Monthly Archive for March, 2007

no place for you to be a girl;

Published on March 27, 2007 in campaigns & charities, music and work & writing. 10 Comments Tags: , , , , .

I once said that the minute music journalism stopped being fun was the minute I stopped doing it, and today I’m taking a little moment to decide if that time is now. There’s enough in my life that isn’t fun, like council tax and the number nine bus and the fact that I can’t buy oversized Jackie O-style sunglasses because I’d have to wear my contact lenses with them and I’m usually too tired to wear my contact lenses. I’m suspicious of spin, I hate regurgitating your press releases and the cocky use of “web 2.0″ as a marketing concept on that shiny new site your record label built for you makes me nauseous. If I’m not so enthusiastic about a band that I get carried away conveying that enthusiasm in giddy, breathless tones then it’s safe to say I don’t want to KNOW.

Dan Sartain gets it. He doesn’t wanna know me or my stupid email questions either. Which is fair enough, but because he’s never got to meet me in person he doesn’t know that I’m half in love with the gut-wrenching murderous hot-blooded rampage that is the promo of his new single, and I’d love to maybe buy him a drink sometime.

So last night a friend of mine bought me dinner, and I was trying to explain to him how it’s not that I’m a music snob: it’s more that I have the attitude of a selfish child when it comes to the things that I love. Sure it doesn’t affect my own relationship with that song, or that band, if for example they’re getting playlisted on Radio 2 and other people are getting some enjoyment out of it. Even if those other people don’t recognise what they’re listening to for something that kicks me in the gut every time and lights a fire in my eyes and makes me believe in life after death and all-conquering love; that makes me want to climb mountains and sing at the top of my lungs or just get uproariously drunk with you in a quiet corner bar and dance the length of our respective ways home. I’m a brat who doesn’t want to share my toys. Or my rock boys.

“Whatever Lis, admit it, you’re a snob.”

I hate the Arctic Monkeys, but I really admire that in an effort to ensure they’re fans and not the touts get a hold of tickets for their next tour they sold them to pre-registered mailing list members only. And it guts me that said scheme didn’t work. What can we do??

Sarah managed to bring my entire office to a halt this morning as we struggled to think of our favourite words following this email:

This is on behalf of a good friend whose daughter works for a charity called I CAN, who help children with communication difficulties. They have a project called the “Wall of Words” which is running throughout March. BT Openreach have vowed to donate £50,000 to I CAN if they get 50,000 people to add their favourite word to the website, thus creating a Wall of Words one mile long, and finding out the UK’s top 10 words.

It only takes a couple of minutes to go to the website and submit your favourite word, so please do – we need another 25,445 words before the 31st March in order for the £50k donation to happen, so the heat is on and all the help we can get is appreciated.

If you add a word to the wall you also get a chance to win a satnav, although I doubt that will be a very good carrot for many of you – however, it’s the charity element that counts, and it really is a good cause and a fascinating idea.

If you’re interested, you can find out more about the work of I CAN and add your word to the wall here.

have i left my home just to whine in this microphone;

Published on March 26, 2007 in a little more personal and music. 12 Comments Tags: , , , , , , , , , , , , , , .

I’ve decided I’m going to make music, and not just because on Saturday night I was starting to get the impression I was the only person in the room not in a band. I’ve got a half-decent singing voice and a beat-up acoustic guitar that cost me twenty quid on eBay; I’m good for a couple of chords and my lyrics (when I wrote them) were always a bit crap, so it should be an interesting experiment.

I’m in a creative slump and I want to make something new. I always get a little antsy for new projects when my big quarterly deadline is approaching. I want a little bit of the prettiness of Court Lajoie, the fire of Hello, Autumn and the lyricism of Emmy The Great. And I’m my own worst critic, so none of you are going to get to hear it until I don’t embarass myself. Ha ha!

I told Kaite some time ago I was gonna write a girl-rock Letters to Cleo-esque song about her and call it “I Wanna Be Your Sidekick”, so I best get on with that.

