Lately I’ve been making a concerted effort to get to the Lorne quiz every Wednesday that I can. There have been occasions in the past when it’s been tempting to withdraw from the team because it starts too late, or there’s something on at the weekend and I can’t do two social activities so close to one another, or my feet got wet earlier in the day and I haven’t gotten over it yet. But now that we’re in a heated race for bar vouchers with not only Quiznae Me but the Plant Doctor’s squad too, every point gained is vital. The only quiz I missed recently was to attend the trustees’ meeting at the Argyll Wellbeing Hub on the same night, and it turned out to be the first quiz that has made it into the pages of the regional newspaper the Press & Journal.
When I was first sent the link to the article, I wondered if we were witnessing the beginning of an interest in the outcome of the Lorne quiz that would stretch from Oban to Fort William, to Inverness and Aberdeen and beyond. However, upon opening the link, the story was reporting on an incident which occurred before the last quiz when the barmaid saved the life of a man who was choking on his dinner. It made a change from every other Wednesday this year when it has been the Unlikely Bawbags who were the ones choking at the quiz.
It was a story of selfless quick-thinking and fast-action, one which highlighted all of the best qualities of the young woman involved. Yet I couldn’t get past some of the detail in the article. It was mesmerising to read it disclosed that the victim was shorter than the barmaid, who is 5ft 7”, and that the food was easy to dislodge since it was chicken and haggis. Then there was the paragraph that simply stated: “The 23-year-old said the man – who has not been named – had initially tried to solve the problem himself by drinking a pint of Tennent’s.” This could have been any man in Scotland. It could just as easily have been me. There isn’t a problem I have encountered where my first thought hasn’t been “can this be solved by drinking Tennent’s Lager?”
I was unaware of the dramatic night at the quiz when I was taking my walk home after work the following evening. It was the last day of traditional Oban weather before the season finally splashed some colour across the town’s sodden canvas and people could stow away their winter jackets. For a while anyway. I had grown fond of my winter jacket and wasn’t sure I was ready to part from it yet. It wasn’t anything special, just something I’d picked up from Peacocks on a whim, but I had worn it in Stockholm and the cigarette smoke from Sarajevo still clings to the fabric. The pockets are fluffy and deeper than anything I’ve ever put my hands into – which come to think of it is probably partly why I struggle to acknowledge people who see me on the street. By the time they have passed, I’m still wrestling my hand from my pocket to wave. To any passer-by I imagine it looks like one of those videos that have been doing the rounds on Twitter recently where unusual items that large snakes have swallowed are prised from the reptile’s stomach.
At the parking machine opposite the War and Peace Museum, a man was performing his civic duty by purchasing a ticket for his vehicle as I approached. A gust of wind caught hold of the slip of paper and picked it up from the slot before the man could snatch it. What followed was a scene that until then I felt certain only occurred in TV sitcoms. The parking ticket was blown along the length of the pavement as the helpless driver went chasing after it. With every other stride the man tried to stop the ticket’s progress by stamping his foot over the top of it, but each time the wind just took it a little bit further from him. It must have taken him at least three attempts to trap the thing under his shoe.
When he reached down to pick the parking ticket up from the ground before turning back to walk towards his car, I didn’t know where to look. Immediately I turned my gaze to the pavement, as though there was suddenly something captivating about my shoes beyond their ability to take in rainwater. I couldn’t face making eye contact with the ticket chaser and preferred to act as if I had never seen the entire thing, as ridiculous as that was given our proximity to one another. When I thought about it later, I couldn’t say whether I looked away to stop him from feeling embarrassed or if it was for myself.
Later that night, the popular Information Oban Facebook page was abuzz with a different incident on the Esplanade. One poster reported that a paving slab had collapsed across the road from the Alexandra Hotel leaving an ominous gap in the pavement. An accompanying picture showed the pavement with a square hole where the slab used to be surrounded by a circle of rocks that had been placed to alert pedestrians of the danger, although it could just as easily have been a Pagan ritual. Curiosity had me looking forward to seeing the hole for myself when I was next down that way. After all, it isn’t every day that a slab just disappears into the earth. However, it was just my luck that the entire section of the pavement had been fenced off, forcing you to step out onto the road to walk around it. I couldn’t help but think it was a typical Oban reaction to a problem. You just block it off and leave it for another time.
For more than a week I’ve been walking up and down the Esplanade wondering if I’ll ever see the hole, each day registering another digit on the thermometer. Spring has brought the annual influx of visitors to the town, and the better weather of late has seen a change of mood about the place. It’s true that everything looks better with a bit of sunlight. I was leaving work for another of those evening walks this week when I was stopped outside the Day To-day Express. As I crossed the road to walk towards Station Square, I noticed a black car sitting outside the corner shop with the passenger side window rolled down. There was nothing I could do about it. I’d already made eye contact with the woman whose head was poking out of the open window. She was older, in her fifties I guessed, and her hair curled like a nest of noodles. I took my ear pods out and felt them vibrate in my hand. I’d been listening to the new Pearl Jam album.
“Can you tell us where the train station car park is?” The woman spoke with an American accent. My heart sank the way a paving stone falls into the sea. Of course I could tell her where the train station car park is – I was virtually looking at it from where I was standing. But I had no idea how to describe how her husband could drive there. “Can’t you just walk?” is what I felt like advising her. It’s the same any time a tourist stops me for directions in Oban, but it’s worse when they’re driving. I have never driven a car, save for a couple of terrifying lessons I took in my early twenties. A driver asking me for directions is no different to someone coming to me for marriage advice.
“Just go down this road you’re on and turn left into the taxi rank,” I eventually mustered, before realising that because of the direction the car was facing they would need to drive out into Argyll Square and around the roundabout before coming back to the station, and that was going to cause all sorts of different problems. They seemed satisfied enough with my effort and I put my ear pods back in, but I’m rarely comfortable after one of these encounters. For hours after I have given directions I find myself worrying about the fate of the tourists. Did they survive the roundabout? Did they catch their train? Where are they now?
I had just about put the American couple out of my thoughts by the time the weekend arrived. Nothing helps me refocus my mind like cooking an omelette on a Sunday morning. It’s the only day of the week when I have the time to go all out and make something better than a bowl of overnight oats. I would probably have stayed in bed for several hours more after being up late watching the NHL had it not been for me discovering a packet of bacon at the back of the freezer on Saturday. As far as breakfast goes, unexpected bacon is as joyous as reaching into the pocket of your spring jacket and finding a ten pound note.
When preparing an omelette it is easy to get lost in whisking the eggs until they’re at the cherished light and fluffy consistency, trying to get the heating right, and scraping the cooked egg in from the side of the pan. By the time I’ve made a crude attempt at folding the omelette I’m usually so frustrated by my inability to make it look like it does on the recipes that I’ve forgotten whatever it is I was thinking about. This time it was an anxious shopping trip to Lidl the day before that had me breaking the eggs. From the moment I walked through the automatic doors I recognised someone I was once involved with practically a lifetime ago. It was typical of my luck that I would have to see her before I was planning to go for a haircut.
My intention was to head straight for the in-store bakery section to pick up a maple pecan plait that had 15% off with a coupon on the Lidl Plus App, but I was worried that she might see me and presume that I’d let myself go. All I could do was abandon the notion of pastry and sneak off to the bread aisle instead. I was a mess. Every step I took was as though I was walking across a flimsy rope bridge, my palms had developed their own microclimate, and my heart thumped like a pair of ear pods. Even if I wanted to talk to this person I used to know it would have been nothing but gibberish.
I clutched a Post-it note shopping list consisting of items such as blueberries, broccoli, apples, and grapes, but she was lingering in the fresh produce aisle and I was too much of a coward to risk going near it. If I had a can of Tennent’s Lager I would have opened it there and then, but in the absence of alcohol I did the only thing I could. I developed a sudden fascination with the smorgasbord of items on sale in the ‘middle of Lidl’, studying each one intently. Who knows if £16.99 is a good price for a telescopic tree pruner or if I’d ever have a use for glow in the dark pebbles. For what could have been an eternity, I stood practising the look of a man who could have bought them all. It was the equivalent of raising a fence around a loose paving slab and taking the long route to avoid the problem, only in this instance I would have welcomed the ground opening up before me.
No sooner was the downpipe fully reattached to the front of our block of flats than another problem had arisen. It was a Tuesday night and I was in the kitchen reducing Lidl’s Marvellous Tomatoes for a pasta sauce. The halved fruits were sweating it out in the pan the same way I had been on my yoga mat a few minutes earlier as I finished a gruelling practice. My overgrown hair was sticking up in all different directions, and I was dressed in the fashion a man adopts when he knows he’s home for the night and won’t have to see another person.
I was dusting the bubbling mixture with mixed herbs with the indiscriminate shake of a person who is not following any particular recipe and whose rhythm is dictated by a banging song which has come on the Spotify playlist when there was a knock at the door. The knock was unfamiliar, not that there are ever enough of them for me to keep track of knuckle variance. Most recently I believe it was a takeaway delivery driver who had the wrong address, and before that, a police officer looking to speak to the occupant of the flat across from mine. This wasn’t long after the Press & Journal had reported about a police raid on the Lochavullin Bar up the street with a picture of our building, and for days I was worried about how this would look.
Briefly I considered ignoring the intrusion, but the volume of my music and the waft of onions would surely have given me up. I left my sauce simmering on a low heat and went to answer the door. It was my upstairs neighbour, who had come to tell me that he had noticed a couple of loose tiles on the roof of our block and he’s been seeking quotes to have them repaired. I was too busy wondering how anyone can spot some loose tiles on the roof of a three-storey building when I struggle to see people I know passing me on the street to ask any further questions, so he continued to tell me that it would likely cost each occupant a couple of hundred pounds to replace them. I didn’t feel that I was in any position to quibble over the cost of the job when the five other households in the block had seemingly approved. It was just going to have to be a case of if I want the tiles fixed, I should be spending a night or two fewer on them.
It’s little wonder that there has been some damage done to properties around town after the weather we’ve seen so far this year. Even the popular Dunollie Museum had to close for a couple of days as a result of the wind. On the west coast of Scotland, it’s a good thing that we have long since learned that you needn’t wait for the finer weather to arrive to mark the beginning of spring. Here we can tell that the season is underway when the first cruise liner appears in the bay and the walk from one end of George Street to the other suddenly takes a few minutes more. Once the benches that have sat empty along the Esplanade since October begin to see some action and the seafront is filled with the fragrant vapour trail of chippies you know that it is finally spring.
Storm Kathleen was causing some bother when we gathered for our latest open mic night at Let’s Make A Scene. A few regular attendees were stormbound, and with a few minutes until the event was scheduled to begin the theatre was almost half-empty. We were growing concerned until a surge of people almost as great as the waves crashing against the sea wall turned up, ensuring the place was as full as it always is. I usually like to arrive at the Corran Halls and prepare a topical joke to serve as an introduction to the written piece I am about to read from my notebook. More often than not it’s the part of my performance I am most nervous about since it is ad-lib and done without the crutch of the notebook. Anyone can take a seat and read aloud from a book, but the very thought of talking from the top of my head sometimes seems as bewildering as the idea of being able to see a couple of loose tiles from a distance; something other people can do, but it isn’t for me. Nevertheless, I ambled onto the stage and thanked everybody for braving the conditions to join us for the evening before launching into the improvised line I had been going over in my head all night.
“As it happens, being a single person in Oban is a lot like a windy day. Your hair is a mess, you are kept up through the night from the howling, and everything gets wet.” I didn’t truly understand what the punchline meant, but it sounded clever in my head and got some laughs when I said it. It’s always a good feeling when something you think is stupid raises a chuckle from other people. If only that could be repeated across all aspects of life.
The night was a fantastic success. It is always such a heartening thing to see the scope of the talent in Oban. At Let’s Make A Scene you’re as likely to hear a poem about the rain being on again as you are a beautiful song performed in Gaelic or a piece of rock music. On this occasion we had three new artists take to the stage, one of whom especially captured my attention. She was a young English woman who had honey-coloured hair and a voice that was just as sweet. It was her first time at Let’s Make A Scene, and despite not intending to perform, she came along with a piece of spoken word prose that she read from her phone. If nothing else it was reassuring to learn that phones can be used for purposes other than disappointing Tinder matches.
Our new performer’s set was based on her impression of Scotland’s west coast from her time cycling around the area, a trip that she enjoyed so much that she decided to move here. I was transfixed by the way that she described the landscape and how it affected her. I have spent my entire life in Oban and often wish that I could write about the place with more insight than to say that the seafront carries the smell of a Norries’ fish supper.
At the end of the night she approached me as she was leaving the theatre. She wanted to tell me that she found my reading funny, while in response I vomited a series of consonants and vowels. I immediately found her to be engaging and earnest, the sort of person who when you’re talking to them you don’t notice things like the time passing or remembering to inhale and exhale. There could have been a fire evacuation and it wouldn’t have mattered. Just a few minutes spent talking to this woman was enough to turn me into a lepidopterist.
She invited me to walk along to the Oban Inn with her group. This sort of thing never happens to me. I had to tell her that I was waiting on some friends who were finishing up clearing the room but that we intended to go to the Oban Inn. When we eventually arrived after what felt like an interminable passage of time, the bar was its usual Saturday night riot of bodies, broken glass, and rivers of beer. It was impossible to get close enough to talk to her again. This was much more like the type of thing that frequently happens to me.
It was tempting to think that I would likely never have the chance to talk to the eloquent English writer again, until a rare instance of me recognising someone as I was walking to work on Wednesday morning gave me that very opportunity. She was carrying a camping mat and a bike helmet but had no bicycle, but I made an effort not to dwell on that. It had just started to rain lightly as we had our stop-and-chat, like a scene from a romantic comedy. Only instead of saying something charming and insightful like Matthew McConaughey would, I attempted to pass comment on her statement that Thursday is her favourite day of the week by pointing out that nobody writes any songs about a Thursday. “Not like Friday and that song…” My mind cycled way ahead of my words and I couldn’t recall the hit song Friday I’m In Love by The Cure. I should have taken the song’s advice for a Wednesday.
Despite my lack of coherent thought, the bicycle-less cyclist was on her way to find a gluten-free bacon roll and asked if I would like to join her. I blurted out that I had already eaten, which while true was not the entire reason that I didn’t go with her. I was more concerned with fulfilling the nine part of my 9-5. I spent the rest of the day kicking myself. The bitter taste of regret was most profound when I reached into my backpack for my apple. Usually that’s the best part of my morning, but how could it be when I could have been eating a bacon roll instead? Never has a Royal Gala been so underwhelming as when I passed up the opportunity to spend a few minutes more with a pink lady.
