Edit This Crap

Saturday 12 September 2009

This morning I dropped the girls off at ballet and drove to Comet in Dunfermline to get a new 4GB flash drive. During last week's radio show I'd put the flash drive in the PC under the desk, only to kick it at some point during the show. When I saved my show and pulled out the drive, the plastic casing had been smashed to pieces by my clumsy feet. It does still work but rather than risk it I got a new one. Having seen a SanDisk product on the Gadget Show do so well against more well-known opposition, including Apple, I plumped for their inexpensive 4GB drive. The Integral one I had before would've been £21 to replace and this one was only £8.99.

After the amazing night on Thursday, I enjoyed a long lie-in on Friday, although it was somewhat enforced on me by a sore back ("the pleasure with the pain"). I had prepared a long To-Do list and raced through it. I popped into Dunfermline to get my haircut. The girl cutting my hair (4 on the top, 2 round the back and sides) enquired, as they are want to do, what I was up to that day. I told her I was recovering from last night's wondrous gig. Naturally, she hadn't heard of Edwyn Collins until I "sang" the chorus of "A Girl Like You". She tried to convince me that it couldn't have been a better gig than an "amazing" Red Hot Chilli Peppers gig she been to. She's young, she knows not what she says. Haircut, £5, £1 tip, check.

Next stop was the Alhambra, Dunfermline's newest venue, which is gradually beginning to attract some bigger names to Fife. My mate Martin had sent me a text saying that The Charlatans would be playing on Saturday 19th December. Now I like The Charlatans but I don't know if would even travel to Edinburgh to see them but I suggested to the good lady wife that as they would be on our doorstep we could use the gig to have our Christmas night out. Fine, she says. I had e-mailed the venue on Thursday to find out when tickets went on sale and how much they would be. No reply.

I walked the 100 yards from the barber's to the venue. Unusually the Box Office, which according to their website is open from 9 until 4 between Monday and Friday, appears to be up a stair at the side of the venue. I'm only surmising this because I had to press a buzzer first to get in. I also noticed a sign saying "Cash Only". Surely not, in this day and age. Anyway, I pressed the buzzer and enquired how much the tickets were and when they'd be on sale. I was told they would be £22.50 but the venue wouldn't get their allocation until Monday because Ticketmaster would be selling them first. I couldn't believe it. Another venue had soul its soul to Ticketbastard. I don't like Ticketmaster, as regular readers will know, with their spurious fees for anything and everything. I decided there and then we wouldn't be going to see The Charlatans after all. You can say what you like about the Carnegie Hall in Dunfermline but at least they don't charge you for nothing. I went to see Davie Scott and Norman Blake, supported by The Vaselines. The advertised cost was £10 each. How much did we pay in total? £10 each. That's the way it should be. We're going to spend the money at Kushis instead.

After the disappointment of the Alhambra I headed off to Tesco to get the week's "big" shop. K had prepared a list. I'm usually quite strict and never veer "off list" but a 5CD box set of "100 Hits - Northern Soul" just happened to fall into the trolley. It was only £6 and while I had many of the tracks already there were enough new ones to make the £6 purchase a worthwhile one. Today I uploaded the tracks onto Windows Media Player and while I doing so I noticed a strange message in to the "Album Artist" column. It says, beside every track, "edit this crap"!! I checked the other CDs and it's the same for each of them. Maybe I'll e-mail Demon and see what they have to say for themselves.

Is it just me or are there times when you're at the checkout in a supermarket you feel the checkout girl (it's always a girl) tries to make you look slow at packing, just because you're a man. Sometimes I think females checkout assistants scan your purchases as fast as they can so that they pile up and you don't have enough time to put them in your bag. This is a veiled attempt to make the male shopper look really stupid. This annoys me because I'm no slouch when it comes to packing a shopping bag. I'm certainly more organised than most. Would they do it to an older person or another woman? I doubt it.