My brother and I used to make music. We wrote a song about how much we loved the radio (and hated “Take That, rave and Portishead”) on my sister’s toy Casio keyboard and recorded it on the single deck tape recorder one of us got from Christmas. There was another time we sang a bunch of Oasis songs to tape, changing the lyrics so they were about Celtic and Rangers.

They were great wee things, those tape recorders. We had one each, identical. I remember I used to borrow cassette tapes from my local library and make mixes by pressing the loudspeaker of one against the other’s microphone. You could barely hear the music over the background hiss, and if anybody shouted up the stairs to me I had to start again.

It was a brilliant weekend, the sort I haven’t had in a long time full of fun and food and friends, samurais Spartans and the odd live band (it’s been a while). Rabies Nation‘s debut show was a resounding success: it was like getting hit in the face, repeatedly, with a dustbin lid and liking it. By the end of their set my teeth hurt so badly we had to go home.

The Shins last night were stunning. You know when you see a band and with every song it’s like “oh my God, I FUCKING LOVE THIS SONG!!!” Yeah, it was like that. And having a young gentleman serenade me with Cliff Richard songs all the way down Argyll Street – after trying to steal my sparkly scarf – made my night.

Plenty to say, no time to say it. A couple of links then: the always wonderful Charlie Brooker’s weekly column, which today is about how none of us really know anything. And, also from the Guardian: contemporary authors write six-word stories.

my paycheque is bleeding but it’s fight or flight;

Published on March 23, 2007 in a little more personal, current affairs and music. 10 Comments Tags: , , , , , , , , .

I got a bit of a shock on checking my payslip yesterday when I discovered that they have begun to requisition my student loan. The position in Scotland is that they reclaim your loan directly from your salary as a percentage of whatever you’re earning above a certain threshold. It’s fair enough, and as I’m barely above that threshold the amount that had been taken from me was the pretty minimal sum of £1, but on principle I phoned up to find out if I’d be able to defer the payments until such a time as I’d be able to afford to make a decent go of it. No can do unfortunately, as I never really borrowed that much in the first place.

(It would be a lot of money to me now of course, but as the accumulation of four years of study it’s pretty minimal compared to the extent to which most of my friends are in debt. Sometimes I curse myself for my lack of foresight and tell myself that if I had only borrowed the maximum available to me and stuck it in the bank I would never have had to get a credit card and subsequently wouldn’t be in the financial trouble I am now. This, of course, is pretty ludicrous because if I’d had that amount of money sitting in my bank account I’m sure I would have been able to come up with countless things to fritter away the cash on. Perhaps I’d have learned to drive and bought a car, and would be stuck having to pay hundreds of pounds a month in road tax and petrol and car repairs for the rest of my life. So really, it’s a mercy, even if it means my transport needs are at the mercy of Arriva’s bus drivers and my little sister for the forseeable future.)

If it seems silly of me to be getting worked up over £1 a month and whatever else it might lead to, then you might have missed the Chancellor’s Budget announcement earlier in the week. Now, I’m not really one to pass comment on levels of taxation. If you ignore the occasional jokey comment I direct towards my student friends, as a socialist I’m more than happy to pay my fair share – if a little less happy about being forced to fund the upkeep of a nuclear arsenal obviously I find morally deplorable. However, this attention-grabbing vote-attracting “tax cut” hides in it a caveat: the lower rate of income tax which we currently pay on the first couple of thousand pounds we earn above the tax-free threshold is being done away with. Essentially, what this means is that those of us on lower incomes (a figure quoted by the Metro newspaper as being £17,000 per annum, and backed up in graphical form here) will be paying more income tax and therefore taking home less money than we were under the old regime.

It’s sickening. It’s the low-income traditional Labour voters that are getting shafted rather than rewarded for their years of loyalty, to say nothing of us “young professionals” who now have to pay for the privilege of a university education that guarantees you little more than a minimum wage prison sentence as a deskmonkey or call centre operative. I hope Backstabber Brown and his cronies get exactly what they deserve on May 3rd.

*edit* This is covered far more eloquently here.

