Our final game of indoor football before the festive break was played on the Monday night following a three-day weekend that resembled a line from the hit 1997 song Tubthumping by Chumbawamba. There had been the office Christmas party on Friday, a Saturday night spent in Aulay’s, and the rare occasion of a World Cup final taking place on a Sunday in December, all of which combined to produce the most torturous hour of my life in Atlantis Leisure. It’s challenging enough trying to compete against your ageing body without adding extreme amounts of whisky drinks and lager drinks to the equation. The five-a-side game, from my perspective anyway, was less decking the halls with boughs of holly and more decking the halls with balls of folly. By the time it had mercifully been brought to an end, my shirt must have been drenched with enough Jameson to refill an empty bottle.
When I awoke on Tuesday, my nostrils weren’t filled with the usual scents of the season, such as a coal fire, pine trees, mulled wine, or mince pies, but rather the air was pungent with the deep heat gel I had applied generously to my aching leg muscles. In some ways, it came as a surprise that this was the first time I was using the heat rub in several weeks. First of all, the warming sensation of the gel was most welcome amidst the freezing temperatures of the last week and it turns out is probably at least as cost-efficient as turning on the heating. Apart from that, the weekend just passed brought the first snowfall of winter in the area, which in turn had left much of the town’s pavements unwalkable due to the ice. It seemed miraculous that a painful injury never occurred, particularly with my history.
Heavy snow, like a really hot summer or a woman accepting an invitation to go out with me, is always something that happened “around ten or eleven years ago” whenever it is talked about. It’s memorable in so much as you know that it occurred but is rare enough for it to be uncertain when. It was maybe around 2009 or 2010 when Oban experienced the most dramatic snowstorm that I can remember. The stuff was several inches deep when it first fell on a Saturday evening, and another coating was added to it on Sunday afternoon. In my memory, it lay around the street for days afterwards, and the ice was especially troublesome. That was the year frozen water joined the top tier in my list of nemeses, alongside mushrooms and people who stand at the traffic lights by a busy road and don’t think to press the button.
I was working as a supervisor in the Co-op supermarket at the time, which involved starting at six o’clock in the morning to take in deliveries and prepare the store for opening at seven. The walk down from Lower Soroba was like something out of a comic book sketch. I left home with all the confidence of a man who had never fallen on ice, and by the time I’d reached the bottom of our street I had hit the tarmac. I fell again just outside the hospital, then for a third time at the traffic lights opposite the high school. My tailbone was the shade of a ripened plum, but even it wasn’t as bruised as my pride. The only comfort I could take from the ordeal was that it had taken place under the cover of darkness and so there were no witnesses to my calamity. With that in mind, I could probably have gotten away without anybody ever knowing about the failure of my feet, but I was soon betrayed by the wince on my face whenever I moved an inch.
Ice has been my mortal enemy ever since that December morning. There is nothing I dread more than the prospect of having to go somewhere on a frozen pavement. A 39-year-old man, afraid to walk. Much of the snow in the town centre had turned to a slush the colour of dishwater when I was going home from the office party in the early hours of Saturday morning. It was deceptive, however, and the conditions underfoot were treacherous. On George Street, I walked past an abandoned shoe shortly before I almost lost my own footing, while on Combie Street a wheelie bin was on its side. How anybody loses a shoe on a night out has always baffled me. A scarf or a wallet I can understand, but how do you not notice that one of your feet is wetter than the other? By Saturday when I went to my dad’s in Lower Soroba, I was filled with fear. The Facebook page Information Oban was teeming with posts from people who were warning of the dangerous state of the pavements and car parks and bemoaning the shortage of available grit.
I knew it was bad when I walked around the corner to Lidl to pick up my morning rolls and found myself gripping the rail at the back of the loading bay the way a nervous child clutches a comforting favourite toy. It was impossible to travel anywhere with any kind of grace or poise, or at least it was for me. Others seemed to be managing it just fine, striding along without a worry in the world. I used to be like them, I thought. Now I find myself hating anybody who shows just an ounce of composure on a frosty street. I heard a lot about the 1984 Winter Olympic Games when I visited Sarajevo earlier in the year, and now I was being forced to channel Torvill & Dean just to be able to eat a bacon roll.
Walking back into town from Soroba, several beers deep on Saturday night, was one of the most challenging expeditions I have embarked upon. A rain shower on the frozen pavements earlier in the evening had left the surface glistening under the streetlights like a jewellery store window. Nothing has looked as menacing. If I had put as much focus, concentration, and determination into other aspects of my life as I did into staying upright on that walk home then there’s no telling what I could have achieved. There were points where the pavement looked so terrifying that there was no option but to walk on the road. Having weighed up the potential outcomes, I guess that being struck by an oncoming car was preferable to the embarrassment of falling on my arse again.
Making it all the way to Aulay’s without incident felt like the greatest triumph I have experienced all year, maybe beyond. It was certainly worthy of a celebratory pint. The bar was thriving with festive revelry; groups of work parties filled the booths while stragglers boogied in the space between the jukebox and the ladies’ bathroom. In a moment of surrealism from a virtual stockingful of them, someone selected the Marilyn Manson song mOBSCENE to act as the soundtrack to the Christmas scene. One woman approached the bar and reached into her shirt to find the drinks order for her table. Then she pulled her phone out from in there, and finally, after a prolonged period of fumbling around, she produced the kitty the group had collected to pay for their drinks. I was mesmerised by the act, struggling to come to terms with the idea that this approach was any easier than carrying a bag. The longer she spent searching for the next item, her torso resembling a bedsheet when a puppy has become trapped underneath and it’s trying to wrestle its way free, the more curious I became to see what would come out. When a magician performs the trick where they pull tissue from their sleeve, you know that the paper is eventually going to run out, but with this, it genuinely felt as though it could go on all night.
Later, a group of young women came in to toast a birthday. One of them was wearing a large badge which was emblazoned with the number 22, presumably to indicate that she was just turning twenty-two. She ordered a glass of pink gin and asked the barmaid if she could “down this in the toilet.” Just when you think that you have heard everything in Aulay’s, someone will always come along and prove you wrong. Sure enough, she waded through the mass of bodies and took her drink into the bathroom, emerging moments later with an empty glass and a look on her face that would have matched mine after I made it down Soroba Road unscathed. The unusual request was all I could think about for the rest of the night. I can only imagine that it was part of some social media challenge that an older person like me wouldn’t understand.
Some form of normality was restored a few days later when, in Aulay’s after the final Lorne pub quiz of the year, Geordie Pete was seen for the first time in many months. It would be a stretch to classify it a Christmas miracle, but I don’t think any of us expected to see Pete in the bar again, and there can’t be many things that are more warming than his big, toothy grin. His smile belied the fact that he was using a crutch due to an injury he had recently sustained. Pariss reached over from behind the bar and asked him if she could borrow the instrument. She disappeared into the public bar with it, and we were left to assume that she had a troublesome customer who she was needing to resort to extreme measures to convince to leave. However, she returned moments later with the crutch wrapped in a sparkling string of red tinsel.
Initially, Pete didn’t like the Christmas crutch, since red is the colour of Newcastle’s fiercest football rivals Sunderland, but he quickly warmed to it and was seen showing it off around the bar like an excited kid with a new toy. I couldn’t help but feel a little envious. The crutch was colourful and striking; a charming piece of festive fun that would make for a real talking point as an accoutrement to my tweed jacket. People have recently been telling me that I dress like a disgraced geography teacher, and the Christmas crutch would surely change all that. Maybe I was too fast in trumpeting my recent transformation into Torvill & Dean at the 1984 Winter Olympics. Deep heat soothed me on Monday, but ice might have been my friend after all. There’s a Christmas message in there about embracing your fears and you never know what might happen, which is probably easier to get behind than the one about an Instagram Reel featuring you downing a glass of gin in a public toilet.
A thick mist hung over Oban for several days in the week before Christmas, which if nothing else had the benefit of hiding the town’s thin display of festive lights from view. It made for quite an eerie spectacle around the area when all you could see was the distant islands wrapped up in a veil of fog, their vaguely visible lumps resembling the appearance of my own crudely papered gifts, or the way the tree in Argyll Square would suddenly emerge from the haze the way a cocktail stick does from a cloudy alcoholic concoction. The entire weekend was as though we were existing within the pages of a Stephen King novella, though it was impossible to say which one.
Nowhere was this more true than out in Pennyfuir Cemetery, where we took a family trip shortly after Santa had visited The Happy Wee Health Club. Graveyards are spooky places by their very nature, often found in remote locations surrounded by dark, bare trees, usually with an old church nearby; and the cold, low-lying mist on this occasion only added to that atmosphere. Just inside the gates at Pennyfuir sits a set of public toilets alongside an enclosed seating area which is described by a sign above its entrance as a “waiting room.” It’s hard not to be struck by the rich black comedy of there being a waiting room by the cemetery gates. Those benches are surely the least worn anywhere in Argyll. They could have labelled it anything else and it would have been better: seated area, benches, shelter, living room. Once I saw it I couldn’t stop from wondering if it was deliberate; a disgruntled council employee’s idea of fun on their last day in the job, or did they really name this little hut at the entrance of the cemetery the “waiting room” without realising the connotation?
After we accompanied dad to lay some flowers at mum’s grave, we all took a wander around the rest of the site on our way out. Some of the headstones around the place are majestic, particularly the much older ones from the turn of the last century that are as big as a fully-grown adult. It was fascinating to read many of the tributes engraved on these stones. You felt as though you were getting a small insight into the life the person lived. Not quite the full story, but something akin to reading the back cover of a book. A handful of the inscriptions were a little more on the disturbing side, though. I read one on the stone of an infant child that mentioned the cause of death being a hospital procedure, which is the first time I can remember seeing such a thing. Closeby, a headstone stated how the poor soul below had died in the Royal Hotel in 1927, whilst another made it known that the deceased had passed in number 33 Combie Street. I have always known that it’s only natural that over the years people will have died on the street where I live, and even in the very same flat I’m currently residing in, but it isn’t something I have ever given any thought to. Something about seeing the name of my street on a gravestone sent a chill down my spine, and I suppose it would have in mid-July, let alone a misty afternoon the week before Christmas. It seemed so final. I couldn’t help from thinking that a hundred years from now someone else would be wandering around Pennyfuir, their hair badly combed and troubled by the breeze, and from looking at my own headstone they might know me only by the fact that I once lived across the street from the Oban Grill House.
As well as visiting mum’s grave around the anniversary of her death on 17 December and what would have been her birthday on the 19th, another tradition our family has that is perhaps more in keeping with the festive spirit is when we get together for an evening of mulled wine consumption. Most other years we have done this on the night when the town’s Christmas lights have been switched on, but because we were in Inverness this year, we saved it for the last Saturday before Christmas. Since it had been agreed that we would all spend the big day at my brother’s flat, he and I ventured out to Benderloch for mulled wine at my sister’s place. I’m always impressed by the spread of food she lays out for guests. We enjoyed mince pies, cheese of all varieties, grapes of every shade, crackers, and venison burgers. I hosted the mulled wine night once, in 2018, and was questioned as to why I had prepared the bottle of wine in a pot with a whole, unpeeled orange sitting in the drink. The only downside this time was my inability to savour as much of the cheese as I ordinarily would have on account of being challenged to eat an entire cheese plate by a waitress at Soroba House the previous evening. I believe that I won the dare, although nothing about how I was feeling afterwards suggested that I was a successful man.
While the usual songs of the season streamed from a nearby Alexa device, a pack of playing cards was produced and it was suggested that we should entertain ourselves with a round of poker. I had never played a hand of any card game more complicated than snap, whilst at five years of age my niece had yet to be introduced to casino contests, so it was going to be up to my siblings to coach the youngest and oldest participants at the table. The first problem we faced was that we didn’t have any chips to place our bets with. We thought about dividing the stems of grapes amongst us, but they were much too juicy to last through more than a couple of hands. Our next best alternative was to use my niece’s collection of small, glossy, paperback books. There had to have been around sixty of these things, each one brightly coloured and depicting popular children’s stories. We shared the substitute chips out evenly between the four of us and embarked on a quick run through the basics of the game before playing it for real.
The first few hands were quite cagey, with more folding than is seen in the Mandarin Laundry. We each won a hand to add to our pile of books, but the truth is that as novices neither my niece nor I had any idea what we were doing. It quickly occurred to me that the skills needed to be successful at poker – a good poker face, the ability to refrain from going “all in” at the first time of asking, as well as having a great deal of luck – are exactly the ones I am lacking when it comes to interacting with women. Somehow, though, it didn’t matter that most of them were missing from my poker game since a lot of the time I was able to bluff and wing my way through.
