Sunday 30 May 2010

Now i know what maddness is

Had a dream last night that I was inside the head of a person who had gone mad. I can't quite remember it but it seemed just like real life only half asleep. I floated and everything was a grey coloured haze. The bit I recognized was the feeling like a vice gripping on my head, where you clench your teeth so hard out of exasperation from inside. Turns out I had a tension headache when I woke up so dreaming about madness isn't really fun.
When I woke up it was 4.30am and bright. I looked outside and the sky was vaguely blue but mostly silver; I kenw it would be a warm bright day.

I think this may be the end... the pen calls.

the multiple faces of you

quickly.

You think you know people. you become acquainted, friends, good friends, you do things together, then suddenly they change. it is said that people change a lot and people grow apart but i'm talking about big change. suddenly everything is on its head and things that were the norm become something awful, something embarrassing. i become something embarrassing. everyone else is SO COOL. everyone else is SUCH A BITCH. and the person you knew is suddenly a ruthless lottery controller of people with little regard for substance and high regard for, what one of my consistent (and lovely) friends said, shiny things. the context was different but it still applies. things and activities and people become big medals to hang. it appears i have none.

please don't come crying to me. and don't use me as middle ground.

also its not fair-weather friend, its FINE weather friend. read aesop.

Tuesday 4 May 2010

Go on... my son


So I went to the football on Saturday. A perfectly normal statement, no? No is right, if you know me at all you will agree. To be honest I'm not sure how we even decided to go (i.e. how stuart convinced me) but it was quite simple I am sure. As Stuart told me, with the league being over and it being against "...motherwell....*sigh*" I should have been quite safe. So we checked on the website only to find this game which was destined to be very dull as £25 per ticket. £25? More often than not thats more than I would pay to go to a gig, and if I was paying that for a gig it better be a sort of "if I dont see them now I may never again" kind of gig (like the Bob Dylan gig, or any band really as bands tend to think just cause they are from America means travelling to their single show in London is feasible for people in Scotland. By the way you are wrong). Yes so the DREAM was SQUASHED.

However, Stuart realising his brother-in-law-to-be, and his brother-of-his-brother-in-law-to-be, had season tickets decided to enquire about if they were going and told me as ted is a big "gloryhunter" he wasn't going and we could go for free as long as I was willing to pretend to 1) be a man 2) be a life long loyal celtic fan 3) go in ON MY OWN in a seperate entrance from stu and pretend to know what the hell I was doing... "why not?"

So you may think I am about to go into detail of the game now. Sorry, to be honest, there was very little in the game I will talk about so if you are after that then you can buggar off. Being a girl, I had to now consider my big day attire. Being someone who doesn't like to stand in a big open air stadium for hours getting hypothermia, I decided on a big old jumper. Jumper dress to be precise. Luckily I own 3 colours of the said garment. Firstly I though I will wear my red one, to be neutral and a lover of "the wonderful game" as opposed to either side of the gulf of glasgow. However, I (note: not stuart) then realised that it was a dark red jumper i.e. one of Motherwells colours, so that was vetoed. The next colour I could wear would be the dark blue one but as stuart pointed out this, and my potato earrings (as some more astute readers will be aware) were not advisable. So I was left with the green one. Ok so I don't support celtic but it did go a bit of the way (i.e one centimeter of the way) to redressing the gap between the person I am and the person the seasonticket holder should be. Aulthough, as Stuart kindly pointed out, my jumper dress was forrest green and celtic was "emerald green" - what other kind of green could it have been? However, I felt as though I had made the right choice. With that, my boots with extra socks, mutli-coloured (multi-cultural) bodywarmer and scarf (non-partisan) and gloves (also non-partisan) I was complete. But I decided to go over board and fashion a badge for the occassion, you know... to fit in. I feel it worked well.

Anyway, now that all the hard work was done we actually went. We drove through the bit of Glasgow that has a lot of "character" to find a place to park only to realise that there were very much nearer and safer looking places right next to the stadium we could have parked. I blame stuart. So we were walking up to the entrance next to some crazy tourists who had bankrupted themselves to wear every bit of celtic merchandise they could get their hands on, some lovely "two-fer-a-poooound" types selling green scarves and flags with nazi slogans on (i.e. hail hail - no wonder football causes so much bother) but surprisingly no-one with a tray selling macaroons and wrigglys spearmint (my dad lives in the past it appears, and I was dissapointed). Anyway we got through this obstacle course and then stuart told me i'd be fine and he would wait in the queue with me to psyche me up to go through the wee barriers inside. However there was no queue and he was like "ok here you go byeeee!!" and i was like "fishsticks". So stuart went and I wandedered up to the security man who had to check my bag to make sure I had a lead for my pet cat not a bag full of shards of broken glass in someones eye. The plan was to just go up and scan the season ticket pretending to know what I was doing but I decided I can get away with looking like a doofus because I am one. "Can I look in your bag?" he said -me: "where do I go?". "Through there" (pointed to green gated swivel type entrance) I looked a bit confused. "Do you know what your doing". "No". "lets see your ticket" I handed him "Mr E McTedslastname"'s season ticket and smiled like a doofus. "Just hold the silver bit up to the orange (orange? ehhh I was more the right colour than that) machine and it will scan it and go through" "THANKS!" *grin like manic* So I did what he said and it all worked out well. So I got in and OH MY GOD is it green or what. The walls were green, the pillars were green, the gates were green, the bannisters were green, the toilets were green and a whole bunch of other stuff was green including the people. Including me. So I did what stuart said and went to the pitch (which was green) and met him (he was green) and all was well.

