If Kim and Aggie walked through my front door (probably not
together, as they no longer speak) they’d be appalled. This whole place is a
disgrace, and not even the proprietor of a crack den would lower himself to
live here. My work/life balance is wrong (call it unbalanced); five days there
and two days here, barely enough time to do anything. It’s all about
priorities, though. Why do housework when you can waste time blogging,
tweeting, watching the telly, going out or, God forbid, sleeping? Why do it when,
as Kim or Aggie (probably Kim, though it could have been Aggie) would say, it’s
like polishing a turd? It’s not much of a house to come over all house-proud
about and not much of a home to get all homely about. It is, however, where all
my stuff is.
I reacquainted myself with the vacuum cleaner a couple of
hours ago and took it for a walk around my bedroom. It’s now cleaner and a
little tidier than when I eventually fell out of bed around noon. There’s still
not enough room to swing the proverbial cat (metaphorically; I am NOT related
to Cat Bin Lady). Ideally, everything needs to come out and only some of it
should go back in, but where would I put everything else? I’ve already got
hundreds of books in the attic (I’m not sure this is an exaggeration, actually)
and a large cupboard I can barely get a big toe into. I tend to have a bit of a
clearout of (ill-fitting) clothes after Christmas (because I’m on holiday at
that time) and head for a charity shop or two, but there’s only so much you can
discard before you start to chip away at what’s left of your identity.
Earlier, I stayed in bed long enough to try and clean out
some other rooms; the nooks and crannies in my mind where the ideas go after
I’ve thought of them. I found about a dozen lurking under floor boards and in
priest holes and at the back of a large wardrobe (sans lion and witch) and
committed them to paper before Alzheimer’s kicked in. Who knows when, if ever,
they’ll be developed? After all, it’s taken nearly five and a half years to get
started with this!
“What about the weekend?”, you say. Very kind of you to ask,
so I shall bore you with it. I had another mad dash to a cash machine on Friday
on the way to the first (official) recital in Milngavie Music Club’s new
season. I missed the free, extra one a month ago due to a dose of the galloping
heebeegeebees, so I was relieved to finally make it to Cairns Church where I was relieved of my subscription and where,
instead of the flowers on a stand, two standard lamps (floor lamps, for any
young ‘uns reading) are strategically placed near the musicians to help them
read their parts in the dark. This month’s performers were the Fidelio Trio,
and they treated those assembled to Schumann’s Piano Trio No. 1 in D Minor,
something by Scottish composer Alasdair Nicholson (which verged on the plinky-plonky*),
Percy Grainger’s ‘Colonial Song’, which I quite liked, and Ravel’s Piano trio,
which I also quite liked. For an encore, they played something about meerkats
by a South African composer. Well, it was different. I went to Tesco on my way
home, but was dismayed to find that they didn’t have any Cornflakes.
I was forced to have toast for breakfast on Saturday. I know
I have to rethink my breakfast fare, as neither are very filling and almost
always lead to mid-morning snacking or the overpowering desire for a sugar rush
at lunchtime, but I hate porridge and don’t have time to ‘cook’ anything more
substantial. Yet again, I left home over an hour later than planned and headed
for M&S via the local Royal Mail sorting office, where I picked up some top
secret documents that may either change my life or confirm what everyone
already knows about me (ask me in three months time). After some over-expensive
food was purchased and transported back to the car, I went to the Mitchell
Library, though not for the seminar on the Spanish Civil War. One of these
days, I’ll find out about such events well in advance and buy a ticket.
I read for a while, from a book about understanding what
Shakespeare was on about, but couldn’t help checking Twitter or the radio for
news from Rugby Park. I needn’t have bothered. Somehow or other, my team
decided that they’d like to go in at half-time 3-0 down to the team second
bottom of the league. With one or two exceptions, noted below, performances
have been poor this season, so far, and I’m sure I’m not the only one who would
like to know why. I expected to tune in an hour or so later to hear that the
manager had resigned or been fired, but the news was slightly better, a 3-3
draw. This time last season, before the (comparatively minor) slump that cost
the league title, they’d lost one game, not three, and didn’t draw until the
disastrous last minute shambles against Dundee United on the 20th of
November. They are now ten points adrift of the leaders and sit third in the
table. It’s not an impossible position but an embarrassing one when you
consider that we have almost the same match-day squad of players, the same guys
who played some wonderful football last season, ultimately with very little
reward. Questions are being asked, but no answers have been forthcoming up to
now. Round 2 of the SPL begins next week against Aberdeen. I shudder to think
what the outcome will be.
*Standard musicological term for tuneless crap
No comments:
Post a Comment