One thing about going on holiday with kids is that their grandparents always give them a tenner before they go. The cash burns a hole in their little shorts from that point forward. In a poll recently conducted by me on the streets of every major city in the UK 8 out of 10 kids claimed they would spend the tenner in the airport gift shop or the train station newsagents. The other 2 out of 10 said they wouldn’t wait that long and would spend it at the ice cream van before they even left for their holiday. Unless you are my brother, in which case you would wait until your sisters had spent theirs and lord it over them that you still had your tenner and the world was your oyster. The world, or a Hoseasons Holiday Camp, or Margate…whatever.

When I was around twelve I was in holiday in Northern Italy with my family, my holiday tenner a distant memory as my brother sloshed about town with his pocket chock full of about one billion lire. These were the days before the Euro when Italians had to take a suitcase of money everywhere with them just to go down the shops. Fashionable chi-chi suitcases mind, we’re talking Italians here. Regretting my purchase of five tins of assorted boiled travel sweets from an all night garage on the A96 on the way to the airport, I had to sit and watch as my brother skipped about an Italian toy shop eyeing up the Mediterranean childrens’ booty.

He’s irritating the hell out of me and my sister as he’s humming and hawing, but he knows the purchase better be a good one, because once the money is gone, he’s just like the rest of us-skint and reliant on good behaviour to make any ice-cream purchases courtesy of my parents’ goodwill. But then he spies it, and this ten year old with a notorious violent streak and an obsession with all things weaponry sees his must-have item- a bright green catapult with elastic so thick and strong it could propel a reluctant Italian into battle.

All purchases, even those made with your own money must go through my Mum’s strict and non-negotiable veto system. Needless to say strong banded catapults capable of taking the eye out of anyone in the firing line and the next three people behind them did not pass the test. “Put it back and pick something we can get through customs,” she orders the young warlord, now rendered impotent in a potential David/Goliath scenario. The boy is not happy and he refuses to even look at anything else, preferring to whine and sulk for the rest of the day. “This is just like the cross bow incident in William Tell country and the time I found an un-exploded grenade on the Normandy coast- you never let me have ANYTHING!” he pouts.

Some days go past and unexpectedly the boy makes no further mention of a desire to spend his tenner. The subject is dropped and we can all go about our 1970s business of cultivating skin cancer inducing sunburn and peeing in the Adriatic because we can’t be bothered coming out of the sea to find a toilet. It’s in one such dooks in the sea that a miracle happens. “Oh…oh…my goodness. Mum! Look! You’ll never guess what I’ve just found!!” the boy hollers as he runs excitedly towards the beach, something waving blurredly in his outstretched sea-wrinkled hand. The assembled parents look up startled- Jaws was only on cinematic release over a year ago and they are still a tad skittish.

My mum gets off her sun-lounger and heads towards her son who is still shouting excitedly. “Look! Mum! Look what I found in the sea!” he says to the woman like she herself had just washed up on the beach in a banana boat. A plastic bright green handled catapult , I’m guessing an ancient military relic from the epic travels of Aenas from Greece to Italy in around 300BC on his way to meet Sibyl who will show him the Underworld, has been found in the sea by this intrepid young archaeologist. The elastic has survived the briny harsh conditions of the Adriatic and indeed is strong enough to slay a Kraken should one emerge in a menacing fashion from the monster filled seas, even after a period of time that has seen civilisations rise and fall. What a find! What a red letter day in the field of archaeology and the study the weaponry of the Trojan era.

“Give me that” she says, the woman clearly a Philistine who callously puts the bounty in her raffia beach bag knowing nothing of its potential monetary worth and its certain historic and cultural value to the Italian and Greek governments who will surely hail the boy a hero and let him keep the relic to do with what he will for the rest of his holidays before they secure it in a museum.

“Give me that. Do you think my head zips up the back?”