After that we decided to get our key experiences dealt with before the "big gem". So we went and bought a pie. I was told by my dad and brother that I had to have pie and bovril but I had pie and tea which I thought was a good compromise. Stuart had pie and coke. The pies were good, but stuarts coke was warm and my tea was cold and the presumptious people doing the catering at "paradise" put milk in my tea without asking!!! (i dont like milk in my tea by the way) Having eaten our pies and sipped then rejected our beverages we had a wee look-see at ye olde celtic shoppe (the writing made it look like it should have said that). I liked the yellow and black gloves but knew they were too partisan to wear outside of that stadium. The only other thing worth noting really were the (cel)tic-tacs. They weren't green though, and they totally could have been= fail. We bought our paradise bet thing where someone wins £9000 (we didnt) and our ladbrokes betting ticket things where i said celtic 2-1 and stu did something more complicated to try and win (we didnt). So It wasn't long until it was show-time and stuart and I took our seats.

I'm not going to go into the details of the game because I dont know and you dont care but I have a few observations (mostly not too much to do with football, but because I have barely talked about football yet I will start with something about what happened on the pitch. Basically I was concerned with shunning those players who fell down alot and the most obvious one was gorgeous george. He (who is actually called samaras or something similar) was one of these lanky floppy type guys who had long lanky floppy type hair and tended to lank and flop all over the ground all time. To be honest most of the time he was lying on the ground kicking at the ball like a maniac. Because I don't know or care about their names I made up some nicknames so I could remember them all better. The pre-existing nickname I had was for darren oday or something which was farmer joe's boy becuase I think he looks like a farmers son. He scored. There was junior who was one of the motherwell players who looked like a 12 year old and skeletor, one of the motherwell players who looked anorexic. Finally there was aiden "fucks sake" mcgeady. This one was because of the way this particular player was treated by the adoring fans. Basically it was like this, fucks sake gets the ball and all the fans (ie crazy men) around us would be like "ohhhh" and "yessssss" and "cmon" and "mcgeady" so he would have it for a bit then he would lose it or someone would tackle him etc and then all of a sudden it was "FUCKS SAKE MCGEADY!" "WHAT ARE YOU DOING?" "FOR GODS SAKE!" and "YOU FUCKIN ERSE!". None of the other players were taunted like this. I thought it was all a bit mean.

Another thing that interested me (you know, other than the tantalising football that was going on..) was the dumb things the people around me said. You know when someone coughs in a quiet place, and then someone else does and then lots do like a chain reaction of coughs, well this happened, only it wasn't coughs it was people saying "come on celtic". "C'monnn celtic!"..."Aye, go SCHETIC"... "COME ON SELLICK".. "SHELLIK!!!!!!". Seriously. I can't even describe how odd this is considering it was a big load of CELTIC fans in CELTIC park wearing CELTIC gear watching CELTIC. There were also some delightful drunk idiots behind us having very meaningful conversations about whether or not to support a person as celtic manager because he was not catholic (which is a whole can of shit I dont want to open) and about what was better at the football: the view or the atmosphere. Consensus: it is better to pay £500 per annum to be near some exited sweaty drunken men even if you cant see the football you have gone to watch. HMM. As well as the well thought out way of cheering on the team, there was "hoopy the huddle hound" (guy in a dog costume, with a celtic shirt on) Apparently someone stuart knows was hoopy for a while. I thought it was a big crap having a dog. Based on their stripey (i mean "hooped") shirts I suggested to stuart it should be a bee. For some reason he didnt get how a bee was more applicable than a dog. Even after i noted that the other shirt was black and yellow. Oh well. I guess shellik dont need my imagination. The final thing I will note about my big celtic experience was the delightful use of subliminal advertising. Basically when a celtic guy scored (im not sure if it would have been the same for the opposition as motherwell failed to score, thus losing me £2, thanks skeletor and junior) they would play that shit fratellis chanty song, all would stand up (apart from me and the guy with the bust hip) and the screen would display a sign saying "goal!". The sign saying "goal!" would flash for one second and then the next second a flash of "carling!" would appear, then back to "goal!", then "carling!" ... "goal!""carling!""goal!""carling!""goal!""carling!""goal!""CARLING!". It was like HOORAY FOR A GOAL, now lets all get pissed... ON CARLING!

So basically that was my exciting experience at the big game. In conclusion, the things about it that I thought would be shit weren't too bad, and at the same time I imagine if I had to do that every week I would have to drink a lot of celebratory carling to get myself through it.