Despite not having any idea of the value of the cards we were holding in relation to the ones being turned over on the table, my niece and I embarked on a strategy of recklessly raising the stakes on every move. Sometimes by as many as three or four books at a time. It was a real test of nerves, but it’s easy to hold your nerve when you have no clue what you’re doing. When the final card was turned and fortune decreed that whatever cards I was holding were better than my niece’s, I won a tremendous bundle of books. My five-year-old competitor became upset. Not only did she hate losing, but she also realised that she had lost her favourite book. From the next round forward we had to wait an eternity as she leafed through her collection to determine which tale it was safe to gamble. There was a valuable life lesson in there somewhere, but I was too busy trying to figure out why I had won to realise what it was.
Either side of the high-stakes poker game, the days were clouded with the fog of alcohol as well as the meteorological phenomenon of condensed water vapour. Hours after my mulled wine win, across the bar in Aulay’s, I was asked by the podcasting phycologist how I was doing. When I told her that I was feeling kinda rough, she took a couple of steps back, despite already being a decent social distance away from me. It was then that I remembered that in 2021 we have to be more expansive when telling others about our physical wellbeing lest the situation is misinterpreted and a round of lateral flow tests need to be ordered. I immediately sought to soothe the situation. “Don’t worry, it’s only the Tennent’s variant,” I insisted to a look questioning what on earth I was talking about. “I’m hungover, basically.”
A group of us went out to watch the Scottish League Cup final between Celtic and Hibernian the following afternoon when I was still in recovery from the aforementioned ailment. It was an entertaining game which Celtic won 2-1, ensuring that they went home with a more palpable prize than the books I was forced to hand back to my niece earlier in the weekend. Most of the guys in our company were on a self-imposed curfew for the night. The Plant Doctor left at seven for an evening of port and cheese with his girlfriend, whilst Brexit Guy had a date with a Chinese – which on this occasion was a takeaway dinner rather than the Colombian women he was due to be socialising with after Christmas. I insisted to my brother that I would be staying out no later than eight o’clock since we both had a few more days of work to get through before the festive break. This noble intention quickly crumbled as soon as I realised that the new barmaid was working on the other side in the public bar. I had talked to her a week earlier and discovered that she has the most remarkable knack for naming business ventures. She has started three or four different businesses of various natures, and although the ideas hadn’t worked out, it was difficult not to admire the creativity that went into the names as well as the determination to try again.
Aulay’s was much quieter than you might expect for the last Sunday before Christmas. With cases of the new Omicron variant on the rise, the Scottish Government had gone to great lengths to deter people from gathering in places like pubs and restaurants without introducing any real measures to compensate the hospitality industry for the loss in trade. At times we virtually had the entire bar to ourselves. There was one large group who briefly appeared alongside us. They had come over to Oban for the weekend from one of the nearby islands, either Islay or Jura, and they had the dialect to prove it. The men were at a level of drunkenness that suggested there was going to be no curfew on their good time. Of the group of four, the senior figure was the most talkative. He frequently leaned across the bar and blurted out a series of words, some of them in the right order, though the only one I could make any sense of was when he kept referring to me as Rupert. It was presumably an attempt at likening me to the long-running cartoon character Rupert Bear, on account of the yellow and black checked shirt I was wearing.
The nickname bothered me. Not because I found it insulting, or even when the pedant within me reasoned that it is Rupert’s trousers that are yellow and black, and not his shirt. It troubled me that so many other people seem to possess the uncanny ability to summon catchy names for folk they barely know when it takes me all my time to come up with a retort, if I can at all. I am struck by how much more useful a skill it is to have than my own quality of asking the most inept questions imaginable, such as when the young man next to the islanders introduced himself as being the captain of the Bulgarian rugby team and I sought to ask him about the worst injury he has suffered on the field. In the last six months alone I have been christened Penfold, Joe 90 and now Rupert. I have little idea of who I am meant to be these days, and evidently, neither does the barmaid who herself has a talent for naming things since she only came to realise on Christmas Eve that my name isn’t actually Rupert.
With hindsight, I suppose the weekend was always likely to be lost in the fog. It all started on Wednesday when we lost the quiz to a tie-break question. It was going well until we reached the food and drink round, which is up there amongst our worst pub quiz subjects. You can hear the groan from our table when that particular round is announced. We completely flopped in the ten questions, allowing Quadrophenia Alley to surge ahead of us, and although we ultimately clawed them back to take the quiz to a tie-break, our chances had been done for by the food and drink round. It’s ironic, really, that the same thing that keeps us alive in day-to-day life is what kills us in the quiz.
The Friday before our family mulled wine poker game was the office Christmas lunch, which in line with the decree from the Scottish Government was most definitely not a party, although it was the source of me picking up the Tennent’s variant. A small handful of us started the day in the Oban Inn before moving on for lunch. In the corner of the bar, someone began streaming the broadcast of the day’s Coronavirus update from the First Minister to parliament. There was an element of the surreal about sitting in a pub listening out to hear whether there would be an announcement of any further restrictions on hospitality venues. In a way, it was no different to sitting on a bench in a cemetery waiting room. Although the restrictions didn’t come that day, it was only a matter of time. You could have bet all your books on it.
In the sort of occurrence that can really make a person step back and take stock of how their life is going, I was recently on the receiving end of a diss from a garden centre Santa. It wasn’t a cruel jibe or a personal insult per se, but until that moment I had never been dissed by a man who impersonates Santa Claus for a living in the approach to Christmas, and these things only ever give pause for reflection. In the days since the incident, I have been doing little else but think back on the events immediately leading up to Santa’s slam and trying to determine for myself whether or not there was something in his words. In my quieter moments, towards the end of my morning meditation, for example, I would convince myself that the faux Father Christmas had gotten it all wrong; that an old man who operates out of a shed at the back of a garden centre couldn’t possibly know enough about me to make the kind of judgment he did. But something about it was still haunting me, and in the back of my mind, I couldn’t help from thinking that he might have had a point.
On the last Friday in November, my sister drove my brother and me up to Inverness so that we could all take my niece to the virtual reality sleigh ride at Simpsons Garden Centre on Sunday morning. At least, we were telling anybody who would listen that we were going to see Santa for our five-year-old niece, but the truth is that we were just as excited about it as she was. We used to travel up north to visit mum’s side of the family quite often when we were growing up, but I hadn’t made the trip since we went to the Belladrum Tartan Heart music festival in the summer of 2014. The drive on this occasion made me think a lot of those journeys as kids when dad would play the same mixtape on repeat every time. Without even looking you could almost map where we were on the route by which song was playing: Sit Down by James, Radio Wall of Sound by Slade, Joyride by Roxette. In an attempt to recreate the memory, we synched a phone to the car’s SatNav system and streamed a 90s playlist from Spotify. It seems to be that nostalgia and Christmas go together like mulled wine and mince pies; pine trees and fairy lights; the eighties Swedish pop duo Roxette and a family car journey to Inverness.
It was funny to think back on those trips and how I would struggle to make it as far as Fort William – or through one play of dad’s mixtape – without feeling car sick. I had a terrible stomach for travel sickness. It’s something that I appear to have grown out of, and this time the journey was a breeze – even with the conditions outside the car being far from a breeze, as 65 miles per hour winds from Storm Arwen raged across the country. If I hadn’t already given up my lunch by the time we stopped in Fort William then it was a near certainty that I would find myself on the shore of Loch Ness in Drumnadrochit with Urquhart Castle in the distance. There aren’t many more picturesque places to be sick, as the tour buses at the side of the road would attest. The old ruin wasn’t visible this time due to the thick veil of mist that was drawn across it by the winter storm, but I could picture it all the same. Back in those childhood days of weak-stomached travel there is a case that could have been made for the role played by Smarties in my car sickness, whilst as adults we were all snacking on oranges, Royal Gala apples and those mini cheese bites with the herbs on top. Time, as well as Covid, has changed us.
While my sister stayed outside the city with her friend Hannah for the weekend, my brother and I took residence in a city centre flat along the bank of the River Ness. It was an ideal location for sampling some of Inverness’s watering holes. Just a ten minute walk away was Glenalbyn Bar, whose sign advertised it as being “the oldest pub on the west of the river.” It seems that these days every pub has to claim that it’s the oldest in some category. The place wasn’t particularly busy for a Friday night, but it seemed friendly enough, and it was difficult to argue against the accuracy of the sign once you had seen the interior decor and the clientele. We were advised by the barmaid that it would be best not to take a seat in the large leather chairs by the corner of the bar since many people seemingly have a habit of falling asleep in them, but such was my brother’s and my confidence in our youth and the proximity of the seats to the bar that we felt we could risk it. As it turned out, the leather chairs were fantastically comfortable and it’s likely that the only reason we didn’t doze off in them was because someone had put a Slipknot song on the jukebox. In my list of places where I would least expect to hear heavy metal music, Glenalbyn Bar is right up there with Monster Fish & Chips, where we stopped in Fort Augustus earlier in the day and could hear the drumbeat from the car park.
The music was considerably better in MacGregor’s on Academy Street, where a man who was wearing a cream straw hat and a white tie with black musical notes played classic rock songs on the piano. It was impossible to imagine that anybody ever comes to MacGregor’s just to hear this guy play, but there was at least a table of women who were seated in the corner near the door who lapped it up and I believe even convinced him to come back for an encore. My favourite part of his performance was when he segued from Space Oddity into Rocket Man, a transition that was almost as smooth as the Cromarty beers on tap. I told a couple of locals I met the next day about the pianist and they immediately knew who I was talking about. That being said, they spoke of a chap who “looks scruffy but plays better than he dresses” which was not at all the impression I had of him. Maybe the tie was a bit gimmicky, but as someone who has been known to match his pocket square to the colour of his socks, I didn’t feel it was my place to say anything.
By the time we returned back along the river at the end of the night, Storm Arwen had really taken hold. My blue corduroy jacket couldn’t be pulled tightly enough around my body to shield it from the biting winds, which according to reports had already forced the closure of much of the rail network in the north and east of the country. Small snowflakes were seemingly suspended in mid-air, caught up in a struggle between gravity and the storm force winds. It could have made for the perfect festive scene, against the backdrop of Christmas lights and the sight of the moon peeking out from behind black clouds over the shoulder of Inverness Castle, had it not been for the fact that the wind was reaching into the very core of my body and tormenting my bladder the way it was ScotRail’s timetable, which was making it dangerous to stop and admire the view.
Although the snow seemingly never did make it all the way to the ground in Inverness, the roads and towns on the outskirts of the city were full of it, adding to my niece’s excitement when we all visited Smyths toy store the next morning. The shelves in this place were stacked so high that even if you craned your neck the way you would gaze up at the stars in the sky, you still wouldn’t see the very top. Every shelf down every aisle was greeted with a breathless “oh wow!” from my niece. I could just about relate to how she was feeling: Smyths is very much to a five-year-old toy lover as Oban Beer Seller is to a grown-up craft beer drinker.
Even when we were sitting in the popular coffee chain next door recovering over a cup of extravagantly priced froth and she spied a young man walking in wearing a Smyths uniform it provoked a great deal of animation. At the time I wondered at what age we lose that wide-eyed wonder for absolutely everything, but really, I don’t think that we actually do lose it – we just have to work harder at it. Following the multiple lockdowns of 2020/21, I’ve been finding that I get a thrill from doing all the simple things that I probably took for granted before, such as standing at the bar in Aulay’s on a Friday night or going out for dinner with friends. I was ecstatic upon finding a pair of green chinos when I was browsing in Next having arrived in Inverness to the realisation that I had only brought the trousers I was wearing. It was the same twelve hours earlier in MacGregor’s when the pianist eased from Space Oddity into Rocket Man.
With a fresh head of steam gained from our mugs of milk and steam, we ventured forth to the Eastgate Shopping Centre, which was resplendent in Christmas lights and decorations of all shapes and sizes. There was an enormous sleigh suspended above the escalator, gift-wrapped presents dangling wherever you looked, stars, reindeer, and baubles the size of your head. As we approached the old part of the building, we were suddenly reminded of the Noah’s Ark clock which dominates the back wall. It is one of only six such automation clocks of its kind in the UK. Each hour a monkey climbs up to the top of a tree and chimes a bell in order to tell those shoppers who aren’t carrying smartphones what time of day it is, while a piece of organ music plays and some of the windows of the ark open out to showcase a different animal every hour. I think we got a pair of reindeer, which I don’t remember featuring in the original Biblical tale, but I suppose Christmas is a time for indulgence. At midday each day the clock embellishes us with an even more dramatic display when all of the windows are opened and the entire diorama operates. As children visiting the Eastgate Centre with our parents all those years ago we would sit patiently on the nearby benches for up to thirty minutes before the hour waiting to watch this event, as though waiting for the lights to come down at the theatre, and on a good shopping trip we might even see it a second time. In some ways, I think we were probably more excited about the clock than my niece was.