(Thanks for the prompt, Ellen at Ready for Ten)

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I haven’t posted this week but not because I haven’t anything to write about. I do but it’ll have to wait because I’ve been spending the week seeking out new Scottish bloggers. Well new to me anyway…

This week I am the guest editor of the Scottish Roundup and I set myself the mission of making the roundup as diverse as I could with at least fifty percent of the blogs to be featured to be ones that have never been included in the Roundup before. I think I managed. In fact, I know I did. Hurrah!

This exercise has been important to me for a number of reasons:

1. I think that you need to refresh your blogroll regularly- too many bloggers give up, get fed up, or just lose their mojo- you’ve got to seek out new stuff.

2. I like a political blog as much as the next naked ape, but the Roundup is often exclusively political and I like to shake it up a little when I edit.

3. I like meeting new bloggers because on the whole they are an interesting bunch, so hello to everyone I met online this week. I’ve come away from the whole thing with some firm new favourites.

4. Sometimes people put pics of their dogs up and that’s always good.

Read the Round Up here and if you own, rent, have feudal rights to or have a freehold on a Scottish blog then nominate yourself for next weeks roundup.

The Scottish Blog Roundup is up here: http://scottishroundup.co.uk/2010/06/06/50-new-blogs-or-your-money-back/

And here’s a pic of my dog.



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Union Terrace Gardens

I never talk about issues on here. Not really. But today I will because it’s something I really care about. Green space…no-o-o-o… please don’t go to someone else’s blog where they are talking about Confectionery of the Seventies that you Miss or Cute Stuff my Kid Has Said or Ultimate Sandwich Fillings. Stay, I’ll be brief and to the point.

THE best park in Aberdeen, the Victorian sunken garden of Union Terrace is under threat from the monster ego of someone who wants to fill it in with concrete, cut down the trees and build a civic square covering the whole valley that the gardens currently occupy. This is someone who wants to literally cement his legacy. I mean that Big Yellow Taxi song by Joni Mitchell was practically written for this purpose. That someone is Sir Ian Wood of the Aberdeen based but internationally operating company oil services company, The Wood Group. He’s like Aberdeen’s answer to Bill Gates or Rockerfeller.

Here’s a photograph of what Union Terrace Gardens looked like this Saturday:

Photo courtesy of Sezza

And here’s a view of the whole garden from the other end so that those who have never visited can appreciate its unique structure:

Here’s what oil mogul Sir Ian Wood and his chums would like to turn it into:

And here’s the Simpsons episode it reminds us all of.

Sir Ian is chucking £50 million of his personal fortune at the venture. The catch? Conservative estimates claim that it will cost in excess of £140 million to build and our city council is nigh on bankrupt. Oh and there’s another problem. The Peacock Visual Arts people already had funding and planning permission in place to build an arts centre into one of the less used sides of the gardens keeping the original structure and planting of the gardens in place and having a sympathetic (and world class) architectural design. But Sir Ian has some considerable clout in this town, and the PVA plans were put into stasis until his plans, or his “vision” as he likes to call it, for filling in the gardens with a multi-storey carpark with a civic square on top and some retail and cafe type outlets were considered. So Peacock were left out of a limb, facing the possibility of their funding opportunity lapsing in the meantime.

Who was to consider all these wonderful plans for the future with such baubles and trinkets as “moving walkways” (Monorail!) and outdoor cafe (in Aberdeen! Our town’s name is Gaelic for hypothermia!)? Well, us- the public. And very kindly Sir Ian together with the council spent over £100,000 putting together a consultation. The trouble was the consultation was heavily geared towards prompting all correspondents to supporting the Monorail proposal, I mean, the City Square project, as it is actually known. in fact, since the votes were counted I’ve heard various reports that even if you ticked the box saying you didn’t want the City Square project to go ahead, as soon as you filled in the box set aside for an additional comment, your tick disappeared and your submission counted as support for the City Square Project. Even if your comment said something like

“If this terrible City Square Project goes ahead I will lie in front of the bulldozers like Arthur Dent in The Hitchhikers’ Guide to the Galaxy!”

