However, on the way home, I managed to mug a random American for a luminous orange plastic torch with ‘jesus is the light…’ written on the side. Just what I never knew I wanted. Fantastic.

All I need now is WWJD underwear. That would complete the collection.

I’m going away for the night. Dinner and that. Back thursday.

x

How exactly, is it fair, that whenever I meet somebody fun to flirt with, whenever I meet somebody that I can talk to endlessly and well, how is it, exactly, that these are always the same people that are leaving in two days.
Or only here for a day trip.
How does that work, precisely?

I’m not expecting an answer here.
I just wanted to ask the question out loud…

1. some lady falling through a glass door
2. said lady being taken away by air ambulance at 5am
3. in a power cut
4. with her face being held together by elastoplast.
5. A damn good disco
6. the buds of three brand new love affairs (it is spring, after all)
7. A slightly unhinged man that had to be escorted off the island last year arriving on the island again, again without his medication, and making sound effects all the way through the Sunday morning communion service. Again.
   Reader: “And Jonah went to sleep in the bows of the ship”
   Strange man in the back row: snoring noises
   Reader: “while a great storm raged outside…”
   Strange man in the back row: whooooosh! whooosh!
   Reader: “And Jonah woke up…”
   S.m.i.t.b.r: *bagpuss type yawn, long, leisurely…*
   Reader:“The sailors all rejoiced”
   S.m.i.t.b.r: ‘Yay!’

You see, if I’ve no clear direction or content, it’s only because nothing ever happens to me.

It all happens while I’m down in London.

Perfect dialogue summing up to weather around here.
Rain and wind have been battering us all winter. And for all the talk of early springs and this shaping up to be the hottest year on record, rain and wind are still battering us. Good weather is to be treated with suspicion, as it’ll probably be replaced by wind and rain within the hour.

So, a passing conversation between two locals this morning…
“Lovely day…”
“Aye. Not sure how long that‘ll last, mind…”

It’s great, you can be happy about the sunshine. Just don’t get cocky.

It’s not fair.
I always have to be the man.

I love dancing. I love ceilidhs. I know the dances, the steps, the best way to spin, the little flouishes that look really pretty as you dance, I know which I dance best with which people, and which are reserved for one person in particular, which you can talk through, flirt through, laugh through. And which you have to just shut-up and dance.

Every monday there’s a ceilidh here. Some weekends too.
And I always have to be the man.
Not always. Usually. If I’m doing the proper thing, and dancing with the guests, it helps if I lead. Or if there are no men available - and bearing in mind that 7:1 ratio, there probably won’t be - someone has to know the dance well enough to adapt to the men’s part.
I’m sick of being a man.
I’m quite obviously not a man. I have lumps in all the wrong places, for a start. And I’m wearing a skirt. And I can multi-task.
And women get to spin, to turn, to waltz on the tips of their toes…

I’d like to be the woman for once. Would anybody like to dance?
(Gosh, but that sounds suggestive. Sorry.)

In a change from the traditional ‘lying in fields looking for shapes in the clouds’ exercise, today I sat in the clouds and looked for shapes in the fields.

Staring out of the window from Stanstead to Prestwick, I watched the patterns of the different coloured fields below and tried to fin some sign or symbol in them… ‘Was that an ‘E’? And there, right near it, an ‘r’?’… And that could very well be a sign. I mean, I like ‘er’ , I like it a lot. So perhaps that was a sign that the fields were talking to me. ……‘And that’s an ‘A’…. That’s me! ‘And there, an arrow! Which way is it pointing? Which way are we going? We’re going in the direction of Scotland. So that must be west! I should go west, apparently. Or perhaps it’s just a marker for lost planes, not lost people.

I saw several other letters (k and f among them), something that resembled a sofa, and a large alien’s head with a talking duck behind. I’m not sure what that meant. I’m sure a talking duck & alien must be a symbol of something. But what?
I shall look to the clouds…

Does the Pope always kiss runways, or was it just the once?
Does he still? No. I imagine he probably doesn’t.
And why did some random man do it when we touched down in Prestwick this morning?
Something to do with the Pope? Was he the Pope? He didn’t look like the Pope.
Was it the whole Elvis thing?
Did he have to do it right at the bottom of the stairs?
Did he not realise that his symbolic act of homecoming might trip people up?
Tired people, yawning, and not looking where they were going?
Maybe?
F***tard.

