Dead squirrel bodies

After a fantastic weekend of blistering heat the sun is holding out over Scotland. Last years summer lasted the whole of two weeks at the most. Could this be our short summer? Fast and fleeting like the life of the little squirrel I passed over on my way to work today. Slightly adjusting the path of the car, making sure either of it's tyres did not disturb the small furry motionless body I wondered where the squirrel had been heading at his time of death. Yes, I know, I should have stopped and tried to somehow move the body to the pavement or at least the side of the road but like so many others that had presumably done so before me, I drove on. I had more important things to do, like get to work on time.
Some of these animals have a death wish anyway. We were heading home in a taxi at the weekend after a BBQ in Chapelton, speeding along, when all of a sudden the driver swerved us into the middle of the road. As the approaching headlights lit up our faces through the windscreen and our lives flashed before our eyes the driver muttered something about narrowly avoiding a passing hedgehog.
Foxes are experts are getting run over too, especially on the expressway. Most of them ending up as flattened piles of mush on the tarmac. Dogs are different though. You run over a dog and they're more than likely to get up and dart away, perhaps with half a leg missing. Not unlike Bullet from 'The Scheme'.
I had been in quite a good mood last night until Ka and myself sat and watched this horrendous programme. A documentary series following a small number of families in a Kilmarnock housing scheme. Possibly the worst advert for life in Scotland ever. Hopefully it was not being transmitted outside Scotland as anyone watching it with little knowledge of our beloved country, it's districts and its people would most probably be horrified in a way that Rab C. Nesbitt could have only hinted at. Zombie like girls hooking each other in the street, stoned, indecipherable young guys slobbering their thoughts in between getting their neighbours daughters pregnant, police visits, court visits, families going on holiday and leaving children to fend for themselves, couples knocking each other about and pet dogs (the aforementioned Bullet) getting run over and left to suffer in the streets (gawd, that squirrel is going to haunt me now!). For the past week now, since the first episode of the series went out I've been listening to folk in the work laughing about it, and the people it follows, so I started watching it under the impression I would get some sort of laugh out of it. Unfortunately I was utterly depressed by the end of it and felt like immediately emigrating. No wonder so many Scots end up leaving. To get away from the people arguing around blind relatives smashing bottles over each others heads? As the credits rolled on this programme a BBC voiceover informed us that future episodes of the series had now been cancelled due to ongoing police investigations... In other words they've all been arrested.
Saying that, my Dad calls our area a 'scheme'. He might be right. There's a neighbour who sings Take That over and over upstairs on drunken nights in with mates, a neighbour living downstairs who likes to walk around the street naked, a bunch of wheelie bin thieves who burn the plastic for the fumes, a couple of six year olds who constantly cycle up and down our lawn while their Mum sits and drinks wine at her front door, a woman who parks her car by hitting it off others and a recently discovered transvestite living further down the street. There's also a bloke who noses at all of this and drives by dead squirrel bodies. Maybe I should put a call in to BBC Scotland?

Take That hell

Okay, she's Swedish!! I had written in yesterday's blog entry that Tiger Wood's wife was Swiss when in fact she's Swedish. Fortunately Kenny was reading and was not slow in pointing this out to me on facebook so I quickly corrected my writing error, just in case Mrs Woods is reading. You never know she may come after me with a golf club, the mood she's in at the moment.
That's the one and only time Kenny has let on that he pays the slightest bit of attention to this blog. I'll have to make more mistakes in future! He did make a mysterious wheelie bin comment a few months back but I dismissed this as a slagging for writing about plastic disposal units. It wasn't until later that I thought, could Kenny have had something to do with it? He did seem to clam up immediately after mentioning it... almost as if he'd said too much. The wheelie bin troubles have long since passed, however, and the block has thankfully been able to dispose of it's rubbish with little difficulty.
Someone who has been making noticeable contributions to the wheelie bin usage is the new bloke that has moved into the block. We now have a overflowing bottle bin and two recycling bins full of empty lager cans. He is the new lodger in the flat directly above us and has most definately made his presence felt in the past few weeks but not in a good way. Last Sunday, for instance, Take That's 'Greatest Day' reverberated round the block from the interior of his flat, played at full volume at least twenty times throughout the day. He had folk round on the Saturday night, which is all fine, but, for some reason, they all decided to leave their party till the Sunday, during the day, hosting what seemed like a drunken Sing A Long A Take That day coupled with the Black eyed Peas' 'Tonight's Gonna Be a Good Night', playing over and over again. I used to quite like the tune but after Sunday, I'm not so sure. Of course, it did not help that Ka and myself were suffering a slight headache, after effects from Roslyn's birthday party the night before. If it had just been the music it may not have been so bad but the fact that the lodger and all his, audibly male, mates sang every lyric continuously and repeatedly throughout the day pretty much made it hell on earth. I could not help but feel bemused and confounded as to why a bunch of blokes would spend a whole Sunday belting out Take That at full volume over and over and over again.
On Monday the girls in Ka's work suggested that it could have been the new Sing Star game for the Playstation. This still, to my mind, does not explain why they would sing Take That all day. Whatever happened to blowing prostitutes' heads off in Grand Theft Auto?! At least that would have been quieter and far less offensive!

Health & safety implications

Morgan, our 5 year old niece, phoned up last night inviting us to a fireworks party in the garden of their new abode. When we asked if there was anything that we could bring she stopped and thought a little and then shouted 'Champagne!'. What a splendid life she must lead. Not only does she get fireworks on Bonfires night but she also gets champagne. Not sure that champagne is part of the traditions of Guy Fawkes night or of the health and safety implications this would raise what with catherine wheels spinning about gardens and rockets being lit. Ka had to give her a polite no (and in the background I said a polite p**s off) and it was revealed to be none other than Steven, Morgan's Dad, who had made the suggestion. He's always good at chancing his arm is Steven. My right shoulder has only now just about recovered after the strains of that flitting of his. If anyone deserves champagne it should be me for surviving that onslaught and chancing my own arm under the weight of his washing machine.
Rockets have been going off in, and around, our street for days now anyway. Every time, for the briefest of seconds, I have thought it was my neighbourhood finally descending into gun toting chaos before realising it is just the neds playing with fireworks. Unfortunately there are never many bonfires about these days, (unless you count the ones that are obviously invite only and involve wheelie bins). I used to love a good bonfire. Going round the neighbours, collecting all their old furniture and other extraneous junk and tossing it on to the pitch outside Duncanrig High school. Those disorganised bonfires were always the best once they got started. This particular fire on the pitches, which are now Duncanrig's 5-a-side football turfs, used to get quite massive. They got particularly exciting when there would be sudden explosions and bursts of gaseous flames from the depths of the bonfire after the occasional paint pot, spray can or vodka bottle had been included in the wood and junk collecting from throughout the day. You would be diving for cover when the glass shards started spinning through the flames, with only a sparkler and a balaclava as protection. The wee girl in the woolly hat with the burnt hand in the eighties ads never warned us about that! Nowadays it's all very safe and cordoned off, if your lucky enough to even attend a bonfire, never mind construct one, without the council's health and safety officials having their say. It's probably for the best. There'd be less exploding glass injuries and wheelie bin abductions that way. Maybe we'd be better off staying at home and cracking open a bottle of bubbly for poor old Guy Fawkes. Bet he didn't foresee all the trouble he'd be causing by going and getting caught!