Symbolic Forest

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, 27^th 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.

People have been going in and out of the flat upstairs all day again. When I popped out, a couple of people were stood at the door holding lots of expensive-llooking audiovisual equipment—one of those big fluffy microphones, for one thing. So now, I’m intrigued. I want to know what they’re up to up there. Maybe, if I turn the stereo up loud enough, they will come and complain and I can ask them what they’re doing.

Yes, I know I’m nosy.

Just when you thought I couldn’t get any geekier: I had half an hour spare this afternoon, so I reordered all my CDs. By colour, the colour of the spine of the CD case. The plain-white and plain-black shelves don’t look that nice, but there’s a lovely graduation of the rest from dark red through orange to green and then blue.

Keyword noise: people watching.

Bored this afternoon, so I ended up watching Richard & Judy. They were trying to suggest some symbols to represent Englishness—it being St. George’s day and all—and kept going on about King Arthur, suggesting Excalibur as a national motif, and so on. Don’t they realise that the King Arthur myth was all about stopping the English from settling in Britain? It would hardly be appropriate.

Keyword noise: mythology, Richard and Judy, King Arthur.

This month I won £50 on the Premium Bonds, so today I thought I’d go and look for clothes, and maybe get some ideas for a wedding outfit. I know it’s only April and the wedding I’m going to is in August, but I wanted to be prepared. Anyway, I searched round every branch of Armstrong’s and didn’t find anything. I was thinking maybe some tweed trousers, but they’re a bit expensive. Part of the problem is that each of their shops has two or three racks of clothed attached to each wall, one about the other, so you can’t really see what’s way up near the ceiling. They have a ladder you can borrow, but I daren’t use it for fear I’ll fall over than thwack the assistant on the head, knocking over everything in the shop in the process. In any case, you can’t really browse through everything whilst you’re stood on top of a stepladder.

So yes, I want to go back and go through everything again, but it will look a bit odd if i keep going back to these shops every day and not actually buying anything. I can’t be bothered with waiting. I thought about spending an extra fiver and going to Glasgow to shop, but I don’t know where any of the decent cheap clothes shops in Glasgow are (except one), and I’d probably end up meeting people and spending lots of extra cash on booze.

Keyword noise: Edinburgh, clothes, shopping.

As I was saying, I went to the theatre on Saturday. It’s not often I do something at all cultured, so it was something to be relished.

I wouldn’t have gone if I hadn’t been comped, of course. I went around to the stage door and asked for the manager, saying “A friend of mine’s in the company, and he said you’d give me a tcket.” Fortunately, he seemed to be expecting me, and he took me round the front of house and told the ushers to sit me somewhere.

The play was rather good, and I’m not just saying that in case W is reading. As it’s really a children’s play, I was dreading the theatre being filled with squalling brats, but fortunately they weren’t that bad (although I was a bit surprised that the family in front of me was sat watching the play and eating a pizza. This isn’t your living room, you know). I definitely laughed at several of the jokes, even though I can’t remember what they were (apart from the “This isn’t India!” line that I used in the previous post), and the play was just the right length to stop me getting bored (I do have the attention-span of a five-year-old, of course).

After it was over (they didn’t do curtain calls), I blustered my way backstage again. I was explaining to the stage door keeper that I knew someone, could he call him please, when the wardrobe master walked past and said “Oh, are you waiting for W?” Either I look distinctive, or they don’t get many backstage visitors. After he’d showered we went to Favorit for some food, and then on for a (rather late-starting) night out at CC’s, because one of the technical people (sorry, I forget all the job titles) had just been dumped by her girlfriend (by SMS, the bitch) and was desperate to pull. She didn’t, but I think we all had a good time anyway.

As you might realise, I officially tend to like supposedly-twee indie-pop, rather than the sort of cheesy chart-dance-pop they play at CC’s. And, proverbially, I never dance. Therefore, it automatically follows that I can’t have been dancing all night to cheesy chart-pop-dance music, can I?

Keyword noise: Edinburgh.

So, I had an actor friend staying the past week or so, which was nice. He’s currently playing in The Borrowers, and is mid-way through a 6-month tour of the UK and Ireland, a different town every week. He cooked me yummy food, and last night we went out after his show and got very very drunk. Details to follow (when I get round to it).

Keyword noise: Edinburgh.