PS Your “somethings-for-the-weekend”: Alan McGee writes a blog (on Elliott Smith) that doesn’t annoy me, and this piece by Laura Barton on musical crushes (and hey, two of my biggies get a mention). And go download the first song off the National’s forthcoming album, Boxer, if you haven’t already (I’m well aware this was on every blog in existence last night).

you are coming down with me, hand in unloveable hand;

Published on March 22, 2007 in a little more personal, aff the telly, film and mmm... food. 8 Comments Tags: , , , , , , , , , , , , , .

Apparently Sarah Jessica Parker sees a nutritionist and a something-elsist every day for her skin, but those of us who can’t afford such things should buy this Garnier lotion she’s pimping in the ad breaks on Five. There’s no amount of money I’d spend to look as odd as she does though.

I can’t turn my head tonight without setting off some reaction up the side of my face, and those crunchy croutons in the caesar salad were a bad idea (like it’s my fault I can’t soften them with any of that sauce which falls quite definitely into my prohibited category of Foods That Look Like Sick (TM)). My boss tell me this is called neuralgia, which according to Wikipedia and the Facial Neuraligia Resources Homepage (yeah, me either) is essentially a painful disorder of the nerves, brought on by simple stimuli such as eating or talking. Essentially… yeah, I’m fucked. And a little more short-tempered than usual.

Last night I was sandwiched in between two identikit guys in suits, chewing gum simultaneously while equally intent on the high-tech communication devices each was holding. They didn’t even flinch when Lori phoned and I told her it was high time I gave her her underwear back. It was like something out of a latter-day zombie movie.

I’ve got to tidy the living room a little because my Small Friend Claire is going to need somewhere to kip tomorrow night after some late-night Spartan action. It seems like cheating since we’re spending this weekend giving the flat a proper, thorough clean the likes of which it’s never seen, but although my Small Friend Claire is small she is not so small that she will be able to curl up on the one corner of the sofa that hasn’t become my overrun and somewhat untidy “desk”. I’m also watching House about ten years after the rest of the world, because Roberta will huff at me otherwise.

(Apparently Jay and I have, as of today, been living together for six months. I feel as if I shouldn’t have to have these things pointed out to me, but it’s as good a reason for profiteroles as any. So yeah, go us.)

I’d bookmarked this over lunch: what is it about the little white comment box at the bottom of a blog post that brings out the morons? It’s always fun, and by “fun” I of course mean “deeply depressing”, to watch any attempt at reasoned debate on the Comment is Free thread descend into lowest common denominator insults, prejudice and name-calling. Last week Heather Mills posted about pig farming and attracted little but people calling her a bitch or asking for money; today sees Elton John’s birthday post, an awareness-raising campaign about the abuse suffered by gay rights activists in El Salvador, descend into all kinds of base nonsense. The thing is, for every comment that sickens me (particularly the rants of one individual who seems to believe that homosexuality is a condition that can be treated!!) I feel a sense of relief that we live in a society where even ridiculous dissenting opinion can be voiced – and shouted down as ridiculous where this is the case.

PS Has the Shins gig on Sunday been moved to the Barrowlands? Anybody else going?

close your eyes and wish a lot;

Published on March 21, 2007 in a little more personal. 1 Comment Tags: , , .



awww

Originally uploaded by lastyearsgirl_.

Look what was waiting on my desk when I got into work this morning!

Bit of a mental day so apologies if you’ve been trying to get a hold of me. Lola – expect email.

wait in the fire;

Published on March 20, 2007 in a little more personal, books & literature and music. 7 Comments Tags: , , , , .



end of an era

Originally uploaded by lastyearsgirl_.

Getting the dentist to agree to taking my troublesome wisdom tooth out on the spot was, it turns out, the easy part of the process. The little fucker didn’t particularly want to go! Although it didn’t quite take two strong men to restrain me while the dentist pulled and we waited for the crackkkkk that signified all was well, it felt like hours I was stuck in that chair. Having to have a third shot of anaesthetic wasn’t particularly pleasant either.

