A Christmas hamper

of random bits today, rather than a coherent post.

* * *
Ruth was working on Christmas Eve, in a little bar a couple of towns along from my parents' house. I drove along to pick her up after the pub had closed and they'd had a chance to close up, at about 1.30 am. When I arrived, there were still a few die-hards downing the last of their pints, so I hung my jacket over a bar stool and settled in to wait.

"This is my brother," Ruth said to her inebriated boss, who was perched precariously on another stool at the end of the bar.
"Oh aye," he said, "so the Saab is yours then?"
I'd loaned Ruth the Trøll while I was on holiday. "Yes. Nice to meet you too," I replied.
"They're great cars they are."
"Yes. Yes they are."

I waited a bit longer. The last group of drinkers were getting their stuff together, and on their way past an old schoolmate said hello. "Long time no see! You've got the Saab 900, right?" she said. We talked for a bit, and then they were off.

Ruth introduced me to the very last punter, a youngish regular, on his way out. "Hi there - so you're Ruth's brother?" Then, in slightly hushed, reverential tones: "That's a great car you've got. I love those Saabs."

These people do not get out much. "A 1992 900 S! And with the Aero kit, if I'm not mistaken. So rare that such an objet d'art comes to our humble village."

* * *
The hot water in our flat is, and has been for the last year or so, only intermittently functional. We have an odd setup whereby the hot water for the shower room and the heating comes from a modern combi boiler at one end of the flat, while the hot water for the bathroom and the kitchen comes from a grain elevator-sized immersion boiler at the other end. Needless to say, the apparently Victorian-era immersion heater functions reliably, if inefficiently, all year round. (The environment audibly groans when we fire it up.) The shiny new combi boiler is rather more of a prima donna.

A while back we discovered, after a succession of visits by largely moronic plumbers, that the heating system has a small leak somewhere. Evidently it's not large enough to easily detect, but it did let the pressure drop until we had neither warm radiators nor a hot shower. The final, competent plumber showed us how to open a top-up valve to refill the combi boiler until a proper fix could be applied.

Of course a little knowledge is a dangerous thing, and although the leak goes unfixed (hell, if anyone of our neighbours noticed a jet of scalding water gushing into their flat, I'm sure they'd let us know. And we did tell the landlord about it. Honest), we now merrily poke around with a screwdriver every few months to make sure the pressure's up.

Last week, though, a new problem arose. The shower became a turbo-sauna. It was like washing on the sun. I developed a technique for showering, which was to plaster oneself up against the tiled wall furthest from the geyser emitting from the shower head and let the superheated steam remove the outer layer of one's skin. Woe betide you if any of the actual water should graze your unprotected self.

Fortunately, and for no discernible reason, the temperature dropped back to a tolerable level during the week. This pleases me because I can shower in safety, and disappoints me because I am deprived of a punchline for this little anecdote.

* * *
In preparation for the upcoming CF gig, I plugged in my bass last night and played away for a while, gazing idly down at the twin curiosities of the gay-bar-for-neds and the brothel above it visible from my window. I was reminded of an evening a month or so back. On the way to Café Royal, I'd rounded the corner onto Rose Street when a drunken buffoon on a stag night stumbled out of a nearby pub, cornered me and asked where they should continue boozing. "And find some wummen tae, like."

He stank like a brewery and I sorely doubted his chances of both getting into any pubs or getting any once he was in there. But I was brought up well, and I tried to be helpful. "Hmm. George Street has a load of pubs, but they're all a bit posh." I had a rather evil notion. "You're already on Rose Street, and it's pretty good for pubs. There's one just across the road, actually-" I said, pointing down the alley to the gay bar, and right on cue, two people physically flew out of the door.

"And dinnae come back!" bellowed the barman.

My drunken friend went to George Street.