Some Things You Should Know About Me..........

...............I have this thing for hideous, shabby, modernist architecture.

Tower blocks, concrete shopping arcades, hi-rise car parks, underpasses, urban motorways, municipal buildings, pedestrianised city streets..........

Growing up in a city that was transforming from one brand of hellish to another, I'm very much aware of the best of the old and the worst of the new.

The City Chambers, Central Station, The Art School (or any other Rennie Mac for that matter), Provand's Lordship, Greek Thomson, Glasgow Cathederal, the Merchant City.  Just the tip of the iceberg.  Then there's the parks.  Kelvingrove, Queens Park, Pollok Park, Bellahouston, Ruchill........ some would say The Necropolis even qualifies in the latter category.

A city screaming with history.  None of it mine.

Is that crass?  Self centred?  Possible.  It's also understandable.  We relate to our environments in a visceral manner.  The high rise flats, the concrete flyovers, the dank underpasses, they all have that imprint in my infant mind.  The M8 at St Georges Cross, viewed from Kelvinbridge, about 3/4 of a mile away seemed to hold a strange, even exotic lure to me as a child, for beyond it lay the city centre and beyond that..... well, who knew?  

As stated above, I have a great deal of pride in Glasgow's architectural history, but it's the less conventionally aesthetic, modernist, nay brutalist constructions that were rattled up in the ten years prior to and following my birth that form my sense of  identity for the pace I live, the place I am from.

In short; I Heart Rennie Mac, but have you ever stood on the Anderston Footbridge and just felt the world flow under your feet?

Some Pertinent Information

I don't know if anybody reads this.  More to the point, I don't know if anybody I know reads this.  Does it matter?

Regardless, I shall continue, if only for my own benefit.

In November of last year I came home to find Diane, my partner & mother of my child, dead on the kitchen floor.  I had received a last text from her at about 4.45 pm whilst I was at work and had attempted to contact her without success. I just thought she'd dropped her phone and couldn't get to it due to her bad back........

The vain attempts to resuscitate her, the surreal 999 call, the house being invaded by paramedics, then Police, being taken to the station for a statement..................  All are indelibly etched in what passes for my soul.

A blood clot killed her.  A combination of a hereditory pre-disposition and lack of movement due to a back ailment.  There were symptoms, but neither of us recognised them, so we went on our merry way.  Diane would come off breast feeding so she could take more than just Ibuprofen & Paracetamol, get moving again and all would be fine once more.  

Yeah.........

Diane was my................ well, I'll leave you to fill in the blanks.  It's nobodies business and I'm not into emotion porn.  She was my whole life and you don't feel that until you've lost someone.  It's the tragedy of all relationships if you're emotionally stunted enough............

I have Calum to look after now, and he's an irascible wee beastie.  He's almost 10 months and nearly walking.  Needless to say, he's my best mate.  Friends and family have made sure he wants for little, apart from maybe a few Duracells for dad when he comes in from work and the kind, loving soul who carried him for nine months and nurtured him for the first months of his life.

Ewen

Prostitution In The Isle Of Man

"Remember when putting something on the internet was the equivalent of hiding it in a vault on a planet your parents had never even heard of?"  Rob Delaney

My dad uses Facebook.  Or should I say, Facebook uses him.  Had my dear mother lived to see it, she'd no doubt have rolled her eyes, snorted in derision and gone back to watching Coronation Street.

It's holiday snaps mainly.  Nowt kinky.......

The amusement on Facebook this weather is observing people still failing to understand that an injudicious choice of words can destroy friendships, rent families asunder and make you look a bit of a twat.  The moment I realised that the culture of Facebook was anti-anonymity, and that I personally knew 80% of my FB "friends" was the day I buttoned it and decided to hold my council.  Something that sits a bit too uncomfortably with me.

Twitter was great for a while. Getting to say cuntish things to vile famous people can never be anything other than awesome, but only having a handful of words to work with can break your spirit a tad.  How do you convey your bottomless contempt for a shit like Donald Trump in only 140 characters?

So we come full circle. 

Nothing new to say, but al the room in the world to say it.


Fetch!

