Told you.

Maglev

Megalithic

We spent last week in Scotland. We arrived on the Monday and spent till Wednesday in Glasgow where we took in some restaurants and pipe bands (an unexpected pleasure) and selected the elements that will form my mum's new bathroom.

Monday evening we ate at Cafe Gandolfini in the Merchant City having enjoyed a drink in the Bar Gandolfini upstairs. I would recommend both, the haggis was very good. The following day we met Dom and ate at Fratelli Sarti in Wellington Street. I liked the atmosphere here and the food was ok. Dabbling in my own kitchen as I do, I felt that my Modena sausage with lentils and tomato sauce was a good enough bit of tuck but not a twelve quid dish. Dom had the Tuscan sausage on his pizza observing that maybe TVR names it's cars after sausages. Lunch on Wednesday was at Grassroots. The salads looked very fresh; my Thai soup could have powered Discovery into orbit.

Then off to Castleton (a handful of houses) near Lochgilphead. We lounged about on the Thursday and took the ferry to Arran on Friday.


Monolithic

There we came across Machrie Moor, the site of countless stone circles and burial grounds. I love a good stone circle.

Tall story

One of the best days of the year for me last year was spent in Shanghai. We did two things of note; travelled on the Maglev train which runs from the Pudong District to the new airport, a distance of 30km; it takes 8 minutes (reaching 430km per hour) and secondly we had a drink in a bar called Cloud 9 which is on the 86th floor of the awesome Jin Mao Tower. I will report on the totally crazy Maglev another time but I found the card for the bar the other day and thought I'd try to explain how it felt to go there. (Also Cloud 9 was the name of a band Dom and I were in in our teens, Dom sucessfully and for a reasonable period of time, me for one practice).

The tower is also in Pudong which is a former area of marshland where mega-buildings are emerging as though they are growing. The building sites are manned 24 hours a day, at night they are brightly lit, there are stacks of porta-cabins on site where the off-duty shifts sleep.

We had visited a number of amazing places in China, seen the Great Wall, the Forbidden Palace in Beijing and the Terracotta Warriors, all of which were amazing. But I never saw people react to a tourist visit the way they were, coming out of the Jin Mao Tower. It is 88 storeys tall; and there is an observation floor at the top. We thought we'd probably do that, but I knew that there was a bar in the Grand Hyatt Hotel which occupies the top 30 or so floors. It was less straight forward to get to but we eventually made it via several lifts and passing through doors that were for guests only.

The building itself I would liken to a giant metal worm. I remember learning in the former stable that served as the "science block" at school that worms have little barbs on them called chetae that help pull them along (and prevent them from being pulled out of a calculator, but that's another story). The tower is like a massive erect, square cross-sectioned wormbot. It is so massive I would admit to finding it a bit scarey to look at, particularly in the dark, when it is lit to awesome effect. The bar cunningly occupied two floors so the windows were double height and then the floor stepped up to the core of the building all the way round so that no matter where you sat you had a view of street level (rather than just the sky). The spectacle was enhanced but the fact that it was quite dark in the bar. The blackness and the exposed girders everywhere lent it a bit of a "batman set" feel. A bar where you need a drink.

Two or three cocktails and several descents in lifts later we were back outside the monster, giddily gazing up and trying to correlate the surreal fact that we knew we had just been all the way "up there" with the fact that moments later we were now in the street. There were a handful of coaches parked nearby and tourists were being disgorged from the door to the observation deck lift. Like me they were all gazing upward, many of them were jumping about and laughing nervously/excitedly as if they had just had a miraculous win. (Batophobia is the fear of being next to tall buildings).

Charity work

Yesterday I received a text from a ring tone company confirming my order and the fact that they would be charging £4 per week for their services; they went on to offer me the opportunity to cancel my order by dialling a premium rate number. I had of course never heard of them.

Last week though, I got a letter from the National Trust, thanking me for my continued support and reminding me that they would be taking £36 from my bank account in the next few weeks. Perhaps five years ago they successfully removed a similar amount from my current account despite my having cancelled my direct debit at least a year before. This latest letter had been forwarded to me by my bank; "we have a mutual customer; we have lost contact with him, blah blah blah". I contacted my bank who were super friendly about it, offering to call the offending charity and sort it out, (the person I spoke to had their number readily at hand) and stating that if it proved that I hadn't issued them with a new instruction, they would reimburse me and then chase the naughty charity. When I pointed out that I relied on them not to let anybody who fancied it, remove arbitrary amounts of money from my account willy nilly, they said they'd find out who was at fault. I asked them how it could happen and they told me the organisation in question may have invented a new reference number.

It is all depressingly cynical.

