Jamie Dobson

6th November, 2010, 11:??.
The good thing about gigs getting cancelled or just having a day off is that you get to hang out, wind each other up, coerce each other into behaving, into hurrying up, drinking up and shutting up.

We have an extra day in Edinburgh today and will be moving onto Glasgow today or tomorrow, depending on the sleeping arrangements.  The gig will be tomorrow night.  I am really looking forward to it, looking forward to a mad crowd, which I am sure Glasgow can provide.

Yesterday I awoke at 13:00, which for me is very late, after having about 13 hours sleep.  I felt bad for the rest of them because they were on the floor of another apartment and it was freezing, and the cushions were not right.  We met up for a drink down in the Grassmarket, an oblong street with pubs, hotels, and beggars on each side.  At the end was a vintage clothes store the girls wanted to visit.  Peter and I followed.  Steph tried on a half black, half red, beret.  Her hair is black, too.  (She likes black and white and animal prints and that’s all she wears.  Her and Signe both wear fur coats.  Steph’s is black.).  I said, ‘you just need a white fleck in your hair and you’ll look like Cruella de Vil, you’ll be rocking’.
    ‘All I need is a traumatic experience.’
    ‘Just wait until Peter sees another empty room.’

Peter and I walked back to their apartment via an off-license.  One litre of whiskey and one can of coke.  The very posh sounding Scottish man said, ‘that’s not foa mixing?’  The cheek.  We bought a thirteen pound bottle of whiskey and this silly four-eyes fucking cardigan wearing babushka wants to take the moral high-ground over a mixer.  Not that I’ve got a problem with people who wear glasses, by the way, I’ve just got a problem with people who wear them at the end of their nose and look over them at me.  I lived in Edinburgh for a year and have come back on numerous occasions. I have never really figured out where these people come from.  The best I can come up with is this: the New Zealand Maori and their white pig countrymen are both tribal, both conformist to their own rules.  This was brought to my attention in King’s History of New Zealand.  Now, this doesn’t make me anything other than a bloke whose read a book, but he made an interesting point: the nature of two, at some point rival groups, is alignment.  You may not start off being a proud Pakeha, maybe you are just a bloke from Hull on a ship to make your fortune, but, in the face of these strange people with tattoos on their faces you feel you have to align with anyone who looks like you.  So, under normal circumstances, I wouldn’t speak to any cunt from east Hull, yet, only last week I found myself with a load of KR fans in a pub in Amsterdam watching the derby.  In the face of foreigners it’s natural to ‘band together’.  (This is why Chinese, Korean, and Vietnamese students all hang together at our western universities.  Similarity lies in the shadow of difference.)  Any-hooooooo, I reckon that all Scots were once upon a time the same.  Then the English came with their wide-screen TVs and red-wine.  The gentry, or the wannabe gentry, aligned with English while the rest, the Sick Boys and the Rentons and my uncle Charlie, utterly rejected this.  The fallout was what we see now: two distinct groups of people in Edinburgh: the wankers and the rest.  To me, that is, was, and always will be the problem with Edinburgh.  ‘Is that for mixing?’  Yeah, I should of said, but not with the likes of you.

Luckily, Edinburgh revealed itself further to us as the day went on.  We went to a pub called the Ye Old Golf Tavern where we ate terrible food but it was served with chips, pale ale, and there was some Rugby Union on in the background.  Adrian and Vicki – my friend whose house I am staying at and his girlfriend – came out, too.  They became our guides.  They took us first to a pub around the corner with an open fire and drunk people.  Peter ordered a Bud for Signe.  When the landlord said that he didn’t sell Bud, Peter said, ‘my girlfriend just had one’, the landlord said, ‘not from here she didnae’ and that was our first bit of trouble of the night.  Peter lamented his stupidity but, frankly, that’s an easy mistake to make.  Luckily the landlord never saw the bottle of Whiskey Peter had in Steph’s hand bag – ‘four fucking pounds a shot’, he said with that nasally, drawling, American voice he has.

Steph and I went out for a cigarette.  A lady was there.  Ex-heroin addict, two children, their dad’s a gypsy, they are not together any more, she speaks gypsy and Dutch.  Dutch, sure, I thought, ‘hoe gaat het met je dan?’  ‘Jaaaaaa!  Goed hoor,’ she replied.  Unbelievable.  Her hair was lank, as if it thought she was still a smack head and it was redirecting nutrition to her vital organs.  Her eyes were too close together and she was massively short sighted, a fact betrayed by the beady pinpricks her glasses created.  She had baggy clothes on and looked like an old hippy.  She was speaking to a rather stunned – but not retracting – young lady saying things like, ‘if I were a lesbiaaan, a’d foak yooo in an instance’.  We walked right out into this.  Steph, not wanting to feel left out, said, ‘what about me?’  The lady then nuzzled Steph’s breasts, put her hand in her bra, and when she came up for air her glasses were steamed up like the boiler room of a steam ship.  She declared, ‘Ahm no a fuckin lesbian!  I love coak’ – she jumped a full 180 degrees, pointed at her bottom, at her anus actually, and looked over her shoulder to Steph and I – ‘I love coak, hard and fast… right up ma erse!’  She then tried to persuade me to get my ‘coak’ out.

We moved onto a pub called the Royal Oak.  This is a yellow, police cell, type of place.  It looks like pubs did when we were kids.  Adrian and I have been there a few times.  Old ugly men, one of them chronically overweight and diabetic and addicted to nicotine and with a big bushy beard, sit around singing songs.  He was a fat fat man and not a big fat man; he could not be strong man; he was an overweight skinny man and so he laboured under his own weight.  Some young men, caught up, I think, in music that will age them prematurely, hung out drinking and waiting their turn. They sing haunting shanties.  Then they switch to songs in the mode of, ‘when ma lassie was young, and she was ugly, and I thought, “for me, that’s no bad”’.  I recognised, ‘That Lucky Old Sun’: ‘Fuss with my woman, toil for my kids/Sweat till I’m wrinkled and gray/While that lucky old sun got nothin’ to do/But roll around heaven all day’.  We were all right at home drinking shit beer: Adrian, Signe; a shit rum and flat coke: me; whiskey from his own bottle: Peter.  It was only a matter of time before Peter had the guitar and did ‘Fatherland’ with the girls chiming in on the chorus.  Signe then did a song about smoke rings; she blew them away.  Just as she started, Peter said to Steph, he eats his words at times like this because the giggle is on the way out, ‘I get to go to bed with that every night’.  They burst out laughing and I thought it was a serious moment and shushed them.  A man with a fiddle, lank, dyed blond hair, and a mouth full of teeth shaped like a chimpanzee, joined in with Signe’s number.  He later did a couple of songs with a hard faced, wide-boy sort of chap with a pirate’s earring and flat-cap on.  He had the air of a sociopath about him, an air of self-pity, and maybe his song choice gave him away: it wasn’t me.  The Scottish, folky, no doubt the original version of Shaggy’s song.  (‘When I pished on the counter; it wasnae me.’)

This morning the shower gel was cold. The houses here are cold. The average life expectancy of Scottish men is 23. Holland seems tropical. We miss it.