Uzi Time

Bloody trains been delayed an hour and twenty minutes and Waverley Station is the coldest place on God’s earth.

Expiditioners to the Arctic Tundra have been known to remark ‘Fuck me! It’s like Waverley Station out here!’

My already strained tolerance for the human race is stretched almost beyond endurance on train journey’s. I become uber-curmudgeon when forced to sit among noisy kids, lap-top tapping business-types, i-pod blaring bastards, and fuckers (usually English) with ‘good-school’ accents who want the world to know it. And this is if you’re lucky and don’t find yourself among Geordies wearing replica shirts travelling south for the Arsenal game. When that happens you might as well throw yourself off the train rather than endure their impenetrable accents and knuckle-dragging songs.

The delay means I will hit London smack in the middle of the rush-hour, when Kings Cross station will be heaving. The ‘busy-ness’ of London is one of many reasons I decided to leave and seek the calm and the beach at Portobello.

I miss its parks though. It’s great that the city has managed to retain so much of its open space to at least offer a measure of tranquillity amidst the madness of the crowds. The nearest thing to a crowd in Portobello is the queue at the fag counter in Scotmids.

I’ve been cursed for my unpleasantness re. geordies by the presence of two ‘lasses’ from Newcastle in the seats directly behind me. They’ve been talking about ‘tops’ and sun-tan treatments for the past forty minutes now and if they’re travelling all the way to London I may well have to shoot them with this Uzi I have in my bag.

One of them ends almost every sentence she utters with an up-lilt inflection one should only employ when asking a question. I find this infuriating on two specific levels. Firstly; because it has now drawn my attention to the extent that I am unable to read my paper. Secondly; because it is symptomatic of a cultural inheritance so casually adopted without consideration of its profound, hegemonic implications i.e. we are becoming homogenised, Aussie TV, Hollywood pap, Starbucks ‘can I get’, pureed rap-culture clones of a dominant culture so repellent and dumbed-down that Miley Cyrus is allowed.              

As if her father wasn’t bad enough!

O God! One of them has just phoned Heathrow about their flight tomorrow!

Uzi time....!!!

The frog, the mandolin, and the fish (and the carpenter)

My strange friend Julie has asked me, and I only live to do her bidding, to write a story incorporating a fish, a frog, a carpenter and a mandolin, so here goes;

The frog, the mandolin, and the fish (and the carpenter)

Once upon a time, and in a land far away, there was a frog who had discovered a wonderful talent for playing the mandolin (it would have been the cello but that would be just ridiculous!). To say that this puzzled the poor frog would have been an understatement for it possessed few, if any, of the basic requirements for such a task.

He, for it was a he, had no hands to speak of, let alone opposable thumbs. How was he able to hold and strum the instrument? His habit of frequently leaping about from frond to frond mitigated disastrously against him being able to sustain a tune for any length of time. It really was a source of great bewilderment to the poor frog, and greatly strained his froggy sensibilties.

When all at once a fish appeared from beneath the murky waters and offered this advice;

"Be not alarmed friend frog, for the ways of the world are not always easily explained. The God of all things, the master of creation has bestowed upon you a beautiful, if unusual gift. It is not the stuff of frogs to question his almighty wisdom. Play, play your mandolin and let the sweet music penetrate the heavens and reach the kingdom of the divine".

The frog, who was actually a keen advocate of the Darwinian theory of evolution, and the pre-eminence of science over religion, begged to differ with the pious fish and did so, thus;

"That I am the possessor of such stringly proclivities is not the work of some omnipotent diety, not some celestial transendence, it is clearly a freak of nature. The fact that we are talking to each other is also rather a bizarre aberration, but not the issue at hand. No! The answer to this riddle has mortal base. Organic selection has chosen that I be the perpetrator of mandolific lilts and strains and such is my lot in life.

Just then, a carpenter from the local town was passing the pond and, on seeing a mandolin-playing frog talking to a fish vowed to knock the magic mushrooms on the head for a bit.