Back to the Same Old Same Old

Ah, work. Can't live with it, can't eat without it. My wee holiday is over (there's a post brewing that'll tell you all about it, as if you're interested, but it's taking me a while to finish it, as it involves posting pictures and whatnot. Thankfully no Venn diagrams as yet, though), and so I've been back at work for the past few days. And contemplating the arduous prospect of a twelve-hour shift tomorrow. That's a pretty large slice of no fun. Phillip Larkin had it pegged when he wrote "Why must this toad 'work' squat upon my life?" I'm seriously thinking about taking up bank robbery. Think about it - it might be a risky business, but the hours are good and you get to be your own boss. Even when the authorities do catch up with you, they'll just force you to take early retirement. And stick you in an early retirement home, which just happens to have bars on the windows.

On the plus side, though, I've kicked my running up a notch since I got back. Probably because I felt a bit guilty about neglecting it for a week. Fourteen and a half miles on Sunday night, and the same on Monday night. Rubbish times, but there was a pretty strong headwind a-blowin' - so much so that at times I felt like a crap mime as I ran into it. The river was running high as well, so there was no sign of my two heron standpipe sentinels (which I may explain sometime in some future post), but seeing the water seething and roiling, whipped up into a dark, frothy frenzy by the wind almost made up for it.

I also found this little snippet the other day. I had a cataclysmic computer failure some six months ago, and lost a hell of a lot of stuff as a result - not just stuff that I'd done, but also music that I'd downloaded which I've been unable to find again - anyway, I'd thought that this too had been lost in the Great Crash of 2003 (as I think of it), but it turns out that I had a paper copy of it kicking about. Anyways - I would have been paid $25 for this (plus my weight in coffee), and it would have appeared on the labels of coffee cans throughout the US thanks to www.storyhouse.com if my computer hadn't have been feeling a bit peaky at the time.


The Zoo

The entire incident was hushed up - even now when I go back the keepers pretend not to recognise me; although, tellingly, none of them ever look me in the eye. I don't go back often. And when I do, I watch the visitors more than the animals. I always make sure I'm parked close by, and sometimes I even keep my engine running.

It all happened the day after the great storm.The whole zoo had been hit pretty hard, but the monkey enclosure had suffered the worst damage. We were sent in to clean things up. The monkeys made more noise than usual that day - I'd never seen them so rattled.

I wasn't the one who made the actual discovery, but I was one of the first on the scene. It was in the far corner of the enclosure, where the visitors can't see and where the keepers hardly ever go. While chasing a wind-blown plastic bag, one of my co-workers had stumbled and fallen. When she looked to see what had tripped her, she noticed a loose strip of turf laid over a hole in the ground. Puzzled, she'd peeled back the turf, and, as she did so, the monkeys all fell curiously silent. I'd seen her fall and rushed to help her, so I was there when she made her disturbing find.

Inside the hole were six long overcoats - one only half-finished - made from old crisp packets and scraps of newspaper roughly stitched together with dried grass. Six baseball caps, crudely fashioned from used fast-food containers, and six small bags filled with an assortment of small change and shiny bottle tops. And, perhaps most ominously of all, at the very back of that shallow hole we also found an old disposable razor.

I quit my job the very next day.

The Wanderer Returns (by bus, sadly)

"Drop That Mangy Saddle," Says Well-Groomed Goat.

So - I'm back from my little mini-holiday thingy. And a damn fine time I had too.

Caught a bus up to Aberdeen on Tuesday, and met my mate Steve from his work at quarter past six. It would have been six, but the bus was a little late, as we had to make an unscheduled pitstop in order to eject an annoying (but comically surreal) drunk. He kept muttering to himself about how annoyed he was about Sir Alex Fergusson stealing his eggs ("See me? I'm the Police. Alex? Sir Alex? You're under arrest, Mr Fergusson. Steal ma bloody eggs, will ya, ya bass..."). Eventually he got bit rowdy, though - banging on the windows and suchlike - so the driver had to put him off. He probably ended up passing out in a park or something. Only to wake up the next morning to find that his eggs had been in his pocket all along, and that they were the least of his worries.


Possible root cause of rusty old drunk's rowdiness. Sir Alex is probably hiding in there somewhere too, just biding his time...

Anyway - me and Steve did a lot of catching up in the short time I spent with him. As I mentioned before, I've known Steve for more years than I care to count; and, although I don't get to see him as much as I'd like to these days, every time we do meet up, it's as if no time has passed at all. We're both leading very different lives these days: and I have a sneaking suspicion that if we'd never known each other and we'd just lately been introduced, we'd probably just half-heartedly shake hands, share a forced smile and perhaps an awkward silence, and then walk away from that encounter both thinking "what a wanker." Thankfully, though, through some accident of happenstance, we fell into each other's company when we were both knee-high to a shin. And we've been best mates ever since. Which is odd, because personality-wise, we're polar opposites. Maybe between the two of us we actually add up to quite a well-balanced individual. Although somehow I doubt it.

