Oh God. We're on tomorrow night.

The set looks good.

I'm being disingenuous. I just have the Oh God We're on Tomorrow Night whim-whams. I've been living on coffee, fags and terror for the past three days as we get this thing ready and apart from a barely suppressed willingness to commit bloody murder on one cast member who is driving everyone up the wall, I think we're doing pretty well under the circumstances. The latest of which was tonight seeing our director vomiting copiously into the bushes outside the hall as we were leaving. If I didn't know that both her kids had just recovered from a stomach bug that involved copious amounts of vomiting I would take this as a bad sign. As I do know that her kids have just recovered from a stomach bug that involved copious amounts of vomiting, I will merely spray her with disinfectant when she come round tomorrow morning to make sense of the illegible notes she gave about the programme.

The set looks good.

We ran the whole show today for the first time. We started at 5 (ish) and ended at about 10 (ish) having lost over half the cast along the way. They had to go home halfway through because it's a school day tomorrow.

4 hours. It felt much longer. We will run it again at least twice tomorrow and we should knock off at least half an hour from the running time just by me alone now knowing which side I'm supposed to be coming on from.

If you have ever been behind stage during an amateur or mixed amateur/pro show like this - especially one with a lot of kids - you will know this, but the entire time the audience are sitting there enjoying the show there is a frantic babble of conversation going on behind the scenes:

"Which bit is this? Which side do I go one next? Christ! When am I on next! Fuck! I'm on the wrong side of the stage! Get out of the way, Get out of the way! Get OUT OF THE FUCKING WAY! Where's my hat?"

All conducted in various degrees of manic whispered shout. Today's hissed whispered babble was louder and more confused than normal. People had costume on for the first time. A few people, me included, had two costumes on, one on top of the other to speed up a dress change. Instead of taking one costume off and putting another one on we just have to take one off. Well, that's the theory.

The lighting has been the big techy problem. Today I spent the morning winching half tonne lighting bars up and down and hanging lights. Later in the day it turns out that some previous user of the hall has managed to trash some vital section of the lighting racks, and the cable that connects the bits that do work to the lighting desk doesn't seem to be doing much either. Kiree, who is driving the lighting desk, is one of the calmest unflappable people I have ever met. Faced with near calamity in the lighting department she raises an eyebrow and mutters " That's interesting!" before doing a few more workings out scribbles in her note book and going off to fix it. Don't know how she does it. I would just want to hide.

Another day locked in the aircraft hanger recreating the Massacre of Glencoe with ballet dancers, Girl pipers, bad actors, and a cardboard mountain - parts of which changed colour several times today accompanied by the sounds of increasing frustration and confusion from Felicity who is painting the set.
Felicity is a lovely woman but does have this dreadful habit - which she gleefully acknowledges - of leaving everything till the last possible minute. Literally. The last show I worked on that she was involved with she was still painting the scenery as the audience were taking their seats. I was first person on in that show and instead of the usual "Good luck!". or "Break a leg," or "Knock 'em dead!", just as I walked on the give the first line of the show, the stage manager leaned over to me and whispered: "Don't lean on any of the scenery, it's still wet."
Felicity's trouble today was that none of the colours she was mixing looked right when she put them on the flats. The purple she was trying to get kept turning into a blue. It took me and Kiree, who is doing the the lighting for the show, a while to convince her that if she was mixing the paint over there <-- under the nice, pinky white Mercury vapour house work lights and then painting it on the flats over there --> which were bathed by the nice bluey-white Halogen flood lights we had rigged up for her, of course the bloody colour would change.

The rest of the day was similarly frustrating. Lots of stop, start, nothing getting finished, trying to work out what to do next faffing about and waiting for other people to stop faffing about and decide what they were going to do next so you didn't get in their way, etc. etc. etc.

The usual pre-show chaos.

I managed to run away and avoid a lot of it by hiding behind the cardboard mountain and pretending to add more bits to the supporting structure. It is now pretty robust now. I screwed a shitload (that's a theatrical technical term) of wood to the back of it and piled it high with concrete blocks swiped from the skateboard park next door. Later Andy turned up with a pile of weights he 'borrowed' from a gym somewhere and we piled them on as well. We are nothing if not inventive - and safe. It would take a bulldozer to knock the thing over now.

3 (or 4ish)

So, day three of NoMoPabloOmo (though technically it is now day four - though not in anywhere west of me yet).

Today was spent in the Nevis Centre in Fort William avoiding looking at the stage. The stage there looks HUGE and I spent the entire morning doing anything and everything I could think of to avoid actually erecting the set I had built to fill it. This included laying carpets,erecting small thrust stages that were twice as big as I had been led to believe, eating too many disgusting but addictive marshmallow snowball thingies off the techie food table and generally fannying about.

There was no way on earth that what I had made flat-packed in Ballachulish village hall was going to fill the space. It was going to be a humiliating failure I just knew it. Like the tiny Stonehenge in Spinal Tap, only flat. Finally, sometime in the afternoon, I gave up and dragged all the parts up onto the stage and with a help from Andy and a couple of other guys screwed it all together flat on the ground and then, with a few other people helping, lifted it up into place. Much to my surprise and relief it didn't fall to bits. The relief was short lived because in my anxiety to get the thing up I had forgotten to organize any way of keeping it up when (if it ever) it got there. A few moments frantic running around followed as we improvised some bracing so we didn't have to have people standing behind it holding it up for the whole run. Then we got to have a look at it completed for the first time. First thing Ilona said was "It's bigger that I thought it was going to be - is it too big, do you think?"

Andy and Ilona make Ross and Paul walk
about being Very Scottish on stage while
they contemplate the relative bigness of
a cardboard mountain.

Other highlights of the day (you may want to skip this next paragraph Ilona) include Paul (Sound engineer and heroically conciousness and love struck Redcoat) mentioning, in passing, that he really aught to start learning his lines. I responded by launching into one of the speeches I had learned yesterday.
That's great." he said, "Where does that come?"
"I'm not sure," I said, "but I know I'm saying it to you."
"Really?"
"Really."
"I have to read the script again. Don't I?"

And I have to stop mangling a line in the middle of a speech I give just towards the end of the play - just before the massacre scenes. Finally, with the order to kill everyone in sight in my grubby little mitt, my character launches into a impassioned rant about what a rotten lot of murdering thieving bastards the MacDonalds of Glencoe really were and how they had raided his family lands the year before. Somehow the line keeps coming out as "They burned all the cattle and stole our houses!" A surreal image which might distract ever so slightly from the tragedy that follows.

"Take that you cattle burning bastard and where's my Winnebago?"

Another Micro blog tonight as I'm getting an early-ish night. Tomorrow I have to be in Fort William early-ish erecting the half-painted scenery I constructed earlier in the week, and which I have to stand in front of in four days, wearing a radio mike, and, I hope, speaking the words I have been dunning into my head all afternoon.

So, to save my face on day two of DaGlo Pablo, please lend an ear to darling daughter number two who, at the tender age of three, has more natural comic timing that I ever will.

Overheard this morning:

Daisy (Singing):

A, B, C, D, E, F, G...
(pause)...
...W, X, Y, Z...
Now I know half my ABC,
won't you sing along with me...

Tomorrow: Tales of set-construction, swearing and other arty, temperamental stuff.

Seven Little Guys Called NoBloPoMo

Well, Write More Fucking Blog Month* gets off to a flying stop. I am just going to bed, having just been woken up from being asleep on the kids bedroom floor for an hour and a half. I fell asleep while reading them a bedtime story. It's not yet 10 pm. Who ever thought November was a good month to do this - when half the computer owning world is suffering from having their internal clocks buggered about with by the weird, and possibly pointless, transition from Summer Daylight Saving Time to Winter Pouring Daylight Down the Drain and Dumping it Out at Sea Time - needs their head examined.

Good Night all.





*A rallying cry inspired by the famous Australian meat marketing slogan of "Eat more beef, you bastards." The standard by which all advertising should be measured.

I've Been Robbed.

This weekend we went down to the big city to meet Brain and Di for the afternoon and I finally got to see what they have done to The Kelvingrove in Glasgow. The Kelvingrove re-opened eighteen months ago after an extensive, and expensive (£27 millions quids worth of expensive) restoration. I love the Kelvingrove. It's a magnificent building, a high Victorian basilica of the arts and a monument to the stinking richness of the city at the time it was built. A hugely impressive and solid building, it used to be stuffed full of treasures from all over the world eclectically displayed, sometimes oddly juxtaposed by time and random acts of curation, but full of goodies and oddities. It was, in short, a marvellous place to go and look at things and marvel at the ingenuity and creativity of the human race of the all the ages from all over the world.

