The Occasional Papers

A morning walk to the Fossil Grove to commune with pre-history.

I’d seen the fossils once before but Samara had not and, every time we’ve tried to see them together, the bloody place has been closed.

There’s something funny about setting out to touch Deep Time only to find it closed. “The Eternal is not accessible today due to staffing shortages. We apologise for any inconvenience this may cause.” Of course! The bloody council! * waves fist *

Anyway, we finally saw the fossils today and they really are something. Evidence of life on Earth some 325 million years ago. I mean, come on.

I was distracted from my sense of deep time only by the fossils’ passing resemblance to Linda Barry’s magic cephalopod. Look:

On the train, a trio of wretched-looking youths were hunched at one end of the carriage while a group of glowing young mums chatted at the other.

Samara and I sat at the centre of the carriage and, suddenly, a baby’s bottle half-filled with milk rolled speedily past us from where the healthy young mums were gathered, all the way down the aisle to the ratboys.

It landed stopped rolling at the feet of their leader who picked it up and sniffed at it. He looked gloriously bewildered for a moment before returning it to a thankful mum.

“It’s a sign,” I told him.

“Blerg,” he said, and squirted Weil’s Disease squarely into my face.

Later in the afternoon, I’d get my own sign from the babygods when, at a barbecue, a little koala-like baby dragged himself along the lawn and used my leg to pull himself unsteadily onto his feet.

I touched the back of his head in an investigatory and hopefully-affectionate way. It was like a warm cantaloupe.

I was slightly drunk and unsure of what to do about this stranger’s child potentially pulling my trousers down, but his father soon came over to rescue us both.

“Don’t you think the world is overcrowded as it is without your sexcrement running all over the place?” is precisely what I didn’t say. “And why is your face so blurry?”

At least, I don’t think I said it.

I like barbecues.

I’m looking forward to seeing this.

I agree with Stewart’s Brum-baiting remark that Birmingham “has a great history of rejecting its culture.”

As well as rejecting the King Kong statue featured in the film, another fibreglass statue–“Forward” by Raymond Mason–was never popular, on the grounds that it optimistically and apparently irreverently depicted Birmingham’s graduation from heavy industry.

It was finally incinerated by vandals 2003. A sibling sculpture survives contentedly in my other hometown of Montreal.

I like the Nightingales a lot (I treasure memories of Robert Lloyd singing loudly into my wife’s tiny face in a Glasgow pub basement) and, of course, I have much love Michael Cumming and Mr Stew.

As it happens, the last time I trod the Rotunda-shadowed streets seen in this trailer was to see Cumming’s own Oxide Ghosts at the Arena Theatre in Wolverhampton last year.

It was a deeply nostalgic trip: I’d performed at the Arena a few times as a student (most memorably as “a demon pouffe” in a daft version of Anansi Spider Stories) but Wolverhampton was also where, agog, I watched Brass Eye and bonded with others over it, and set my sights on a lifetime of nonsense.

On the same trip, I was shocked to learn of the refurbishment (the DEVASTATION!) of Mr Egg, a late-night lifesaver near to the Glee Club.

Stewart Lee has mentioned Mr Egg somewhere and, oddly enough, Richard Herring refers to the refurbishment in his podcast this very week:

“I was hanging out at Mr Egg the other day… just late-night, having a bit of an egg… the original Mr Egg was there, not the new one, the original Mr Egg, the good… the proper one.”

Anyway. Yes. I find myself earnestly hankering to see King Rocker. I email my Mum to ask if she remembers the King Kong statue from its six-month Bullring residency in 1972. She does! She also remembers it being in Edinburgh.

The ape seems oddly familiar to me (and there’s apparently a maquette in Wolverhampton Art Gallery) but, alas, I do not consciously remember it from either location, despite their significance to me as places.

Gentlemen. If you have the urge to hula-hoop in the nude, oblige it. But know that you’ll remind us all of some chewing gum caught in a ceiling fan.

To Liverpool to see my parents. They don’t live in Liverpool; I just didn’t want to go to Dudley and they didn’t want to come to Glasgow so we meet partway.

