My Twitter Feed

-
so,
well,
this is awkward,
i’m
LITERALLY
choosing this hill to die on
so hold my beer
while I throw serious shade on this
cybernat, yoon
hun, fenian
blairite, millennial 
centrist Dad, TERF
cause the absolute state of this
is peak 2019
tfw
I LITERALLY
can’t even
is EVERYTHING
and i’m crying
for these clichés, tropes
and borrowed jokes
avocado snowflakes
and gammon-free wokes
it's *clap* just *clap* so *clap*
SAD!




Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

Dad

-
Image
The last time I saw my Dad, he'd just dropped me off at my flat after we'd been driving together. I failed my first test at the end of December and I've been practicing since to get it right the next time. We clashed a bit during that day's practice. At the very first junction, the green light came on but I couldn't get the car to move. The handbrake seemed jammed. "Go!", Dad shouted. His impatience just made me more irritated and flustered. "Shut up! What do you think I'm trying to do!", was my bad-tempered response. Later, we were doing reverse parking. He was trying to show me how to do it through positional judgement, and seemed unconvinced by the step-by-step method I'd learned from the instructor and YouTube videos. Again, we snapped at each other.  There was no lingering bitterness though, and I hold no regrets about that happening, because we made up straight away. We'd long reached a point where those tiffs rarely...
Read more

A Peculiar Prison

-
Image
In early November, Guxim Imerio, a 25 year old man from Albania, absconded from Dungavel Immigration Removal Centre near Strathaven. Reports say Guxim attached himself to the underside of a van, waited until it was out of the compound and had stopped, before fleeing. Even after escaping the centre, he faced several cross-country miles on foot. A search on Google Maps would have told him it is “unable to calculate transit directions” to or from the facility. Tucked in the rural backroads of South Lanarkshire, Dungavel is a remote abstraction, out of sight and out of mind. Housed in this strange outpost are around 250 asylum seekers, many having fled war, persecution, even torture; cast to our geographic and societal periphery while awaiting deportation or a ruling on their claim. Men and women enduring compound displacement, and locked up indefinitely for the crime of seeking residence in this country. Two weeks after Guxim’s escape, around 200 protestors descend on th...
Read more

the economist and I

-
the economist and I are fae the same lang toun he was shaped by the capital and spending time with Hume inspired patriot rebels and came to influence soon everyone from Marx to Wall Street tycoons I was there in the nineties, before dial-up was obsolete when the fans in the railway stand used to fill all the seats the settled will of the people, for some remained incomplete half-time in Munich and they’ll be dancing in the streets more than 200 years after the philosopher’s death with his statues and institutes and the national debt even a far-off asteroid bears his fabled epithet like a Champagne Supernova from my cousin’s cassette and the fireworks above his theatre which made me upset an explosive debate surrounds his key messages like Jacobite rebellions and yes-voting percentages hearing Brimful of Asha on the Forty-Five carriages of the fairground dodgems recalled in fragmentary images these Links Market memories and a free market idol cited w...
Read more

Filippiada

-
Image
In 2015, over one million people journeyed to Europe from the Middle East, central Asia and Africa in one of the greatest mass migrations of modern history. Another 280,000 souls have made the monumental exodus so far this year, trekking hundreds of miles through all seasons, risking their lives on flimsy, jam-packed dinghies across the treacherous Mediterranean, or left stranded to await their fate at gridlocked borders. Thousands remain in limbo in refugee camps, with over sixty such sites in Greece alone. A small camp just outside Filippiada in north western Greece is currently home to 400 of these women, men and children. Given the scale of such a crisis, my vague expectation when I arrived was to find a fairly well-functioning and co-ordinated humanitarian effort, led by international NGOs and supported by volunteers with assigned tasks and roles. I was pretty amazed to discover that untrained volunteers were essentially running the show. The organisation and delivery of the dai...
Read more

La Coupe du Monde Féminine

-
Image
#OurGirlsOurGame. Inclusive and supportive, yet assertive and unapologetic; the hashtag adopted by the Scottish Football Association for the Women’s World Cup was well-pitched and used widely throughout the tournament. It’s also directly at odds with the shameful history of that organisation’s treatment of the women’s game. Perhaps the nadir in this ignominious record was in 1971, when UEFA’s 32 members voted on a motion to incorporate women’s football within their associations. Only one country voted against. Wha's like us? Rose Reilly didn’t wait for anyone’s permission or blessing to play the game she loved. Shunned by her homeland, talent and single-mindedness took her to Italy and she won the World Cup. As midfielder Leanne Crichton tweeted in the aftermath of the lassies’ inaugural appearance at the competition 35 years later, “We don’t play this game for acceptance, we play this game because it’s ours.” When the team took to the field for their final group match v...
Read more

