New Year - Good Times?

“….As market days are wearing late,
And folk begin to tak the gate,
While we sit bousing at the nappy,
An’ getting fou and unco happy,
We think na on the lang Scots miles…”

Following the Christmas celebrations, I was thinking about the run up to new year and the traditional Scottish link between Hogmanay and booze and it got me wondering how many folks indulge in a wee spot o’ mind altering substances (not just at this time of year but throughout the year). I thought about the different people using different methods - food, sport, booze, drugs, meditating, bodybuilding, sex, running and any other mood altering activity. If so many people are using one or other of these methods to get away or opt out of their normal hum drum life… is anybody actually having the great life we’re all not living?

Perhaps a ‘good life’ is nothing more than a big fat lie, like Santa. Each of us helping to build a delusion that a good life is possible… and each of us buy into it out of desperation that better times are just around the corner. What if this illusion of more, is as good as it gets? To admit that there is nothing really that great about life after all would be so depressing that we’d might be left with the conclusion that reading any meaning and purpose into human life is absurd, and who would want to raise a glass to that?

Happy New Year Readers
Good Luck with your Adventures in 2008!

Fire Down Below

Not my usual topic for blogging but its fair to say I’ve had something on my mind this past week. It would seem that for the first time ever it has affected my ability to think with clarity and do my job. I’m ashamed to say that in the embarrassing stakes it outranks the ‘inside-out top’ scenario by a long way. It happened like this…

I was beavering away trying to get my desk cleared as quickly as possible, the sooner the better as I’d be on holiday the moment I could see the wood under the paper mountain. Phone rings…. ‘hello’… ‘oh, hello, I’ve been trying to contact you. You don’t know me by we know a mutual acquaintance. Sandy’ ‘ah, yes. I know Sandy. How is he?’… blah blah blah - pleasantries pleasantries pleasantries…. ‘So, anyway. I was rather hoping to meet with you to discuss a joint project’… ‘Oh, I’m so sorry I don’t have a free minute before the end of the year’ … silence…. ‘What about on my way home today?’…

I caved….

Resigned but determined to keeping it short and to the point I did some homework before he arrived. Prepared with my ‘wish’ list ready to negotiate I welcomed him into the office. That’s when it happened. I found my thoughts wandering…. oh so wandering. He wasn’t particularly handsome but with every uttered word I was finding him more and more appealing… EEK… here I was trying to sound intelligent, erudite and lucid but failing miserably to keep my guttural thoughts checked!!

He asked if I was okay… I muttered something about trying to remember the ingredient that one of my boys needed for home economics the next day. Not sure he believed me.. truth be told he’d have to have been blind and deaf to not realise why I was unsettled… oh the shame - the shame of it all!!!

Needless to say I stuttered like a buffoon, simpered like an overzealous Labrador and agreed to FAR more than I would have ordinarily done. All because i couldn’t rise about my hormones. Now I face the task of extracting myself and my project from the terms I’ve signed up to… Any good lawyers out there? Preferably, unattached, fiscally sound and willing to embrace primal urges as they happen…

Who Stole Christmas Cheer?

Got my first Christmas card this weekend and it spun me into a tizzy… I’m not organised at all. So I trotted off to face the big bright lights of the city and after two hours of soul destroying indecency I returned home empty handed. Where did all the Christmas spirit go?

After enduring ignorant people stepping in front of me, people causing mayhem in an attempt to secure the last car park space and much ‘tutting’ at the sales assistant, the final straw came when I overheard a young lady talking to her friend saying ‘that’ll do for so-in-so’… as she picked up items from the stores gift selection. It made me think of how many presents will be opened on Christmas morning to bring disappointment or at best disinterest, simply because they were bought for the sake of giving rather than with the receiver in mind… I felt so sad. I always thought that the joy of Christmas was in the giving of gifts, but it would seem ‘not today’.

Don’t get me wrong, I’m not really religious but I do try to keep the real sentiment of Christmas in mind… I mean I know that the X in Xmas comes from the Greek word ‘Chi’ which means Christ, so technically its okay to shorten ‘Christmas’ to ‘Xmas’… but I feel I’m not Greek so I should stick to keeping the Christ in Christmas, even if this means my hand gets cramp writing it into so many cards. I think it’s important.

I mean, if the magic of Christmas was to be swallowed up by mean-spirited shallowness it’s hard to imagine anything else keeping acts of kindness and human decency alive. Its only having lived thro’ eleven and a half months of disrespect, road enraged selfishness that you realise every one of us ‘needs’ Christmas to keep up the delusion that our lives are actually beautiful. Mebbe it’s not the parcels around the tree that is the real gift at Christmas, but perhaps it’s this realisation that humans can sometimes be selfless that is precious.