When my sister and Hannah carried on to go shopping at one of the larger outlets outside the city centre, it left my brother and me with the unplanned opportunity to go to the pub and watch the football scores on television, in a turn of events that I can only imagine as being similar to rounding a corner and finding a display full of L.O.L. Surprise dolls. With the addition of a rare treble coming in for a grand winning of £11.35, it was just about the best Saturday ever.
Those additional digits in my online betting account proved useful when my brother and I took a £30 taxi from Inverness out to the Cottage Bar & Restaurant in the village of Maryburgh, where we had reserved a table for dinner with my sister and the rest of our family. Our driver was a friendly and talkative young fellow who professed that he had once driven the 66 miles from Inverness to Fort William in under an hour and a half. Having never been behind the wheel of a car myself it was difficult to know how to react to such a claim, but I think we were supposed to be impressed. If nothing else, we at least knew that we were probably going to arrive at the pub well before six o’clock, although it is probably the uneasiest my stomach has felt in the back seat of a car without having a bellyful of Smarties.
The Cottage is a cosy little family-run bar with further tables for dining out in the conservatory. It was the perfect setting for catching up with family who we hadn’t seen for too many years. I learned that my uncle is a huge fan of the four-piece Irish band U2, which for some reason surprised me. It seems like the sort of thing you should know about a close relative, especially when we had seen them play on the same tour, albeit on different dates. At the bar, over a pint of Cromarty’s wonderful local pale ale Happy Chappy, we even met a man who had left Oban more than forty years ago and worked with our grandfather in the hydro. People from Oban have a habit of getting everywhere. My attention was caught by an A4 poster on the wall behind the bar which was advertising the drawing of the monthly “meat raffle” due to take place that night. I wondered what the letters M.E.A.T stood for, presuming that it must be an acronym for some cause benefitting the surrounding area, and thought of how funny it would be if customers were buying tickets for this lottery without realising that the prizes on offer were, in fact, entirely cuts of meat.
As I discovered when the barmaid arrived at the table during our meal with a book of raffle tickets, a meat raffle is exactly that – a drawing where the winners each receive a different piece of meat. I couldn’t believe it, though since my luck seemed to be in for the day I paid a pound for one ticket. If I had thought it through I would have realised that transporting any winnings back down the road on a three-hour car journey on Monday would have been ridiculous, but a pound stake for a steak seemed too good a deal to pass up. The draw was being held back in the main bar, and my sister took her daughter through to watch the ceremony. To my niece’s delight, she was invited to assist with the raffle – an important job that was seemingly no less exciting than an entire shop filled with toys. Within minutes she appeared back in the conservatory clutching a green ticket and the whole chicken that evidently my uncle’s wife had won. The same act was repeated moments later when Donna had the winning number for a joint of beef, at which point I began hoping that no one else from our table would win a prize. I worried how the whole scene might look to the regulars in the pub when this five-year-old was just so happening to pull out all of the tickets that were bought by the adults at her table. It was all I could do to imagine the front page of the following Monday’s edition of the Press & Journal: “Oban gang foiled in Maryburgh meat raffle scheme.” It would be impossible for us to show our faces at any fête or fundraising gala ever again. We were innocent, of course, but then everybody says that.
Sunday was the big day, the one in which we were scheduled to meet Santa, and it began with an unusual request. We were due to meet our sister in the city centre sometime after 10:30 en route to making our way to Simpsons Garden Centre, however, our niece had awoken with a desire to wear a Christmas party dress like my sister and Hannah were kitted out in, and my brother and I were given the task of venturing across the river to Primark to pick one out. Whilst I have amassed plenty of experience in shopping for chinos and corduroy trousers, I’m not as familiar with what I’m looking for in terms of dresses for a five-year-old girl. I had never knowingly been in a Primark before, but it struck me as being the retail equivalent of international waters; a place transcending boundaries and laws. There were some people who had clearly wandered in there without knowing where they were going and they couldn’t find their way back out. Who knows how long they had been there. Typically, the girls clothing section was as far away from the entrance as you could get. To our surprise, there wasn’t an abundance of Christmas party dresses, and it took a bit of effort to find the two they had left in stock. It didn’t take very long for me to become aware that we were two men in our late thirties wearing black masks, a dazed look in our eyes and doubtless the fragrance of stale Happy Chappy still clinging to my corduroy jacket, wading our way through the girls section of Primark at 10.30 on a Sunday morning. I couldn’t help but feel that we were attracting curious glances from passing mothers, and not the sort of looks we’re usually hoping for. Suddenly Monday’s Press & Journal was looking worse and worse.
Fortunately, of the two dresses Primark had one of them was in our niece’s size, and she was so delighted to receive it that she conducted an outfit change in the car park of Simpsons Garden Centre. You don’t want to meet Santa without wearing your party dress, after all. Before we could see the man in red we were taken through the virtual reality sleigh ride experience, though only after we had resolved some confusion caused by the fact that we had somehow booked tickets for two different dates. We arrived at the right time but three-and-a-half weeks early for one slot and thirty minutes late for the second. The elves were thankfully very understanding of our predicament and helped rearrange Santa’s entire schedule to accommodate us. Our group of six was led through to sit in the large mechanical sleigh, where we were each handed a sanitised set of yellow goggles that felt as heavy as an Argos catalogue. If I’d thought that I was going to be wrapping something like this around my head then I probably wouldn’t have spent so much time combing my hair before we left the flat.
The ride itself was probably more enjoyable for the adults amongst us, with the presentation taking us through the skies of cities such as London and New York City and then out into orbit, looking back down on planet Earth before guiding us to Santa’s workshop in the North Pole. It was pretty cool, though it ended with one of Santa’s animated helpers informing us that we had failed the trial to join his team on Christmas Eve and that they were just going to carry on delivering presents themselves. I don’t know, I felt like I could have done without a virtual reality failure being added to all of the real ones. From there we walked through Santa’s living room, which had a human-sized taxidermied owl and an enormous bear dressed in a three-piece tweed suit sitting on a golden throne. As far as feng shui goes, Santa’s energy is all over the place.
Meeting Santa was always a magical experience, I seem to remember. It didn’t matter if one week he was big and jolly when dropping in to the primary school Christmas party and the next he had gone through a remarkable weight loss programme to greet children in the Caledonian Hotel, or if his whiskers had a distinct whiff of tobacco. Our capacity for suspending disbelief when young is incredible. The Simpsons Garden Centre Santa was on the short side, had little festive cheer to speak of around the stomach department and was clean-shaven on his cheeks, with only an explosion of fluffy white covering the front of his face like an oversized surgical mask. He was very pleasant, though, and seemed to be following the How To Be Santa Claus manual to the letter. Santa asked the usual questions about what my niece would like to receive from him on the 25th of December, what she would be leaving out for him to eat and drink when he visits on Christmas Eve and whether or not her house has a chimney. Upon hearing that there is no chimney in my sister’s home, Santa showed us the key he uses to enter any house in the world that doesn’t have a fireplace for him to flop down into. It was pretty big, probably as long as a good-sized television remote control – the sort of thing that would be a nightmare to find a replacement for in Timpsons if it was ever lost.
Santa asked my niece about everyone who had come along with her to meet him, and when she reached my brother and me at the end of the room he paused. On the desk before him were a few different sheets of paper, which Santa reached for. He repeated our names and announced that, as he suspected, both of us were on his naughty list. My niece found this greatly amusing and laughed out loud, whereas on the inside I was seething. It seemed like an unnecessary slight on my character, particularly when one of my most proficient failures is my effort to get on anybody else’s naughty list. I couldn’t understand where the garden centre Santa got off making such a statement, especially when he doesn’t have the powers to see everything as the actual Santa has. Maybe if he had witnessed my part in the suspected ruse to defraud the Cottage Bar’s meat raffle of its two main prizes I could concede my place on the naughty list, but then nothing was ever proven, and by rights our entire family should have been struck from the nice list if that was the standard Santa was holding.
Usually garden centres are a place of boundless optimism, filled with all of these beautiful plants that you look at and imagine how much colour and life they could bring to your home. It is easy to believe that I might one day get around to taking care of a plant like the ones you see there, even if in reality it never happens. My optimism was being stifled by Santa’s barbed comments, however, and I was finding it difficult to concentrate on anything else. Even when Simpsons had an assortment of Christmas decorations as far as the eye could see and every fragrance you could think of, from scented candles to bath bombs to chocolate, I could think of nothing but the fake Santa’s announcement that I was on his fake naughty list. Word was beginning to spread around that my niece had confided in my sister that Santa had probably put my brother and me on the naughty list due to all the wine we drink, which was the moment I realised that we were probably going to be stuck on his list forever, despite being told by him that we had around twenty-seven days to change our ways and be transferred to the nice list.
The episode was still playing on my mind when we went out for a couple of games of bowling at the Inverness Rollerbowl later in the afternoon. Bowling, like seeing Santa, isn’t something that I had done since being much younger, and I could only hope that it would go better than that particular event. Somehow the red and blue bowling shoes complimented my navy corduroy attire quite well, which made me feel more at ease with things. I had never considered what a bowling look should be, but I think I pulled it off. The shoes were actually so comfortable that I walked out of the place at the end of the night with them still on my feet and didn’t realise until my uncle pointed out my mistake. Imagine adding the theft of a size 12 pair of bowling shoes to the shame of rigging a meat raffle and being caught wandering around the girls clothing section in Primark. The woman behind the counter didn’t seem too perturbed when I walked back inside and confessed to my crime. Apparently they see this sort of thing all the time, and often people will phone the alley when they get home and realise that they are still wearing the bowling shoes.
Away from the catwalk and onto the actual sport, my niece opened our game by knocking down nine pins with the very first bowl of her life. Despite having the advantage of the bumpers that are available to children, she didn’t even need them on her second round when she rolled the ball straight down the middle of the lane and hit a strike. Things were going so well for her that she was developing her own wee victory dance after every round she played. I threw two gutters in my first round; the pins weren’t even close to being troubled, and everyone else was fairly terrible, too. It was gutting.
I went up to the bar hoping that another beer would be the thing to help improve my hand-eye coordination. It’s my experience that alcohol at least gives the illusion of developing better physical qualities. The young woman who was tending bar had hair that was as dark as a stormy winter night, and as she poured my drinks I thought to ask if she could see the spectacle that was unfolding on lane 22. I described the way that my five-year-old niece was giving us all a bowling lesson and how I had to get myself out of there after completely missing the pins with my first two attempts. She laughed as I explained how all this had come after I was mercilessly dissed by the garden centre Santa. “It sounds like you’re having a pretty bad day,” she said with the kind of sympathy that only a barmaid can have for a drunk bowler. It is difficult to say with any certainty whether it was the beer or the sound of someone laughing at my jokes, but I returned to our game and found that I could suddenly bowl. Within minutes I actually smashed a strike. Throughout my life, I have become used to striking out, but this was different altogether.
Although it was probably only in my head, things were beginning to heat up in a competitive sense. I could tell that my niece was starting to tire of the game as it reached the later rounds, as is always likely to happen when you’re five and there’s an arcade full of games to explore. The closer the margin between our scores narrowed, the more desperate I became to win. Perhaps the best thing for an uncle to do when it became clear that a competent final round would snatch a comeback win right out of the hands of his niece would be to roll the ball into the gutter and allow her to have the glory. Maybe anybody else would have done that. But the way I saw it, my niece would have forgotten all about whether she won or lost her first game of bowling by the time she fell asleep that night. It wasn’t like meeting Santa, exploring the vast aisles of Smyths toy store, drawing the tickets for a meat raffle, or even listening to a mixtape on a long car journey.
For me, on the other hand, winning a game of bowling – even against my five-year-old niece – was everything. It would probably be the achievement I would remember years from now when everybody else I know is proudly talking about their career, their wife and their children. So I picked up the medium-sized purple ball which had become my weapon of choice in this battle, strode up to the line and bowled a strike to win the game. The garden centre Santa might have been right about me all along, but at least now I could justify it.
Despite the fact that at 37 years of age I had never set my eyes on an actual chessboard, I managed to develop a fascination with the game by the time 2020 was drawing to an end. For no reason other than sheer ignorance I had always viewed chess as being a pursuit for lonely nerds who had nothing better to do with their time, though really, wasn’t that all of us this year? It was the Netflix show The Queen’s Gambit that was responsible for me re-examining my views on chess. The series tells the story of a young girl in an orphanage who begins to play chess with the janitor in the basement, and it turns out that she has a natural gift for it. As she grows older, Beth battles with addiction to the tranquillizer pills she was given each day in the orphanage and a dependency on alcohol, as well as a string of broken relationships, all while becoming a successful chess prodigy. The show was mesmerising, both for Anya Taylor-Joy’s performance and the tense scenes portraying the game of chess. I couldn’t help but want to learn how to play, and let’s face it, it’s not like I had anything else to be doing.
