This Isn't About Them

Strictly speaking, this BLT isn’t a BLT at all. It’s a BRT but nobody gives a shit. The R stands for Rocket, which may or may not be real lettuce. It’s green enough, and they stack it in the salad aisle, but you can never be sure. Is it the greatest sandwich ever made? Hard to say. There are others that stand in the ring with it.

1.There’s the crayfish and rocket number. Pret used to make one if you were too refined to build your own.

2.There’s a piece on real chips with brown sauce. A working man’s meal once. God only knows if it’s survived the death of the deadly old chip pan.

3. Peanut butter and jam—strawberry jam, crunchy peanut butter. Smucker’s Goober will do in a pinch, though it’s grape and tastes like a far away childhood that never quite happened.

4. Pastrami and pickle, the New York kind, maybe with a slice of American cheese sweating between them like a couple on a cheap date.

5. Crisps of any sort, so long as they’re not vinegar, with a good smear of mayonnaise to ease the going.

6. Anchovies and mustard on toast. That one’s for the brave, or the lonely, or those who have no patience left for Presbyterian opinions about food. No need for salt but you might add a tomato.

I forgot the fish finger sarnie. There may be more. Thinking of all this tires a man.

The bread used to be the Scottish plain loaf. It was the standard. The one true bread for a chip sandwich. Now it’s gone. Possibly banned by the health men in grey suits in grey offices filled with blue screens. Maybe outlawed by the same quiet forces that kill off anything good. I can’t find any in the shops. It feels like something from an old fever ward, spoken of but never seen. Dark times. There are pale and new generations suffering this loss, but they don't even know it.

These days the world is full of white sourdough. Fashionable and fickle stuff. I'm stuck with it for now, leaning into the forces. Diet is important to the rich, essential but tricky for the poor. Two-fifty for seven or eight airy slices. Hardly the people’s bread. It tastes fine though but the cheaper loaves of supermarket junk just taste bad these days, though a good rye can surprise a man if he’s lucky enough to come across one. Tiger bread remains an alternative but lacks staying power.

Leave out the rolls, the stotties, the muffins, the brioche buns. They’re not the bread for a true sandwich. They’re something else and this isn’t about them.

Free Graphic

They (🍎) gave us, and everyone else I guess, a free graphic. So we feel we have to use it. Display it like a badge or a trophy. For whatever it means. Free-loaders. An imaginary bag of magic beans. We're just chimps accepting another banana tossed into the pen while they scoff fine food and wine uptown and maintain a safe distance from the zoo, the coal mine or the paddy field. We scratch each other and check for fleas or tics.

Every so often there's a bit of a fight between the stronger and bigger chimps in the pen or they'll pick on the weaker chimps because they caught a decent sized banana or just seemed contented, but nobody outside pays attention to that sort of thing. They're quite happy if we fight amongst ourselves instead of attacking the fence that keeps us trapped.

That's the truth about the state of the music industry and most of life in general. If you can't see that then you're clearly not looking, perhaps you're not bothered. I'm not bitter. I'm passed that. There's a numbness setting in. The temple of the low man. Life just goes on. 

impossible songs: Fat Balls Diary

impossible songs: Fat Balls Diary: Today's entry is a bit of a diary thing based around real or possibly fictitious events that took place yesterday, 25th - in no particul...

Eight

I discovered this figure, one which looks like an eight, in an old wooden floor. The floor had no other numbers or blemishes in it so it was a puzzling sight. I've no idea how or why it got there. Eight (8) is the natural number following 7 and preceding 9. In nuclear physics it's the second magic number. The seven most widely recognized magic numbers as of 2019 are 2, 8, 20, 28, 50, 82, and 126. Atomic nuclei with a "magic" number of protons or neutrons are much more stable than other nuclei. I'm no expert but I can believe that. However it's clearly nothing to do with this number 8 being there, marked into the surface of the floor for no obvious reason. I'll leave it here.

November at Seventy

The morning arrived without ceremony, as if it had slipped in through a crack in the night rather than risen in any deliberate way. I became aware of it not by light but by the thinning of darkness, that hesitant grey peculiar to November in Scotland, a colour that seems less like the world revealing itself and more like an admission that it has little to offer today.

I lay there for some time, listening to the house settling into its Sunday quiet. At seventy, waking is no longer the abrupt shift it once was; it comes in stages, like a tide feeling its way up a beach. First the awareness of the cold in the room, then the protest of the knees, and finally the familiar heaviness in the chest—a weight not painful but simply present, like a reminder. Of what, I couldn’t say. Age, perhaps. Or the sum of all the days that came before this one.

The clock ticked with an insistence that felt louder than it should have. I imagined the long corridor outside the bedroom: the cold tiles, the slight draught that always seemed to gather near the skirting boards, the framed photographs whose colours had dulled along with the years they depicted. There was comfort in these things, even in their shabbiness. It meant continuity.

