Monthly Archive for July, 2009

The Alpha Site

Published on July 29, 2009 in Family, Musings, Transport and Travel. 1 Comment Tags: , , , , , , .

Rumour has it, or at least the sneaky blog they’ve set up has it, that the famously restless McDowalls are at this very minute planning to up sticks and move all the way across the Atlantic Ocean to Canada. I’ll admit that I’ve a sneaking admiration for their ambition, but also a small twinge of sadness that they’re planning to head off into the wild blue yonder.I’ve known Mr McDowall a long time, and for the first time in many years he seems rested and content with his new wife and their rascally wee cat.

I can’t say I’m surprised as John has long said that he believes Scotland to be dying a death and I must reluctantly agree with him that socially, politically, spiritually and industrially the country is slowly losing everything that once made her great. You know things are getting bad when a journalist from Malawi tours Glasgow and tells the press that Scotland should keep the aid money it’s sending to Africa and try to improve things here first.

So I’ll do my bit and tell you all that the McDowalls are trying to raise enough money to move by selling their cherished Hyundai Coupe for a knock-down price of £3,500.

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Tell your friends and family to have a look.

Of course since the McDowall man is good enough to host this blog I’m going to have to start looking for alternative place to keep my witterings in the near future.

The Communal Wean

Published on July 22, 2009 in Family, People Be Fools and Whiiiit!?. 0 Comments

One of the women in my team at THE WORK is a few months pregnant with the baby due round about the middle of December. She and her partner have been trying for a long time to conceive so it’s good news for them after many years of disappointment and trying.

The odd thing that we’ve all noticed though is that she has more or less become what can only be described as “public property” since the news broke. Women of all creeds, colours ages and sexual persuasion have come crawling out of the woodwork to congratulate her on her. My team leader The Boy Blunder and his manager Captain Calamity have both started to talk about her “condition” with a level of reverence normally reserved for Mary.

All of that is fairly strange, but strangest of all is the touching. It’s almost as though carrying a baby causes the body to emit a powerful psychic instruction to touch the pregnant woman without invitation. It’s almost as though pregnancy makes the woman, and especially her stomach, into an object of wonder and reverence.

I’m well aware that pregnancy itself is a strange and fairly miraculous event. El Kat often tells me how amazing it is that a woman can manufacture a tiny person basically out of the food that she eats during the baby’s gestation, but I don’t think that’s sufficient reason for normal social boundaries to go out the window.

I have an odd theory that this behaviour is maybe a throwback to when humans lived in small tribal groups without the power of language. It seems reasonable to say that touching and grooming would serve the purpose of reinforcing social bonds and reassuring the expectant mother. In large closely related hunter-gatherer communities the birth of a child would be an important event to the whole tribe. It’s likely that nearly everyone in the tribe would display a familial interest in the health of the mother and the unborn wean. The Touching seems to be some kind of subconscious extension of this instinct.

Either way though it’s all very creepy SO STOP IT.

A Lesser Burden

Published on July 19, 2009 in Banks and Finances. 0 Comments

Well today marks the end of an era. After a lot of blood, sweat, tears and sacrifice I’ve finally cleared the entire outstanding balance on my Barclaycard. As we speak the last payment is making its electronic journey from my account to Barclays and I’ll at last be free of the indentured slavery of consumer debt.

I immensely regret having ever allowed myself to be talked into getting a credit card. I feel it’s done nothing but drain away my limited funds since the day and hour it first dropped through my letter box. I regret it, but the decision had to be made. When I first got the thing I was struggling along on my grant and student loan. I didn’t have much spare cash and I needed to pay the rent. I remember my flatmate telling me it was fine, I just had to use the cash advance from the card to pay the rent, and then pay the card back once I got my next grant or loan instalment. Seems simple doesn’t it? What he neglected to remind me was that his parents were FUCKING LOADED and paid off his credit card every month FOR HIM. I on the other hand suddenly found myself with a credit card, and not enough money to cover it and to pay for food, books and all the other things essential to university life.

As I was new to the idea of credit and magically invented money I made a lot of classic mistakes. I used it to get cash from ATMS, and spent years only paying the minimum payment amount which was nothing compared to the outstanding balance. Eventually I reached a point where I couldn’t use the card any more even if I had wanted to because to do so would keep taking me over my limit. I owed about £3,500 and it was round about that point that I resolved to be rid of the damn card forever.

That was about three years ago, and I’ve been slowly but surely paying, paying and thrice paying to get rid of the damn thing at the rate of a hundred bucks a month. That might not sound like much, but I’m also paying out a hundred bucks to Cahoot for the flexible loan that I took out with them when I walked out of my job at Abbey National after a fortnight. I don’t know many people that could soak up the loss of two hundred quid a month and not feel some kind of pain from it.

It’s done now, but I keep wondering what I could have done with all the cash I’ve poured down the drain over the last ten years or so.

Let me out officer I promise I’ve learned my lesson.

The PEN Story

Published on July 13, 2009 in Advertising and Youtube. 1 Comment

Once again El Kat has come up trumps with an outstanding video from Youtube:

Unfortunatly I’ve now got the background track stuck in my head and will need to find and listen to it.

Four Ideas

Published on July 7, 2009 in Humour, Teh Madness and Work. 0 Comments

Like all normal human beings I go through phases with my job. Much of the time I beetle on through it without too much trouble. I look on it as a necessary evil, nothing to get excited about, but not a great burden for the rewards that it provides. I get up in the morning, sigh, and head in. It’s just another one of those things that are part of life like paying taxes, eating, breathing and shitting.

