuse Service To You - Kinky Friedman

Curious Bedfellows

I have two sources of junk e-mail to contend with this weather. One is a weekly bulletin from a mob of rabid yank right wingers, doubtless girding their loins for what they see as a dangerous new dawn of socialist radicalism, led by that nice Mr Obama chap. So far, so tedious. I'm also getting dyslexic porn spam, which isn't nearly as exciting at it sounds. As it stands, I don't know if I'm being tempted with internet filth or addressed by a pervy tourrettes sufferer with a broken keyboard. Slightly more amusing, but not by much. This leads me to ponder something that really ought not to be pondered. Hardcore right wing porn anyone? Now, there's a market they've yet to exploit................ Afghan Whigs - Turn On The Water

Attack Of The Killer Light Entertainers

'Tis the season to get our panties in a bunch about contaminated food products it would seem. First of all, Country Life butter was recalled from branches of Iceland because people had been finding traces of rubber in the cartons. As a purchaser of 'spreadable' butter and various substitute spreads for most of my life, I can honestly state that I don't see what the problem is. I mean, those little chewy bits are the best part, right?..............

Do you think John Lydon might have anything to do with all this? I know he's an irrelevant old pantomime dame who no longer poses any threat to anyone other than himself and the odd personal assistant, but it's all a little too coincidental for my liking. They didn't let Him or Steve Jones do a tour of the Country Life factory perchance?

Then we have Irish pork. Or rather we don't. What an absolute bag of old bollocks!

The risk from dioxins in this situation is deemed to be very low. You'd probably need to eat nothing but Irish pork products for the next two years to become ill, but that hasn't stopped vast amounts of only slightly iffy food being binned to fend off the prospect of Daily Mail fueled mass hysteria. Fuck me! Does anyone realise how much filth and poison we consume on a daily basis? If you ate a supermarket apple, a Big Mac and drank a can of Coke today, then let's just say that a few dodgy Irish bangers aren't going to make a whole heap of difference to your general health. Look, I'm not advocating a laissez faire attitude towards food safety ("yes you are!" - blog readers), but can we all just accept that you might as well withdraw ready salted crisps because they carry a threat of scurvy if you ate twenty bags a day.

There, that made no sense at all.

Mind you, nor did seeing Bernie Clifton* on TV recently. (Caution ladies!, site contains semi naked Keith Harris/Bernie Clifton photos)

I quite like Paul O'Grady, I also like some of his show, but the moment Bernie 'fucking' Clifton appears with his blessed ostrich, well, I'm off to do something a little more entertaining, like rub salt in my eyeballs, or count my nostril hairs. I thought that guy was dead, but hell, I suppose those old lags never die, they just disappear into the anonymity of pantomime and local radio.

Or maybe, if they're particularly poor, they get gigs as opening night turn at slums like Lapland New Forest.

My first thought when I read of the Dorset hell hole was "Pah! What did you expect?". Having seen this article on the Kent Lapland experience, I can now honestly say that the notion that people would be mugs to think such a theme park could ever be anything other than a dismal rip-off, is a little bit inaccurate and unfair. The £75 per head entry fee is horrific, but there is something of a 'Christmas Experience' involved, with customers booked in small-ish groups, rather than the messy, disorganised, turn up on the day approach of the New Forest site.

Having seen Youtube clips of the the approach to the infamous park, I can tell you that it's the sort of place that had I been taken there as a nipper by my folks, they would have turned tail before they got to the pay gate. Therein lies the problem. Some folk most probably did smell a rat, but a promised day out in santa land for the kids is not easily weasled out of. It's very hard to explain the concept of cheap, shoddy crap to a six year old, and the attitude of 'best just pay the cash and keep them quiet' seems to prevail.

This sort of shit is everywhere, and even the sharpest folk get suckered in occassionally

The Nazz - Open My Eyes Taken from Lenny Kaye's Nuggets comp *Not Bernie Winters, of Schnorbitz & Glasgow Empire infamy

A Picture & A Song

View of Kelvingrove Art Galleries and Glasgow University from the Forth & Clyde Canal (Glasgow branch) Durutti Column - Belgian Friends. A bonus track which can be found on the album LC, if you're willing to wallop down the best part of a ton for it on import............ Mine cost about a fiver I think..........

Unsent Letters From A Dead Man Pt 3

"Jim, eyes open love" A gentle pressure on my shoulder and a soft voice in the pre-conscious fog. I ignored it. "Jim! C'mon, You need to get up" The voice had hardened a little. Still calm and patient, but I knew who it belonged to now. I felt Elaine's weight on the other side of the bed and I turned to watch her. The room looked cluttered but homely, though I'd had little time to take any of it in the previous night when the two of us had stumbled into into bed, haphazardly undressing as we went. Route one stuff. There were interesting body parts to be explored, a crazy, insanely passionate tangle of limbs that didn't sort itself out for a good half hour. She had her back to me and was sliding on some garment or other. My brain was still in neutral, and would be for at least another hour. "Where are you off to?" I said, trying not to sound desperate or worried. "Nowhere just yet" she said without looking up from what she was doing. My eyes followed her in the half darkness as she walked round the end of the bed towards the curtains, opening them with a quick jerk. The light streaming through the window punched a hole in my half open eyelids, scorching the image of the window pane and the rest of the room onto the back wall of my brain, so that it remained in negative when I blinked or closed my eyes. "Now, can you move that lazy arse of yours and come and have lunch with me?"

"I'm not sure" I croaked. "I think you may have shattered my pelvis last night"

______________________________

An hour later we were huddled in the little perspex shelter next to the bus stop. I didn't need to be anywhere, but Elaine was working at 4pm in some shitehole pub in the city centre. I wanted to be back in bed with her, wrapped in those strong arms and legs, buried in blankets and body heat like any sane man would. Instead I was waiting on a bus that seemingly wasn't coming, as the wind and rain hammered against our flimsy hiding place.

"Is this bus usually late?" I asked, trying not to sound too narky. "It's probably broken down somewhere" she replied, giving me a weak smile and firing up another Silk Cut. "Sorry, it sounds like I can't wait to get away from you" I replied sheepishly. "It's just the rain and wind, I'm not really dressed for the weather".

I must have been staring a bit too longingly at the giant fake fur lined parka she had on.

"C'mon Jim, it's hardly you, is it?" she smirked, looking down at the coat then back up at me. Her long red hair framed her smiling face under the hood and made her look like a member of some long lost clan of Irish Eskimos. I wondered how Eskimos dealt with crappy weather. Maybe they just hung out in plastic boxes that smelled of urine, waiting for the No 25 bus like the rest of us. "If you're cold, I could give you a wee heat" Elaine whispered lecherously as she put an arm around me. I tried to put my arm around her, but it felt odd and uncomfortable as we perched upon the thin grey rail that passed for seating in the shelter. I let my arm drop and felt slightly more awkward than usual. She sighed and took a draw of her cigarette, blew out a stream of grey smoke at the ground, then looked back at me with an air of bemusement.

"Not in the mood love?"

I didn't answer, just stared at my shoes and at the never ending whirl of leaves, crisp packets and carrier bags that gusted around us and under our feet. I felt Elaine's hand lightly on my shoulder .

"Look, it's ok Jim, I know what you're going to say"

I heard the low deisel growl of a bus approaching and noticed she had got up to signal it down.

"Not here" I kept thinking

"Just, not here................"