Limpet Bizkit

Last week I had the notion that Ash and I should have a day out of some kind: a mini road trip, in effect, to blow away the cobwebs of too many 40-hour weeks since our last big holiday. I brought the Trøll back from work on Friday evening so we could hop in and enthusiastically drive off at daybreak the next morning. Subsequently we went out with Austen, Maria and Angela for a few drinks and hit the sack rather later than intended.

Saturday morning came and went in a couch-potato haze but with my idea stubbornly refusing to die a death, I dragged a justifiably complaining Ash round to the car. Truth be told, I was feeling pretty ropey myself but if there's one thing I've learned from my parents it's that you will enjoy yourself, dammit! Our one errand for the day was to buy a new TV to reduce the eye-strain meted out by Ash's portable set, so we stopped by Cash Generator to pick one from the graveyard of dubious legality and loaded it into the back of the car.

"So where should we go then?" I asked, having failed to settle on a sensible destination despite my insistence that we go there, wherever there happened to be.
"I don't know," wailed Ash, "I feel awful. My eyes hurt!"
"Let's go to Gullane," ever my fall-back position for pleasant weekend drives.
"Okay, okay. Let's go then."

So we set off. Mindful of the vacuum tube in the boot, I took it easy (not that the sunny day traffic and continual roadworks afforded much chance to pick up any speed) and so we crawled out east to arrive around three with the sun still high in the sky but producing no palpable warmth. We rolled to a halt in the gusty beach car park and hurried gingerly down the path to the shore where the beach opened up before us. Some hardy outdoor types were picnicking and watching a solitary, insane kite-surfer battle the wind.

"Man, I feel terrible," I said to Ash. We looked pathetically at each other, turned and bolted back to the car.

Stuck in a fifteen minute traffic jam just outside Portobello with hunger, fatigue and seemingly unending headaches bearing down upon us, Ash pointed at a Burger King sign just visible across a deserted car park and said emphatically, "We need burgers!"

We practically skipped back to the car. Or we would have done if the saturated fat hadn't been weighing us down.

P.S. The title, by the way, is in reference to a game that Scott and Angela introduced us to on Sunday night: try to come up with band names that involve fishy or otherwise marine terms. Try it. B:Ream. Sole 2 Sole. Bob Marley and the Whalers. Sweeet.

Catching up:

Last week at work we apparently we had a deadline for a trade show at which a customer wanted to demonstrate our product. I say apparently because it came and went with obscene ease; by the time I had noticed a slightly raised level of collective blood pressure around the office, we'd done all the required work and our boss took us out to the pub for a couple of pints on Friday lunchtime to congratulate us on a job well done. The afternoon passed in a Zeppelin haze and set the tone for the weekend: leisurely, enjoyable and with a healthy dose of late '60s rock providing the soundtrack.

Having bought a new (old) camera from Amazon the other day, we toddled up to Princes Street gardens on Saturday afternoon to try it out and had an expectedly awesome tourist interlude for a couple of hours. We ate overpriced hot dogs and drank coffee on a patio in gale-force winds, took in the 3dinburgh design exhibition and pottered around my favourite graveyard in the shadow of both St. Cuthbert's and St. John's. I can't put my finger on quite why the afternoon was so much fun, but I think it's just a happy confluence of a number of factors: my diary is joyously empty for the next week, Ash's visa quest is out of our hands (and hence out of our minds) until her appointment through in Glasgow at the end of July, and work is rather obviously running smoothly.

I was feeling conspicuously relaxed in advance of the evening's entertaining, when we had Jez, Serena, Neil and Vanessa round for dinner. I think we've been a bit remiss of late in getting together with the usual suspects and I must say I was replete with joy to have everyone round. Ash cooked a monstrous Southern feast (I tried to help, honestly; but whenever I turned my back for a moment some new dish had materialised and all I could do was serve it up) and I acted as barman for the evening. After some amaretto-fortified coffee I unpacked the stereo and slipped on some CCR under the radar whenever no-one was looking.

On Sunday morning I paid in full for the previous evening's indulgences but it was damn well worth it: food, friends and a few snifters is a nigh-on foolproof recipe for a perfect night.

TM troika:

I met up with Mart and Dom, the original Tiny Monkey triumvirate, in the wanky upper reaches of Bruntsfield last Tuesday for some good old fashioned food and booze. In Henrick's, I was gratified to see Mart choose Peeterman Artois instead of the usual Stella, propelled, I think, by the same desperation that caused me to swear off the hard stuff myself. "It tastes like water," opined Dom, hitting the nail on the head in a most concise fashion. Compared to the Irn-Bru fizz and chemical tang of Stella, the newcomer is pleasantly neutral in both taste and pH terms and lacks the mule-kick to the frontal lobe characteristic of a wife-beater-induced hangover.

I had an 80/- instead, as is my current wont. The resultant hangover from these bad boys is an entirely different matter. Where Stella neatly dangles a red-hot poker directly into the nerve centres of one's conscious mind, causing flashes of truly criminal pain to strike whenever one moves (hence the couch-bound nature of the typical Stella afflictee), an 80/- hangover is a more pastoral experience. The entire brain is enveloped in a slowing, treacly fug that retards one's movement and thought processes and which gently encourages one onto the couch. I cannot help but think fondly of such mornings, in stern contrast to the near-death experiences meted out by la famille Artois.

Anyway, Dom and I blew any sort of controlled hangover experiment out of the water by sharing a bottle of wine next door in the Apartment while Mart stuck chastely to bottled water. I've been to the Apartment once before, back in the mists of time, and could remember nothing about the experience apart from the fact that the waiting staff are either wafty model wannabes who move only from the waist down, or cheeky chappies who confuse absolutist browbeating over menu choices with friendly service.

This time round we had a friendly waiter who could actually have been a little more forward with menu suggestions, a so-so meal (waiter: "Oh, the chunky healthy lines are a bit dull sometimes. You should have gone for the sea bass if you'd wanted fish. And here's your bill.") and a seat at the window, and I can't really complain. The food might have been dull but the company most assuredly wasn't and we talked non-stop until we decamped (decanted might be a more appropriate term) to the Traverse for a final jar. A great night!

Apart from that, and a nice evening round at Neil and Vanessa's on Thursday, it feels like we've been a bit static of late. Ash's visa travails seem to be occupying most of the spare mental energy we both have with scouring websites and phoning contradictory helplines whenever we get the chance. The idea that a Canadian national should find it so hard to live here for an extended period of time without having to jump through flaming bureaucratic hoops is starting to annoy me!

The weekend in review:

On Saturday, we went to see Spider-Man 3. On Sunday, we mostly whined about how crap it was. Ash made banana bread on Sunday evening (in time for an impromptu visit from my parents, who were most appreciative) and that one cake tin of baked goods was better than $258 million-worth of Hollywood's finest produce. The film wasn't quite so dreadful as Pirates of the Caribbean 2 - how could it have been, unless it had been the vehicle for the return of Satan, the great deceiver and Lord of the Flies to this mortal plane? - but still, how is it possible to spend such a colossal amount of money and fail to come up with a decent script? Ah well. The banana bread of joy soothes all ills.

(And yes, it was a quiet week :)