As I unpacked the hastily-packing shopping when I got home I put on the radio, which lives in the kitchen. It's a DAB I won in a competition on Forth One. It was still on BBC 6Music from when I tuned into Andrew Collins on Wednesday who was subbing for a Mercury Music-ligging Steve Lamacq. Anyway, as I unpacked the messages (Scottish word for shopping) I heard this dreadful whining noise coming out of the DAB. It was George Lamb. Come the Judgement Day award ceremony the nominees for Bastardisation of the English Language will be Paul Merson, Jamie Redknapp and George Lamb. Thankfully he was finishing in 10 minutes. File under "Loves the Sound of His Own Voice and Isn't As Funny As He Thinks". See also Jonathan Ross.

During a spot of lunch, I watched a couple of programmes from Sky+. Monday's The Gadget Show and Derren Brown's lottery prediction show. I really like the Gadget Show and not just because Suzi Perry was wearing high boots and a short skirt! Their weekly competition prizes are amazing and this week's includes a car that they'd "pimped" to include a PSP 3 and a projector screen under the bonnet! Ooh, ooh, pick me, pick me. It's the only text competition I do.

There's no rest for the wicked and I took advantage of the weather to cut the grass on the front and back lawns. The back lawn had been left uncut for so long that there were Japanese soldiers in there thinking the war was still on. Both jobs were completed just in time to collect Flick from the After School Club. I hadn't even had time for a shower. K had caught an earlier bus home so she did some weeding, I tried pathetically to repair some scratches in the car (check me Mr Pleasant Valley Sunday) and Felicity cycled up and down. At one point she told everyone what our car was but that her favourite cars were Kias and BMWs. She informed the other kids that she was saving for the latter!

Also picked some bad news late yesterday afternoon that our childminders had ceased trading! The Scottish Care Commission had initially informed them that the number of children they were looking after wouldn't include their own kids (there are two childminders) but now the Commission has changed their mind. With K and I having changed our working hours and fitted in around Flick's school times, we're now left without a childminder. Apparently the Scottish Care Commission informed the childminders that a weekend was more than enough time for the parents to organise alternative child care!! Unbelievable! As soon as I finish this blog entry I shall be giving them a piece of my mind. Just when you think everything's sorted...

Should I Stay or Should I Go?

Thursday 3 September 2009

Why do people seem to drive even faster in the rain? I take a cautious drive into work during which the first Andrew Collins CD finishes. I’ve really enjoyed the first one, which brought back some memories of my own. I look forward to the other CDs over the next couple of weeks.

Our gym has two treadmills. I did 10 minutes on the bike and as I began on the rowing machine someone else came in. He went to the right treadmill and started jogging. After my 1500m row and a rest, I stepped on to the other treadmill and began my ten-minute walk (10 minutes at Speed 6 on an incline of 5, if you must know). I wondered how the other guy must have felt because we were side-by-side but he was jogging and I was walking and yet we were still side-by-side. Maybe it didn’t occur to him because he was “in the zone”. My mind tends to wonder and come up with such random thoughts.

I pick up Flick at 4, as usual, and she bemoans the “early” collection because she “hasn’t had a chance to play”! I’ve changed my working hours, getting up in the dead of night at an ungodly 5.30am, so I can collect her from After School Club and she wants to stay there later! Kids today.

Friday 4 September 2009

I’m relieved of school collection duties as mum and granny are collecting the Flickster from school after attending a Buddy Mass.

I enjoy a leisurely drive home, still in the company of Andrew Collins’ excellent “Where Did It All Go Right”.

I’m home just before the girls. I get a call from Tim at the Scotland on Sunday asking for my comment on the line-up for the forthcoming Homecoming Live event. The story is embargoed until Sunday so I’m not to put anything up on the Jocknroll website. Fair enough.

Saturday 5 September 2009

There’s a busy day in prospect as the girls head off to ballet. Later they attend a centenary celebration for the Guides in Dunfermline. Road works near the school venue only add to the traffic chaos. I drop off the girls and head off home. Trying to avoid the nearby chaos and the busy town centre, I take a long shortcut home, a nifty wee route I’ve logged in my mental SatNav for future use.