One of the other sure signs that it is officially spring in Oban is when the Lorne pub quiz moves back into its traditional 9pm slot. For as long as I can remember, Quiznae Me have been the main nemesis of The Unlikely Bawbags; the Gozer the Gozerian to our Ghostbusters. For the last five weeks we have had a new contender to deal with in the form of the Plant Doctor and his alliance of Aulay’s pint dwellers. They just showed up one week, my brother and Geordie Dave amongst them, and came within a point of winning the thing. The following week they won it. It had taken them two attempts to do something we haven’t achieved since October. Their win coincided with the first night of the nine o’clock quizzes and some kind of issue with chilling the draft beers which meant the taps were out of order. When I arrived there were three of us who were stood at the bar with no idea what to do next. I imagined it was like having your hands placed in casts and being forced to figure out how to use a set of chopsticks. We had a lousy performance that night, finishing sixth out of nine teams, but while I was keen to put it down to the absence of a good pint, the truth is we’ve been struggling at the quiz for a while.
In an effort to arrest our slump, we brought out the heavy artillery for the most recent quiz and went six strong. It was the first time we’d managed a full quota of players in a long time, even managing to bring along a pharmacist who was once a regular member of The Unlikely Lads before she moved to Australia. A strong opening couple of rounds had us feeling good about our prospects, as if we had finally found the cure for our quiz ills. Things rapidly began to fall apart for us in the round on springtime, where each of the answers began with a letter from the word ‘springtime’ with each character being used only once. We scored a wounding 7 points in that one, although the silver-haired host awarded us 8. Being experienced quiz players we knew that it was only right to confess that our round had been wrongly marked, especially when the contest was so close, but it still smarted to give up that point. It’s not that we were wanting rose petals thrown at our feet for our honesty, but something more than polite applause from the rest of the bar would have made it worthwhile. A standing ovation, having our names chanted in unison, or some sympathy points when we’d crossed out a correct answer for a wrong one or inadvertently identified Paul Young as being Paul Simon.
As it was, our performance continued its downward turn in the next round where the questions were based on the four main points on a compass. I knew right away that the city of Charlotte is the state capital of North Carolina and said it with an authority that I don’t usually display. However, the more I kept repeating the options in my internal monologue I started to believe that the answer could be South Carolina. Sitting on either side of me, two cartoon devils on my shoulders, the nut tax man and the pharmacist were doing their best to convince me that South Carolina sounded right to them, too. Eventually I relented and changed our answer from North to South. It was yet another terrible decision I’d made that Wednesday. Although in the final standings we’d gotten the better of the Plant Doctor’s Aulay’s alliance and Quiznae Me, we still only managed to finish third. Despite winning the bonus bottle of wine for the second week running, we couldn’t help but feel disappointed that the real prize of quiz supremacy remained out of our reach.
Me and the pharmacist took to Aulay’s to pick at the scabs of another defeat. We arrived to find that we had almost the entire pub to choose where we would sit. If I had walked in with the Plant Doctor or alone, as is usually the case, you can be sure that the place would have been busy. But when I walk in with a beautiful woman there is almost nobody there to see it. It has always been this way. We took the stools at the end of the bar, where the pharmacist marvelled at the full-length panoramic painting of Oban Bay that stretches from one end of the wall to the other. She had never noticed it before. It often takes a few visits for folk to appreciate the artwork since usually you tend to spend your time in the bar with your back to it or you are too drunk to notice.
Last orders had just been called when we bought our drinks, so there wasn’t much time to enjoy them. We discussed the differences in the culture between Scotland and Australia: how there is so much more peer pressure in this country to be involved in a relationship; the attitudes to drinking; and the cost of drugs through the health service. Upon recognising who the barmaid was, the pharmacist reminisced over when she was 12-years-old and everyone would spend their time after school hanging around the cafe in Tesco. It wasn’t a story I could relate to since I was terrible at socialising at that age. The barmaid was working there at the time, presumably pouring coffee rather than pints, and the pharmacist recalled how it would be her modus operandi to ask the schoolkids if they were buying anything. Those who responded that they weren’t would be asked to leave, with the pharmacist usually being one who would have to leave her friends behind. There’s just no way that would be allowed to happen these days, we agreed.
With last orders long gone and the time approaching midnight, the bar staff were busy clearing up and naturally keen to finish their shifts for the night. The barmaid peered over the top of the gleaming taps and asked the pharmacist if she had finished her drink, “because it’s time to go home.” The timing was so exquisite that I couldn’t help but wonder if she had heard us talking. We gulped down the last mouthful of our drinks and went on our separate ways. By the time I reached home a few minutes later, it was already Thursday morning. The week wasn’t finished yet and I’d inadvertently declined the opportunity to hang out with an engaging woman – twice – lost the pub quiz again, and been told that I’d likely need to pay a couple of hundred pounds to replace some tiles on my roof. This seemed like a good day to watch the walls instead.
I think it would be fair to say that none of us particularly knew what to expect when my brother and the nut tax man accompanied me to Braehead Arena to watch the recent Challenge Cup semi-final first leg contest between Glasgow Clan and Guildford Flames. While the three of us have varying degrees of interest in ice hockey, with me becoming borderline obsessed with the NHL, the UK league is not televised anywhere, making it difficult for casual fans like us to follow. We knew that it wouldn’t be the same as the game we saw in Stockholm last year, at least not in terms of the standard of the play, but we were curious as to whether the British game would have the glitz and razzmatazz of the North American arena experience.
The game had sold out a few days beforehand, which made for a fantastic atmosphere inside the building. Our seats in Block N were so close to the rink that we could feel the chill from the ice on our cheeks. From the back of our section, a drum was being battered all night long, sometimes even in rhythm with whichever chant was being belted out at the time. Pop music played during the frequent stoppages in play, and in the second intermission Glasgow’s mascot Clangus – an enormous dancing Highland Cow – took to the ice and encouraged spectators to throw pre-purchased pucks into his pouch to win a prize. It was quite the spectacle. Best of all, a pint in the arena costs only £5, which is surely amongst the cheapest in the Glasgow area. Sure it was Coors, but still, you don’t look a gift horse in the mouth and you can’t refuse cheap beer for your mouth.
There is no doubt that a night watching the hockey at Braehead is as fun a way of spending between two & three hours as anything. That was even the case on this occasion when the game finished 0-0 after the regulation 60 minutes, with there being no overtime on account of the teams playing again at a later date in the second leg. I could scarcely believe that we’d seen a 0-0 draw. Ice hockey games are virtually never goalless. To confirm my suspicion, I sat on the bus back into the city, soaked from the walk we undertook in search of the bus stop, and asked Safari to Google “How many ice hockey games finish 0-0?” Although statistics are not complete, the search engine told me that since the introduction of the shootout in 2005, 0.25% of NHL games have finished 0-0. As of May 2017, there had been 189 0-0 draws dating back to 1924. In the 2023 NHL regular season – without considering the Stanley Cup playoffs – there were 1,312 games played.
To put it into perspective, had I stayed in Oban and done my usual routine of scrolling through the NHL fixtures on my Firestick after coming home from Aulay’s, I could have watched the following games on the Saturday in question:
Philadelphia Flyers 4-7 Colorado Avalanche
Vancouver Canucks 6-4 Toronto Maple Leafs
Boston Bruins 9-4 Montreal Canadiens
New Jersey Devils 2-6 Dallas Stars
San Jose Sharks 5-3 Anaheim Ducks
Not only is a goalless draw in hockey vanishingly rare, but more often than not both teams will score in a game, as opposed to neither of them scoring at all. If you are to place a bet on the over/under total goals in a standard NHL game, a bookmaker tends to offer 6.5 goals. For comparison, football is typically 2.5. In the last few months, I have been in attendance for 125 minutes of live ice hockey and witnessed two goals.
Despite the absence of the most valuable commodity in competitive sports, I felt the game was quite entertaining with plenty of action and some excellent netminding. At least that was the opinion of a couple of guys who I overheard talking about it at the urinal. By this stage in life, I have learned that it is usually for the best to believe anything that is said over a urinal. People speak with such authority when they are peeing. Not everybody in the arena shared that outlook, though. From my seat, I could see a woman sitting a couple of rows in front of me who was on her phone shopping on Amazon during the second period. Despite my curiosity, I couldn’t get a close enough look to see what she was buying. I guess a 0-0 tie isn’t for everyone.
In a stroke of fortune that wasn’t in keeping with my experiences travelling to watch ice hockey in Stockholm and Glasgow, my brother and I took the mid-morning train back to Oban from Glasgow, some hours before the entire rail network in Scotland was suspended due to the arrival of the first of two named storms that week. The second of those storms, Jocelyn, landed on Tuesday night and provoked dad to message our family group chat to warn that we “need to have bins and other loose items secure.” I don’t know why the simple piece of advice tickled me so much, but it didn’t seem so funny the following morning when the downpipe on my block of flats was damaged by the wind and was left dangling at a 45-degree angle away from the wall. As if we need to be drawing any more attention to ourselves on Combie Street.
By the time I was ready to go out to the first Lorne pub quiz of the year, one of my neighbours had reunited the two broken ends of the pipe using industrial-strength Duct Tape. It was an admirable piece of DIY, the sort of thing that convinces you that everything will work out alright after all. The Unlikely Bawbags were hoping to take that same sentiment into the quiz, which we hadn’t won since October when I split from the team to participate with my Aulay’s crew on my 40th birthday. Quiznae Me have since become the dominant force on the Lorne quiz landscape, with at least one of their members clearly possessing stronger general knowledge than their ability to play the plastic kazoo in a novelty Christmas board game. We didn’t know why exactly, but we did know that their reign of trivia terror had to be stopped.
Ultimately we finished third out of around a dozen teams, which is pretty good going, but it could have been better. The first quiz of a brand new year typically features many questions based on events that have taken place in the twelve months just past, but there are other morsels of information to get tucked into. One of the questions set out to test our spelling, asking competitors to spell the name of the US state of which Boston is the state capital. We knew that it was a case of separating the double letters from the single, but nobody on our team was entirely certain what went where. I was in charge of the pen for the round and had tentatively scrawled Massachusetts across the blank line, completely unaware of whether it was accurate or not without Grammarly there to tell me. We moved on with the rest of the round, but the more we looked back at Massachusetts the more we managed to convince ourselves that we had gotten our t’s and s’s confused. The nut tax man was especially taken with Massachussets, enough to break his cardinal rule of never changing an answer once it has been written on the page. Of course, we had made the wrong decision and should have stuck with our first answer. We were kicking ourselves, and it wasn’t the only time we had done it. It goes to show that sometimes you shouldn’t spend so much time worrying about having your t’s and s’s in the right places and instead follow your instincts.
It was my instincts that took me to Markie Dans a couple of nights later for their pop-punk theme night. I knew that the sandwich artist formerly known as Subway Girl was going to be there and I could hardly wait to see her in a purple dress that had been anticipated more than the third Ghostbusters movie. Her favourite song, Teenage Dirtbag by Wheatus, was playing as she walked in, as if it was meant to be, and without ordering a drink or even saying hello she pulled me away from my Jack Daniel’s and we danced to it. Things could hardly have been better. Later we threw some shapes to Limp Bizkit’s classic take on the Mission Impossible theme Take A Look Around. If my 18-year-old self could see me dance with a girl to this song he would be beside himself. So would my 38-year-old self if he could see me dance to this song with this girl.
The night was easily the best one I have had this year, even accounting for a 0-0 draw at the ice hockey and the US State of Massachusetts. For a moment I dared to believe that I might even go one better than the skaters and get one past the netminder. At closing time, as I was waiting outside for the sandwich artist formerly known as Subway Girl to gather her belongings, I struck up a conversation with a man who was smoking a cigarette. He was visiting Oban for the weekend from Glasow and at first seemed like a regular drunk, however it didn’t take long for him to mention that one of his favourite things to do is to “box someone’s jaw.” The way he said it made it sound like getting involved in a fight was as regular to him as reading a book, making a risotto, or completing a patchwork quilt. It’s just like any other hobby.
“Seriously, I’ll knock anyone’s cunt in,” he continued.
There was a poetry about the way he spoke, though I couldn’t help but feel unnerved by it. He was clearly agitating for a fight, and despite him not acting particularly aggressively towards me sometimes you get a feel for these things, like when you’re making a pot of soup and you sense when it’s time to remove it from the hob before it bubbles over. I bid him a good night and took myself away from the heat, but he soon caught up with us and walked along the Esplanade with our group. We had hardly reached the Gem Box when the bloke proposed kissing me. I didn’t have the chance to protest that I’d rather he box my jaw in than kiss me before he planted a smacker on my mouth, although really it was more beard on lips than anything intimate. By the time we were past the Oban Times building he was reporting to anyone who would listen that “I’m gonnae shag him.”
This came as news to me. He repeated the statement again and again, as if it was somehow going to sound better the third or fourth time. My internal monologue was debating the entire time whether I should be concerned or complimented by the outburst. On the one hand, nobody ever expresses romantic intentions towards me. But on the other, it would have been nice to have at least been wooed a little. I found myself irritated that he had waited until after the bar was closed and I was already drunk, when there wasn’t even the opportunity to buy me a drink and seduce me the old-fashioned way. More than anything, I was once again wondering how it is that a guy can make an effort to initiate sex with someone he met nigh upon ten minutes previously when I can harbour a crush for eight years and do nothing about it.
Things were complicated enough with me being in the unusual position of rejecting another’s advances before I walked into Aulay’s some 18 hours later to find matters had taken a turn. The bar was as busy as I had seen it in a long time, while there had to have been a ratio of around eight women to every two men. I was welcomed into the corner of the lounge by the jukebox where some of the elder statesmen of the bar had congregated. A friend of my dad’s invited me to join him, Doc and a third man who I didn’t recognise. His hair was as white as a rabbit’s tail and equally as wild. Strands of it stood up in every direction, the sort of hair you might find on a cartoon mad scientist. This guy was the loud talker of the group; the focal point and always the centre of discussion. In the beginning I felt privileged to be summoned into their company, but in time it dawned on me that I am now probably considered old as well. I didn’t stop to work out the numbers, though if I did there is a fair chance that at one point we were likely the four oldest people in the pub.
The complication arose when the cartoon mad scientist leaned across the bar and confessed that he had an apology to make to me. I was intrigued by what this could be all about considering that as far as I knew I had never met the man before.
“I always assumed that you were gay,” he confided solemnly. It was the quietest he spoke all night.
My life was turning into the season four episode of Seinfeld, ‘The Outing’, where every denial I made would have to be followed with the famous line from the show. For example: “What made you assume that I am gay? Not that there’s anything wrong with that…”
“I always used to see you drinking in here on a Friday after work and you’d be wearing those fancy suits.”
I wasn’t annoyed by it, but I was disappointed, I suppose, to discover that rather than being a well-dressed man for all this time, I have actually just been a fancy boy. Since when did a brightly coloured tie and a pair of socks that match say so much about a person’s lifestyle anyway?
At any other time I could have happily laughed off the misapprehension, but coming a night after the encounter on the Esplanade it gave me pause for thought. In those 24 hours, I’d had more men proposition me or announce a belief they’d held about my sexuality than I have had women show any kind of interest in me for as long as I can remember. It turns out that there is more chance of me having a man declare his attraction to me or seeing a 0-0 game of ice hockey than there is meeting a woman.
It was six days after I sent an email to the Press & Journal newspaper complaining about their use of a Google Maps image of Combie Street where my flat is clearly visible alongside a headline reporting “Drugs seized following police raid in Oban” that they removed the picture from the online article and replaced it with a shot of the actual pub involved. By then it felt as if it was too late, of course. Everyone would have already seen the story and concluded that there is a drug operation being run from the block of flats where I live. Word travels fast in this town.
