Giggling in the dark................

photo - Alastair Sim, actor.

This afternoon I picked up the lovely G from work when she finished at 3pm.

We headed off across Edinburgh on a bright but blustery afternoon and parked the car at Kings Stables Road car park. We talked about whether we { or I} should take the big umbrella out of the back of the car as there were a few dark clouds about, but decided to leave it as if it should rain we would just dive into a coffee shop or a pub till it blew over. Anyway it was blowing a gale!

From there it was just a short walk up St Johns Terrace by the side of the castle to the top of the Royal Mile where we stopped at The Hub for a drink and to watch the tourists go hurtling past, battered by the wind, high percentages of them wrapped in those see through blue tinted plastic waterproof wrappers that seem to be made out of economy bin bags, as others, with varying degrees of success, struggled with umbrellas against the strong wind. There were a number of great photo opportunities but sadly I hadn't my camera as we were planning on going to the cinema a bit later.

Once the wind had died down a bit and we had finished our drinks we walked down the Royal Mile. It was absolutely crammed with tourists and we found it really hard to make any headway as people would just stop in the middle of the pavement to look into a shop window not noticing there was anyone else near and that there were streams of people trying to get past on one side or another. I was quite fascinated as usual with people watching and listening out for the various languages that come at you from every direction. American, French, German, Italian, Dutch, Swiss German { I can recognise some of the accents by now } and of course the ubiquitous Japanese, all vying to get into the shops and take advantage of the weak pound and buy all the tat that everyday Scots find most cringe worthy. You know the stuff, the tartan equivalents of the stuffed donkey and over sized sombreros that us Brits are so fond of bringing back from Spain: the Braveheart tee shirts and those beautiful little plastic Highland Piper dolls dressed in garish tartan and black and stuffed into a plastic tube sealed with a red lid.

Aye that's the one - made in China or India especially for us by five year olds being paid 50 pence a fortnight to work 14 hours a day so we can exercise our basic human right to buy complete rubbish!

G and I lost each other in the crowd for a bit - I wasn't paying attention of course - but found each other after a while.


So after that we headed to The Filmhouse to see 'The Happiest Days Of Your Life', part of the Edinburgh film festival season celebrating the work of Alastair Sim { photo at top } who was "born near here" according to a plaque on the wall of The Filmhouse itself.


The film was great - very funny in a typically british "jolly hockey sticks" kind of way but our enjoyment was increased by the presence of three lovely elderly ladies who sat in the row behind and had a fantastic time right from lights off when the adverts and trailers started. They "Ooh'd" and "Ah'd" as every product was revealed regardless of whether it was a well known brand of vodka or a designer car and giggled infectiously with each other and promised to buy each other one or other of the goods on offer and discuss who would best suit each one.

This continued through the trailers as they described their amazement with the actors, actresses or special effects and you could feel their excitement build as the main film started. G and I sat hand in hand and listened to their quiet banter and hoped we would be so full of life at their age. Like us they really enjoyed the film and its look back to simpler times and gentler humour. It was just hilarious and even more so as we saw it through their eyes perhaps just a little.


Thank you, Girls..........

The Unholy bin bag of Lothian

Blessed be the most unholy and mighty bin bag of Lothian Council for you are the sanctuary of things unclean.

You provide a resting place for that which is ripe or rank.

You rain strength and security down upon us and bear without rancour the weightiest of our problems.

You carry and lighten our loads and deliver us unto cleanliness and perspicacity.

You are thrice blessed.

You bless those who manufacture and purchase, and those who use and honour thy strength

You never fail to support us in our time of need or remove from sight that which doth offend us.

May your mighty double strength walls and tie handles never tear or pour forth offense for you are the great and the good unholy bin bag of Lothian Council.



A curse on makers of economy bin bags! I hope you have to use them yourselves forever.

The start of another week

'Towards Torness'


Hullo there ma wee blog.

Well all went well with the first of August celebrations on Saturday evening. The lovely G planned the evening out and her two brothers and wife and girlfriend { what is the simple pc way to say that?} came with Leen and K staying over and T+T heading back home to see to their kids, who at 18 and 16 must have had their plans for a parent free Saturday night spoiled in all probability. Its one of the few pleasures left for parents I imagine. We had the table decked out with Swiss tablecloth, napkins, placemats and even had some traditional paper lantern 'lampiones' with real candles swaying outside the patio doors - even if it was too windy to go the whole hog and light them. We even downloaded some Swiss music { definitely no yodelling or alphorns thanks very much}. All very twee but a good laugh as its not taken too seriously........