Playing online seemed my best option since I wasn’t yet interested enough to spend any kind of money, and the website chess.com had everything I was looking for. There were tutorial videos for beginners which explained the basics of the game, alongside a vast library of lessons that expanded on many of the principles and theories of chess. Users could get some practice in against a variety of computer bots of different difficulties, which is where I decided to start. For absolute novices like me there was an option to play with assistance, where the app would offer a few suggested moves each turn and warn you if any of your pieces were in danger. After the opening move, the system would tell you that you had made the Réti Opening or the King’s Gambit, which sounded impressive, but really, after a couple of weeks of playing the game this way, I wasn’t any wiser at what I was doing.
Frequently once I had moved a piece a yellow “inaccuracy” notice would flash up on the screen, which presumably meant that I wasn’t following the book opening through its natural course. Sometimes the app would tell me that I had made a “mistake”, which was accompanied by an ominous sound. If I had made a really terrible move I would be reprimanded in red lettering with the word “blunder!” It seemed harsh to have my inadequacies pointed out in such blunt terms, the sort of thing I might ordinarily hear if I was being given a running commentary on my approach to attempt conversation with a woman in a bar. Every now and again I would beat the computer bot and it would feel good, but effectively it was like riding a bicycle with the stabilisers on: I knew that I was getting somewhere, but I didn’t really understand how. Whenever I would take the stabilisers off and play a game without any assistance, I would fall flat on my face. Since I preferred occasionally winning, I continued to learn how to play the game with the assistance on.
I was forced to keep my new-found interest in chess in check for a couple of days as we celebrated the Christmas festivities. Our family kept things reasonably as normal within the restrictions of the time, though dad decided that with him likely being in line to receive the vaccine within months it would be foolish to take the risk of spending five or six hours indoors with the rest of us, which made sense. Who would want to risk being in our company at the best of times? I asked myself. My sister hosted Christmas once again, but before that my brother and I visited on Christmas Eve for a trial run of sorts – or, as our sister’s partner put it, to find out to what extent we could all handle mixing our drinks. Our niece was drunk on the seasonal spirits of another sort, hyper from the imminent arrival of Santa Claus. Before bed-time, she was keen to organise a glass of milk and a plate of cookies for our jolly visitor, along with a carrot for Rudolph, which was placed on the step outside. Upstairs, in secretive tones, we considered why it was that Santa always left behind a little crumb from the offerings laid out for him. Would the whole ruse really fall apart if Santa started to eat every morsel of food left for him on plates around the world?
We drank glasses of pink gin followed later by large Jack Daniels and Cokes as we looked to prepare ourselves for the big day ahead, sort of like putting a military unit through a series of intensive drills before sending them off into battle; there’s little point in going to war if you don’t know what to expect. The four of us played the 8 years+ version of the board game Cards Against Humanity, which was more family-friendly than the regular variant, whilst a true-crime documentary about a child abducting sect in Australia played on the television in the background. Nobody could say that we didn’t know how to party. I seemed to be excelling at the 8 years+ pack of Cards Against Humanity, picking up more cards than I usually would, having perhaps finally found my level of maturity.
It was sometime around midnight, while we were talking about the vivid dreams we had had and my brother’s experiences with sleepwalking that the door creaked open and my niece shuffled into the room, bleary-eyed, and announced that she had been downstairs and seen that there were presents underneath the Christmas tree. Santa had been. I didn’t have a clue what a parent would do in that moment when even as a bystander I was filled with panic. It was down to my sister to talk her excited girl down from her hype, and I think she eventually had to get into bed with her to make sure that she would go back to sleep and stay in bed so that she could save Santa’s spoils for the morning. I had never seen a bank robber go to all the trouble of planning the perfect heist, studying the schematics of the property and making sure that they knew the exact time when the guards would be drunk and deeply involved in their card game, only to go and turn himself in when all that is left to do is open the vault and help himself, but somehow I think it wouldn’t look all that different to the scene on Christmas Eve. I thought back to my games on chess.com and imagined that my niece had gotten into a position where she had the opposition king in check, only to decide to go and capture a rook instead. Blunder!
Each year since I had moved into my single occupancy flat I bought myself a block of Stilton cheese with my Christmas shopping, and I had done the same this year. I never really knew why this became a tradition of mine since I hardly bought any type of cheese during the other eleven months of the year, and it was difficult to know what to do with the rest of the block after it was opened for the first serving, much like the 1KG bag of carrots I had bought because they were only fourteen pence and I needed one for the beef goulash I was preparing. Still though, I came to recognise the pungent waft of blue cheese each time I opened my fridge in the days which followed as being the true essence of Christmas.
I needn’t have bothered trying to think of a dish to use up some more of my Stilton on Christmas morning since my sister and her partner put on their usual incredible banquet of food later in the day. I think I had lost count of the number of courses somewhere after the fourth. It was immense, and there was booze of every description to go with it. It was impossible to tell who had the most excitement: my niece for the Elsa doll she had been waiting to open from Santa since midnight, or my sister for the bottle of Tequila Rose in the fridge. My own excitement threatened to reach a similar level when I opened the gift from my sister and her partner, which was so large that I had to enlist my niece to help me with it. They had got me a vintage globe drinks cabinet, which was something I had coveted for years. It was the first piece of furniture I wanted to buy when I moved into my flat in 2018, but I procrastinated over whether I had the space for such an elaborate display and eventually forgot all about it. Ever since, my bottles of Jack Daniels and Jameson, along with glasses and some other spirits that prospective guests might enjoy, have shared the same cupboard as my books, which made for quite a display itself, though it was becoming cramped as I bought more books or was gifted with bottles. Occasionally I considered moving my own handwritten notebooks out of the cupboard to make some room, but I was reluctant since it is the only time I will be able to see my work alongside that of Charles Bukowski, Jack Kerouac, and David Sedaris, so I just found different ways of piling them on top of one another.
It wasn’t just the prospect of having more space on the shelves in my cupboard which excited me about the globe drinks trolley. I liked to think about the first time I would be able to have people in my flat for post-pub drinks after all of the restrictions had been lifted. They would admire the vintage globe in the corner of the living room and ask which year the map was drawn. Obviously I would have no idea, so I would quickly move to distract from the question by lifting up the top of the globe to reveal the bottles contained within. It was thrilling to imagine that there would be a talking point for my guests other than for them to ask “have you ever thought about watering your plant?” or “is it always this dark in here?”
Not every present exchanged came with such immediately obvious benefits. Dad gave each of us an inflatable camping pillow which through the day became a source of bemused joy. My niece was the first to unwrap hers, and the look on her face surely matched those on ours when we were four-years-old and would receive a pair of socks. It was a look somewhere between confusion and frustration, the sort reserved for when you see someone in the supermarket who isn’t wearing a mask. I recognised the look well, but also understood that if it was anything like me, who after thirty years came to appreciate the value of a pair of socks – especially if they were with a tie of the same colour – then, in time, an inflatable pillow might not seem all that bad.
One-by-one we each dipped into the carrier bag of goodies dad had prepared for us and opened our inflatable camping pillows. He later explained to us over video chat that he often struggles to know what to get for everyone and he didn’t want to just “buy any old crap” such as a Lynx deodorant gift set. We didn’t know what this meant, though by the evening, and after a couple of shots of Tequila Rose, some of us were beginning to find some uses for the pillows. My sister’s partner was already thinking of another summer camping trip like the one they had enjoyed this year, while in my mind I could see the inflatable pillow as being handy for those Friday nights when I had a habit of falling asleep on the couch. My niece found that it was a comfortable headrest for when she was laying back playing her favourite new Paw Patrol game, discovering that sometimes, if you are patient, you can still find your checkmate.
As I have grown older, I seem to have gotten better at Christmas shopping. My ability in the department of gift buying is seemingly akin to a fine wine; not that my budget would ever allow me to be that generous with my presents. It isn’t that the quality of my gifts has improved over the years – just ask my sister, who to this day still regrets the 12-inch traditional crepe maker that I handed over on Christmas Day 2019 and which enjoyed substantial use throughout the subsequent months of lockdown – but more a case that I have become better at getting my shopping out of the way early in the festive period. Of course, I would still be found on my knees on the floor of my living room on Christmas Eve 2019, surrounded by a jigsaw of discarded wrapping paper, grunting and cursing as I attempted to fold the corners of the red sheet neatly into place around a Peppa Pig sticker book, with scrumpled snowmen smiling smugly up at me, but at least I could say that I had done my shopping.
The main benefit of making sure that I had bought presents for everybody else early in the month was that it meant I could spend more time buying things for myself. In the weeks before Christmas, I looked to get myself into the spirit of the season by making a couple of visits to the Oban Beer Seller to stock up on some suitably festive drinks for the period ahead. The shop was a veritable Santa’s grotto of goodies tucked away in the shadow of McCaig’s Tower and opposite the Distillery on Stafford Street, which, when all lit up, could so easily have been a scene fashioned from gingerbread on a decorative carousel. Christmas-inspired beers had long been one of my favourite things about the month of December. Nothing quite said Christmas to me like drinking those themed beers whilst watching the Bill Murray film Scrooged by an open fire, or underneath around half a dozen layers as the case was in the years after I moved into my own flat. The best ones were usually chocolate porters or dark ales, sometimes sweetened with flavours of berries or honey, and often finished with the spice of the season, cinnamon. It was a different taste to the alcohol we were allowed to drink at the table during the Christmas dinners of our youth, usually a Babycham or a glass of Bucks Fizz, when I would like to try and convince everybody that I was drunk, unlike when I was older and I would insist that I wasn’t drunk and could handle one more drink. Nobody was for believing it on either occasion.
Those beers always had the most wonderful names, sobriety breaking sobriquets such as Santa Paws, Fairytale of Brew York, Hoppy Christmas, and Winter Mess, which seemed a particularly fitting purchase in 2020 of all years. I loaded a canvas bag full with beers, eleven of them in total, at which point Karen asked me if I would like to pick up one more, since she was offering a free glass worth £4.99 with every dozen beers bought. In that moment, nothing made more sense to me than buying another can of beer and obtaining the free glass that it could be enjoyed in. It always seemed foolish to look a gift horse in the mouth, let alone a gift glass in the rim, and I picked up an oat lager to complete my order. I had officially finished my Christmas shopping for the year, and in the process was treated to my first gift with it.
There’s almost nothing that brings as much hope as a bag filled with beers does. It is as though the entire world is within reach, just the cracking of a can away. With hops the possibilities seem limitless, you can go anywhere and be anyone. It was on one of those drunken journeys, I came to believe, that I finally got around to ordering The Tender Bar, a book which had been recommended to me by a woman in our album club. She had suggested to me some months earlier that I would enjoy the memoir by J.R. Moehringer since he writes in the same loving, almost romantic, way about his favourite local bar that I often speak of Aulay’s. By the middle of December, Aulay’s had become just like any other romance I had enjoyed in my life. The pub had been closed due to government restrictions since October and the good times spent there had become a distant memory; the former lover who no longer calls or texts, its presence on the street not much more than a spectre. Does she think of me as much as I think about her? I would ask myself every time I passed the empty bar, the faint smell of Tennent’s still lingering in the mind.
The book was delivered to my dad’s like all of my packages were, since the mailbox at my flat was seemingly designed for nothing much larger than a Christmas card. I could tell that something wasn’t right as soon as I tore open the World of Books package and spied the dog-eared red sticker attached near the bottom-right of the book’s cover informing whoever happened to be holding the copy in their hands that the book was a Der Spiegel bestseller. I knew from my high school language classes that Der Spiegel is a popular German news magazine, and it struck me as being odd that it was considered that the fact The Tender Bar is a bestseller in Germany was something I should know about. Who buys a book because it sold well in Germany?
When I turned the book over to read the synopsis on the back, I was given my second clue that things had gone awry. The words were unintelligible and offered me no indication as to the romantic sentimentalities of the memoir. It was printed entirely in German. The book I was holding was the Deutsche edition which, according to the price on the barcode, retailed for €9.95. I could hardly believe that such a thing could happen. First I bought a pizza that unbeknownst to me had mushrooms amidst the topping, and now this. It was apparent that I was going to have to pay more attention to product descriptions when I was shopping, though surely the fact that the book was printed in German would have been quite obvious on the website.
I tried to console myself with the knowledge that, really, it wasn’t my fault that I had bought the wrong book, it could have happened to anyone. In an effort to lighten my mood, I liked to imagine that this particular copy of The Tender Bar had been bought and sold again over and over through the World of Books store, purchased by one bookworm after another, completely unaware that it was a German edition that would be useless to anyone who didn’t understand the language, then hastily sold on again out of embarrassment. No-one would be willing to own up to the mistake they had made in buying a book that they could never read, and it would just be passed around for eternity without a word spoken about it, sort of like the way someone gifts you a bottle of vodka when you are a whisky drinker and you sneakily change the label on the gift bag and give it to someone else at their next birthday.
