I’ve decided that I don’t care how hackneyed and cliched it is, I love lyrics.
I love them so much that whenever I think “Ooooh, I’d like to post those to TQ and share them with people” I also think “Ohh, that’s a really shitty post idea, how lame.”
Well you know what?

Fuck y’all.

From now on, when I decide that I like lyrics, I’m posting them.

I may make it a regular thing, like the Fussy hair shot of the day thing that happened for a while.

Today’s lyrics are coming from “Seeing Other People” by Belle and Sebastian.

Well if I remain passive
And you just wanna cuddle
Then we should be OK
And we won’t get in a muddle.
Seeing other people, at least
That’s what we say we are doing.

You’re kissing your elbow,
You’re kissing your reflection.
And you can’t understand why all the other boys
Are going for the new, tall, elegant, rich kids.
You can bet it is a bitch kid.
But if they don’t see the quality
Then it is apparent
That you’re gonna have to change,
Or you’re gonna have to go with girls.
You’d be better off,
At least they know what they’re doing.

Not content with producing wonderful anti N-Gage cartoons, the marvelous Gabe and Tycho have come up with some simply splendid multi-page comics for Band of Brothers (funny/poignant) and the new Splinter Cell production (very silly indeed)

You should check them out.

*snort* “Terrorist riding on a giraffe”….

“You OK pal? I hope you are just too busy enjoying yourself to blog but if not, gimme a shout and let me help.Take good care”

So ran the email I received this morning and it reminded me, dear readers, that I’ve been neglecting you. And ohhh, have I stories to tell!

I hate big long “What I done on my holidays” posts, cos they’re shit, so I’ll probably just post lots of little bon mots until you’re all up to speed.

Suffice to say that main reason I’ve not been blogging is because I’ve been horrendously busy. Since the government stops working on public holidays, I had Good Friday and Easter Monday off, so I called the Dungeon and asked for some shifts.

I’ve not blogged extensively about the Dungeon, but I guess I should explain. If you’re Merkin, you’ll understand when I say it’s a Haunted House. Brits? It’s like a Chamber of Horrors, you come downstairs and get entertained/scared by a bunch of folk all dressed up and covered in blood. There’s a series of short shows (Autopsy, Vampires, Cannibals, Glencoe Massacre) and various wandery-about bits with displays and information boards. It’s all good family fun, scary, but funny, with our tongues lodged firmly in our cheeks.

I’ve worked there, on and off, since I moved to Edinburgh. It was my first real job when I came here and I’ve maintained my relationship with them. They’re a good employer, they recognise that I can’t commit to a steady shift schedule and so allow me to ring up every now and again and say “I’d like shifts on these days, please”.

They also pay weekly, so if my monthly budget gets shafted, I can slope off and do a weekend with them, picking up a bit of extra cash on the following Thursday.

It’s also fabulous therapy, we’re paid to abuse and amuse the customers, so if someone’s got your back up, or heckles you, you can let rip right back. As long as I don’t say anything that’s too far from a PG13 rating, I’m pretty much ok. As an example, despite a big sign at the ticket office and one actor asking her already, a woman in one of my shows was persistently texting on her mobile phone and receiving calls.

Why ask her politely when she’s already been asked once? Far preferable to call her a “Slap-faced old moo” and squirt her with water; it gets a laugh from the crowd and she gets the message.

The holiday weekend was, predictably, busy as all hell, we had customers queuing down the street to get in and on Sunday afternoon it was my job to keep them entertained. The two highlights for me were one woman stomping up to me and declaring “I’ve been standing in line for an hour and a half now.” I smiled sweetly and replied “Well, that was very foolish of you, wasn’t it?”

She didn’t like that.

What was fun, though, was the side-shows we set up for the queue. We had a big box of sweeties we were handing out to the customers, just to keep them happy. Kids whining? Here! Have some chemicals, colours and sugar!

These led to all sorts of fun, including the “Throw sweets at your colleagues” game and my personal favourite “Stick green sweets up your nose, block the opposing nostril, blow hard into hand. Make customers look at slightly snotty green blob, grin and eat with great relish”. This game developed a variation where we ate them from each other’s noses. It was utterly puerile, but great fun.

