Airbrush Android
I am not sure what to make of this. Meeester, who is not a bad photographer has been tinkering with a Photshop-esque computer programme that is making us all too perfect. It’s called Portrait Professional.
He’s been transforming us all and sticking the results up on Facebook for our amusement. One even prompted one husband to comment on response to his wife’s enhanced photo, that it looked like the photo of the actress that would play his wife in a TV biopic. I’m unsure if she has read the comment…
So what you do is you take your photo, warts and all (see PIC. A below) literally- find the wartiest one you can. There we go….
PIC A
and…you stick it in Portrait Professional and make yourself perfect….(see PIC B) …like so.
PIC B
I am not sure what to make of it. Part of me is delighted at the result. If Cameron Diaz can live by the pockmark vanishing airbrush, then so can I. Look, no wrinkles..! Look no blemishes…! look, perfect skin a la Lloyd Cole’s muse. Champion!
“That’s how I look in my head!” I scream (even though I have a little look of a Stepford Wife, I must admit).
But then Meeester puts them side by side for comparison and the depression sets in quicker than you can shout, “Help me, Gok Wan!“.
Initial delight is quickly replaced with soul destroying discontent at the actual state of things. Nudging forty, as I am, it crystallises the bare faced fact that no amount of pento-pento-peptides with a range of antioxidant boswelox-bollox particles rammed roughly onto my epidermis by the very hands of Nadine Baggot can save me.
Further depression sets in when I realise that PIC A is the one I sent to the radio station to stick on the website a good few weeks before Meeester even discovered Portrait Professional.
In the words of plastic surgery veteran and rhinoplasty poster-girl, Cher…”if I could turn back time…”
Bugger!
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Jessie
I’m told that around 16.30 she moved her head to one side and breathed her last two breaths. Two months ago she told my mum that she was “frightened of getting better”. This was my gran, Jessie who died yesterday.
I don’t feel sad. I feel glad for Gran. I feel relieved for her because she didn’t want to be here anymore without Tommy, my Papa. She didn’t want to be moved into a nursing home, unable to see, unable to walk, far away from the house she’d lived in for over 50 years.
She would have made friends in the nursing home, I’m sure. She was a right good laugh. She was cheeky, and opinionated, and animated, and always had good chat. When I would visit her from University, we would go shopping in the precinct and you couldn’t get ten yards without Jessie meeting someone she knew. She knew everybody. She had lots of friends. She would have definately made an impact in the nursing home she was due to be moved to today. Finally up to Aberdeen beside her family from her home in Glasgow. If she hadn’t become seriously ill on Saturday.
She had decided that if she was going to be denied release from her increasingly long life that she was going to have to do something about it herself. She made herself ill, she ran out into the garden and made a lot of noise about getting an ambulance. She had a complete and utter strop about being 86, widowed, blind and bored. She lost her temper and made a complete fuss. That was what she was like all her life; throwing strops, being a madam. She couldn’t just pick up the phone. Where’s the fun in that? Where’s the drama? By her own admission she had been a spoilt brat as a child, running rings round the older sisters who brought her up when their own mother died when Jessie was only 14 months old.
“All my sisters died when they were in their seventies. Why not me?”
She went into Gartnavel hospital at the end of January with a largely made up complaint. She admitted to my mum that she had “lost her temper”. She wanted something done, but she didn’t know what. We had been trying for years to convince her to move up near us. She was having none of it.
In the hospital, she let me and my sister into a secret that she hadn’t been taking her medicine. She showed us a handful of pills that she had stashed in her dressing gown with a wee smile. We also found some under her bed. Ever the cheeky madam. We knew she was giving those nurses and doctors hell. But apparently yesterday a few of them were in tears when it was all over.
Within a week of seeing her and laughingly declaring, “There’s nothing wrong with you gran,” the hospital-bred MRSA and Dificil viruses found their way to her and she got her wish; she became ill for real. She began to see her long dead sister Margaret, the woman who had effectively brought her up, sitting beside her.
She also had to be reminded that the reason Papa hadn’t visited was that he was dead.
“Oh, I thought that must be why. Or else he would have been up” she’d say, very matter of fact.
When I last saw her, she was small, angry, rude and nasty to everyone. She didn’t even take me on. In fact she was horrible to me and my mum. The cheeky, funny lady who would give you a “big squeeze” til your eyes popped out your head had gone leaving someone else in her place that I didn’t recognise.
Last night when I fell asleep I smelled her scent and felt her jumper against my chest as she gave me a “big squeeze” for the last time.
I really felt it.
I don’t feel glad anymore, I feel so sad.
There’s to be “no fuss” at her funeral on Friday, says my mum. But Gran liked fuss, so we’ll just have to see about that….
Old Andy and the cricket
My Granda would have been ninety this year. But he only made it to eighty-five. In fact his birthday would have been this month. He was a typical West coast of Scotland bloke of his generation; hard-drinking, working class and a little bit old-fashioned when it came to women. He was extremely well read and if he had been born 50 years later I’m sure would have gone to University. But working class guys from Glasgow just didn’t do that in his day. He was a foreman for Hoover and shop steward for the union.
He knew everything. Or so it seemed to me. He was a nightmare to play “Trivial Pursuit” with at Christmas as he knew everyone else’s answers and couldn’t keep quiet about it. He was also a big film buff and I think I take after him in that respect. He knew film trivia inside out having spent many hours in the cinema throughout his life. He always bought the yearly Halliwell’s Film Guides. He read reference books like you or I would read novels.
Anyway I have a cracking Granda story, which I remember telling to his youngest son (my Uncle) at Granda’s wake. I was amazed he hadn’t heard it before.
My dad used to phone his dad fairly regularly. We lived 150 miles away, so my dad couldn’t just pop round. Sometimes Granda would answer the phone, but most of the time he’d be out at the pub. The barmaid would phone if he didn’t appear, to make sure he was still alive- that’s NO JOKE.
On one occasion when he was in, Granda complained that he had a cricket in his flat. It was keeping him awake at night and he couldn’t find it. My dad laughed this off joking about the cricket in “The Last Emperor” that is found in the same place tucked behind the throne after 50 years.
“Well, you’re stuck with it, they live til they’re 50 odd” he laughed.
A month or so later, dad phones him again to check in. “Is the cricket still there?” he jokes
“Aye son, and I know what species it is.”
It turns out that Granda has been researching entymology. He has been at the library and has looked thoroughly into the various calls of crickets. He has checked into which ones could feasibly sustain themselves in a Scottish climate. This is typical of Granda. He has a house full of fishing, bird books and encyclopaedias. He taught me all about the planets and solar system when I was a kid, he took me fishing, he told me stuff. Of course he would find out what kind of cricket he was sharing his house with!
“I am convinced it’s a West African. I’ve narrowed it down.” he says, very matter of fact.
He still can’t find it though, and it’s driving him daft.
My dad, however, starts to worry that Granda is losing his marbles.
A few weeks later my parents go to see him and discover that the West African cricket call is actually a low battery tone in the smoke alarm.
Granda is not convinced. That West African cricket has been his hobby for the last couple of months. He was reluctant to let it go.
