A Guide to the Sea Coast

Please don’t take this the wrong way. I’m sort of writing because I have to in order to avoid a telling-off. I think it will take a while to get into this blog-writing. No offence to any bloggers but I can never quite understand why people would want to stuff their lives into a few paragraphs and share them with anybody and I understand less why somebody might want to read them. We’ll just have to assume that the only people who will give this a glance have some vague interest in what we might have to say and therefore I must try to provide them (you) with something. This is the last Thursday of June in a week that keeps lolloping between explicitly summery days and gloomy non-starters.
I’m listening to the more tragic moments of Doris Day, that’s not the title of a collection by the way, but if it was, I would probably buy it.
I’m still vexed about the lack of theme for my personal page on our website, I’m not sure my out-dated ramblings are really up to scratch because they’re indistinguishable from this. Looking around my room at the sagging shelves, some sort of pishy book-review is the only idea that suggests itself and I don’t think I could stand myself if I did that. One of my friends kindly suggested I did some sort of nature diary but I think she is perceiving my recognition of five kinds of bird and having planted some flowers in her garden once as some kind of exaggerated knowledge of all things natural. And it would be dull. Leave it to the experts. Sometimes I think that when I’m playing the piano too.
This is the best time of year for me, the beautiful half-idle months between university semesters. It’s usually when we try and schedule most of our touring but we’re staying put because rehearsing the new songs is the priority this year. I think we’re all feeling a bit melancholy because of it. Although I feel slightly sick because I am getting my first proper holiday this year and I don’t quite feel I deserve it because there is so much work to do. The more free time you have, the more there is to waste.
by Carey

dumfries camera obscura

So i was in Dumfries last weekend, and decided to go and see the Dumfries Camera Obscura. Its not a tribute band ((c) Kenny), but a proper camera obscura. Its the oldest working one in the world apparently. If you don't know what a camera obscura is, its a lens and mirrors built so you can lever them around and the image its pointing at will be inverted onto a screen or table inside the building. Its a pretty amazing thing. The Dumfries one is built in what was originally a windmill, so its a really cool old building.

We managed to get a private viewing (when i say private viewing, it was 10am, and no one was stupid enough to be up that early on a Saturday morning) so we got a personal 20 minute demonstration of how it all works along with descriptions of Dumfries throughout the ages as the lens cast its eye across the town. Interesting stuff, and quite a lot of stuff about Robert Burns when he lived in the town towards the end of his life, which was cool.

It was funny watching the guy operating the equipment, pulling levers to move the lens round , and pushing/pulling the table/screen that the image was inverted onto, which slides up and down to put the image into focus. He obviously does the talk every day, and gets to look all around Dumfries, and the impression was given that he gets to spy on folk going about their everyday business. Dirty rascal.

I heard that someone in the Edinburgh Camera Obscura, during the demonstration, saw their car being stolen, and they phoned the police and the guy controlling the lens followed the car round the city and they caught the thief, which is handy.

Gav

Is it June already?

Time flies when you're pre-producing an album.

We've been working away, rehearsing up the new record, Richard Hawley was supposed to produce it for us this month, but unfortuneately he was stolen by REM as their tour support, so our search continues for a producer. Its looking good though, and the new tracks for the album are sounding great.

Anyway, i thought it was time to actually start posting here....

People often say to me, Gav, they say, why are you the king of partick? (i am, its true)
and funnily enough, there is a little story as to how this came about. So i thought i would tell it here.

A long time ago, in an area of Glasgow not that far away.....I was hanging out with friends near my house, probably 89/90/91, thereabouts. There was a school across the road from my house in Broomhill (an area in Glasgow's leafy west end, just next to Partick - see environs thereof) (this was in fact the primary school i had attended as a small youth) and in the evenings, it was traditional to congregate in the playground for a game of football, or just to sit about and chat, hanging out.

This one night, a couple of neds (glasgow term for shellsuit wearing scum that tend to enjoy fighting and petty crime rather than more noble pursuits) wandered into the playground. One of them turned out to be a Bam, rather than just a ned. (a Bam being a specific kind of ned that not only tends to prefer fighting/petty crime to more noble pursuits, but also happens to be a psycopath, intent on damaging people/things). He decided that he wanted to fight me, which was at best a worry, since i am not cognisent in the ways of pugilism, and am quite frankly, a coward, and have no wish to be on the wrong end of a good shoeing.

He spent about an hour following me around and attempting to get me to fight him. His attempts really didn't make sense (in those days i was tall, but also considerably broader than i am now) and he kept telling me that if we had a fight, i would batter him, but then he'd get his brother up to kill me. Not the most convincing way to get me interested in a situation that i was already completely petrified of. This went on for some time, and he continued to try and persuade me to fight him, in spite of the fact that his acquaintance had been at my school and kept telling him to leave me alone cause i was 'alright'. He really couldn't understand why i wasn't interested in fighting him, he found it completely incomprehensible that someone wouldn't actually be interested in fighting people.

After a considerable amount of time, he eventually got bored and sat down and said, "f**k's sake mate, see me, see if i was you, a f**king big man, i'd be out there every night battering folk. No one could f**king batter you man. If i was you, i'd f**king rule partick man!!"

I was just relieved that i wasn't going to get a kicking, and found what he said to be rather funny.Many years later, when the Belle and Sebastian auction was occuring, Stuart listed me as Gav, King of Partick, having heard the story from someone and finding it funny, and since then it has become my interweb persona, and i figured, if someone has to rule partick, it might as well be me, since i'm not going to go around battering people. So these days, i am the King of Partick and environs thereof (Broomhill, Hyndland, Scotstoun, Whiteinch, Dowanhill, Hillhead, even Thornwood). Its fairly hands off, i don't have to do much, things just get on with themselves, but i do get first dibs on decent stuff in the charity shops there (i got a cracking organ once, so it has its advantages). And now you know...