At the Walker Gallery, we see Glasgow Museums’ travelling exhibition about Charles Rennie Mackintosh. It feels a bit silly being there when Samara and I essentially live in a Mackintosh theme park, but we see plenty of archival items that aren’t typically on display in Glasgow. I think about my pals in Glasgow Museums boxing up these treasures up and loading them into the van.

I’m disappointed that Dad at no point says, “Ohhh Rennie!” with reference to ‘Allo ‘Allo. He spots a Blackadder in the list of names on a war memorial by the Mersey though so not all is lost.

In the exhibition, I’m taken with a Talwin Morris ex-libris bookplate. It reads, “There lyeth more in ye telling than in ye tale,” which I like. “Style over substance,” is a tedious criticism, isn’t it? It’s Sontag or bust for me.

We retire to a pub and talk about how Mum doesn’t like The Beatles. She keeps speaking with her mouth full. She used to tell me off for that.

Not for the first time, I feel bad that my mum saw her baby slowly transmogrified into a weird, awkward man who lives so far from home. But when I see the Kenn Dodd statue in Lime Street station, I realise it could have been worse.

Dad points out that the statue version of Doddy’s tickling stick looks like a revolving column of doner kebab meat. It does too.

Wanting to get my eczema fixed, I attend a clinic this afternoon for a long-overdue “patch test.”

This should involve having adhesive patches applied to my back, each one instilled with a common allergen: wool, polyester, dust, gorilla saliva, etc. I’d then endure them for three fun, fun, days before reporting to a dermatologist to see which materials must be expunged from my world.

In the event, my skin is too eczematic to conduct the test. It doesn’t seem particularly bad to me, but the nurse says the test wouldn’t be conclusive and I’m to come back in two weeks to try again.

The fact that my skin doesn’t feel particularly bad to me at the moment is a little troubling. Apparently I’m in state of allergic reaction so perpetual that, to me, it just seems normal.

So now I’m in a state of Allergy Catch-22 in which I’m too allergic for the test that will allow me to escape the reaction. Bloody hell.

Ever since Peter introduced me to the pre-installed app in my phone, I’ve had more than half an eye on my daily step count.

I wish this weren’t the case. I’m a flaneur by nature and step-counting is hardly of the ethos. But it’s also in my nature to be quite obsessive, and anything involving personal data capture appeals to me on a level deeper than sense.

Last night, I knew I’d be walking from our home in the West of the city to a bar in the East and then back again. This is a longer-than-usual walk so I felt confident of wracking up around 16,000 steps and being able to say something triumphant along the lines of “who, precisely, is your daddy?”

Imagine my despondency then, when on the way home in the early hours of this morning, I look to the app to marvel at my step-based treasure only to be met with the paltry number 1,700.

What Peter didn’t tell me is that the bloody thing resets at midnight. I suppose now this should have been obvious, but I hadn’t thought of it. Modern life is cruel.

Still, the 5,000 steps I technically earned before breakfast this morning can hardly be complained about. Now then. Where do I cash them in?

I’m out for a walk this afternoon when Samara texts me something about how we need more exercise. We’re putting on weight since I became a full-time writer again last year and Samara quit a physically-demanding job for something more desk-based.

I’m about to reply with “I like big butts and I cannot lie,” when something makes me stop. I realise that the person walking in front of me has a huge, entirely-likeable butt.

While this is firmly outside the boundaries of all reasonable likelihood, my catastrophising brain decides not to type this text message after all. It would be just my luck to drop the phone and for it to go skidding along the street only to be picked up by the big-butted pedestrian and for terrible, misunderstanding-based outrage to follow.

You other brothers can’t deny you’d have done the same.

Reggie emails first thing this morning purely to say, “they should have cast Bruce Willis in Die Hand Die Verletzt.”

I like to think he woke up with that in his mind. A good day to die verletzt.

To dinner with Graeme and Louise. Graeme says he has brought me a present and he passes it to me over the table.

I say “passes,” but “hefts” would be a better word because the present is quite large and heavy. It is wrapped in carrier bags and jumbo bubble-wrap and I have no idea what it could be.