I grabbed two young lads out of the line and stood them next to each other, passing them three bags of Haribo each, I informed them that they were to race each other to the end of their sweetie haul. The crowd loved it, the kids were up for it, so we started them.

Kid one got off to a fast start, cramming a whole bag into his mouth at once and starting on his second, Kid Two was slower and steadier, placing two or three sweets in, chewing and swallowing. He was well behind Kid One half way through.

Kid One continued to bolt his sweets down, but seemed to be slowing, his cheeks bulging out like a hamster. Picking a sweet between finger and thumb be crams it into one corner of his mouth, only for another sweet to pop out of the opposing corner. Space can be neither created nor destroyed…unfortunately this kid now had so many sweets in his face he can’t move his tongue or jaw to chew and swallow!

Kid Two made a rapid come back, polishing off bag three in record time and standing idly aside for a second before mumbling “Ummm, I’m finished”.

Sure enough, empty mouth, none on the floor, a clear winner.

Which left me with Kid One. Standing on the pavement with cheeks stretched to bursting, his bags of sweets are empty; I sure as hell wasn’t about to ask him to open his mouth so I could see.

Instead I walked him back to the queue line and stood him in front of a group of teenage girls who’d already squealed like pigs when we mentioned the gross-outs they were preparing for.
I gently leant the lad forward, put my hands against the back of his cheeks and pushed.
A rainbow of dribbly, semi-dissolved, sticky, neon toned spiders, skulls, bugs and bats poured out of his mouth onto the pavement, to the general disgust of the girls and utter hilarity of those in the crowd.

A colleague excitedly ran over and counted the sweets now scattered on the floor “29! 29!”.
The kid had swallowed one of his sweets, the rest were crammed into his mouth.

Never mind, it was a fun diversion and we rounded the event off with grinning photos, handshakes, hugs and freebies from the gift shop for them being prepared, at the age of 8, to publicly humiliate themselves.

I saw them later, loser boy was grinning and winner boy was suspiciously quiet, breathing carefully in through his nose and out through his mouth…..

I’m assuming Zeno’s referring to the same person as me, but if not, I’d hope the person who reads this knows I’m talking about them.
We’ll miss you, we’ll be here when you come back, we’re always here to listen.
*HUG*
Send my friend some good thoughts and love, guys? They need it.

“No, no, I can’t buy the Notions sweetie things, because the advert’s all “I shouldn’t really eat these…” which makes my head go “bing-a-bing-a-bing, those will make you really fat.” So they’re all spoiled for me, it’s like the Tesco car insurance ads, I’m not going to go with them because I don’t want to make the trolleys sad.
Now, the Extra mints advert, with Hanson on it, that’s brilliant, it’s such a funky tune, with people eating mints in the bus station, it makes me go “Fuck yeah, I want to buy those mints, look how happy they’ll make me!”
I must sound like a real psycho, huh? Oooh, did I tell you how I couldn’t climb stairs until I was about 9, because my house had a ladder and I fell over when I tried to run up stairs at the same angle I was used to climbing the ladder? Jesus, I was a feral wolf child.”

I’m currently waiting for my mobile to bleep (or to play the 24 sound that I have recorded, so I guess I’m waiting for it to “Bip-Bip…Beebrrbrbr”) to tell me if I’m on strike or not on Wednesday.

This seems such a funny way of looking at things. I’m not a big political person, I only joined the union at work because I didn’t want to cross a picket line when they were striking last time.

That sounds like such a pussy way out, I know, but I’ll support striking workers, always, I will not cross picket lines, it’s such a slap in the face.

I also feel that if your union tells you you’re striking, you strike. Even if the issues don’t affect you or your workplace, you should come out in support of those who *are* affected.

But either way, I’m signed up to my union’s auto-text function, so they’ll let me know on my mobile as soon as something happens.

And while the following statement may make my parents disown me, particularly as my tiny years were spent in the midst of the miners’ strikes of the 80s….

I really hope we strike, I want a day off in the middle of the week!

“You’ve got a voice.” I was told yesterday.
“Ummm, yup.”
“No, no, you’ve got this ‘everything’s cool, I’m in control’ voice, it’s different from your normal one.”
I laughed.