Cock Sucking Fool At Pussy Licking School

Good Greetings people, I'm back!

I'm not actually, but such proclamations are often of comfort.

So, what tales of bitterness and woe do I have to impart to my brood of random Googlers, online pharmacy spammers and people dropping in from long, long dead blogs who forgot to remove me from their sidebar?  Oh, not much.

Still living with a woman who quite inexplicably loves me.  Still scratching by in that stoic, yet undignified manner I've managed to make my own.  Still drinking like my life depended on it.  Still campaigning to make auto-erotic asphyxiation and wheelie bin racing Olympic sports.

It would also seem to be the case that I am about to be a father.  I'm not convinced, empirical evidence of a urine stained plastic stick aside.......

This is the part in the movie where I could probably make a bid for national fame. I'd reveal my most intimate feelings, fears and hopes to the world, baring my soul to complete strangers and relating whimsical, heart warming every-day anecdotes about impending fatherhood in a gauchly titled blog.  I'd decorate it with a template utilising a warm orange, ochre and deep pink colour scheme with a pre-designed floral motif and middle class yummy mummies all over the world would inexplicably trade in the horrific memories of their own preganancies for my soft focus, third party edited hilights version.

I could,  but I won't.  I might be a cunt, but I'm not Fucking Arsehole.

If I tell you anything, it'll be the disgusting, distressing, vomit  flecked dispatches of a man trapped at the front line.  It'll be about the emotional and physical violence of living with a woman whose hormones think Adolf Hitler was a pussy.  It'll be piles, flatulence and Eraserhead flashbacks.  It'll be be banal, confusing, profane and fist chewingly embarrassing.

I probably won't bother.  He will be called Clevon.  She will be called Euphemia.

T(w)itty Twister

For any of you still haunting this place, rather in hope more than expectation that I might start speaking my brains again, I can more commonly be found here, attempting pithy one-liners and re-tweeting Frankie Boyle

Cheers!

Only Slightly Less Amusing Than Facebook

According to Google, it's one of the least visited websites on the Internet.  I'm not even sure why you would ever go to the bother of editing profanities over a Spongebob Squarepants cartoon, but hats off to these guys for going that extra mile.  True (f)art.

http://spongebobedits.blogspot.co.uk/

Love & Hate Are Over-used Words. It's About Time You Told Someone You Sort Of Like Them. Maybe.

The annual search for work has been creeping on for six months now, and has only just shown signs of abating.  And so the sad stories fill the void, as I stumble around the internet like a man looking for something he lost in the street a year ago, sure that if he keeps looking in the gutters and gulleys, he'll find it.  I find myself asking some searching questions, like  "What is a Jessie J?"  or  "Who the fuck are Fun and why are they not?" and finally  "I could swear I had that tuneless cunt Jason Mraz rubbed out by a hit man a year ago, look, I have the receipt....."

Fuck me!  I haven't even mentioned Coldplay yet.......

Am I the only one who thinks Chris Martin isn't so much a post-millenial Bono, as much as a delusional 'The Police' fan and Gordon Sumner Acolyte, right down to the fuckin album names: Viva La Vida = Outlandos d'amour?  I thought Myloto Xyloto was their attempt to go one further and quote some Esperanto.......  Sadly, it was just a semi random mishmash of vowels and consonants arranged skilfully to look like it might be derived from a foreign language.  I was most disappointed.


Bugri min purpuro!


. .........and so, winter gives way to Spring.  The waterways are starting to look quite the thing, what with the ferns unfolding and lilly pads bobbing about at the side of the canal.  Mother and her ducks are venturing forth, with swan couples not far behind, and coots, grebe's and cormorants adding to the mix.  Mr Heron fishes in the ponds, weirs and reed beds and  for those with a keen eye and a bit of luck, there may just be a chance meeting with the lesser spotted urban roe-deer.   There's nothing better than a good jant along the tow paths and walkways of yr local canal or river.

Well, that's what the old American lad I met at Maryhill Locks said before he headed on his way to good old downtown 'Mil-na-gayvee'.  Me?  I took a pish in the bushes and chucked my empty Coke can in the nolly.

Fuckin dump!