Scotland - Land of Manhandled Moggies

Well it seems it's about time for the year end report from the firm of
Sharman & Parsons Ltd.

Actually, I'm not making that up.  We are about to become a limited company.

This is because of my job but I'm getting ahead of myself.  Long story
short, I have to start up my own limited company which I was going to give a silly name - like Pooey Data or Skittery Bottom Systems but Caroline bless her, said "If you call it Sharman & Parsons, that means we can have business cards and letterheads."  

And her little eyes lit up, so there you go.

We have been back in Scotland for nearly two months now.  Our travels
already seem like an awful long time ago.  

We were a bit sad and grumpy when Caro and I finally tumbled into Sue's
flat in Edinburgh after a long stressful trip home, through enhanced post 9/11 security.  

Fortunately the cats, Dusty and Ripley were on hand to cheer us up.  Bizarrely, they seemed to remember who we were!  

Quite frankly both cats have always struck me as a bit dim, and so I'm astonished they even remember where their litter-box is from day to day.  But obviously I'd completely underestimated them because they were purring around our legs within about 10 minutes of arrival.  Ten minutes after THAT I had collapsed on Sue's bed and was snoring soundly when Sue herself came home from work and asked me what I wanted for dinner.

So that was the beginning of a month living with Sue and the cats.  It was
all very relaxing after charging around the world.  I think Dusty enjoyed it
too, since she got into the habit of purring like she was about to pass out
whenever Caro spoke to her.  As for Ripley, well - he's more of an outdoors cat despite the fact that there's this black and white cat who terrorises him and chases him back through his cat-flap whenever he spots him.

Sue however, does not take this lying down!  No!  She has a water pistol and whenever she sees the black and white cat (or "Satan" as Sue calls him) she LEAPS INTO ACTION!!  The window is flung open, and Sue blasts away at the offending moggie.

He sits there impassively, just out of range.

"Go away.  Yes, I'm talking to YOU," says Sue.  Only, since Sue is not one
of nature's more aggressive people, and can't stand the thought of being
mean to cats, it sounds more like she's cooing at him.  I swear he was
purring at this stage.

Fortunately, Caro was on hand.  "MEEEEE-oooWWWRRRRR-FFFFT-TT!!!!!" sheshrieked out of the window before flinging a mouldy orange at Satan, who buggered off at great haste.  Actually I think that Sue was even more
terrified by the display than he was.

Ripley takes it in his stride so long as he's inside.  This may be partly
due to the fact that he's got double-glazing between him and Satan, or it
could be down to his stash of catnip.  Ripley has turned into this pathetic
stoner cat, who drags his catnip out of a bowl onto the floor and then rolls in it until his eyes go big.  Dusty, meanwhile, likes to spend her time
sitting on the windowsill, getting excited whenever a plane passed overhead and trying to pounce on it.

I did my usual thing and took over the kitchen.  My culinary repetoire is
not great but I find it relaxing to make things, and even more so to eat
them.  I think it was a bit of a break for Sue anyway, who is used to Marks
& Spencer ready meals and expressed great wonder at marvels like roast
potatoes.

While all this was going on, Caro and I were having a frustrating time
searching for flats.  It was, we were told, "a flat time in the market
- nothing much is happening."  

Well we knew THAT.  Every time we turned up to see a flat there were like, a MILLION* other people there too, and we inevitably lost out every time we expressed an interest.

And some of the flats were just plain WEIRD.  Like the one with a huge
kitchen and living room, but NO bedrooms - just two tiny boxrooms, one off the kitchen (presumably it used to be a washroom) and one off the living room (presumably it used to be a cupboard.)

We were reaching the end of our tether when I managed to hear about a flat BEFORE it was advertised - a-HA!!  And, as it turned out, it was on Rose Street, which for those of you who don't know is a terribly groovy address in the middle of EVERYTHING.**

Anyway, it was perfect and we decided to take it right there and then.  What wasn't so perfect was the estate agent - one Jo Fox-Pitt don'tcha'know who was exactly as posh as her name suggested.  "Ew that's AWFULLY good," she gushed, "We could gew beck to the awffice jest naow end call Lady Blake."

Lady Joan Blake - our new landlady.  It's been terribly difficult to avoid
the temptation to call her Lady Muck.

So anyway.  We went back to this office which appeared to be staffed
ENTIRELY by Yahs.  My god.  Do they have a special hiring policy at this
place or something?  You can't be a member of staff unless you own a
burberry coat and think fox-hunting is a jolly larf?  Well, apparently not. 

But lots of faffing about later (Yahs aren't the most efficient people to
deal with.  They normally have People to do practical things for them) we
managed to get an entry date in late November.

We were quite sad to be leaving Sue and the cats, because she had been so kind and accommodating and because they had spent many a night sitting and purring at us (the cats, not Sue).  

