My mother has a fairly nice stereo. It’s nothing special—not one of those hi-fi enthusiast setups with everything separate, but it has all the ordinary functions and features and is worth a few hundred quid. She won it, a year or two ago. She was thinking about buying a new one to replace their mid-70s record player, when all of a sudden she won one that was worth a fair bit more than she was thinking of spending.
I, on the other hand, do not have a stereo. Well. I have a small portable, which was a christmas present when I was at university. The CD part has been broken for a few years, but it still plays tapes and the radio. The CD drive on my computer plays some of my CDs, but not very many; it’s on its last legs.
So anyway. On the phone to the mother yesterday, she says: “Oh, by the way. What’s a micro-hi-fi system?”
“Um … a hi-fi system that’s smaller than a mini hi-fi system? One of those that’s a 6-inch cube and nothing else? I don’t know? Why?”
“Oh, I was just wondering. I’ve won one, you see.”
Gah!
Keyword noise: The Mother, luck.
In last night’s bizarre dream, I was desperately trying to print out the President of Ireland’s daily schedule (so I could give it to her personally), but my printer wouldn’t work. Then, I had an argument with my dad as to whether I should buy a laser printer or not. I have no idea what any of that was about. Or, for that matter, the bit slightly earlier where people in wheelchairs kept getting eaten by giant plants.
Keyword noise: dreams.
No sooner do I post here mentioning Scholl sandals, then they get mentioned in The Guardian as an example of something that suddenly becomes popular purely because it has been featured on the telly. It must be telepathy, you know.
Keyword noise: shoes, Scholl.
June has come in, and everything is full of drizzle, still. Typical. I forgot to say “White rabbits!” until mid-morning, too.
This site probably isn’t too useful to you unless you live in Oregon or want to make a skirt out of an old pair of trousers, but I just love the picture on the home page. I wish I could draw like that.
I’m tempted to try the trousers-into-skirt thing too, although it would take ages cos I don’t have a sewing machine. I have several pairs of trousers which have developed holes in Unfortunate Places, which could do with a new lease of life. Reading the intructions, I realised that lots of skirts in the shops over the past year or so are deliberately designed to look like they have been hacked out of an old pair of trousers. Did anyone else spot this earlier, or was it just me that was in the dark?
Another fashion item that I’ve spotted in the shops recently that’s been bugging me a little is Scholl sandals. Why are these suddenly all over the place? The Mother had a pair of these, identical to the ones in all the fashion stores right now, twenty years ago. Of course, they can’t have been fashionable in 1982, because The Mother was wearing them. So why are they so popular now?
Of course, heavily-promoted and popular aren’t quite the same thing. I should look at people’s feet more. Maybe. It’s a shame The Mother’s feet are so much smaller than mine, because she probably still has hers at the back of a cupboard somewhere.
Incidentally—on the subject of The Mother’s feet—when I was born, I’m told that the first thing my dad said was something like “deformed fingers and toes just like yours!” Now there’s romance. And they’re only slightly bent.
Update, 2nd May 2022: The site this post linked to is no longer online, and I have no idea if it’s been moved elsewhere, but I thought it worth keeping the post here because I did eventually follow the instructions and use it to make myself a skirt. I still have the skirt, even, although it doesn’t fit me any more. The site was by a woman called Andrea who was a member of one of the same mailing lists as me, and it really did have lovely illustrations. And, as an aside, when I originally wrote this I didn’t know quite how messed up my parents’ relationship actually was.
Keyword noise: The Mother, clothing, Scholl, shoes, crafting.
I was walking up The Vennel today, in heavy drizzle, when I saw a piece of paper pinned to a wall. On it, it said “What would make Edinburgh better? Have your say!” The top entry was “SUNSHINE” in big letters, and with a smiley-faced sun. I couldn’t help but agree.
Mind you, lower down it said “more sweaty moshing”, which isn’t really the sort of thing I’d encourage, at least not right next to me.
Keyword noise: Edinburgh, graffiti.