I wasn’t in the mood to re-gift my German copy of The Tender Bar, not even as a joke, and in fact, I wasn’t sure how I was feeling about Christmas at all, especially after it was announced that Scotland would effectively be going back into lockdown from the 26th. Despite feeling pretty pleased with myself for once again doing a good job with my shopping – for other people, at least – December just didn’t seem very Christmassy, even though many places around town looked to be decorated with much more flair than in previous years. There were some especially striking light displays on the outsides of houses and hotels, although it seemed unusual to me that they would go to such an effort when presumably most of the hotels were empty due to the pandemic. Lights of all colours would dance exuberantly around the exterior of dark hotels, giving the appearance of a disco that nobody had turned up for. From my own perspective, things were bleak enough without me adding my own dismal decorations to the mix. I just couldn’t bring myself to dust off the tiny old Christmas tree I had inherited from the 1990s or to line up along the edge of my mantel place the three-piece set of plush Christmas figurines I had bought a couple of years earlier, knowing that the little Santa, reindeer and snowman ornaments would be my only prospect of company for the foreseeable future. That had been the case in previous years, of course, but at least then I could tell myself that there was a chance it wouldn’t be. At times in December I was feeling like a cheap cracker that has just been pulled apart to no fanfare: the bang just isn’t there, and all that’s left is a stupid joke that nobody finds funny.
Christmas in the midst of a pandemic was always going to be a strange thing. Ordinarily, the last working Friday before the big day would have been set aside for our office party, but like everything else, such things weren’t possible under the restrictions of the time. Instead, I went to the Lorne’s beer garden with the plant doctor, where I met up with a work colleague and her friend. It was the first time I had shared a drink with the young island woman since the night of the Royal Rumpus music event in February, when it would be more accurate to say that she had shared a drink with my shoes. Perhaps one of the advantages of social distancing was that our groups were sat at separate tables and we could enjoy our drinks in the conventional way. At an adjacent table was sitting a man who was shaped like a Christmas pudding, and he struck up a conversation with the plant doctor and myself by asking us how many grapes or potatoes we thought a person with diabetes was allowed to eat in a single day. The plant doctor approached the question in a typically scientific manner, reasoning that it would depend on the diabetic’s diet and body mass as well as the type and size of the potato, amongst other factors. All I could think about was how terrible an existence it must be to have to log every item of food you eat in a day, even a single grape. It would probably be easier now, in the times of Covid, when people don’t have much better to do with their lives. But any other time? What a chore.
“And bananas,” the man interjected, as though suddenly remembering. “How many of those are you allowed to eat if you have diabetes?” He had initially seemed quite suspicious of me and the plant doctor when we arrived in the beer garden wearing our face coverings, his narrow-eyed glances almost questioning: what the hell do you think you’re doing wearing that shit out here? I wondered if all of these questions about grapes and potatoes were what he did when he sensed a weakness about another person, a test of sorts. We tried our best to answer sensibly, but how could we know what it would be like to be diabetic? It wouldn’t be much different to trying to read the German edition of a book you’d mistakenly bought online without knowing a word of the language. “How many of those can you have?” I finally asked, nodding my head in the direction of his half-empty glass of Tennent’s Lager. “Ah, I drink pints of the stuff every day and it’s never done me any harm,” he said with a smile, and I presumed that we had passed his test.
The plant doctor and I turned our attention to reminiscing about the night a year or so earlier when I returned to his flat after the pub and he tricked me into eating mushrooms, which were deep within the biggest omelette I had ever seen. Hearing the phrase “tricked me into eating mushrooms” seemed to draw the attention of the young women who were in our company at the next table. Maybe they hadn’t been landed with the pair of dweeby dorks they first thought they were with. “Were they magic?” One of them asked, almost giddy. We were quickly forced into confessing that we weren’t the fun guys the girls were suddenly picturing and we had in fact only eaten a mushroom omelette with regular store-bought mushrooms – or half-eaten, in my case, once I’d discovered the grizzly secret ingredient.
From across the garden another man was keen to have his voice heard. The figure resembled a scarecrow who wasn’t having very much success in its role; a dirty red baseball cap sat atop a mop of hair the same shade as the fur of an invasive species of squirrel. He was a fascinating fella who had clearly been rehomed in The Lorne from one of the town’s less salubrious establishments, though for all his quirks he seemed harmless enough, even if he did briefly threaten to ignite a Hebridean war with my colleague when he announced that he hails from Coll and anyone who is from Mull is a “fake islander.” I never really understood his claim, though it did at least result in what at one stage seemed like it could have been an endless supply of “Coll girl” puns.
What struck me most about the man – who called himself George, though I wasn’t sure how much I believed it – was a particular turn of phrase he used at the height of his bombastic blethering. I wasn’t paying attention closely enough to pick up on the context, but he was talking about a conversation he had apparently had with his mother, who it was to be presumed is dead. In this discussion, she had told her son that she hoped to see him in heaven soon because, in his words, “I’m due a good few clatterings.”
It was a phrase that was stuck in my thoughts for days, the sort that you only ever hear when you’re drunk in the pub. One night in the pub with friends and colleagues, listening to strange characters and their unusual ways with words, had given my bleak festive blues a good clattering. I woke up on my couch early on Saturday morning, still fully clothed in my zebra-coloured tie and my black sweater vest, my trousers and my shoes, and I couldn’t tell if what I was feeling was schadenfreude or a winter mess.
It was around four days before the shortest day when it occurred to me that I had forgotten to decorate my flat for Christmas. The cobweb that was tangled around the five red candles which stood at the foot of the fireplace was white, but it didn’t bring the same festive feel that a string of tinsel would have. While the temperature in my home was chilly and in keeping with the season, no-one ever wanted to come indoors to an actual snowman.
The realisation of my festal faux pas was sparked by a little pink headband which had been sighted lying on the pavement outside my living room window some days before. When I first saw the small piece of pink material I wondered, unwilling to stop in my tracks to study it completely, if it might have been a garment of underwear, and if people may have been impressed by the idea that it had perhaps been tossed from my flat. As the winter days wore on, the wee pink headband became increasingly dirty and beaten by the inclement weather, trodden upon by people who didn’t care that it might have been the trophy of some sexual conquest I had enjoyed the previous weekend. Eventually, it had curled upon itself and become dramatically misshapen, and it reminded me of the nine-foot artificial pine garland I had bought from eBay a year earlier.
Removing the nine-foot artificial pine garland from the utility cupboard in the kitchen, where it had been stored since the early days in January when everybody was trying to eradicate all memories of Christmas from their homes, proved to be a much more challenging exercise than when I had squashed the awkward green thing in all those months ago. When I pulled the beast out, it brought with it many other suppressed items: a 250 piece stationery set which hadn’t been used nearly as much as I had anticipated when I bought it, a 2018 Aldi Christmas magazine that wouldn’t have been of any use even if I wanted it to be, a roll of sellotape, and the charging cable for my stubble trimmer. I carried the garland through to the living room and struggled to mount it onto the mantel place, its twisted green ends dangling dangerously over the sides of the shelf. I was trying to fashion a way of attaching the garland to the mirror, as I had done the previous year, but like a romantic interlude the whole thing unravelled before me, and the loose hanging end of one side of the decoration sent the candle holder sprawling across the oak flooring, the explosion of red wax resembling a crime scene. I decided that the mantel place could do without the nine-foot pine garland, and I returned it to the kitchen cupboard where it wouldn’t be able to wreak any more havoc.
Midnight mass wasn’t as busy as I thought it would be
In contrast to my flat, the scene in The Lorne was much more festive when twelve teams gathered for the final pub quiz of 2019. To mark the occasion, everyone from The Unlikely Lads turned up wearing their Christmas jumpers as we were seeking our first win as a breakaway outfit. We had confidence in numbers, with six being the greatest number of people we had encouraged to join our crusade. In addition to me, with my specialist knowledge in the fields of world beers, that one good round on Budapest and, occasionally, the nationality of Celtic players, there were five young women with varying degrees of expertise in medicine. Amongst them were three ladies who I had never met before. Given the anxiety I would feel when I encountered one woman for the first time, the nervous awkwardness was multiplied by three as we tackled the picture round, where we had to identify the famous Santas. Even though I was never that great with maths, I knew that the numbers spelt trouble.
My ability to focus on the numerous rounds of Christmas-themed questions quickly evaporated like the bubbles in a Christmas morning glass of Prosecco. Far from being able to formulate a guess for the number of hours the Guinness world record was set for time spent inside an inflatable snow globe, my mind had been turned upside down by the dilemma of trying to think of interesting conversation for an audience of five women.
In particular, my attention was drawn to the woman whose hair was the same colour as the piece of coal which an unruly child might have found in his stocking on the twenty-fifth. Her accent was musical, the sort of piece that when you first hear it you can’t identify the instruments or even understand what it is about it that you like, but you know that you do and you want to hear it again. Every time she spoke it was all I could do to keep myself from singing along. It took me at least three rounds of Christmas-themed pub quiz questions before I could summon the courage to find out more about the voice that for days afterwards would float around the recesses of my mind like snowflakes in a shaken globe. I leaned across the table to deliver the question which I felt sure would endear me.
“I’m fascinated by your voice,” I began. “Where does your accent come from?” I paused for a moment, my eyes locked on hers. “Other than your throat, I mean.”
Although she smiled, it was the sort of smile you see when someone pulls away the wrapping paper on a Christmas present and finds a Lynx deodorant set inside. A smile of resignation. As if to say, I knew that was coming. I knew there and then that the only place I would be hearing that piece of music again would be in the back of my head.
Meanwhile at the table, an elaborate tale was being told by the tallest girl I had ever seen, a story which at Christmas time emphasised the true value of friendship. The episode centred on a group of girls, of which the fabulously tall lass was one, who were enjoying a night out in Glasgow some years earlier. It was late on in the night, and the group were taking a taxi to a popular club in the city. The effects of the evening’s festivities were beginning to be felt in the back seat of the car as it motored along the M8, and it became clear to some of the girls that their friend was suffering and on the verge of expelling some of the cocktails she had been enjoying. The girl with the generous height extended her hands to act as a basin beneath the chin of her inebriated friend, while another of the group asked the driver if he had a carrier bag, each of them aware of the consequence of throwing up in a taxi.
“Someone isn’t being sick back there, are they?” The driver responded to the request for a bag. “You know it’s an eighty-pounds fine if you are.”
The girls resigned themselves to their fate, worried that as students they could ill-afford to cough up £80 for a fine, or at least to have £80 coughed up over the back seat of a taxi. They worked in unison, opening the windows of the car and cupping their hands under the mouth of their stricken pal to catch the next heave, funnelling it out of the window and onto the passing motorway with the care of a water carrier on their way back from the well in some sun-beaten desert village. Eventually, they made it into Glasgow city centre with the interior of the taxi unscathed. The heavy rainfall of the night helped to wash away much of their endeavour, and by the time they reached the club, the ladies were waved in without question.
It was the sort of story that once you’d heard you couldn’t stop thinking about. The moral was so pure and lifting, maybe not the makings of a Hallmark movie, but it had a charm all the same. I found myself questioning the lengths I would go to help another person, and whether I could cup a friend’s vomit in my hands in order to avoid paying a fine: there were many times when I had nervously clutched my tie against my chest as I was throwing up into a toilet bowl, and so I considered that it would be unlikely. At the end of it all, The Unlikely Lads finished fourth in the final quiz of the year.
Things seemed a lot more sedate on Christmas Eve when I stepped out to collect my final piece of Christmas shopping, which had been sitting in the Royal Mail depot for a couple of days. On George Street, some pedestrians were seen wearing red Santa hats. Most of the women I saw around town were walking with carefree confidence, evidence that they knew they had everything under control. Straggling amongst them were a succession of harassed, red-faced men, their cheeks puffed and their eyes filled with terror. It was reminiscent of a scene from a Stephen King novel. Each of them had hands which were laden with bags bulging with goods, the integrity of the plastic surely giving cause for concern. Somewhere in between, I strolled through the crowds with a roll of wrapping paper purchased from WH Smith for £2.49.
On the night before Christmas, I decided to reward my efforts in having all of my gifts wrapped several hours before the big day itself, unlike in previous years, by indulging in a celebratory bottle of Rioja after I had come home from a few hours spent in Aulay’s. All through the flat, everything was quiet, and the more I sank into the wine, the heavier the feeling was that something was missing. I was thinking a lot about people who weren’t there, people who couldn’t be there, friends I hadn’t seen and friends who were far away. I felt low and in need of something different. It was 11.30 and I finished the last of the red wine and left for midnight mass.
Although the rain from earlier in the evening had cleared, the streets around Oban were virtually deserted as I made my way to St Columba’s Cathedral at the other end of town. There were no cars on the road, and the only person I encountered on the fifteen-minute walk was a drunk who I could see from afar staggering away from the Oban Inn. Even as I was approaching the church it was clear that there wasn’t a soul around, to the extent that I was questioning whether midnight mass was still a thing, or if it was even Christmas Eve at all. It was an altogether more silent night than I was expecting.