All I could think was how the newspaper’s misrepresentation is going to make it even more difficult for me to meet a woman who would be willing to date me; while inviting someone back to my flat at the end of the night will become practically impossible. People will either be reluctant to go for a nightcap in a reputed drug den, or they will be sorely disappointed when all I have to offer my guests is Jameson and ginger ale.
The truth is that it could hardly be any more arduous to find a woman who wants to spend time with me, even without all of this Press & Journal business. This much was evident on a recent evening when I took a cursory swipe through the dating apps whilst waiting for a batch of plant-based chilli nuggets to heat in the air fryer. Nothing was doing on Tinder or Bumble, but Sally* – an Oban-based sailor – appeared on Hinge. Unlike other dating apps, Hinge gives users a series of prompts selected by the person and allows them the opportunity to leave a comment on one. While Tinder and Bumble rely on two people liking one another’s profile, on Hinge you can really let your personality shine with the right message.
Sally was another outdoors type whose profile was filled with sailboat pictures. We had nothing in common, but nobody living in Oban ever shows up on Hinge, and her page at least had the popular prompt where she lists “two truths and a lie” and it is up to prospective dates to decide which of her three statements is untrue.
“I’m a vicar’s daughter, I used to be cabin crew and I can play 6 musical instruments” the little box read. There wasn’t a lot to go on in terms of using the prompt to show Sally who I am, but a good answer here was most likely my best shot at impressing her. Adopting the traits of a detective seems necessary to have any chance of success in the world of online dating, so I channelled my inner Columbo to scrutinise each of the statements for holes, as if Sally were a criminal under suspicion of murdering my hopes of romance. Immediately it stood out that nobody would lie about being a vicar’s daughter. In fact, I wouldn’t be surprised if the Church of England has a rule against it.
Any good detective’s senses are pricked when a suspect offers more information than is essential, which is why I was drawn to the line on musical instruments. That anyone can play an instrument at all blows my mind, so to claim that you can play six was really stretching credibility. To my mind, it would be like someone who worked as cabin crew insisting that they can fly an aircraft. It was obvious to me that Sally was lying about her musical ability, but even a doofus like me knows that I can’t flirt with a woman by outright brandishing her a liar, so I sought to soften it a little by suggesting that she wasn’t being truthful about her musical accomplishments “because you can actually only play 5 instruments.”
Sally immediately matched with me and replied to my comment. “Have we matched before? As that answer is correct.”
Unlike Sally with her brazen lies, I thought that honesty was the best policy. “Mostly I responded with 5 because I don’t think that I could name 6 instruments.”
“Fair enough! Well done for getting it right.”
“I would have responded to your voice prompt, but initially I was hearing some Irish and Australian in your accent and I realised that didn’t make any sense.”
Silence. The timer on my air fryer pinged and in the time it had taken to cook a portion of plant-based chilli nuggets, I had made and lost a match on Hinge. I opened the door and found that there was green jalapeño goop splattered all over the wire rack. This is going to be a nightmare to clean, I thought to myself. Such is the reality of online dating.
With the inevitable exception of my romantic exploits, it would be hard to say that January 2024 has been anything but a good month so far. I have fully booked up my next trip to Bosnia in February and my friend Medina has even generously invited me to have dinner with her family when I visit her home town of Sanski Most. Nothing excites me more than knowing that I will be back in my favourite place in a matter of weeks, even if the weather is likely to be even more frigid than it has been in Oban. Here the temperature has barely scraped above zero in the last fortnight. Every morning has seen varying degrees of frost, ice, or snow on the pavements, meaning that I have had to adopt a different walking technique each day. Each step is a potential calamity. I don’t know how people do it. Remarkably the dread of falling on ice isn’t the worst thing about this weather. That would be the hat hair, which I imagine must give casual observers the impression that I have made no effort at all on my hair before leaving the flat, when in fact there has been a minimal attempt at styling it.
My daily yoga routine gave me a great deal of focus in the early weeks of the new year, while even after just a couple of days of stretching I was feeling an energy I hadn’t experienced in months. I was walking with a real spring in my step, not that anyone would have known it from my penguin-like shuffle down George Street. I was willing to do just about anything to maintain the positivity that was coursing through me. This extended to spending an extra forty pence on a tin of chopped tomatoes from Lidl just because the deluxe brand has a ring pull and the regular cheap tins no longer do. It seemed extravagant at the time, but it was worthwhile to avoid the frustration of trying to operate my terrible tin opener. I just couldn’t put myself through that this early in the year when things are going well and I’m brimming with positive energy. It’s the same reason why I bought the chopped tomatoes at all rather than go through with my original midweek meal plan of spaghetti carbonara. I can never stir in the eggs quickly enough.
As well as the renewal of some healthy habits, the new year usually tends to bring a fresh scent in the form of the traditional Christmas haul of Lynx gift sets. It’s always easy to turn one’s nose up at the Lynx gift set at the time, but once you’re into January it’s welcome to not have to spend money on yet more shower gel or deodorant for a while. Of the two boxes I received for Christmas the first one I broke open was the Lynx Gold, which promises 48-hour freshness and an oud wood and dark vanilla fragrance. It’s hard to deny that the stuff smells good, though the trouble with it is that it is far stronger than the bodyspray I am used to and it seems to make my nose run. Who knows why that is, an allergy of some sort I guess. That notwithstanding, free deodorant is not to be sniffed at, even if it is the cause of quite a lot of sniffling.
I was hopeful that walking into Aulay’s on a Friday night with my positive posture and a brand-new scent would prove to be irresistible like the official Lynx Gold website promises, but I think that other than us there were maybe only another two or three people in at any one time. At least apart from the brief 20 minutes when a large group of youths turned up. One of the boys had a lump under his eye the size of a plum, while another asked the new Australian barmaid if she could put his empty quarter bottle of Glen’s Vodka in the bin. She dispatched of the contraband with the same ease she had snuffed out some of our delicate attacking play when she joined our game of indoor football earlier in the week. Not only was she a formidable defender, but some of her footwork could open a can of chopped tomatoes. At one point as she dribbled past me I was left feeling the same way I do when I am walking on an icy pavement.
For most of the night, it looked as if the installation of a new television set above the corner of the bar in the lounge was going to be the height of our excitement. To be fair, a second screen in the lounge bar is something we have often dreamed about. The space has always been perfect for it, and it would put a stop to those occasions when someone wants to watch the rugby and we are unable to see the Partick Thistle game we have negligible interest in but would quite like to have on in the background.
My brother, the nut tax man and I were huddled beneath the new screen as if it was a vision of some great deity, which in a way it was. There was some mid-level Spanish or Italian football being shown on the TV – or it could have been Portuguese, we weren’t giving it much notice. Our discussion was around making plans to go to an upcoming Glasgow Clan ice hockey game when I noticed the numbers in the bar swell by one when a woman entered from the public side and took a stool at the opposite side of the bar, close to the original television. She was around my age, give or take a couple of years out of politeness, and wore a hairband on the top of her head that sat up and gave the appearance of tiny bunny ears. The woman attempted to engage Doc in conversation, but he wasn’t having any of it, perhaps due to being in the unfamiliar surroundings of the lounge. I could see her occasionally looking over at the three of us as if she was trying to catch our eye and enter herself into our discussion. We were so caught up in our vital planning meeting that we never allowed an opening for her to join us, and the woman eventually left the bar without any fanfare, presumably disgruntled that she couldn’t get the attention of any of the four men who were in there.
Lately, it has been the case that most of the people in my social circle have other things to be doing on the weekend rather than just hanging around Aulay’s until closing time, and so it was that they departed and I found myself alone in the lounge with one of the stalwarts who by this point I’ve become convinced only has the wherewithal to recognise his own name and drink order. It’s times like these where it’s almost tempting to wish that I actually did live in a drug den if only for the thrill of it. The night was hurtling towards indifference until the lone woman from earlier returned. I fancied my chances considering that it was either me or the old drunk dude, and I felt that I had the advantage by virtue of the fact that the woman and I were both wearing glasses. Everybody knows that spectacle wearers stick together. That wasn’t going to be enough to get me talking to her, though. I needed something more and kept looking over the woman’s shoulder to the original TV which was showing WWE wrestling. I was watching two oiled-up men trying to get to grips with one another as I grappled with the best way of striking up a conversation with this woman. I knew that I just had to get her talking to me and the Lynx Gold would do the rest.
Eventually I played it straight and asked how her night had been going. She told me that it had been fine and she was visiting Oban for a short holiday to see her dad who had taken ill in hospital. I considered my response to be the natural question anyone in my shoes would ask, but seemingly it struck a nerve and I had put my big feet in it.
“I’m sorry to hear about your dad,” I said. “How long are you in Oban for?”
“That’s none of your business.”
“Fair enough,” I whimpered, suitably chastised. I returned to considering the bubbles atop the head of my Tennent’s Lager, resigned to the fact that I was out of the reckoning and the coast was clear for the drunk regular in the corner.
A heavy silence hung over the bar, higher even than the brand-new television screen, until it was broken by the woman entering into a rant about how people from Oban are far too interested in what others are doing. I agreed that this is always the way in a small town, but pleaded my case that I was just making casual conversation. She claimed that she has found it far worse here than in Islay where she is from, and it was all I could do to resist the urge to tell her that I hadn’t been so nosey as to ask about where she lives. I was content knowing that I had the moral victory.
Over the next five minutes or so as the woman rolled a cigarette on the bar, I could hardly get a word in as she blurted out all sorts of information that I hadn’t asked for. She proceeded to tell me who her sister living in Oban is as well as the local business she manages, about another family member who is soon travelling to Israel, that she works for the NHS, and that she is tired of her taxes being spent on funding paedophiles at the BBC. It was like interacting with a walking, talking Twitter profile. I didn’t want to be too hard on the woman, especially after she had bought me a whiskey, but boy was she hard work. Ordinarily, the sound of last orders being called causes the heart to sink, faced with the comedown of tomorrow’s return to reality, but on this occasion, it was most welcome. I looked forward to going home and getting into bed alone, just me and my sniffling nose with the irresistible lingering fragrance of oud wood and dark vanilla.
Everyone has been talking about the 16-year-old darts sensation Luke Littler, who reached the final of the PDC World Darts Championship this week but ultimately lost. Even people who don’t usually engage in conversation about sports were raving about the youngster’s achievement. I felt compelled to tune into the live coverage of the final on Wednesday night but gave up with it around halfway through the match. Voluntary maths just isn’t something I can get behind, which is effectively what darts is. Any sport that requires me to take off my shoes and socks to keep score isn’t for me. Darts is something I could only ever watch in the pub, where the World Championship is a traditional feature over the festive period – but that isn’t saying much. The television in Aulay’s has always been like a flame to the hopeless moths that are my drunken eyes. It doesn’t matter what’s on, they are drawn to the light over and over again.
Luke Littler’s unexpected run to the final inspired folk to reminisce about what they were doing with their lives when they were aged 16. In my case, I recall that I was spending much of my time fantasising about dating females who were unattainable and completely out of my league, listening to morose music, and writing stupid puns to impress my friends. To most it was an exercise in highlighting how wasteful the time spent at that age was when compared to a young lad competing for a World Championship, but for me it only served to confirm my suspicion that my life at 40 isn’t any different to the way it was at 16.
As well as being the day of the big darts match, Wednesday was the first day back at work following the Christmas break, and to say it was a slog would be putting it mildly. I think I must have slept for little more than an hour the night before, and even then it was the hour before my alarm went off in the morning. I don’t know why I ever think it’s going to be any different when I’m getting into bed before midnight – and sober – for the first time in a fortnight. Returning to the office for the first time in 12 days has a familiar ‘back to school’ feeling about it when you are forced into immediately shrugging off all of the terrible habits accumulated over the festive period. There is an element of having to re-educate yourself when you’re returning to the real world after such an absence, as if you need to learn how to act like a civil human being all over again. A healthy sleep pattern needs to be re-established, there’s a requirement to go shopping for proper food, and you find that you no longer have the option of asking yourself “Can I get another day out of this shirt?”
Perhaps the worst thing about having to leave the flat for an extended period of time was that over the first couple of days of the new year I had noticed a pair of enormous spiders on the living room ceiling, one in each corner either side of the window. Across Monday and Tuesday I sat on the couch for hours studying the two spiders, thinking to myself how fascinating it is that they could stay in the same spot for so long without doing anything. Don’t they get bored? Before I went back to work it had been my duty to keep an eye on them and make sure that they weren’t getting up to mischief – not that there is anything I could have done about it if they were when my ceilings are so high that they might as well be in the sky. For all I knew the spiders were waiting for me to return to work before their collusion began. Until then the behaviour of the arachnids quietly resembled my own romantic endeavours. Awkward, incapable of making a move, and forever destined to be separated by the curtain pole.
Temperatures have dipped in the New Year
Unlike the spiders on my living room ceiling I couldn’t hang around all week, and I would eventually have to reintegrate myself into society. I wouldn’t say that I had made any New Year’s resolutions as such, mainly because I made a promise to myself years ago that I would never make a resolution in January, but I suggested that it would be of benefit to me if I could get back into a couple of habits that had fallen by the wayside by the end of 2023. I can’t even blame the Christmas break for it, I know that I’ve gotten lazy and let things slide. The first thing I was keen to do was to get back into a daily yoga routine. My current exercise regimen of playing indoor football on a Monday night and then spending the rest of the week complaining about how much my legs hurt isn’t doing it for me. I miss the mindfulness and energy that my regular yoga practice brings. Usually when I have that everything else follows. If I really think about it, I imagine that I probably stopped writing consistent journal entries around the same time I got slack with my yoga. I decided that as well as putting my feet on the mat, I wanted to get back into a routine of putting pen to paper at least once a day, even if all I had to write about was the movements of a spider on the ceiling. It would be recapturing my youth all over again.
My New Year’s writing habit got off to an unexpected start when the Press & Journal newspaper used a screenshot from Google Maps of Combie Street with my flat at the forefront on a story about drugs being seized following a police raid at the Lochavullin pub. When I first saw the article on my Facebook feed after having spent eight hours in Aulay’s watching the Celtic versus Rangers game, I was surprised to see a photograph of my home alongside a headline reporting “Drugs seized following police raid in Oban.” I found it funny that people might see it and think that I live in a drug den, the Walter White of Argyll, when the strongest substance in my place is the Stilton that’s been in the fridge since Christmas. Then I considered how absurd it was that a news outlet could use an image taken from Google Maps of a residential building on the opposite side of the street from the pub featured in their story about a police raid. The more I thought about it, fuelled by Tennent’s Lager, the more irritated I became, and I ultimately fired off a furious email to the publication demanding an immediate explanation.
