: 07 November 2002 :

To be honest, the reason I’ve not been updating is because nobody wants to hear what I did at work today or yesterday or last week. I bore enough people with that at home. So, looking back through my diary for the past couple of weeks, here’s a brief update on recent events:

Saturday 5th October

Went to my girlfriend’s dad’s birthday party in a hall in Dunblane. I’d not met Les before, so I knew a total of about five or six people. Still had a good time, though; got drunk and watched the ceilidh dancing. Was dragged into doing the Gay Gordons. I think it was the Gay Gordons, anyway. I’m no expert on these things.

Sunday 6th October

Went to see Sweet Sixteen. It’s very good. Because I'm in Scotland it didn't have subtitles, which apparently it does in England.

Tuesday 8th October

Went to a party – girlfriend’s friends from university. I know a few of them quite well, though. Most of the people I know up here are students I’ve met through Lex. Had a conversation with one girl about Arab Strap, and whether they were any good live. Having seen them in London (supported by Bright Eyes and a somewhat reinvented Bis) I said they were. She’d seen them in Edinburgh and she said they weren’t that good because they didn’t like Edinburgh audiences. The best thing, I suggested, would be if they played in the back room of some pub in Falkirk. That’s a gig I’d like to see.

Sunday 13th October

Went to see two flats. One was a couple of minutes away, in Montpellier Terrace, and had a big bedroom and a huge living room with a great north-facing view. The two main presences when you looked out of the window were the castle and the McEwans brewery. The second flat was nearer the centre, an old schoolhouse in Drummond Street that’s been converted into flats. Small and carpeted and cosy, with a balcony, though that wouldn’t have been any good during the Edinburgh winter. I got on well with the two girls I’d be living with, but in the end both the flats turned me down.

Tuesday 15th October

I think it was Tuesday that I spoke to my mum. She asked if I was alright for money. I said yes, as I almost always do, no matter what the truth is. She told me she was going to Toronto on the 18th, for a holiday. Her aunt Jill lives there so she’s going to visit for ten days. And my sister’s going to Munich on another school trip (she went to Venice not too long ago). And my dad’s still in Abu Dhabi. I imagine my brother’s filled the house with all the people he can get his hands on, to sit around and drink and play Playstation.

Wednesday 16th October

Called in sick with flu. Spent all morning in bed. Got up and slumped in front of the TV with a Lemsip. Went in the evening to see a flat in the next street, making an effort to be cheery while feeling kind of limp and sick. The room was nice and big, and there was a big comfortable living room. Kitchen was kind of small but it looked good. They had the same rug in their hall as Lex does in the kitchen. I didn’t hear from them so after a few days I assumed they’d gone with someone else.

Friday 18th October

Party at the old flat in Melville Terrace, where Linda and Claire and Lex lived when I met them a couple of years ago. The other Clare invited us over – it was her that took the room when Lex went to Berkeley, and she stayed in the flat when the others moved out in the summer. Clare’s nice. I’d not met her before. She rang us when we were on the way to make sure we were coming, saying “you’ll be the coolest people here”. I’d assumed she was being flattering or facetious, but it seemed to be the truth. We got in and everyone was listening to some cheese compilation and sitting around. There seemed to be a general lack of energy. As a result, we sat around in a little circle, getting steadily drunk and eventually seizing control of the CD player. There was a faceoff between Clare and her flatmate Omar, who isn’t as cool as his name. He kept walking in and trying to put Kylie on. Apparently he does this a lot. Anyway, we had the Clash and the Strokes and the Hives and some Britpop stuff, which was much better. I spotted some Joy Division in the racks so we had about thirty seconds of “Atrocity Exhibition” before someone turned it off. It turned into quite a good party, although I did get the feeling that we pissed off the majority of the guests.

By the time we left (we were among the last to leave) I was stinking drunk on red wine, which I don’t usually drink. Consequently I was acting like an idiot, prompting an argument with Lex which led to me sitting down on a bench and refusing to go home. She walked off quite slowly, because (as she said later) “I was quite concerned that you wouldn’t actually make it home; I thought you would go off in a huff and get lost and die of hypothermia”. As it happened, I lasted about two minutes on the bench before I got bored and went home. Went to sleep in the boxroom, still in a huff, despite the fact that the bunk bed has no mattress and is covered in cardboard boxes. Removed jacket, shoes and watch and curled up under a blanket. I don’t know how long I was huddled there before I ran to the bathroom to throw up.This done, I crawled contritely back to the bedroom and got in a real bed.

Jesus, I felt terrible for work the next day.

Saturday 19th October

Was supposed to go to another party – a girl I knew from Cirencester College. Couldn’t face it, so I left her a message saying I’d invite her round for dinner sometime. I was going to invite her this weekend, but there’s a rival dinner party planned in the flat so I had to defer.

Sunday 20th October

Had a really good day. We went to the National Portrait Gallery in Queen Street to see an exhibition of paintings called Ossian: Fragments of Ancient Poetry. Ossian was a third-century Gaelic bard whose work was “discovered” by James Macpherson in the eighteenth century. Although most people now regard Macpherson’s “translations” as his own invention, Ossian’s still an interesting figure. The painter, Calum Colvin, used this idea of authenticity to produce some interesting work about national identity. He used some of Dali’s techniques, but with nowhere near as much pretension. It was dead good. We wandered around some of the permanent displays in the gallery too, including the marbles of luminaries like James Watt and Thomas Carlyle and Robert Burns and Walter Scott, and some twentieth-century portraits.

Then that evening, following an afternoon of looking at eminent figures, the flat as a whole sat down to watch “100 All-Time Greatest Britons” or whatever they called it, on BBC2. Voted for by the public. Much argument was provoked, as expected. We kept a tally: 13 women, 10 Scots, 7 Welsh, 3 Irish. There was an argument about whether the Irish should have been in it at all. Many of the votes were applauded. A few were greeted with scorn. Enough dickhead racists voted for Enoch Powell for him to make it to number 55. The top ten, which were presented in alphabetical order awaiting a further vote, were Isambard Kingdom Brunel, Winston Churchill, Oliver Cromwell, Charles Darwin, Princess Diana, Elizabeth I, John Lennon, Horatio Nelson, Isaac Newton and William Shakespeare. As of November 7th the voting on these ten is still ongoing. I’d spend a couple of quid voting for Shakespeare, but we don’t have a touch-tone phone. As long as it’s not Diana or Lennon in the top spot I’m not really bothered. Oh, and Churchill isn’t allowed to get it either, the fat fascist.