..which I think was my comment.

Anyway at least we had the chance to comment. Sir Ian promised that if we didn’t want it he would “walk away” taking his £50 million with him.

And then Aberdeen’s favourite daughter, Annie Lennox got involved. She HATES the idea of the gardens being touched at all and said so publicly on her website. What she hated almost as much was her image being used in one of the City Square’s pamphlets without her permission or endorsement. Those in support of the Monorail started writing into newspapers saying things like:

“She doesn’t even live here anymore and hasn’t been to the city since she was a wee girl and even when she does come back she never gives us a free concert like she bloody well should. And she lives in that there big smoke with her fancy ways hanging about with Bono and stuff”.

Real constructive stuff like that. However feisty Annie is made of sterner stuff. Whose business is it when she comes back up to the ‘Deen and how often? She’s Aberdonian and cares about her city. And she’s actually from Ellon where I went to school and Ellon folk are hard so I wouldn’t mess.

Still thinking of messing with Ms Lennox?

The consultation ended and despite the skew whiff biased ballot papers reminiscent of a George W Bush presidential campaign, the clever people of Aberdeen still voted 55% against the Sir Ian Wood Monorail vision. Yay, us! That’ll be the sound of Sir Ian Wood walking away with his £50 million to go and see if Shelbyville want to share his “vision” then?

Except he didn’t walk away. He turned around and said something along the lines of (and I’m paraphrasing here) “Ignore all that, let the elected councillors decide. My money is still on the table, folks!”

The councillors vote on Wednesday. The Chief Executive of Aberdeen City Council has already urged them to support Sir Ian’s plans. We’re in desperate times. The people have spoken. The people have been promptly dismissed because they didn’t like what we said . (Sounds familiar, eh?)

Still, I have a sliver of faith in the councillors. Some of them are good people and many of them know a white elephant when they see one. How many of them will listen to the public is not known, but it is important to remind them that listening to the public is their actual job.

If anyone reading this is from Aberdeen and wants to write to the councillors to let them know your views then let me know. I happen to have a handy list of their email addresses. Just email me: gillianamartin (at) hotmail.com

Meanwhile, you can read this excellent, well written and informed blog from Fraser Denholm who says all of this is a far more mature and factually irreproachable way here. His whole blog is a mine of information on the whole experience but I think it’s best to start with this entry in which he lays out THE FACTS. Hi Fraser, I’m Misssy M long time reader first time caller, loving your work.

I would say that I’m putting my soap box away, but to be honest I’m leaving it out til at least Thursday.

And here’s Joni because I’m nothing if not obvious:

STOP PRESS: Sadly it’s very bad news from the City Chambers tonight. Click here to see BBC report. Now for them to find that other £90million (at least). Think I’ll move back to Glasgow…

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You would be forgiven for thinking that I’ve been caught and stranded at the outer rim of Eyjafjallajökull this past month, so light has my posting been. But I have a note from my Mum, and a handy excuse, for I, along with my sister, the legendary Misssy A, have been attending to our duties as the oldest bridesmaids in town. This is not an easy task. The hen night was last week and given our advancing ages this event had to be carefully planned to avoid the pitfalls that a bride and maids of usual wedding-y ages would be able to sidestep with ease, but those past the age of 35 might have difficulty in surviving.

These include:

Drinking in the afternoon where there are no handy cots or beds upstairs to have a wee lie down on around teatime.
There is a point in a woman’s life where even the taste of a brandy snap or a rum truffle before teatime can have her needing a disco nap before long. Unfortunately the “toon” hasn’t cottoned onto the money making extravaganza that’s to be had with the invention of coin-operated pubside sleeping capsules, so either drink up and man up, or have a cup of tea instead and declare your life over. And no, phoneboxes do not count as coin operated sleeping capsules. A policeman kindly told me that.

