For the first time in ages, last night I drank a beer. This took 2 attempts:

1. Pete bought me a Thrappledouser but the barmaid then pulled another pint of it, was told it was off and then came to check on mine. It tasted OK to me but Pete vetoed it.
2. The Thrappleshagger was replaced by a St Andrews Ale. A bit insipid but it felt like beer.

Of course, my body punished me by waking up at 6·30. This was after Julia had phoned at 1·30. I’m truly non compos mentis right now

I’ve left my yoga homework in the scanner at work. I had planned to scan it and email it to Lady J.

From Roy Harper’s The Dream Society’

Can’t you see the future in drugs for everybody
Can’t you see the future in our hands
Spliffs at 15p down at the 7 to 11
Make your choice from 20 different brands
Smoking shit
Talking it
Can’t you see the future in our hands

The future
Well she’ll be right on by
En route to the never ever lands
Back on the gondolas
With the broken rock-n-rollers
Dreaming of some future in their hands

Can’t you see the future in drugs for everybody
Don’t you want to live the fairy tale
Happiness available on tap over the counter
Life and death and skunk all in the mail
With Hillary
Ancillary
To make sure Bill remembers to inhale

The future
Well she’ll be right on by
En route to the never ever lands
Back on the gondolas
With the broken rock-n-rollers
Dreaming of some future in their hands

Can’t you see the future in drugs for everybody
Helping us escape the aches and pains
The future is a planet I imagine I inhabit
On board the cocktail flowing through my veins
Reality
Is not for me
I’d sooner be completely out my brains

Can’t you see the future in drugs for everybody
We could all be hundreds of years old
Grafted onto blue baboons and propagated monkeys
With valium
Up the bum
Can’t you see the pharmacy unfold

And the great Pharmacist
Well he’ll be right on by
En route to the never ever lands
Riding the gondolas
With the broken rock-n-rollers
The future permanently put on hold
As usual everybody put on hold
We could put the universe on hold
Let’s go put the universe on hold

OK, this happened about 15 years ago. I was returning from visiting a friend in the Ninewells area of Dundee and was walking down the Blackness Road. I cross the road as a some locals spilled out of a pub and crossed in the other direction. Being my polite self, I said ‘evening’. I heard drunken voices say “English”, then “Tory” and then a hail of rocks followed me down the road.

Ahem, I’d sooner cut my dick off than vote right-wing. I have a bad conscience about voting tactically for Menzies Campbell. (He’s a liberal democrat but seems to be rather pro-war.)

Also, I was born and bred in England but my dad is australian and my mother was born austrian. She became british after she and her family moved here in 1938. She was born jewish in Wien (Vienna to you linguistic plebs). Not the best of moves… thank goodness her dad’s boss saw what was going down and arranged for him to have a post in the UK.

I’ve just seen William Shatner – looking fat and crass – in an advertisment for All-Bran. This really hurts.

Firstly Julia called this morning and there was very little acrimony and even some pleasantness.

I thought work might blow this good feeling but I was able to avoid any difficult tasks. Listening to RH’s “me and my woman” was painful – I was almost in tears – but I really got into RH’s “The Dream Society”. The music and lyrics are ‘vintage RH’ yet with none of the loss of verve you might expect from someone in their 50s. OK he has lost some of his youthful brashness but I suspect that “The Dream Society” will see me through this period in the same way that “Death or Glory” saw me through the first break with Catriona.

Tonight’s yoga class introduced more postures, so it was more difficult but no harder. I think this is called ‘progressive overload’ 🙂

I got a lift to the bus station with one of my classmates (a nurse from Wormit) and wrote this on the Palm while I was waiting for Baz. (I so love this little toy – thank you Ms J. OK, I can’t use it to email my entries à la Gavin but he’s a real techie and so deserves to able to do so.) It was my fortune but maybe his misfortune that he was still en route back from Glasgow and so was able to pick me up without diverting from his original route. He played me some of the latest Electric Boogie Band music he and Callum have been concocting. It’s rather good and deserves to sell well – here’s hoping there are no more label fuck-ups.

I let Baz and EM know what’s happened and tomorrow I’ll start letting the rest of the world know. Wow, I’m so looking forward to that!

So Deep Freeze want to release some records. The music is done and with the pressing plant and all they have to do is do their usual-style labels and email them to the pressing plant:

1. Emily makes up the labels in Illustrator on her mac – Illustrator falls over and refuses to work.
2. She comes here to make them up and email them late on the last evening before they go on holiday. The emails work fine and we assume the records will be ready on their return.
3. No they’re not – the pressing plant asks us to re-email the labels, so I do so from here, CCing to work to check that they’re OK. They’re fine at work.
4. The pressing plant asks for the labels to be sent on CD. I do this.
5. The pressing plant asks for the labels to be resupplied as PDF, TIFF or JPG. PDF is fine but they don’t specify the resolution for TIFF and as for bloody JPGs, well, I ask you….

In the meantime, Julia is having computer woes by proxy… the last thing she needs on top of the current mayhem. Sometimes I could cry for her.

These have been very rare recently. I have to place on record that she initiated the conversations this morning and this evening. For that, I thank her publicly.

I’m not sure what I can really say about this yet but yesterday was definitely from a town on the north bank of the Tay estuary. I’m still in shock-induced lethargy.

Until yesterday I had certain things in my life. Now I don’t. Whether I’m better off without them – well, only time will tell. I don’t feel much worse off just now but that’s maybe because I don’t feel anything just now.

Yesterday also raised the alarming spectre that I might horrendous enough to hail from Menzieshill. (For the innocents among you, Menzieshill is a rough area of Dundee. The denizens pronounce it ‘mingishill’.)

It contains Ninewells, Scotland’s most famous teaching hospital, so the locals have somewhere to bleed to death without dripping blood and guts in the less unpleasant areas of this blighted town.