What it is is now is a series of coffee shops with a kids' playground strung between them.

They spent 27 million quid fucking the place up. It is terrible. There's no room to look at anything and often no way of finding out what it is you are trying to look at. Most of the wall space seems to be taken up with laminated signs telling you fuck all about anything but asking "How do you feel...?" about this that or the other. The galleries that used to be stuffed full of paintings, and furniture, and sculpture, and artefacts of every kind are now stuffed full of patronising uninformative notices and grandiose display cases that are more about showing how smart and clever the twats who redesigned this place are, than showing to best advantage anything that they may contain. They are so busy interpreting everything for you they don't let you see anything. My lowest point came when I was presented with a glass case full of armour (most of it unlabelled) - at one end of the case was, for no discernible reason, a pair of arms from a suit of armour and underneath them was, for an equally indiscernible reason, a stuffed armadillo. Then I got it. Arms + Arms + Armadillo. Oh, ha bloody ha. They must have pissed themselves with self-congratulatory smugness when they thought that one up.

The kids needless to say loved it. It was full of things to push and crash and flap and squeeze. But so is everywhere else these days. If everywhere turns into a huge feely bag for five year olds where are they going to learn about all the other things in life that are important. If every museum is reduced to the level of the Early Learning Centre with interactive brightly coloured plastic and patronising Janet and John notices, how are they ever going to learn about stillness, and awe, and respect for the arts. If all art is is a bit of background decoration upon which to hang a 'Hands-on Interactive Learning Experience', where are they going to learn about beauty and the sheer overwhelming gobsmacking joy of discovering something wonderful for themselves? How are they going to make the thrilling discovery of hidden treasures if there are only two over-interpreted objects in every room?

The Philistine fuckwits who did over the Kelvingrove wouldn't know an artist experience if it bit them on the arse. Take Dali's Christ of St John of the Cross for example. I'm no great Dali fan myself - too much of the chocolate box painter / showman made good for my taste, but people like him and the Kelvingrove's painting is a famous work of his. So famous in fact that it features heavily in the museum's literature. Why then is it stuffed in a corner with two huge spotlights shining on it? Spotlights which reflect so brightly off the glass, that you can't get close to the painting and see it? It is just a terribly piece of hanging. There are others. Avril Paton's equally iconic (in Scotland anyway), wonderfully voyeuristic painting of a Glasgow tenement block, The Window on the West, is hung way way too high. Far higher than it was in the Glasgow Museum of Modern Art where I last saw it. The only reason it is hung so high is because the structure of the building means there is a stone dado in the way of hanging it any lower. It's in the wrong space. The viewer's eye line needs to be level with the top floor of the block for the painting to do its work, not halfway down the building. Hanging on the wall next to The Window on the West is a massive, floor to ceiling painting. It looked interesting. I would have liked to have been able to step back and look at it - but I couldn't, because there was a huge Janet and John book disguised as a 'learning zone', or some such shite, plonked directly in front of it - which meant you couldn't do anything other than look at the bottom of the the painting and stare up at the rest somewhere near the ceiling, and so it went on, and on etc. etc. etc.

It was a depressing experience. It's crap. The whole place is crap. It didn't used to be. And I feel robbed.

27 million fucking quids worth of robbed.

I think I need more sleep. I have just spent an hour giggling myself stupid mixing this out of tracks found over at wfmu.org. I'm not sure why, but it just had to be done.

In a fit of script avoidance. (Must learn Archibald Cuningham's impassioned - but mercifully short - speech for the Lament show tonight. Loads of bile in a heavy costume) I have signed myself up to NaBloPoMo which stands for National Blog Posting Month - A blog entry a day for the whole of November. Why? No idea. I just liked the sound of 'NaBloPoMo'. Sounds like a Spanish artist: Nablo Pomo. You must have heard of him, used to go drinking with Picasso and Dali. A great practical joker, Pomo used to turn Dali's canvases sideways on the easel when no-one was looking. Sometimes Dali would be so wrapped up in his work he would continue for hours and only notice his friend's little jape when the painting was completed:

"Pomo, you great twat! You ruined my picture! This watch I painted, it goes round a corner now. It looks like it's bloody melting!"

Other times Pomo would sneak into Dali's studio and tilt his easel back a little bit more each day.

What a wag.


So. November. Blogging every day sounds a lot more achievable (and worthy) than NaNoWriMo - National Novel Writing Month. 50,000 people have signed up to that one. Does the world really need fifty thousand more novels? Maybe I should start NoMoWriMo. No More Writing Month, where no-one writes anything. Nobody types anything at all for thirty days, no-one witters on drearily about their kids' talented drooling, no-one inflicts their 'poetry' on anyone else, no-one struggles with that difficult second novel. No-one writes ANYTHING for a whole month. Apart from shopping lists and notes to the milkman. I think that would be allowed.

We might all get some reading done.

I'm going to cheat and count cartoons as blog entries.

I hate advertising. Always have. I turn the sound off during the commercial breaks on the television and then go for a piss (whether I need one or not) so I don't have to look at the pictures - I take the remote with me in case anyone else in the room is tempted to turn the volume up in my absence*. I don't listen to any commercial radio, and throw junk mail straight in the bin unopened.

Over the past few days I have finally realised what it is about the bloody stuff that I loath so much. All advertising is designed to make you buy something or, at the very least, feel good about some 'Brand' so you will buy something off them later - or not mind if they do something really shitty in a Third World country because well, they did do those funny adverts with the monkey after all, so how evil can they really be.
There are various ways you can be made to buy something. You can be made to want it because it will make you feel better. It will make you happy if you use this product or that. Or you could be persuaded to want something because evil things will happen if you don't. Paranoia advertising - "Look at all those fucking germs lurking down your kitchen plughole!" stuff.

Or snobbery. "People will sneer at you if you haven't got the new cool technological gee-gaw in your pocket." - or, even better - "If you get the new cool technological gee-gaw in your pocket NOW! you can then you can sneer at THEM!", That will make you feel better "Ha! Ha! I'm officially cool You're not!" and you'll have a nifty up to the minute do-dah which you won't know how to operate properly but everyone will be jealous of it and you for at least three weeks - till it becomes obsolete.

The one thing all advertising seems to have in common (and I feel really dumb for only having really worked this out at the tender age of 48) is that to be effective it has to make you feel unhappy.

Advertising is all about identifying people's miseries then dangling the magic carrot that will cure them.Advertising is all about telling people they are sad, lonely, miserable, depressed ugly and stupid - then selling them the cure.

I don't know how many adverts the average person is exposed to during the day but that bombardment of negative messages must have a qualitative effect. I don't need overpaid 'Creatives' telling me I'm shit.

That's what my family is for.


*This is a total lie - but a good idea.


Meanwhile if anyone has a copy of the original of this they can lend me, I WANT!

Any film that has dialogue like:

"Follow our example, Comrades!
Unite into a family of workers in a
Martian Union of Socialist Soviet Republics!"

has to be worth a look.

The full 100 minute version is, by all accounts, a total chore to watch but the Martian sequences look extraordinary. Especially the battle towards the end. I remember the 1950s American remake Flight to Mars being a total turd. And I don't remember there being impassioned speeches about the dignity of Labour and the Rights of the Proletariat, lumpen or otherwise. It was all running around corridors with zap guns, and girls in short skirt heaving their interestingly large 1950s pointed Martian boobies (well maybe not a total turd) at hunky square jawed Space jocks.

The other day while laying the fire, and reading, as you do, the month old newspapers that I was scrunching up before laying the sticks. I came across this gem of a letter in The Sunday Times. It was in a section of the letter column devoted to pouring scorn on Germaine Greer for an article in which, I'm guessing here, she had the temerity to suggest Diana Princess of Wales didn't walk on water, didn't cure the sick with a glance, and may well have gone to the toilet from time to time like the rest of us. From the general tone of the letters you would have thought Ms Greer had accused The Sainted Diana of being someone who regularly snorted pure heroin off the nipples of prepubescent girls before pummelling kittens to death with a meat tenderizer. Most of them were just the sad outpourings of lonely people. One of them just made me laugh,

Power Play: What a pity Diana died when she did. Had she survived to inspire the men of our nation, our rugby team would be winning every match and the war in Iraq would be won.