We had Raclette using the rarely displayed Raclette set brought all the way from- UM - Edinburgh now I come to think of it. We have only used it a handful of times so it was good to do it again. A Raclette set is basically a table top cooker with a communal hot plate/griddle on the top and individual cooking/grill slots underneath where you put whatever you fancy into a metal spatula type affair and grill it to your liking under the hot plate. Raclette is the name of the melty cheese you are supposed to use in the dishes but it can be hard to come by especially up in rural Scotland so I used Tallegio instead which turned out to be a very suitable alternative.

So we used whole boiled baby potatoes, cheese, onions mushrooms bacon, ham, and peppers with various pickles and other nibbles to go along. We polished off a few bottles of good wine and had such a great time chatting around the table that we stayed in the dining area for most of the night and only when T+T went at about 11pm did we move to the lounge. Its a very kind of retro meal I suppose in a 70's flairs and fondue kind of a way but we were introduced to it in Switzerland many years ago and we kind of like the kitschy feel to it and its a bit of a laugh.

We finished the meal off with one of G's fabulous Bircher mueslis, bursting full of fruit, yogurt and a touch of cream and oats. Just the absolute dogs do dahs.........

After a late night it was a late brekkie too with just some simple bacon rolls and the last of the Bircher muesli. Then Leen cycled back home {50 miles} and K followed on after with the car.

G and I took ourselves off to the Riverside bistro in Abby St Bathans late in the afternoon for a quiet drink and a wee walk along part of the Southern Upland Way. Not far, just enough to loosen up and get the kinks ironed out a wee bit. Then we had a quiet night in to get G ready for another week of pure slog at work.



Today I have been surfing the job sites as per and getting a couple of applications ready. When I have them complete a contact who vets applications for the police is going to give them the once over against the selection criteria and give me some feedback so I can hopefully iron out any issues before the application deadlines at the end of this week. In the late afternoon I drove through to pick up G from the office in Edinburgh and we went to the Filmhouse on Lothian Rd to see "Fermats Room" in a lovely little cinema which looked like it only sat about 80 people. We had a drink and a light bite in the cafe at the filmhouse before the show which was nice but expensive. Still, look on the bright side - at least I qualify for concession rates for the films as I am now one of the great unwaged.

The film was ok but as usual I struggled to stay awake. Honestly put me anywhere dark and warm and I am going to be nodding off in about 15 minutes. Its really frustrating when I cant sleep at night even when I'm completely knackered.


Oh well



gotta go, see you later.................



listening to ' Playing for Change'...... " One Love"

Almost the weekend

Hello there ma wee blog!

Well its been a successful day today. The final prep for the hearings went well and I had time in the morning to go down to Dunbar and get my overdue haircut which is always strangely going to make me feel a wee bit better about 'life the universe and everything' anyway to quote Douglas Adams.

Getting a haircut, especially if I have left it a bit overdue, always takes me back to being a wee boy and going to the local barbers in the village where I grew up; sitting on the childs seat that was just a short plank of wood put across the arms of the barbers chair so you stuck up enough above the chair back to let the guy actually get to your napper. That almost tearful feeling of having been scalped as you stepped out of the shop with your Mum or Dad at your side and felt the wind caress your baldy heid for the first time reminding you of just how much hair you had just left behind on the floor. You actually felt lighter so much seemed to have gone, and of course, you knew your pals were going to make fun of you for "havin' a baldy" or having been "rumped right intae the wid" as they laughed ruefully and ran hands self consciously back through no doubt soon to be shorn locks themselves. You also could never resist that first tentative hand up and across the back of your head to check how sharp the remaining stubble was, feeling lucky no doubt that you actually got out of there with some hair left. No one was allowed to have their hair long it seemed. Everyone had to look like military conscripts with identical short back and sides. I doubt, looking back, that the demon barber of Drongan could actually cut hair other than in that universal, one fits all style. Certainly I remember seeing grown men of all ages with the exact same cut { and reaction on coming out of the shop }. Sometimes Dad would get his hair cut at the same time and we would look at each other as we stood outside the shop and he would smile sympathetically at me and offer his hand for the walk back home.

I got that feeling so strongly this morning that I smiled broadly to myself as I stepped out into the warm breeze { and not the forecast torrential downpour } to get on with the rest of the day.
Aye, sometimes its the simple things in life eh?