It’s true, my voice changes depending on location, situation, company and mood. On approach to an OSH, it deepens and increases in volume. You don’t fuck with me while I approach a casualty, unless you can prove your qualifications out-rank mine, in which case they’re all yours. Until then, it’s loud, booming “back off bystanders, lemme at the leaking guy”.

My ‘approach’ voice is remarkably similar to one of its cousins from my nannying days, it shares at least 98% of its genes with “Yes, I *can* see you stealing those biscuits I explicitly denied you 5 minutes ago. Go sit on the stairs.”

Their similarity comes from their ability to assert myself as being absolutely the last word in the situation we’re in. I don’t care if you think your rugby playing kid should “Just get back in the game” or that “I just really really want a chocolate one”, until I’m happy with the end result, nothing’s happening.

Saying that, they both soften quickly. There’s a fine line between “I’m in control, don’t fuck with me” and “I’m in control, chill out, everything’s going to be ok”; the latter also morphs quickly into “Shhh, shhh, c’mon, you’re ok, off to sleep now…night night.”

Always loved it when the kids nodded off in the car, loved that feeling of “Sleep well, relax, I’ll drive us safely home, nothing for you to worry about.”

I worked at a “Mini Rugby” tournament yesterday; I’m using the quotes because the “Mini” part only referred to the size of the players. Lots of people learned yesterday that the size of the person standing on your arm isn’t important, it’s their size relative to you.

But you know what? My nannying voices scrambled up to the surface and leapt out of my mouth time and again. There were injured kids who needed bogey jokes, another I made promise not to die “You’ve gotta promise, I know it’s only a bashed knee, but if you die I get in trouble. Promise? Promise?” - we made a giggling hand-shaking deal for his continuing survival.

The shouts were all fairly minor, the reactions ranging from hysterical screaming to calm, rational discussion, albeit with silver tear trails on their cheeks.
5 years from shaving he’s throwing out ER soundbytes “I think I heard something snap, is it dislocated?”

Another wee guy stumbled up to the back of the vehicle, his shoulders rigid and stiff, hyperventilating, sobbing, snot and tears pouring down his face. A worried maternal face behind, peering through the rear doors, no room inside my vehicle for anxious parents.
Our patient had been trampled in a scrum and had pain across the posterior clavicle and bilaterally on the superior edge of the scapulas. We quickly surmised he hadn’t broken anything and was suffering from simple soft tissue damage and the emotional shakeup of being literally run over.

And I fractured into pieces.

One hand was methodically moving along the ridges and bumps of his shoulders, checking the bones for movement or deformity, my brain recording the information my fingertips received and playing it back moments later when I compared left with right.

Meanwhile, my left hand was held in his own pincer grip, my thumb rubbing back and forth across the back of his glove, my mouth murmuring a constant rhetoric “Shhh, come on buddy, you’re ok, deep breaths. You’re fine, it’ll all be over in a minute. Shhh, I know, I know…”

The pain in his shoulders abated with some ice, but the major difference was in his breathing, it slowed, became more regular, less jerky. The sobs left his conversation and he joined us for some teasing and wry smiles. Loudly sniffing and wiping his face with his sleeve, he returned to the touchline to shout encouragement to his team-mates.

“Rest, reassure, monitor.” we write on patients’ treatment records. It’s a get-out clause at times, it often means “I have no idea what was going on with this one, but they seemed to be better for sitting down and having a chat with us, so we sent them on their way.”

But occasionally, just occasionally, some soft words, gentle shh-ing and showing your patient that you’re in control is what makes the difference.

“Child care” is listed on my CV, I’ll sell it to the SAS interview board as “experience in care situations”; but it’s one of the most valuable and powerful tools on my belt.

Because, to be honest with you, there is no need to veil it all, as the whole failing the test thing is actually kind of funny.

Just for a little background, I was doing pretty well, considering that I was driving something 6.5887 times bigger than the first car I ever drove (I know this, because I’ve just sat down and worked it out. I’m a geek, sosumi.)

In fact, fuck it, I worked it out, i’m wowing you with the details; the first car I ever really drove (not including learning to drive a Volvo estate round fields when I was 10) was a Renault Clio, dimensions 3.8m by1.6m by 1.4m and the truck was a BFO Truck 8m by 2m by 3.5m which according to my reckoning make the Clio take up, roughly, 8.5 cubic metres and the BFO Truck 56 cubic metres.

