Symbolic Forest

When I looked out of my hotel window, I remembered why I missed the place. In a tower block above Charing Cross station, the random architecture of the city looked lovely in the early morning light. To the west, I could see the spire of the university.

I sprawled across the hotel bed. An enormous thing, it took over the entire room. I was alone in my bed that night, so I laid right across it diagonally, just because I could. An awful lot of things over the weekend, I did just because I could do.

Not bothering with breakfast, I showered, dressed, and wandered across Blytheswood Hill, up St Vincent Street and down towards Central Station. Glasgow always seems slightly American in flavour to me, with its city blocks, the street plan ignoring its hills, its urban motorways slashing through the city and over the river. It makes it awkward to navigate, though, if you can’t remember street names. I found my way without too much trouble, though, down towards the station. I was scared, and excited, but I wasn’t scared for very long.

Keyword noise: Charing Cross, Glasgow, holiday, Scotland, travel.

It’s Friday afternoon, and the office is in a cheerful mood. I keep hearing little babbles of laughter when I pass office doors. Noone has been phoning me up with stupid problems, and Big Dave isn’t here at all, having gone off to Italy for a week. No doubt he will come back with tales of bizarre events he stupidly got himself into, going by previous holidays – sneaking out of the country incognito after an accidental run-in with the local Mafia boss, or something along those lines.

I’m in a cheerful mood too. I know I haven’t been blogging much lately, but it hasn’t been because of gloom and doom. I’m going away for the weekend, and I’m looking forward to it. I’m taking the camera, and I’m going to come back with a full memory card.

Anyway, I’m going away to clear up lots of those little jobs that are nice and easy to get cleared; and then, come five o’clock, I’m zooming off down the motorway. See you soon!

Keyword noise: Big Dave, holiday.

…is one of my favourite cosy, romantic songs. It’s by The Clientele, and it goes something like:

The taxi lights were in your eyes
So warm again, St Mary’s spires
The carnival was over in the rain
And on and on, through Vincent St
The evening hanging like a dream
I touched your faith^*
And saw the night again

When I lived in Edinburgh, I thought it was a song about the city. After all, the Clientele did record one song almost definitely set in Edinburgh,^** and it has both a St Mary’s Cathedral (with distinctive spires)^*** and a Saint Vincent St. Glasgow, though, has both too.

And in your arms, I watch the stars
Ascend, and sleep
The loneliness away for a while
Your fingers wide and locked in mine
I kiss your face, I kiss your eyes
Until they turn to me and softly smile

Edinburgh or Glasgow, I wish I was up in Scotland this weekend. I’m sure I will be again soon.

* Until writing this post, I thought it said “I touched your face”. Listening very carefully just now, for the first time I realised it’s actually “faith”.

** A B-side called “6am, Morningside”

*** Actually, it has two St Mary’s Cathedrals, just to confuse people. One of them, the Episcopalian one, has three distinctive spires that are a major city landmark, especially when you look down the length of Princes St. The Catholic one, on the other hand, is tucked away inconspicuously behind a shopping centre.

Keyword noise: Edinburgh, Glasgow, indie, lyrics, Morningside, music, romantic, Scotland, The Clientele.

This is something that Big Dave pointed out to me today:

If you go to the post office, and buy foreign currency, with cash, they’ll happily give you it.

If you go to the post office, and buy foreign currency, with a debit card, they expect to see photo ID first.

But if you go to the post office, and give them your Link card, you can withdraw money over the counter, without ID. Even if you just hand that money straight back over the counter, in exchange for foreign currency. Even if you’re using the same card that you can’t use to buy foreign currency with, unless you’ve got ID on you.

What’s the point of that, then?

Keyword noise: bureau de change, foreign exchange, identity, anti money laundering, money, Post Office.

This week has mostly consisted of: coughing fits. Coughing until bent double, sometimes. It’s not fun, but it seems to be fading now.

The worst part is, I didn’t even take any time off work. My sinuses and ears were all aching, and due to the earache I was wobbly on my feet, and having trouble moving my jaw. At one point, I even fell down the stairs.* Why the hell I didn’t take any time off work, I don’t know. I might have had plenty of important work to do, but I sure as hell wasn’t up to doing it properly – I’d spend half an hour at a time changing the wrong file, and making Big Dave think I was about to cough up a lung. I’m unlikely to get any respect or kudos from the management for trying to get my work finished despite feeling shit, so why did I bother to do it?

* Why is it that I never lost my balance and fell over on flat ground? The one place I lose my balance has to be at the top of a flight of stairs, so I go thunk thunk thunk thunk thunk on my arse all the way down to the bottom.

Keyword noise: coughing, falling, sickness, sinuses, sore throat.

Off on another kissogram-escorting job last weekend. We had a booking in Marthwaite Hill, a little village overlooking Wooldale.

When I was younger, I had one particular type of recurring dream which I found slightly disturbing. It would involve setting off on a journey but never reaching the destination, because the road would get narrower and I’d get more and more lost as the dream went on. And that’s pretty much what reaching Marthwaite Hill is like. We turned off the main road, onto a country lane which went up into the moors, twisting and forking, until eventually we reached a little cluster of houses lodged on the edge of a high hill,^* with half the county spread out below.

We trundled slowly up and down the village street – there is only one – looking for the Working Men’s Club. We passed a reasonable-looking pub, and approached a run-down looking building with a small patch of rocky wasteground for a car park. “I hope that’s not it,” said Kissogram Girl.

