Oh lord, you should have been on the train with me on the way north. I managed to run my upgrade trick on GNER again, so rode all the way to Inverness in First Class, supping their coffee and munching on free biscuits. The rule in First Class tends to be that one doesn’t speak to others. You hide behind your newspaper or book, slide your headphones into your ears and politely ignore everyone, pretending you can’t hear their conversations.

I shuffle into the carriage, wrestle my outrageously large rucksack into the luggage compartment and slide my bag of presents into a handy space. Two thirds of the way down the aisle sits a small woman, probably in her 70s, beaming gleefully at all and sundry. The two seats opposite her are empty.

I plop my smaller rucksack into the seat facing her, flash her my patented “nice young man” grin and state “You don’t mind if I join you?”

“Actually, there’s a gentleman sitting there”

“Oh, ok, well, I’ll sit by the window then”

“No, he’s sitting there too”

“Excuse me?”

“He’s sitting on both the seats. But this one by me is free, if you like”

I thank her, slide into the window seat and collapse, gratefully, into my faux leather throne.

We swap niceties, the station is busy, the weather is cold, I’m glad to get a seat, I’m heading to Inverness, she to Pitlochry.

The owner of the opposite seats returns, he’s not morbidly obese, or has an artificial leg which has to have its own seat booked for it. He’s slim, tall, spiky bleach blonde hair, he wears a swagger and a grin. His mouth opens and out pours a stream of banter and instant friendship. He doesn’t bother to ask names, relying on “pet” and “chief”. Turning so his back is facing the window, he hops backwards, landing with his arse on the window seat and his feet on it’s neighbour by the aisle. It’s as though someone distilled the phrase “diamond geezer”, shaped it into a golem, gave it life and sent it to sit opposite me.

Neither of these people are your typical First Class passenger, they chat together, laugh, share their little round tins of boiled sweets, licking their fingers and dipping them in spilled icing sugar without a hint of self-consciousness. They’re honest and funny, leaving their airs, graces and pretensions at the door, gently absorbing me into the rapport they’ve been busily developing together since the train left London. Not without their drawbacks, he’s a little loud and she has an irritating habit of repeating the last point you made in the conversation. Diamond Geezer and State-The-Obvious Girl, working together to banish boredom on Britain’s railways.

“We were playing a game” says DG “You go through the alphabet with a chosen category, say “Animals” and everyone has to come up with an answer that fits that letter, if you can’t, you lose a point”

“Ok” says I “What shall our category be?”

“Famous people” says STO Girl and so we continue.

Now, I’ve always made a rule of avoiding issues such as race, religion and politics when meeting new people, it’s just not worth it, so it strikes me that a simple word game, such as one might play with bored kids on a long journey. How dangerous can it be?

Apparently hugely, I suggest “Leonard Cohen” for “C”, which leads to a disastrous misunderstanding about his being Jewish and depressing. This is swiftly followed by a conversation about Kilroy Silk, asylum seekers, chopping hands off, Abu Hamza and how many refugees should be allowed into the country.

You have no idea how pleased I was when we changed to category to “Geography”…

For Christmas and it’s all lovely.

It’s 10am and I’ve only opened one present, I’m looking forward to a nice morning lounging on the sofas with my folks, lazily opening presents, drinking and smiling a lot. Cromarty’s looking fab this morning, just enough snow to look like a white christmas without it being enough to screw you up if you want to go outside.

More to come, probably later today, but no promises. I have ot tell you all about my journey up the road, it was too much fun.

Oh, and scotsmedicman? Bring a dressing gown.

The shop is crowded, packed with sweaty, Gore-tex wrapped bodies. Christmas songs play intrusively from every corner; “Here comes Santa Claus, here comes Santa Claus, riding on his sleigh”, like I needed reminding that the 25th continues to rumble inexorably closer and I still haven’t completed my shopping.

She’s flustered, alone in a shop that really needs two or three folk managing it. I imagine her colleagues are out to lunch, which really isn’t a scheme that’s going to work this close to Christmas when everyone and their adopted children’s dogs are trying to cram in a little more shopping in their lunch hour.