The first I’d heard of the police raid on my street was when dad mentioned it over coffee in Roxy’s the morning after it had happened. How he knew about the incident when I didn’t, despite being out in the bars the night before, is anybody’s guess. Though perhaps it shouldn’t be so remarkable when I think back to the week before Christmas when we were all out in Wetherspoons for a family meal. The place was packed with revellers, work parties and the like. There was a constant hum of activity around us; glasses clinking, festive cheer, the buzz of drunken chatter. I don’t recall the context of the conversation it was used in, but from out of nowhere dad used the phrase: “I was stoned out of my head at a Searchers concert in the Corran Halls.” My brother, sister and I looked at one another as if to ask if we’d heard dad say what we thought he said. We were almost egging him on to repeat it, posing questions like what were you doing at the Corran Halls? and what was your state of mind? But he never did say it again. The unlikely statement was left as one of those colourful things you’re destined to hear once and never again, like when I overheard one barman say to another at Gellions Bar in Inverness “he was making a shitload of sushi.”
As it was, I could hardly bear to log into my email account for days in case I was forced to follow up on my complaint to the Press & Journal. The prospect of having to read back what I’d written filled me with a horror that was only surpassed when I came home from work to discover that there was only one spider remaining on the living room ceiling.
I recently came across a couple of inspirational quotes on the subject of turning 40. The first of these was in the days leading up to my 40th birthday when I was still seeking a measure of reassurance over the approaching milestone. I took to Microsoft Edge and visited google.co.uk where I searched specifically for “famous quotes about turning 40” since as a society we put much more currency in the experiences of famous people than anybody else. There weren’t as many comments attributed to celebrities as I hoped there might be, although one of the founding fathers of the United States, Benjamin Franklin, apparently did once say: “At twenty years of age, the will reigns; at thirty, the wit; at forty, the judgment.” It was heartening to think that even if I was leaving my decade of wit, I might now at least have a better judgment of when – or when not – to use it.
Equally as inspiring, the second quote came in the form of a statement on the front of a card produced by the Holy Mackerel greeting card company which was presented to me by one of the maiden mothers of our latest pub quiz adversaries, Quiznae Me, and an accidental Tinder match. Although there was nothing to say that the wisdom was strictly limited to the occasion of a 40th birthday, it was a card given to a man who was celebrating turning 40. The enormous green text read: “HAPPY BIRTHDAY YOU GIN-RADDLED OLD SOAK.” I guess it has been determined that my forties will either be a time of good judgment or gin, and all that remains is to see which it is.
As October approached, I had for some reason convinced myself that the final days of my thirties were going to be a light procession, similar to the Charities Day parade we used to see during the summer in Oban when I was growing up, only with more corduroy and tweed. In reality, even on the cusp of one of life’s significant milestones, I was still having to contend with the challenges that come with being a single occupant. The night before bin collection day, for example, I performed my usual role of taking our block’s three blue recycling bins from the garden out to the pavement for emptying. There has always been something of a laissez-faire approach to filling the bins, at least as far as I’ve been aware. I tend to drop my recycling into whichever one other people have been using, which I have always assumed is what everybody else in the block does since the bins are not numbered or marked in any identifying way. I approached the first receptacle, finding it to be around three-quarters full, and wheeled it through the close to the front of the building. The next bin was the same – plastic and paper barely halfway up the length of the thing. I lifted the lid on the final bin expecting that it would be empty and I would be spared the trouble of dragging all three of the things out into the pavement. But then, like some kind of rubbish fruit machine, the third bin lid dropped with me having seen that there were maybe six inches of material lying on the bottom. I’m not ordinarily an advocate for capital punishment, but in that moment I would have happily witnessed the responsible party maybe not lose a hand, but certainly have a fingernail badly bruised.
It wasn’t only my bin collection woes which were being recycled in early October. By the end of the first week, four of the five bulbs in my living room chandelier had expired. The fifth lightbulb has continued to valiantly light part of the room for several weeks while I muster the enthusiasm to take the stepladder out. Lightbulbs have been a nemesis of mine since I moved into my flat, especially when the ceilings in the place are so high. How can it be that four bulbs die within a day or so of one another while the other in the set burns moderately brightly for weeks after? Six years of research has thus far only told me that dimmer bulbs are not necessarily the smartest lighting option.
On the final day of my thirties I was forced into defrosting my freezer, a monumentally mundane household task that was only made into a mountain by the realisation that I have never considered what other people use to dislodge blocks of ice from their freezer. A look in my kitchen drawer was only a crude version of a hit 1995 single by Alanis Morissette when there were half a dozen spoons when all I needed was a pick. The most suitable tool I could find for the job was a cake slice I had inherited from the previous owner of the flat. It was a chunky silver thing that sent flakes of frost flying across the kitchen when I chipped away at the ice that had built up on the top shelf – as if I was battling the elements on a gruelling Arctic expedition. It’s these things that nobody ever writes about on a 40th birthday card.
For months I agonised over hosting a birthday party for myself since, being someone who is so awkwardly shy that the only reason there isn’t a picture of me next to the dictionary definition of introvert is that I couldn’t face having my photograph taken, I felt uncomfortable with the notion of an event that would be all about me. Besides, a party for a person’s 40th birthday isn’t anything like, say, the fifth birthday party that your mum organised, when classmates are forced to come along because their parents like your parents and because there is cake. I worried that if I was to put on my own party the night would trundle by with only my brother and me standing at the bar with our niece, which would be just like any other Saturday night in Aulay’s, only in this instance there would be a girl who actually laughs at the things we say. Yet, despite those anxieties, I pressed on and invited everyone I know to Soroba House the Saturday after my birthday.
There turned out to be far more interest in the event beyond only my immediate family, and I proceeded with planning ways of making the night appealing to everyone. As with any celebration, there is always an important person or two who can’t make it. On this occasion, it was the Doctor of Words who was using the school holidays to take a trip to Ireland. To compensate for missing the party, she offered to take me out for dinner and pints in Markie Dans the weekend before the big day. We made a night of it by inviting the formerly raven-haired quiztress and a bird-watching accountant to join us. In a way, the evening was a kind of initiation into my forties by three of the finest fortysomethings I know. They have shown me that people in their forties are every bit as attractive, witty, conscientious, and fun-loving as anybody else. That the Doctor of Words ordered a round of Tequila for the table less than an hour after we arrived surely only confirms Benjamin Franklin’s theory.
During the evening, sometime after we had eaten a portion of salt and chilli chips that was as big as any of our heads, we were joined by a couple of trainee doctors who had recently moved to Argyll from the south of England to further their development. These young women had smiles that were so sparkling one could be forgiven for believing that they were student dental nurses. They were fun and easygoing and didn’t seem at all perturbed by sitting at a table with a pageant of fortysomethings. Of course, much like every woman on the dating apps seems to be, I quickly discovered that they were both really into outdoor activities. One of the doctors told me about her plans to go white water rafting the following afternoon. Knowing that Saturday was forecast to see Old Testament levels of rainfall throughout Scotland, I queried whether going rafting on the rainiest day of the year was such a great idea. With clinical precision, the trainee doctor responded that “I’m going to get wet anyway,” and it was all I could do to nod my head and hope that the beats from Steve-O’s decks would swallow me up. I didn’t have a clue what to say; whether to be funny or flirty or simply outright admit that I don’t know what the point of white water rafting is. It was in that moment that I came to realise that at 39 years and 360 days of age, I no longer know how to talk to women who are in their twenties. However, there was a part of me that wondered when I ever could.
Sure enough, the rain on Saturday morning was unlike anything any of us had seen. It was coming down more steadily than the new short-term let licence notices have been going up on property doors around town. By the time I walked around the corner to Lidl, the road was effectively a stream and cars were like jet skis coughing up waves in their wake. At least a quarter of the supermarket car park was flooded, and this was 10.30am – hours before high tide was due to arrive.
With my head still swimming in Tequila, I met the rest of my family at the Bridge Cafe. There was a sort of end of days feel about the place: it was practically deserted; Halloween decorations dangling from the ceiling, twisting menacingly in the breeze whilst Britney Spears played from a radio in the kitchen. Over coffee, we revisited my night in Markies and discussed plans for my party the following weekend. It would be my birthday in midweek, and I mentioned how I would like a repeat of the meal a few of us enjoyed in Bar Rio a year earlier. My sister made a quip questioning whether I thought of myself as the Queen by holding three separate events celebrating my birthday. As someone who holds fairly strong Republican beliefs, the zinger was a stinger. But the truth is that if I could have gotten away with it, I would likely have spent the entire month partying.
By the time we had quaffed our coffee and ventured back outside, almost the entirety of Lochavullin Road was flooded. The water had travelled all the way down to the bridge and was troubling the lane outside the cafe. We stepped down off the pavement to find that the flow was at least ankle-deep in its shallowest parts. Dad was keen to get to Tesco on the other side of the road, but he was trepidacious to walk through the water. My brother and I insisted that he could get whatever he needed in Lidl, or at least take the long route around to Tesco if necessary, but he wouldn’t listen. He began to shuffle across the bridge, almost in the manner of someone who is learning to walk for the first time, which I suppose in a way we all were. I never thought that I would see the sight of my dad wading through water that was at least shin-high by the time he reached the middle of the road, just to get to Tesco. There was something admirable about it; in that I couldn’t help but wish that I had the kind of desire for something, anything, as my dad had to buy some milk and bread. Still, the depth of the water was getting silly before he could reach his destination, and as soon as he realised that my sister wasn’t going to risk walking across to retrieve her car, he relented and came back to the bridge. It truly seems that nobody can resist the authority of a Les Mills instructor.
The Great Flood of 12pm-10pm 7 October 2023 will live long in the memory of everybody in Oban who survived it. I can remember standing in the bus shelter at the station with dad waiting for the Soroba bus to arrive as the rain continued to fall without any sign of it ever stopping. With no sign of the bus at least 30 minutes after its scheduled time, rumours began to spread that it had become stuck at the Corran Halls and wasn’t able to drive up the hill to Dunollie due to flooding. It was easy to see an armageddon scenario knowing the consternation it causes when people can’t get out of Dunollie. The relief we felt when it eventually arrived was similar to the euphoria when a barstool facing the television in Aulay’s opens up and there’s a game on that you want to watch. As the day developed, a deluge of photographs appeared on social media, businesses in some of the worst affected areas were forced to close as water levels rose, while landslides on the roads to the north and south of the town meant that Oban was cut off from the rest of civilisation in the physical sense rather than the figurative way many people usually like to believe.
By the time the day of the 40th anniversary of my birth came around the following Wednesday, the flood was just another one of those things that happen at the weekend and are quickly forgotten about, a phenomenon that becomes easier with age it seems. It was to my surprise that I awoke in the morning to discover that not only had my body not completely broken down the way I had occasionally feared it might, but rather it felt like it did any other morning – only somewhat sprightly. A residual rush of energy from my indoor football game on Monday accompanied a spring in my step. I had scored the finest goal of my fleeting career in the hall at Atlantis, and although there were only nine other people there who witnessed it, it was still nine more than are present any other time I’m scoring.
A group of us arranged to go for dinner at Bar Rio in a sort of recreation of my 39th birthday, only this time we arrived with a no-fern pact – nobody wanted to finish up with soil on their hands from my inability to care for houseplants. The eight of us managed to unconsciously organise ourselves into a seating plan that was identical to a year earlier, with (much more than just…) the Plant Doctor’s girlfriend taking up the spot vacated by The Algaeman. After our initial drinks order was taken by a bloke, we were even joined by the same waitress who had previously served us. Nobody had seen her since she disappeared midway through that last meal following my handcuff remark, so there was some relief to know that she hadn’t skipped town. The waitress had a knowing smile as she approached our table. It was easy to see that she recognised us, though there was an unspoken agreement that no-one from our group would attempt to engage in any banter with her lest we ended up going hungry, and she seemed quite comfortable with the unspoken element of the agreement. I was only a matter of hours into my forties and already the better judgment was coming through.
Having filled our pie holes with pizza, and without this time offending any waiting staff, we ventured forth to the Lorne pub quiz in search of trivia triumph. It wasn’t without some guilt that I temporarily separated from my usual team, the Unlikely Bawbags, but this was a rare occasion. It isn’t often that I get to team up with my brother and the Plant Doctor at a quiz without one of them falling asleep before the music round, and never with Dirty Finger, who we hoped would show the same acumen for general knowledge as he does for picking cheesy chart hits at the jukebox.
The main purpose of our one-night-only alliance, however, was to take our rivals Quiznae Me down a peg or two. Their rise to prominence in the quiz makes me think of the Stay Puft Marshmallow Man in the original Ghostbusters film: a cute and fluffy little character who couldn’t possibly cause any harm to anybody until it suddenly grows to a monstrous size and threatens to crush the entire city before the heroic Ghostbusters cross their streams and melt it down to a puddle of goo. They had been getting their excuses in early ahead of the quiz, claiming that half of their team was away on holiday and they were going to be down to only two members. I didn’t believe a word of it. The whole thing sounded like the days when my niece was younger and I would hide whatever toy she was playing with that day behind my back. She would protest and I’d insist that I didn’t have the missing toy. Eventually, once her guard was down, I’d sit the toy atop my head waiting for my niece to notice it, her eyes would widen, and Quiznae Me would win the quiz.
Perhaps the only obstacle I could see to our alliance going all the way and winning the quiz was our inability to agree on a team name. I quite liked the idea of Traveling Quizburys, but there were a variety of alternatives put forward in our group chat. Steak Pie: Revisited is always a popular reminder of the disastrous entry the Plant Doctor and I made into the Settle Inn’s quiz in Stirling; Don’t Cross The Streams was our Ghostbusters-themed suggestion, though it is precisely what we were going to have to do to defeat Quiznae Me; A Caricature of a single quiz team and Are stars just pinpricks in the curtain of night (spoken like Sean Connery) were also options. We hadn’t decided on a name when the silver-haired host came around to ask and we were forced into a panicked 40-Year-Old Virgin.
Things didn’t get any better from there when we were presented with the opening picture round, which was ten photographs of famous places of worship. When the general knowledge round contained the weekly Celtic-themed question, the Rangers-supporting Dirty Finger began to question whether he had been reeled into some kind of Papal conspiracy. Despite this, our alliance made a strong start to the quiz. Indeed, we performed well throughout the entire night. Yet, to our frustration, there was always one team ahead of us from beginning to end. A team that had no qualms about denying a 40-year-old man a victory at the pub quiz on his birthday. It wasn’t Quiznae Me – we crushed them – but, rather, the Unlikely Bawbags. The very team I had left to join my one-night-only alliance. It seems that the first lesson of my forties is to never underestimate your bawbags.
I couldn’t let my birthday pass without stopping in to have a drink in Aulay’s, the one place that almost feels as natural as the womb. Being a Wednesday night it was quiet and we had the run of the lounge bar to dissect our quiz defeat and pump the jukebox full of pound coins. It wasn’t long before a pint of Tennent’s was passed through from the public bar accompanied by hushed words from the bar staff. “Doc says happy birthday.” I couldn’t recall ever being bought a pint by Doc before. It feels it would be something a person would remember, like an Old Testament-style flood. More important than that, though, was the question of whether receiving a pint from Doc is an act of congratulations or commiserations.
