Lived

Highlights

• Moved into my new flat.
• Saw Russell Howard on his current tour
• Was at a comedy gig (see above) where a fight broke out!
• Got some major tattoo envy at the Scottish Tattoo Convention (but no tattoo)

Stepcount: 314,071.

Read

Highlight – A Man Called Ove by Fredrik Bachman
No idea why I picked this up but so glad I did. It took me a few chapters to get into it but it’s well worth it. A bittersweet tale that will make you laugh and smile, as the story of Ove unfolds. Ohhh and it’ll make you cry as well, but it’s a wonderful book, that I highly recommend.

Also
Go Set a Watchman by Harper Lee – started this for the next Book Club, so far it’s … well I’m holding off making a judgement (let’s just say it’s no To Kill a Mockingbird…).

Watched

Highlight – Hidden Figures
No wonder it won Oscars. Fantastic movie, tackling the discrimination of NASA scientists through the eyes of three black women who made the Apollo program possible. Didn’t sugar coat anything, but didn’t preach, felt very realistic, and very emotional, from anger to joy and everything in between.

Also good

• Logan – For all the flaws, I love the X-Men ‘world’ and this was a different take on that, a very mature look at a couple of the key characters. Very violent in places, and very ‘X-men’ at times, it was also darker in tone, sobering take on the last throes of Logan.
• Kong Island – Stupidly massive monster movie. It was awesome. Silly when it needed to be, and only ever got serious as a ‘pause’ to the amazing CGI effects.
• Gilmore Girls (Netflix) – Finally watching this and after a so-so first season I’m really enjoying the sarcastic banter.

The older I get the fewer fucks I give.

I know I will be whatever old man I end up being, but part of me hopes I’ll be an eccentric. Another part of me thinks I’ll just be a bit grumpy, and yet another part of me hopes I’ll expand my tendency towards silliness. This may mean that the little moments of madness that pepper my day, which currently stay in my head or the confines of my home, will be let loose on the poor unsuspecting people of Glasgow.

I do like being silly.

Two lions are walking down Oxford Street, one turns to the other and says “Quiet, isn’t it”.

The tendency to break into song about random kitchen utensils – OHHHH WOAAHH WOAAHHHH SWEET SPATULA OF MINE! – or frequent attempts to dance my way round the living room as I tidy up which invariably end up with me poised, one foot on the edge of the sofa, almost ready to step it over a la Singing in the Rain, these are things which I should keep to myself.

Admittedly these examples are very home specific, but as I walk around the streets on my way to yet another sparkling social event (aka meeting people in the pub for drinks) I usually have headphones on and some form of musical accompaniment and, let’s be honest, who hasn’t stumbled across the perfect soundtrack moment from the movie of your life.

I’ve been an undercover spy walking along Sauciehall Street, a wistful romantic lead strolling the banks of the Clyde, the side-kick in an old time musical sashaying my way along Mitchell Lane (and fighting the urge to throw in a few spins as I go).

Ohhh that I could tap dance.

Perhaps a top hat and cane will be part of my ensemble when I’m an elderly eccentric curmudgeon (ohhh I love that word, curmudgeon, life goal right there!).

I phoned the local gym and I asked if they could teach me how to do the splits. He said, “How flexible are you?” I said, “I can’t make Tuesdays.”

Of course, I’ve no idea what kind of old man I’ll be but I don’t think it’ll be that different from the man I am today, hopefully a little wiser and thinner, but I’ve been prone to bouts of silly for many years now and there is no sign of them abating. Instead I will embrace the second half of my life and, as Doris once sang, what will be will be.

It’s a funny thing, being silly for the sake of it. It’s not an attention thing, it’s an outlet, a way to find a balance, or at least it is for me. Life can be so serious!

I visited the offices of the RSPCA today. It’s tiny, you couldn’t swing a cat in there.

