The Xmas Market is back, Edinburgh’s ‘winter wonderland’. Stalls selling tacky clobber, ‘German’ food and drink at Weimar Republic-level prices, and jingle bells noises.
Personally, I think it’s shite, but it lures in the tourists and scares away the junkies because they get too confused by bright lights and the smell of warm food.
Slap-bang in the middle of the Saughton ghetto is this anomaly. All around crime is rampant and social housing derelict, but I believe millions have been spunked on the park’s upgrades; the epicentre must be a beacon of light. It’s always chock-full of chavs, though, creatures who resemble those chortling Toon Patrol weasels in Who Framed Roger Rabbit (1988). But the park looks lovely, doesn’t it?
Further reading:
http://www.edinburgh.gov.uk/info/20162/saughton_park_project/924/saughton_park_restoration_project
Stonehenge – Americana-style. This peculiar piece in Alliance, Nebraska is an aesthetic lifted from Return to Oz (1985). I fear the Wheelers when I look at this, not the Druids.
38 spray-painted vintage cars put together in 1987 by local Jim Reinders as a memorial to his father. I like the idea of that, a gnarly construct to the departed, not some grim, dull statue for an inebriated plonker to stick a traffic cone on.
Further reading/viewing:
Dundee was briefly passed en route to Montrose; I didn’t like the look of ‘Yes City’ and I am most confused as to why the it has two football teams, their stadiums yards apart. Montrose was alright, though, and it has a Last of the Summer Wine feel to it (aside from the Lidl, Aldi, and Farmfoods). I went for morning runs in fields of wheat à la Theresa May, but mostly sat in a cottage all day drinking spirits and watching movies whilst my travel companions did stuff. How a getaway should be.
We also played cards using candles instead of chips. And it was so cold a fridge wasn’t required for the beers. And that’s Montrose.
Gorgie, Edinburgh is by all accounts a total toilet, a veritable shithole, a bloated haven of the tracksuit, the smackhead, and the football yob.
Sometimes it’s quiet and the sky looks nice.
I don’t really know what was happening here. Normally on a stroll by the castle I glance up at the beastly fortress and briefly envision the Wars of Scottish Independence as I whistle a chunk of James Horner. This Sunday, however, I saw some randoms chucking around a large fluffy dice. Weird.
Rose Street is somewhat like the famous York Shambles but with more pubs and less Romans. Princes Street is an adjacent hellhole – chav clobber galore and rickety buses – but Rose Street almost takes the stench away. A lovely street.
Ryanair are fucking dreadful. A flight with them is always an ordeal. The gate is called and you rock up to find a big fuck-off queue with no plane in sight; the staff are pumped-up scavengers, stalking the heaving gate for any carry-on item with dimensions bigger than a tub of Bold 2-in-1 Washing Capsules; their luggage policy metamorphoses weekly from nuts to bonkers to insane then back to nuts; the interior of the plane makes one sick in its tackiness; you can’t get a wink of sleep for lottery or scratch card announcements and trolley-dollies peddling hyperinflated savoury snacks. What else? Oh yeah, there’s quite the high probability that your flight will be cancelled. This is when the ground staff disappear into a bush which features in a Homer Simpson meme.
Ryanair staff in a crisis.
Worst airline ever. Yet we still fly with them in droves because we’re either poor or miserly.
I’ll never understand why the alleged ‘hard-as-nails’ denizens of Edinburgh shit their nappies when the rain arrives; you’d think it’s a hurricane descending upon The Burgh, Bill Paxton en route with his gear.
Here is a standard ‘thunderstorm’ … and a pale local (based on physiognomy most likely a junkie) with an umbrella eyeballing me as he sucks on a lollipop. Wanker.
Four years ago today consisted of crawling from Warsaw to Gdansk on some shitty crapper of a bus, absolutely melted into oblivion. Both cities were hellholes, but the booze was cheap as fuck. And that’s all that matters.
Wanderings and ... wonderings. 
