[morgueatlarge] The Hogmanay That Wasn’t!

[originally an email to the morgueatlarge list, sent January 2004]

Edinburgh’s big street party to see in the new year has become somewhat infamous over the last decade, and is now reputedly the biggest in Europe. It’s certainly a folded page-corner in the Lonely Planet of many a traveller. The Hogmanay celebrations run for days, with events both ‘afore and after.

I was newly arrived in Edinburgh for last year’s Hogmanay and the ever-prepared Blair managed to produce a ticket to the street party for me. The party is free but ticketed, and once the free ones go the black market starts up – it’s typically up to £20 for a ticket, depending on how lucky you are and how late you leave it. Anyway, we got in, jumped around, looked at the fireworks and had a right old good time!

This year, after some plans to be in Belgium for the holiday season fell through, Cal and I agreed to open our home to antipodean orphans, and so we had a strong compliment of good Kiwi folk for the big day, including Alastair Galloway who materialised out of the rain at about 5pm on New Years Eve. The rain was heavy and it was cold and windy. Reminded me of home, to be honest – wind and rain always do. With his pack safely stowed at Broomhouse, we went to a favourite eatery for an Eve dinner, filling up the central table with Cal and myself, Alastair, Julian, Yuuki, Sibs, Trimmy and suspiciously non-Kiwi Kathleen. Guid fuid, induid, followed by leisurely chatting until the arrival of Jess with her own band of Kiwi travellers. And we set off.

The rain was coming down with some enthusiasm now, but spirits were high. Even the wind didn’t feel too bad. We passed through the gate, our wristbands checked, and descended the slope of the mound towards the massed throng in Princes St. Thousands of people filled up the road. We dove straight in.

The strange absence of music was soon explained as we wandered near enough to a speaker to hear the PA announcement – the street party was cancelled. Nasty weather. Everyone had to bugger off home. Thank you very much for your co-operation.

Miserable outcome! We wandered through the crowds for a while, soon finding that even the midnight fireworks on the city’s seven hills were cancelled. The largest rendition of Auld Lang Syne ever was right out.

By the time the minutes of 2003 were running out, we had found ourselves near one of the entrances to the street party, on the outside as it happened, where a large number of people had just decided to stand around and wait. This we did. One game punter scrambled up a lamppost and stripped off his clothing piece by piece, tossing it out to the crowd. It was unclear whether he gave up when down to his trousers due to modesty or because of he understood the lethal difficulty of trying to strip them off in the wind and rain atop a streetlamp.

Soon the ragged cheering of midnight’s arrival began, as everyone’s watch and cellphone separately decided the time had come. Everyone snogged everyone else and smiled happily, because that’s all they wanted to do anyway, street party cancellation or no. Members of our little circle proved instrumental in beginning a rather large circle singing Auld Lang Syne, not to mention lots of more general jumping around hugging people and an astonishingly successful and seasonally inappropriate conga line. It
were cool fun.

In the steadily improving weather we wandered around to the Grassmarket beneath the castle, and were eventually let into The White Hart, a lovely wee historic pub, reputedly haunted (not exceptional in Edinburgh), in this case by the ghosts of the victims of Burke and Hare, the bodysnatchers who once worked the area. I saw no ghosts that night, except perhaps the face of one of our number who proved rather the worse for wear come four in the morning. The rest of us had a lovely big yarn to all and sundry in a nice warm pub. And then finally home to bed as the clock swung past five.

A happy night. Condolences are not necessary, at least to me. Those poor geezers who flew up from London and paid quids for worthless tickets – they’re the ones to console.

And then, by the way, it was 2004. And so it still is.

———

This year the night afore had giant metal elephants instead of big pink giraffes. For what it’s worth.

———

And we’ve moved at last. In Belmont Gardens now. Step out the front door to a view over the tops of houses to the distant Pentland Hills to the south. Sweet. (Not to mention a housely guest book that reads like a greatest hits of my university friends.)

———

Hello to everyone! Those off to Kapcon this weekend – my best and fondest regards.

Cheers
Morgan

Some New Costs

So, should we broadband?
Rent is a given, albeit a new one.
Should I put my phone on contract instead of pay as go?
Could be an expensive year, all these costs.
Mostly, though, I want to whinge about the crap tech that is my old Nokia 3310 phone and, by extension, most cellphones, for having internal singular batteries that don’t cope well with continual top-up charging and even when taken care of eventually end up with a battery life of 3 days even when not used.
Bleah. Stupid phone. I’m sick of having my phone beep in my ear and hang up all my calls for me.
~`morgue (contract gives me new phone, at least… hmmm.)

