An Apology to the US

So here we are thrust into the world stage. Suddenly Scotland is being talked about all over the world. Let’s not go into why, this is not a political blog and I would like to keep it that way. However, it occurs to me that a handful of people are seeking to boycott Scottish goods and services in some kind of bizarre protest about events this week. Do The Misssives count? I know I have a few US readers, I hope you won’t desert me. Especially after what I’m about to confess.

Now I don’t want to wade in and upset anyone but I feel dutybound to confess that I have had a little fun at the expense of some American citizens in the past. Some fun of the type that may no longer be possible now that Scotland is firmly on America’s radar. Before my confession begins, I want to stress that I only made fun of the really stupid ones and I do realise that stupidity has no nationality, as a quick look at the initial auditions of the UK X Factor will swiftly back up.

All of these conversations happened when I was a cocktail waitress in New Orleans in 1990, where stupid teenage boys go to drink til they pass out on a holiday weekend, particularly in the bar I worked in which was one of the few non-transvestite/gay disco type establishments on Bourbon Street and which also was fairly lax in the checking of ID.

The temptation was too great. Forgive me, but waitressing can be a little dull, so sometimes you feel the need to have a little fun to make the time pass quicker.

Scenario 1: The Haunting
Him: Wow what’s that accent? Where ya from?
Me: Scotland
Him: Wow. I know Scotland! Do they really have ghosts and shit there.
Me: Oh yes, my dad’s one.
Him: You're kidding me right?

Me: No.

Him: Cooool.

Scenario 2: What time is it?
Him: So what age can y’all drink over there?
Me: Eighteen
Him: That’s awesome. So what age are you?
Me: Well I’m twenty-two back home but I’m twenty one over here because of the time difference.
Him: Awesome!

Scenario 3: Fight the Power
Him: So where are you from?
Me: Scotland
Him: Scotland, eh? So you guys still bombing the English?
Me: Not really. I think you’re thinking of the IRA in Northern Ireland (this was 1990)
Him: So you guys ain’t doing that. I thought you were.
Me: No we’re not doing that.
Him: Well, you should.
Me: OK then.

Scenario 4: Landed Gentry
Him: So do you live in a castle in Scotland?
Me: Yes, we all do.
Him: Awesome.
Me: Yes it is.


Scenario 5: Life in the dark ages
Drunken boy: So all this must be different for you guys coming from Scotland.
Me: Well, New Orleans is different all right.
Drunken boy: More modern and stuff
Me (clocking where he was going with this): Oh yes! You’ve got telephones and everything!
Drunken boy: Man, you don’t have telephones?
Me: Well, the whole town shares one.
Drunken boy: That’s fucked up.
Me: I write my parents a letter to let them know when I'll be calling and they book an appointment at the phone to take my call.

Drunken boy: That's fucked up.

Me: Ah, it works for us.

C'mon...you've never messed with someone?

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I'm Beggin' of You Please Don't Take My Man

Graceland.
Little known fact:Named after previous owners Grace and Lando Fuffkin

For about five minutes last week Meeester and I entertained the thought of moving house. We even did a slow drive by of a house on sale in not so nearby Fyvie. By the time we’d driven by, we decided that we’re happy where we are. At least we’re not unhappy enough to move to Fyvie.

Some hours later we both admit what really bothered us about our quick not-quite-stop-off to the village featured in the famous party piece of old codgers everywhere, The Bonnie Lass O’ Fyvie-o! (You’ve got to add an –“o!” to all folk songs, it’s the folk song law. There’s never a “Bonnie Lassie”, she’s always a “Bonnie Lassie-o!”; you’re never alive but you’re “Alive-alive-oh!” You know the kind of thing. )

No, it’s not the village itself -OK it is a wee bit, it’s a horse short of being a one horse town. It’s not even the house in question -OK it is a wee bit, Meeester didn’t like it, but if I liked it enough I could’ve strong armed him like I did into the whole living together, getting a job, getting married and having kids thing. Easy. No it was the house next door. Specifically, the name of the house next door.

The house was called Johlene. The name stood brazenly in big mirrored letters reflecting the entire village back. Clearly someone called John and someone called Arlene or Carlene or Sharlene had decided to proclaim their union to the world by Frankensteiningly forcing their names together into one like a big bastard hybrid monster. We both clocked it, we both stored it and we both dwelt upon it silently until some hours later.

“Did you see that house?”

“You mean Johlene?”

“Yes. Yes I did.”

“I don’t want to live in Fyvie-o.”

“No, me neither, let’s just stay where we are.”

