• Me
• Chris
• Neil
• Devon
• Jesus
• my Dad
• 2010

In amongst all this, Coba Fynn have been recording an album; I built a cyclocross bike and then abjectly failed to enter any cyclocross races; the Project is finally under way again; and just the other day we took the Antiquary pub quiz by the scruff of its neck and gave it a thorough hiding. Good times! (And though that sounds sarcastic, it is not meant to be so.)

Before all this, though, we were in town on the day of Christmas Eve to see It’s a Wonderful Life at the Glasgow Film Theatre. This is a tradition at the GFT; they show the film every Christmas and apparently some families go to see it year after year.

We wedged ourselves into the period accurate chairs (the cinema is very 1930s, and so is its maximum customer girth) and settled in.

As the film rolled on, I was somewhat confused. Wasn’t this supposed to be a happy film? About, for example, the wondrousness of life? Because as far as I could tell, it really wasn’t. George Bailey is trapped in Bedford Falls by cruel circumstance and the outright selfishness of others for nigh on forty years. After a lifetime of disappointment and crushed dreams, the coup de grâce is delivered when his alcoholic uncle inadvertently drops their last $8000 into the lap of the banker Mr Potter, the Baileys’ lifelong nemesis. George finally acknowledges the enormity of the situation and he suffers an entirely appropriate nervous breadown. The town bails him out, deciding belatedly to thank him for 38 years of suffering and an attempted suicide on their behalf. Oh, thanks guys. Really.

What made it doubly weird was the pacing: with the audience of 1947 boasting a collective attention span orders of magnitude longer than Kids Today™, the film plods easily along, dwelling on each new disaster that detains in town the only man who actually wants to leave.

I mean, did I miss anything?

The final denouement is moving, granted, but then what wouldn’t be after two hours of relentless despair and small-town claustrophobia? Despite all this, there was a hearty round of applause when the credits rolled, with people calling out “See you next year!” to each other as they filed out, and I left the cinema with a spring in my step. I couldn’t help wondering if this could be the start of a tradition for Ash & I; at the very least, a year should be long enough to erase the worst of George’s meticulously chronicled downfall from my memory :)

Have a good Hogmanay!

** Honestly, take a read of this guff. I smell desperation in the air.

I mostly jest. But the truth is somewhat related: the big event for me at Christmas was that I got a coffee and tea set while my Dad revelled in his new iPod Touch. There is a distinct role reversal happening here. (Happily, it is the baddest-ass tableware I’ve ever seen. And I did actually need a teapot, so I should quit my whining.)

Christmas morning came and went, and after gifts had been exchanged and breakfast rolls eaten (bought round the corner at Stuart’s the baker, the outgoing Scotch Pie World Champion), Ash and I waddled out for a constitutional. I took the opportunity to show her around some notable Buckhaven beauty spots: the rocky shoreline, with Edinburgh and the Bass Rock off in the indistinct distance; the ex-harbour, now home to rather less than the second-largest fishing fleet in Scotland; and of course WF Stark the butcher, the new World Scotch Pie Champion. For all its faults, the town of my youth is a seriously good place for pies.

I was in a bit of a quandary at New Year: Chris & Leyla are over here at the moment and were planning to be in Edinburgh over Hogmanay, so I was itching to get over there to see them again. Unfortunately, Ash’s imminent exams had her in a minor fit of nerves which in turn brought on a bout of the cold, and I really didn’t want to leave her to see in the new year by her snuffling self. She ended the deadlock by pleading with me to bugger off and leave her to study and recuperate. I agreed under protest.

Jeff & Devon were hosting a mini Hogmanay party, so after a few phone calls I picked up Chris & Leyla from a friend’s house in Corstorphine and drove the rest of the way into town, the car alive with ridiculous chat and reminiscence. It was fantastic to see them again. We kept on blethering away at the party, and at one point I had an abrupt realisation: “Wow, I forgot you guys were married. Of course, I remember playing the bagpipes at your wedding. That was mental—I was scared for half the day and drunk for the rest.”

Chris: “Yeah, me too.”

Ally G was also in attendance, and in a reprise of our most recent holding-forth on typography, we spent an age talking about modernist architecture, or at least our hazy understandings of it. I was particularly enthused that day: for all the times I’ve marvelled at straight lines and textured concrete on holiday, I’d come across some amazing, textbook concrete monstrosities/masterpieces on Christmas Day when Ash and I came to the flats at the end of Shore Street. These won a Saltire Award back in 1973, and only 35 years later (the concrete is still barely touched by the weather and shone even in the dim winter afternoon) are already being demolished to be replaced by soulless, faux miner’s cottages.

I took some photos with my phone, intending to proudly preserve part of Buckhaven’s otherwise undistinguished architectural heritage but irritatingly they seem to have vanished into the electronic ether without a trace. The sad thing is, judging by the new foundations being built in the muddy wasteground where the first demolished blocks used to be, the rest may even be gone by the next time I’m home!

Anyway, enough wallowing. Merry (belated) Christmas and a Happy (less belated) New Year!

Ruth was working on Christmas Eve, in a little bar a couple of towns along from my parents’ house. I drove along to pick her up after the pub had closed and they’d had a chance to close up, at about 1.30 am. When I arrived, there were still a few die-hards downing the last of their pints, so I hung my jacket over a bar stool and settled in to wait.