I’d gone in all full of bravado, so desperate to be rid of the thing that I’d forgotten I don’t react very well to dental procedures. I didn’t faint, but we decided it wasn’t a very good idea to go into work. I spent the afternoon huddled under a duvet on the sofa, shivering and reading yet another media history book (because I enjoyed the last one so much, this being a Napier set text I never got around to).This evening I have recovered enough to make some soup for Jay before he headed for the airport (en route to yet another work-related training course) and have been catching up on some of the CD review pile – if you like the Lucksmiths or The Boy Least Likely To, you might enjoy The Pony Collaboration. If my dictaphone isn’t in the office I’ll probably try to get some of Friday’s interview written up before bed.

Since I don’t have much reason to go into my hometown centre these days (not that I ever did when I lived there, since it consisted of two supermarkets and a coffee shop), the little changes always take me aback. Perhaps the saddest change is the closure of one of those supermarkets: I worked there in fits and bursts from my seventeenth birthday, when I was hired for £2.76 an hour after the most perfunctory of interviews, right up until a couple of weeks after I started the “grown up job” I’m in now.

There’s a whole other level of skill set required in that sort of job, which is something Fi and I were commenting on yesterday. While it can be difficult to get creative tasks done when you’re not feeling at your best (something my home and work to-do lists will attest to) I never seemed to have a problem showing up at the supermarket at 8am on a Saturday morning and getting on with a nine-hour shift, whether hungover or just lacking in sleep. Perhaps it was youthful exuberance, but more likely with customers to see to and without a computer to slump behind (until I started working in the cash office the year before I left) you just had to get on with it.

One of the best things about a smalltown supermarket is that you get to know a lot of the customers and their little routines, and over time I began to really enjoy getting to know them and their stories and they seemed to like me too. My mother was once given preferential treatment in a local shop because, or so the story goes, I had “a smile that lit up the town”. Talking to people and acually feeling as if you’ve made a positive difference in their day is what I miss most in my predominantly office-based current employment and something which, as I’m sure recent entries will attest to, I’d like to get back to doing. Although possibly not in a scan-beep-scan-beep context, and I’d ideally like to avoid manning a lottery terminal on a Saturday afternoon too.

It’s also the reason that I get pretty narked when I’m on the receiving end of bad customer service in any of Glasgow city centre’s stores. I know from experience that a smile and a bit of a hand packing bags or whatever doesn’t cost much effort, and actually makes your own day pass quicker. Contrary to popular belief, the entire shopping public aren’t complete cunts. Although a lot of them are.

Cheese alert: I’ve always said that no experience is a complete waste of time when you come away from it with at least one lifelong friend and that store was no exception. We were at the stage in our lives where a lot of the important relationships are forged, and while I don’t call the Neil-bear or Buffy as much as I ought to they’re among my most trusted. And while we’ve all moved on to other things (journalism, motherhood, other stores…) I couldn’t help but feel a pang for so many mad teenage dramas and memories and bags of chips and instore fairywings outside that stripped building which, if the rumours are to be belived, will be an Aldi or a Lidl or some other model of discounted continental efficiency before too long.

This small world of the inter nets never ceases to amaze me: you know the friend I mentioned yesterday who went on to become a dentist? He found this blog last night. And he’s going to New York next week. Which I’m not jealous about AT ALL.

oh don’t you put me on the backburner;

Published on March 19, 2007 in a little more personal and blogging & pixlet. 8 Comments Tags: , , , , , .

For want of any actual content on my part: my mate Paul interviewed me a couple of days ago about my visit to New York and you can read it and laugh at a really bad picture of me here. (Hee hee, my blog is “professional and well-written”!)

New York is currently once again under Scottish invasion in the form of some very good friends of mine, who we shall call Barbie and Ken (because it’s funny). It’s something I’m trying not to think about, since I miss the place so much.

Why so quiet? Busy, I guess. And my mouth hurts, which shouldn’t really affect my typing any – I honestly don’t post with my tongue pointing out of the side of my mouth, muttering to myself – but there it is. I’m going to the dentist tomorrow, and the fact that I’m hoping he whips this squashed little wisdom tooth out on the spot is I think testament to the amount of discomfort I’ve been under this past week or so. I’m a bit phobic of dentists, like most right-thinking people I guess, but as I came through a previous wisdom tooth removal with a (lop-sided) smile despite the horror stories my colleagues cheerfully fed me I think I’ll survive. If I keep my eyes closed. And the dentist doesn’t attempt to talk to me while I’m hiding in my happy place… I’ve never understood why it is that dentists insist on talking to you while they’re, um, working on you* and you’re incapable of much conversation beyond variants of “urnghhhhh!”