Sometimes though I really start to resent the fact that for five days of the week I’m basically throwing away the best part of a day just to serve someone else.

It’s during these downturn phases that I’ve turned to that good old Scottish staple of fantasy known as “when I win the lottery”. The fantasy is self explanatory: I win the lottery and I quit my wage slave job for a life of leisurely aristocratic ease. I’ll lay long odds that everyone reading this has had the same fantasy at some point in their working lives, although the older ones amongst you would probably originally have wished they could win the Pools.

Most people fantasise about what they would do with all that cash. How they would spend it on sumptuous mansions, fast cars and the like. I however have mainly confined myself to imagining he best way to make an exit from the work. At first I went for the most ostentatious things I could think of: being picked up by a limo or even in a helicopter landing on the roof, but these don’t really fit in with my personality or my feelings over the job.

In the end I’ve narrowed down my plans to four possible options that increase in deviousness and decrease in common consideration for my fellow employees.

#1 – Just don’t go back to work. No letter of resignation and no phone call, no email and not even a txt message by way of explanation either. I just up and vanish overnight without any warning what so ever. When the boss comes round my house looking for me he finds the place is empty and the forwarding address from my letting agent is a PO Box in a made up town somewhere in Manitoba.

#2 – Somewhat similar in execution to #1 but with one important difference: I use my newfound wealth to hire the biggest mobile billboard truck I can get my hands on, park it up across the street from my work with a huge picture of me flipping the bird and a caption saying “GET IT UP YE!”

Those two ideas require very little personal effort and although interesting would only have a small impact on THE WORK. I would prefer to see and be involved directly in the act of departing from my place of employment after my hypothetical windfall so I’ve come up with two more ideas:

#3 – I start work as normal on what appears to be an ordinary Monday morning. Have a chat with my colleagues about the weekend, the weather and so on. Start working away quite normally and then I say I’m going on a fairly trivial errand, maybe across to the canteen for some coffee or off to get some paper for the printer, and I just leave there and then. I never answer any phone calls or enquires and as in #1 and #2 when the boss comes knocking to try and locate me I’m long gone, like I never existed.

#4 – This idea is similar to #3 I start as normal on the Monday morning and, as before, it appears to be the start of an average everyday week. However I’m on the lookout for something, anything that I can use to carry out my plan. I act normally until something utterly trivial, but irritating, happens. Maybe I spill some tea, the photocopier jams or I forget to save a document. It has to be something very stupid and not something caused by a person. I don’t want to alienate folk, I just something to appear to be the trigger. As soon as it happens I go off like Mount Vesuvius throwing the mother of all crazy flip outs. The monitor gets hurled out the window, the laptops and phone smash off the walls and I storm out and never return leaving a sea of surprised and concerned faces in my wake. Naturally I disappear much as I do in the previous ideas.

Unfortunately I’ll need to keep these ideas on the backburner for now as I’m on the upswing again and work doesn’t seem to be too much a problem.

I’ve also not won the lottery so they’re not practical… yet…

Back In The USSR

Published on July 6, 2009 in Bizarre Internet. 1 Comment

Congratulations to the man they call McDowall on his long awaited return to the blogosphere.  I’m expecting big things from his new blog which is entitled  Zombie Defence Corporation.

Check it out here.

A Palatial Exploration

Published on July 5, 2009 in Castles, History, Monuments, Old Buildings and Scotland. 1 Comment

El Kat and I decided to escape the dust, grime and endless streams of Loyal Orange Lodge flute bands for the tranquil surroundings of the royal burgh of Linlithgow. Now those of you who know a bit about West Lothian probably think that’s a counter productive step as they seem to be just about as crazy on the whole Catholic/Protestant marching as any bit of Glasgow. It’s a matter of scale though. Linlithgow only has a couple of orange lodges and one march. Glasgow has 138 lodges and about 8,000 marchers who invade the centre of town every weekend leading up to the 12th of July.

I digress however, so I shall return to talking about Linlithgow.

Most of you probably recognise it as a town that lies on the Glasgow to Edinburgh line but it has a far richer and more important history than you might realise, and central to the history of the burgh is Linlithgow Palace. The Palace is a hugely impressive royal residence built over the course of two centuries by the Kings James I, James III, James IV and James V of the Stewart Dynasty. It’s perhaps most famously associated with Mary Queen of Scots who was born there in 1542

The palace as it stands today was built on the site of an older timber fortress destroyed, along with much of the town, by a fire in 1452 on the orders of James I. It was continued expanded and improved by his grandson James III and his heirs into a vast four sided palace designed to show the wealth and power of the Stewart Kings.

The palace remained in use for several centuries, but was eventually heavily damaged in September 1745 by fire a fire started by government troops bivouacked there during the Jacobite rebellion.

The Palace is now owned and cared for by Historic Scotland who provide guided tours and maintain the fabric of the structure. That said the stone work is in fabulously good condition for having been almost burned to the ground at least twice. They really don’t build them like this anymore.

Anyhow here are a few pictures:

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The Great Hall

The Great Hall

It might not look like it, but the gaps under the hood of the fireplace in the hall are tall enough that even my six foot odd frame can stand underneath without stooping. That’s one huge fire!

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The Courtyard Fountain

The Courtyard Fountain

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Maybe this time I’ll get a flicker account and put the rest up on there… In the meantime I highly recommend that you all pay a visit to this impressive piece of Scottish History.