When I was next in Aulay’s in the hours before the party I had decided to throw for myself, my mind was almost utterly consumed by a comment made to me in the same place the night before. I was talking to the former barmaid who once believed that my name is Rupert when she told me she planned to come to my party dressed as Lara Croft. It didn’t seem to phase her when I pleaded that I would likely hardly see five minutes of the night if she turned up in the guise of the Tomb Raider. There were all manner of things going on around me – Aulay’s had a bottle of Lagavulin behind the bar for the first time in years; the scientist from Swansea University who has strong opinions on shoelaces had travelled down from Skye with his wife; the nut tax man was being sent on a wheeze around town to source balloon weights after the ones I had bought from eBay proved to be defective – yet all I could think about was that damned Lara Croft.
With whisky in our bellies, we sauntered across the road to the taxi rank to catch a ride up to my dad’s on our way to Soroba House. Cars were at a premium, but in a rare stroke of luck, there was one pulling in just as we arrived. I sat in the front passenger’s seat for the journey, which was considerably more dry than the same route was a week earlier. A strong breeze ruffled the branches of the trees in Argyll Square, enticing the driver into invoking page one of the small talk handbook. “It’s been so windy today,” she observed. I hadn’t noticed, but the new wisdom that comes with being 40 years old suggested that confessing as much wouldn’t assist in continuing the conversation, so I went with one of my most-used self-depreciating jokes.
“Aye, I spent ages doing my hair this morning and it was all for nothing.” I could feel the driver’s eyes twist from the road to my head, and a faint chuckle followed. “But you don’t have any hair,” she jabbed. I hammed up the feigned indignation, blaming the approaching winter nights for her poor vision and threatening to withhold our fare as she collapsed into hysterics. I reckon it was at some point on that brief journey that I remembered that I was always more into Super Mario Kart anyway.
Despite having organised the thing, nothing could have prepared me for the emotions of walking into my own party, while others seemed unprepared for the harrowing sight of the ‘Green and Glowing Ghostbusters’ cocktail I had ordered for arrival, with the Irish Cream slowly curdling on the surface of the drink. People had put in such a remarkable effort to make the night memorable, especially my sister and partner who must have inflated more than a hundred balloons, and Oban’s leading purveyor of Irish dance who did so much to help put the ‘jig’ in Gettin’ Jiggy Wit It. As many as 16 would-be DJs added more than 12 hours worth of music to a collaborative Spotify playlist for the event, while Dirty Finger went to the extent of having his friend create an enormous creamy fruit cake centred on a daft throwaway comment I’d made during one of our lockdown beer clubs on Zoom about a particular tipple having the taste of “Babe Ruth smashing berries into your mouth.”
Then there was the grand reveal of the project the no longer raven-haired quiztress had been secretly working on for weeks. A ray of inspiration had come to her during one of our quiz defeats in September that it would be fun to prepare a Piñata for the party, though she refused to indulge me with the theme of the piece. I couldn’t even begin to hazard a guess as to what kind of Piñata someone would bring to a 40th birthday party, and so concerned myself more with whether we could get miniature bottles of whisky inside the thing – although that was quickly ruled out on the grounds of safety. I couldn’t believe it when I arrived at Soroba House and saw the creation swinging from the ceiling in the middle of the room: a Piñata of my own head, complete with glasses and a colourful tie. The features were unabashedly accurate, from the size of the forehead to the haunted hairline. From this angle, I could see why the taxi driver was so amused.
In addition to the generosity of time and effort, I was touched by the number of people who came to the party bearing gifts. I had received an Andy Warhol picture depicting the 1984 Winter Olympics in Sarajevo, a snappy tie and socks combo that nearly matched, a gorgeous green and gold silk pocket square, a personally engraved notebook, and enough Jack Daniel’s and Jameson to last me until my 50th birthday. It was almost too much, and then it did become overwhelming when the Plant Doctor made his presentation. From the outside it looked like any other gift-wrapped offering, even if it was difficult to believe that he could wrap so neatly. Inside, however, it was anything but an ordinary gift. I was stunned to find a collection of six books bringing to life all of the blog stories I had published online between 2018 and 2023. Across 1, 114 pages, the books weaved together every fabric of our friendship, with contributions in each volume from those closest to me and others who have featured in my writing through the years. I have long dreamed of seeing my words in print but tempered that ambition with my own self-doubt about who really wants to read of interactions where women are being asked if it’s a good idea to go rafting in the rain.
It would be easy to think from the likeness of the Piñata that my head could hardly get any bigger, but holding this impressive tome in my hands challenged that notion. At least, it was that way until I witnessed the vigour that my niece showed in battering the Piñata. There was a relentless cacophony of plastic on paper mache, yet my big bald forehead wouldn’t budge. Eventually the bat slipped out of my niece’s hand, landing at the feet of the VAT man. He reached down to pick it up and found himself overcome with the temptation that just about anybody else would. A gunshot-like sound reverberated around the place and the room was filled with silence as bags of Haribo fell from the gaping wound in my head. As my paper likeness crumpled to the floor, the VAT man’s face was a picture of remorse – at least for a handful of seconds, until the sweets were gleefully gathered up and the burst Piñata was placed over my head. Think Frank Sidebottom, but reeking of Joop! and Jameson. When you consider that split-second decision to pick up the dropped bat and all that followed, maybe Benjamin Franklin didn’t have it all figured out after all.
In recent years I’ve made it a habit at the end of the summer to place an order on the World of Books website. Similar to a squirrel gathering nuts to see it through the winter, I spend an evening browsing the 4-for-3 offer on the second-hand book retailer’s catalogue. My end-of-summer 2023 haul was placed on 25 July. The package arrived sometime in early August, and I was pretty excited to get torn into it. While it feels nice to hold a brand-new book, one that has never belonged to anybody else, there is something appealing about the pre-owned sort. You never know what you’re going to find written inside the cover or in the margins, and they always have a pleasing fragrance. Or maybe that is just something I have been telling myself since 2018 when a woman in Markie Dans said to me that “You smell like old books.”
I was chuffed with my delivery from World of Books, although I quickly realised that not everything was as it should have been. There were four books, that much was correct, but only three of them were items I had ordered. Amongst them was a rogue little number that had 373 pages, each the colour of a porcelain cup after a teabag has been left inside for too long. It was a book that not only had I not ordered, but I had never even heard of before: The Good Earth – “a classic novel of pre-revolutionary China by the Nobel Prize-winning author” Pearl S. Buck. Despite having never read anything of even post-revolutionary China, let alone pre-revolutionary, I was intrigued. While I was disappointed not to have received Blink by Malcolm Gladwell, at a retail cost of £3.60 it hardly seemed worth the administrative hassle of composing an email and packaging the book back up to return it, so I decided to keep The Good Earth. I guess it’s true what they say about things in life passing by your eye quickly – though I can never remember exactly how that phrase goes.
August in Scotland often does this thing of being more like autumn masquerading in summer clothes. This year it has been that way since I got home from Sarajevo in mid-June to discover that I had already missed Oban’s two-week heatwave while I was away. There were a handful of days where summer threatened to break free from autumn’s clutch, such as on the consecutive weekends in July when I did two-fifths of a Hugh Grant film and attended two weddings and no funerals. But otherwise, it has been a brief parody of a season when I could have placed my World of Books order at any time in the last three months.
Indeed, nothing seems to have been the same since I returned from Bosnia. It’s almost as if my flight passed through some alternative timeline and I arrived back in Oban with no sense of where I am or even who I am, similar to the way I imagine people might feel when they get off the bus at the Dunbeg turning circle. I couldn’t put it down to the usual post-trip blues anybody feels when they get back from a place they enjoy, although part of me was undeniably pining for cevapi, rakija, and Sarajevo. My motivation was off on an extended holiday, while the baggage I was carrying felt way over the usual allowance. I found myself inventing all sorts of excuses to get out of my daily yoga routine; things like not having time because the bins needed taking out, feeling too tired from my 9-5 desk job, or feeling an urgent need to reorganise my book cupboard. It’s much too easy to get out of a good habit by making a habit out of bad excuses.
My yoga ritual isn’t the only area of my life that has stalled in the months since my trip. It has been a struggle to muster much interest in many of the things I usually love doing, such as writing about my hapless exploits with the opposite sex, going to the weekly Lorne pub quiz, playing five-a-side football, or performing at our regular open mic night. There have been times when even going to Aulay’s seemed like a chore, although it turns out that is one thing I can always manage. But somehow it is different, too. It is as if somebody had hit a switch and suddenly everyone I know is a responsible grown-up who is either married, in a relationship, or drinking 0% lager. Though when the price of a pint of Tennent’s is as much as £4.10 it is hard to blame anyone for seeking an alternative. Even the Plant Doctor has committed to a period of sobriety, which strikes me as being akin to a bird that chooses to walk rather than fly. Chances are if you walk into Aulay’s on any given night now, the Plant Doctor will be nursing a 0% Menabrea and Doc will be sitting on a stool in the lounge bar. Going for a pint nowadays is like getting off the bus at Dunbeg turning circle.
There’s a gap between the side of my bed and the wall where I have to reach in to turn off my bedside lamp after I’ve read a chapter of the Chinese book I didn’t order. For a split second while my hand blindly fumbles for the switch, I never know what I’m going to find in there. It occurred to me that the uncertainty involved in the act of reaching for the switch is exactly what I’ve been experiencing since the summer ended, when I’ve been lying in the comfort of being in my thirties whilst reaching unaware into the dust and cobwebs of becoming forty. When is the summer of one’s life, I wonder, and how do you know when it has passed you by?
The reality of growing older has never been something that has bothered me, aside from in 2016 when I turned 33. For several months leading up to my thirty-third birthday – in that gap between my bed and the light switch that is July to October – I felt panicked by the prospect of being the same age as Jesus was when he died. It’s all very well knowing now that there is nobody who is going to judge you by such a ridiculous standard, but back then I had no idea how to handle the pressure associated with outliving our Lord and Saviour. When I thought about the 73 books in the Bible recognised by the Catholic Church, it seemed a lot of material for a man who only lived for thirty-three years. Sure, I was writing a blog at the time documenting my days out at the football as a Celtic season ticket holder, but it didn’t have anything like the same audience, and it was mostly complaining about the difficulty of getting a decent steak pie at half-time rather than any great achievement I had made.
At the depth of my fretting, I began to compile a list in my notebook of some of the things other people had achieved while aged 33 as a sort of spur to inspire me that it needn’t necessarily mark the end of my usefulness. My list included items such as the Vaudeville performer Walter Nilsson riding across the United States on an 8 ½ foot unicycle; Paul Raposo beginning his study of watchmaking; Robert Hensel setting a world record for the longest non-stop wheelie in a wheelchair – covering a distance of 6.178 miles despite being born with spina bifida. The entries went on and on.
Things worked out alright once I realised that being 33 wasn’t all that bad and that very few people these days care about what Jesus did anyway, while later into my thirties I came to appreciate that the personal relationships you build are much more important than any list of achievements you can put to paper. I’ve been trying to tell myself that every time I hear it said that “life begins at forty” and the temptation is then to question what the fuck I’ve been doing with all of these nights standing at the bar in Aulay’s if not living my life. Was life really still to begin when the podcasting phycologist warned me that the face cream I’d been buying from Lidl was most likely terrible for my skin? Or every night when I walked in wearing a suit and Geordie Dave would holler after me, “Oi, Penfold!”
The fact that I am getting older is inescapable, however. Despite my brain trying to fool me into believing that I am still 29, my body has long since started to behave as if I am already 40. If I am not playing football like my trainers are filled with cement then I am straining a muscle in my back just by lying on my living room floor during one of the yoga practices I can be bothered doing. Towards the end of summer, around the time I received my copy of The Good Earth, I was invited to join the board of trustees and become the secretary of the local mental health charity Argyll Wellbeing Hub. I was thrilled to accept, even when it just feels like something only a person in their forties would be asked to do. Things have reached the stage where I’ve now accepted that I need to expand the age range of the women I’m seeking to meet on dating apps into the late-forties.
Somehow it doesn’t seem to matter how wide I set the age range on Bumble or Tinder, it does not affect my chances of success. For all I can see, there are approximately a dozen women between the two apps who are living in the Oban area, and none of them appear to have an interest in dating me. Everyone else is from places where nobody actually lives, such as Bridge of Orchy or Kinlochleven. From the number of women who show up as being in these far-flung villages, you’d be forgiven for believing that the Highlands is a bustling metropolis. What is going on up there that there exists such a thriving population of single women?
For as frustrating as that is, it’s not even the location of the Bumble and Tinder users that is most perplexing to me. The thing that gets me is that virtually every one of these women has the same interests. They like to go hiking, or freshwater swimming, or climbing, or foraging, while their “ideal Sunday” is a country walk followed by a roast dinner. Reading profile after profile of this it is hard to stop yourself from imagining that somewhere like Ben Cruachan or Glencoe is choked full of outdoor enthusiast single women as far as the eye can see, while in the surrounding villages, there are nothing but lonely men who cannot understand why they can’t get a date. These days more than ever I find myself asking where are all the women who want to waste a few hours in Aulay’s before going home and falling asleep while watching Ghostbusters for the 500th time?
Despite all of this, I did manage to make a match on Bumble in August. The woman was 41 and seemed to be visiting the Isle of Mull from either Germany or France, it wasn’t immediately obvious, though I later sussed that she was in fact German. The nature of Bumble requires that, once two people have been paired together, the woman makes the first move. Having read my profile, the German asked in the first instance if I would send her a link to my blog so that she could learn what type of guys are hanging around in Scotland. Although I felt as though I would make the least impressive spokesperson possible for the men in my country, I felt obliged to comply. After all, this was a woman whose first thought wasn’t how many metres she could climb, but how many words per minute she could read, and most importantly, she actually sent me a message.
Without hesitation, I gave her the link to my blog. Her response read: “And you are the only single person in Oban? That must be really hard. Maybe you should move to the continent where more and more people believe romantic relations to be utterly overrated, a postmodern substitute for church. But of course, church also isn’t an option.” I’ve heard of playing hard to get, but this seemed ridiculous.
Despite the initial difficulties, I exchanged messages with the German for a couple of days while she travelled around the Inner Hebridean islands. During one of her stopovers, she was complaining about how the only pub on the island closes at five o’clock in the afternoon and as a result, she was being forced to make conversation with the elderly man whose home she was lodging in. If nothing else, I felt sure that the situation would benefit me by encouraging the German to seek refuge in a blossoming online holiday romance. Things were really looking up when she asked me for recommendations on what she could do in Oban the following day. I suggested that she should go to either McCaig’s Tower or Dunollie Castle, visit the Distillery, or eat some seafood. Since it wasn’t clear from her messages whether she was staying overnight or just passing through, I added that it would depend on how much time she has and that there are plenty of good pubs and cafes in town.
I was excited about the possibilities that Thursday had in store for me. My head was filled with scenarios where the German would come off the ferry and our messages led to us going for a drink. It was all I could do to think about the places we would go: Aulay’s wouldn’t do for a first date, it would have to be somewhere a bit more classy, such as a Mediterranean meal at the Olive Garden or some cocktails in the Perle. I could just see the faces of the people at the office when I went in and bragged about the Bumble date I was going to go on after work. Things didn’t work out that way, however. The bus timetable to Callandar turned out to be my undoing and the German was only ever in Oban for a handful of hours during the afternoon. Our interaction was over by the end of the week. As someone whose Bumble bio relies heavily on the art of wordplay, it was somewhat ironic that my chances of a date should be scuppered by Callandar.