I settle down to watch the Scotland-Macedonia game. It’s a dour first half with Scotland being outplayed and lucky not to be behind. It kicks off in first half stoppage time when Scott Brown, never the most mature individual on god’s earth, decides to contest a drop ball instead of giving the ball back to the Macedonians. The visitors had kicked the ball out following an injury to one of their players and the accepted action is for the ball to be given back to them. Brown decided instead to contest the drop ball and the ball came off the Macedonian (who made no attempt to play the ball) and resulted in a corner for Scotland. The Macedonians were furious and surrounded Brown. After the subsequent corner the referee blew his whistle for half time and the protests continued with Macedonian management and substitutes joining in the hunt for Brown’s head.

I watched 10 minutes of the second half and went to collect the girls. The road works had mysteriously been removed and we took a different “shortcut” home. Except we weren’t going home. Flick had been great at getting up during her first week of full-time school that we decided to treat her and took her to Frankie and Benny’s, which is a favourite of hers.

While Frankie and Benny’s is really a fast food outlet dressed up as a restaurant I generally enjoy its ambience, especially as it plays some decent 50s and 60s music. Flick has a good singalong to Manfred Mann’s “5-4-3-2-1”, which opens her own personal compilation that I’ve put together over the last year. I plumped for the New York Chicken and an East Coast Sundae for dessert. They were tasty enough at the time but on four occasions that evening and during the early hours of the next morning I cursed the very name of Frankie and Benny’s. I was ill, very ill and such was the extent of my upset stomach that my body was actually aching the next morning. I say morning because it was almost lunchtime before I finally surfaced such was my discomfort. The girls had been fine but we all had different meals. I don’t know if it was the coleslaw that came with the meal, or the sauce on the chicken, the chicken itself or the sundae but something I ate there disagreed with me. Following on from the New Taste of China, Frankie and Benny is the second of my usual fast food eateries to make me ill. I haven’t been back to the former and it’ll be a while before I return to the latter.

On Twitter I have a moan about my BT Broadband once again “dropping out”. It’s been doing it regularly, in the evening, and is beginning to resemble the pedestrian dial-up service of the past. Before BT (BT Care) start “following” me on Twitter and asking me what’s wrong! I’ll investigate how genuine this service is before I pass on my account details. Remind me never to slag off the CIA.

Sunday 6 September 2009

The girls returned from church with rolls and the Scotland on Sunday. My quote was in the paper (http://scotlandonsunday.scotsman.com/scotland/Bands-line-up-for-final.5621666.jp). Not feeling too good I enjoyed the luxury of wading through the Sunday papers or in this case paper. We used to buy three Sunday newspapers (for contrast, crosswords and competitions) but now we don’t bother. We realised we’d never read them all and we went from ensuring that all the comps and crosswords were completed and posted before the Sunday pick-up to not even bothering to start the prize puzzles. In the end we stopped getting any papers at all. Sitting browsing the Scotland on Sunday and its supplements and magazines was very relaxing and I almost yearned for the lazy Sundays again. With a young family, this is now an impossibility.

Flick has been “playing up” this morning and she’s blaming her dark blue Ben Sherman jeans! She says they’re “making her naughty”!! I resist the temptation to laugh and tell her to not be so silly. There’s nothing wrong with the jeans, a birthday present from her godfather, and a change into her High School Musical outfit doesn’t suddenly change her behaviour. As a result her promised 4.30pm pick up, to allow her to some play time, has been put back to the original 4pm.

I head off for my radio show and encounter the usual idiots on the roads between Dunfermline and Kirkcaldy. Luckily I have ‘Andrew’ to calm me down. Today’s show is an Ellie Greenwich special, celebrating the legendary songwriter’s extensive catalogue of songs. Notwithstanding the Myriad system crashing as I start to tape my show (I tape them all), I really enjoy the show and there are no major technical hitches. She wrote some brilliant songs, some known (River Deep Mountain High, Da Doo Ron Ron, Baby I Love You) and some less well known (The Kind of Boy You Can’t Forget, You Don’t Know, I Didn’t Mean To Hurt You) but all gems.