“Yes, let’s just stay in The House of the Flying Martinis. Let’s just sit tight.”

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Snaggletooth

David on the phone to his Tooth Jockey

Up until I was in my twenties I had straight teeth. Not perfect, but straight. Then they Bowied. Just like David, two fangs from the side began to creep out from their rightful position and not in a cool of the moment Twilight or True Blood vampire kind of way, but in a Snaggletooth way. This has bugged me for a very long time. It has bugged my mother even more, who uses my graduation photo as a benchmark. “Your hair was so lovely that day” (au natural; undyed and un-ironed) , “Look how straight your teeth were in that photo”(she’s right, they were. What happened?) She stops short at saying that she’d prefer me to wear a gown and hold a scroll on a permanent basis. She blames our family dentist, The Tooth Jockey for the whole thing. “He should have been onto that.” Our family has a love/hate relationship with The Tooth Jockey. I’m sure when he sees my mother’s name in his appointment book he thinks about throwing a sickie.

I have broached the subject of my unhappiness of the two snaggleteeth on a couple of occasions with The Tooth Jockey, a man who, in having a new car outside his practice pretty much every time I go there, you’d think would be happy to use my insecurity and vanity for a down payment on the next one. But no. He says, “Well, they aren’t that bad. You’ve got ask yourself, how bothered are you?”

Truth is I AM bothered, but he has made me feel an idiot for even mentioning it, so I meekly demur and slope off feeling my snaggleteeth with my tongue and check them in my rear view mirror on the way home trying to convince myself that he’s right; they aren’t that bad. I tell myself that if shit teeth were good enough for Freddie Mercury then they are good enough for me.

Years later I find I’m cringing when I see photos of me smiling. My teeth are squint and I hate them. Time goes on and I find myself not smiling so much when I see a camera trained on me. I am tight lipped like a Muppet (but not the muppet Doctor Teeth).

So, I decide to do something about it and last week I made an appointment to see about getting something called an Inman Aligner, which a man on the radio says can straighten your teeth in three months and is practically invisible. The nearest dentist that is certified is in Edinburgh, 120 miles away from my home. I take the plunge, I tell people, I Twitter about it, I proclaim my smile sorted by Christmas. People make noises about my teeth not being "that bad" (except my mum, who uses the occasion to badmouth The Tooth Jockey once more).

My appointment is with a young pretender tooth jockey called David who looks uncannily like the comedian Jimmy Carr. David/Jimmy looks at my gnashers, he takes photos of them and then he sits me down alongside him at the computer. He does not tell me “they’re not that bad”. They are bad, and he wants to tell me just how bad things really are. David/Jimmy, in fact, tells me things that I didn’t even realise were wrong with how my smile looks. I’m squint, I’m not symmetrical, my teeth aren't in the right part of my mouth, my teeth are the wrong size, they are too close together, and one, in particular, is singled out as a complete design affront to God and the world He created.

I think he’s either trying to convince me how shocking things are so that I’ll definitely go for the miracle brace in some kind of clever sales ruse, or he is, in fact, the actual Jimmy Carr and gets a kick out of insulting people like he does on that show he hosts where no vulnerable section of society is too vulnerable to be the butt of his jokes. Turns out it’s neither. David/Jimmy is working up to break the terrible news to me; my teeth are too much for the miracle brace. “There’s too much that needs done. The Inman Aligner is not for you. It wouldn’t work. You’ll need full orthodontic treatment plus a possible four veneers if you were to completely correct everything. Go back to your dentist and tell him that’s what you want.”

Five minutes and fifty quid later I’m on the street with tears welling up.

I’m off to the Tooth Jockey next week. I may take my Mum with me.

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Space Chimp

So last week saw the 40th anniversary of the first moon landing. And yes, it did happen- could you imagine how that footage would have looked if a late Sixties film director was in charge of directing the fake landing that dweebs all over the internet reckon took place? The moon would have been decorated in hideous orange and brown wallpaper and the craters would have had mixed nuts and cheese and pineapple on sticks in them. Jack Nicholson would have been one of the astronauts because he was in just about everything else out at that time. And if he wasn’t one of the astronauts he would have just been hanging about in the background...grinning and without a helmet, because Jack wouldn’t wear a helmet, for goodness sakes.

I’ve always been a little bit obsessed with the moon landing, mainly, I think, because it happened the year I was born. I remember being bitterly disappointed when I found out that you have to be good at sums to be an astronaut. Foiled again. You have to be able to do trig and algebra for all the good jobs.

