These sleepless nights will break my heart in two

Listening to: Charlotte Gainsbourg - 5:55

Dialect Word of the Day: Plukey - Spotty

Does it ever go dark in summer in Scotland? This nigh on continuous day light plays havoc with a young man's sleeping patterns. Hence I'm writing this at ten to three in the morning.

I now have a mere four weeks left of employment with Social Services. Whilst I actually don't mind the job, the end is in sight and I am struggling to stay motivated for this last run in. If I were a footballer and this was a tabloid newspaper (which I'm not and this isn't) I would be described as 'Wantaway.' It's strange how football journalism has adopted a vocabulary which one never hears in everyday speech, players are always getting 'Slammed' 'Shammed' or 'Branded' by their managers or Supremo in tabloidese. It assume this is to make utterly mundane stories seem dramatic, but imagine if people actually talked like that in real life.

"My shoddy timekeeping was slammed today by the Social Services supremo. I hit back, branding their obsession with punctuality as a pain in the arse. I then rocked the East Lothian based outfit by handing in my resignation, throwing their tea making rota into chaos. "

Anyway I appear to have gone off on a tangent, much like Ryan Giggs on a bad day. It seems odd that after a few weeks I may never work in the field of Youth Justice again, I won't pretend this isn't a relief, but after nearly 6 years all told, it's provided its' highs as well as its' inevitable lows and provided a huge treasury of anecdotes. Mind you I said 'never again' when I left Leeds, but got sucked back into it. I'm beginning to think Youth Justice is a bit like the Freemasons or the Dennis the Menace fanclub, once you're in you're in for life.

Today, apparently was the Clan Gathering, which explained why I saw so many be-kilted Americans wandering about the place. When I first heard the term Clan Gathering I was utterly unaware of what it was, it all sounded rather sinister to me; I was thinking more Klu Klux than Highland. Thankfully it was all part of the Homecoming celebrations and was an exercise in kitsch and an excuse to extract money from gullible tourists with dubious claims to Scottish ancestry.

I confess it sent me a bit Gok Wan and I was inwardly cringing at some of the Highland dress on display, a full Bonnie Prince Charlie outfit teamed with white trainers was the worst, but by no means sole offender. I also noted that a number of the more portly gentlemen were sporting kilts that were so short they could only described as buttock skimming.

I have profound problems with the whole Homecoming celebrations, firstly it panders to the whole shortbread tin cliche of Scotland; Whisky, Tartan, Highland Games and Golf courses. Needless to say this isn't the Scotland I have experienced and isn't the reason I fell in love with Edinburgh. My love affair is in no small part due due to the array of Scottish writers, starting with Alaisdair Gray in the 70s who have attempted to capture the rhythms of everyday speech have portray modern Scotland as it is.

Alongside promoting Scotland as a backward looking nation, stuck in some imaginary past, I have profound problems linking Scottishness and belonging so closely to blood ties. To my mind belonging is rooted in the present and comes from citizenry and participation rather than being based on ancestry. Basing the whole notion of Homecoming on this reductive notion of Scottishness seems very divisive and to a hand-wringing bleeding heart lefty, such as myself exclusionary. The unspoken and probably unintended message of Homecoming is: "you're Scottish if you're a wealthy American who can find some claim, however tenuous, to Scottish ancestors who left centuries ago and are prepared to spend plenty of money to spend on Whisky, golf courses and tartan tat, but if you belong to a minority community who have lived in Scotland for generations , sorry pal you're not Scottish, it's not in your blood." A retired Scottish academic of African-Caribbean heritage pointed out in superb article in the Evening News -(can't find the link!) that there are plenty of people in the Caribbean who have Scottish heritage and blood (there are more Campbells in the Bridgetown phone book than the Edinburgh one) and their links with Scotland were forged not by choice, but by the unspeakable brutalities of the Slave trade. He, quite rightly in my opinion, called for this experience to be chronicled as part of the Homecoming.

But hey... such uncomfortable truths, amongst this orgy of tweeness, might make the tourists put their wallets away.


Anyway, lefty rant over, my spleen is well and truly vented. I would hate to leave you on such a cynical note. I will leave you with my favourite joke, first told to me by my mother on the day of my grandfather's funeral, minutes before we were due to head to the service. It popped into my head earlier today and had me smirking to myself all afternoon.