Nevertheless, I walked up the slick steps towards the entrance of the granite church, where I found that the door was closed over with a laminated white notice attached to its front. It requested that worshippers “please use the side door” and was accompanied by an arrow which helpfully pointed in the direction of the entryway on the right of the building. I breathed a sigh which was swallowed by the wind as it howled in from the bay. I put my pink hand into my pocket and pulled out my phone, staring at the screen as though I had received a vital message, when the reality was that no-one was going to contact me at 11.50 on Christmas Eve and I simply wasn’t wanting to be seen to go in the wrong door. I stood on the step, analysing my phone with a concentration I could have done with summoning at the pub quiz days earlier for what felt like an eternity, until finally the headlights of an approaching car appeared like a bright blazing star in the Bethlehem sky. A group of three or four people emerged, clearly regulars at the church, and they walked up the path towards the side entrance. I finished composing my fictitious text message and promptly followed them inside.
When I was much younger and my mother took me to midnight mass at the Cathedral she would be sure to have us there by half-past eleven in order to secure us a good seat, usually away from the drunks. The church always filled up quickly, and often folk would be forced to stand at the back. On this occasion I was the drunk, but it didn’t matter, because the place was surely not even a quarter filled and it was possible to sit just about anywhere. There was an eerie silence in the building, barely even a cough, and none of the carol singing that I remembered taking place before the mass when I was a boy. I was sitting in a row of seats all to myself, the fingers of each hand pressed against its respective twin on the other, wondering why it was that I thought that going to mass for the first time in six years would be the cure for the shape I was in.
Minutes after the service had started, the side door of the church creaked open and one last attendee groaned in. The man, who was short and visibly older than I was, appeared a little disoriented as he slumped into the small wooden seat at the end of the row a few in front of me. For whatever reason he was dissatisfied with his selection, perhaps his view was obstructed by a pillar he hadn’t been aware of until he sat down, and he got up and shambled into the row directly behind mine, sitting over my right shoulder. He immediately took to kneeling and, amidst a cacophony of sniffling, he began gibbering away to himself, presumably in prayer although it was difficult to tell, so long had it been since I had said one. In my head, I too was talking to God, cursing the arrival of the sniffling man and questioning if this was His way of punishing me for being absent from the church for all those years, by forcing upon me a man who would pass on a winter virus the night before Christmas. So much for peace and goodwill to all men, I was thinking to myself.
Another moment of panic came later when I noticed the usher emerge with the long black collection purse in his hand. I had forgotten that the offering of money was such an integral part of mass, and noticeably they were no longer trusting the collection to make it all the way around the church on its own accord, like when I was younger and we would pass the basket amongst ourselves, from front to rear, and it would always find its way back to the altar. Now, as the usher walked from person to person, there was no getting away from it. I worriedly rummaged through my pocket for my wallet and fortunately discovered that there were a few coins which I hadn’t spent in the pub earlier. Though perhaps the fact that the usher had to walk the bag around the church shouldn’t have been so surprising when so sparse was the population of the congregation that some folk chose to walk across the aisle when it came time to offer a handshake as a sign of peace. On the other hand, I, as with in most situations, largely kept myself to myself, though it was always going to prove difficult to make peace with myself.
When it came time to take Communion, I was finally faced with the sniffling man from the row behind me. We had both reached the aisle at the same time, and it became obvious when I saw his eyes that his sniffling was not the result of a cold, but rather he appeared genuinely distraught. Without thinking, I threw my arm around his shoulder and asked if he was alright. He sniffled and said that he was, but I didn’t believe a word of it. “Are you sure? You don’t seem okay.”
“Well,” he confessed with a sniffle. “My gran passed away yesterday.” I immediately felt a pang of guilt for all the terrible things I had been thinking about him since he had sat behind me, all the silent complaints I had made about his sniffling and his garbled, nonsensical prayers. There was nothing I could say, and all I could do to show my sympathy for his loss was to let him go ahead of me in the line to receive Holy Communion.
In all my time of going to mass, I had never taken the Communion wine. It wasn’t so much a concern about the hygiene of sharing a cup with dozens of strangers, but more because the wine – the ‘blood of Christ’ – was so far down in the chalice that I could never reach it. To bring it from the bottom of the gold chalice to my mouth always required such an elaborate motion that it felt to me that the others waiting behind me would think that I was taking more than my fair share, so after a couple of awkward attempts where I never even had the drink touch my lips, I gave up. Whether I was drunk with confidence on Christmas Eve or eager to have the taste of guilt washed from my mouth, I decided that I would try once more to take the Communion wine. I said my amens and accepted the cup from the woman at the side of the altar, peering briefly inside it to measure the kind of swig I was going to have to take to bring the wine to my mouth. The liquid peeled from the sides of the cup as I tilted it towards me, its colour having all the appearance of gooseberry jam, and when I finally tasted the Communion wine for the first time as an adult, I realised that it was nothing like the Rioja I had enjoyed at home.
When I returned to my row of empty seats, I kneeled on the little stool in front of me, bowing my head because that’s what everybody else seemed to be doing. I was contemplating how much the midnight mass experience had changed since I was going as a child, how lonely the whole thing felt, and how terrible the wine was. As I knelt in silence, the sniffling and gibbering began over my shoulder again. “Thanks for that, Big Man,” I was able to make out amongst it all. I couldn’t be sure if he was talking to me or to God, who was often referred to as ‘the big man upstairs’, and I didn’t want to make any assumptions by acknowledging it, even though I really enjoyed the idea of someone thinking of me as being a big man. I continued staring ahead towards the altar, in perfect silence and reverence.
Some minutes later, when the service finally came to an end, having felt almost as interminably long as the subsequent walk home did, the identity of the Big Man was confirmed. I turned to wish the sniffler all the best for the festive period, where he was still visibly upset. “I appreciated what you said up there, Big Man.” To me, it didn’t seem like that much of a deal, no more than anyone would have said when they’ve drunkenly wrapped their arm around a stranger in the aisle of the Cathedral. But I accepted his words and shook his trembling hand. I couldn’t be sure how I had become a Big Man, but I was determined to stay that way.
People enjoyed photographing and filming Kyle Falconer
It was three days after the midnight mass when something truly remarkable happened. Kyle Falconer, the lead singer of the sometimes popular Scottish indie band The View, played a solo concert in the sometimes popular Oban nightspot The View. I liked to imagine that the musician’s management and everyone involved were completely oblivious to the connection when they were booking the tour to promote his debut album.
“We could play this small seaside town on the west coast, they have a couple of venues worth looking at. The Corran Halls might be a bit too big for us to sell, and Markie Dans is on the small side, but this place called The View looks perfect.”
“That sounds familiar. Has Kyle ever played in The View?”
“No. We’ve never toured in Oban. He’s never been in The View.”
The joke was an obvious play on words that everyone was bound to have thought of, but I enjoyed thinking that it was my own. It was much the same when for several weeks before the gig I had been pointing it out to anyone who would listen that by the time the gig came around on Friday, my workplace would have been closed for the Christmas break since the previous Monday and so I likely would have had the same jeans on for four days. I had been proudly telling so many people about my excellent pun that when the day of the show arrived I was forced to wear a pair of tan chinos, lest anyone believe that I actually had been wearing the same pair of jeans all week.
Although the venue was modestly filled on the night, those who were there managed to enjoy the performance. I spent much of my time studying the room as people funnelled in, desperately seeking the faces of people who could be older than I was in an effort to pacify my growing worry that I was the most aged person at the gig. The previous occasion I had been in The View was on the night of my thirty-fifth birthday when I had foolishly accepted a shot of Sambuca and quickly had to dart to the toilet and desperately try to avoid being sick on my purple tie. The prospect of being the oldest attendee watching Kyle Falconer somehow seemed worse, and the relief I felt when I spotted a clutch of people who were surely my senior was matched only by the man himself finishing his set with Same Jeans, which it seemed was the one song everybody was waiting to hear.
Any sense of being the Big Man had dissipated by the late hours of Friday night. I had left a group of friends in The Oban Inn to go and celebrate a friend’s birthday in Markies, but my timing was off and by the time I arrived there, she had left. I was feeling so miserable for having missed her that even the presence of some people who were older than me wasn’t much consolation. By closing time, I had been convinced by a quartet of friends that it would be a good idea to invite them back to my place for a post-pub drink. Even though I wasn’t in the most sociable of moods, it would have taken a fool to reject an offer of having four female friends in his flat.
We sat drinking beer until five in the morning, listening to Frank Zappa songs and discussing the merits of an Oxford comma and whether anyone really cares about them anyway. With hindsight, it was the best thing I could have done at the time, even as I was crouching by the toilet bowl the following afternoon. I considered all of the things I had learned over the Christmas period: how difficult it was to keep an artificial garland still, the price of friendship being £80, the wrong method of asking where a woman is from, how to become known as a Big Man, the true taste of Communion wine, that very few people were going to church anymore, that the only song I knew by The View was Same Jeans, and how to correctly use an Oxford comma. Sometimes you just need to know the right place for something to go.
Links:
“A little weariness’ll change a lot of things” is a quote from The Dharma Bums by Jack Kerouac.
For those who do not have a Spotify account but do have an interest in the music I have been listening to, the following are my three most played songs from December.
It’s difficult to imagine that the frontman from indie rock bores Snow Patrol, Gary Lightbody, could be responsible for this beautiful piece of folk music, and yet I Am A Landside is breathtaking, and one of my favourite songs:
Over time, I have probably tried to use just about every line from Kathleen by Josh Ritter when talking to a woman:
What could be more romantic than getting together with someone for a drink and pretending that the world isn’t fucked up?
Although I didn’t have an Advent calendar, the third night of December still carried a surprise behind the window of my bedroom. The festive discovery maybe shouldn’t have come as such a shock to me, or at least it wouldn’t have done if I had read the letter I received in the post a week or so earlier from the energy company SGN instead of tearing it up into snowflake-sized pieces of paper and tossing it into the recycling bin. I was reminded of the contents of the communication at around ten o’clock when, in the way that a smiling snowman or a steaming pudding in the form of something resembling a piece of chocolate prompts you that Christmas is another day nearer, the dim and distant sound of a drill cutting through tarmac reminded me that there were roadworks scheduled at the end of my street.
My bedroom was lit up like a fairground park, only as usual without the amusement. The curtains, which stood from the floor and were much taller than I was, danced along to the beat of a dazzling orange light, which was flickering wildly through the material, on and off and on again, in rhythm to the sound of a pneumatic drill. I approached the beaming drapes with all of the excitement that a younger me had when holding a cardboard Thomas The Tank Engine Advent calendar, curious to see what was going on on the other side of the window. I peeled back the curtain with the care of piercing a perforated, numbered square and craned my neck to look out towards the top of the street, where the works vehicles were stationed. It soon became clear that for me it wouldn’t be a silent night, but for the men who were working on the road, it would be a holey night.
For nigh upon two years of living in my town centre flat, my bedroom had witnessed an underwhelmingly little amount of activity. Suddenly, on the third night of Advent, there was too much of it. As I was getting changed for bed under the glowing spotlight of an SGN van, minding my own business in much the same way that any single occupant does, I noticed a spider sitting around fourteen inches from the top of the ivory coloured curtain which hung across the front of my floor-to-ceiling wardrobe. Having disrobed myself of my yellow shirt, I was feeling fairly certain that the spider, with its eight little eyes, was much more terrified of the situation we had found ourselves in than I was. We hadn’t quite locked eyes, its being much too small to pick out from a distance, but we were bitterly entrenched in a stand-off across the room, neither party willing to cede ground. Eventually, like whenever I thought about talking to a woman I liked, my feet grew cold – the disadvantage of having to stick to walking on the floor – and I gave up and got into bed.
From under the comfort of my two thousand thread count Egyptian cotton duvet, all I could think about was the spider. Was it thinking about me? Who knew. But all I knew was that it looked ridiculous standing there on the curtain which my suits and shirts were neatly stored behind. I stared at it and thought how it would be like me, as someone who gave up learning how to drive after four lessons, standing on the forecourt of a used car dealership. Like every other spider, the one on my wardrobe curtain had eight legs, and just like every other shirt, the ones I wore had two sleeves. Even if it was presumed that the arachnid could stretch two of its legs out into the sleeves, I had no idea what it would expect to do with the remaining limbs. What colour of shirt would a spider even wear? It would be an absurd appearance. And that would be without considering its ability to match the socks.