So many years later I’m in Florida visiting a friend working in Disneyworld as part of my summer mission in the US to systematically test pilot all the cocktails of the region. At the same time NASA are launching a space shuttle about an hour away. I have to go. I just don't want to have to take public transport.

One night about a week before the launch we meet two Italian blokes in a nightclub who happened, as luck would have it, to be easy on the eye and have a car. Always a winning combination when you're 21 years old and shy of a driving license. The idea of going to NASA is floated, although in retrospect my hand gestures indicating the launch of a rocket may have been misinterpreted at first and led to one of cultural misunderstandings that have peppered my life. Anyway, the plan is set and we’re poised and ready to make our way down to the Kennedy Space Center at Cape Canaveral. I am ridiculously excited. I feel part of history. I mean I'm not, these launches were ten a penny at the time...but I feel that I am all the same.

By the day of the launch I am so beside myself with excitement that at one point I almost have an out of body experience where I see myself behaving like an excited loon and look down upon my earthly personage and scoff at how much of an ass I’m making of myself.

Night falls like a cat jumping down from a ledge, like it seems to do in that part of the world. It happens so quickly you almost get a fright. T minus 4 hours. Time to dress up like and astronaut’s wife in the 1960s and think about miming “Shall we think about getting going so that we can get a good spot?” to the Italian guys.

And then it happens. The news breaks. The launch is cancelled due to “a technical fault”. I set about cursing all the technicians of the world. How could they have been so slack? Who put that washer in the wrong way round- the fools?

I am not sure how the phrase crestfallen originated, but my crest fell like a ton of bricks that night. I actually shed a tear. I had to be consoled. I don’t think I’ve ever been so disappointed in my life. I was almost as disappointed as Michael Collins was when he heard the phrase, “And you’ll be staying inside the ship, Mike.”

The shuttle was launched three weeks later when I was on a plane back to the UK. Nineteen years later I’m still bleating on about it. Even Michael Collins has got over his disappointment quicker than me.*


*As the man who was left on the spaceship whilst Buzz Aldrin and Neil Armstrong went down to the Moon surface to play golf, he is actually the coolest of the three men on the Apollo 11 mission. He had the hardest job and was responsible for the lives of his two buddies. He also knew he might have to come back alone if things went wrong (which they pretty much thought they would) and the world would despise him. I hate it when people say “The Other One” when they can’t remember his name. He is also the only one of the three that is still married to his wife and didn’t go all nuts when he returned. He claims that not going on the surface of the Moon wasn't a big deal. I think he may be fibbing slightly about that, though.

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Summer of Bleurgh

For Black Menace fans

Hello I’m back, those of you who noticed. (Thanks to all who got in touch to say, “Where the Hell are you, Misssy?” That was nice.) This is a short one just to get me back in and catch you all up.

It’s been a crappy summer really and that’s why I’ve not been posting. My husband’s dad died a month ago as the summer holidays started. It’s been sad, weird and complicated. That’s all I’ll say on the matter.*

We also cancelled our holiday which could have been full of bloggable material since we had been going to Loch Lomond and had bought a dinghy for the occasion. We, however were never going to call it Dignity, since that song, Misssives readers of old will remember, is the first song on the personalised playlist waiting for me on Beelzebub's Jukebox in Purgatory, should I ever end up there. We’ve called it Unmashable, because there’s nothing like a name like that to tempt ye Gods. Also it’s orange...and no-one looks dignified in orange.

Another reason for being light on the blog front is the fact that I’ve been busy with a project that’s been ongoing for about six months. I have written a humour book with super-blogger Emma Kaufmann about being a mum. We’ve finally finished it, we’re very happy with it and we think it’s pretty damn funny. But doing something that big has squeezed all the creative juice out of me like a Kiwi Fruit in the path of a steamroller carjacked by a toddler. I thought about telling you all about it before, but it seemed a bit jinxy. It still does if I’m honest. But there, I’ve done it now. Emma’s probably going to kill me for hexing it. But she’s over in the US and can’t reach over to slap me, so I’m safe.

So I’m back, and I’ll be posting regularly again soon. Forthcoming attractions are: How I Nearly Got Involved in the Space Race and David Bowie, Snaggletooth and Me.

Also I'm off to New York in two months so something humiliating involving mugging, airport security or cultural misunderstanding is bound to happen to Meeester and I, so I'd stick around if I were you.


Ahhh, I've misssed this....



*I’d also like to point out that Michael Jackson is not my husband’s dad, just in case anyone thought they were on to something with that.





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