"Hello Mr Bank, we are a big charity and you have been our bank for some time. But we're thinking of changing to a bank that helps us generate more cash. We used to have an arrangement with some of your personal customers. If you don't mind, we will have a go at removing money from their accounts (many of them won't notice), if you'd be busy with something else whilst we're at it, that'd be jolly amenable; this will ensure our continued beautiful sybiotic relationship. Lots of love, Bent Charity".

Perhaps I should get in touch with that supercilious bloke from Radio 4.....probably could, but the arse who came up with the scam, sold the idea to his bosses by pointing out that I don't really have the time or inclination (The bank just left me a message to say that they've credited my account with the £36 that the NT swiped from my account last year....without me noticing!)

Magic Roundabout

A friend/someone I do some work with and I travelled to a meeting together in his Vauxhall VRX thingy this morning. It has had a number of adaptations to make it faster than a normal one. I was actually a little uncomfortable at the speeds we were doing on the A3 in reasonable traffic, I think that had to do with the size of the car and my friend's use of the brakes. On a previous occasion we were in a Lambourghini Murcielago going very fast indeed and it felt much safer. We duly dismounted the A3 and spent a very happy several minutes circulating the roundabout below. I started to feel sick largley due, I reckon, to the sticky competition tyres he has on the car (it has only done 1500 miles, some at a track day, and already the rubber looks very used), corners had to be taken very fast to get the tyres to let go at all, I was reminded of ride on the Waltzer. Anyway, he kindly let me take the wheel and so a few more revolutions of the roundabout were enjoyed before heading for the solicitor's office.

Traffic, speed bumps and various other obstacles meant that best fun to be had from this thirty thousand pound go cart was to go round in circles.

I would like one.

Julian Vilarrubi's work

Study from Umbrian Hilltown

Happy Days

Dom in Knossos, '84

Reality TV

"Confirm Discovery is 2 engine Zaragozza". The words of Eileen Collins when the shuttle reached the point, a couple of minutes after lift-off, at which it could land in Zaragozza, Spain, in the event of one (of the three) engine(s) failing.

Newton Mearns

A while ago I was in Glasgow and drove to where I lived for a couple of years when I was four or five in Newton Mearns. There is a small block of flats there called Broomcliff. We lived on the first floor, I don't recall the number, but I do have many sharp memories of that time. Behind the flats was a row of garages next to which I learnt to ride a bike (my brother and I called the bike Tronic because the right pedal rubbed agianst the chain guard every time it went round and made the noise: tronic) and behind the garages there seemed to be a permanent building site. When I ventured in there, the blokes working there would sing "Hadrian, Hadrian, the one coat paint", which I am told was an ad on TV at the time. I got extremely muddy in there once. The flats had a distinctive kind of clean smell, which they still have. There were rubbish shutes on each floor which was quite exciting. There was a hill down from the garages to a kind of roundabout at the front of the flats where the kids played on their bikes, I managed to turn over my tricycle going down that hill and cut my knee open. I recall crying in the lobby, mum phoning dad to tell him she was taking me to hospital, more crying and the smell of TCP. I was given a Chopper as an early birthday present, it was orange and was one of the original ones which had adjustable handle bars (not fixed like later, safer models). There was a boy who had got kind of Chopper copy for passing his exams to get into Hutchison Grammar, but mine was the first actual Chopper in the area although mine was not earned through hard work but my nagging rather a lot I seem to remember. Setting off on it for the first time was more exciting than driving my Porsche off the forecourt for the first time.

Occasionally I would attend coffee mornings with my mum, I particularly remember an older lady from upstairs called Bunty making me laugh. We would get Lucky Bags from the newsagent down the road. My uncle (who must have been 17) and I locked ourselves in a bedroom to play on the Scalextric set that my brother had been given for his birthday that day. I used to play chess with an older boy from a flat upstairs. He would come down to our flat in his pyjamas, I think he let me win. There was a scandal when he got expelled from school or something. I remember a very Action Man and Meccano oriented Christmas, my mum's hair piece coming off before a dinner party, fondue, getting our first dish washer, eating Scotch pie and beans at the table that is next to me as I type this, the smell of fresias, going to bed in the afternoon because we were going to the circus at the Kelvin Hall that evening, my dad's new aubergine Ford Zodiac, having to stand up in the back of my mum's Mini when I had had a toilet related accident at school and going to visit Uncle John and Aunt Anne (pronounced "an tan")in Cambuslang, they had the first colour TV I had ever seen and a model of Concorde. Their kids had the most astoninshing set of Action Man gear including jeeps, tanks and I think a parachute. We would eat chips there, and a skinny friend of their's from up the road called Graham could eat loads.

Police food

Spaghetti Carabinieri
Cold Bill
Paddington Greens
Cop au Vin

Generation gap

The other day I asked my friend's eight year old daughter how she was getting on at school. She said that it had been sport's day that week.
"Did you win any prizes?" I asked.
"No," she looked a little disappointed.
"She came first in two races and second in another," her sister said.
"You just get stickers," the little athlete reported.