Still, it was very exciting to have our own place again and so we were delighted when the end of November rolled around.  We also got to meet Lady Blake who was EXACTLY what you would expect someone called "Lady Blake" to look like with her pearls, sensible shoes and blazer.  

Audrey Fforbes-Hamilton came to mind, I have to admit. 

She told us that her husband often stayed in the flat opposite ours during
the week after his job as a stockbroker.  "But not today," she told us, "he's out shooting in the Borders."  She then went on to tell us about her
son Julian and his wife who keeps horses.

She's putting it on, I thought.  No-one is THIS much of a stereotype.  I'll
bet her name is really Gladys Scubbins and she's from Grimsby.

However, that apart, she displayed the usual upper-class talent for dealing with practical matters, forgetting that we would need her bank details to pay the rent and also forgetting the little matter of giving us the keys. 

By gum, as we say in Yorkshire, she's a rum 'un and no mistake.

Caroline had a Dirt Attack on our second day in the flat and had to go
shopping for cleaning materials.  She came back about two hours later,
having made several friends at Lakeland Plastics.  

Apparently a crowd of little old ladies had been so impressed with Caroline's purchases of Oxi-Clean, Febreeze, Orange Grease Remover and Astonish! that they felt compelled to surround her and tell her all their Stories of Dirt from the past sixty years.

Anyway, Caroline then went quite MAD with her Oxi-Clean and a toothbrush. 

The result is that we now live in a flat which does NOT stink of smoke or
have walls the colour of an old drunk's teeth.

Caroline then got to work on the look of the flat.  Actually she's been
working on this in her head for the entire past year.  So she basically had
all this pent-up decorating energy which came out in one cataclysmic
Interior Design Frenzy.  There are THINGS all over the flat now, and various themes for the different rooms, including a Maori and Viking thing going on in the living room, a sand 'n' surf look for Feona's room and Postcards of the World decorating our bog.

Feona's room, you might say?  Well, the word is that Caroline's sister Feona will be joining us in Scotland this summer.  If this proves to be the case, then she has her own room.  Otherwise, Lisa Brown gets it.

Our bog is pretty spectacular.  It's got a step up to it, so it feels like
you're sitting on a throne, The Master of All You Survey when you're doing
your business.  It's also one of those fabulous old high-cistern, chain-pull
thingies so the FLUSH is spectacular.  It's like your poo is being dispensed by the Angel Falls.  Awesome.

What was I doing in the middle of all this you might ask?  Well, I was
organising my kitchen of course, and also dealing with the other
high-priority stuff like GETTING A TELLY.

The teev is extremely important to us.  And by us I mean "me".  So you can imagine my chagrin, nay DESOLATION at finding NO AERIAL SOCKET when we first moved in.  We were forced to watch The Godfather Trilogy on video over again when we first moved in, and "The Ricki Lake Show" on channel 5 through a blizzard of snow.

So I got a little man in to fit the aerial, which to my relief works
perfectly.  Two days ago, Caroline found the aerial socket behind some
shitty old curtains in Feona's room.  How I laughed.

Apart from that, we have been startlingly inactive.  We are gearing up for
Xmas however, I can now smugly say that I have finished my shopping ha ha ha.  On the job front, when I first returned to Edinburgh I put feelers out to my old team at Standard Life who (three weeks later) told me that there wasn't room for a little Yorkshireman on the budget, sorry.

That was kind of a drag.  I wasn't seriously worried about money, and I knew there was likely to be work around in the New Year, but you know - it meant I had to watch the Xmas spending.  However, in a lucky twist of fate, I bumped into another old Standard Life manager the following weekend at the pictures.  (And by "old" I mean she used to be my manager a couple of years ago.  She's not wobbling about on a zimmer frame or anything).  

As it turned out, SHE had plenty of money for returning contractors.  And in a bizarre turn of fate, HER office is much closer to Rose Street than that of the other team!  Hurrah!

So I'm quite happy***.  I'll be starting work on the 7th of January.  Money
will still be extremely tight until the first dividend kicks in (Spring) but
there are of course, three magic words that can sort that out (BAR, CLAY and CARD).

Anyway - hence the limited company.  For tax reasons, you know.  As before, I will probably end up working for Caroline so that I can utilise her higher tax thresholds.  It's also quite exciting to know that I am a mere underling of my girlfriend the Powerful Company Director in a pervy sexual sort of way.

The other thing Caro and I have been doing is catching up with all the
lovely people we left behind in Scotland.  I think we've seen just about
everybody now.  One of our first visits were to Julie and Joanne, Caro's old room-mates from her Before Me days.  

Julie and Joanne are LOVELY, and the big news is that Joanne is getting married to Lio who I first met about two and a half years ago.  In this, they are about the fifth couple we know who are due to be married in the coming year. 

Caroline asked Julie how the plans were going, "OooooOOOOOOHHHH!!!" she wailed, "They should have A SPECIAL SUPPORT GROUP for brides!"

