For Christmas I was given a day at Cook School by Martin Wishart. I didn’t know anything about Martin Wishart, so I looked him up. Turns out he’s a Michelin-starred chef specialising in French cuisine; he has one restaurant in Leith, another at Loch Lomond, and a cookery school down the road from my work. [...]
February 17th, 2010
November 2nd, 2009
Hallowe’en
(A brief intermission before I attack the mountain of LA/LV notes from September.) A few numbers for you: ten merry men. Three Norman bad guys. One Robin Hood. One cross-dressing ‘Maid’ Marian. One racially insensitive Azeem costume. Josh was up. It rocked.
May 28th, 2009
Sittin’ on the dock of the bay
This is the calm before the storm. Very little out of the ordinary is happening to distract me at the moment and so I’m free, metaphorically speaking, to stand and stare, rabbit-like, into the headlights of the upcoming Vancouver trip. Predictably, the HR, finance and management drones involved in this whole enterprise appear to be [...]
May 6th, 2009
It’s a dog’s life
Yes, the dog-related puns will just keep on comin’. Things have been quiet of late; not boring as such, but to borrow and roundly abuse a mathematical metaphor, the graph of excitement against time is smoother than normal even as the integral of said graph is somewhat greater. Dog ownership enforces more responsibility and regularity [...]
February 16th, 2009
Tantra, baby
I think I must be overcompensating for an ascetic, near-teetotal existence in Glasgow. Over the past couple of weeks I’ve met up with anyone and everyone I could in an effort to break in my drinking habit again. A couple of Fridays ago, Doug, Keef and I engaged in a mini pub crawl around the [...]
January 28th, 2009
Old School
Not only have we arrived back in Edinburgh, I think we may also have arrived back in 2005. Two birthday parties in as many days; fry-ups with Josh, talking up world domination via the infallible medium of an iPhone application; a commute to work which takes less time than a trip to the bathroom, and [...]
December 16th, 2008
Of late
Despite a few weeks of rapid-fire social engagements providing plenty of grist for the mill, I seem to be suffering from writer’s block. I could tell you at length how to scribe skirting board or build a bath panel from scratch, but throwing down a few hundred words to describe anything other than DIY is [...]
November 30th, 2008
Arm and The Man
The day of the scheduled pin-removal operation rolled around, and I cycled down to the RIE in the darkness before the dawn. The receptionist in the Day Surgery Unit told me to take a seat and wait, and so I did. At about 11.30 one of the nurses took me through to a second waiting [...]
November 18th, 2008
Hi, Glasgow.
Sorry we haven’t spoken in a while. Honestly, it’s not you, it’s me. We’ve just never bonded, and lately I feel like we’ve been growing apart. But mainly, it’s because Ash just got a contract in Edinburgh and I never found the right job in the west. So, the great Glasgow experiment is coming to [...]
September 15th, 2008
Gighausted
Last weekend the band played at Waxy’s wedding up in Callander. We were well oiled (not literally) from sundry other gigs[*, **] and rehearsals, but had only a single practice to ensure that we didn’t get a frosty reception at the reception. Unfortunately, that crucial, last-chance-to-buy rehearsal limped home inconclusively under the weight of fatigue [...]