Ken Wilson
Manchester

I suspect this was written tongue firmly in cheek just to see if the paper would be foolish enough to print it, but it wasn't hard to see the ten year dead, simpering, Hug an AIDS orphan, anti-landmine, people's Princess as some sort of British boy's comic cartoon hero. Smashing the Taliban with one hand, and, with the other, kicking the winning conversion in the Six Nations Championship before nipping off to the showers with Johnny Wilkinson and the rest of the team*.

Sort of like Tupper 'The Tough of the Track' who used to appear in 'The Victor' when I were a lad, a working class hero who would eat vast quantities of Fish and Chips, probably fought Germans with his bare hands "Achtchung! Die Englander!" but always made it back, despite all the odds, to win the Three Peaks Race in his bare feet - but with tits and a tiara.

What's the point of all this? I have no idea, except for the past day or so I have had the nagging desire to do a comic strip in which Diana does just that; Diana of the SAS blasting her way through hordes of Kalashnikov wielding Taliban with her trusty British Tommy Gun while barking out lines like "Like eat lead, yah? You Ragheads, Okay? Cool!" Before jumping in her trusty British Harrier Jump Jet and whizzing back to Twickers to run out with the England team and thrash the Froggies 53 - 51 after a nail-biting climax.

I am so tempted...

*Okay, I'll give you that bit. I can imagine that bit - her climbing into the showers with the entire England rugby team - I don't want to, but I could. If I wanted to. Which I don't. (I also know you don't kick rugby balls with your hands, either of them.)

Don't Say "Bungee Jumping Mermaid!" - That's Rude!

I sometimes wonder how some people manage to make it out of bed in the mornings without straining their brain.
This afternoon I was in the queue for the till in the village shop, loaf of bread in one hand bar of chocolate in the other, it's a small Co-op with tiny Post Office (pronounced 'po - stoffice' round here). In front of me in the queue was a lady of middle to advance middle years who I didn't recognise (i.e. almost certainly a tourist) and behind the counter was the new lad, I don't know his name, who is friendly and helpful but still finding his way around. She is attempting to pay and he was having trouble with her card.

He stabbed at a few keys on the till. Shook his head and apologised. "I'm sorry. The system hasn't recognised the card, could you put it in again, please?".
She pulls out and then reinserts her card. He waits for a moment. But it's obvious from his expression that the same non-recognition thing has happened again. I can see the doubt on his face. I can see him wondering whether it something he has done, or hasn't done. Should he call the supervisor? He decides to have one last go.
"I'll cancel the transaction," he tells her, "and we'll try again. Could you take your card out again, please?"
He presses a few more buttons on the till as she removes her card. The queue has grown in length by now, and those of us who can see what is going on are exchanging typically British "tut tut, I don't know..." type micro-eye contacts. The rest who are around the corner next to the crisps and can't see what is going on, probably assume that someone up front is buying a Lottery ticket, a process which any time I have seen it acted out, seems to take the entire shop staff, several keys, and a lot of apologising, "The machine is usually a lot faster than this, the lines are slow today. Was it a Lucky Dip you're wanting?"
The lad finally gets the amount re-entered into the till and asks the woman to insert her card for at least the third time. She slides it into the machine. Still no joy. He is feeling awkward. What's he supposed to do? He's new on the job. He's never encountered this situation before. He's just on the point of saying something when the woman pulls out a twenty pound note and some loose change. " I'll have to pay with cash." she says, "I don't know my PIN number for that card anyway..."

I am getting really worried about me. The other day listening to some Radio 4 remix of the Desert Island Discs format I heard this brilliant piece of music.. I mean it really knocked my socks off and about half an hour ago I downloaded it.
I love music. I don't know a lot about it (but I know what I like) and I am in constant awe of friends like Chaz who understand what keys are and what to do with them, and can make music. I've always had eclectic musical tastes (thanks, Pa!) and have never been a great fan of any particular type. Back in my student days I still managed to listen to Steve Hillage, Gong, and all that other Hippy - "Ooooh take me on magic trippy teapot ride!" - druggy stuff and alternate it with loads of Bang your head on the table, "Gonna cut my liver out and nail it to your door" punk (other druggy) stuff, depending on my mood (enhanced or otherwise).
These days I flit from old Blues, to Techno, love mashup, Enrico Morricone, and minimalist composers like Glass, Reich and Nyman. From time to time I will have short crazes for Jazz or Baroque organ music but Never. Ever. In my entire life did I think I would ever ever ever! listen to...

Bert Kaempfert.

Bert K, it turns out, had earned his place in musical history by being the first person to pay The Beatles to go into a recording studio, but his album Swinging Safari makes me want to upgrade him. It's a work of pure genius. It stands in direct ratio to my usual cheesy listening as a great slab of honking, live Roquefort does to a individually wrapped Baby Bellette or a sterile slice of Dairylea. It is wonderful. I want more!

And it got Popcorn out of my head!

When I think of all the Bert Kaempfert LPs I have idly flipped past in the charity shops over the years I could kick myself. I'll be buying James Last LPs soon.

Sorting through the pictures on my phone today I came across a few that weren't of the kids, or of total strangers - the number of pictures I have on my phone of people who are total strangers is quite worrying, - or floors. I seem to have taken a lots and lots of photos of floors. I don't remember taking these but I guess I must have done - though why is a good question. (God, I hope this is my phone). Anyway, I thought I would share some of the oddness I found in there. You lucky people.

This year's Truss Award for most misplaced apostrophe
on a professionally made sign goes to:

This was from a 'continental' market in Fort William.

I just don't understand that one at all. Even if it was supposed to say "Made of Stuff" it would still be pretty weird.

The white hot heat of oil lamp technology
reaches the far north of Scotland

And finally...

I wonder what a 50% official Power Ranger looks like.


There, that wasn't to painful was it?

My brain has totally collapsed.

Last night, under the influence of god knows what impulse, I finally ventured onto the 79 versions of Popcorn page at WFWU.org. I have been avoiding visiting this page for ages because I know I have no willpower and I would end up doing exactly what I did do, which was listen to most of them in one sitting.
I listened to sixty versions of one of the most annoyingly brilliant three minutes of instrumental pop music ever. In one go. Over three hours. Everything from a capella versions, to home made midi files, to The Boston Pops orchestra and James Last to heavy, thudding Techno remixes. I have no idea why I did this to myself except, as I said, I have no will power. All day today, anything and everything anyone has said to me has been filtered through a background soundtrack of be bo be bo biddy boop. Be bo be bo biddy boop. Be bo be bo de bo debo debo de bo biddy bop...

Tonight, in a desperate attempt to Be bo get this be bo insidious musical mega-meme out of my bo biddy bloody boop head, I tried to think of a tune even more annoyingly infectious with which to exorcize it.

Cue the muppets:



Mahna Mahna - do do de doo doot - Mahna Mahna - do do di doot!

Be careful what you wish for...

After only a few minutes Googling, looking for other versions, I discover that Mahna Mahna was originaly written by an Italian composer called Piero Umiliani - for the soundtrack of a 1970s Swedish porn movie??? Dear god, NO! The images that that conjured up were just so disturbingly weird. The thought of vast numbers of hearty, Swedish hippies bonking along to 'Mahna Mahna - do do de doo doot!' in glorious hand-held 16mm pornovision was just too much.

I seriously have no space left in my head to think. It's all full of Popcorn and Mahna Mahna getting mashed up together: bo be bo biddy boop, Mahna Mahna, bo be bo biddy boop...

In 1951 Alfred Bester wrote a classic SF novel called The Demolished Man in which he conjectured a police force with detectives able to read the minds of suspects. The villain of the piece wants to commit a murder but knows that the first copper who came by would be able to pick all the details of the crime right out of his head. To avoid this happening he deliberately gets the world's most annoying jingle, stuck in his mind. 'Tenser', said the Tensor; 'tension, apprehension, and dissension have begun'. His plan is to mask his thoughts from the prying telepaths by having this annoyingly insistent crap in his head drowning out all other thoughts . Right now I know what he felt like.

Be bo be bo biddy boop.
-Mahna Mahna
Be bo be bo biddy boop.
-do do de doo doot
Be bo be bo de bo debo debo de bo biddy bop...
-Mahna Mahna

Only now that I just went and thought of 'Tenser', said the Tensor... I now got that stuck in there as well -

Right that's it. I'm off to bed with a pile of arch-minimalist Steve Reich's CDs (stuff like this) and see if I can wipe my mind's music buffers clean- before I go totally do-lally.