I’ll admit silly used to be something I used as way to cope, a way to fit in, and whilst I’ve been lucky enough to find my tribe – a wonderful cross-section of people who, if nothing else, tolerate my frequent sojourns into the land of nonsense – not everyone I interact with gets it. Which is fine, not everyone needs to, right?

Life is too short, there are too few moments to hold on to, but I’m increasingly finding that letting go of things I once thought important are letting me hold on to more of things I value. I’ve not come to this realisation alone, and by lucifers beard it’s been a long time coming (fnar), but it feels good not to always be worrying. That’s the real lesson I’ve learned, for every ying there is a yang, for every worry there is a silly.

Someone walked up to my desk the other day and asked “Can I have a quick word?”, “Sure” I said, “Velocity”.

So, why all the amazingly funny jokes peppering this post, you ask? Well, why the hell not, says I! Then I honk my clown nose, and pedal off down the street on my unicycle (and try and avoid those pesky lions).

Note: This isn’t the first time I’ve written about “Silly”, ohhh how times have(n’t massively if I’m being honest) changed:

Silly

OK, confession time. I have a go to, super quick meal that I eat about once a month. It’s not the healthiest, but it’s not bad for you*, and it can be ready in a few mins (depending on how long your kettle takes to boil).

Gosh, I feel quite nervous about this, this is one of my darkest held secrets, and I’m about to share it with the world. Please try not to judge me, or at the very least, don’t be nasty about it.

Right, here it goes.

Tuna, Smash, and baked beans (with butter/salt to taste).

It’s perfect if I’ve had a long shitty day and I can’t even be bothered flinging something in the oven, but I know I want something warm and tasty and comforting (which rules out my other occasional dinner substitute, a bowl of cornflakes) then tuna, Smash, and beans is the way to go.

Yes, on the same plate. Yes, as a meal. Don’t mock it unless you’ve tried it, meanies!

And there has been the added bonus in recent years; it’s gotten even quicker to make thanks to Heinz snap pots, 1 minute in the microwave! Perfection.

Now, I can imagine that you are, probably, thinking I’m some kind of crackpot. Based on discussing this with some work colleagues, and the horrified, quizzical looks it brought to their collective faces, I know I’m kinda out on a limb with this one.

BUT, and I’m convinced of this, I know I’m not alone. Well, I might be alone with this particular ‘dish’, but I know damn well that you’ve got some weird concotion hidden away at the back of your mind, ready to be rolled out in times of need.

Do you have a quick go to meal? Is it a bit weird? I’m always looking for more options (how else would I have discovered the lunchtime joy that is a roll with ham, cheese, and banana!) so leave a comment, spill the beans (geddit!), and share your own fast food dish of choice.

* a portion of Smash (100), a tin of tuna (340), and a snap pot of beans (160) = 600 kcal

Do you believe everything you read? Are you happy to take the opinion of the clearly ill-informed over those who weigh their words and provide evidence both for and against what they are offering?

Don’t worry, this isn’t about Trump.

I’ll admit that I like to have a sense of whether something is good or bad before trying it and find myself reading reviews on purchases, bars, restaurants, books, movies and, well, pretty much anything I consume or use. It wasn’t something I really considered noteworthy until a friend of mine commented that she always asks me what I think of something because she knows I’ll have researched the shit out of it (she’s classy with words that way). It hasn’t always been this way.

When the first consumer sites started hosting reviews it was a bit of a novelty, you could rate something using stars and leave an opinion detailing why you thought it was good or bad. It all felt very much in the spirit of how the internet was (or at least seemed to be) back then, it was a good thing to share your opinion, to give a little back to the growing community of geeks and nerds. Back then, (we)blogs were on the rise and a certain Mark Zuckerberg was years away from entering college.

Of course in those early days Amazon mostly sold books and a few other items, it wasn’t the behemoth it is today, but as it grew, and more consumer sites started to appear, so did the power and influence of the reviews. The more stuff that became available to us, the more we seem to want our say on whether it was bad or good, ohhh and here are a few paragraphs of text on why I hold that opinion.

