December 2003

December 31st, 2003. Train

I definitely know the journey with my eyes shut, now. Every little bit of it, all the way. I can tell when the train is slowing down when it shouldn't be, and we're about to be delayed.

Opposite me was a middle-class woman taking her two young boys away somewhere, desperately distracting them with Disney books and trying to get them to eat something healthy. "No, Sebastian, you can have more sweets when you've finished your sandwich. No, you do like your sandwich! It's pesto. You loved pesto the last time you had it."

It feels, now, as if Grimsby and Edinburgh are two separate worlds. When I'm back here I can't imagine being there, and vice-versa. When I'm here I'm a completely different person - well, if that's true, then it's for the sake of my parents. Now I'm back here, I can go back to being myself: when I'm visiting the parents, it feels as if I automatically slip back into sulky teenager mode.

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December 28th, 2003. Nitespot

We're still eating the Christmas turkey: cold, dry, tasteless and impossible to swallow. My mother keeps saying: "It's Christmas! You've got to have turkey! If we just had chicken it wouldn't be special." Tomorrow I'm going back to Edinburgh, and I've been promised a turkey-sandwich packed lunch.

I've hardly left the house whilst I've been here, apart from trips to the newsagents, a mile up the road, to buy copies of The Guardian - my mother resents paying the 5p-per-day delivery charge to add it onto their regular order. I assume she thinks paperboys are hugely overpaid and live in the lap of luxury.

On Friday, though, we did have a night out - "we" being W, C-of-the-Parisian-wedding and her husband, and the various other schoolfriends that I sometimes mention here. We started off at the Wheatsheaf, and went on to Gullivers, a club by the bus station that's the only place in town that's vaguely 'alternative'. Reassuringly, it hasn't changed since we were 18 - the same decor, the same music (well, nearly), and the same ominous carpet: if you stand still for too long, you feel your soles sticking to the floor. It was the first time, I think, that I've come home for Christmas, gone for a night out, and not vaguely recognised virtually every face I've seen. That's probably a good thing.

(yes, I did get on the dancefloor occasionally, even though I wasn't really dressed for it. It made a change to be in a club in Grimsby and find it full of people who look like they'd fit in in any of the places I visit usually. Outside, of course, the town was full of fake Burberry, micro-minis, and overworked police. But the club itself wasn't too bad.)

There were a few people who came up and said hello. Two were apparently from the GCDYO - I recognised one as a violinist and have spent hours since trying to remember her name. In the taxi queue to get home, we bumped into a few blokes we'd been at school with. It's weird how people who, then, would hardly have said hello in the street, can be suddenly as friendly as anything.

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December 25th, 2003. Christmas Message

Christmas is going the same as it always does. Our presents are all unwrapped, and spread about the living room floor. We've eaten our Christmas dinners - a plate piled high with turkey, sausages, bacon, sausagemeat, stuffing, chestnuts, mashed potatoes, roast potatoes, carrots, parsnips, broccoli, sprouts and gravy. We've slumped into armchairs and watched Top Of The Pops, and mother is trying hard to stay awake after her single glass of wine.

This year, I have received:

• Metro Maps Of The World (as mentioned below).
• Fans Only, the Belle and Sebastian DVD.
• Quicksilver by Neal Stephenson
• This year's new Terry Pratchett book (as usual).
• Various CDs from my list, a careful compromise between what I actually want and what my mum will be able to find in the local record shop.
• Socks (no, really).
• A not-very-nice jumper (again, no, really).
• Only one nasty insult from my mother: "If you were a bit more intelligent, you wouldn't have so many silly thoughts."

Apart from that, there's not that much to say. I've not been out of the house, because there'd be nothing to do if I did leave. The top news stories in the Grimsby Telegraph were (1) a woman was so fed up of having to wait in checkout queues whilst Christmas shopping, she had a tantrum and jumped up and down on the cake she was buying; (2) a local soldier got to meet the Queen when she was taping the Christmas Message. And these are the front page stories since I've been here.

My Christmas present to you lot, this year, is new photographs. These are some of the pictures I've taken over the past year, including him, him, and her. And lots of other people (including two of them). Hope you like them.