I must decorate more often. After weeks of not having a decent cartoony idea, I was starting to get worried that I had run out of gags. This week I have spent two days painting the kitchen and come up with half a dozen of the buggers in two afternoons. There is something about the monotony of painting a white ceiling even whiter that lets my brain go into freefall, hit the comedy trampoline which lies deep within me, and come back up clutching a wee nugget of funny.

Like This:


This one came as a shock. I've had the pencil drawing of this in my notebook for some six months now and I would look at it from time to time while deciding which of my many half started ideas to work on next and every time I saw it I would be filled with vague dissatisfaction - because the idea was good, but it wasn't funny (a major failing in a cartoon). Suddenly, yesterday, out of the blue, while I was washing up, not having thought about it for weeks, I knew what the joke SHOULD be. Wham! No warning at all. I had the wording reading "Walk for your lives!" instead of "Walk Away! Walk Away!" and I had the joke. It was suddenly funny. I didn't change anything else. I can't remember what I was thinking about (if anything) while I was doing the washing up but it wasn't anything to do with cartoonery. I rushed upstairs to get the idea written down before I forgot it.
When I came back down again three minutes later, feeling more than a little chuffed that I had finally solved this nagging little problem, I got another funny idea. Totally unrelated and fully worked out. Two gags in one day. Yipee!

Today I had another five.

What the hell do they put in emulsion paint?

Spiders...

I've been annoying spiders for a great deal of today. I've been cleaning the windows. A job I eventually drag myself round to doing once every couple of years when the light levels inside get so low we have to wear head torches to eat our tea and Merriol starts dropping some of her famous really heavy hints:

"Liam, remember when light used to come out of those rectangles on the walls?"

Post Hoc rationalisation for my not doing cleaning the windows all this summer (and I must remember this for next year) being that there were lots and lots of spiders living in our window frames. I'm not scared of spiders; quite the oposite, I like them. Spiders eat midges. This is a good thing. Some people buy expensive gas powered machines to kill midges, I just encourage huge numbers of spiders to live in my house. Now it's getting later in the year and the midges have gone for the winter (packed their tiny little suitcases and fucked off to Ibiza or wherever it they go between September and April) the spiders have outlived their usefulness for a bit, so I have been downsizing the local population. I would especially like to downsize the one that frightened the crap out of me in bed the other night. There I was, happily lying there reading some trashy SF novel, when, over the breast of the duvet hill on my chest, charged this spider the size of a small hamburger on legs. I swear to Darwin this thing was on a mission. It was heading straight for my throat, its master's instructions still ringing its ears:

"Go, my little eight-legged friend. Kill, Kill, Killl!!!...!"

I screamed like a girl, threw the duvet to one side, and leapt out of bed. I stood there for ages, bollock naked, book in hand, ready to whack the fucker, wondering where it had gone. I still have no idea. I've not seen it again.

Other highlights of the week included finding I had (literally) poured god knows how much heating fuel down the drain by not tightening up a nut when I bled a valve on the heating system five months ago. I should have checked on this at some point during the summer but never did get round to it, partially because the nettles around that part of the garden had grown to over two meters in hight (that's over six foot in Earth money). I generally stay away from scarily huge, diesel powered weeds.

I wonder if there is any link with the scarily huge spider?

Oh bum! Now I really have pressed most of the buttons in the bad monster movie fuelled part of my imagination (ie most of it - though there is a small portion that thrives on chocolate). Now I'm not going to be able to get sleep tonight. I mean this is how most monster movies start out: an accidental spillage, seemingly trivial incidents that slowly add up to form a larger picture which only become clear when Timmy the adorable terrier is discovered lying dead beneath a quivering six foot plant that WAS ON THE OTHER SIDE OF THE HEDGE THIS MORNING!!!!

Oh Crap.

I haven't got a dog.

I wonder if I can borrow one.

My Leg's Gone Fizzy

Today was my birthday. Happy birthday me. I am now 48 and my handy inferiority-ometer informs me that by the time he was my age Mozart had now been dead for 13 years.

I need a new yardstick by which to measure my lack of achievement over the last near half a century.

Five minutes Google time later:

By typing "Didn't start writing until he was" into the search box, and reading through the first few hits, I discovered that Raymond Chandler didn't start writing until he was 45, and didn't publish his first big commercial sucess, The Big Sleep, until he was in his early 50s. He went on to win two Oscars.

That'll do me. My inferiority-ometer is now off the Mozart standard and is now measured in 'Chandlers'. Gives me at least another ten years before I have to start feeling guilty and dissatisfied that I have not produced some monumental world shatteringly famous opus. But by then who knows - in a decade's time I may well have done that thing (and stop laughing at the back there - it's my birthday. You're not allowed to laugh at people on their birthdays).

I spent most of the day locked in a room with Mike writing lewd jokes for the first half of the village panto and trying to work out what the hell we are going to do in act two. By the end of the day we had blocked out the whole thing. We now know roughly who does what to whom and where - we have no idea why any of this stuff happens apart from it getting us from where we are now, to where we want to be (ie gleefully typing the words 'THE END') with as many opportunities for silliness and childish lewdity as possible.
I just hope I can remember what all our hastily scribbled notes and 'joke ideas' were when I get to work on it again sometime tomorrow because our incredibly elastic deadline is, even by the local West Coast of Scotland, relaxed, "Ach fuck it, we'll get round to it soon enough", standards is getting a bit tight (basically we have started rehearsals and only have half a script).

I was tempted to throw a few of the choicer moments from what we did today up here but I know Ilona, our director, sometimes reads the blog, and I didn't want to get to the next rehearsal to find she had blue pencilled half the lines before I had a chance to see people go pink as they read them.

Lucy, our princess, went a lovely shade of pink the other day when she finally got the joke about a Mongolian Porn Star being called 'Attilla The Hung'. A moment I shall treasure for a while. I mean, getting sixteen year olds to blush these days is some fucking achievement let me tell you.

My Knees Feel Funny

It is a week since my last public blogging. A lot of that time was spent in bed feeling like I had been run over by a bus and very sorry for myself. I had what is commonly known as Man Flu. It's just the same as the normal everyday flu that women get, but with added whimpering and overacting.

On Thursday Holly to go her first school trip to the Sea Life Centre down towards Oban way where she got to be brave with real life starfish and bought Daisy a present from the shop.

On Friday she came out from school babbling about Jesus and how we should talk to him and how he is everywhere...

WHAT!?????

Let me explain. I don't do God. At all. I have never done God. Neither have my parents, nor does Merriol. God, and all talk of Goddy things, Jesus, Holy Spirits, Giant Flying Spaghetti Monsters and all the other big sky fairies is noticeable absent from our house. (Thinking about it The Giant Flying Spaghetti Monster is probably mentioned most often around here) . I have varied over the years from utter indifference as to people's belief systems, to standing and heckling Bible thumpers on the street, and all points in between. At the moment I'm towards the 'don't give a damn as long as they don't fucking annoy me with it' end of the spectrum but I also know I don't want my kids Bible thumped until they have the mental tool kit to take on board what religion (ANY religion) is all about.

It turns out there had been an assembly at the school and one of the local Ministers had been in preaching at my kid ( he didn't single Holly out I think this was a scatter-gun preachifying).

What pisses me off about this is we were given no warning about this. No one asked us if it was OK to have our kids preached at by one of God's local franchise holders. The same day as this happened she also came home with a medical history form to fill in. 'Has your child had the following shots?', ' Does your child have any allergies?,' Is your child missing any bits we should know about?' That sort of thing. At the end of the form was a small consent section asking our permission to weigh, measure, and check her eyesight etc. We were to sign if it was okay with us that that was done.

So the school has to ask our permission to do measure how tall Holly is but doesn't have to ask if we mind having some outside visitor filling her impressionable little head with one of several hundred (if not thousand) unproven Bronze-age Creation Myths which may or may not conflict with any particular unproven Bronze-age Creation Myths we might subscribe to at home.

Apart from anything else this puts me as a parent in the position of wanting to tell my child to ignore what people in school tell her because they are wrong. It's hardly good start to my child's education for me to tell her her teachers are talking rubbish.