Karaoke.
What would a hen night be without a group of women tunelessly belting “Stand by your Man” or “I Beg your Pardon, I Never Promised you a Rose Garden” depending on what mood you left your husband in to go out subjecting him to lone parenting the kids overnight. The bride wanted karaoke, but the last time she did karaoke she sat on the lap of a stranger and serenaded him like she was Jane McDonald when she used to work on that cruise ship. Sadly for her, we could not find a karaoke bar that wasn’t a safe enough distance from Aberdeen’s notorious harbour area, so that plan was safely detonated, with no-one getting seriously harmed.

Someone always brings a sex toy along for a laugh
Misguided Ann Summers contributions abound on these occasions, and it’s usually from the person you’d least expect, like the bride’s Mum’s unmarried cousin or the quiet girl in Accounts you had to invite because she invited you to her Born Again Christening celebrations. Yes there’s always one hen at a hen night who has popped into Ann Summers beforehand and gone a bit mad. Made up statistics suggest that 70% of all Ann Summers purchases are joke purchases. So much so that the vast majority of the stores’ more mechanical devices don’t even have working parts, as their main objective is to be screamed at and thrown about a bar hysterically, so why bother? Know this; the bride of advancing years does not want the gift of pants that don’t have a hardy gusset attached, and is more likely to put chocolate body paint on her kids sandwiches for their packed lunch when she realises there’s nothing else in the cupboard.

Health Issues
The following symptoms of a hen night on a bride and her hens of more mature years are numerous. Known side effects can include :

-Skin rash from the scratchy fake veil the other hens insisted the bride wear the entire night.

-Vomiting- blame it on that dodgy seafood starter you had all you like but remember one thing, you did drink more tonight that you have in the last three years combined. And you haven’t drunk a Guinness since you were in the student union in 1990, so why the need for one tonight with a tequila chaser?

-Thrush- Even though you were disgusted at the time with the pair of PVC pants that your boss brought to the hen night with the zip down the front, it’s now 1am and you’ve got them on and are dancing to Nik Kershaw’s “Wouldn’t it be Good?” in a retro 80′s theme club night. Luckily someone else gave you Canesten Duo as a hen present so it’s all good.

-Burns- You gave up smoking before you had your kids over ten years ago, but suddenly you fancy a cigarette because you are hammered. Not only do you try and light the wrong end but once you’ve got the blasted thing going you try to tidy your hair up with that handy handbag sized hairspray you’ve got in your bag, and end up with severe chemical burns as the lit end ignites the hairspray and causes a blue flash that can be seen the other end of town.

Your homing device no longer works
Time was you had a reliable inbuilt homing chip that was known to get you safely back into your bed from wherever you had ended up on a night out, with no actual memory the next day of what route you had taken or even who you had been with. This device, like any mechanical equipment will fall into disrepair if not used regularly. They’ve even changed where the taxi ranks are since you were last out a million years ago, so it’s a good thirty minutes before you realise you are actually standing in a nightclub queue. If your homing device is knackered, get a hotel room or have your husband collect you and suffer his ridicule and possible disgust if an overnight pass has not been previously negotiated.

This post is dedicated to the lovely Sezza who will be married to her man AT BLOODY LAST on 29th May 2010. Congratulations to you both.

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I am an i-Phone widow. Meeester took delivery of his i-Phone yesterday and I think that’s it for me. He said less than three words to me last night as he footered with it and didn’t even say goodbye to me this morning before leaving for work. Maybe because he’s got an app for that and just forgot to activate it, assuming that it had already whispered a computer generated “Cheerio. Do you need me to get anything on my way home?” to me as he walked past me as I pretended to be just about to get up. “Need to remember to pay attention to your wife? We’ve got an app for that!”

Of course I could always try and salvage our relationship and join his club by getting one of my own like one of those wives who take up golf because they realise if they don’t they’ll only ever see their husband when he’s asleep beside them or at family weddings and funerals. But I can’t think of anything else that would be more of a waste of money (apart from buying a set of golf clubs). Not because the i-Phone isn’t amazing- adverts every four minutes tell me that this isn’t the case. No it would be a waste of money because I don’t even like having a mobile phone. I barely like having a home telephone.