Today, with a mind boggling number of things available to consume and use available – seriously, search Amazon for ‘torch’ and you get 346,724 results, even if three quarters of the items aren’t actually torches that still leaves 86,681 types of torch! – you soon develop the ability to sort the wheat from the chaff when it comes to reviews, or rather the useful and helpful from the almightily pissed off and BY JUPITERS BEARD everyone is gonna hear about it.

These 1-star reviews are easily identified because they are usually set in ALL CAPS BECAUSE THAT IS HOW BAD THIS THING IS, but at times they are oddly similar in tone to the 5-star reviews which are full of praise and reverence for this most amazing of things that you should buy because IT WILL LITERALLY CHANGE YOUR LIFE IT’S THAT AMAZING!

With so many opinions and views available, I know I’m not alone in wanting a way to figure out what the best things are and over the past couple of years I’ve been continually delighted by the consistency of approach, information, and recommendations from The Wirecutter and The Sweethome, two review websites who take detailed looks at products, test them, review them, review the reviews of them (wheat from chaff!) and give you their reasoning as to why X is better than Y (and if you don’t like X then why you should consider buying Z). Essentially they apply more rigor, science, and patience than I do and as a result I’m almost trusting enough of their considered opinion to buy their recommendation without reading their full review (almost, I’m not a weirdo).

Despite being a regular consumer of reviews, for a long time I’d only ever sporadically written reviews on this blog. It’s just never really been a thing I felt comfortable sharing and the few times I have have been mostly gigs or movies and not massively insightful beyond OMG that was totally awesome because I’ve written them too soon after said gig/movie and I’m still caught up in the emotions of it.

However I have been writing reviews, quite a lot of them, just not here. A few months after I moved to Glasgow I realised I wasn’t really exploring it, wasn’t really trying new places to eat, drink, or visit. To combat that I started using Yelp. For the first few months I used it to search for places to go, but eventually I signed up and started writing reviews to ‘give back’ to some of the places I had visited that I enjoyed, particularly those who had old reviews or no reviews at all.

I’ve been on Yelp for over five years now. In that time I became a Yelp Elite and started attending local Yelp community events (which Yelp recently ditched, boooo) and over the last 90 days the 300 odd reviews I’ve posted have been read over 25,000 times. Far far above the numbers I see here. This still staggers me, that the words I write have been seen by so many people and, I hope, helped them make a decision, one way or another. But as nice as the numbers are, my desire to write reviews isn’t solely about that (I’m not that shallow, honest). No, I write them to give back, to put something back out into a service that I have found useful.

It’s very easy these days, with so many free services available, to take without giving back. Recently I’ve been wondering if, in some small way, this aspect of the internet, this expectation of ‘free’ isn’t hurting the world at large. The more people who drop into that mindset and let it permeate their everyday lives, the more society may start to drift and change into something a lot more selfish. Look out for yourself, screw everyone else.

It does feel like the prevailing attitude these days is “why should I bother, someone else will do it”. I can be as guilty of it as the next person, and it’s not much of a leap from that to a larger world view that is selfish and self-centred, a view that is shaped by the information I chose to take in because it is easily obtained and already part of my world view.

And bearing that in mind, is it that much more of a leap to see why Brexit was voted through? Is it really a surprise that Trump is President?*

OK, I’ll admit the leap I’m making here is a large one; from not bothering to write a review to the fact a country voted in an unintelligent brutish man-child as President. It just seems that, at the moment, the world is turning to all those 1 and 5 star reviews, the ones that can’t be trusted because they are singular of view and devoid of fact, and using them as the basis of how society should be.

Now, maybe it’s just me, but I think most of us want a world that lies somewhere in-between and we accept that sometimes it’ll be a 2-star place, and sometimes it’ll be a 4-star place, but we know that those 1-star and 5-star reviews need to be taken with a very large pinch of salt.

* OK, I fibbed. But I promise I didn’t set out to write about Trump…