Either way, I smile sweetly and say “May I look at your (insert boyfriend’s gift)s, please?”

She glares back “You mean the (synonym for item)s ?”

“Yes, those”.

She grumps her way out from behind the counter, stomps to the back of the shop and opens a cabinet. “Which?” she demands, curtly.

“Uhh, the two at the back please.”

She sighs heavily, “Oh, you mean the (other synonym which is so close in meaning as to be absurd).”

I admire them, check them for various attributes and, before choosing, ask her a question about the material in which they’re manufactured.

“Of course they’re (insert material in which item is manufactured) ” she snaps “You don’t expect to find them at this price made of (insert far pricier material) ”

“No, no, of course not, I was just checking”

She snatches the chosen item from my hand and goose-steps back to her counter, blustering and fussing about with bags and wrapping.

I interrupt.

“Is that an island accent?”

She hesitates, smiles and replies “Yes, the Isle of Lewis. Do you know it?”

“Oh, I’ve been, but I’m Orcadian myself”

“Oh! I thought you were English! You have an English accent!”

“Aye, I’ve been down here too long, it’s all worn away”

“Och, I never lost my accent, but nobody knows where its from. So, Orkney you say…?”

We chat, we smile, we wish each other a happy Christmas and a “Good New Year”, just as we both, I’m sure, used to say to other folk who happened to live on the same lump of rock, out in the middle of the sea.

I once heard someone say “The Rastafarians say if you have one drop of black blood, you’re black”. I’d like to think islanders have the same mentality; get on with folk, because there are a finite number of people to fall out with before you end up talking to the seals on the beach.

So when we find each other outside ‘home’, you can bet we’ll become friends.

So Friday night saw me continuing my “Won’t it look impressive to the ambulance service if when I apply I let them know I’ve given up lots of my time to learn all about their working practices” kick and schlepping down the ambulance control to watch their night shift.

It was utterly hoopy. I was principally interested in the call handlers’ jobs, winkling out information from panicked people who’ve just discovered their baby’s legs unscrew, or something.

So I sat and listened in on lots of 999 calls, which were all very interesting and I occasionally served a useful purpose by finding things on the map (”It doesn’t matter where on that street they are, it’s tiny, they’re probably the only thing that is on the street” and noticing typos the handler had made (”That’s not how you spell Ventolin” “You’ve typoed her DOB, she’s 7, not 27″).

In retrospect, this makes me sound like an interfering arse and maybe I was, but I don’t care, I was having fun!

What struck me most of all was the outstanding ability the staff had to be talking to the caller in all seriousness, mute their microphone during short breaks in the conversation, laugh their legs off, unmute their mic and continue with the call with a straight face. Yes, I knowwe shouldn’t laugh at the afflicted, but some of the calls *were* funny.

One of the highlights of the evening though, was while I was sitting with a handler who we shall call Martin. We’ll call him that, because that’s his name.

We were chatting to a first-party caller (a person who’s calling the ambulance for themselves) and had asked him to go and open the front door and turn on the outside lights. While he’s away from the phone, we can hear that he’s listening to some bangin’ festive choons in the background, all sung by a woman who sounds like Doris Day. At one point Martin turns to me and says

“Santa Claus is *what-ing* my chimney?”. I didn’t get a chance to answer, as the caller returned to the phone so had to wait until we’d hung up to clarify:

“‘Stuck in’, Martin, ‘STUCK IN’”

“Ohhhhhh, that makes a lot more sense!”

Yes, Hi there, I’m Kal. *tinkling laugh* Yes, yes, that’s right, I might be down on there as TQ, yes.

Right, well, ahhhh, it’s a little embarassing. Ummm, it’s of a personal nature.

Hmm?

No! Jesus, no, nothing like that, it’s more of a, ummm.

Oh hell, you’re a professional, right? This is all confidential, right?

I have something stuck up my arse.

No I didn’t slip in the shower! Now was I hoovering. This is in no way sexual at all. AT ALL!

It’s, ummmm, a horse.

Yah.

A horse.

Quite a high horse, in fact.

Yup, it’s mine.