I am what they call a late adopter. I am the person who people get stuff for because I need to be forced into updating my life. I am convinced I wouldn’t even have a mobile phone at all if it weren’t for the fact that ten years ago I got given a Nokia as a leaving present from the work that I refused to take a company mobile phone from in the first place because “it means you’ll call me when I’m not at work and make me do work things”. I can’t think why I never moved up in that company, for the life of me.

I don’t think I’ve ever got over that contempt for people in the late eighties who carried mobile phones the size of a large doner kebab about and shouted into them, like they were yoghurt cartons attached to their mates distant yoghurt carton with a piece of string. A part of me still feels like a right dick if I answer my mobile phone in a public place. I cringe as I hear myself say “I’m on a bus!” People stopped declaring where they were a good decade ago, for goodness sakes.

I forget to take my phone with me, I forget to charge it, I forget to switch it back off silent mode for a good week after I’ve been to the cinema with it, I have lost it more times that I’ve probably ever used it to make an actual call. I am not alone in this. Phone my mother on hers and she will answer startled like the ringing has slapped across the face, shrieking “Hello????” at a pitch only spaniels can hear. I don’t think I’ve ever called my dad on his and he’s actually ever answered. Pretty much everyone I am in contact with has said this phrase to me “Didn’t you get the message I left for you on your phone?” To which the universal answer is a sheepish “No….” and a silent thought to myself of “My phone has an answering service, who knew?”

No I will just have to watch my husband silently from the sidelines and occasionally show interest as he shows me a new app for an action he never needed to perform in real life before the machine arrived. Yes, you heard right I just called it a machine.

I will try to link it to my own life to show I’m not completely out of touch, “Can you blog from that?” I’ll say, to which the universal answer will be “Blogging is so 2007. We’re all tweeting now.”

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Tomorrow I return to lecturing television production at college. Only on a part time basis, and still keeping on all the other work I do. Gosh, now that it’s down in black in white I wonder what the blazes I am doing. All this work AND the resignation of my trusty cleaner could mean a Toxic Hazard sign appears on my front door before the month is out. No matter, I need to do it. I miss them pesky kids. I’ve missed college ever since I left over two years ago, it was part of my identity.

Bizarrely with a two year hiatus from something that became second nature to me, I am actually quite nervous. Working with students means anything can happen. I cast my mind over incidents that happened over the years the last time around. The male student that couldn’t handle doing a role play situation and pushed me over to get out of the room when one of his friends sniggered when he got tongue tied, or the time another girl student slapped a chap’s face in the studio gallery when he told her what to do. As the years go on you become able to handle almost anything, and compared to schools you don’t really have much in the way of discipline issues on the whole.

However you are never immune from making an absolute tit of yourself in front of a class.

About a few months into my time there as a full time Media Studies lecturer the Twin Towers were attacked. Of course as media students after a period of few weeks we looked at the news coverage and one afternoon we were discussing the common pattern that the television news coverage was taking in terms of the type of footage and media used.

“Right, you are compiling a television news report based on the newspaper article you have in front of you.” I said. “What material do you need to take into the edit suite with you?”

Some-one shouts out “Towers and the planes going in”

“Yup, the actual attack. What else?”

“Photo of Osama Bin Laden”

“Yes, and who else”

“The bombers- those mugshots…” someone shouts.

“And the dodgy video that Bin Laden released” another person ventures.

I’m frantically writing all this up on a board as they shout it out. “Yes, that’s all going in. What about the political angle. What are you going to show there?”

“George W Bush.”

“Yes,” I say turning to write the name ‘Bush’ up on the whiteboard. “You’ll show them a bit of Bush.”

One second… two seconds..three. I sigh and turn around to face them. The entire studentage is falling about laughing.

Class dismissed.

