Today is my Dad’s birthday. Happy birthday old man!

He just turned 61. Which brings up the time honoured subject of age maths. Because I am 30. The more mathematically gifted will have it all worked out, but if, like me, numbers are to you what salt is to a slug, I’ll explain.

When I was 10, my dad was 40. So I was exactly a quarter of his age. For the last 6 months, I was 30 while he was 60. So I was exactly half his age. And, of course, if I make it to 60, and the old boy is still on the go- he’ll be 90… and I’ll be two thirds of his age.

This obviously means nothing because age maths, apart from not being an orthodox branch of mathematics (ask Stephen Hawking if you don’t believe me) is also thoroughly pointless in every other way. But still.

Hello new years day. I am very hungover and it's okay because so is the rest of the world. I was round at Lorna and Neil's place lat night and then went over to the party at Nick's. I ended up drinking etc. right through the night.

Bang goes another year.

Time for another round up of Burning Salad errata. Here are a few things that I didn't post about at the time...

1. The moustache. Experimental facial hair that it was, I kind of liked it. So did some other people who said, Oh I like the moustache. And then when it was gone, Aw, you look good without the moustache, I never really liked it. My girlfriend was not one of these people. She hated it all along. All in all it had something like a three month run on my ugly mug. Ex-moustache, I salute thee.

2. Walking dogs. I have been walking a couple of dogs for a wee while now. My contempt for the canine is absolute. Dogs, I hate you.

3. Man buys machete. It's true. I saw a man buying a machete. He did it really casually like he was buying a houseplant or something.

4. Pop Star Porn. In order to protect the innocent (and guilty) I'll have to be a tad circuitous about this one... I found a magazine that belonged to a friend that had pictures of naked ladies in it. So I cut up some pictures of some people in a popular band and pasted them in said magazine in a semi-ambient fashion. Then I replaced the magazine and forgot all about it. The resulting psychological shock came a few months later.

5. Punching Pigeons. On Glasgow's Buchanan Street you have to go down a slight slope at the top. In certain weather conditions at a certain time of day, you can find yourself walking straight into the sun as it reflects off of a lot of wet Starbucksy surfaces. There are often a lot of pigeons there too. Often they take off and fly up the street at head height- or at least my head height. On more than one occasion I've had to duck very quickly at the last minute to avoid what would have almost certainly been a pigeon in the face. Anyway, all of the above happened to me one day apart from the ducking part. I was in a bad mood and without thinking about it I ducked to the side and went for the airborne pest. And I caught it with a short jab at close range. The bird flapped a bit and flew away and a few people stared as if I had just spat on an old lady. I didn't care though because it was a good shot and I had just fulfilled a long standing ambition.


Anyway, here are the full versions of the above nonsense. Remember there's some porn here, just in case you're at work (and you don't work in the porn industry). read more...

Well, I’m home now. Christmas down south with Trish’s family was definitely more relaxing than I first imagined. Apart from the flies. We did the things the Dutch way- or maybe it’s just Trish’s family’s way, but it involved doing the whole presents thing on Christmas Eve. Present wise, the highlight for me was definitely from The ‘Grid. She gave me a big, squashy parcel that turned out to be the bath towel I left at her apartment when I was in New York at the beginning of the year! I’ve washed it you know, she said. Very amusing I thought; top marks to The ‘Grid. (I should mention that she also got me the Fight Club DVD… which I didn’t leave at her apartment).

Trish made all of her presents this year- and had far more success than I ever remember anyone else who trod the lonely homemade path having. She made me a bag for my laptop from some kind of bomb-proof fabric. And I like it. It’s a far cry from maccaroni necklaces that’s for sure.

But it’s good to be home… to another mini-Christmas on Boxing Day. Mum and dad got me socks, aftershave, fifty quid that I’m not allowed to spend on booze and The Dada Almanac. Result!

I’m staying in a very Christmasy gingerbread house. It is very old and thus, mostly falling to bits. And apart from that it is, in fact, so old that it was constructed in the days when people were apparently a maximum of five feet tall. And even if they weren’t, for some reason (money saving scam, religious hysteria) they made all of their doorways that size. I myself am a gangly six feet, four and a half inches tall… and so everything sharp, wooden and metal- the style of choice four hundred years ago- conveniently hovers at throat height.

Another thing that hovers a lot is the flies in our bedroom. Unseasonally mild weather- no doubt the result of western civilisation being more worried about aerosols and fridges than nature etc.- has somehow or other made it possible for a… what’s the collective noun for a lot of flies?… horde(?) of flies to hatch somewhere in the… wooden bits. Their next course of action seems to have been to come buzzing through a hole in the ceiling above our bed and form a small cloud. Seriously, there were about two hundred of the bastards… fat little bluebottles, all over excited about hatching just before Christmas in a dramatic break with bluebottle tradition.

Flies tend to get everywhere at the best of times, but let’s face it, en masse they’re pretty easily avoided. What with their tendency to mostly hang around shit, and the dead. I don’t know the best way to describe a small cloud of flies. Imagine one fly multiplied a couple of hundred time… the mid-frequency hum created by their semi-synchronised buzzings; the apparently pointless flight paths; the thought of where they’ve been and what they’ve been doing.

Trish’s uncle Onno is here for Chrimbo too, and he’s a biologist. His theory is that there’s a dead bat somewhere on the premises that could be held to account for the sudden pest invasion. But let’s face it, it’s a bat. The sort of creature that you might expect to be in cahoots with flies and maggots in the first place.

Tonight was the second wave of attack and I dealt with it exactly the same way I dealt with the first one last night. I got up on the bed with the vacuum cleaner, took aim and sucked the bastards up. Which isn’t as easy as it sounds. For a start, the architectural reasoning of yore seems to be that all doorways and ceilings should be as low as humanly possible (if not lower) apart from underneath the roof where there should be more than enough room for bats and the like to roost, die and fester whilst remaining conveniently out of reach. And so I had to bounce on the bed in order to suck every last one of the antisocial insects to its Hoover-based death. I wonder what they did in the olde days. Probably ate them.

We stayed at one of Trish’s friends in Chelsea last night and made it down to the Rough Trade Chrimbo party just in time to miss the 1990s. Oh well. We’ll probably be seeing a lot more of them soon enough, no point in overdoing it.

Then this morning we had enough time to scoot around London for a while. I insisted on going to Riflemaker gallery to see an exhibition of Bill Burroughs‘ visual work. But it was closed. Even though the Time Out listing said it was due to close tomorrow. The Riflemaker man said that that happens all the time- they’re always getting the dates wrong, sorry we’re closed. We were starting to get chatting but he was having none of it and I just wasn’t in the right mood to try and talk him round… look mister, I could give you the first couple of pages of Nova Express off the top of my head right here, right now, in the street- with all the words in the right order. When I told him I was only in London for a few hours, he said, Are you going to be around in a month or so? I said, No. (Is William Burroughs?) And so I had to just peek through the window at an adding machine, some shotgun paintings and what looked like an amazing picture of Kurt Cobain. If only I could have got my hands on a rifle I might have bargained my way in. Maybe next time.