Well, ummmm, see, the thing is, I got into work this morning a little late and 30 minutes after sitting at my desk, an ambulance pulled up to reception.

Yeah, *I’m* the first-aider here and pretty damn good I am at it too, but they never call me! This was a genuine shit-hits-the-fan emergency and they never paged me.

Well I’ll tell you, I wasn’t pleased, I mean, I’m comfortably the most qualified medical person on staff and the patient obviously wasn’t receiving the utmost care available to them.

The situation stank.

Now, granted, I hadn’t picked up my pager this morning, but they can also reach me on my office phone, so there was really no excuse for me not being called.

So I popped over to reception to collect my pager and they all went “Where *were* you? We’ve been calling you!”.

Turns out they’d first called me at 8am, when I’m meant to be in, but because I was so late I never got it.

So the poor woman (who I saw being wheeled out and I’d class in the “Affy nae weil” category) sat downstairs without any proper treatment because I was late.

Oops.

So, yeah, ummmm, I need a high horse pulled out of my arse.

Any takers?

I just caught myself saying “Damn, i left my cufflinks on the mantlepiece”.

Now if you’ll excuse me, I have a stable boy to thrash soundly before sending him to his chamber; I must have Mary (Irish woman, “downstairs sor”) blacken my good riding boots and the hounds will need a run before bed.

Then it’s back to the parlour for crumpets in front of the fire, while the little ones cavort to the tunes of Florence on the pianoforte.

Is fun when you don’t have to panic about it.

I bought two of my nephews fab things, a green and orange box that straps onto your bike handlebars, with it’s own handlebar on the side.

When you rev the handlebar, it makes a fantastic “Rinnnn-ningngngngngng” motorbike noise.

I showed Giles, he thought it was for my bike.

Asshole.

Oh, and just in case anyone (like my boyfriend) is in anyway dubious about my ‘alignment’, you may like to know that last night I dreamed I was running a cheerleading troupe with Christopher Kennedy Masterson.

May I start by saying a big “hi” to Zeno from fasteddiesbullet.com (link seems inactive, is he offline?) who not only graced me with his presence but left a *comment*! Whooo!

Now I just want to know who sent him here…

For those of you of a non-Edinburgh bent who occasionally read me (who, I think, can be narrowed down to Amber, Zeno, Mindy, Doc Shazam, Tom, Zoot and Pam), let me explain. The Scotsman is the principal paper of Edinburgh, it’s of a reasonable quality and tends to be what your average estate agent reads on the train into work. There is no avoiding the fact, however, that it has certain tabloid tendencies and occasionally slips into filthy red-top ways.

And today is no exception, as two headlines made me laugh until my legs fell off.

“Sobbing Santa quits after dropping baby on grotto floor”

and

Protester hits Kilroy-Silk with a bucket of slurry

For those of you not familiar with Mr Silk, he is an uber-tanned, bouffant haired ex-daytime-chat-show-host who was ousted from his TV job for making remarks about Arabic countries (I think one of the best was “We should chop all their hands off”). He then went onto form UKIP, the UK Independence Party, which effectively makes him the friendly smiling face of modern Nazi-ism.

The phrase “bucket of slurry” just trips off the tongue, doesn’t it?

I also love the way the article states that Mr Silk “had to be cleaned up”; as though he was dunked in a tin bath and scrubbed behind the ears by a fat, fussing Irish woman who worked ‘downstairs, sor”.

Finally, last night I sat and watched “Hard Spell”, effectively a spelling bee with better lighting effects than usual.

One of the contestants said that his revision methods made spelling “A lot more easier”.

Thank god it’s not Hard Grammar, huh?

Change into my shirt and suit.

Go for a pee

Make coffee

Start work.

Now, I’m thinking, if I go upstairs and boil the kettle, I could go for a pee while that’s happening. But I really shouldn’t schlep around the public areas in my jeans and teeshirt.

So I’ll make coffee and get changed while the kettle boils.

But I need a pee badly.

I know! I’ll do none of these things, I’ll blog about it.

*rolls eyes*

Hi! I’m Kal, I’m incompetent. ;0)