My next mission, should I choose to accept it, is to persuade my parents that a film with subtitles might be more enjoyable than Only Fools And Horses. Merry Christmas.

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December 21st, 2003. Solstice (almost)

Ooh, I'm actually starting to feel a bit festive and seasonal. Maybe it's the half-inch of snow that fell yesterday evening (all melted by bedtime, though), or maybe it's because I've been listening to Just Like Christmas by Low on repeat quite a lot - it's the most festive and Christmassy Christmas pop song ever.

Recently, a search request I received was belle sebastian emmanuel lyrics. So, as I'm in this mood, here are the lyrics to O Come O Come Emmanuel, as performed by Belle and Sebastian (and released on a compilation album called It's A Cool Cool Christmas a couple of years ago):

O come, O come, Emmanuel,
And ransom captive Israel,
That mourns in lonely exile here
Until the Son of God appears.
Rejoice! Rejoice!
Emmanuel shall come to thee, O Israel.

O come, O come, O Lord of might,
Who to thy tribes on Sinai's height
In ancient times didst give the law
In cloud and majesty and awe.
Rejoice! Rejoice!
Emmanuel shall come to thee, O Israel.

O come, thou day-spring, come and cheer
Our spirits by thine advent here;
Disperse the gloomy clouds of night,
And death's dark shadows put to flight.
Rejoice! Rejoice!
Emmanuel shall come to thee, O Israel.

O come, thou key of David, come,
And open wide our heavenly home;
Make safe the way that leads on high,
And close the path to misery.
Rejoice! Rejoice!
Emmanuel shall come to thee, O Israel.

O come, O come, Emmanuel,
And ransom captive Israel,
That mourns in lonely exile here
Until the Son of God appears.
Rejoice! Rejoice!
Emmanuel shall come to thee, O Israel.

There's a slightly different version, with more verses and annoying MIDI background tune, here. It was originally a medieval Latin hymn, apparently. Yesterday afternoon, I was walking along Princes St humming it to myself. Spookily, just as I walked past the Salvation Army band, they launched into it themselves. Well, I thought it was spooky.

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December 18th, 2003. Little notes of feedback

A couple of months back, I wrote about the Holyrood Tavern closing, and promised to write more about it. Well, two months after their big closing party, it still hasn't actually changed hands yet. There are lots of rumours going round; the latest is that the new licensee forgot to apply for a license, so it won't be changing until the city council get that sorted. I've also heard a rumour (from Ben, I think) that as the building is listed the new owners won't be allowed to rip out the interior.

Bought my train tickets for my Christmas holiday yesterday - I really hope the parents will refund me the money. With a twinge of sadness, I bought my last-ever student young person's railcard. Yes, I really am getting that old.

Just a week after writing this, Grimsby is in the news again. I don't really want to write about that news story, though, but I've decided I want to turn "in Grimsby" into a euphemism, a bit like "sent to Coventry". It means: not knowing something because you're shockingly, horrifically unobservant. Example: "You didn't notice your wife had left you for three days?!" "I know! I must have been in Grimsby or something!"

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December 17th, 2003. Still not feeling seasonal though

Was given my first Christmas present of the year yesterday. It's very nice, too.

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December 15th, 2003. Review time

Last night, we introduced W to the world of Belle and Sebastian's music, by taking him to the final gig on their current tour, at the Usher Hall. W was very excited - not because he was seeing B&S, but because of the venue. In 1972, you see, the Eurovision Song Contest was held there. We sat in the front row of the circle, spied on all the indiekids standing in the stalls, and watched the sound engineer read What Car when he had nothing better to do.

Instead of the billed support band, Franz Ferdinand, there was a group called Scatter. With a variety of instruments, they played something you might describe as "world jazz", with performance poetry shouted over the top. And between the songs, too. The performer was using the Standard Performance Poetry voice; I couldn't decide whether he was taking the piss, or was just rather bad. "I wish he'd shut up," said Cat, "because the music's actually quite good." "You're shite!" heckled someone between songs.