I’m probably wrong, I just want to all to go “Oooh, ok, it’s a lot bigger than what he usually drives”.

Do that now, it’ll make me happy.

Anyway, I can drive this big truck, I can squee-eeze it into little tiny streets, I can reverse it into a matchbox (naturally a mathbox of about 60 cubic metres, but hey). I can drive it super-duper fast, or at least as super-duper fast as I’m allowed and I can even be aware of the location of all its corners as I go round bends, to make sure I’m not decapitating pedestrians (this is more of an achievement than you might think, owing to the fact that two of the corners are a long way away, make no movements that in anyway relate to the movement of the cab and also do not bear in mind the utter fucking stupidity of most pedestrians).

I can overtake other vehicles, I can start it on the flat, uphill, downhill and even diagonally, I’ve mastered the art of cruising down through your gears as you approach a junction and keeping the wheels turning sooooo slowly so as not to have to go through the rigmarole of kicking motion back into them. I can stop at lights, flick on my handbrake and enjoy the manly sound of the air brakes going PSSSSHKT as my mammoth settles down onto her haunches.

I grew to anticipate the driving conditions so much further than your average car driver, because I had so much more weight to stop than your average car driver. I saw aspects of the oncoming traffic that people two or three cars ahead of me weren’t even worrying about yet. I laughed as I piloted 6.5tonnes of metal around itsy bitsy country lanes, imagining the vehicle as a fat old woman at a ceilidh, rolling her hips back and forth as she wriggles through the gaps in the crowd.

I even found friendship and solace with other truckers on the road, a raised hand as we passed each other, a nod at lights, a recognition that we were thinking ten times harder about the situation than those silly little car drivers all the way down there.

We were men, who drove trucks.

Rah!

Unfortunately, it turns out the best way to pass your test is to be a little bit poofy, because I failed (on one count) for being “too aggressive”. I also failed my emergency stop procedure, by stopping too gently. I was concentrating too much on the “under complete control” bit and not enough on the “My God, that pram from the Untouchables has bounced into my path! *hands over eyes* EEEEEEE!” bit, which is apparently the bit they really want you to do.

So to summarise, I failed my test before I even left the depot.

Before. I. Got. On. The. Road.

They don’t *tell* you this, of course, so I spent an hour carefully driving around the little commuter towns of West Lothian, making a big show of checking my mirrors, watching my speed and it was all for shit.

Thankfully, I clocked the exam sheet 20 minutes through and saw a big stroke in the “S” (serious) column, so relaxed and thought “Fuck it, I’ll just drive along then”.

Which leads to the third serious fault I managed to perform. I’ve had it hammered into me all through my lessons “Don’t race the lights, don’t race the lights, just take your time, approach every light as though its about to change, because sod’s law dictates that it will”. So I approach a set of lights on green and I throttle waaaaay back, approach them nice and slowly, cos they’ve been green for a while.

Slowly.

Slowly.

Wait, this is a stupid thing to do, it’s a green light, for god’s sake, I look like I’m colour blind, I can go through this, here watch me.

Red.

Brakes.

Screech.

Examiner glances at me, sighs, picks up clipboard.

Bugger.

Bus test on Friday, I’m scared! I think I’ll ask them not to put the clipboard on the seat next to them and just hold onto it, nothing shakes me more than seeing them reach over to pick it up.

Sad on the way home, moped around, didn’t go to first aid. Then decided that friends, babies and whisky was a good plan, so went to see nerfboy, girl and baby.

Just for reference, I made an utter pigs cunt of the test and flunked. We’ll draw a veil now.Up to speed, cos if I don’t do this now I’ll forget, spending the evening dcrinking malts, bouncing babies and deciding which electro-wave is best for bouncing babies. Results: Love Will Tear Us Apart loses to Blue Monday, but Fight Test wins all.

Antisocial, must go.

T, my gorgeous, talented pseudo-sister (that’s her on the right) called me from Uganda today and read me a poem she wrote, recording it onto my voicemail, which only gives you a minute of message time so she had to call back a couple of times to get it all in. It was the best surprise I’ve had for aaaages

And she’s back in *May*!

*does a little dance*