*This was the least vulgar way I could think of phrasing a process where you open your mouth while somebody sticks his tools in there – which I figured it best to say it before Jonic did.

One of my best friends in high school went on to study dentistry at uni: I remember meeting in Central Station one night on the way home from various classes, both of us laden down with a large cardboard box. In mine was four volumes of tax law – in his a human head. It was truly one of those “what the hell am I doing in law school” moments.

it’s what you thought you could be if you tried much harder;

Published on March 16, 2007 in a little more personal, aff the telly and work & writing. 12 Comments Tags: , , , , , , , , .

Yesterday I had one of those afternoons that reminded me what it is I’m doing here. It had been a sleepless night and one of those dizzy mornings that don’t really amount to anything, and then at lunchtime I got the train through to Edinburgh where I interviewed this lovely, unassuming lady for the magazine. I was listening to her story (she had won an award for, as she put it, “merely doing my job”), and eventually found myself getting caught up in a conversation about my own path and ambitions with both her and her superior. That’s one of the things I love about journalism: meeting people, listening to their particular story (be it dramatic or otherwise) and being privileged enough to put that story into words and share it with others.

I’ve never wanted to start the revolution, but one of the reasons I get too introspective sometimes is when I start to convince myself that what I’m doing has no purpose: that I’m not changing the world a little bit at a time. Although I have a particular talent for the craft, at least, of news journalism it’s something that I doubt I’ll ever be able to practice professionally. I remember my mother telling me, before I did my MSc, that she could never see me showing up on somebody’s doorstep or reporting from a war zone while bombs exploded behind me and she was absolutely right: I’m over-sensitive sometimes, and physically quite timid (I’d be too terrified for chutes and climbing frames as a child: indeed, there’s a photo of my somewhere as a little girl clinging proudly to the first rung of a rope ladder, which was as far as I ever got). I never would have survived the cutthroat, testosterone-fuelled world that was Glasgow print journalism in its heyday, if my current book (a Christmas present from Jay) is any indication.

Still, newspapers have always been… where it’s at, I guess, at least in terms of personal/childish ambitions. I’d love a job on a newspaper’s arts section, but I doubt I’m talented enough or that I’ll ever be lucky enough to make that happen. There’s a friend of mine who writes for an arts magazine, and whose elegant and dissarming way with words is something I envy every time I have the privilege of reading it.

So I fucking love Rob Sheffield. Or maybe just the lifestyle he writes about: this 1990s indie kid life where you somehow always managed to cobble together enough money for booze and rent and rock shows, where you weren’t so weighted down by years of student debt that as soon as you managed to get yourself a job you knew you were tied into full-time work for life. “If you didn’t like your job, you quit your job and got another one,” Sheffield told me as I shook my head enviously. “Or you just quit and freelanced for a while.” (That’s in this interview.) Thoughts to live by on a Friday afternoon, while you’re counting down the minutes and desperately trying to order five Mountain Goats CDs for $35 off some website that doesn’t want to work.

Tonight I’m making (read: heating up) a steak pie, and we’ve got the TV on low so we can catch the highlights from the BBC’s annual quasi-celebrity filled marathon guiltfest. I’ve always found the juxtaposition of girl bands, novelty cheques and singing newsreaders (or is that Children in Need?) with images of Ant and Dec patronising starving children in Africa quite discomfiting.

PS Interesting blog I’ve come across – The Virginity Project, in which the author is collecting stories from a cross section of the British public on how they lost their virginity. Fascinating stuff.

ACTUAL POSTSCRIPT: Did Jeremy just say the Top Gear boys are going to be performing as their own band?? EVERYBODY SWITCH ON BBC2 RIGHT NOW (10pm). THIS IS GOING TO BE THE GREATEST THING EVER.

the insurgency began and you missed it;

Published on March 13, 2007 in music and technology. 11 Comments Tags: , , , , , , .