Apparently the plans aren't progressing as smoothly as she would like then. 

I think Julie knows this and is having a bit of fun with it by winding her
sister up.  She announced that she might just squish a bit of make-up on for the wedding which set Joanne off again.  "You will NOT 'just squish some on'!!!" she exploded.

Meanwhile, Julie moved into her own new flat with a little bit of help from
us.  I manhandled one-third of a couch up three flights of stairs with Lio
and his brother.

That was me finished.  I had to sit on Julie's half-put-together couch,
sucking on me inhaler for half an hour after that.

We also spent a very pleasant weekend kittysitting Salem the Cat for Jim and Mechelle.  Mechelle was taking her first ever boat trip to Amsterdam for the weekend, which meant I got to spend some quality time with their cable tv, while Caroline made a huge fuss of the kitty.  Salem is SUCH a slut.  She's one of those cats who rolls over when she sees you approaching and waves her belly in the air.  If you don't IMMEDIATELY stroke her she then swears at you in cat.

I also made the mistake of cooking a joint for Caro, myself and Sue who had come around to see "Apocalypse Now" at the cinema across the street.  Of course the cat got wind of this and became RATHER VOCAL****.  I gave her a little plate of meat to herself which kept her happy right up until the time she went off to the bedroom to barf on my leather jacket.

Another visit we made recently was to see Carol and Pete.  Carol (you may remember) rented me my first flat.  And indeed Dusty and Ripley, who were once her cats and for reasons that I won't go into were included in my original lease.  (How my rental cats got from me to Sue is Another Story).

Carol is now pregnant.  Extremely so.  She's due on the 28th Dec, and when we went to see her she was not at all happy.  The baby has decided it's quite happy where it is and is making no effort at all to turn itself.  This resulted in Carol being prodded, poked and shoved for fifteen minutes last week which left her extremely bruised and miserable, with the prospect of a c-section awaiting.  Mind you, I think in some respects she's quite relieved.  I remember her telling me she was worried about ending up with "a fanny like the Dartmouth Tunnel" back in August.

I was telling her about the delights of parenthood around the corner and
related the story of how I had been speaking to my friend Malcolm on the
phone.  He's got a little girl himself who must be about 18 months old.  Me and Malcolm chatted for a while before I heard him in the background saying, "Your mouth's all black!!  Have you been at the coal scuttle again??!!"
 
Then he excused himself.

"Oh that's nothing," replied Carol.  "A friend of mine caught her baby
eating poo the other day."  Apparently, a used nappy got left lying around
and...  Well, I've said too much already.

Anyway, it was lovely to see Carol, poor lamb.  I hope it all goes well for
her.

Of course, I have also spent some time with the Standard Life crowd.  This has mainly served to inform me that I can No Longer Drink.  I think a year of (mostly) abstaining has led me to lose all my powers of drinking.  I have just a couple and I turn extremely messy.  Mind you, the locals aren't much better just now.  I turned up to one post-Xmas-lunch thing to find my ex-colleagues all over the place.  One had found some papers and tobacco and was rolling the most elaborate joints I had ever seen with them, while giggling manically.  The fact that these Camberwell Carrots had NOTHING in them did not stop them being passed around the other drunks and dragged on like it was the best sh*t ever to come out of Central America.

(Said roller then fell asleep in the middle of a packed pub and proceeded to fall off his chair.)

What I'm saying is this: Xmas is not pretty.  And I have to watch myself
because my alcohol tolerance is now practically zero.

But this hasn't stopped our Christmas plans which are now in full swing. 
Lisa Brownie (whom you may remember from the Hawaii email) will be arriving from London and staying in Feona's room.  Trent is coming over from Ireland and staying with Jim & Mechelle and the whole lot of us will be getting together for a jolly festive time on Xmas day.

There's also the matter of New Year of course.  We will be in the thick of
it on Rose Street, which is very exciting.  I have already ascertained that
you get a great view of the fireworks from our kitchen and bathroom windows, and Julie, Joanne and Lio might just make an appearance for that as well.

That's about all my news from us.  So far as I know, Caroline has not yet
worked out what I've bought her for Xmas.  I've checked the parcels and I
don't think she's pulled the old "peel 'n' peek" gambit of pulling back the
sticky tape.  Hmmm...  It's quite worrying really.

So that's it from me for another year.  All the best to everyone and a big
Xmassing mistletoe smooch right at ya.  (Unless you are a boy, in which case a manly punch on the shoulder is all you're getting.)

Lots of love from us both,

Symon & Caro

*    This may be a slight exaggeration.

**    And by everything I mean "pubs".

***  I'm HAPPY to go back to WORK???  Am I INSANE?

****  Because the cat wanted the roast beef.  She had no interest in
      going to see "Apocalypse Now" that I know of.