I Must Be Crazy!

You'd think i'd learn. But no, not me. The past couple of months have kept me so busy with work and life stuff that I have been unable to blog. It's not that I've not had the ideas to blog, it's just a major case of not having enough time in the day. When I have had a moment to myself to sit down for two minutes the blogging inspiration has inevitably passed or I have just had the energy to fight with my brain and get my thoughts into some sort of order and get them onto the screen. So what did I do today? I only went and made myself a new blog that i'm not going to have time for either. I must be crazy!
Anyway if you want to have a look at it, the link is in the top left corner of this page. Its called The Scottish List and it is my take on things you should do, or taste, or visit if you ever come to Scotland. It's only got two items in the list so far, but give me a break it will grow - slowly.

Wedding - Is It Over Yet?

What’s a blog for if it can’t be used to get something selfishly off your chest? At this moment in time I can’t think of a use so I am going to use this blog for that very purpose. Yesterday, I sat through what was possibly the most boring event I have ever been to. And as I sat there, straining to stop myself from slipping off my chair and under the table, I suddenly managed to crystallise everything I hate into just two things: injustice and big weddings.

Yes, it’s true, I have a very low boredom threshold – OK, I’m impatient – but surely everyone’s patience would have been tested by 10 hours of speeches, small talk and ceremonies. I felt like a child, fidgeting through something really boring and getting that sharp look that your parents used to give you, which means something like this: sit up, shut up, or else. Except I’m 29. I wanted to have a tantrum and roll around on the floor – anything so I’d be sent home in disgrace.

Of course, weddings are more fun if you know the people getting married really well or there’s a coach-load of your friends there too, but that’s nothing to do with the wedding itself. Think about it. The emperor has no clothes on. And weddings are boring.

Some of them are incredibly self-indulgent, too. It’s bad enough that I have to hear allusions to the groom’s sexual past from the best man, but why do I have to gaze in awe at photos projected on a wall of the bride and groom when they were three? Why do I have to hear the details of their first date? Why do people want to bare their souls? Just get on with it. Please.

It’s not just the bride and groom who spoil weddings – the guests can be horrible too. We all know people who just go to fill their faces and get drunk – and then spend most of the evening complaining very loudly that there wasn’t enough food or drink. I seem to be sat next to this couple all too often. Why? I smile at the appropriate times, like I really want to be there when I don’t. I behave myself. So why stick me next to someone who is pre-designed to act like a jerk? Let’s see, could it perhaps be because neither the bride nor the groom know me well enough to put me at another table?

How can you possibly know all 600 people at your wedding? And why do all the women try to out-bling each other with their dresses, hats and diamonds? Less is more, girls. Where’s the quality control?

When done right Scottish weddings can be fun – the men arrive in kilts looking smartly dressed but without looking like the let’s-bring-out-the-old-suit-brigade. The music can be excellent making it an event where you can laugh and dance for hours, and then there are events like yesterday’s where the music is crap and it’s just a long, long slog until the end of the night. There is of course a lot of sitting and eating – two things I excel at. However, I’d prefer to do them on my comfort of my own home with people I know, not in the function room of some horrid hotel with nasty carpets and mock Tudor chairs, getting backache from holding a false smile on my face for six hours whilst listening to Mr & Mrs B. O. Ring tell stories about their Persian cat.

I consider myself a generous person I spend more money buying things for other people than I ever do on myself. In truth I don’t really like money, I enjoy spending money on others but even my generous spirit is challenged when faced with the wedding gift list. You used to be able to go to a wedding and spend the amount of money you thought appropriate on the couple. The amount you would spend on the couple’s gift would depend on how much you knew them. Now in the interest of not getting 10 toasters, 7 irons and 4 knife sets, the couple get together and make up a list of the items that they want, complete with prices. By the time you get your hands on this price list, after 400 other guests have got their grubby paws on it you are left with the – chopping board - £75.

£75 chopping board, you have to be kidding me, it looks like, strangely enough, a chopping board. At £75 I’d want it to get the vegetables out the fridge and the knives out of the knife block and do the chopping on its own, unaided with the help of man. In truth I don’t mind spending £75 on a present; I don’t mind spending even more than that, after all they invited me to their wedding. Ok so I might not have wanted to go in the first place but still they invited me to their big day, getting them a gift is the least I can do. It’s the idea that they have priced every item out, it takes away all the pleasure of buying the gift, knowing that the couple expected you to spend a predetermined amount.