Luckily Holly has an imaginary friend - who she knows to be imaginary - this gives me a quick and simple way to explain this Jesus thing to her and, incidentally, a great deal of hope for her future. She is five and knows her imaginary friend isn't real, which is a fuck of lot more than a lot of 'grown-ups' appear to.

I'll go back to utter indifference as to people's belief systems soon. It's better for my blood pressure.

Merriol has some of the girls over tonight for a fun evening dressing up as nurses, drinking, and watching Green Wing, a baffling medical comedy show which she adores but leaves me cold. Having booked my place on the first bus to hell with my latest cartoon over on The Other Place, I'm off to bed after having been up till three am last night drawing it (I know it doesn't look a like a lot but I ended up with a dozen layers on the bloody thing). I also wrote a joke for the panto at about 2.30. So the night wasn't a total waste of time.
So to bed. I've pointed Firefox at good old freeform Station WMFU, plugged an extension cable onto my good old 70s style BIG headphones (can't stand those things that screw into your ears and get clogged up with earwax), then trailed the cable through to the bedroom. This should cut out most of the raucousness from downstairs. I can only hope that, at whatever time she finally stumbles into bed, Merriol doesn't trip over the cable and accidentally rip my ears off.

We have mice again. I really hate mice. I don't mind them playing outside and doing micey things in the fields, and riverbanks, and doing the whole Brambly Hedge, Beatrix Potter thing but when they come in my house and start chewing my wiring and pooing on my floors. No. Not having that.

For the past few nights I have been putting down traps and waiting for the deeply satisfying -'Clunk!'- as they trip followed, I hope, by a tiny stifled squeak. Sometimes I get the buggers, sometimes not. I'll come down in the morning to find the trap tripped and the bait gone but with no sign of any stiff rodents lying around. I have been using chunks of milk chocolate as bait but as of tonight I have started using tiny pieces of Snickers Bars on the incredibly small off chance that our mice might have a severe nut allergy and will snuff it from anaphylactic shock somewhere.

I really hate mice.

Strawberry Flavoured Conversation Chewing Gum

Sorry, but it's time for my quarterly 'Buks what i have red,' dump

June

1. The Seed of Earth - Robert Silverberg
2. A Rose for Ecclestiastes - Roger Zelazny
3. Decade of the 1960's - Ed. Aldiss & Harrison 'Classic' SF shorts.
4. War Reporting for Cowards - Chris Ayres . Genuinely Laugh Out Loud "How I ended up as a war reporter" madness.

July

1. Gentlemen of the West - Agnes Owen.
2. The Valley of Statues - Robert Holdstock
3. Kingdoms of Elfin - Sylvia Townsend Warner (This is turning into one of those read every couple of years books. It is delightful.)
4. Tara - Terence De Vere White

August

1. Moondust - Andrew Smith. Subtitled 'In Search Of The Men Who Fell To Earth' a fascinating read which recaptured my childhood sense of wonder at the whole Apollo program - despite a couple of obvious factual inaccuracies.
2. Authentic Science Fiction - Not very good 1950s SF
3. Say, Darling - Richard Bissell. Funny backstage novel. I now want to read The Pajama Game to find out what it was all about.
4. Hieroglyphic Tales - Horace Walpole.
5. Welcome To The Monkey House - Kurt Vonnegut.

I have only read 13 books in the last 3 months. This is pathetic.

And Movies:

June

1. The Lost Continent - Cheap Lost World knock off containing footage lifted from (Dear god! Noooooo!) Rocketship X-M
2. Lady Ice -Dull Thomas Crown wannabee that seemed to be have been made by filming Donald Sutherland on holiday.
3. Counterblast - 1948 British 'thriller'.
4. The Hound of The Baskervilles - Hammer films, l love 'em, total tosh but great total tosh.
5. The Phantom Planet - dreadful early 60s 'SF'
6. The Bride of the Monster - Ed Wood Jr's second greatest bad film with some truly inspired weird acting moments from Bela Lugosi.
7. Rancho Notorious - Great title! Fritz Lang, Marline Deitrich. and Cowboys. Odd.
8. Dark City - gorgous comic book nonsence. If you ever watch it keep the sound down until the watch shows 12, as it has one of those dreadful tacked on pre-credit narrations that fuck up the whole mystery before it starts.
9. The Dresser - Tom Courtney. What a brilliant performance and this is one of the reasons I don't watch good films. I was was an emotional wreck at the end of this movie. I have to stop watching films about long unexpressed love. I've seen two recently, Cyrano and this, and I was snivelling wreck at the end of both of them. Hanky jobs both times. I'm going back to watching androids fighting; cheap 60s SF movies don't make me feel life an emotional dishrag at the end.

July

1. The Dark Crystal - a cuddled up on the sofa (or in daughter number one's case behind the sofa. "It's a bit scary.") wet Sunday afternoon movie which was not as good as I remembered but it kept the kids hooked.
2. A Scanner Darkly - weird and interesting (and funny) but how did they let continuity errors get through in an Animated movie?
3. Prayer of the Rollerboys - in a future world, only one man stands in the way of formation rollerblading, drug dealing, fascist street gangs in white trenchcoats and Flock of Seagulls haircuts - and that man is... Corey Haim. As bad as it sounds.
4. Withnail and I - I laughed
5. Goodbye Lenin - I cried. The great thing about watching so many crap movies is that when I get to see a good one it really goes to work on me.
6. Jimmy Neutron - Boy Genius - CGI animated kids nonsense, and like a lot of animated kids nonsense a lot funnier and better made than most movies for adults.
7. Attack of the Killer Tomatoes - Stupid fun.
8. Wild Women of Wongo - I had never actually seen this classic piece of drek before. If I have, I had forgotten every frame and after it was finished ...
9. Voyage to the Planet of Prehistoric Women - it was 'Women Night' on the Crapmoviethon sofa.
10. Attack of the Monsters - Space Bimbos! Giant Space Turtles! What's not to like? Best Line of the movie: "You're right, we'll eat their brains after we've fixed the ship."
11. I Was a Teenage Werewolf - (MST3K) This movie didn't have any best lines.
12. Samson Vs The Vampire Women - (MST3K) My first encounter with a Mexican wrestling Horror movie - a strange genre, and an experience I shared with Phoebe in Portland as she took a break from painting her kitchen. I went to the movies with someone 8 thousand miles away via Skype and a bit of ad hoc synchronisation. I love the Web.
13. Confidential Report - Orson Welles at his most baroque.
14. His Girl Friday - Comfort movie.
15. Steal This Movie - OK, but not great, Biopic of Abbie Hoffman only watched because I have a thing about the yummy Janeane Garofalo and it was only a quid in Tesco's.
16. Mr. Robinson Crusoe - they don't make them like this any more. Thank god.
17. The Man Who Knew Too Much - First time I had seen the original version. Some very nice moments but not my favourite (yet) early Hitchock
18. Orlando - I love every frame of this movie (even those with Billy Zane in them). Every frame.

August

1. Cabaret - Liza Minnelli - perfect! Joel Grey - brilliant! Oh but dear god why did they cast Michael York? Tomorrow Belongs To Me gives me the shivers.
2. I Heart Huckabees - What a pretentious, self-indulgent pile of crap! I hope this lost whoever made it a LOT of money.
3. Raising Arizona -
   
4. Paycheck - total turd of a movie. Pointless, explosion-ridden expansion of an adequate, but not that good, Philip K Dick short story.
5. The Return Of The Four Musketeers - almost good.
6. Django Against Sartana - Tinned Spahetti Hoops western.
7. Witchfinder General - A genuinely one-off piece of movie making. The nearest thing (that I know of) to an English Spaghetti Western. Great stuff.
8. The Amazing Transparent Man - (Note to self: Avoid Science Fiction movies made in Texas in future - especially those shot in only one week flat.)

That's it. You can breath again now.

Today's great totally non-surprising discovery: I chanced upon this site tonight. It's a site dedicated to Electronic Ambient Music. Always open to the delights of new music - especially if it is free, as this lot is, I had a listen.

'Electronic Ambient' turns out to be the sort of pointless, tuneless, invisible stuff that plays in the background of games like Myst. It's all vague and dribbley electronic ooooooooooaaaaaah and gentle gongs and bucketfuls of echo. Pointless pseudo Spiritually-uplifting musical Prozac that makes the inane Celtic drivel I ranted about a while ago sound like Satan Ate My Puppy Thrash Metal. It's the sort of stuff you don't notice until it stops.
After a few minutes of increasing boredom I tried playing several of the tracks simultaneously - and found it made no difference whatsoever. It was amazing. It sounded exactly the same! Okay, maybe it was slightly louder, but it was certainly no more interesting. Normally when you play two pieces of music simultaneously it either sounds dreadful or, if you are very lucky, weirdly mashed up funny. I added a few more tracks and it started to get a bit more interesting but hardly anything worth bothering to repeat. (I suspect the only interest I was finding in it was wondering just how many tracks Firefox could play simultaneously without crashing.)

How can you play seven pieces of music at the same time and still not get any discords?

I think I may have just invented the world's most pointless art form, and, as its only current practitioner*, I can tell you that 'Electronic Ambient Mashup' is the only kind of music yet discovered that is improved by the interruption of Windows error alert sounds.






* 'Electronic Ambient Mashup' gets zero hits on Google so I claim this art form as my own. It's mine! I am the Godfather of EAM! and if I could be bothered I'd write a manifesto - then stand up and mumble it gently to myself.


.

Lack of bloggerising round here at the moment is down to trying to get the Panto into some sort of presentable shape. Or at least the fifty percent of it that Mike and I had already written.

I'll rephrase that.

Or at least the fifty percent of it that Mike and I though we had already written.

For one reason and another we haven't really been working on this a lot recently and stopped at the end of Act one. When, the other night, I finally got round to thinking about giving it a quick read through before printing it - I found I couldn't find it. I found various earlier versions but not the finished finished first act I remembered having last worked on. One everso cold-sweaty, slight panic later I found it on a laptop I had forgotten I own - only to realise, as I re-read it, I was supposed to have written an entire new scene to get some plot points in, and complete the final scene which sort of just dwindled away to a

So, for the past few nights I have been up till stupid times of the early hours of tomorrow trying to be funny. Some jokes came - when the kids are asleep and there are no distractions I can hear what's going on in my head they will come - "Type them, and they will come..." but I gave up trying to get the plot points in and just ended up having one character say to another:

"Hand me the piece of paper with all the exposition on it."

Which he then proceeds to read out.

As it was this turned out to have been a good idea because

a. people laughed on the read through, and
b. all the exposition he reads out has to be changed.

The scene as written has to be moved nearer the front of the show, and yet another scene added in its place to get the love interest in much earlier and make the baddy badder. I would have been spitting feathers if I had spent all those hours seamlessly weaving that exposition into the dialogue only to have to start all over again.

A night off, then back to the funny mines tomorrow night. Let's see what's happening over on the BarbieCam...


BarbieCam

I personally believe... it is dead scary that people applauded at the end of that, and that she will have the vote soon.

Merriol is away for a couple of days. Some NHS wallah has just discovered a rich new seam of previously undiscovered paperwork and has called together doctors and practice managers from all over the country to dump it on them. So my poor missus is far from home tonight, languishing in a "not very good" room - somewhere in here:

Dunblane Hydro

I'm sure I've seen this place in a bejillion movies doubling for castles all over the world (OK, Europe*) and in every genre of movie (bar Westerns - I don't remember any Westerns with castles in them). This place has four stars and the 'Free' facilities include Indoor Pool, Jacuzzi, Sauna, Solarium, Gym, and 24 hour room service! How come when I go on the road I end up in windowless converted garages with mad landladies who decorate each room of their houses with three different, clashing, wallpapers and the sort of insanely ugly ornaments you only ever see in Bed and Breakfast places in this country? I work for the wrong people I guess.

I became convinced last time I was on tour that there was , circulated only with the closed and closely guarded ranks of B&B owners, a catalogue from which they could order the ghastly crinoline lady toilet roll covers, ugly gold-rimmed lampshades, strange ceramic and crystal sculptures of dolphins, bad paintings of Scotty dogs, and all manner of things decorated with frogs! By god there are a lot of froggy things in Bed and Breakfasts in Scotland. Some of this stuff was so ugly it makes Argos crap look tasteful.

My other fantasy about this was that Bed and Breakfast owners regularly sneaked (snuck?) into each other's houses at night and planted these ugly things to make the competition look bad, but because they had all been at it for so long they had totally lost any grasp of whatever critical faculties they had in the first place and didn't notice any more that all their own houses looked like the Land That Taste Forgot.



* and I was so tempted to Photoshop in a lightning bolt into that sky...

...and drape a few of those long red Nazi flags down the front for good measure like some bad 60s war movie with Lee Marvin in it.

A weird half-tank half-armoured car thing zooms up the gravel drive to the front door where it stops with a screech of well-maintained brakes. A uniformed officer of the Third Waffen Ubergrupenngschaftenmeinenzeit, steps down from the running board and slaps one leather gloves onto his crisp black jodhpurs. A uniformed flunky runs towards him from the house.
"I am Reichvicemarschallgesentinbumsfassenfuher Schmitt of the Third Waffen Ubergrupenngschaftenmeinenzeit," roars the new arrival, "I wish to speak to your Commanding officer."
"Yes, Reichvicemarschallgesentinbumsfassenfuher Schmitt!" The flunky salutes and hurries off.
Cut to interior. The office of Reichsmarschallinsebensschtummer Hans Faltermeister. The Flunky enters:
"Reichsmarschallinsebensschtummer, there's a Reichvicemarschallgesentinbumsfassenfuher Schmitt of the Third Waffen Ubergrupenngschaftenmeinenzeit to see you sir."
"What! Reichvicemarschallgesentinbumsfassenfuher Schmitt? Here?"
"Yes, Reichsmarschallinsebensschtummer."
"Well, Untermarschallinsebensschtummer, you had better show him in..."

Meanwhile across the channel, Somewhere in England, the same conversation was taking place in a different language.
"Captain! there's Lieutenant Dick Smith to see you, sir."
"What! Dick Smith? Here?"
"Yes Captain."
"Well sergeant, you had better show him in..."

You see where this is going don't you? The Allies won the Second World War not because of any spectacularly wonderful planning, or because the American had more money, or even because we were right and Nazidom was an evil monstrosity that had to be destroyed (still does), no, the Allies won the war because a great chunk of it spoke English. It took half the time to say stuff in English. The grammar was a great help too. Putting verbs at the end of the sentence is not a good idea in emergency situations

English: Shoot that tank, over there!
German: Over there, that tank shoot!

The English shells were half way to their target before the German guys had been told what to do. "Ah! You want us to shoot them!" Obviously that is a silly simple example but anything more complex - possibly involving clauses and the English speaker is at a natural advantage. Indeed the average native English speaker doesn't normally listen to the second half of any sentence at all, all the good stuff is in the opening.

By the time Reichvicemarschallgesentinbumsfassenfuher Schmitt had, later in the movie, finally finished saying: "For you,Tommy, the war is over!" It was over.


I've no idea what all that was about but I think I'm glad to have got it out of blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blahblah blah blah blah.

Did You Just Put A Magnet Up Your Bum!?

As of Monday this week both Holly and Daisy go to school. (Pictures over on Merriol's Blog). I have been looking forward to this for ages. Much as I love my daughters to bits it is sometimes hard to know how children so small can occupy so much time and space. I've been looking forward to this week for ages because it meant that I would now have some time in which to do something above and beyond the basic "Keeping Everything Under Control and Cooking" which is all that I seem to be able to do at the moment. Currently a good day is when the place doesn't look quite as shambolical in the evening as it did in the morning. Real gold medal time is when I actually get to finish the things I list in my head I have to do during they day.
With Holly in school all day and Daisy away for the afternoon I would be able to think about larger projects like painting the bare plasterboard walls that didn't get finished when we built the upstairs four years ago, like getting to grips with the tottering piles of books and magazines in the office, like finishing the script I should have completed three months ago. Stuff like that.

The trouble is that for the first 4 weeks of the term Holly isn't at school all day. I found this out to my crushing disappointment only last week so had to immediately shelve any idea I had of actually achieving anything this month. Holly goes to school in the morning. Daisy goes to school in the afternoon. This means that I have to get Daisy her lunch, and get her up the hill by 12.30 to meet Holly coming out of school. We then kick about in the playground for fifteen minutes till Nursery opens then I take Holly home and feed her her lunch. If you add in dawdle on the way home time, unavoidable chuntering to Mums at the gates time, chitchat with teachers time, lost shoes searching time etc. etc. lunch, which used to take an hour, now takes two. By Holly going to school I actually have less time during the day than I did before. And, because when Holly is at school she can't play with Daisy, and vice versa in the afternoon, they both demand even more of my time because they haven't got each other to distract them.