When the latest Let’s Make A Scene open mic night came around at the end of August, I was so caught up in the cobwebs of existing in the space between 39 and 40 that I didn’t feel like reading from my notebook as I normally would. There have been so many talented people who have performed at the Corran Halls in our last few events that I figured I could get away with not participating on this occasion. However, just in case I had an unlikely burst of enthusiasm, I did bring along the book which I read from the night I supported the comedian Gary Little a year ago. It was nice to go along and enjoy the rest of the poets and musicians without the stomach-turning nerves that usually accompany these things. My comfort wasn’t to be permanent, though, after a couple of people insisted that I perform. There’s nothing that will motivate a person more than having their ego stroked. As well as that, it was the first time that my dad had come to a Let’s Make A Scene in four years, when his review of my set was that “it was good, but he went on a bit long.”
Getting up to read in front of an audience was the best thing I have done since the summer ended. My performance went better than I could have expected, and I even got a laugh out of the joke I’ve been trying for years about whether it would be acceptable to ask for assistance in finding the self-help book section in Waterstones. Afterwards, I was complimented by a woman who I can remember all of the lads in my year in high school having a crush on, while I ended up talking to another woman who had some nice things to say. She was keen to tell me that “I don’t normally enjoy cringe comedy, but some of your bits were funny.” It was the sort of thing I wished I could put on my Tinder bio: Not likely to go hill walking with you, but I will make you cringe. She continued that “There were times when it felt as if I was being stabbed in the side…not by a knife…maybe something like a needle.” For the first time in a while, my hand reached for the switch by my bedside table without fumbling. The light went out, summer was over, but I knew that doesn’t have to be a bad thing.
There was a moment on Easter Sunday when I wondered if I would ever be able to have another alcoholic drink again. It was around the time that instead of being at the Glasgow Royal Concert Hall watching Ryan Adams perform an intimate three-hour set I was hunched over the toilet in a city centre Premier Inn throwing up for the fourth time in as many hours. I couldn’t face going to the gig, so I stayed in my hotel room with a takeaway from Nando’s while watching episodes of Columbo. Unfortunately, as it turns out, the Nando’s chicken stayed down no longer than my typical interactions on Tinder last.
I was booked onto a 7.15 flight to Dublin the following morning, and if I was going to have to miss one thing, it was better that it would be a musician who I have seen play more than 25 times before rather than a trip to the Irish capital. So it was with a heavy heart and a heavier hangover that I sat on the bed and considered everything that had led me to that episode.
The arrival of Easter week is always an exciting time in a seaside town like Oban. Seasonal businesses begin to emerge from their winter hibernation as tourists stream in from all over the world by train, tour bus, and cruise ship. Some years the weather has even brightened enough to allow lighter jackets to be coaxed out from the wardrobe, though in other years it has been known to snow and there can be sledges seen rolling down hills instead of painted boiled eggs.
It is always fascinating to observe these wide-eyed new subjects when they’re introduced to the complex ecosystem of this quaint little place. I like to watch them as they walk along George Street and ask myself which of them has it better, whether it is in comparison with the other tourists or in competition with my own life. For example, is it the lonely old man who I saw shuffling slowly down the street gripping a white polystyrene chip box the way another might warmly clasp the hand of a lover or the salty-haired gentleman who could be seen mouthing the words “Oh for fuck sake” as his wife stopped to take another photograph of the view across the North Pier? More pressingly, I was curious as to which tourist I would appear to be a few days later in Dublin.
Since Thursday evening marked the beginning of the long Easter weekend, a few of us decided to make the most of it by paying a visit to the Oban Phoenix Cinema. We had been keen to see the new film Cocaine Bear, but since that particular carnivoran mammal’s party had long since departed the big screen we had no option but to watch Scream 6, which is at least three more Screams than I was aware were even in the franchise. Our group of seven met firstly in Wetherspoons for dinner and drinks, a location which in itself seems more frightening than any slasher flick could be.
On our way to the cinema, we stopped off in the corner shop to pick up as many beers as we could reasonably carry without being detected by the usher. I brought an empty satchel with me for the job, though others simply stuffed the bottles into their pockets believing it to be more discreet. As a man who is approaching forty years of age, this is about as close as I get to breaking the rules, and there was a minor surge of adrenaline as I deceived a young man who is likely earning minimum wage into believing that a carton of sweet and salted popcorn was all that I was carrying into the cinema.
Screen Two in the Oban Phoenix Cinema is probably no bigger than my living room, and indeed the only discernable difference between them is the absence of dead houseplants in the cinema and the fact that I wasn’t the only person who was getting drunk while watching a movie. Our varying degrees of effort to disguise the cargo we had brought with us was immediately made a mockery of when we walked in to find that the place smelled like Nories chip shop and the people sitting in the back row hadn’t gone to the trouble of sneaking in their contraband fish takeaway. Theirs was a Last Supper everybody knew about.
Despite sitting in Aulay’s until closing time drinking in our favourite highlights from the scary movie and filling the jukebox with songs from the Full Monty soundtrack, I was feeling surprisingly sprightly on Friday morning. It has become something of a tradition in my Easter weekend that Good Friday is a day where I get shit done. By midday, I had already changed my bedsheets, put on a load of washing, vacuumed the floor, done a grocery shop, and polished my dado rail. Something about a religious holiday seems to bring out the best in my housekeeping. Even though my faith has practically turned to dust over the years, I can’t help from feeling that I would at least be more capable of cleaning it up if we had more religious holidays. I felt good about my morning and toasted my success with a Lidl’s hot cross bun.
When I returned to Aulay’s in the evening, Brexit Guy was standing by himself at the bar. He had spent much of the afternoon in Wetherspoons, where he complained that the San Miguel was as much as £4.25 a pint. The pub seemed quiet considering that it was a holiday weekend. There were a handful of small groups scattered around the place. Sitting amongst one of them was a young woman who I had worked with maybe nigh upon 18 years ago and who I of course had an unspoken crush on at the time. She looked much the same as she did back then, save maybe her blonde hair had become darker the way a dimmer switch lessens the brightness of a lightbulb. Brexit Guy had moved next door to bemoan the price of Spanish beer, which enabled my former colleague to step into his place.
I was surprised and thrilled that she recognised me. What is this? I thought to myself. Some kind of a good Friday? We exchanged the usual pleasantries and she asked me what I had been doing with myself. “Mostly this,” I responded, nodding to the pint of Tennent’s which I was holding in my right hand the way an elderly tourist cradles a box of chips.
“I don’t usually see you in here,” I said, before realising that all of this was probably giving the impression that I had spent the last 18 years in Aulay’s when in reality it has only been some of the time. “Not that I’m always here,” I hastily added in a bumbling manner. “Just two or three times a week.” Internally I was kicking myself. It hadn’t been my intention to reintroduce myself to this person who I hadn’t seen in so long as though we had run into each other at an AA meeting. I could feel my entire face burning with the fury of a thousand suns, while my heart was a stick on the drum skin of my ribs. Although we continued to speak for a few minutes more, I couldn’t stop thinking about how I had already ruined it all, whatever all could have been. Eventually she wished me a good night and shook my hand in a way that suggested we had agreed to ship several tonnes of paper to an associate in Belgium rather than that we would ever talk again.
I was still processing my thoughts and nursing my wounds when the VAT man and a birdwatching accountant arrived expecting to be able to watch the Partick Thistle versus Queen’s Park Scottish Championship fixture. Unfortunately for them, their hopes were dashed when minutes earlier a group of men who were visiting from Burnley requested that they watch their team’s game, in which a win would have them promoted to the English Premier League. We took a seat at the table next to theirs, as if to live the moment vicariously through them. It was nice seeing other people experiencing true joy in the pub, and in a way, it seemed as though getting close to them was my best chance of feeling it for myself.
After a brief stop in the recently reopened Mantrap, we ventured forth to the Oban Inn, where I was relieved to stumble upon the barmaid who on the occasion of my 39th birthday vanished from Bar Rio after my niece bound my wrists together with the gold chain from her bag and I made a remark about needing the keys. Part of me had long since feared she had skipped town in protest at the joke, so abrupt was her departure from waiting on our table that night. She appeared at the bar next to me as I sipped at my pint of Beavertown Neck Oil, and in a moment that felt almost dream-like in its surreality, this beautiful young woman said that she remembers me. However, it wasn’t the fairly recent incident at my birthday dinner that she could recall, but rather the first Saturday afternoon that the pubs could reopen their outdoor seating areas in May 2021 following the winter Covid lockdown.
Typically, after a period of promising sunshine, it began to pour with rain, and there was nothing we could do about it. We had full pints, and drinking them indoors was forbidden at the time, so we were forced to take the soaking. The barmaid returned after some time to take our next order, when I seized on the opportunity to steal a joke the Plant Doctor had made and suggested to her that we should really be drinking cocktails rather than pints so that we could get those little cocktail umbrellas. With the face masks everyone was wearing at the time, it was difficult to tell whether she smiled or if I received the same reaction I usually achieve when I try to make a woman laugh. But a few moments later, she came back to our table with a small plastic box full of cocktail umbrellas and invited us to help ourselves. It turns out that not only did she enjoy the joke at the time, but it was still on her mind almost two years later.
Despite this relative triumph, I couldn’t stop myself from asking her about the handcuff remark. I tried describing my memory of the night as best I could, but her carefully painted facial features seemed unmoved. It was clear that she didn’t have a clue what I was talking about – which, all things considered, was probably for the best. There was a more visible reaction from her when she realised that the Plant Doctor and I were drinking shots of Fireball, which meant that the least I could do was offer to buy her one. I didn’t know it at the time, but taking a shot of Fireball with the barmaid from the umbrella day would be the pinnacle of my Easter weekend. It could also be marked with a signpost that reads: this is the point where things started to go wrong.
Drinking a Canadian whisky mixed with cinnamon which shares its name with an extremely hot and highly luminous spherical mass of air hours before a 12:30 kick-off in a Celtic vs Rangers game that would inevitably require around 11 hours in the pub doesn’t seem like the brightest idea in hindsight. Celtic won 3-2, which put us in celebration mode like the Burnley lads the night before. When you spend so much time in the same place the hours kind of blend together, the way a bottle of ginger ale does in a glass of Jameson. Aulay’s becomes a sort of vacuum on days like these where things like time and the outside world cease to exist. The last thing I can reliably remember is when somebody played the Simple Minds song Don’t You (Forget About Me) on the jukebox and we gaily belted out the chorus. It wasn’t as much Breakfast Club as it was boozing duds.
As fate would have it, in the same way that someone finds a black fly in their Chardonnay or ten thousand spoons when all they need is a knife, Ryan Adams played the song as part of the Glasgow set that I missed whilst vomiting a Nando’s dinner down the toilet in my Premier Inn. I was furious with myself. In another of a series of bad decisions, I booked the earliest flight available from Glasgow to Dublin because it saved me around £40 if I flew at 7:15 am rather than 9:35. Consequently, I was walking through Glasgow city centre to the bus station at the same time as the night clubs were emptying. It was a striking contrast, a glimpse of the night I could have had if only I hadn’t pissed it all away on Saturday. While these folks all seemed to be having the time of their lives, I was still nursing what appeared to be the mother of all hangovers, though I was beginning to suspect something deeper at play. At Glasgow Airport, I was prodding a fork at something closely resembling a cooked breakfast at half-past five in the morning while stag dos and hen parties carrying inflatable grooms were downing pints and proseccos. I don’t know how they do it.
My stop off the airport bus was at the famous Ha’penny Bridge, which has been around since 1816 and is one of 21 bridges which cross the River Liffey. Alongside the Brooklyn Bridge, it is the crossing on which my walking pace has been most disrupted by people taking selfies. The scene across the river was exactly what you might expect if you asked a young child to sketch a picture of what they believe Ireland to look like. It was grey, drizzly, gloomy, atmospheric, beautiful. In my pursuit to save those precious pennies by taking a 7:15 flight, I hadn’t considered how I would spend the nearly six hours until I was able to check in to my hotel, least of all when I was feeling under the weather. I found myself wandering aimlessly around the slick cobblestone streets in Temple Bar, meandering in and out of narrow alleyways, and sitting by the river with a coffee and a salted caramel and pistachio sourdough doughnut from The Rolling Donut. This small, colourful store had a constant stream of customers and a line stretching out onto the street. The window was pure Instagram bait, with row upon row of gleaming glazed doughnuts in every flavour imaginable. My tooth is far from a sweet one, but even I couldn’t resist.
Traversing the streets of Dublin is a sometimes peculiar experience. It’s no different to any other city centre, with buskers playing on Grafton Street, homeless people sheltering in the doorways of abandoned retail premises, and in one instance I saw two Starbucks franchises situated across the road from one another. But what sets it apart is the faint beep, beep, beep noise you hear as you approach a pedestrian crossing, before all of a sudden there is a zapppp! followed by several seconds of more urgent beeping. It’s like something you might have seen on an episode of The X-Files. For a moment, you aren’t sure whether to cross the road or brace yourself for an alien abduction.
Even more curious than the sci-fi pedestrian crossings was the sight of all the rubbish bins on the streets around Dublin Castle being covered up with black bags, which were secured at the base by a cable tie. It isn’t something you see every day – or even any day – and it wasn’t until I joined a walking tour later in the afternoon that I learned the reason behind concealing the city’s bins. We were told that President Biden was due to visit the Irish capital later in the week, during which he would be attending a ceremony at the castle. As part of the security measures in place prior to the trip, all of the bins in the area surrounding Dublin Castle had sacks placed over them, seemingly to prevent any would-be assassins from planting a bomb. We couldn’t tell if this said that the Irish just aren’t all that persistent anymore, or if their bin bags are much more resilient than the tie-handle sacks I’m buying from Lidl.
Walking tours are often a fantastic way of seeing many of the important historical aspects of a city as well as giving you the opportunity to meet new people. Amongst my group of seven were four Australian PE teachers who were travelling around the UK and Ireland. It was a measure of how tired and unwell I was feeling when I couldn’t summon the energy to attempt conversation with any of the women. Not even when the perfect line to impress the Aussies with my Scottish wit and charm presented itself in the grounds of the medieval Christ Church Cathedral could I bring myself to use it. Our guide was telling us the story of the patron saint of Dublin, Laurence O’Toole, whose heart was preserved and displayed in the church in a wooden box within a small iron-barred cage for more than 800 years until it was stolen in 2012. Nobody knew who had taken the heart or why, and it took six years for the relic to be recovered.
In addition to the heart of Saint O’Toole, the cathedral is also home to another infamous organ. The story goes that for around 90 years the organ in the church was silent. Nobody could get the thing to play a note, and it wasn’t at all clear why. Finally, they called in one of the world’s leading organ experts to take a look at the instrument. He spent a couple of hours playing around with it, but even he couldn’t get a tune out of it. This organ guru was dumbfounded; he couldn’t understand why there was nothing happening. He was ready to call it quits and fly back home to the continent when the church pleaded with him to try again since he had travelled all the way to Ireland.