I settled back into my pillow and turned off the lamp on my bedside table, not that it really made much difference with the roadworks ongoing up the street. With my glasses folded away and the light from the trucks illuminating the room every other second, the spider was resembling little more than a conspicuous smudge on the curtain, like an inkblot on an old-fashioned scroll. As I was laying there, instead of laughing in the arms of a loved one, I was questioning the motives of a spider. If it wasn’t trying to get into my shirts or to spin a web around the fly of my trousers, then what did it think it was up to? Nobody ever spoke of finding a spider on their curtain. A moth, usually, but never a spider. I began to wonder if it might have been identifying as a moth. It wouldn’t matter because, in time, like anything connected with my bedroom, the spider eventually scurried over the horizon of the curtain and was never seen again.
A calendar, either traditional or Advent, wasn’t required to tell me that it was the first week of December and that the countdown to the twenty-fifth day was underway. Across my social media accounts, Christmas trees had been popping up everywhere, as though most people had received the same notification alert. The Instagram photographs and Facebook status updates were only a reminder to me of the pitifully sad tree I had erected in my living room a year earlier, where all of the 1980s novelty glass baubles had been hung on the lower branches, at arms reach of my two-year-old niece, and I wasn’t ready to think about festive decorations again. It was similar to the way I felt when friends would post pictures of their latest romantic adventure with their partners when all I had recently done was to make a joke to a girl about dressing my mantelpiece with a DVD copy of The Wizard of Oz.
Although I looked forward to Christmas every year; the festivities, spending time with family, seeing people who maybe hadn’t been seen for some time, I wasn’t quite able to get into the spirit yet, though it was hard to say if it was through a Scrooge complex or laziness. I was treating the early December days like any other in the year, more concerned with matching the colour of my socks to my tie than mistletoe and yuletide. In an effort to brighten my mood and embolden my dress, I took a rare midweek foray into wearing a red shirt. I hardly ever wore my red shirt, a decision which wasn’t so much due to sartorial consideration, but rather was born more from a fear of putting the garment in the washing machine. Nevertheless, sometimes a man has to throw on a black sweater vest and a tie, face his anxieties and, at the end of the day, hide the red shirt at the bottom of the clothes hamper if necessary.
Throughout the day, no fewer than four people, though no more than five, passed comment on my red shirt “looking festive.” I tried to defend myself with my insistence that it was just a shirt with no cheery motive behind it, or inside it, but the charges of a festive appearance continued. I was forced to accept that by innocently wearing a red shirt I had become accidentally festive, even if my mood was closer to the black tie. Would a spider be forced to endure such criticism if it left the web wearing a bright red shirt?
Worse was to follow the next day when I returned to a more standard combination. In the comfort of my bedroom, I dressed myself in a pair of smart navy trousers which no-one could mistake for looking festive. The shirt and tie were equally as unseasonal, and I was feeling more like myself. I plugged my earphones in and left my flat, stepping out into the dirty daylight of a December morning. I think I had reached the square, or maybe it was the station, when I realised that the trousers I had believed were blue were actually black, and my face had become as red as a festive shirt. I thought about hastily retreating home to change, but someone was bound to have already seen me, and what would look more foolish than a man wearing black trousers with a purple tie, other than one who wore two different pairs of trousers in the same morning? I could at least console myself with the knowledge that my shoes were black, and it wasn’t a completely ridiculous circumstance, but I was troubled by how such a mistake could have happened. It was apparent that the lighting in my bedroom was to blame and I would have to change the bulb, or at least consider dressing at night, when the roadworks were illuminating the street and I could compare notes with the spider on the curtain.
The air was thick with the fragrances of a late November night. It was either a roast beef dinner, chestnuts over an open fire, toffee, or chimney smoke coughing into the damp air. It could have been all of those. In the distance, the Cathedral bells could be heard ringing over and over again, their sound growing louder all the time, as though struggling to compete with the pipe band that was leading the reindeer parade through town; the fight between the church and commercialisation taken to the streets of Oban. My brother and I were walking from his new flat to meet up again with our sister for the switching on of the Christmas lights, having spent the afternoon drinking mulled wine, in a family tradition we had started some years earlier. Before the 2018 ceremony we celebrated the beginning of the build-up to Christmas with the festive flavours in my town centre flat, and it was debatable whether we had gone to my brother’s as a flat warming of sorts, or because of the memory of a whole unpeeled orange sitting in a boiling pot of red wine in my kitchen twelve months previous. As the seminal Canadian pop poet Alanis Morissette once sang in 1995, “you live, you learn.”
The reindeer parade took place on 23 November
We were really pushing it to make the advertised time of six o’clock for the seasonal lights being illuminated, though I wouldn’t have known it from looking at my watch. When I checked my timepiece it was showing eleven-forty, though in those days it was always twenty minutes to twelve, no matter when I glanced down to my wrist. The battery in my watch had died almost a week earlier when I wasn’t looking, and although I still made sure to wear the thing every day, I could never remember to have the battery replaced. From our vantage point on the road running below McCaig’s Tower, we were looking out over the entire town, the mass of darkness broken only by a mushroom cloud of light around the station, where the festivities were taking place. The view was like staring at a Christmas carousel on a mantelpiece, and the church bells were the music, letting us know that it was almost six.
Earlier in the day, I was standing in line at McColl’s waiting to top up my electricity key, because at one o’clock on a Saturday afternoon there was only one place in town with PayPoint facilities. I had just invested in a new Christmas jumper, since the tradition we had introduced also required the wearing of dubious knitwear, and I was feeling pretty good about things once I had come across a tie that it could be worn with sitting in the bottom of a drawer in my bedroom. Walking uptown to the newsagents was a study in how it would be to be invited onto a catwalk for a winter catalogue. Every other person seemed to be dressed in a Christmas sweater, even the little brown and white terrier dog I passed outside the mobile phone shop was in a red and white knitted outfit.
I was fidgeting with the plastic electricity key in my left hand as I waited, its halves of green and blue much less festive than the canine coat. There were two people ahead of me in the queue, and when the older gentleman who was standing in front of me happened to look over the shoulder of his black winter jacket, he spoke with a voice which made him sound like a character from a Guy Ritchie movie, both in accent and tone.
“I haven’t seen you in a long time,” he said to me. If I didn’t know better it could as well have been an accusation, but I recognised him and was in agreement that it had been a while. I told him that it had been five years since the Co-operative supermarket had closed, which is where I was working the last time he laid eyes me. His facial features were inscrutable, like an artefact from the Natural History Museum, but I was certain that he had spent those years believing that everyone from the Co-op who he hadn’t seen since the day it closed had died.
“It’s frightening how quickly time passes,” he whispered in another classic Lock, Stock & Two Smoking barrels line as he stepped forward to the front of the queue and I looked down at my watch and wondered how many lottery scratchcards he was going to buy.
From up high, the station looked like a Christmas carousel.
The official turning on of the lights was preceded by the ‘reindeer parade’, where a figure we are to believe is Santa is led through town by a trio of reindeer and a pipe band. By the time we had worked our way through three bottles of mulled wine and a box of mince pies the parade had already reached the station and the reindeer were in a makeshift pen, happily munching on some straw. None of them appeared to have a red nose, though under the spotlight of the Christmas lights it was clear that some of our faces were a little rosier than normal. Around the area which was usually reserved for the taxi rank were a selection of fairground rides which attracted the attention of the young and the old alike. There was a House of Fun which was taller than the clock tower, the standard spinning teacups, and an ‘extreme’ Helter Skelter, the frame of which was brightly-coloured and emblazoned with the animated image of two young women wearing bikinis. It looked an unfortunate choice of outfit for a parade in Oban in late November, though the scene did leave me feeling much more smug about the warm new Christmas jumper I was wearing.
My brother and I left the parade for Aulay’s, where we stopped for a couple of pints of lager before eating dinner at our sister’s. There was a steady hum of early evening revellers around the bar, where we managed to take our usual position close to the icebox, which was a spot where at least something managed to look cool. Looking across at us from by the fruit machine was a woman whose coat was as thick as the fur on a reindeer, although darker in colour, and her hair was white and curled like an envelope which has been crammed inside a pocket for two weeks. She wasn’t long in telling us that she was 73-years-old and enjoyed nothing better than coming to the pub on a Saturday night and talking to people. That much was evident when the woman went on to compliment my brother on having a nice nose, the way that someone might pay homage to a homegrown vegetable patch or a bed of flowers: it’s all the work of nature, but I suppose he helped it along the way.
Stood to the left of the woman was a similarly-aged man who she pointed to as being her husband. I wondered what he was thinking as his wife once more emphasised how she thought that my brother had a very nice nose, particularly when his own snout resembled a slice of pastrami. The more this woman was heaping praise upon my sibling’s sneezer, the more I was feeling aggrieved that she hadn’t mentioned mine, despite it having come from the same allotment. I wasn’t especially wanting to be noticed by a 73-year-old lady at the bar, but it would have been nice, and I was expecting that her husband was feeling the same way.
I gazed across the bar at the elderly man with a sympathetic eye, the same way I looked at anyone who was near the fruit machine. My elbow was pressed tightly into the surface of the bar as I spoke in his direction. “Don’t worry, I think your nose is fine.” It seemed like a gentle, reassuring thing to say, but the gentleman glanced back at me in a manner that suggested he didn’t know what I was talking about, or as if to say keep your nose out of my business. For a moment I considered that maybe I had read the situation all wrong, and the whole episode might just have been the couple’s bold attempt at sparking some renewed interest in their relationship. They would go to bars, or any public space, really, and she would compliment younger men on their more appealing features in an effort to inspire some jealous passion in her husband before they took a taxi home together. My brother was just a patsy, really. Who knew if it was really the case, but it was an explanation that would keep everyone happy.
The figures on the side of the Helter Skelter were poorly dressed for a winter parade.
At my sister’s, we ate a meal of roasted duck and potatoes, before drinking some more mulled wine and playing a spirited game of Cards Against Humanity, which revealed much about us. Somewhere in amongst all that, the one-year-old daughter of my sister’s friend, who were both spending the night at the house, decided to walk for the very first time. It was an emotional thing to witness happen, even if technically the baby had initially walked on her own feet upstairs when her mum was getting her ready for bed. In the excitement, she was brought back downstairs and convinced to perform the act again, in front of an adoring audience who had mobile phones poised. In that sense, I hadn’t seen the girl walk for the very first time, rather it was like seeing only the encore at a Beyoncé concert.
It was a remarkable thing to be present in the room for, when suddenly for this little person the world went from being a very small space that was limited to places where she could be carried, to a place of never-ending potential. The entire world was there, ready to be explored. As I was watching the first steps being taken for the second, third and fourth time, I was thinking about how it was probably a similar sight to how seeing myself walk away from the bar in Aulay’s at the end of a night would look. The way that she first rose to her feet, shaky and looking very uncertain about it all. There was a look of stern focus on her face as she took a few steps forward, away from the safety of her mother’s arms, and slowly began to realise that she could do it; her legs were working and her toes were more than just hilarious little things to play with. She was growing in confidence with every step, building up an impressive head of steam, before finally collapsing onto her bottom in fits of laughter. The only difference was that the laughter was her own.
For anyone who doesn’t have access to Spotify, but does have an interest in the music I have been listening to, the following are the three songs I have been listening to most throughout November.
If I could, I would listen to November Rain by Guns N’ Roses all month long, but instead I settled for around three times a day:
I Can’t Think About It Now sounds like the best song Dire Straits never wrote. The section from 2:34 to the line “the everlasting wisdom of a sports bar” is remarkable:
Twas the night before Christmas, when all through my flat there was a great deal of stirring and noise, and I was finding it difficult to sleep. There was a commotion in the walls and pipes of the old block of flats, the same way there is at around the same time every night, whilst traffic was clattering past my window with abandon, like a drunk driven sleigh landing on a tiled roof. In the corner of my bedroom, by the door, was a gathering of shadowy figures cast in darkness. I couldn’t stop myself from looking at them, convinced that they could belong to the ghost which for a brief week or two earlier in the year I suspected was haunting me. I tried to ignore them, tried to close my eyes and sleep, but I was restless and I kept returning to stare at them through eyes which were heavy from four bottles of mulled wine and two bottles of Jammy Red Roo, which had been shared earlier in the evening with family to celebrate the arrival of Santa. I knew that the shadows were either from a benevolent spirit or from the three coats which were hanging on the back of the bedroom door.
My troubles with sleeping could be traced back to the night after my office Christmas party when, even following fifteen hours of continuous drinking the previous day, I found myself sitting with my brother and the plant doctor, drinking beers and eating dry roasted peanuts until 7.30 on Sunday morning. We listened to the George Harrison track Wah-Wah at least a dozen times, and despite promising to myself several years ago that I would never again make another New Year’s resolution, I vowed that in 2019 I would convince as many people as I could to listen to the song.
During an interlude in my sleeplessness, I had a dream which took place back in the days when I was working in a supermarket. I spent more than eight years in a variety of roles in the local Co-operative before it closed at the end of 2014, and they occasionally occur to me when I am in an unconscious state. In my dream, I was approached by a female customer to whom I was immediately attracted, and when she asked me about a product which had escaped my mind by the time I had woken, I began to attempt a series of jokes based on canned foods. Each pun exasperated her more than the last, and she went to great lengths during the rest of her time in the store to avoid making contact with me, including spending an inordinate amount of time in the customer toilets. By morning, I was unsure whether I had experienced a dream, a memory or an epiphany.