B&S, on the other hand, were on top form. There were a few fluffed lyrics; but it wouldn't be a proper B&S gig if there weren't a few fluffed lyrics. It was definitely a value-for-money set - almost two hours long, with ten tracks from the new album and lots of the 'classic' tracks from Tigermilk, If You're Feeling Sinister, and their early singles. There was only one song I didn't recognise: an opening instrumental, in which Stevie seemed to be trying to become Hank Marvin. In once sense the large number of songs from the new album was a disappointment. but it was good to hear some of them played live: especially the simplicity of Piazza, New York Catcher - just Stuart's voice and an acoustic guitar - and the electronic epic Stay Loose, complete with programmed drum-beats.

It was the first time, I think, that I'd been to a B&S gig without any cover versions. Instead of the normal mid-gig interval - where the band try to busk a song suggested by the audience - they did the seasonal O Come O Come Emmanuel. It's understandable, though: the gig is being broadcast on Radio One later this week, and they wouldn't want to get sued. On previous gigs in the tour, they've (apparently) done covers as their encore, but last night they finished off with two songs: Sleep The Clock Around followed by Judy And The Dream Of Horses. Both songs sound wonderful live: an excellent way to finish off the night.

(In the past I would have posted B&S reviews to Sinister, but the awful webmail I have to use at the moment makes my emails get eaten by Sinister's anti-HTML mail blocker. So, you lot get to read one instead.)

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December 12th, 2003. Top of the table

If you read this site for any length of time, you'll probably realise that I love it whenever Grimsby gets in the news for any reason. Partly because the reasons Grimsby is in the news are usually so awful that I find it very, very amusing, and feel very glad that I don't live there any more.

So, of course, I was delighted to find, the other day, that the North-East Lincolnshire district has finally come at the top of a league-table for something! Yes, really, there is something that Grimsby is better for than anywhere else in England or Wales. It's the quickest place in the country for getting an abortion. Woohoo!

Grimsby does very well in some other statistics: the percentage of the population who are teenage single mothers, for example. I'd have assumed that the two would counteract each other, but there you go. I mean, surely, you can't win in both categories unless virtually everyone in the town is a tracksuit-wearing, fake-gold-jewellery covered council-estate tart, surely. Oh, hang on a minute...

(in related news, I was flipping through old Scary Go Round stories yesterday, and burst out laughing at this cartoon. Purely because a mention of Lincolnshire had been slipped into a joke. I think I could do with a new sense of humour - does anyone have one going spare?)

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December 10th, 2003. All around me are familiar faces

Six AM. Blearily, I switch on the radio and listen to Today's headlines. "Chancellor's Statement blah blah, abortion rates blah wibble bank fined millions blah blah blah. And, later, will this song be this year's Christmas number one?" I curl my toes, expecting some awful novelty record to start. Instead, though, they play a few seconds of "Mad World" by Gary Jules - you know, the song that comes up at the end of Donnie Darko.

Wow, I thought. It might be a cover version, but it's a really lovely song; one of those covers that really is better than the original. I've briefly mentioned it before, but didn't say just how beautiful it sounds. And - according to Today, at least - it has a good chance of getting to number one this Christmas over all the awful novelty records and talent-show winners that usually come out at this time of year. In part, because it's a kind of anti-Christmas hit: it's not a party record, and it's not a record to dance to. It's slow, quiet, and thoughtful.

Now, I know I'm not the only person who thinks it's a wonderful song, and I'm probably not the only person who would love it to get to the top of the charts, and especially at Christmas. If anything, it will be great just to have a copy of the song on my shelves. So, I think that next week, everyone in the UK who reads this should pop down their High Street and buy a copy. Go on; you know you want to. Being part of internet-organised "support this X" campaigns is always fun. And it is a beautiful song. You don't really want Basil Brush, Cliff Richard or Noddy to top the charts, do you?

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December 9th, 2003. Reconstruction

Another day of unemployment.

I should be taking the opportunity to decide who I really want to be. It's a chance for a new start! It's a chance to reinvent myself! The problem, though, is working up enough energy to go around being changed. I know I want to be different; I even have a vague idea of who I want to be. The hard part is getting from here to there.

Life must be a lot easier for ordinary, happy-with-who-they-are straight people. I'm not sure how it must feel to be comfortable with the fact that you're X or Y or whatever, attracted to the opposite sex, your parents daydreaming of grandchildren. It must be nice to be able to be yourself without having to put in much of an effort. Straight men, in particular, don't have to do anything beyond put on whatever they feel like wearing, and do whatever they feel like doing. At least, that's the impression I get.

