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.

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!

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.

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….

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.

OK, I thought I better kick this off by explaining why I name it such. It’s the nearest big town but is a pain in the arse to reach. I started a yoga course there last Thursday. So I left work early, knowing that with the state of the buses it might take me 2 hours to travel the 20 or so miles to the back end of Dundee. OK, I got a bus there no problem – it was ready to leave just as I got to the bus station. The journey was fast but the bus had NO suspension – my back pain leapt up with each pothole deeper than a nanometre.

At Dundee bus station, I asked at the information desk where my next bus would leave from. ‘I don’t know – it’s run by a different bus company.’ (The different bus company is ‘Strathtay’.) The info-bot guessed it would go from somewhere about half a mile away. What in hell is the point of having a bus station if bus companies don’t use it? Why is Strathtay not using it? Answers on soggy toast to the usual address please.

Anyway, I trudged to the bus-stop the info-bot suggested. Turns out he was right so I waited for the next bus. Wow! This bus-stop even had a timetable! A vast improvement on their ‘our website is under construction’ nonsense. A 20-minute wait punctuated by boredom and muttering as I translated how late my bus was into octal and binary. Finally, my bus turned up. What’s this – the bastards don’t give change! (My fare was £1 and I had 73 pence and two £10 notes.) No indication of this nonsense policy the bus-stop. I had had plenty of time to get change. Hell, it might have even attenuated some of the boredom.

The driver told me to get on and sort out getting change from another passenger. No-one had change of a tenner but a kindly Dundonian gave me the 27 pence I needed. Another saw I was checking where we were going on a map and offered to point out where I needed to get off. (I hate the place, not the inmates.)

At Dundee college, the security guard who was doubling as info-bot was totally surly. ‘You’re too early’ Ahem, isn’t being at a lesson early part of being a good student? Also, the joining instructions told students to be there 15 minutes early to register. So bollocks to Dundonian info-bots – they’re not human so they are part of the place and it is legitimate to hate them.

The room we were in was stuffy, south-facing and very hot. As other students arrived, we all commented on the heat and unsuitability. I have to congratulate the yoga teacher though – her lesson made me feel wonderful. Here’s her website.

Back to more reasons to hate Dundee: after the class, no-one I met could give me change for the bus. So I started walking back along the route, hoping to encounter a shop. I did but was passed by my bus on the way – the next one would be about an hour. However, I did meet a taxi who was looking for a passenger. On the way, the driver sneered at my accent, at regular car drivers and life in general. He claimed that taxi-drivers could drive but everyone else couldn’t. I replied ‘fair enough, most folk could do my job if they had the 10 year’s experience that I have but they don’t so they can’t’. (I refrained from saying they don’t have the necessary masochism.) Anyway, I was deposited at the bus station and a short wait later, Emily turned up – such a wonder to see a familiar, friendly face and a good time ensued at Shepherd’s Cottage. Shame Emily had to crash so early but she is mother to a one-year-old who wakes her at 6 in the morning. Many thanks to Emily for a lift to work the next morning and to all three deepfreezites for a lovely hot bath in the morning.

OK, I think I’ve written enough for a first entry.