Not willing to be defeated, the organ expert went back to have one final go at resurrecting the enormous instrument. This time, he noticed that there was one pipe in particular that seemed to be causing the problem. He rolled up his sleeve and stuck his arm up the narrow pipe, hoping to find out what was troubling the tube. At stretching point, his hand was suddenly tickling a furry little something. Pulling the mystery object carefully out of the pipe, the expert was astonished to find that it was a fully intact, perfectly mummified cat. Feeling triumphant, he sat back down to play the majestic organ, eager to hear the wind be transformed into beautiful music. But still, there was nothing. That same pipe was still causing a blockage, so he reached up deep into it again, anxious to discover if something was still stopping it from playing. Sure enough, right up there in the pipe, just beyond where he had found the cat, the organ expert pulled out the mummified corpse of a rat. Just like the heart of Laurence O’Toole, the two animals are currently on display in the crypt of Christ Church Cathedral, positioned side-by-side in a way that has the cat perennially chasing the rat.
From the minute the guide began telling the story of these fascinatingly morbid discoveries in the pipe, the perfect joke sparked a fuse in my brain. I was desperate to interrupt the guide with my line, which I just knew would have the four Australian PE teachers in raptures. “So…there are two major organs in Christ Church Cathedral?”
But I just couldn’t do it. Like I heard Yo La Tengo perform in their encore later that night, My Heart’s Not In It. All my energy was still working its way through the Greater Glasgow sewage system.
Through the tour, we heard a lot about the lyrical qualities of Irish Gaelic. The language seems to me to be the equivalent of dressing words up in neatly-pressed trousers and shiny shoes; they like to use a lot of them to exaggerate their effect. It is for this reason that Irish Gaelic is a key influence in the success of famous Irish writers like James Joyce, Oscar Wilde, Samuel Becket, Bram Stoker, and Bono. The example he liked to use to emphasise the wordy romanticism of the Irish language was the English phrase “I am hungry,” which the Gaelic counterpart can roughly be translated as saying: “The hunger of the world is upon me.” I wondered what the Gaelic expression describing my attempts at interacting with other people would translate into. Something like “the ineptitude of the universe resides in him,” I expect.
As it goes, I could probably be summed up in the story our guide told us about the origin of the famous ballad of Molly Malone. Although Wikipedia.org says otherwise, believing the tale to be about a fictitious woman, we were assured that the song was written by a Scotsman who while visiting Dublin fell in love with a young lady who by day was an actress in the theatres and by night was a prostitute struggling to make ends meet. He became infatuated with the woman and eventually asked her to travel back with him to Scotland, where he promised her a much better quality of life. Molly considered the proposal, but ultimately rejected the Scotsman and sent him packing with his heart broken. He returned home across the Irish Sea and penned a sweet ode to his would-be lover, with the bitter twist in the final verse that he now considers her a ghost. I suppose it would be harsh to think of the Australian PE teachers as ghosts since I wasn’t spurned by any of them, but that’s likely only because I couldn’t summon the strength to make my joke. Ultimately, I was only frustrated with myself.
Some relief came in The Black Sheep, where my fears that I might never be able to face another pint of beer again were allayed by a delicious chocolate truffle stout. It wasn’t the pint of ‘black stuff’ that people normally come to this part of the world to have, but it was the nicest beer I have tasted in Dublin. I think it was around six o’clock when a member of the bar staff walked around each of the tables placing down a red glass candleholder with a lit tealight candle held inside, bringing a level of intimacy I wasn’t expecting to enjoy with alcohol so soon after the trauma of Easter Sunday. Meanwhile, the large table of a dozen or so people to my left broke into a rendition of Happy Birthday and began to play a board game whereby somebody stuck a card to their forehead and asked the other players questions that would lead them to guess who or what they are. There was much rapture and hilarity.
Amidst the usual pub hustle, the candles and board games, I noticed a young woman who appeared to be sitting by herself just a few tables away from me. The candlelight lent a certain aura to her; it wasn’t amplifying her loneliness the way it felt it did mine. She had a book open in front of her, but she wasn’t reading it, more glancing around the bar. We had that much in common, at least, since I was sitting with my notebook open on a blank page and a pen by the side of my beer, having already journaled all I could remember about the two organs in Christ Church Cathedral. I knew why I was sitting in a bar by myself with a notebook on my table to give the appearance of me being a considered and thoughtful individual, but I wondered what this woman’s story was. While I’m barely an expert in the field of dating, I presume that you don’t bring a book along if you’re meeting someone and expecting it to go well. Apart from the additional baggage of carrying a book around with you, where does it end when it comes to bringing your hobby with you on a date? Are there people bringing instruments into restaurants in case there is a lull in the conversation? Or a canvas if the picture isn’t working out the way you want it to look?
Within five minutes of seeing the stranger across the crowded bar, I’d managed to convince myself that she was just like me: an ordinary person enjoying a quiet drink on a Monday evening while using a book as a social crutch. Eventually, in my mind anyway, our eyes would meet over the awkwardly-placed candles on our respective solo tables. She would probably smile and look away shyly, and by the time she glanced back in my direction, I’d be writing about it in my notebook. We would no doubt sit in pained silence for an interminable time while from the table next to mine come occasional shouts of “Am I a primate?” or “How many legs do I have?” In my imagined scenario, which felt increasingly likely the more I thought about it, I took a hearty swallow of the last of my chocolate truffle stout and strode purposefully up to the bar to order another. The tension is palpable as I pass her table with another pint in my hand. I lean over her shoulder and say something suave like “What are you reading?” or “I never like to judge a book by its cover, but I don’t mind telling you that is a lovely blouse.” We would spend the rest of the evening talking, and it seemed certain that the outcome would be the complete opposite of the Scotsman who came to Dublin and was spurned by sweet Molly Malone.
Suddenly, the table immediately between us was cleared, leaving a clear line of vision. This was it, the moment of truth. I braced myself for the instant that my life would change forever. Now she was interested in reading her book! As I turned to write about these latest developments in my notebook, into the bar walked a man who was carrying an umbrella that was as long as a snooker cue. He took a brief look around the bar, but it didn’t take him long to spot the person he was looking for. Of course, it turns out that the book-reading stranger was in fact waiting for someone all along and did bring a book to pass the time.
By the time I left The Black Sheep to make my way across the River Liffey to the 3Olympia Theatre where Yo La Tengo were performing, the rain had subsided. The sky was the colour of a cup of tea when the bag has been removed much too soon. It had the benefit of amplifying the Irish tricolour fluttering in the distance from the roof of City Hall as I approached one of the 21 bridges which span the river. Over the Ha’Penny Bridge, where I was dropped off earlier in the day, a large rainbow arched the full length of the horizon. It seemed a ridiculous, albeit gorgeous, stereotype for nature to be pulling. Was I to follow the leprechaun across the thing to find the pot of gold waiting on the other side? I had already allowed myself to believe one fairytale and wasn’t ready to fall for another so soon after.
Having missed Ryan Adams the previous night in Glasgow, I decided to take things easy at the Yo La Tengo gig. While drinking a few chocolate truffle stouts surely constituted an Easter miracle of sorts following my ordeal in the Premier Inn, I was still feeling out of sorts. Instead of going straight to the bar as I ordinarily would upon entering a venue, I immediately found my seat, which was three rows away from the stage. The night turned out to be a proper theatre experience. Before the performance began, there was a five-minute countdown warning people to take their seats. There was an intermission midway through the set to allow people in the audience to purchase ice creams and beverages, while the young couple who were seated next to me munched through a box of popcorn that was surely the size of the young lady’s head. In fact, they had bought two boxes and, when realising how large they were, offered the second helping to anyone who wanted it. Admittedly, it was a tad strange being sober at a gig, but in the end, I think I kind of liked it. I was able to see the entire thing for a start, which hasn’t always been the case, and Yo La Tengo were more than worth it.
Ira Kaplan turned out to be one of the most fantastically talented guitar players I have seen perform live, strumming the instrument behind his back and using the reverb from the amps to make it virtually play itself. I could almost have cried with happiness when within the first three songs of the set they played Our Way to Fall and Black Flowers, two tracks that I never used to think of as being amongst my favourites by the band but which played as I took the bus to Glasgow Airport at 4.30 that morning when I was still feeling tired and ashamed from the Easter Sunday episode. With my cheek pressed against the cold, trembling pane of the window and my heart still somewhere around my stomach, I decided that these were songs I would like to hear played at the Olympia later. Black Flowers has almost taken on an anthemic quality for me ever since. I’ve listened to it at least once a day, and things usually work out alright.
When I saw U2 at Croke Park in 2017 I spent the evening following the gig by taking part in the Dublin Literary Pub Crawl, which has been operating since 1988. The tour combines Dublin’s wealth of literary history with the pubs which helped shape it through professional actors who tell the stories and perform some of the works of Wilde, Joyce, Behan, and Beckett. It’s not that I had such an unquenchable thirst for Irish literature that I couldn’t resist going on the tour once again, rather I was hoping for a repeat of that previous trip when I found myself in the company of three women from Boston who had also attended the U2 concert. We had a fun night discussing Bono and the lads, the Claddagh ring, and how you would deal with inadvertently turning up for dinner at the home of a couple of swingers. One of the Bostonians in particular was enjoying my craic, to the extent that I was feeling confident about my chances of having a nightcap with her, until her more sensible friends reminded her that they were due to take an early bus to Belfast.
The pub crawl convenes upstairs in The Duke, which has been a favourite watering hole of Dubliners since 1822. I was met at the entrance by one of the two actors who was going to lead our journey through literature and libation. He seemed impressed that I had signed up for the tour despite having already been on it. I didn’t have the heart to tell him that my interests were closer to women than Wilde. The room was quick to fill up with fellow attendees, but none of them looked like they could fill the role of the Bostonians I met in 2017. Instead, I ended up in conversation with a 55-year-old man from Aberdeen who was visiting Ireland for the first time in search of his ancestry. He told me that he became interested in tracing his family roots more than thirty years ago. The traditional methods weren’t giving him much information and he was growing frustrated, so he started studying genealogy himself. It was only then that he began to discover more about where his family originated from, leading him to a farm in County Offaly, which he was going to visit later in the week. This seemed remarkable to me. It’s the equivalent of having a medical condition that conventional medicine seems incapable of curing and becoming a doctor to treat it yourself, or being a single man who longs for the touch of a woman and eventually deciding to become one just to get it.
Our night ended in Davy Byrnes, which is famous for being the pub in which chapter eight of the James Joyce novel Ulysses is set, although that is six chapters more than I have ever managed to read. Myself and the Aberdonian genealogist were the last men standing in the group. We stood around the bar with the two actors who led the tour, where the conversation naturally centred around Ireland’s relationship with alcohol and writing. It was only very recently that Ireland allowed its bars to open and sell alcohol on the religious holiday of Good Friday. I couldn’t help but wonder how different my weekend might have been if that was the case in Scotland. There would have been no shots of Fireball, I would probably have seen Ryan Adams perform in Glasgow, and I might even have had the heart to make my joke about there being two major organs in Christ Church Cathedral.
In my time as a single occupant, I have found a variety of ways of spending Valentine’s Day. Over the years, the date in the calendar set aside for celebrating the patron saint of beekeepers, plague, and epileptics has seen me dining alone on a frozen lasagne, drinking at the bar, loaning books from the library, and listening to Everybody Hurts play in the waiting room of Specsavers. For most people, the fourteenth of February is the most romantic day of the year. For me, it is just Tuesday.
This year I was determined to do Valentine’s differently. In many ways, I had no choice. My current mortgage deal is due to expire at the end of the month and needs to be renewed, a task I had been ignoring for several months after the UK government sent the economy into a tailspin with a catastrophic mini-budget just days before I received the letter from my bank reminding me that I would need to arrange a new mortgage before 28 February. I waited until after dinner before getting down to the job at hand. After all, I assume that is when most of the hot action happens on a Valentine’s night.
My mobile banking app advised me that the entire process of renewing a mortgage can be completed online, which while convenient seemed terrifying to me. The idea that the next few years of my life could be determined with a few swipes, in the same manner as ordering drinks from the app in Wetherspoons or playing a game of Candy Crush, is absurd. Yet there I was, scrolling through the numbers of deal after deal whilst listening to a podcast about the Historical Museum of Bosnia and Herzegovina. It hardly felt real considering how important a thing it was, and after no more than ten minutes I had agreed to a new mortgage. Ultimately, all I truly took from the night is that the Royal Bank of Scotland’s 4.34% is the greatest amount of interest I have seen on Valentine’s Day in a long time.
There was a time in the not-so-distant past when I would likely have felt depressed about the absence of romance from yet another Tuesday, but I know better than that these days. I think that I’ve seen enough from other people to understand that being in love is not the be-all and end-all of our existence. As ever, this realisation came over a pint of lager in the pub. It was around a week before I renewed my mortgage when I was in the Oban Inn with Geordie Dave and the Nut Tax Man that I saw how fragile the act of celebrating a date with grand romantic gestures can really be. The bar was quiet for a Friday night and we were easily able to get a table in a prime location. We were approached by the bloke who was sitting by himself at the long table in the middle of the pub. He was dressed in a thick navy checked shirt and a deerstalker hat and had thin yellow tufts of hair on his face, similar to the balls of fluff a kid might stick to an Easter bonnet.
His glass was left behind on the table as he gestured towards us asking if we would watch his drink while he stepped outside for a cigarette. These sorts of requests are always difficult to refuse when you are sitting directly in the eye-line of the item concerned, even if you’re the sort of person who obsesses over these minor details and worries that it’s all a ruse and the owner will never return. To add to that, the would-be huntsman picked up two plastic bags of shopping from under his table and placed them next to ours. As a reward, he invited us to help ourselves to the packets of crisps he had at the top of one of the bags. It was a pretty foolish offer to make to three guys who had been out drinking all night, for his entire haul of savoury snacks was quickly devoured. It struck me as unusual that someone would buy several single packets of crisps instead of a multipack, especially when he also had a couple of six-pack cases of sparkling water.
When he returned inside from smoking his cigarette, the crisp-sharing stranger joined us at our table, where we were able to learn more about what makes a man who buys single packets of crisps tick. We discovered that he was visiting Oban for the weekend with his girlfriend to celebrate their first anniversary. They had met at a karaoke night in a pub in Dumbarton, though he couldn’t remember which song either of them performed, which seemed a key piece of information in the story. For their first date, they went to a Wetherspoons pub in Glasgow city centre before going for dinner. The experience was too much for our new companion.
“I’ve never seen so many people in one place,” he told us. “There were more people in there than there are in the town I come from.”
Following drinks in the crowded bar, the dating duo ventured forth to their dining destination. The fella told us that they went to a fancy restaurant, which naturally led us to ask which one. “I don’t remember the name,” he said, “but my girlfriend is vegetarian…so it was probably Italian.”