I have to put work into things, though. I have to decide who I want to be and what I want to be like. What do I want to make myself into? What do I want to do with my life? In theory, right now, I have the ideal opportunity to find out. In reality, I don't have enough money. The "experimentation time" was at university, and I'm a few years past that now. Back then, I just wasn't confident enough with who I was to come out and do anything about it.

I'm getting there, I think, but it's slow. But it'll happen, one day. I'll wake up and be happy with who I am. Back when I was a child, my mother always used to say: "when you grow up, you'll be able to do anything you want to." It turns out, of course, that she didn't actually mean it. What she meant was: "...as long as it's what I think of as normal." Unfortunately, I took her at her word.

I've got a feeling that I've just written 26 entirely unconnected sentences. Sorry for not making very much sense. I might try to expand on all this later.

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December 7th, 2003. Measuring out (with annoying brackets)

Things I have done in the week since losing my job:

• Signed on.
• Read 10 newspapers.
• Re-read His Dark Materials.
• Applied for 1 job.
• Cuddled the cat (a lot).
• Visited Glendinning (once).
• Visited 2 art exhibitions (both free).
• Listened to Radio Scotland (once).
• Listened to Radio 4 and the World Service (mostly when asleep).
• Written out "I, Caitlin Ross, will soon find an interesting, well-paid job," 20 times a day.
• Had a lie-in until 9am (every day).
• Been grocery shopping (twice).
• Updated the blog (5 times).
• Written a Bible Code-style computer program.
• Talked to my ex-boyfriend for the first time since we split up.
• Phoned my parents (twice).
• Argued with my mother (twice)
• Went out drinking (once). Ended up drinking shots of ouzo (yum). Even got eyed up, albeit by someone who looked too drunk to walk.
• Had sleepless nights (several).

The next project to keep me occupied is something I've been threatening for a while: write a script for Rum and Monkey: The Movie. The hard part will be thinking up a plot with more to it than: "everyone has a party! And gets drunk! Way-hey!"

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December 4th, 2003. Final Reminder

One last reminder: Blog Day is on tomorrow - Friday - at 11:30 and 22:30 GMT, on Radio Scotland, and you can listen to it online. I'm not sure how much (if anything) from this site will be on the programme, but I know that lots of great stuff will be.

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December 4th, 2003. Knowing Where The Bodies Are Buried

Taking advantage of my excess free time, yesterday I visited an exhibition at the Scottish National Portrait Gallery: Terrain: Landscapes of the Great War by Peter Cattrell, a small exhibition of black-and-white photographs of Great War battlefields, mostly of The Somme.

I visited the Somme area as a teenager, on a school trip along with W. and Catherine and people. On the way to Catherine's wedding, nine years later, I passed over the battlefield on the train. If you know about the battle it's a strange place to visit: the farmland looks, on the surface, plain and ordinary, until you remember that the ground is full, still, of parts and pieces of the thousands of soldiers whose bodies were never found.

In a few parts of the vast battlefield, trenches and mine-craters were left unfilled as monuments to the dead. Seeing them in the photographs, I recognised them from our visit: the Lochnagar Crater, and the Newfoundland Memorial Park. The park is full of shell-holes and zigzag trenches, all grassed over and subsided now, so the trenches' sharp vertical walls have become smooth V-shapes. They are peaceful and serene, and I couldn't conceive how they must have been during war: the mud, blood, the smell of rot and howls of dying men. Its serenity helps you forget that the park is a graveyard, of sorts.

It's the same with the photographs: unless you read the captions, all you see is a grassy dimple in the ground, or a field of freshly-harvested stubble. The caption might tell you that farmers plough up fresh shrapnel every year, but there's none in the picture. The pictures are free of people, too. The only sign of people is the way they have shaped the landscape, either by farming or by warfare.

The whole point, then, is that these pictures stop being ordinary landscapes when you are aware of history; you can only read these photos fully by reading the caption. The exhibition was partly organised by the Scottish Poetry Library, so there is a photo of the place where Wilfred Owen was killed. Unless you know that, and who he was, it's just an ordinary canalbank scene.