Over ‘Ere

Bradley departs. He’s the reason I ended up in Scotland in the first place; he invited me, told me Edinburgh would suit me, and gave me a place to stay on my arrival. For the past year-and-a-bit he’s been my friend-from-home. (Which is not to forget Blair, who did the first few months, and Cal, who did the last few, nor all the friends-from-home based in London and other places.)

The cliché of the Kiwi on OE (non-Kiwi readers, OE = Overseas Experience = the reason why middle-class Antipodeans are working in your local pub) is you get a job and a flat and then sit tight with your circle of Kiwi mates in whatever city you’re in (i.e. London) and embark on the occasional bus tour through Ireland, drinking trip to Prague, café trip to Amsterdam and mission to a Germanic beer fest to keep your travelling hand in. And then two years later you go home, wondering if you did fit in enough travelling, really.

There’re reasons for this. Take the travelling one. Once you have a job, it’s harder to disappear off the beaten path and go randomly travelling for a month. If you don’t have a regular job, it’s hard to get enough money together to live on, let alone fund a trip to the continent. The old catch 22.

The friends-from-home thing is a bit less of a logic game and a bit more of a psych undergrad’s 1am theorising. What’s indisputable is that for most folk, staying close to friends from home becomes a big deal when you’re on the other side of the world. It’s not just about using people from home as a crutch or safe haven, but something a lot more enigmatic – something to do with perspective and scale, and with identifying what we value in life. Not to say safety and ease aren’t part of the equation, but it’s too easy to sneer at this trend.

Most New Zealanders will fall into some variation of this trap when they travel, unless they have chosen destinations more exotic than the big, obvious cities. I’m certainly in the trap. Of course, and this is also the standard cry for mitigation, “I’ve also engaged with the locals!” (Such as they are in Edinburgh. Scotland’s capital city is a large swirl of immigrants and travellers anyway. If you want Scots, it is commonly understood, you’re on the wrong coast – Glasgow where you head for that.)

I have a bunch of friends who are not from South Africa, or Australia, or New Zealand, and we get on fine. But I’ve had almost as many friends here who are New Zealanders as friends who are not. Almost all of them I didn’t know before arriving here – the other obvious fallout of travelling, that if you meet someone from home on the other side of the world, you have an instant conversation starter and enough common ground to make friendship easy.

Sometimes this has bothered me, this business of being in Scotland and passing time with New Zealanders. Then I realised something, and now it doesn’t.

I realised, simply, that when I look at my friends, I don’t see any difference between the Kiwis and the locals (not to mention the travellers from other lands again). It’s so obvious I hadn’t even realised it – they’re all in the same big category of ‘friends in Edinburgh’. And if that’s the case, then the only way the from home/not from home distinction matters is in justifying to myself, and others, that I haven’t squandered my travel by spending too much time with people just like me.

So I’ve realised that now. And I’m not going to give the matter another thought, because I don’t need to justify anything to myself. They’re all friends. They’re all just people, and I like ‘em. Och.

(Note: this point of view does nothing to mitigate the ‘didn’t travel much’ thing. If I believed in New Years’ Revolutions, that would be one – to have travelled to enough places that I’d look back this time next year and feel like I hadn’t wasted a moment on this side of the world.)

Anyway, Bradley departs. He’s heading back to New Zealand, for at least the immediate future. Wellingtonians, watch out for him. Buy him a beer for me.

[morgueatlarge] Edinburgh X-Moose II: The Snowing

[originally an email to the morgueatlarge list, sent December 2003]

I used to make my own Christmas cards, the infamous Why Be Normal series that emerged each December (and often on birthdays, too). The pinnacle of these, in ’98, involved musing on which was better, real or fake Christmas Trees, and working it out by putting them both in a wrestling ring and
letting them fight it out. I don’t think I’ll ever be funnier than that. So I don’t do those cards any more.

It’s snowing today, big white cornflakes drifting down. Cal’s first snow. It’ll be our first Christmas together. And since this is my second Christmas in the northern hemisphere, I get to be all knowledgeable about
things and touched by how excited Cal gets at the snow. (Of course, anyone who saw the video I sent homewards will know quite how excited I got at the snow last year.)

It’s looking to be fun. Old friends Julian and Yuuki are heading up from London to warm our hearth on the day itself, and we’ll also be joined by new friend Kathleen, one of the many Christmas orphans in Edinburgh. I know of a couple other orphan-gatherings and with luck we’ll find a way to crash all of them by the end of the night. (With luck no carols though.)