Shit. I’ve got a train to catch…

Blogger has decided you don’t need to read about how many trains I missed, connections f***ed up, check-ins I made by the skin of my teeth, and nice window seats I secured all the same.
Blogger has decided it was all far too long winded.
Blogger was right. Well done blogger.
It was arse-wrenchingly dull. Lucky you, you missed it.

Lookit! New design and everything!

Too wet for tourism, too tired for shopping, so we redesigned the site.
Well, I say ‘we’. I mean meg.

She did the designing, I just made the tea.

Well, I say ‘made the tea’, I made one cup, and that was so bad, I wasn’t really asked to make any more.

I did draw the pictures. But Meg did the rest. Because she’s great.
Lookit! Isn’t it cute?

‘Ladies and gentlemen, the guard is passing through the train, please have your tickets and railcards ready for inspection.’

And the door opens at the end of the carriage. A tired looking woman with limp hair, no lust for life and a crumpled blue uniform steps into the narrow gangway between the newspapers and knees.
With small, sad, passing glances at outstretched tickets, she strides through as best she can, and the door bangs at the other end of the carriage less than 30 seconds later.

I’m sure there was a time, or at least, I’ve heard tell of a time, when the ticket inspector inspected your ticket. Perhaps it was merely myth. I know I’ve read about it in books.

A time when the conductor would come along, take your proffered ticket in a wrinkled but kindly hand, study carefully the date, and the destination, and eventually turn to you, with a gentle grandfatherly smile, and say “oh, nononono, young lady, dear oh dear. No, you see, you’ve picked yourself the wrong train here, lassie, this one’s going entirely the wrong direction for where you want to be going, oh yes, dear oh dear oh dear. What are we to do?”

Those times are now sadly passed, and gone. Which is a shame. Because that would have been a useful thing for someone to have said to me at that point.

Still, luckily, I’d left myself an extra couple of hours to get from Glasgow to the airport.

I just hadn’t realised what I was leaving those extra hours for. It turns out they weren’t extra after all. They were for seeing Lanarkshire. Which was lovely.

Two favourite things that parents have apparently told their children about Ice Cream Vans;

“No darling, that’s the tune he plays when he’s run out of ice cream…”
and,
“Oh, listen, darling, there goes the Music Van again…”

but like most ‘I heard a parent say to their child’ stories, they’re probably bollocks. Shame.

I was confused. It was a Co-Op. It sold other staples, bread, milk, toilet paper, the like.
But on the beverage shelf, something was missing.

There were Tea Bags. There was Hot Chocolate. There was Ovaltine. No Coffee. None.

Resigned, I took my paper to the till, thinking I’d pop into the next shop - Hell, it’s London. It’s a big place. Somewhere’s got to sell coffee… - And there it was. Amongst the spirits, medicines, and tobacco, there was the coffee. Behind the counter.

I asked why, and was given a simple answer. “It gets stolen, more than any other product. More than alcohol. So we put it behind the counter.

So there I was, made to feel like the addict I am.

“Excuse me, have you got any”- sniff, shifty look -“…Kenco? I need some. I need caffine, have you got any? I don’t care if it’s Nestle, I’ve got cash. It’s not decaff? Is it?”

I wonder if decaffinated gets lifted quite so often…

People - and by people I mean people I know, love, am usually great friends with - laugh at me. Because I choose to live in a place with an extremely high incidence of weather. We have a lot of weather, where I usually live. Much. And wet. We also have the most hours of sunshine of anywhere in the country, but that is, admittedly, usually accompanied by winds that can take the skin off your face.

Sometimes it’s very lovely.

It’s very lovely up there right now, for example.
While I am in London. With hail, and 20mph winds.

hmm. Either the God of Sunshine hates me, the God of wind is woo-ing me, Or I am, myself, a small shite-weather-deity.