[...]

The Holiday Begins...

I was just thinking that maybe I should have called this "The Wind-Up Blog Chronicles". But I didn't. Oh well.

So - I am now officially on holiday. And bloody good it feels too. And thanks for all the suggestions for potential shennanigans for me to, um, shennang. I should really have mentioned in the original post that I don't actually drive, though. Given that small fact, you can see how I saw myself facing a pretty slim set of options.

But - never fear, for all is well. I spent today making a series of frenzied phonecalls and emails, and it looks like I now have a definite plan. My best mate Steve, who I've known since I was about the size of this next comma, has a day off on Wednesday. He moved away some years ago, and I don't get to see him and his good lady wife (and tiny little "!" of a child) as much as I'd like these days (in fact, my next-to-last visit to his inspired my "Light House" HB idea). So I'm going to grab a bus into Aberdeen, meet him after work, and stay with them on Tuesday and Wednesday night. They've even arranged a visit to a Petting Zoo on Wednesday afternoon - ostensibly for their little girl, but I'm actually quite excited about it myself. The sensible part of me knows that they probably won't have giraffes, elephants and siberian tigers anyway, but there's also a little bit of me that thinks, "well, you never know until you get there." It's a bit of a shame it's just a Petting Zoo. I really wish someone would make a Ride-On Safari park, as in "if you can saddle it, you can ride it." It's always been a fantasy of mine to lumber into a drive-through McDonalds astride an African Hippo. "Just a burger and fries please... Sorry - almost forgot. Can you make that 54 burgers and one helping of fries? And if you could hold the salad on 53 of those burgers, that'd be great. My trusty steed is on a diet." I'm fairly sure it's going to be all mangy goats and maybe the odd guinea-pig with allopecia, but still, I can but dream.

Then after that, on Thursday Steve will drop me off in Aberdeen, and I'll hook up with my wee brother Stu. I'll spend Thursday night with him and his charming Aussie girlfriend Dene, eating fine foods and drinking far too many exotic cocktails, if past experience is anything to go by; then I'll be poured onto a bus sometime on Friday, and arrive back home just in time for the weekend, when all my local friends who have sensible jobs will be free anyway.

So, that's the plan. I'm looking forward to it, but now that I've written this, no matter how much fun I have, I'm still going to wish I could return back home on the back of a hippo rather than the top deck of a rickety, held-together-by-the-chewing-gum-under-the-seats bus. Even a giraffe would be nice.

Anyway, I'll let you know how it went when I get back. "Man Attempts to Ride Mangy Goat" - I can see the headlines now.

bwv61

I just heard on the HB that bwv61 (affectionately known - to me at least - as "bev") died last Monday.

Or did she?

It's a sure thing that bwv61 is no more. What's not so clear is whether it's just been a nickname or an actual person that has passed on.

bev was - to say the least - unique. In the short time I knew her, I found her to be funny, witty, intelligent; but, more than all that, what impressed me most about her was the fact that she took even the harshest criticisms with grace, dignity and wit. Even when people were being downright nasty to her, she was never nasty back. There was always a knowing smile behind every post she made - she always countered cruelty with kindness, and I thought all the more of her for it.

Whatever the circumstances, I'm sad that she's gone. Thing is, though, she's left a more than a few questions behind her. Jutta's memorial post on the HB - which I was shocked to read in the first place - hasn't exactly attracted a stream of touching epitaphs. People whose opinions I value are doubting whether she actually existed in the first place. And so now, I don't know what to believe.

The cynic in me looks back over what I knew of her with a cold, steely eye, and finds much to ponder over. First off - she never made any newbie-typical mistakes. As both a poster of new ideas and as an annotator, she seemed to hit the ground running, She seemed to "get" the site from the get-go. Also, every one of her ideas/annos seemed to progress her story somewhat - "Bubu"/smoking was mentioned at every opportunity, and, rather than giving an opinion in her annos, she almost seemed to give another little slice of her life instead. And it did seem odd that her short time at the HB coincided exactly with her smoking habits finally catching up with her. I also found it a little strange that - given that she'd not been visiting the HB for very long - someone still emailed Jutta to let her know that she had died.

The optimist in me refutes all these points, though. I kind of hit the ground running as an HBer myself - the site chimed in with my sense of humour immediately: it struck a chord, and I struck back. And one of the things that I liked about her was the fact that she would relate everything back to her day-to-day situation - it seemed to me like she was so happy about having met Bubu that she'd share that experience with anyone who'd care to listen. Timing-wise - who knows? Shit happens, and it does so in its own time. As to my last point in the previous paragraph - bev had obviously been spending a lot of time at the HB recently. And she'd mentioned that Bubu had been looking over her shoulder most of the time.

So - all things considered, I have no idea what's happened. I actually do hope that some sick fuck has been hoaxing us all. At least if that's true nobody's died. As things stand, I don't know what to think.

The only thing that's certain is that I'll miss you, bev. I didn't know you well, but I enjoyed reading every word you wrote.