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I tell you starting your forties is a freaky experience. One recurring leitmotif that rears its head every so often like that beast in the trash compactor onboard the Death Star in Star Wars every so often is this: that I should have sorted myself out by now.

I have compiled a list of things that if you asked anyone they would say someone who is forty should have sorted out by now:

• Forty year olds should have an established career
• Forty year olds should have a pension instead of a Direct Debit instruction for the National Lottery
• Forty year olds should be able to phone a tax office without physically shaking
• Forty year olds should be able to talk to other forty year olds in suits without feeling like a wee girl
• Forty year olds should have had the braces removed from their teeth by now
  
  
• Forty year olds should not be contemplating actually wearing the sequined shorts given to them by their sister (who also bought herself a pair)
• Forty year olds should not be anyone’s bridesmaid
• Forty year olds should not be urging their forty-two year old friend to wear the sequined shorts she bought online
  
  
• Forty year olds should know how to programme the central heating
• Forty year olds should be able to have a disagreement with a client on the phone without giving the phone the Vs after the receiver has been put down.
• Forty one year olds should stop still saying that they are forty when they are not.

I am failing on all those fronts. This year I am to be a shivering, brace wearing, pensionless, career-wanting, possibly sequined short wearing(at least at one point on the Henny) bridesmaid to my friend, Sezza, the Demon Bride of Peterculter. Along with my similarly misguided (but, crucially, five years younger sister), Misssy A. My mother keeps on insisting that we’re Matrons of Honour, but really, where’s the honour in that?

Elderly bridesmaiding aside, the pension thing is the most confusing. Meeester keeps on saying things like “I’ve looked at my pension and we can’t afford to be alive past sixty. Let’s do a Sid and Nancy…which one do you want to be?” Or “I’ve booked us a consultation with that Dr Kevorkian for our Golden Wedding Anniversary. Put it in the diary and book the flight to Switzerland whilst our credit cards might still be authorised….” , or, chillingly,“It appears I’m worth more to you dead…”.

I look at my own pension portfolio through semi-closed fingers. It’s full of lots of little frozen company pensions from jobs I spent five or six years in each paying out about a fiver on maturity. It felt like I paid a lot in at the time but the cash appears to have gone through some kind of evaporation vortex. I’m totally buggered.

Still, it’s not all doom and gloom. I remind myself that I’ll probably just be like my late gran, and her expensive cigarette habit aside, I should be able to live cheaply by never buying myself any new clothes given that “It’ll be a waste, because I’ll be dead soon.” Not even sequined shorts reduced from £25 to £5 that my elderly sister who I share a room with in the home has also bought herself.

And as for being one of those old ladies who can’t afford to put the heating on because they are too poor to pay their bills, I’ve got no worries. Because I still won’t be able to programme the bloody central heating anyway.

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By the way……See a response to this post from Canada’s best blogger, the Ex-Urban Pedestrian here.

The huge and copious Scottish Roundup blog awards are up. The Misssives came third in their category of Best Personal Blog and I’m delighted despite noting the lack of cash prize (only kidding…)

Apparently over 1,500 votes were cast which is pretty great. There are loads of blogs I had previously never heard of and I suggest if you’re thinking that your blog reading list is a little tired that you get over there and check out some of the winners/runners up. I’m certainly going to, (even just to leave rude messages on the two blogs that beat me into third place).

The categories were wide- there are photography blogs, hyper local blogs, technology blogs, art blogs, newcomers’ blogs- the lot. And if you’re a Scottish blogger who wasn’t nominated this year, then maybe get in about and start commenting on the Scottish Roundup-or start nominating your own posts for inclusion every week on the forum and you’ll start to get noticed. Duncan Stephen (the blogger, Dr Vee) runs the site with a few regular volunteers and has done a huge amount to give a platform to Scottish bloggers. He’s always looking for new blogs to highlight.

And remember chums, let’s not let 140 character quips kill blogging. Paragraphs rule!

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