Entry for February 19, 2007

This is interesting. My laptop now appears to be fully functioning and is actiually proving to be useful. This entry is being brought to you from a cafe in Edinburgh, while I wait for a train. Some of the more astute amongst you may have noticed that my definition of "useful" is wide enough to cover the fact that I can use the laptop to piss about doing my blog on the road instead of being limited to piss about doing my blog when I'm at home or in the office. Well, in my book, that is a great leap forward. More power to you Dell Computers.
Me and Il Famille were at a loose end yesterday afternoon, so I took us on a pleasant family outing to a graveyard. To be specific, we went to the Necropolis in Glasgow, which I hadn't even known was there until I found it in a guidebook a couple of months back. But it's there all right; a huge cemetry right in the city centre, full of monuments to the grand and the good (and the mostly forgotten), and there was something pleasant to be wandering around a hilltop in the middle of town, the sun shining. I was surrounded by the dead and by foreign tourists with digital cameras. I think when I am dead I will insist on obsenities in foreign languages being printed on my tombstone, so that no-one will take photos of their lover perched on top of my monument (to coin a phrase).
After the walk in the park we had a coffee in the Museum of Religous Life (from an atheist's perspective this might have been more aptly called The Museum of Peculiar and Contradictory Rituals - but I suspect the Arts Council would have been less forthcoming with funding).
Anyway, while I was standing in the queue, I was accosted by a woman twice my age. (As I write this I realise that I only have a few more years when anyone on the planet will actually be twice my age - I must get on with the gardening.) She approached me with the manic false toothed grin of a person for whom the term "spritely" was coined and said in a broad Yorkshire accent - "You know there's three men in my life!"
For a horrible moment I thought she was going to invite me to be the fourth, but happily she continued - "Arthur Itis - he wakes me up in the morning. Will Power - he keeps me going all day." (Although if you've actually read any of his novels, they might actually encourage you to end things. Perhaps she doesn't read deeply.) "And Glen Morangie - I take him to bed every evening."
She then said "Lovely to meet you" and pointed out, before vanishing like a ghost, that everyone we meet in life meets us for a "reason".
Presumably the reason in this case was to leave me confused and little bit afraid.