Then the famed Edinburgh Hogmanay. Again, my second one of these, this time mustering a fair roster of folk instead of just-me-and-Blair like last year. (Hi Blair!)   We all have to sing Auld Lang Syne at midnight and everyone’s getting a water bottle with the words on so we can all learn it. I intend to just grunt drunkenly instead of worrying about proper type words. Should be magic.

I’ve now been resident in Edinburgh for over a year. That’s sorta shocking to me. Time flying and all that. I’m still in the same place and job I’ve been in since March – Broomhouse (little Bosnia to the locals, apparently) and Queen Margaret University College, still doing the same nonsense, still six foot four and a half. Cal is well settled now also, and I’m finally getting used to having someone else around 24/7, after so many months of random solitude and independence. I loved living alone, but I think I like hugs-on-tap a bit more.

Slowly getting momentum back on writing stuff. The New Novel is stirring once again in my cerebellum or my occipital lobe or my camille paglia or whatever the neurojargon is. Various short bits are waiting in the wings also. Bit disappointed that I haven’t achieved professional publication yet but I think my lack of actually submitting stuff might have something to do with it. Complicated business, what what.

Lots of energy has been going into eternal time-sink of roleplaying games, but with good cause. The Ottakar’s Roleplaying Club that I willed into being six months ago is thriving and building a new generation of collaborative-creative minds whose enthusiasm and damn good ideas keep surprising me week after week. I’ve also had the privilege of leading a game called ‘Providence Summer’ which was about kids and teens in 1961 Providence dealing with the failures of their parents and the hard choices of finding new futures. The five players delivered wild plot twists, deep and engaging characters and heartrending emotional arcs. Every contention I have had, that roleplaying can produce experiences as powerful and real as any other fiction medium, has been borne out in this game.

Speaking of which, it was a great thing to see Return of the King on the big screen. The local connection, of course, but also the message that this is sending to the mass-marketed creative sphere, in tandem with Harry Potter – story is everything. Lord of the Rings will be making money on DVD for decades. Who the hell will be watching Matrix Revolutions in two years’ time? Every hope I had for these movies, back when I first heard that Mighty Joe Young and Godzilla were forcing Peter Jackson to put Kong on the backburner and Rings was announced as the new project, has been fulfilled. We’re looking at the defining pop-cultural moment of the new, er, 25 years or so, just as Star Wars was key for the last one.

I am a happy morgue.

I miss home, a bit. Mostly I wish I could be having all these new experiences without leaving all my friends and family on the other side of the world and out of my life (endless stream of welcome visitors excepted). Looking forward to seeing all your faces again.

Take care, everyone. Compliments of the season.

Peace and love and, seriously, goodwill to all.

~`morgue

Why Be Normal?

Mooses for Hooses

Mezzy Xmas. Hey, off work! Like my job. Better, like my workmates – immeasurable benefit of two levels of damn good folk above me in management line, plus competent bodies left and right. Makes it all so much easier to be the shop of sanity in the institutional ocean of bloody foolishness.
Snow. Shopping. Yuck to shopping. Fed fed fed. Dancing kittens, well, cats. I have become a dog person although I distinctly recall once being a cat person. Still like cats though. Evil, wicked beastses that they are. Stupid fat hobbit! Snow on the roof, in the garden. Riding in the bus.
I still haven’t watched Alien3 workprint cut. Am I cured? Answers on back of an envelope please. Please. Mind the antelopen.

Ready for winter

Lots been happening. Chuck gone. Saddam found. Alien 3 extended cut! etc.
But I’ve been concentrating on getting ready for the cold Scottish winter.
See, here’s me before:

And here’s me after:

Thanks, Brad-and-Cal, for your good clippering. Now the snow will slide right off my head!