Outside, a wind was moving across the roofs, not strong, just persistent. I could picture the sky without needing to open the curtains, clouds like dirty wool pulled tightly over the town, the suggestion of rain hanging in the air, undecided. Somewhere in the distance a gull called, its voice thin and lonely, echoing the emptiness and flatness of the harbour, down the hill and across the chimney pots to the north.

I finally pushed myself upright, feeling the stiffness crack along my spine. This, too, was part of the ritual: the confirmation that the body had once again agreed to the small labour of living. I shuffled to the kitchen, where the kettle sat cold on the counter, stainless steel reflecting that same dreary morning light.

The first boil of the day always felt like an event. Not because of the coffee, though I have come to rely on it, but because it marked the moment when the house began to wake with me. The kettle’s rising groan, the faint smell of the gas radiator beginning its reluctant work, the soft clank of mugs as I set them down. These were small sounds, almost nothing, yet they stitched together the hour in a way that felt solid and reassuring.

Through the window I watched the neighbour’s garden, brown and sodden, the last of the leaves clinging to the branches like stubborn old men refusing to admit the season had moved on. A blackbird hopped across the frost-licked grass, pausing occasionally as if trying to remember what it was looking for. I need to top up the feeders.

And there I stood, hands around the warm mug, the steam rising gently into my face. Sunday mornings used to feel like pauses in a busy life; now they feel like mirrors, showing me the quiet I carry everywhere. But there was nothing bleak about it. Only a kind of clarity, a recognition that the world was still here, grey and tired and slow, yes, but here nonetheless. And so was I. Sunday morning. Now where had that cat got to?

Black on White

Spindly, boney, twiggy, stretchy, creepy, silent.

Black and white

White on black

Negative and positive

Reversed

Turned around

Now steady.

Checkout the Checkouts

I don’t like the robot checkouts. No one really does. You give in to them because time is short and life is dull. You stand in a line behind people who can’t find the barcodes, and you think about the old days when someone else did the work. But now it’s just you and the machine.

The rich don’t wait. They don’t line up with a basket and a few cans of beans. They make rules about “efficiency” and “savings” and someone somewhere gets richer. You just want to get home.

Aldi is best. Small, tight, quick. The barcodes are large and true. Everything scans first time. The people there are steady, fast, and silent. The machine doesn’t talk. It works. You feel something clean and sharp in that.

Tesco is a mess. Always noise, always too much. Staff talking, lights flashing, alarms for things that don’t matter. They sell too much of everything. You stand there, waiting for help that never comes. Machines talk sometimes, but not all of them. The fridges have doors now. Whose idea was that? The place feels tired and greedy.

Morrisons is nothing. Not bad. Not good. Just there. You can buy bread that looks fresh. You probably won’t.

Co-op has a strange machine that beeps in odd ways. It talks like a man from the west of Scotland. You hear it every day and it grates on you. Still, it works. It’s quick.

Boots is hell. No one is ever at the till. You try to buy something simple, and it becomes hard. You give up.

M&S is fine. The machines are tall, the baskets have nowhere to go. You lift things higher than feels right. Someone designed it without ever buying food.

B&Q is not a supermarket but it feels like one run by men who’ve forgotten what shopping is. Sometimes you do it yourself, sometimes a man in orange helps. If you’re behind someone buying pipes and plaster, you suffer.

Lidl is like Aldi’s scruffy brother. The bread is good. The machines work. Sometimes they sell peanut butter with jam already mixed in. That’s something.

Asda is solid. Plain. The kind of place you go when you just want to eat. Their meal deals make sense, unlike Tesco’s. Tesco’s make you want to walk into the sea.

Waitrose is another world. I went once. Paid a man. The bread was good.

Maybe I’ve drifted from the point. But it’s my space to drift in.

Next time: which of these fine systems can be fooled the easiest.

A Plain Day

Dopplegangers

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Dull Challenges

1. Alphabetize a phone book – By hand, from A to Z, page after page, using colour coded tags. A-A, A-B, A-C etc.

2. Count grains of rice in a 10 pound bag – No tools allowed except a magnifying glass and tweezers (optional).

3. Watch paint dry – Paint and area of wall. Literally sit, time and monitor the drying process of multiple coats on various wall textures.

4. Transcribe the Urban Dictionary – Word for word in pencil, include all pronunciation keys and example sentences.

5. Sort a jar of mixed buttons by size and shade – Bonus points for labeling each pile with its Pantone equivalent.

6. Match identically shaped puzzle pieces from 10 large jigsaw puzzles mixed together – Without assembling the puzzles.

7. Track the evaporation rate of a glass of tap water – One measurement per hour, for a week.

8. Write “I love to procrastinate” 10,000 times – On lined paper, using your best handwriting.

9. Listen to an 8 hour loop of the Spotify Top Ten – No distractions allowed, and eyes must remain on a blank wall.

10. Identify and list every item in your most cluttered drawer – Create a spreadsheet with columns for weight, material, origin story, and frequency of use.