As I peel away the layers, Samara says, “Do you still not know what it is?” because she has clearly worked it out, but I have’t the foggiest. The only thing it feels like through the wrapping is one of those wooden shields you sometimes see in trophy cabinets, but I sincerely doubt I’ve excelled in a team game.

It’s my head.

Once I get over the surprise, I must say that it’s rather dashing. I should wear no glasses more often. Or perhaps I have aged horrifically since the photograph was taken.

It is not wood at all but a serious piece of metal. I dong it with my fork and it sings.

The head was part of an art installation by our friend Sven at the City Art Centre in Edinburgh last year. Graeme went to Sven’s studio sale last week, salvaged my head, and carried it home.

I pose for photographs, holding the head in front of my face. The couple at the next table find this amusing for some reason.

So the head lives in our spare room now, where it can keep visiting friends company as they sleep. “Not a wink,” is a phrase I expect to hear a little more often in our flat.

I’d gone out without a bag as usual, so as I walked home from the shops, I found myself juggling some vegetables and two “fishless fishcakes.”

I was already dreading the conversation if I bumped into someone I knew. Why do I do it to myself?

Coming through the park and rounding a corner, I spotted some kids fighting. Two boys and girl seemed to be duffing up another girl on the floor.

I knew I’d have to do something. Could I pick two of them up by the collar like a Beano dad? I wasn’t sure.

As I moved closer, I saw that the girl on the ground was laughing and someone else was saying “Rarr, look at those muscles.” It was all just fun! Fun was happening! Not gang warfare at all.

But can you imagine if I’d had to intervene in a brawl? Even without the fishless fishcakes to worry about?

A jaunt by train to see Greek Thomson’s Holmwood House.

It turns out to be undergoing major restoration work and it’s not quite what one would describe as “open,” but the volunteers on site let us in for a look around anyway. Disappointingly, nobody uses the expression, “caught with our pants down.”

We cannot see the upper floors of the house (though I glimpse of the famous dome by looking up through a scaffold) and we see the Greek fresco in the main downstairs room.

The guide who shows us around a little explains that the house was a convent for a large part of the twentieth century and that the nuns “obliterated” much of the Pagan imagery of Greek-o’s vision. The word, “obliterated,” makes me think of Friar Park, the English house restored by George Harrison, which is also sometimes said to have been “obliterated by nuns.”

Come on, nuns. Stop obliterating everything.

On the way home, we take a detour to see Moray Place, which was also designed by Thomson and where he lived for some years and eventually died. It is just around the corner from my very first Glasgow home on Marywood Square.

The urge to learn about Auld Greekie comes from my increasing awareness of how much of Glasgow was designed or built or inspired by Thomson. He sort-of built the world I live in: all of those columns and porticoes I see on my walks are his.

The new Idler hits the doormat. As well as my regular column this time, I have a feature about the FIRE movement (early retirement and whatnot with special reference to my old friends Jacob and Pete).

Art director Alice has decorated my piece with images of an exquisite young Greek reclined upon a velveteen olive-green cushion. She has focused on the right thing: pieces about early retirement too often focus on money. But money is only worth thinking about if the real prize is repose.

A moment in the column I had forgotten writing and am now fond of:

When the idler has “nothing to do,” we default to something pleasant like flipping through a book containing some nice pictures of ducks: hardly productive in the industrialist scheme, but we know otherwise.

The Greek boy is really something. If Alice intends this as a portrait of the person who wrote the piece, I am not going to hurry to correct her.

Coming in from work, Samara mentions seeing a minor altercation on the train. Apparently it involved “a woman with a scrunchie and an underbite.”

On my way to the cinema this afternoon, I find that I’m almost an hour early so I pop into a cafe with the intention of doing some light editing work from my phone. Just as I’m sitting down, I see that the person at the next table is Penny. I don’t know Penny super-well but I’m a secret admirer of her art and writing and, since we have some friends in common, I decide to say hello.

She’s very kind to indulge me (especially in a weird moment when I cite Grotbags as a queer icon) and the chat soon fills all of the time I’d wanted to burn. It is such lovely serendipity and does not require social media or anything for it to happen.