Three weeks to go...

I hope I make it.

So, back to the trip to Glasgow we did a few days ago...

We arrived back in the village at the same time as our latest load of Couchsurfers phoned They too had just arrived in the village -all six of them. Mother, Father and four kids. (They have five but they left one at the airport, or at home with the grandparents, or something.) We got them to our place, offered them a cup of coffee - they don't drink coffee - or tea..

Okay, calm slow breaths, I've got six Mormons in my kitchen - and I invited them in...

I make them Roobush tea (it's caffine free), we chit chat for a bit and then, suddenly with no warning, they all go to bed. In my living room. This is about ten o'clock, about three or four hours before I usually even think about sleep - even as an abstract concept. If you know the layout of my house you are thinking "Oh no!", or "Oh dear!", or something similar. If you don't know the layout of my house, let me explain:

Our house is a converted old single room school. You walk in through the front door into the kitchen in the centre of the building with stairs up to the bedrooms. A door in the Kitchen leads to the Living Room which occupies the end third of the building. In the far corner of the Living Room is another door which leads to the Bathroom containing - and here's the crunch - the only toilet in the house.

There are six people wearing strange underwear between me and the bog.

I send Mike a text, ' I have Mormons in my living room, I may need to pee at your place.'

I don't know what time Mormons get up when they aren't on holiday but he wasn't too horrified when I burst into his house the next morning yelling, "Hi Mike, I've come round for a crap!"

I have never been one for great toilet anxieties. I don't remember as a child being scared that some great poo monster was going to bite my bum and drag me into the sewers but the thought of sitting having my morning dump with the Waltons sitting the other side of the door was just too much. I just can't shit in front of an audience.

The annual nominees for this month's weekly No Shit! Sherlock Award for pointless, weird or misleading guff in any category are in.

First up is Yahoo for this bit of their sign-up for a new username routine:

Gender: (Select One) ?

It just got weirder and weirder the more I thought about it. 'Select One' Why not just 'Select'? it's a pull down menu, you can only select one - and the list to select from is disappointingly short.

The second is a washing label, which I have lovingly recreated in Illustrator because I couldn't be bothered to scan it:


Apart from not understanding half of it (I have never knowingly triangled any of my washing but am now worried that I might have been unwittingly doing it for years) the instructions also warn me not to iron this item. Not that I need any prompting in that direction. I hate ironing and just don't do any, but it did make me wonder who in their right minds would need to be told not to iron a cushion?

Bats Can Smell Them With Their Ears

We did something Summer Holidayish with the kids! They go back to school next week and we finally got our act together. We went down to Glasgow to go to the "Glasgow Science Place" where one of the kids' favourite TV shows Nina and the Neurons is filmed. I love exploratory hands on science places like this, but this trip was hard work. I twatted my back last week and have been hobbling around very slowly, very painfully ever since (some days, getting out of bed has been a major and painful operation) and after two hours sat in the car both of kids had energy to burn, so, as soon as we were in through the doors, both of them were off, like rats up a drainpipe, pushing levers, pulling handles, and twisting knobs all over the place. As soon as Holly had found a brand new, ultra-fascinating, hands-on, vaguely educational thing to play with, (and I had got my head around which Basic Principle of Physics it was trying to demonstrate, but before I had worked out how to convert my high school science lessons - augmented by 30 years of 'real life' - understanding of the Basic Principle into Holly compatible terminology) she was off somewhere else whanging another lever back and forth, making another set of magnets bang into each other, leaving me to creak back onto my feet and stagger after her.
I soon swapped her for Daisy, who was a lot more biddable and a bit slower on her feet. At one point we encountered some of those giant distorting mirrors that used to be big fun at fairgrounds in the days before sophistication set in. Daisy loved them, "Look! I'm fat!" - and I have to admit so did I - not because they made me look fat, I don't need any help in that direction, but because for a second in one of them I saw Daisy stretched tall and thin. She didn't look like the cute little three year old girl at my side at all. I was seeing her as she will look when she she is eight or nine. It was a very strange moment. I was as if I was looking into the future. As she ran off to peer at her self in another weird mirror my back creaked painfully and I farted, both loudly and noisomely, and I thought "...and this is what I will be like when I'm eighty..."

Eva's Day

Yesterday was good.
Eva's ashes were scattered under the small tree in Mike and Morag's back garden. Words were spoken, a poem was read, drinks were drunk, and people were hugged. I got to wear my kilt and get introduced to loads of people I will never meet again. I sat, talked, played with the kids, and gave Mike a hug when he needed one. It was, strange to say, a good day. A sad one but good.
I think it has helped.

Just before the moment when Mike and Morag planted the tree and scattered their daughter's ashes beneath it, a camera was thrust into my hands by Morag's brother-in-law who had to go help them. They both wanted loads of photos of this moment and I had, at a moment's notice, been elected to take them. It was a very odd, unsettling, and unpleasant feeling. I took the photos, with part of my brain in automatic phototaking mode - trying to frame the picture so that no one's heads were sticking out of plant pots and moving to get clear shots without having someone's ear filling half the screen - but another part of my brain was feeling incredibly uncomfortable, as if I was intruding , taking pictures of my friends on what was a very sad, personal moment. Though I knew they wanted the photos taken, it somehow felt very - wrong.
And, even as I was taking the pictures, I realised this is what press photographers do every day. All those photos we see in the papers taken in war zones and disaster areas, the endless streams of images of death, illness, and despair, someone has to take them. I wondered how they do it, how they distance themselves from what they are seeing and take the photos they have to. The very nature of what they do means they have to look at the unpleasant and distressing much more closely than many of us could imagine. I wondered how they cope - I also found it pretty amazing how much thinking about the totally abstract I can do when feeling incredibly uncomfortable with my situation. Don't think about it, just do it - and if you do have to think, think about something else! Maybe that's how they do it.
Having that camera in my hand did remove me from the moment. Having a task, a role, something to do I was, for those few minutes, an observer of the event when I really wanted to be a participant.
I was glad to hand the camera back so I could join everyone again.

Topology for 3 year olds:

Me:
Do you want me to cut your
burger into pieces for you, Daisy?

Daisy:
Yes please.

Me:
How many pieces do you
want me to cut it into?

Daisy:
One...

It has not been a happy weekend. Our good friends Mike and Morag lost their baby on Saturday. The baby was several days overdue but, as far as everyone knew, healthy. Both Morag's boys were born several days late so no one was unduly concerned. Morag started labour on Friday night and went to our local hospital in Fort William. The contractions stopped, but that is is not uncommon. The baby was still moving well. On Saturday morning the baby's heartbeat became faint and Morag was rushed up to the Raigmore hospital in Inverness. The baby died on the journey.

It is hard to think about, though I have done little else over the last couple of days, and I'm finding it almost impossible to write about. For the amount of time I have spent going over this in my head I find it hard to put anything down that makes any sense. It is bewildering. I have no scheme of things to fit the death of a baby, I suspect very few people have. I am angry, confused, frustrated, bewildered - grieving. I'm glad I have never believed in god, because if I had I would have been burning down a church by now. There is nothing to say. Merriol and I have both been bursting into tears most of the weekend and I can't begin to comprehend what Mike and Morag must be feeling. They are the best people. They didn't deserve this. No one does.

Eva Anderson Pitt

28th July 2007

Loved







.

Space Chickens Are Chickens in Space

Gah! Gerk! Pfui! - and other noises of disgust and annoyance. My sleep patterns are all ballsed up again - all my own fault.

Tonight, after a long day frolicking with the kids and trying to persuade them at meal times that bread pudding is wonderful - which it is - I think I just need to find a sexier name for it. 'Bread Pudding' just doesn't have "Mmmmmm-yummy!" written all over it. I really like it though. It's good old British stodge, the sort of food that made the Empire great and constipation a national obsession for a hundred years. Working class, frugal food, the major constituent is stale bread and, cheapness and ease of manufacture aside, a favourite of mine. I wish other people in this house liked it too - because I made a hell of a lot of it yesterday. Half a fridge full.