Three great Danes were sitting in the Vets' waiting room.

The first great Dane turned to the second and says "What you here for mate?"

"Well" replied the second Great Dane, "I live with very house proud couple and as I've got older I've lost control of my bowels and I keep on making a mess of the carpet, so my number's up, I'm here to be put down."

The first Great Dane sighed "If it's any consolation to you mate, I'm here for the needle as well. I live with a family with small children and as I've got older I've got a bit crochety and the kids were pulling my ears and tormenting me something awful and I snapped at one of them."

"Bad luck" said the second Great Dane. He then turned to the third Great Dane and asked "what about you?"

"I live alone with an attractive young woman and one day she was getting ready to go out. She had just come out of the shower, and by gum did she look and smell lovely. It was then that she took off her dressing gown and bent over to pick something up from on the floor. Well it was all too much for me and I couldn't help myself and... you two can guess the rest."

"Blimey" said the first Great Dane, "After that, I suppose you're here to be put down too."


"Not at all" replied the third Great Dane with a grin "I'm here to have my front claws clipped."


Thank you and goodnight.

Winterval wonderland

Listening to: Herman Dune - Giant

Dialect word of the day: Swedge (a fight or brawl)

How does one measure when Christmas period starts? The first day Advent? December 1st? or maybe the week immediately proceeding the big day? I prefer a more unconventional temporal marker, albeit every bit as regular and reliable as the ones above. For the past decade or so, I have considered it to be Christmas from the the moment I'm informed by a right-wing pillock, normally apalectic with rage that, this year "Birmingham City Council has banned Christmas." They usually cite the Daily Mail or the Sun as the source of this nugget and that it's an attempt of "loony left councillors going out of the way to avoid offending minorities" and/or "Political Correctness gone mad."

Problem is, there is not a shred of truth in the claim. What annoys me most, is the sheer gullibility of the people who believe such arrant nonsense (although being utterly spineless I never actually say this to them) All they need to do is think about what they're saying for a second. It is not, in the council's interests or power to 'ban' Christmas. What do these staunch opponents of all things political correct imagine the council are getting up to? Are they raiding branches of HMV looking for contraband copies of Slade CDs? Making road blocks on the A38 to catch those smuggling tinsel into the exclusion zone? Or sending specially trained sniffer dogs door to door to detect the smell of Mince Pies or Turkey?

Amazingly not.... those loony lefties at the council have suppressed official recognition of Christmas in Birmingham to such a degree , that every year they've put up a tree, an array of Christmas decorations, including a huge illuminated sign across Corporation Street that reads 'Happy Christmas Birmingham' in 15ft high letters! This pap about Birmingham banning Christmas comes from a marketing campaign the Council employed about 10 years ago, to get more shoppers into the refurbished city centre shops for a greater period of the year, and promote a range of secular and non-secular events throughout the Winter, including Winter solstice, Bonfire Night, Children in Need, Ice Skating, Carol concerts, New Year, Diwali and at the very heart of it all...Christmas itself. They hit upon the term 'Winterval' to market these diverse events to shoppers, the term Winterval was never used to replace Christmas and all the Winterval literature makes copious reference to Christmas. Don't believe me? Well here's the long defunct Winterval website, count up all those C-words!

http://web.archive.org/web/19971210073015/http://birmingham.gov.uk/winterval/index.html

This rather mundane truth hasn't stop lazy journos regularly trotting out "Birmingham bans Christmas" stories or their gullible readership, desperate for evidence of 'political correctness gone mad' or reverse discrimination ( however fictitious) lapping it up like sick puppies. What is doubly depressing is the way that the Church Of England have jumped onto the Birmingham bashing bandwagon, either out of ignorance or a cynical bid to curry favour with the baying mob.

It is an ideal story for reinforcing a whole set of deeply ingrained prejudices about council officials, minorities and the left in general. I am deeply suspicious of those jourmalists, (and yes I mean you Richard Littlejohn) who revel in being 'politically incorrect.' I suspect it is often just a way of legitimating their racist, homophobic or sexist attitudes, and celebrating the 'good' old days when you could slap the secretary's arse, call Indian waiters 'Gunga Din' or drive home after 10 pints "without the PC brigade jumping on your back."



Breathe easy chums, my lefty rant is over and Christmas is now officially upon us; eat drink and be merry (and that includes folks in Birmingham)