The hearings went well today too. The cases went smoothly and we worked well together as a team during the hearings. Its good to be able to terminate a supervision order and say to a child or a family that although they have been through a bad time that its clear that the worst is over and you no longer need us to support you. Its clear that you can do it on your own, working voluntarily with social work. Its a great boost to a child or families confidence not only to feel or to be told things are getting so much better but to be shown by action that legal compulsion to do certain things is not needed and they must feel that if we can step back out of it then getting social work to do the same and to take back full control is a reality. One of the big anxieties I see in families is that fear that once social work depts are involved its never going to be over.

I was also able to have a bit of a rant to social work about the information in reports - the huge amounts of abbreviations, the ICPCC, RCPCC, MAAG and ELIS and all those other things which although meant to help - and do to the likes of us who see these things on a regular basis - can actually be quite intimidating to people and to children who are already in a stressful situation and dont need the additional threat of this secret code which can only be understood by the initiated. I also hate how so much understanding can be lost at the altar of the great God 'Cut and Paste' when a hard pressed social worker clearly doesn't take the time to stop and proof read the reports before issuing them. Not helpful.....

Actually I have a huge amount of respect for social workers and the job they do in often really trying circumstances. They are fantastic folk in my opinion and I have yet to meet one who does not really care about the job they do and the folk they are trying to help. Unfortunately so often now they are the scapegoats for society and the media in particular. Damned if they do and damned if they dont. I have the utmost respect for them and I dont think I could do their job for a pension.

That doesn't mean that I am not critical of the structures they work in or some of the policies they enforce or some of the procedures used but I certainly don't feel that as a society we are really prepared to shoulder the cost of giving them the training, tools and resources to truly provide that fine mesh safety net that we expect them to have for every possible permutation of problem or consequence for the vulnerable elements of our society. Instead we seem only too willing to pillory them at the first opportunity.

Whoa Boy! Slow down man! .......... Rant over, ok Alistair?. Look at what it says at the top of the blog entry. Its "almost the weekend" not " Get on your high horse". Calm down......... Breathe deeply......... REEEELAAAX...........

Aye.

So anyway........

Its almost the weekend!

And this weekend its the 1st of August.! National day of Switzerland!


So we are celebrating the Swiss part of the family with a get together, a meal, Swiss flags, Swiss tablecloth, Swiss napkins, Swiss food , Swiss wine, Schnapps, Kirsch and anything else we can find that remotely smacks of Heidi Land, of edelweiss, cowbells, alphorns, yodelling, mad obsessions about time, efficient train and bus services to impossibly remote locations, chocolate, fondue, badly timed senses of humour { they say if you tell a Swiss a joke on Tuesday they will laugh Sunday in church! } - and missing Nazi millions.....

Yee-ha!

see you later............

listening to Bob Marley, "three little birds"

Job done

Well, thats the initial read through done and my case notes made up. Time now to let the cases soak in and I'll revisit them again tonight or early tomorrow and get the questions together ready for the hearings.

Never managed to get a haircut though. Went down to the town but my usual place was closed so I will try again later in the week. Its annoying as I have left it a week too long and its been bugging me.

Ah well serves me right.

see you later.

listening to - absolutely nothing............

A few whiskers short of the full kitty!

As usual I am sitting in the kitchen while I blog this. I have just let the cats out. We have two, sisters, which we took to look after for a couple of weeks a few years ago. As you will recognise they never did go back to their owner, a colleague of the lovely G who was recovering from divorce or something and had moved into temporary rented accomodation for a few weeks while he looked for something better. I can't remember now what happened but he moved office or something and never got in touch. Whatever. The "Girls" as we call them settled in very easily and we grew to see them as ours very quickly - we were getting over the fact that our cat had died {old age} recently.

Jess and Bailey are very alike, white with some brown markings. Jess' main distinguishing feature is that she has a smudge on her chin and is smaller than Bailey who to be honest is a greedy guts. They are more recognisable by their behaviours. Bailey as becomes a cat who has just scoffed for Scotland and won is usually very sedate and when she goes out she is usually back at the door in less than ten minutes looking for some more food and a cosy corner. She is quite affectionate and loves a good petting session and to snuggle up with me on the couch. She is definitely MY cat and she knows she can twist me around her little claw. She loves to go out after a good meal and waddle around the garden for a while pretending to the local birds that she is a lethal hunter on the prowl when actually, although she does have some ability in that direction, she is much more likely to be just sitting in front of the hedge and watching the birds come and go. More an aid to digestion than anything else. One of her favourite tricks is to come back after a visit to the garden and do an enormous crap in the litter tray which I have just cleaned out.

As I speak she is sitting at the patio door practising her Jedi mind tricks on me, trying to convince me through the glass that I did not feed her an hour ago and that I should let her in so she can rub around my trouser leg while mewling pitifully until I cave in and feed her for the first time in weeks thank you very much.