What brought me to recognise the frailty of celebrating a significant date such as a first anniversary or Valentine’s Day was the fact that this guy was spending his evening with a trio of unknowns and not with his partner, who we were told had found the bed in the couple’s hotel room so comfortable that she wanted to stay there, insisting that he go out by himself instead. Although the couple would have an entire Saturday together in Oban and the guy was masking any disappointment he might have been feeling very well, the first night of his anniversary weekend away can’t have been any more memorable than spending Valentine’s evening renewing your mortgage.
When I’m not organising my household finances, one of my favourite pastimes is seeing live music. On the fifteenth of February, I took the train to Glasgow to see one of my favourite artists, Jesse Malin, perform a concert to mark the twentieth anniversary of the release of his debut album The Fine Art of Self Destruction. I’ve been listening to that record since at least 2004 and have lost count of the number of times I’ve seen Jesse play live. It has to be upwards of 20. This time I went to the show with my Glasgow gig buddy Laura, which usually means that things are not going to be entirely straightforward; and so it proved to be the case. We never meet up with the intention of the night going awry, but there’s an implied inevitability about it when you’re introducing Jagerbombs to the mix at tea time on a Wednesday. You should never act surprised if you release a fox into a chicken coup and suddenly find that your feather allergy is playing up.
Before we met for the fateful pre-gig drinks, I made a solo pilgrimage to the Thundercat Pub and Diner on Miller Street. The place was recommended to me by friends for its Chicago-style deep dish pizza pies and American staples, and it was all I could think about for days before I finally made it there. When you walk down the short stairway into the restaurant, you are met with bright neon lights and smooth soul music. It feels like walking into every roadside diner you’ve ever seen on the silver screen. I was led to an open table on a raised platform that must have had me looking like the worst centrepiece on a Christmas dinner table. As someone who has dined alone in enough establishments to know, it’s becoming clear to me that it must be an unwritten rule of hospitality that solo diners are situated in the spot that will draw the most attention to our plight.
I already knew what I wanted to eat from my days of salivating over the prospect, though looking over the menu again had me second-guessing myself. It’s times like these when I wish I had a second stomach and another bank account. I stuck with my gut instinct and ordered a deep dish pizza with black pudding and chorizo topping. When the pizza arrived at my table it became abundantly clear why they are described on the menu as being “designed to share”, because the base was as thick as my fist. By the time my enormous portion of food was delivered, the previously vacant table adjacent to mine had been filled by two young women. It’s ridiculous how often this happens when I am about to tuck into some messy finger food. What must they have made of the sight of a pizza the size of a small island nation being carried to my table as I sat there with a pint and a half of Brooklyn Lager in front of me is anybody’s guess.
As soon as I began to slice the pie with the pizza cutter, thick blobs of tomato sauce went squirting all over the place. My table was starting to resemble a crime scene, and I was certain to be caught red-handed. I picked up a slice of the pizza, which I imagined was almost as heavy as a newborn baby, and brought it to my mouth. Wiry strands of mozzarella cheese dangled from the roughly-cut edges, while a couple of cubes of chorizo leapt towards the wooden board below for temporary safety. Meantime, the two ladies at the next table were discussing booking a holiday to Croatia in September when the temperature hopefully shouldn’t be as hot, though it might depend on what Beth says since she is already going to Tenerife during the summer. I couldn’t bring myself to look in their direction the entire time I was there.
It must have taken me twice the length of time it usually would to waddle down Argyle Street to The Solid Rock Cafe where I met my gig-going companion. I felt bad about leaving behind a slice of pizza, but just couldn’t get through it all, and I was beginning to worry that my antics were disturbing the other patrons. Laura and I have always met in the Solid. I’m not sure how that started since I’m not your archetypal heavy metal guy, but I believe at one point they used to play some Gaslight Anthem on their rotation. I was into my second beer and standing at the bar amongst a sea of black leather jackets and Iron Maiden t-shirts when she arrived with two of her classmates from college. At the time, I couldn’t fathom how she was able to pick me out from the crowd so easily, but on reflection, I was probably the only person to have ever drunk in Solid Rock dressed in corduroy.
The four of us went downstairs to find a space to sit by the snooker table at the rear of the bar. What caught our eye more than anything down there was the carpet that they had covering half of the floor. It was a deep blue shade of tartan and looked like it belonged in a museum rather than a heavy metal bar – either on the floor or as part of an exhibit of things that went out of fashion in the 1980s. The Solid Rock seems like the least likely place in Glasgow to find a carpeted pub, purely on account of it being the bar I would most expect to see a drink spilt in. I don’t know if any of this contributed to our decision to start taking shots at an hour when most people are eating dinner, but before long there were glasses of Jagermeister and Sambuca alongside our pints of lager and cider. I can’t stomach the sight of Sambuca at the best of times, and it wasn’t any better here. Laura’s friend is Slovakian and had recently been offered a modelling opportunity in Manchester, despite in her words having the body but not the face for it. She used to only drink vodka until her new boyfriend introduced her to Sambuca. “I fell in love with him and Sambuca,” she told me, which was enough to give me two reasons not to like the guy.
Our other companion was also downing shots of Sambuca as well as pints of dark fruits cider. He had vowed to only go out for one drink after work, but he’s young and isn’t to know about the inevitability of having a drink with Laura and me. After numerous rounds, the young man disappeared to the bathroom for a while. We were alerted by someone leaving the men’s room that the guy seemed to be having some trouble in there, and being the only other male at the table it was left to me to find out what was going on. I tentatively walked into the toilet to find our friend locked in the cubicle. The floor resembled the sewer scene in Ghostbusters 2, with a river of pink cider and Sambuca-infused slime trailing across the tiles to the stall. From behind the closed door he assured me that he was alright, and sure enough, he returned to the table a few minutes later as if nothing had ever happened, with the sort of swagger that a person usually has when they’re debuting a slick new outfit.
It could hardly have been eight o’clock by the time things started to unravel. Soon the Slovakian sparked up a cigarette at the table, which somehow went undetected by the barmaid who came over to clear the empty glasses from around us. We had earlier predicted that Jesse Malin would be taking to the stage at around nine and so agreed it would be a good idea to be at Stereo by then. As the hour approached, we still had nearly full pints in front of us, so the ladies simply put the glasses inside their jackets before we walked out. We walked up Hope Street necking pints of Budweiser, and it came as no surprise when we arrived at the venue to have the gentleman who checked our tickets inform us that Jesse Malin had been playing since 8:15 and we’d missed half of the gig.
My time in Glasgow wasn’t all shots and slices. Before I’d even made it to Stereo to hear the back half of The Fine Art of Self Destruction I had been matched with two women on Tinder and another on the Bumble dating app. It was an unprecedented level of interest which had me considering how different my romantic life would be if I lived in the city. For better or worse, I felt that honesty was the best policy, so I messaged each of the women and told them that I was only in Glasgow for the night and actually live in Oban, adding that Oban “is not a million miles away (it’s only 93.)” The two Tinder women unmatched me immediately, but the lass on Bumble was unperturbed. We continued chatting for much of the night when I returned to my hotel room after the pubs closed, and things seemed to be going well. She had U2 listed among her favourite bands on her profile, and our conversation was littered with laughing emojis from her side. It was beginning to feel like she could be the one. I learned that she plays the guitar, and her favourite song to play is Stay (Faraway, So Close!) by U2. It is a fantastic love song. Despite this, she hasn’t practised the track in a long time, leading me to comment: “It sounds as though you’re an Edge without a Bono.” My match told me that it was one of the best dating analogies she had ever heard, and she even went as far as to agree to come with me to my next gig in Glasgow in March. Our interaction had slowed by the time I was back in Oban the next day, though, and by the end of the week we were like a couple celebrating their anniversary weekend away. Although I might not be one for commemorating a significant date such as Valentine’s Day, I’m beginning to think that I might buy myself a card if a woman ever talks to me for any longer than a week.
I first noticed it on Thursday following the first Lorne Bar quiz of the year. I was sitting on the end of my yoga mat putting my socks back on and looking every bit as limp as the fern on the coffee table to my right. Because it had been more than four weeks since I last took part in a pub quiz, I had just about forgotten how much of a struggle the hangover can turn the next day into. Often I would forgo my daily yoga practice on account of it, persuading myself that I was ‘too tired’ for a 30-minute exercise. My intention, if not my resolution, is to get better at sticking to my movement routine – mostly because I have found that days with yoga are much nicer than days without yoga, and the hangovers last longer without the mindfulness of half an hour on the mat. Effectively, I am trying to get in touch with my inner peace rather than my inner pissed.
My socks were coral pink and still a little damp from the rain, which forced me to immediately change out of them. Whilst peeling the socks from my feet again, I caught the distinctive whiff of smoke passing my nostrils. It was a peculiar thing to smell in my living room. While I could feel the burn from my side planks and tree poses, I knew that they weren’t sizzling that much. In the hallway, the aroma was so pungent that it could have been coming from inside my flat. For a moment, I was forced to convince myself that I hadn’t started smoking again. It was only a few beers after the quiz I kept telling myself, like it was a meditative mantra. Minds were only put at ease once I opened the door to my flat and found that the entire close smelled like a Marlboro production plant.
Usually the scent of cigarette smoke is inoffensive to me. In many ways, it is the thing I miss most about being a part-time smoker. The rest of the habit I found to be pretty disgusting and ultimately pointless, but I really enjoyed the smell of tobacco on my fingers – especially the morning after a night out. I could have lain in bed for hours savouring the space between my index and middle fingers. Sometimes it seemed a real pity to have to shower and lose everything that I had worked so hard for hours before. These days I find myself walking behind people on the street who are smoking and positioning myself in their slipstream, waiting to catch a puff of that sweet second-hand cigarette smoke, only to get a mouthful of wet melon or cotton candy. It is often tempting to wish for the vapers to walk into traffic.
In truth, my understanding of the physics of cigarette smoke is as paltry as the next person’s. I don’t know why the fragrance is so strong in my flat. There have been smokers living in the block before, but never anything like this. Considering that there was not a hint of smoke before I took to the floor for my yoga practice, it was remarkable that it would be so pungent less than thirty minutes later. They had to have blown through an entire packet of the things to create this much of a stink. You never get a neighbour’s batch of freshly baked bread or a homemade curry wafting under the door, at least not on Combie Street. What’s all the more difficult to comprehend is how the smell can be so overpowering in the living room and the hallway and for there to be no trace of it in the kitchen or the bathroom, the two rooms that have windows looking onto the garden. I also can’t smell it in the bedroom, but then nothing has ever been smoking in there.
I purchased a pre-owned copy of a book which has a warm birthday greeting for Margaret. I think this now makes me Margaret.
If there was one positive to come from the unseemly smoke saga it is that it at least served to take my mind off the other matter which has threatened to consume the early part of my 2023. At the tail end of last year, my barber announced that his wife had accepted a new job in Dundee and the couple would be moving there in February, therefore closing the barber shop that he had opened in its current location more than thirty years ago. The news was swirling around my head like a cloud of nicotine. Some days it was all I could think about. Apart from the few years in late childhood and early teens when most boys seemed to get their hair cut at home, I have always gone to the same barber. It isn’t that he necessarily snips sideburns better than anybody else in town, that his scalpside manner is more entertaining, or that he keeps the best selection of newspapers for people to read while they’re waiting. Visiting the same barber for a lifetime is one of those things that men seem to do, the same way that we use only one butcher, trust the same tailor, or call on the same electrician. Mostly it is through laziness dressed up in the guise of “ach, he’s always done that for me.”
Throughout my adult life, I have never had to think about where I would get my next haircut. The laziness that I inherited from being born a male means that there has only ever been one person I could entrust with that job. Now my entire world has been blown up, it feels as though everything is all over the place, like my hair after a walk along the Esplanade on a February morning. I don’t know where to begin looking for someone to cut my hair. It’s not as if there can be an audition process – once a haircut has been fucked up, you’re forced to live with it until the next one. Apart from anything else, Oban these days seems to be suffering a dearth of traditional barbershops. There are plenty of hair salons and Turkish barbers, but very few old-school barbers. One of the guys who we play football with on a Monday night is a Kurd who works for one of the many Turkish barbers in town and I have considered taking my short back and sides to him, but I worry that it is enough being skinned by him on the football pitch without being skinned in the style that Turkish barbers are known for.
I went for my final cut on the morning of the latest Let’s Make A Scene open mic night, where I read a piece concerning the storage of my herbs and spices that sparked an intense discussion around the room. When I arrived in the barbershop on Saturday morning, there was already a student in the chair who had enough hair to help his secret lover scale a tower. I worried that I might miss our family’s weekly coffee at eleven, but to my relief, the young man was only in for a minor procedure. Taking my seat in the barber’s chair for the last time was a curious feeling. It was tempting to ask about getting a little more taken off to make up for the barber’s imminent departure, and were it not for genetics giving me a sparse head of hair as it is I probably would have.
Although this was definitely different to any other time I have been in the barber’s over the years, it was also exactly the same as always. As the sound of the clippers began to buzz around my ears like a determined bee, the barber told me about how he had recently entered into an eBay auction for an antique guitar. He was mostly just curious to see how much the vintage instrument would sell for, but as things developed his bid ended up being the winning one. I don’t remember how much he told me he paid for the guitar, which he believed he could sell for a profit in a few months anyway, but I know that I was suddenly thinking that £10 for a haircut doesn’t seem so outrageous after all.
While the barber was initially sceptical about his and his wife’s move to Dundee, he has recently found himself warming to the new life ahead of them. He is seeing it as his retirement and is planning on hanging up his scissors and working a small part-time job to allow him to pay for things like antique guitars. “I won’t even be telling people that I used to cut hair for a living,” he told me in a way that made it sound as though he is going on witness protection.
“If anybody asks what I did in Oban, I’ll tell them that I used to work in the distillery rolling barrels. Nobody asks any more questions after telling them that.” This has always been one of his favourite things to say. You usually hear him bring it out when he’s about to go on holiday to Italy or Spain. I’ve never fully understood why being a barber is something that he feels the need to be so secretive about, but I believe that it’s out of a fear that once people know that you can cut hair, they will start asking you if you can do them. Before you know it, you have a queue of folk looking to have their hair cut. I’m not convinced that’s the way it works. You might be on the flight to your sunny destination when another passenger takes unwell and the cabin crew ask if anyone on board is a doctor, but you never hear emergency requests for a hairstylist.
I don’t know if I’ll find another barber in town who has the same turn of phrase and the ability to turn a haircut into an adventure down all sorts of rabbit holes. The last hair was snipped on the back of my head, and the barber asked me to put my glasses back on and review his handiwork. This always struck me as the most awkward part of the haircut process. There isn’t a lot anyone can do about a terrible haircut when the hairs are on the floor of the barbershop. Like asking how a meal was after it has been digested, or if a demolition job was suitable when you’re standing amongst the rubble. I said that I was happy with the haircut, and the barber handed me a tissue, which I presumed was for dabbing the stray hairs from the back of my neck and not the anticipated tears from my cheek. When I left, I was walking into a world of uncertainty, a place that wasn’t the same as it was twenty minutes before. For the first time, I was a man without a barber or any idea where my next haircut would come from. It was unnerving, no different to coming up from a downward dog and finding the scent of cigarette smoke in your living room.
Diaries of a single man 