I think I come across as cool enough but when she asks what I’m up to next, I’m forced to tell her that I’m going to watch Apollo 11 on my own.

On one of my regular walks, past a row of nice old houses, I pass a sign that reads, in red text, “PRIVATE GARDEN: FOR RESIDENTS ONLY.”

The “garden” in question is not much more than a strip of lawn, shielded slightly from the main public pavement by a hedge. It’s a mere spit–a gossling–of unremarkable space.

Usually, when you see a “rule” like this, it usually tells a story. “No smoking in the nursery,” suggests that someone was once caught smoking in the nursery. There is, however, no way on Earth anybody has ever strayed into this private “garden” for any length of time.

It is not the sort of space that would be frequented by hooded youths, nor is it the sort of space one would think to walk for any length of time. There is nothing in it that could be vandalised, stolen, or infringed upon in any meaningful way.

The sign is an invitation into a unique and bizarre mind. “Private Garden! Private Garden! Don’t stray into the Private Garden!”

“It is a bloody garden, and it’s a private one at that! Private Garden! Private Garden! Thank you! Keep away!”

“Don’t touch it, don’t regard it in any way. Don’t bloody look at it and go taking your memory of the garden home with you. That memory is COPYRIGHT and thieves will be prosecuted! Residents only! Private Garden!”

I’ve been seriously thinking about taking some nice, red letraset and, under cover of darkness, adding a “trademark” ™ symbol to PRIVATE GARDEN™ on the sign.

What do you think? Shall I do it? Would that be a nice little prank to lightly mock the incivility of the sign-planter? Or would it upset someone and/or have the po-po raining down on me with their truncheons?

A housewife opens the curtains:

“Desmond! Someone has DEFACED our private garden sign with a letter-a-set!”

“I don’t know, Margaret, it looks rather snappy…”

“Desmond!! Oh, Desmond…. [*sex noises ensue*]… not the private garden, Desmond, oh!”

Meet Katia and Maurice Krafft, husband and wife volcanologists.

I chanced upon their incredible footage today while watching Into the Inferno, part of a Herzog bender I seem to be on. Have a look:

To be the Tommy and Tuppence of volcanology, eh? Not bad.

Hand in hand, on the edge of the sand…

Neil‘s overhaul (4.1?) of my website is DONE. Overhauled, overnight. Fabulous!

There was some chat about running with this header image and a smaller, neater version of the same. “I prefer the energy and the monster, fun-bucket chaos of the larger one,” I said.

Neil: FUN BUCKET CHAOS ALL THE WAY!

No bad credo for life, that.

It was also Neil’s canny choice to use the same typeface used on the cover of A Loose Egg.

Posts should now display properly on mobile phones and tablets and clever toasters.

To Super Bario, Glasgow’s retro-gaming pub, for a meeting with Neil about this very website. The site needs a minor upgrade, not least to make it look less dog’s-dinnerish when viewed on a mobile phone.

I learn during this meeting that the little expandable menu often seen on mobile websites is called a “hamburger menu.”

As if to reinforce the geekery of our technical website discussion, we play some two-player Pacman. Neil and I have long been each other’s Pac-nemeses. Who is yours?

I just about win the first Pac-off, Neil claiming the second by a far wider margin. We’d have played a best-of-thee but a queue of other players had formed behind us.

First in line is a teenager who I looks like she could be a serious retro-gamer who would take our Pac-asses to Pac-town. I ask if she’s good at the old Pac-a-lack-a-lack-dack, to which she says she’s quite good “but I’m not exactly of that generation.”

“Just be clear,” I say, “neither are we.”

“Yeah right!” she says.

Little shit.

Neil watches over her shoulder for a moment as she plays. Apparently she made a beeline for the nearest power pill. Our Pac-asses had nothing to fear. Pac-fear, I mean.

Because the machines in Super Bario are switched off at night, the hi scores are erased each night, which I always think is a shame as any reigning champ will have to reign in secret (even to him/herself, as you’d never know how good you were). The owners of the bar have now remedied this with a fix even lower-tech than Pacman itself: