Tiggy

I’ve never regretted not having kids. It strikes me as a tad perverse to claim you’re doing your bit for the future of the species when that future involves the next generation waking up with their hair on fire in the 50 degree heat of Christmas 2050 knowing that it’s just hit £50 a pint.

When it comes up in conversation, and it does, I just say I can’t see why I’d give up a life of little responsibility, frolics unencumbered and full nights of unconsciousness in favour of ‘kids eat free’ Saturdays in the local and grimly suggesting you move nearer the in-laws just for the cheap babysitting.

But don’t worry, you parents out there, because I’m now one of you. Now, I have a cat.

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The corners of a day

I’m starting to get the horrible feeling I’m middle aged.

Not in mathematical terms obviously; I imagine I passed that event horizon a good 15 or 20 years back. And not necessarily in terms of my state of mind, which got as far down the road of adulthood as it was ever going to get by about 25 and has been sat in a paddling pool ever since. But in one specific way, it feels like I’ve joined my peers in that terrifying centrepoint of human life between carefree invincibility and packing pyjamas for the hospice.

Every day is the fucking same.

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A hamster indeed

I found out something the other night when my daughter was visiting; we were chatting and she had steered the conversation excitedly on to the subject of her new pet, a hamster indeed. 

With her partner they had procured it a couple of days before in what sounded like an expensive Supermarket Sweep-style spree down every aisle of Pets At Home (Pets Are Us? I forget). It turned out that the manager that night was Mick, an old band mate of mine, and when he recognised the young couple he popped over to say hello, see how they were doing.

It sounds like he quickly clocked that they needed someone a bit more qualified to hold their metaphoric hand and steer them, like the metaphoric monkey, up and down and all through the store. Someone to support them, to help make sure they mibee didn’t buy just that, and to deffo buy this here, instead. So, Mick bullshitted- something about just realising this was a conflict of interest for him, and he said he’d have to pass them on to a colleague.

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DDDDFI

I suppose it’s a bit like that thing, ‘suck-teeth’ l believe they cry it, and, according to an urban slang blog l just looked at, I’m triggered to do my version of it for the very same reasons, mostly. These shared reasons are to express “disgust, defiance, disapproval, disappointment, frustration”, or (and here’s the one l can really identify with), “impatience”.

From now on we shall call these collective pissing-off triggers DDDDFI. 

Suck-teeth, you will no doubt know if you have ever half skimmed the same urban slang blogs that l have, is the “gesture of drawing air through the teeth and into the mouth to produce a loud sucking sound”.

My version of suck-teeth is different.

More…musical.

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The Edge

This morning, I was just finishing getting ready for work. One final, cursory glance towards the mirror before heading off, and I realised, with a jolt, and indeed some large amount of alarm, that The Edge was staring somewhat morosely back at me. This strange…illusion, for it surely must have been such, was so… perhaps…veridical that I remember spinning wildly around to grab the sleekit wee fucker. Just like how, I would imagine, one might body-tackle and pummel an unlucky leprechaun in order to squeeze out some of his luck.

Alas! My attempt was futile. I reckon that you’d definitely need the edge, to catch The Edge. But can you imagine – a somewhat scruffy, but well kent Irish intruder creeping up behind you, in your own house?!

Can you imagine!

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When your left arm starts to throb

I’ve been thinking a lot about death lately. 

Well, ‘lately’. Since September 2018, when that skinny fucker with the scythe and cowl moved in next door, and proceeded to drill holes in the wall every few weeks in the form of some new and brilliant medical complaint. This month’s worsening cough and lump in my neck are presumably my neighbour’s version of a Ring security system pointed at my front door so he can make sure I don’t order too much from the pharmacy.

Being ill in some way nearly all the time, after 41 years of little more than the odd tree climbing injury, makes me see death – where it is, and where it conspicuously isn’t. Which is almost everywhere because wow do we do some job of avoiding it. 

And by we I mean you. You’re never going to die, are you?

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The kindness of Rangers

So, me and the missus were up Glasgow’s west end the other week, it might have been for Valentines; a walk round the park and a nice bit of lunch was our simple plan. As there was still rather a nip in the air l decided to put on the camo army jacket l had recently picked up rather cheaply from a local charity shop, and then, we were offski (can we still say offski?)

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Five stars at Majestic

It’s the look on his face as he’s swilling.

Round and round. Never quite reaching the lip of the glass. Round and round. Its holder peers nonchalantly at the smear left with each viscous rotation. The liquid gradually slides back into the bowl and slowly, slowly, a calm settles.

His expression is that of ecstasy delayed, like Sting a few hours in. He thrusts his beak into the glass and takes a massive sniff. Because he’s a wine buff, and he knows that the finest wine begins in the nose.

It doesn’t though, does it? It begins in the bottle, then goes to the glass, then your mouth, then your stomach. There’s a period where you’re not sure where it is, or where you are or why, and then it’s in the toilet and it’s suddenly Monday again. That’s the process by which wine moves from vine to sewer via the human body. Yet to hear a wine buff speak you’d think there was a nobility of archangels escorting wine through the nirvana of the senses, though they still have to fill out a lot more forms since Brexit.

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Call me Judith

I like to think I do my bit in the fight against climate change. I don’t leave lights on – the dark hasn’t scared me since I saw Johnny Depp sucked into a bed aged about nine. It disturbs people to see me in anything other than fraying black hoodies so I don’t need to order a set of new outfits from Bangladesh every other week. I’ve been cutting back on meat because I heard cows have worse flatulence than my 80-year-old stepfather, though whichever scientist declared that has clearly never heard dear old Merv after he’s been bell-ringing.

I don’t have a car, that’s a big one. And biggest of all: I don’t have kids. Don’t, shouldn’t, probably can’t now anyway. No urgent young voices demanding India cut their emissions but also please put cling film around my vegetables because the supermarket’s full of poor people and God knows where they’ve been.

So I’m saving humanity, one locally grown leek at a time. But I do catch the odd flight. And if you people start trying to stop me getting in planes, I will burn your fucking world.

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