I seem to have got the stupid thing working sort-of reliably now, by unplugging the old Windows hard disk completely. Well, I hardly ever used it. It’s not crashed at all since I did that.
Saturday night: I wasn’t impressed by the Eurovision result, but I wasn’t impressed by the songs generally. Ah, well. It’s always a big disappointment, I think: the song you want to win never does. Slovenia were working on the right lines by going for a complete camp-overload—isn’t that the whole point of the thing? Jessica Garlick would have done better if she’d worn shoes that matched her outfit, I think. And why did Malta do so well, anyway, when it sounded just like the music from Wish You Were Here? I kept having visions of Judith Chalmers.
Dimitra said she wants to forget all about this year’s song content so she can forget the Greek entry ever existed. It was definitely going into “so bad it’s good” territory—I couldn’t keep a straight face through it.
Keyword noise: computers, television, Eurovision, Eurovision Song Contest.
Well, it’s still broken. Sort of. I managed to get it running again most of the time—I’m not sure really how—but every so often the disk drive starts making nasty clonking noises and the whole thing just freezes. Actually, it did The Noises just then, but for some reason kept on working.
Because I’ve not been writing things down, I don’t seem to have anything interesting to write down. I quickly got bored of going back and forth to an internet café every two or three days to read all my email (I know, too many mailing lists). I was planning to take up lots of exciting new activities—and especially, get some more things ready to type and put up elsewhere on this site. But, um, I haven’t. I wrote a letter to a friend in the US, two poems to post to one of the many, many mailing lists, and that was about it. Oh, and I managed to get two friends’ computers online. No self-interest there, of course. One of them paid me in cake, which has to be a good thing.
If you go to Not You, The Other One, you can read all about what students at my university were like. Not me though, of course. Everyone else seemed to be Dead Posh. When I worked in the library, behind the counter, we could see what the students’ names were when their matric cards got scanned. There was a frightening number of people with names like “The Honourable James Twistleton Ponsonby-Smythe”. I had friends whose flatmates thought a nice weekend in the middle of term was a quick flight to Switzerland, for the skiing.
Oh, of course, I have to remind you that it’s the Eurovision on Saturday. My friend W (the actor) would be terribly disappointed if I didn’t point it out.
Update, 27th April 2022: Not You, The Other One no longer seems to be online these days, although its writer is still around and about on social media.
Keyword noise: Edinburgh, computers, television, Eurovision, Eurovision Song Contest.
So, the computer has broken. The bastard. I won’t be writing much until I manage to get it fixed, which will probably take a couple of weeks at least. I managed this by persuading a friend to let me use his machine.
Keyword noise: computers.
Last night’s dream: I was supposed to be travelling to Mull, which had managed to move itself to the other side of the country and was now somewhere in the Tay. Then, I was sat around in my old school, fixing clocks. Or something like that. Later on, I was attending a conference (which seemed to be something to do with town planning) in a labyrinthine hotel, adn it all got very scary. I discovered that we were some kind of guinea-pigs for the real conference-goers, we tried to escape but couldn’t and all that sort of thing. The best bit was when I found that if I took my phone and flipped over the SIM, I could then use it to reprogram reality—although this gave us a better chance of escaping, it meant we could be tracked down a lot quicker, too.
I really should have less cheese with my evening meals, I think.
Keyword noise: dreams, nightmares.
Strange dream last night. Basically, I was creating a TV adaptation of the Umberto Eco novel Foucault’s Pendulum. I wasn’t just writing the script, but was inside the programme—although I was careful to design it so there was a good ending in the first episode, so it would work well as a pilot for a mini-series. Then, I went outside, and the sky was yellow and the landscape in shades of brown and umber, with black seagulls that looked like paper cutouts flying round in flocks.
Stumbled out of bed this morning and put the kettle on as normal. Pouring my tea, I was sure I saw some sort of black blob drop out of the kettle. fifteen minutes later, reached the bottom of my mug and almost swallowed a boiled moth. EW EW EW EW EW—ran to the kitchen for something to rinse my mouth out.
Keyword noise: dreams.
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