Jess on the other hand is G's cat and will usually only deign to darken my door if G is absent from the household or she has just had a scolding or something and feels she needs to get in my good books. Of course also if G isn't around I can provide and fairly adequate cat massage although clearly not in the same league as G. And so, I am suffered and allowed to approach and scratch the ears or the back. Jess is a few whiskers short of being the full kitty if you catch my drift and there are times when you look at her that you can see the lights on but nobody is in or that she is going to kick off on one of her daft half hours shortly where she will tear about the house and bounce off the furniture {if she gets a chance that is} G will often cradle her in her arms like a baby while sitting in the lounge and Jess will sit there contendedly hour after hour while staring gently at me to remind me that although I get to go to bed with G at the end of the evening thats just so I can warm the bed and that I should never NEVER forget that G clearly knows who comes first and its not you mate!!!

Bailey as I said is always around and will come racing across like a rocket from the other side of the garden when I whistle. As she weighs a bit its advisable to look out carefully for this phenomenon and keep feet, legs and assorted other bits of human anatomy well out of the way until she comes to a halt and reverses back towards you to find out why the utility room door isn't open and food piled meaningfully up in bowls already.

Jess is a house cat. Not something she has actually signed up for mind you, just that she disappeared for 5 days the last time she was officially let out. There have been a couple of escapes since then, which of course I am totally to blame for { so I 'm told } but I wont go into that just now in case G ever reads this and I get pounded!. We bought a cat harness and one of those extending leads and G will occasionally take her out and drag her, sometimes almost literally around the garden. Over time though Jess has got used to this set up and now I can take her out to the garden and using the extending lead tie her safely to one of the apple trees and she has learned that she:

A} is safe

B} can't get away even if she wants to.

C} still can get to most of the interesting bits of the garden nearby

This has brought an new equilibrium to our relationship as she now recognises that I am at home every day and have control over whether she gets out or not and, being a smart little kitty, she will now quite happy suck up to me for garden access rights as long as its not raining or too windy and therefore she can get to many interesting little bits of the garden. She can also play "untangle me" by crawling up and around through the branches of aforementioned apple tree and jumping down on the other side before walking back around and lying down facing the patio doors where I most often am sitting as I still need to keep an eye on her. { I WILL die if she gets away from me again and she knows it the bugger that she is} Once she sees that I have noticed, she will do that appealing little cat roll onto her back so her head is upside down and she looks as cute as possible and as innocent as sin. Little sod!

So, thats a thumbnail sketch of "The Girls".

Must go now. I have a cat to feed, a litter tray to empty and I'm on untangling duty in 10 mins.

Thank goodness we don't have kids as well......

see you later......................

listening to John Barrys' theme to "Somewhere in time".

Another day and not another dollar.........

As usual I have been dosing on and off for most of the night, tossing and turning and being in danger of waking up the lovely G who is sometimes less then lovely to me when kept awake at all hours of the night. I got up at one point for a cup of tea which is probably not going to help me sleep either I know but at least gives G the chance to have a couple of hours of undisturbed rest and help preserve my safety for a couple of hours too. For one so small she packs a mean poke in the ribs!.

Having been up from 2.30 till 4.30, its now half past five and I have given up trying to sleep anymore for today. Daylight has seeped through the window and the rain which came last night has left droplets of rainwater hanging brightly from the underside of the velux window which we always have open summer or winter. A quick glance out past them shows me a pale blue and fairly clear sky over the sea as I carefully pick up my shirt and trousers and head off downstairs for a coffee.

Everyone says, and I have to agree, that the first coffee of the day is the best one. I love to have mine in the kitchen and in peaceful solitude, quietly able to consider the day ahead, planning and organising my half thought out day and looking forward to the small things that make each day worth living.

Today I need to prepare for the childrens hearing tommorrow afternoon as its a heavy caseload and the reports posted to me a few days ago have lain, an undisturbed but weighty reminder, in their sealed pack across the weekend and the start of the week. It can take quite a few hours to go over a case and there are 4 to hear tomorrow so it feels like a pretty full day of reading and thinking today. I also need to get a haircut which I will do when I need a break from the social work background reports for the cases. A short trip to the nearest hairdresser and a quick cut should hopefully only take an hour or two maximum. I will read the reports and my notes again later either tonight or tommorrow morning to make sure I know exactly what questions I want answered for each case before any decisions are made. I'm chairing two hearings so I need to be thoroughly prepared.

A well, better get started but maybe also another coffee. The second of the day can sometimes just be a continuation of the first.......

see you later