An Indian Wedding

-
Image
We’ve just arrived in Chennai after a long day’s travel, weary but excited. On the journey to Vellore, Nav’s home town, the raw force and pulsing energy of the street scenes leave me dizzy. Ubiquitous bright yellow auto-rickshaws – three-wheeled mini-taxis – jostle for space with cavalier bikers, brazen cyclists and cars without seatbelts. Commuters are crammed into kicking-can buses, with a dozen more hanging nonchalantly off the outside windows. Women in sarees sit casually sideways on the back of 40mph motorbikes, while rogue cows and bulls plod alongside or simply park themselves in the middle of the frenzied traffic for a nap. The scuttling packs of stray dogs are an unfamiliar species; straggly limbed and vaguely malevolent. Every would-be collision is a near miraculous escape in this zig-zagging, criss-crossing, technicolour chaos. The whole scene has an exhilarating offbeat rhythm, echoed by the Tamil hip-hop that pounds from the car stereo. The Gurusamy family home ...
Read more

Andy Murray

-
Image
Also published on Bella Caledonia .  “Maybe, I’ll see you again.” In classic Andy Murray fashion, after the downcast press conference, the worldwide tributes and the schmaltzy retirement video by his fellow pros, he gave us all something to cling onto. This week he’s expected to announce if he’ll go ahead with a hip resurfacing operation, which would, if nothing else, improve his quality of life. It’s an operation no singles player has ever come back from, but it just might give him a shot at competing again. Keeping us in suspense, one more time. But if this is to be the end, his career highlights are worth savouring: US Open champion; two-time Wimbledon winner; twice Olympic gold medalist; Davis Cup victor; World Number One. These are remarkable achievements by any measure and for those who have followed his journey there’s an overriding sense of pride and gratitude. Yet there remains a nagging feeling that he could and maybe should have achieved even more. I...
Read more

"Who's Ken?" - Social class and the Scots language

-
Image
ach well all livin language is sacred fuck thi lohta thim - Tom Leonard, 1984 I’ve long been intrigued by accents and the different ways people speak, particularly within Scotland, which has its own idiosyncrasies and tensions. In early primary school in Kirkcaldy, Fife, I remember at least one of my teachers telling kids off for saying “aye” instead of “yes”, “ken” rather than “know”, “dinnae” in place of “do not”, and so on (incidentally, when wee boys mentioned someone they knew who’d been beaten up, these teachers would utter tropes like “I thought only fish got battered”). This was in the mid-1990s, sixty years on from my Gran getting rows in school for referring to where she lived as her “hoose”. It’s an experience I’m sure resonates with many people who grew up in Scotland. Broughton High School, where I attended. Alumni also include Martyn Bennett and Hugh McDiarmid, two great proponents of Scots. When I was eight we moved to a middle-class area in Edinbu...
Read more

Busboys, Poets and AOC

-
Image
      Taking up my brother's challenge to meet Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez (AOC) during my stint in the States, I'm elated to discover she's giving her congressional inaugural address in New York on the Saturday after my arrival. My old pal Paul takes an overnight bus from Savannah to join me for this moment of serendipity. The event is five miles north of Manhattan, deep in eastern Bronx - the Boogie Down, the birthplace of hip hop. Our bus passes clusters of mud-brown high-rise housing projects, common in many corners of New York, stopping next to a freeway, outside the Free NYC WiFi range and far from the tourists. There appear to be few nearby amenities, save for a Dunkin’ Donuts across the street. A couple of inconspicuous A4 sheets of paper sellotaped to the wall state simply ‘Inaugural address this way’, leading us to the Renaissance High School for Musical Theater and the Arts. We’re uncharacteristically early but queues are already forming and we get chatti...
Read more

Watching The Wire with my Dad (minor spoilers)

-
Image
Last year I convinced my Dad to join me in watching my favourite TV series, The Wire. I'd been pestering him for ages to check it out and even bought him the box set for Christmas a few years ago. He was never dismissive, he just never seemed to get around to it (these epic dramas are a commitment, to be fair). Last summer, when I was living with my parents for a few months, he eventually caved. As I expected, he was a big fan. We didn't race through the series, but watched it steadily - maybe an episode or two every couple of nights for a few months. Viewing it for the third time, but having not seen some of the episodes for several years, I was struck by how laugh-out-loud funny some of it is. I remember the show's creator, David Simon, saying that without the humour it would be unwatchable, such is the tragedy, decay and corruption depicted in early 2000s Baltimore. It's also glaring how much the technology has evolved since that period. The subject of the police i...
Read more