Yesterday’s exciting lunchtime meeting resulted in a little bit of paid journalism work for somebody I’m equally as excited about. I’m sure I’m mad taking on yet another commitment, but the nature of this industry is when the opportunities arise you have to take them. And sleep when you’re dead.

Today I’m going to take advantage of my little soapbox in order to ask you guys, many of whom I know are much more competent in this particular area than I, for a little bit of advice. Since I’ve moaned about it often enough, my laptop is pretty much on its last legs. Even after moving about 15gb of music that should never have been there in the first place onto an external hard drive, it takes about half an hour to load up and ready itself for use after switching it on. And as for trying to play music while surfing the net for information for an article that you’re typing up in Microsoft Word… forget it.

I don’t really have a lot of money right now, but as a journalist who often has to work from home (and I don’t even mean the freelance or “fun” stuff – whenever a new magazine is due I’m often found typing up interviews I should have done weeks before into the wee small hours) a reliable laptop is a necessity. I had wanted to treat myself to a MacBook because I’ve heard so many good things about them and, well, because they’re so gosh-darn pretty, but as I’m not some yuppie “creative” type living in an apartment in Shoreditch my parents paid for because they still haven’t given up on me maybe one day getting a real job I’ll probably have to give up on that dream. Macs are priced far too prohibitively for the demographic they pride themselves on targeting.

My problem with PCs running on Windows operating systems is the way in which the software is bundled. I don’t use Internet Explorer, much as I doubt anybody in their right mind does (I used to hate the look of Firefox, but got over it pretty quickly the first time I ran a spyware scan after switching), and as an iPod user I have no need for Media Player either. I was having a chat with David about how easily one can strip a laptop of those aspects it programming one has no need for and it sounds like far too complicated a procedure for somebody whose technical knowledge is average at best (something which also precludes me buying an “empty” laptop and loading it up with open-source software of my choosing).

Of course it’s possible to leave the unnecessary bits alone, but it feels rather untidy. And anyway, before a couple of weeks ago I was having to plough through the add/remove programmes bit of my Control Panel on a nightly basis looking for things I could get rid of in order to free up enough space to shove files onto a CD-ROM for storage. It’s taught me to be fairly economical.

Basically, this is what I’m looking for. I hope the experts out there will be able to give me some advice as to where to look and what to ask for. I should point out that although my budget is limited, if it turns out that a MacBook or a similarly-priced Windows-based option is the best thing for me I will work something out: I need this for my livelihood and there’s no point buying something oan the cheap I’ll need to replace in six months.

- It has to be a laptop, not a desktop computer although I know those are cheaper. It has to be something of my very own. It has to be lightweight enough that I can take it to meetings/trips (at the risk of sounding a little too girlie I’m not able to carry much weight and my current laptop is a little too heavy to go anywhere with me bar the sofa). And yes, I’d like it to be alright-looking. Not necessarily stunning, but not like a relic from Stalinist Russia either.
- I need Microsoft Word. I’m sure it’s not the best word processing programme in the world but it’s what I use at the office, and I do quite often take stuff home.
- Other programmes I use on a regular basis: iTunes (non-negotiable), Firefox (although I’d be fine using another browser which complies with web standards and doesn’t come with a big “kick me” sign on its arse), Kodak Easyshare software. I use MSN and AOL instant messengers, although not at the moment as if I get a message it crashes my laptop for ten minutes. I also use Yahoo IM to keep track of new emails.
- Speaking of which, I use web-based programmes to keep track of things like email, calendar, RSS feeds so I can easily switch between home and work computers and keep things in one place (saving bookmarks I can later use in the magazine for example) and I don’t really see that changing.
- As far as RAM/hard disk size is concerned, I’m not really bothered having “top of the range” because it’s never top of the range for long, but I would like something that will conceivably last me another four years.
- Oh, and wireless internet access. Because I’m sick of sitting hooked up to wires on the sofa while Stringer gets to blog in the bath. But I think that’s a given these days, innit?

