Behind the times

I have just made my first purchase on ebay! Well, I think I have. It may turn out, in due course, that I failed to enter the right bank account details or forgot to verify something or other that I was supposed to verify and thus will be charged a small fortune in return for no goods at all, or that I've actually bought an antique persian rug for £3000 instead of a pasta bowl for a tenner. Only time will tell.

Dear green place

I said in my previous post that trips to Scotland do not usually ignite my heart with joy, but to be fair that’s probably because my trips to Scotland generally involve staying with my mother in a place that makes people inhale sharply when I tell them I’m from there.

The wedding I’ve just attended took place at Glasgow University, somewhere I've not been since I graduated. The sun shone for the whole weekend, which I suspect it had not done in the intervening seventeen years, so I walked for miles, revisiting my old haunts and reacquainting myself with the beautiful West End. I’d forgotten how majestic it is with its grand, sweeping terraces, huge mansion flats, and gothic towers and quadrangles.

I visited the Hunterian Museum, which I’m ashamed to say I’d never done before despite having lived just round the corner from it. Had I known when I was 20 that it contained a mastodon’s tooth and a weasel’s penis bone, I'd have been a regular. I left satisfied and, as I strolled through Kelvingrove Park, bumped into the happy couple from the wedding the night before.

A lovely day was had and by the time the evening, and my trip to the place that makes people inhale sharply, came around, I was feeling quite sentimental.

Chiffon

One of my least favourite things is attending weddings. The very word stirs painful memories of forced gaiety, women in pastel-coloured chiffon, and lecherous uncles reeking of whisky. Someone always falls over on the dance floor, the band is always appalling, and aunties always demand to know when I’m getting hitched myself. Weddings are dreadful, dispiriting events.

Another of my least favourite things is Scotland, for reasons too numerous to get into here, so it was with a sense of grim foreboding that I boarded the train for Glasgow with a wedding invitation and a pastel chiffon dress in my luggage.

That's a lie; I didn’t really have a dress in my luggage. I wore jeans, but I did splash out on some mascara, for this was the wedding of two old friends from my university days. No one wore chiffon, no fights broke out, and no one sang Ten Guitars. Someone did ask me when I was getting married, but other than that it was grand night.

Wedding

I'm off to a wedding in Glasgow. Will report on drunken fights, etc. upon my return. Be good.

Silence of the pussies

When I moved here to Hovisville, I wanted to get my own house. Alas, my income of bugger all made this a bit tricky, so I set about finding a suitable houseshare. What I wanted was to share with one other person, preferably older than me, and a dog. What I got was to share with a 38-year old woman, her stroppy teenage daughter, and a cat. Stroppy Teenager does the following:

• Leaves her knickers steeping in the bathroom sink

• Slams the living room door every time she enters or leaves

• Goes on holiday (good) leaving me to wash her dirty dishes (bad)

• Soaks the entire bathroom every time she has a shower

• Takes at least 2 hours to soak the entire bathroom

• Throws a hissy fit because there’s no toilet paper, then finds toilet paper and does not apologise

• Believes that I am going to look after the cat (bad) when she moves to London (good)

As soon as she moves out, I shall cook the cat with some fava beans and a nice chianti.

The Scandinavian side

Last week, I went to Morecambe. This week, I went to the other coast. Scarborough is not only the final resting place of Anne Bronte. It is also the final resting place of my uncle, who died last week. It’s a beautiful town that clings to steep, steadily eroding cliffs below a dramatic ruined castle, and this week, an even more brooding, gothic atmosphere was bestowed by the thick fog that rolled in every evening, shrouding the grand Victorian buildings that line the cliffs in swirling fingers of mist.

At the funeral, the Yorkshire half of the family talked about the “sea fret”, while the Scottish half nodded sorrowfully, conceding, “Aye, it’s a right cold haar”. I don’t know the origins of fret, but haar comes from Old Norse. The Scandinavian theme continued – one cousin had been researching her family tree and had uncovered a Danish great grandmother, another had a Norwegian grandfather, and Uncle John had spent the night before at a local pub where he stumbled upon a troupe of Norwegian teenagers doing karaoke.