On Christmas Morning I started, and finished, wrapping my presents whilst watching an episode of the Netflix murder docuseries The Innocent Man. It didn’t seem like the most festive beginning to proceedings, but it did prepare me for the emotional waterfall of a day spent drinking gin. My sister and her partner hosted the family dinner for the third year running, which was wise when she has all of the poise and grace under pressure required for cooking a meal for more than one person. I often struggle with the timings of preparing a straightforward pasta dish, and burned sweet potato wedges have become my specialty, yet she prepared roast beef, goose and all of the traditional trimmings with aplomb and a plumb and cinnamon gin.
In contrast to hearing the details of a gruesome murder in a town in Oklahoma in the 1980s and a discussion of the DNA analysis of pubic hair, the scene inside my sister’s flat was filled with festive cheer. Her two-year-old daughter was hyper with the excitement of the day and the spoils of Santa. It was heartening to witness such joy and madness, unblemished by politics or religion. A little thing with nothing but happiness for the world around her. Strewn amongst the rubble of wrapping paper and musical toys and plush animals was a microphone which Santa had picked up for fifty pence from a branch of Poundstretchers in Fort William. For the entire day, this small pink amplifier was the most wondrous thing that had ever existed.
After a hearty feast of food, it followed that the board games would be dusted down and brought out of hibernation. My sister unveiled the WH Smith version of the stacking game Jenga, which was named Tumble and was exactly like the classic version, but with a different name. We each took turns removing a block of wood from the structure and placing it on top of the increasingly unstable pile, and after a few collapses we were getting the hang of the game. Even my niece, no more than three months away from her third birthday, displayed brazen and unnerving confidence when it came to pulling a plank from its place. As what turned out to be our final game was becoming more competitive and fraught with tension, I think that my sister could tell that I was becoming slightly intimidated by my niece’s unflinching ability.
“Maybe you should try thinking of it as being like when you are out on a Friday night. Try and find the loosest one in the group.”
It was a pretty good line, but I reminded her that all of the blocks were proving equally as difficult to influence, and that my romantic prowess is even less impressive than my board game expertise.
“So I just have to not talk to them?”
The game advanced to an impressive, and baffling, feat of engineering until, as with at the bar on a Friday night, my unsteady and uncertain movements caused the entire thing to collapse before me. I could see from my niece’s face that even though she wasn’t entirely understanding what was happening, she was feeling a certain smugness that she had gotten the better of me again.
Once a certain threshold of drunkenness had been reached, my brother, sister and I seized the opportunity to question our father about the songbook he had written some decades earlier. We had seen the songbook once, one afternoon in the nineties when it was briefly retrieved from the loft, and we held it in our hands in a triumphant scene reminiscent to the moment Indiana Jones first recovers the Ark of the Covenant. It was taken from our hands before we could fully appreciate it, and ever since we have been searching for its return. Christmas seemed like the ideal time to raise it again, and we vowed that if the treasure was ever handed over to us we would do something tremendous with it: my brother could put the songs to music; my sister could use her great social influence to make sure that the songs are heard; I would….well, we all agreed that it would be a family project.
On Boxing Day the bars were busy with festive revellers. The dancefloor in Markie Dans was crammed with gyrating bodies, whilst the air was thick with the fragrance of gift set body spray. I was wondering if there had been a generous sale on somewhere in the last week, because everyone seemed to be smelling the same way.
It was difficult to move amongst the mass of bodies, and I found myself stuck in the corner like a life-sized doll which had been set aside in favour of a fifty pence novelty microphone. I was looking around the crowded bar, trying to catch sight of a face I would recognise, but no-one was familiar and everyone else was looking exactly like one another. The more I looked around me, the more I was feeling something like the titular character in The Curious Case of Benjamin Button. I was an old man, getting older by the minute, and everywhere around me were young people who were only getting younger the more I glanced around the bar.
The situation reminded me of the previous Saturday night, where I had briefly been in conversation with an NHS staff nurse whose role it was to insert catheters into elderly patients. She made the announcement to our group that she “does catheter insertions”, and it was all I could do to throw myself into the conversation and ask: “but what do you do for your profession?” She didn’t understand nor care for my joke, and she repeated that she is responsible for the insertion of catheters.
I was biding my time, waiting for an opportunity to make a second impression, when the woman was making the exclamation that “nobody messes with me.” It was perfect, and I immediately coughed out my line: “they probably mess on you at work though, don’t they?” She buckled and complimented me on a very clever line, though I felt the need to confess that it was the most clever thing I had said in thirty years.
“But you said you are thirty-five?”
“That’s right, ” I admitted, and she didn’t acknowledge me again.
Having left the crowded scene in Markie Dans on Boxing Day night, I arrived in the Lorne to see a woman I recognised as being my neighbour from the top floor of my block of flats. She confirmed that a couple with a young child had recently moved into the flat opposite hers, and I felt relieved to learn that the stroller which had been sitting at the bottom of the stairs outside my flat for the past three or four weeks was not a cruel joke after all. She went on to note that every weekend when she passes my door at the end of the night there is music playing, and she remarked that for someone who looks like the most mild-mannered man imaginable, I seem to be quite the party animal. I chortled at this suggestion, and began to picture the look on her face if only she could open the door on one of these apparent parties and see the plant doctor and I sitting there, eating dry roasted nuts and listening to Wah-Wah on a continuous loop. Or on any of the many occasions in which I have fallen asleep on the couch in my full suit with a quarter drunk bottle of Budweiser.
By the end of Christmas week, the pale winter sky had been washed away by the wettest rain you will ever see. I went to Aulay’s for some catchup beers with a keen bird enthusiast and the VAT man, which proved to be significantly more enjoyable than my time in Aulay’s the following afternoon. Afterwards, the bird watcher and I made our way to the Oban Inn, where I saw a bar band play a cover of U2’s With or Without You for the second time that week, though on this occasion it was not dedicated to a newly engaged couple.
Along the rainswept Esplanade in Markies, a ceilidh band was playing to a much smaller audience than had been present earlier in the week. I spoke to a sandwich artist for the first time since the bread in a friendship baguette turned soggy several weeks earlier. I was feeling anxious when I saw her, the same way I felt days earlier when I was reaching for a delicately balanced piece in Tumble, though once we enjoyed a shot of Tequila Rose I was feeling more of the wah-wah.
The walk home felt shorter than it had done of late, though the rain was so cold and wet that it soaked me through to my bones. Even with my leather jacket zipped all the way to my throat, the rain reached through all of my layers and the next morning I could still feel it reverberate around my being like a voice through a cheap Poundstretcher microphone. I was alone again at 3am, but this time I felt sure that the only ghost was a wet leather jacket hanging on the back of my bedroom door.
Although I had only heard Fairytale of New York once – on the dark journey home from Edinburgh, whilst travelling through a sleepy village on Sunday morning – I could tell that the Christmas party season was in full swing by the end of the week. Around Aulay’s there were ladies flaunting their finest frocks, some men were attired in tasteful Christmas jumpers, and no more than one gentleman was resplendent in a kilt which had been thoughtfully gifted to him by a co-worker, despite the seasonal conditions outdoors. I was standing at the bar drinking the scene in.
At a table in the corner of the room, I observed a group of three women who had carried their drinks from the bar to sit down. They each removed their scarves and their jackets and took a seat, one by one, the way a squad of synchronised swimmers might. The women all had a shade of blonde hair, which made it difficult not to question whether it was by coincidence or if having a certain style of hair was a prerequisite to joining their group. They were seated along the cushioned couch side of the table, in a perfect line from lightest shade of blonde hair to darkest. From my vantage point at the bar, it was almost like looking at a magazine article depicting the appearance of a turkey during the process of cooking Christmas dinner: the way it starts out pale and tightly held in place, gradually yellowing under the burning light in the oven, here represented by the gentle glimmer of a bar light, before finally coming out a crisp, luscious texture.
After a while, continuing their commitment to synchronicity, the trio of blondes reached into their respective handbags, pulling out smartphones in the way, once upon a time, they might have withdrawn a compact mirror. They were each gazing into their screens, swiping through social media and interacting with the world; save for the life which was going on around them. For several minutes there was no communication amongst the group, neither through eyes nor voice, as the three of them became lost in technology. I was wondering how much they could be enjoying their night. Then, bearing witness to the scene, I wondered how much I was enjoying mine.
My fixation with the non-communicative trio of blondes was broken when an unrelated woman with fair hair appeared beside me at the bar to order drinks for her table, who were a group on a work party. She asked the banker who was moonlighting behind the bar which whisky he would recommend for her boss, and he turned the question over to me. I have never considered myself an expert in the grain, or in anything for that matter, and I felt sure that if anyone else was standing at the bar they would have been better suited to offer advice. As it was, my knowledge of whisky extended to two varieties: the type which would make me brilliantly drunk and aid in an enjoyable night, typically Jameson, or the kind of whisky that would have me falling through my shower screen and waking up the next morning in my bathtub.
I asked the fair-haired woman if she would point out her boss to me. We turned in the direction of her table, where there must have been around a dozen people, and she told me which of the figures was her boss. He was dressed casually and had floppy silver hair, although I still couldn’t be sure why I had asked for the information. It did nothing to help me, but I supposed it was adding to the air of whisky authority I had somehow assumed, and I went along with it. After a moment which was heavy with consideration, I suggested that he would enjoy a Lagavulin.
Some time later, the girl was returning from the bathroom when I stopped her en route to her table to ask whether her boss had liked the malt whisky I had selected for him. She said that he considered it better than the Famous Grouse he had been drinking for much of the night, and I felt quietly satisfied. As our brief conversation developed beyond whisky, the woman with the fair hair informed me that it had occurred to her when she was in the toilet that she knew me from a time when I worked with her mother. I knew that she was right, but I was immediately distracted by my attempt to think of an occasion when something had occurred to me whilst in the bathroom.
Things just don’t tend to occur to me when I am standing in the men’s room, particularly the men’s room in Aulay’s, which is an intimate space. Do other people experience these flashes of inspiration when they are splashing their urination? Could I be the only person who doesn’t experience a moment of clarity in the toilet? We continued to talk, and I was wondering if I had ever been an occurrence in the mind of any other women when they were in the bathroom. The thought disturbed me, and the fair-haired woman soon wandered back to her table.
“Just a wee bit of ice…naw hunners,” was a phrase I heard uttered over my left shoulder. The gentleman in question was requesting that his empty pint glass, which was intended for a bottle of cider, be supplied with only a few ice cubes, but I couldn’t get past the idea of hundreds of blocks of ice being fitted into the pint glass. In my mind, I was imagining the last person who served this customer, the member of the bar staff who caused him to ensure in future that he asked specifically not to be given a glass with hundreds of pieces of ice in it. I could see the look of determination on his or her face as they were focussed on angling the cubes in such a way that they could get another in, like a cold game of Tetris. I looked at my own glass, which was still around half empty, and reckoned that I could only manage 33 ice cubes at best, but then I was never very spaciously aware.
In the upstairs of a bar overlooking the sea, a young woman was carrying a large handcrafted version of the popular board game Battleship. It was attached around her neck with a piece of cable and was housed in a box which was the size of a very big pizza delivery box. When she lifted open the lid, an elaborate maritime warfare scenario was revealed. I expressed wonder at the impressive work which had gone into the board, though she seemed to be burdened by the effort of carrying it around her neck all night. She asked me if I would like to make a move, which is a question that ordinarily results in me crumbling into a small pile of bones and dust before a woman. I realised before I said something stupid that she was referring to her ongoing game of Battleship, and I studied the board for a while before settling on B9. She looked back at the scorecard on the base of the lid, and as is typically the case with the moves I make, nothing came of it.
Beyond the Battleship beholder, I could see the moonlighting barmaid who, months earlier, disputed my claim that Kenny Anderson of King Creosote was dressed like a homeless man. I was keen to find a way of getting across the bar to talk to her, but the floor was crowded and I didn’t know what I would say to her without introducing myself as the man who thought King Creosote appeared underwhelmingly dressed. It seemed like the most difficult level of Minesweeper, and before it could all blow up in my face I left for a bar further along the seafront.
An inconsequential number of minutes passed and I became aware that the moonlighting barmaid had arrived in Markies. It was all I could do to stare across the sparsely populated bar, and eventually, I managed to convince myself that I should approach her. The Jameson I had been drinking earlier in the night ensured that I would never remember the words which stumbled from my mouth, but I felt confident that she had moved past the King Creosote incident, and like with the game of Battleship, I hadn’t triggered any fatal explosives.
Diaries of a single man 