“This is my brother,” Ruth said to her inebriated boss, who was perched precariously on another stool at the end of the bar.
“Oh aye,” he said, “so the Saab is yours then?”
I’d loaned Ruth the Trøll while I was on holiday. “Yes. Nice to meet you too,” I replied.
“They’re great cars they are.”
“Yes. Yes they are.”

I waited a bit longer. The last group of drinkers were getting their stuff together, and on their way past an old schoolmate said hello. “Long time no see! You’ve got the Saab 900, right?” she said. We talked for a bit, and then they were off.

Ruth introduced me to the very last punter, a youngish regular, on his way out. “Hi there – so you’re Ruth’s brother?” Then, in slightly hushed, reverential tones: “That’s a great car you’ve got. I love those Saabs.”

These people do not get out much. “A 1992 900 S! And with the Aero kit, if I’m not mistaken. So rare that such an objet d’art comes to our humble village.”

The hot water in our flat is, and has been for the last year or so, only intermittently functional. We have an odd setup whereby the hot water for the shower room and the heating comes from a modern combi boiler at one end of the flat, while the hot water for the bathroom and the kitchen comes from a grain elevator-sized immersion boiler at the other end. Needless to say, the apparently Victorian-era immersion heater functions reliably, if inefficiently, all year round. (The environment audibly groans when we fire it up.) The shiny new combi boiler is rather more of a prima donna.

A while back we discovered, after a succession of visits by largely moronic plumbers, that the heating system has a small leak somewhere. Evidently it’s not large enough to easily detect, but it did let the pressure drop until we had neither warm radiators nor a hot shower. The final, competent plumber showed us how to open a top-up valve to refill the combi boiler until a proper fix could be applied.

Of course a little knowledge is a dangerous thing, and although the leak goes unfixed (hell, if anyone of our neighbours noticed a jet of scalding water gushing into their flat, I’m sure they’d let us know. And we did tell the landlord about it. Honest), we now merrily poke around with a screwdriver every few months to make sure the pressure’s up.

Last week, though, a new problem arose. The shower became a turbo-sauna. It was like washing on the sun. I developed a technique for showering, which was to plaster oneself up against the tiled wall furthest from the geyser emitting from the shower head and let the superheated steam remove the outer layer of one’s skin. Woe betide you if any of the actual water should graze your unprotected self.

Fortunately, and for no discernible reason, the temperature dropped back to a tolerable level during the week. This pleases me because I can shower in safety, and disappoints me because I am deprived of a punchline for this little anecdote.

In preparation for the upcoming CF gig, I plugged in my bass last night and played away for a while, gazing idly down at the twin curiosities of the gay-bar-for-neds and the brothel above it visible from my window. I was reminded of an evening a month or so back. On the way to Café Royal, I’d rounded the corner onto Rose Street when a drunken buffoon on a stag night stumbled out of a nearby pub, cornered me and asked where they should continue boozing. “And find some wummen tae, like.”

He stank like a brewery and I sorely doubted his chances of both getting into any pubs or getting any once he was in there. But I was brought up well, and I tried to be helpful. “Hmm. George Street has a load of pubs, but they’re all a bit posh.” I had a rather evil notion. “You’re already on Rose Street, and it’s pretty good for pubs. There’s one just across the road, actually-” I said, pointing down the alley to the gay bar, and right on cue, two people physically flew out of the door.

“And dinnae come back!” bellowed the barman.

My drunken friend went to George Street.

The sheer Sex and the City-ness of it all assailed my senses. Here I was, on a crisp winter’s evening, dressed in an accidentally fashionable pea coat bought six unfashionable years ago, ferrying home designer charity Christmas cards (like they say in Friends with Money, why not just give the money straight to charity?), wrapping paper so restrained as to be conceited and an Ikea-but-more-expensive candlestick. I didn’t mind per se, but my God, did I feel ridiculous.

As soon as the pseudo-respectability turn had passed, I started thinking about the bizarre act of tapping in my PIN to identify myself as the appropriate card’s owner. The reduction of this act to typing four digits into a keypad make the world seem a step closer to 1984. To the Man (the state is too inept to count as such, while your common or garden retail corporation is continually trying to extract the largest possible amount of money from me and isn’t held back by troublesome ethics), I am quite literally just a number. Granted, I’ve been just a number for years now – to the electricity company, the telephone company and my bank among others – but the removal of any truly personal acts of identification, like matching a photograph or signing my name, seems like a step too far.

And then piled on top of any vague metaphysical concerns, there’s what would seem to be the oddly lax security behind Chip & PIN. To wit: four digits isn’t a big number to crack; a photo would massively restrict fraud should anyone get hold of my card (and assuage my increasing feeling of nothingness to boot), and I haven’t yet seen a keypad with a worthwhile guard to shield your PIN from prying eyes. If these four numbers are all that stands between me and the supposed legions of identity thieves waiting to relieve me of all my money (ha! Give me three weeks of Christmas shopping and I’ll do it myself), maybe a token effort at bolstering their security might be a good idea, n’est-ce pas?

Anyway.

Bookending this journey through ill-defined concerns about self and self-worth (in monetary terms at least) were a couple of pleasantly festive evenings hosted by Jez & Max and Jeff & Devon respectively. At Jez’s we quaffed mulled wine and ate homemade mince pies, and at the old flat we ate and drank ourselves into a happy stupor. All in all, a moderately inebriated and wholly tasty weekend. Roll on Christmas…