Recommend away :)

In other news: congratulations to that old favourite band of mine on their induction into the Rock n Roll Hall of Fame, although you’ll pardon my blood running cold at the thought of Bloc Party’s producer taking on the new album. And look at the geekish treat I couldn’t hold back on buying myself! It’ll look ridiculous on me since they only had a small left, but, yeah. Damn that dollar exchange rate, and Mary for pointing it out.

stumble past the record store, end up at the movies;

Published on March 12, 2007 in aff the telly and fitba. 11 Comments Tags: , , , , , , , , , , , , , , .

Now I know that Rome wasn’t built in a day and all that, but I’m starting to suspect that our downstairs neighbours are constructing their own little city in their front room. They told us there was going to be a bit of disruption in the mornings, but that wouldn’t take much longer than a fortnight. That was six weeks ago, and every evening is another adventure in which piece of half-constructed furniture or what sort of building materials are going to appear in the close.

We were fortunate in that there was no early-morning banging to rouse us from our beds as there has been over the last couple of weekends. Oddly, what we got instead was the extended sound of a heavy-duty vacuum cleaner until ten o’clock at night. Perhaps this means the cleanup operation has begun, although as it still looks as if somebody’s building a wheelchair ramp over half the stairs I doubt it.

It’s somewhat ironic that, after having talked about the efforts of various bodies to combat bigotry in previous posts, I ended up sharing the bus home last night with a crowd of charming young gentlemen belting out The Sash (no, not the ballboy song). There’s not much you can do in a situation like that but turn your earphones up and switch your gaze to the floor, but I had to laugh when they had the smackdown laid down on them from an unlikely source: the pensioners in the seat in front who it turns out were Grand Masters or whatever they call themselves at one stage. “Huv ye ever worn a sash son? No? Well calm down.”

The yobs apologised, then bolted upstairs where I’m guessing they continued their behaviour because two young Celtic fans came down not long after, rolled their eyes and sat at the back of the bus watching videos of past glories on their mobile phones.

As for the result, well, to paraphrase the Sky Sports News ticker (we had it on for hours last night waiting for them to show Jay Boothroyd’s wonder goal): Celtic sixteen points clear after first home defeat… whatever.

I didn’t really get up to much over the rest of the weekend: I haven’t been feeling too well so even left my Small Friend Claire’s birthday dinner early. I met an old friend from uni for coffee on Sunday, and despaired over the press release for Ted Leo’s new album in which it is claimed he channels his Irish ancestry in a song about tanking bottles of Buckie in Govanhill while the neds with their knuckles and their Burberry scarves said how did Jersey boys ever make it this far? (Okay, I concede there’s a lot of deedly-deedly-dee going on in the track but having a favourite New York artist sing about my city is a big deal I hate to see unacknowledged).

I’m not really one for watching television these days, and if the rumours are true I probably won’t be much for it in the future (Jeremy, Jeremy, say it isn’t so!). I’ve never been much of a channel hopper and have tended to develop my favourites of which I’ll never miss an episode. There doesn’t seem to be much of them about these days though: I’m watching Ugly Betty, and although I like it it’s not the sort of thing I’d be buying the boxset of when it comes out. Katie sent us some episodes of The Wire, which looks as if it could be a winner in our household if we ever had the time to watch it, but all the rest of the shows everybody seems to be talking about would rely on us downloading (which neither of our laptops is in any fit state to manage), having channels we can’t afford to pay for or watching Grey’s Anatomy (which I shouldn’t slag off having never seen an episode but it sounds like The O.C. with doctors, from what I’ve heard).

Still, Doctor Who is back soon and I’m hoping that the arrival of a sassy new assistant will help me warm to David Tennant. Until then, there’s always the joy of the DVD boxset when you’re stuck at home with a stomachache on a Saturday night. My favourite X-Files episodes are like old friends, and I wonder what Darin Morgan is doing these days? We also watched some Season Six, which although derided by many for its quirky standalones and shift away from the darkness (in tone and lighting!) which characterised much of the Vancouver years, contained some fantastic moments. Like the below.

I’ve got an exciting meeting over lunch, which nothing might actually come of… but you never know. I’m sure I’ll be telling you about it in due course if something does.