When I was a kid and people asked me what I wanted for Christmas my answer would be ‘nothing!’ I didn’t want other people to spend money on me, but I would spend all the money I had on them, I was a strange kid in that I enjoyed buying for other people but felt guilty when they bought for me. I got much more joy from giving than I did receiving. When I got older and I realised that ‘nothing’ ended up as something more expensive than I intended, I thought I could get around that same question by looking up the catalogue and asking for the £6.99 Bullseye dartboard. Not that I wanted the Bullseye dartboard but then I didn’t want them to spend even more money on me either. As a kid I foolishly thought I could manipulate relatives into spending less, in reality they would get me the £6.99 dartboard and something else but they felt good about it.

Today peoples attitudes have changed somewhat to a ‘I want, I want, I want.’ It gets to the stage you just want to turn round and say ‘You’ll get what you are given!’

If one lesson was learned this weekend it was that I much prefer small weddings. If I ever get married, (not going to happen anytime soon since I’m single) I want mine to be a mercifully short, intimate do for 30. A small gathering of people that I know, people who I want to be there, no-one that comes under the category of a friend of a friend of a long distant relative that I have never seen other than being present at weddings and funerals. If my future wife wants to spend six months drowning in vast lists and worrying about cakes and cars, and seating plans then the relationship can only be doomed to failure and is the perfect reason for not getting married in the first place.

Funny Little Blog

Ah my funny little blog

I come home late at night and I type a piece of my soul

I get to be myself and I get to sing

I get to play at being irresponsible

I can say what I feel without needing to worry about the consequences

I have a conversation with you at night

It's a little one sided but that's alright

For the briefest of moments I can live out the life of a poet

Or demonstrate my abilities as the world’s worst comedian

You’re the smallest picture of what’s going on in my mind in an instant

You help clear my vision when my eyesight is fogged

I don’t write to be understood, I write to understand

People are going to be reading this & see me talking in person to a blog and think I’ve cracked

Well they’ll be right, but this post is written in jest

That though doesn’t make me any less crazy

Do you think the Pope swears?

I’m a little bit strange, I admit it. I’ll be doing something innocuous and I’ll suddenly feel the need to have a question answered. Like today for example I wanted to know the answer to the question above. Despite living in the West of Scotland all my life I’m a strange one in that I don’t really swear all that often. To grow up in the west of Scotland and not swear is an unusual occurrence to say the least. Everyone does it. You aren’t considered a real man unless you swear. It’s like a rap album without the parental advisory sticker, it doesn’t happen very often.

Strangely, I was actually 24 before I swore for the first time. I lost my virginity before I swore, no mean feat for an ugly bugger. Still to this day I have not sworn in front of my mother. Despite now being 29 if I swore in front of my mother I probably wouldn’t live to see the next day. In fact it was her fault that I never swore until it was 24. Don’t get me wrong she is a nice woman but if you do wrong she can also become one scary woman, and no-one really scares me. Well no-one but my mother that is, she has this look of silent impending doom where you would rather the earth swallowed you whole and the devil whipped your back raw with barbed wire than suffer the wrath that was coming next. Sadly the devil has never rescued me yet.

Needless to say I have never sworn in front of my mother and probably never will. When I did swear for the first time it caught me off guard, I didn’t see it coming it just come out of my mouth, no warning. As much as it surprised me, it surprised the people I was with at the time. Having known me most of my life and never hearing those words being uttered by my mouth they were stunned into silence for a couple of seconds, before looking at one another and then pointing to me and falling to the floor laughing “Steven … swore……hahahahaha”. Evil fuckers! It was then I realised that me and swearing would not make a good partnership. Apparently when I swear it has the same effect as when my mother swears. People just laugh.

I’ve only ever heard my mother swear 3 times. Each occasion was hilarious. She only swears when provoked by something that makes her really angry. The problem lies in the build up to the act of swearing. She can’t pull off swearing effectively because she thinks about the act too much. You can see her thinking about swearing 5 minutes before she does it. The whole time her anger is building up and her voice is getting louder and louder she really wants to swear but she’s also thinking of her grandmother, whom she is inherited the silent-impending-doom look from, and by the time she finally has built up enough rage to swear she’s been thinking about the deed too long. The words then escape from her mouth in her quiet posh telephone voice, which is a such a contrast to her loud angry voice that anyone in the room at the time instantly falls to the floor in hysterics. Of course this is not the effect she is aiming for but she just can’t help it, she can’t swear effectively. I don’t have the posh telephone voice but it seems to have a similar comical effect when I swear because I swear so infrequently.

