Happy Christmas!

So I'm heading out to Lanark for Christmas tomorrow. Dinner at Shona's ma's is always a three day event so I'm taking jogging bottoms for extra belly expansion. I'm also looking after my nephew tonight, he's three years old and full of three year old thunder. But I can take him. Look at what happened to the last kid that messed with me.



So to all who pop by, have a very merry Christmas and a happy new year.

Even more Blessed!

And Just because I love it, and it's been a slow day.

The Day After.

I had friends from Leeds up at my flat last night. I feel like somebody has slapped my head with bricks. It was nice to see them but I will never, never drink again. Ever. Well, at least until my next crimbo night out.
It was my girlfriends cousin David and his wife Lynne who were visiting. Davids a doctor and Lynne is now a full time mum. She used to work with the people that created Dolly the sheep. The first cloned animal. Interesting stuff when you're half canned.

I matched Doctor Dave drink for drink, AND got up for work at half six this morning. This is not me bragging. This is me trying to explain just how bad I feel.

Now if you will excuse me, there is a toilet bowl destined to have my head in it.

Check out the Groovy steps!

I don't know why. But I like it.

John Mair

Today, I want to write about my next door neighbour, John Mair. I've stayed beside John for five years now. The first year I never really saw him. He was always away with his girlfriend Liz, to some caravan she owned just outside Edinburgh. Both John and Liz are in their 70's.

In my first year of living in the flat, I was unlucky enough to have a group of neds in the flat above me. They would have constant all night parties and fights. The police were phoned by me and other neighbours on a regular basis. Eventually they caused so much damage to the flat they were evicted.

When the neds left the flat, all was quite; apart from the occasional junky trying to kick in my security entrance. This is when I first noticed that I could hear everything that was going on next door. There is a cupboard in my bedroom, built into the wall. John has one on the other side. I can literally hear a pin drop from next door.

I became aware of this when John and Liz were having a blazing argument. It was like I was in the room with them. These arguments continued, and sometimes ended up in violence. Eventually, Liz got sick of getting hit by John, and left.
For weeks after I would hear John coming in at night loaded. He would spend his days and nights in the pub, just like other older men in Glasgow.

After a while, I would get up for work in the morning to find that someone was urinating in the close. I never caught whoever was doing this until one night, when I was coming home late, I caught john lying at the bottom of the stairs in a pool of his own urine. He had also been sick.

Months rolled by and John was getting worse. He would rattle my door with his walking stick at 2am to get me to come out and give him the chat. If I answered, he would try and force his way into my home. He could also be heard in his bedroom at the wee hours of the morning shouting the F word at the top of his voice.

This went on for 3years. I was getting increasingly sick of his behaviour. At one stage I thought about smacking him. I hoped that it would teach him a lesson. But it would just have brought me down to a level I was not prepared to go to. I could imagine the headlines, “Hairy man Strikes OAP”. Not good. Not good at all.

So, this continued, much to my annoyance, until last year. John had yet again spent the day in the pub until chucking out time. Some young guy who was in the pub offered to give him a hand up the stairs. Half way up the stairs, John started trying to hit the young guy. The guy left him to it. No doubt disgusted that his good deed was being rewarded by a torrid of abuse and attempted assault. John, left to his own devices now, started up stairs. He managed to make it up half way when he fell back.

The loud crash John made when he hit the floor was followed by silence. I quickly got out of bed and dressed. When I found John at the bottom of the stairs he was unconscious in a pool of his own blood. I phoned an ambulance and they came and took him away.

After 2 weeks John returned from hospital, and all was quiet for a couple more weeks. Then he began to drink again. Things got worse than before. He would regularly collapse at the bottom of the stairs. He would also go up and down the stairs mumbling to his self. On rare occasions, he would come in and out of his extremely squeaky door, go down stairs, open the close door, go outside and start pressing everyone’s buzzer, while shouting let me in and kicking the door. Some nights he would collapse, and not move until an ambulance arrived. Then he would swing punches at the paramedics. Also, he would turn up at my door with a letter that he got from the TV licence people, and ask if it was mine. He had done this every day for a month.

At 2am on Saturday, there was a knock at my door. It was the guy from the top flat just letting me know that John was in hospital. Apparently he’s on his last legs.

Now, it’s fair to say that I hated the old shit. So hearing that he was just about to die should have made my day. But it didn’t. Instead I feel sad. What’s that about? I wont miss being woken up at 2am, or getting up for work in the mornings to find Johns urination from the night before, but for some reason, I feel a sense of lose. The kind of feeling I got when my dad passed away.

That is why I wrote this blog entry. I wrote it to make sense of the whole situation. To understand why I’m feeling the way I am. Is it the fear that I might end up the same way? Is it guilt because I wished him dead? Or do I just recognise something familiar in him? Are we all a heartbreak away from being a John Mair? Is the old bugger going to haunt me? Is retirment just a waiting room for the dead?