The problem I have with this is that it overestimates known history. The Western Front of the Great War is an iconic part of British history; but it was only part of a global war. To the French, Verdun is probably the most important Western Front battle; all I was taught about it was: "The Somme was started partly to relieve Verdun." Of the war outside Europe, we were hardly taught a thing. All I know about the Great War in the Middle East, for example, is that a) T. E. Lawrence went around befriending Arabs and blowing up trains, and b) my Mum's great-uncle died fighting there. His body, too, was never found, but his name is written on a memorial in Jerusalem.

We could go further than this. Little tragedies, of one sort or another, have happened everywhere. Britain, for example, has seen hundreds of battles whose sites are now unknown, and many more which people barely remember. If I were to take a photograph of, say, the battlefield of Towton - the most destructive battle recorded in the British Isles - how many people would recognise it? How many people would understand its significance even after reading what it was a picture of? It's important to remember the Western Front, and how awful it was, but we must also remember that there are many, many more bodies scattered under the earth's fields, and that noone now can remember who or what they were fighting for.

(the exhibition, incidentally, is only on for one more month, so go now if you want to see it).

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December 3rd, 2003. Now That's What I Call Sexy

For the first time in a while, some post came for the mad ex-flatmate today. "Urgent Post", it said on the outside. It was sealed in plastic with no return address, and nothing to say what it might be. Intrigued, I opened it.

It was, of course, a sex-toy catalogue. I'm not sure why she is getting sex-toy catalogues at my address two years after she moved out, but there you go. Intrigued, I flicked through it.

My first thought was: "why the hell would people want to buy any of this?" The catalogue's design style seemed to be based on the small-ads in the back of Sunday newspapers. Row-on-row of vibrators shaped like horribly distended and deformed phalluses. Pages of skimpy polyester with everything on display. Devices for insecure men - penis-extending condoms, for example - with blurb like "her eyes pop with pleasurable surprise at having such an unexpectedly sized intruder ramming into her love box." All the models looked over-breasted, over-tanned and over-made-up; and, basically, fake. Even the expensive things looked cheap, and the cheap things - "Authentic Chinese Penis Balm!" - even worse.

Teenage boys might want to keep the catalogue under their mattress, but I don't see why anyone else would want to buy anything from it. What these people need to do, if you ask me, is produce some kind of sex-shop equivalent of the Ikea catalogue. In that, you see people sitting or working or enjoying everyday life in ordinary furnished rooms, with little notes explaining what each thing is. They don't overcrowd their pages. They get their catalogue designed by people who know how to do print design. The catalogue I'm imagining would have big double-page spreads of people on the job, the things they've been using laid artfully but believably around them. Ordinary-looking people, not porn stars. People who look like they're really enjoying it, not just putting a face on for the camera. People who look real. In a catalogue like that, the things might even start to look sexy.

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December 1st, 2003. Normal Service Will Be Resumed Shortly

Big thanks to everyone who left comments over the weekend: it means a lot. Being unemployed again is still all very sudden, and I have to try hard to build up the energy to start hunting everywhere for jobs, sending out my CV and so on. As Sarah said in the comments box, I can even think about changing career completely - although how, I'm not entirely sure.

My mother provided her typical words of motherly wisdom. "Maybe you should move away from Edinburgh - so many bad things have happened to you there." "You need to be less eccentric and more conformist." "You've always kept trying to be a bit different, but you have to realise that that's why people don't like you." Thanks, Mum.

I should probably email you all to reply to your comments, but it takes me long enough to answer emails as it is. Hopefully I'll get round to it before too long. I've just been to sign on, or at least fill in all the signing-on application forms; the next step will be writing a new CV, I suppose.

Ben: I would have told you last night, but the conversation gets a bit repetitive if I repeat the story every time someone new arrives.
Tara: You have contacts in Embra? Ooh, who? It's such a small town that at least someone I know will have probably heard of them.

One smal benefit of having nothing to do all day: I'll be free to listen to Blog Day, on Radio Scotland on Friday. It's on at 11:30am (GMT), repeated at 11:30pm 10:30pm, and if you're outside Scotland you should be able to listen to their internet feed.

Update: Yes, I got the time of the repeat wrong. It's at 10:30pm, not 11:30.

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