That was, of course, it.

We were supposedly there for a stag do – but the lad in question looked to be about fifteen. There was no sort of party going on, as far as you would notice, just a typical crowd of people drinking and playing pool. The lad was a drunken tosser, who wouldn’t do what he was told. The crowd wasn’t impressed by the performance, either. “Can I have a word, mate,” one of them said to me. “Is that all we get? Is that all we get for what we paid? Is that it? We’re expecting a bit more than that, mate.”

“Sorry, mate,” I said, trying to work out how many of them were between us and the door, “we don’t set the price.” He tried to get some more of the crowd interested in arguing with me, but fortunately none of them felt like starting anything. We stalked out of the building as quickly as we could, without trying to make it look obvious, hoping like hell that none of them followed us back to the car. And we didn’t look back, just headed straight back to the A-road and didn’t look back until we’d returned to civilisation.

* I checked on an OS map later – the village is on the 1200ft contour

Keyword noise: countryside, kissogram, remote, rural, Wooldale, yokels, Yorkshire.

Taloollah: Oh, something happened the other day, and I’ve been waiting for someone to tell.

Me: Yes?

T: I came home from the pub the other night, and I was feeling hungry, so I got a packet of crisps out of the cupboard … and it was full of crisps. You know how most crisp packets have lots of empty space inside? This one was packed full.

Me: Wow.

T: I know! I only realised when I’d been eating crisps for a bit, and I suddenly thought: hang on, this packet of crisps is lasting a long time.

Me: That’s the ultimate packet of crisps ever. The best crisps in history.

T: You should blog about it. Say it happened to you.

Me: No, I can’t do that! I’ll blog this phone call, though.

Keyword noise: crisps, food, miracle, phone call, surprise, ultimate crisps.

Not feeling very healthy at the moment; as I said on Monday, I have a nasty sore throat that just won’t go away. I know who I caught it off, too.

Small update: someone called martyn read this (from May), and possibly this, from April, and left a comment, about Christian SF writer Dilwyn Horvat. Which makes me think I should probably dig his books out some time, reread them, and review them properly. If I can find them, of course.

One of the main sources of traffic to this site has always been people searching for the lyrics to the childrens’ hymn “Autumn Days” by Estelle White – you can find them here. The number of searches has jumped a lot in the past few weeks, though, to the point where new visitors were coming in looking for them every five or ten minutes the other day. It took me a while to realise that not only is it just coming into autumn, but all the schools have just started term again. If you’re a schoolteacher looking for the words, you really should go out and buy a hymnbook with it in, you know, such as Come And Praise or something similar. Copying the words off the internet just isn’t the Christian thing to do, honest.

More search requests, whilst we’re at it:
how to secure myself from harm in a forest – don’t go in it to start with! Haven’t you seen Blair Witch?
evan davies piercings little box big box
covered in gunge
nostradamus prediction of gordon brown
gothic victorian desktop wallpaper
summary operation titan dilwyn horvat – see, I said I should review it
shimura curves pictures – there’s some fairly crap ones here
trafalgar square pervs

I think that’s enough of that for a while.

Keyword noise: books, Christian literature, Dilwyn Horvat, internet, literature, science fiction, searching.

My throat feels like someone has been rubbing it with sandpaper. I’m sure that hasn’t actually happened. I’d remember.

Nevertheless, I have dragged myself into the office. Given that it’s Monday, everyone would get somewhat suspicious if I stayed at home and croaked down the phone at the office secretary. I’ve come in, and I’m medicating myself by sucking on jelly babies.^* They’re definitely soothing my throat more than cough sweets would.

* the secret sort that are actually made from real babies, of course

Keyword noise: illness, sickness, sore throat.

Well, good morning. It’s the end of the week, and I’m glad. One more day to get through, though.

Things I haven’t managed to write this week: more Books I Haven’t Read; a Book I’ve Finally Finished Reading; any Photos Of The Week. I was even tempted, at one point, to do the first Symbolic Forest Restaurant Review,^* but, er, didn’t.

Also-ran news stories of the week: another stupid driver, whose excuse for speeding was that there was little risk of hitting a goat at the time. Unluckily, his bleatings^** were ignored by the police. Not quite as stupid, though, as the man from Thorne who decided to destroy a speed camera with Thermite, but drove his van right past the camera as he did so. Oops.

A few days ago, I was chatting to Taloollah on the phone, and she said she’d read my review of the little local gig we went to last week. Apparently, it read as if I didn’t enjoy myself, feeling much older than the rest of the crowd, and not really liking the music. Which is a bit unfair of me to put across, because I did have a good night out. I’m probably much grumpier in style, writing here, than I am in real life; it’s just that I find writing cynically to be easier, and often more fun too. In real life I can be annoyingly enthusiastic and bouncy about some things – puppyish, even – but I rarely express that here, because I find that sort of mood a lot harder to describe effectively. I take the easy option, and write like a curmudgeon instead.

Oh, well, I’m going to try to be cheerful today anyway. Time to get myself to the office and get some work done, and then time to switch off, forget about the office, and relax. See you next week.

* of a rather nice Indian on Haxby Road. It needed a bigger indoor pond.

** The Plain People Of The Internet: Groan!

Keyword noise: bad driving, books, Craig Moore, driving, food, grumpy, literature, reading, restaurant, Thermite, Yorkshire.