A stress-free drive home and it’s a yummy tea of chicken, Yorkshire Puddings, peas and chips, albeit heated up in the microwave. K does the bedtime stories, I do the dishes and after preparing the family’s lunches for the next day we settle down for the first of a new two-part “Waking The Dead”. Trevor Eve’s character Boyd annoys me a lot because he seems to permanently scowl and grumble and is downright rude. I’m looking forward to part 2 already.

Monday 7 September 2009

The quiz night I’m writing and hosting for K’s employer – an annual paying gig I really enjoy - has been put back three weeks thanks to a double booking by The Pleasance. I’m quite glad because while I’ve written the vast majority of it and already put together the two picture rounds, I need to write a few more questions and put together the audio rounds. I still put the audio rounds together using tapes but when I’ve completed one I digitise the whole round as one track on my PC and put it on to CD. I always take a CD and tape version of the audio rounds because you never know when the technical gremlins can strike. They’ve certainly struck me in the past and can be embarrassing for all concerned, especially the quizmaster. I have a portable speaker with microphone, which also has a built-in cassette deck.

Luckily The Pleasance has its own sound system and I usually get the CDs played through that. I take my speaker as a stand-by. I try to cover myself for all eventualities. Anyone who has written a decent pub quiz - I’ve been to some shockers in my time - will know how much effort goes into writing and putting one together. It’s not all about Quizelda, my glamorous assistance (aka my good lady wife), because the audience play their part too. I can’t recall how many years I’ve been doing this quiz but every year the room is busy and buzzing so I must be doing something right. It always makes a pleasant change to have an attentive audience who are there solely for the quiz. Okay there is a disco too but most people drift off when it starts. I guess mental and then physical exertion is just too much for some! I feel sorry for the DJ but he gets paid nonetheless so I guess he’s not bothered.

K asks me on behalf of the social committee if I have any specific requirements. My request for “ten vestal virgins fanning me while I “perform”” and “a backstage masseuse and a bowl of peanut M&Ms (no brown ones)” and a private helicopter are being considered.

K has a Guides meeting so we don’t watch University Challenge, Pointless, The Gadget Show or part 2 of Waking The Dead. There’s now only 16% left on the Sky+ box. I’ve already purged a whole page of Peppa Pig and Charlie and Lola so something I’ve been saving for a “quiet hour or two” might have to go. Decisions, decisions. Will I get around to watching Pierrepoint or Control or those two More4 documentaries on Enron and Naomi Klien? I’ll need to make time. Having checked my diary, 3 am is looking good.

Tuesday 8 September 2009

There really is no rest for the wicked. I headed straight for Tesco after work. I volunteered (why?) to collect 8 different exotic fruits from the supermarket for K’s Guides. They would be tasting the fruits and also locating the country of origin on a map. I picked by some physalis (Colombia), figs (Turkey), a papaya (Brazil), pomegranate (Israel), bananitos (Costa Rica), a passion fruit (Colombia), a baby pineapple (Ivory Coast) and some Kiwi fruit (Chile).

Edwyn Collins is playing a not-so-secret gig with Teenage Fanclub in Glasgow on Thursday and I’m sorely tempted to make the trip through. My friend Giselle in Long Beach is giving me pelters for even thinking about not going. I’d love to go but have to be realistic. It starts at 10.30pm, when I’m usually getting into bed! I could take Friday off, I suppose. Oh, what to do. There was a time when I wouldn’t have twice about it. I remember popping off to Leeds (or was it Manchester?) to see One Thousand Violins having only heard about the gig that morning. I was living in Edinburgh at the time and still very much at the mercy of National Express. Should I stay or should I go?

Taking of which, have you heard Sharleen Spiteri’s abomination of a cover of The Clash’s classic? Ripping off The Shangri-las and now butchering one of the pioneering punks’ classics is not the way to get credibility or, hopefully, sales.