Anyway what was this post about? Oh yeah, the pope. Why did I think about the pope and if he swore or not? Well today I was getting ready to wash my clothes when the question popped into my head. I was getting the washing out of the laundry basket when the door bell rang. My head automatically turned towards the sound of the doorbell but my hand at the time was still digging into the basket for that last piece of clothing at the bottom when my finger. Because my head and my hand were not coordinated at the time, my finger scraped down the inside of the basket and split my nail down the middle before it ripped in two and fell off completely. At the time of the splitting of the nail incident a few words escaped from my mouth, I can’t say I remember the exact order the words came out but it went something like this……’FUUUUCK, SHIT, FUCK, BASTARD, FUCK, SHIT, FUCK IN THE NAME OF THE WEE MAN…..(deep breath) ….owwwww that hurt!”

I then went down the stairs, answered the door and discovered no-one there. “Fuckers!”

It was then, in the middle of doing a boring chore that I wondered if the Pope swore. I mean if I can be provoked into swearing surely the Pope can too. Imagine if the Pope was addressing the people of Rome on Easter Sunday and he accidentally dropped the Holy Bible on his foot. I bet you he’d swear, but he’d be sneaky about it, he’d do it Latin.

Ladies and gentlemen we have an epidemic - run, save yourselves!

I’m sitting here watching the BBC 10 o’clock news and one of the reporters on it is describing, not for the first time, the 'epidemic levels of obesity in England and Wales'.

Obesity epidemic; you have to love that phrase, a journalist (probably American) somewhere has spent many years in university before coining such a phrase and many journalists since then have seized on it and used it for themselves. But come on, can we really call obesity an epidemic? To me the black death was a proper epidemic. Poor sanitation and hygiene with rats rapidly spreading disease killing 240 million people in Europe, a third of the entire medieval population, now that is a serious epidemic. To describe obesity with the same language has got to be a joke.

Imagine 50 years from now some kid asking his grandparents about the obesity epidemic of 2006 for a school project,

‘Grandad how did you survive?’

‘Oh son it was terrible, there were Burger King joints at just about every corner. We couldn’t walk to get the paper in the morning because we had the car. At work we sat at computer desks for 8 hours a day, then came home and sat at the computer some more to write on something called blogs. We had far too much salt and sugar in our diets but with super size meals just 50 pence extra it was so hard to resist. Really son, it’s amazing you are even here, your grandmother found it very hard to have kids due to my diabetes, if it wasn’t for viagra we doubt that your father would ever have been conceived.’

I know obesity is a serious issue and I shouldn’t make light of it but the language is over the top. Obesity is a problem of our time because of the lifestyle many of us in the western world lead. We’ve become lazy when it comes to meal times, we don’t cook home made meals like people used to, some of us can’t even cook. In the past people used to walk locally to work everyday, now many of us have to drive to work. Work itself used to be physically exhausting it involved manual labour; now most work is office based moving nothing but our fingers and our mouths.

Obesity is not an epidemic. It is a killer but so is cancer. It’s a long term slow process killer, it doesn’t come along and sweep through the population wiping a third of it out in the space of a few decades. It’s a result of our spoilt lifestyle with food being in easy reach of us all and few of us exercising enough. It’s only an epidemic if you consider McDonalds & Burger King the rats of the 21^st century sweeping through America and Europe. Even then you have to wonder why the world’s population is still growing if we are in the middle of an epidemic.

I love language, the English language is a great tool but I hate to see it abused by people who should know better. Describing obesity as an epidemic at best shows a lack of knowledge of the causes of obesity, at worst it is a deliberate attempt to use scary language to frighten fat people into dieting. If I were obese I’d tell the journalist who coined the phrase ‘obesity epidemic’ to stick two fingers up his judgemental ass.

Can You See The Join?

Normally as a photographer I don't believe in editing. Truth be told I'm too lazy to touch up my photographs. I point, I shoot, if I think its good I keep it, if its bad I delete. Simple. But I've seen other people making great panorama shots by stitching two or thre photographs together and saw this scene and thought it was the perfect opportunity mto try that myself. Well stupid me didn't really know what the hell he was doing. As a result you can see this great big diagonal line where the join is so if anyone wants to tell me what I did wrong or tell me what I need to do to fix it I would appreciate the help.