Ceilidh pron. Kaylee

Kaylee was one of New Zealand’s periodic ‘pop ingenues’ from our vast and booming ‘manufactured pop music’ sub-industry. She covered ‘Broken Wings’ and for about two weeks it was inescapable. Then it was gone.
I loved that track. Her voice was so damn fragile and unprofessional – almost fit to shatter in the high bits – that it communicated more than proper-singer-type Hayley Westenra ever could, no matter how much she furrowed her brow. Of course, Hayley would have been trying, whereas Kaylee couldn’t help sounding like that. I didn’t care. (Still didn’t buy the single though.)
===
So we took Chuck to a Ceilidh on Saturday night. Great fun. Held in an old stone church (NB in this country, ‘old’ and ‘stone’ are redundant descriptors for a church). You pay yer money to get in the door, and push through a curtain into the darkened shell of the church, with a stage up at the altar end and tables all around the periphery. The entire bodylength of the church is the dance floor.
The bar runs all night. A band strikes up the rhythms from the front, sometimes old-time traditional, sometimes (as this time) throwing in plenty of modern-rock/pop flourishes along the way. And everyone gets out in the dancefloor and dances.
The band usually call the dance in advance, walking everyone through it, but almost all the locals know almost all the dances. They’re the traditional dances, handed down through generations. Usually you’re in sets of four or five couples, sometimes all the couples are together in one big circle. The music strikes up and you’re off, spinning and moving in and back, ducking under linked hands and through arches, whirling each other around, moving from partner to partner. It’s awesome fun and great exercise.
If you watch the men in kilts carefully, the ones who *really* know what they’re doing, you can answer the question of what they wear under the kilt. At least, that’s what Cal told me.
And to finish, of course, Auld Lang Syne, all holding hands, starting sentimental and getting progressively rowdy until it’s basically a giant folk-mosh. Then out, grinning and turning into the chill night, and away.
===
Caroline/Cal is my girlfriend. Or, according to certain medical personnel, my “partner”. Just by the way.
===
My last ramble produced a lot of commentary. Which is always good. I’ll try and make some sense of it here. As usual, thinking this up as I go, so I might contradict myself and be just plain wrong. All part of the fun. All of this in the full entry…

Continue reading Ceilidh pron. Kaylee

It Gets, um, *Chile* in Winter ’round here

I hate myself for that lame title. But it’s a good, satisfying kind of self-hate.
So Chuck has arrived! Last night I took him out for his first good Scottish Night Out – ‘Donde las papas queman!’ (“Where the tatties are burning!”), Chilean traditional music performed by a group of Chilean ex-pats and one hairy Scot.
We met up with Jess, a Kiwi from Rotorua, and George, a Kiwi from Wellington. To paraphrase Chuck: “What could be more Scottish than listening to South American folk music with a bunch of New Zealanders?” And you know, I really don’t know what could.
Made me reflect for a bit on the absence of a ‘traditional music scene’ in Wellington, and perhaps in wider New Zealand. Traditional/cultural music groups exist, of course, but they’re pretty hard to find – I certainly never stumbled across more than one or two. (Although, now I think of it, the Cuba Street Carnival always seemed to summon them out of their shadowy corners.)
In New Zealand we have little in the way of local traditional ‘folk’ music that is shared with the community. Certainly, we have cultural music traditions that are strong – I defy any New Zealander’s spine not to tingle when a waiata rings out – but they are bounded into particular spaces and contexts. The Pacific Island musical traditions are likewise heavily tied into their particular communities. New Zealand’s European-descended pakeha seem to be largely happy to let the musical traditions of their various forefathers fade to nothing. The Asian communities are still a long battle away from being accepted as ‘part of New Zealand’ and their music likewise.
All of this adds up to a New Zealand with a quiet sort of multiculturalism.
Which is no bad thing. But it is odd – another distinguishing feature of the strangely half-formed New Zealand culture. Hell, even Aussie has a style of music (twangy guitar ballads often filled with filthy jokes) of its own. And as usual with NZ, it gives us a rare opportunity to have a foot in many worlds and construct a society with a 21st century mindset that is the Victorian humanist legacy of the nation’s modern founders.
It’s an interesting country, Aotearoa.
(Note: all the above is generalising from personal experience – I’m quite ready to believe that other parts of NZ have much wider-spread engagement in cultural musical traditions.)
(Note 2: I recognise the oddness of reflecting on NZ traditional music when Chilean music is hardly local to Edinburgh – but there is a connection, namely the fact that the hairy Scot of the players got chatting to us in Sandy Bells, local folk music pub. Everything connects, etc etc.)
I think the best example I can recall of engaging with traditional music and making it part of the community: the Pacific Island drumming that accompanied every home game for the Hutt Valley Lakers basketball team back in the early 90s. That was a beautiful thing.

(skims back over entry)
Ah, so that’s what I’ll be using this blog for – long stream-of-consciousness rambles. Cool, I guess.

21st Century Thingness

This is a thing of the 21st Century. (Link courtesy the ever-wise Billy.)
I call it art, dammit. But that’s another rant. (Don’t get me started on Jake and Milos Forman.)
In other news, the fabulous Chuck Gillespie lands on Scottish Soil in about a half hour. ‘ray! And I emailed Ella all the suggestions people made, and more besides. Should keep her busy.

Mad Home

Somewhat odd to be on the other side of the world while my home town goes completely wild
(And if, four years ago, someone told me that in 2003 Seth Green would be hanging out in Lower Hutt but I would be in Edinburgh, I would have thought them a very adventurous sort of psychic.)