So, to get back on track, tonight, after this fun-filled day moving stuff around the house trying to make it look smaller and trying to convince the kids to try some of their cultural food heritage by burying it under custard, I flopped in front of box to watch, for a change, a good movie (or at least not a Teenage Lesbian Vampire Zombie Bikers From Outer Space Vs Gozilla's Evil Twin Sister 2* type movie) . I chose to watch Confidential Report a deliriously weird, Orson Welles flick. One of those ones he kept adding bits to as and when he had the money, wherever he happened to be in the world, even if it meant having to rewrite great chunks of dialogue that had already been shot. For half of the movie no one's voice is saying what their mouths are. It is a very strange, very funny, very odd movie. I love it to bits.

I fell asleep within 10 minutes. And woke up several hours later unable to move my neck, with the DVD starting over again.

How is it I can stay riveted to incoherent tosh about Belgian kick-boxing aliens and fat Japanese men in rubber suits belting the crap out of each other while standing on a model of Tokyo but anything of any quality sends me into a drooling stupor? I've gone wrong. I need my critical faculties rebooting.

So now it is 2 am. I have just spent 2 hours drawing a loaf of bread for a cartoon that isn't that funny anyway. At least it won't go stale.







*obviously the original, not the remake. The remake was crap.


.

It's My Turn On The Ghoolie Thomas!

It was Daisy's birthday last week but we had a little party for her on Sunday. Some of her friends from playgroup and mums came round. The morning was spent frantically tidying the house and preparing food.

Daisy decided that, as we were having a party, we needed some party decorations.

So she carefully and diligently spent half an hour -

- taping an octopus keyring to the front of a drawer.

I am in constant awe of my kids. I spend hours fiddling with 'jokes' for my cartoon blog and other laborious attempts at humour which may or may not find their way into people's ears and eyes, and just when I think I have come up with something I am really happy with - like this over on the Toon Blog - Holly or daisy will do something so utterly surreal it makes my head hurt.

Just like the Tax Office:

Eight identical letter received from the tax office on one day.
Four for me. Four for Merriol.

The piece of paper on top of the left hand pile is actually an other half-formed, quickly-scribbled joke which may, or may not, find its way into people's ears and eyes.

It reads:

"And the Three Kings came unto Jesus.
But Luke had a Full House and scooped the pot."

Can't work out how to turn that into a cartoon, or how to work it into the Panto. I just may have to drag it kicking and screaming into a blog entry someday.

But not today.




Meanwhile could I point your bookmarking fingers at http://www.the-junk-monkey.com/ which is the address of my metablog. An easier and faster way to get to the Cartoon, Merriol's, and a couple of other worthy blogs (including Phoebe's). It's rough at the moment but works (a beta-meta-blog?). I will improve on it when time allows. (A better-beta-meta-blog?)

I forgot how long it takes to get anywhere around here in the tourist season so, despite having set off in good time to get to the Fort, we are a good fifteen minutes past the time of the kid's appointment with the dentist as we arrive in the nearest car park.

I'm not in a good mood having spent the last 15 minutes swearing silently at the tourist bus and camper van doing a steady 35 mph along a road I usually zip along at 60ish. Actually it got quite fascinating watching the camper van brake at the corners. I don't know what he was up to but he consistently braked (broke?) very late at every bend - quite often at the point that I would normally be starting to accelerate out of it.

We arrived at the car park. Drove into the space right next to the ticket machine (Score! 15 seconds saved!) and found I had no money... I searched the car and found a quid and some other coins in the guddle bucket in front of the gear stick reserved for old sweet wrappers and CDs. Hurrah! Saved.

Notice on the ticket machine.

£1.50 for one hour or part thereof. £20 fine for non-possession of ticket.

Bugger! Damn! and Blast!

So I'm standing there with £1.27 pence in my hand and I find myself asking Holly if she has any money. And the sweetheart looks! She's five years old and on the off chance she has a few coins in her pocket she starts to look. She has no concept of money AT ALL - other than it's round and the Tooth Fairy seems to think it's worth teeth. I don't think I have loved her so much as I loved her in that instant. Needless to say she didn't have anything. So I ended up scribbling a note and shoving it under the windscreen:

Late for Dentist. No cash. I'll get change and buy ticket when back! Promise!

The dentisting was done in minutes and on the way back, standing in front of an ATM, I discovered I didn't have my cash card with me.

Dear Highland Council
IOU £1.50

Next time. I promise.

Happy Birthday Daisy!

Daisy was three today.

To celebrate, Merriol came home from work to have lunch with us and help Daisy open her presents - or at least be there while they were opened. Holly was more than eager to get in there and start ripping off wrappings. This is the first time Merriol has been home for lunch for ages. Shortly before she arrived back from work Fraser from over the road arrived waving his laptop, desperate to get an Excel spreadsheet printed. This was turning into a bit of a saga as his laptop has Vista and doesn't recognise his printer - and I couldn't get his machine to save the spreadsheet into a format my pooter would recognise to enable me to print it off on the printer here.
Merriol is the village Excel goddess. Fraser, a builder by trade, is damn good at putting in showers.
Two hours later Fraser has his documents, we have a working shower, and I understand how agents feel when they put a deal together.

No news today from the Lakeland Product Query Team. I am disappointed and worried. Disappointed they haven't got back to me and worried that, from his secret underground bunker, Ernst Stavro Lakeland has dispatched a team of highly trained Lakeland Ninjas to deal with me. They are probably sitting in a large cardboard box waiting for the carrier to pick them up at this very minute.

Mister Plastics has responded (after a nudge) to my pedantic email the other day asking if a Lakeland Plastic product really was 'Completely chemical-free' as advertised in one of their catalogues:

Dear Mr Baldwin

Thank you for your email, and I am sorry we did not get back to you earlier. The Ant Stoppa Tape is chemical free.

As always, if there's anything else we can help you with, please do let us know. You can email us at net.shop@lakeland.co.uk or call our friendly customer services team on 015394 88100. We're available 24 hours a day, seven days a week and will be happy to help.

Kind regard

I reply:

Hello,

Thank you for your reply, it was very fast. You say in your mail
The Ant Stoppa is 'chemical free' not 'completely chemical-free'.

Could you confirm it is 'completely chemical-free' as it says in
the catalogue?

Liam Baldwin

Their turn:

Dear Liam

Thank you for your reply.

I can confirm that ,according to all the information we have here ,the Ant Stoppa Tape has no chemicals in it at all. It works as the basis of being a double sided adhesive tape and as the ants cross it they will stick to the glue.

I trust this helps and as always, if there's anything else we can help you with, please blah blah blah...
Kind regards,

Blah Blah
Customer Services

NO chemicals at all?

Hello,

Again, thanks for your quick reply. Nice to know the system works - I wonder what happened to my first mail?

I find it extraordinary that you say "Ant Stoppa Tape has no chemicals in it at all". As I understand physics, every material thing in the universe is made of chemicals of one sort of another.

There must be some chemicals in this stuff - unless, of course, you are selling an empty box.

ARE you selling an empty box?

Liam

This evening I got this:

Dear Liam

Thank you for taking the time to get in touch with us about the Ant Stoppa Tape.

I've passed your email on to our Product Query team. They'll be in touch with you shortly with more information.

Presumably the Lakeland Product Query team (now there's an idea for a TV series) will go and open a few boxes and find out.

I will keep you informed.

This week's TV pick

Tuesday Channel 5 11.45 pm - LPQ: Miami
Lakeland Product Query Team spin off series. Flashy camera work and dramatic music, as week by week a mixed bag of actors who couldn't get jobs on Torchwood get to the bottom of Tupperware related mysteries.


.

Occasionally, when I'm bored, I play a game called Inventing Confusing or Pointless Metaphors and Similes To be Used in The Staggering Work of Genius Novel I Am Determined To Write - One Day (But Not Soon). Today's winner was:

Pissing up a one way street.

I have no idea what it means - though I would guess it depends on which end of the street you are standing at the time - but it made me laugh.

But then again I think THIS is funny. No, wait, I'll go better than that I'll say it is very funny. It has to be the funniest thing I have heard in ages. I literally cried with laughter when I heard it.
You don't need (though it helps) to know it comes from an LP called The Two Pete's - Live At The Ever New Montague Arms recorded in 1981. The Two Pete's (sic) comprised "a blind keyboard player with more synths than Rick Wakeman and a drummer with a kit matched in scale only by his beard." This is their assault on 1970's standard Macarthur Park seguing into the ever brilliant Popcorn for a bit. I love both bits of music. They are both pieces of near indestructible kitsch; no matter what you do to them they come out the other side just as perky and clean as when they went in. These guys bash the hell out of them...