» Family codes and rituals

There was an imaginary ghost in our house
We lived in a mad rambling victorian villa when i was little, and out the back there was a daft wee staircase that led to the maids quarters. A lodger lived there and she was really very unhinged but that's another story.

I don't know who started it, i suspect it was my dad, but someone said that at 10pm precisely the ghost would leave the maids quarters and go hunting for virgin blood. So of course, if me or my brother was up about then, we would hear the clock in the living room tolling and fucking leg it up the stairs because the only way to prevent some kind of spectral massacre on the stairs was to be in our rooms by the final toll of the clock with the lights out and in our beds.

I'm writing this and i'm realising what manipulative bastards my parents were.

10 o'clock at night - until i was 15
(Tue 25th Nov 2008, 17:41, More)

» Thrown away: The stuff you loved and lost.

2 years of animation
Many many years ago, after getting a fine degree in a sensible subject from a fairly old uni, i decided to stick it to the man, rebel against the olds, give up the job and the trendy flat in Edinburgh and go to a piss pot college in a one horse town (and the horse was dead) and study animation - the great and abiding love of my life.

Why a shitty little college instead of a shiny nice BA at art school. Couldn't be arsed with another 4 years of chiselling someone elses beanfeast off my plates in a hall of residence kitchen. I digress

It was the first year they'd done the course and they didn't have a clue. It wasn't until a year in that they even attempted a walk cycle which in the end they asked me to teach everyone. I desperately wanted to do stop motion and they had promised me the wherewithall and the software, in truth they gave me a cupboard and a spotlight and i somehow managed to cobble something together. We were running maya on our fisher price PCs, rendering scenes overnight. Those of us with real talent banded together to share our skills, coz the tutors had feck all. This was in 2002 and you would expect that we could somehow burn our work to disc and take it home to work on it. Nope, they gave us HD floppies FFS. Which none of us had a reader for at home. At the end of the year we had eye wateringly massive files at college of all our 3D, 2D and in my case stop motion work that we'd done. We all passed the course - not fucking surprised as we were self taught - and we were all looking forward to our promised CD Rom of work to take to our prospective employers at the end of the year.

But they wiped it all, overnight, because it was taking up too much room on their servers. All of it. Every last little walk cycle, lip sync, music video, wire frame, beautifully realised grey clay angel with silk and metal wire wings crying tears of glycerine over the body of a dead clay soldier in a stop motion version of Dulce Et Decorum Est.

I work in PR now, never did get that Animation job, Craig, one of the most talented 3D modellers i've ever seen drives a JCB on a building site, Colin, a naturally gifted 2D animator had a nervous breakdown.

not funny, not cool, but true
(Thu 14th Aug 2008, 22:14, More)

» Mums

Mrs Manga, in the garden, with a bra
Mum is a sun worshipper - she learned her lesson and taught me one too as her skin is now a bit thick and brown and freckly. Whenever the temperature rose above 10 degrees (we live in Scotland, it's rare) and the sun put his hat on mum would strip off and go lie in the garden. Not in her cossie, not in a bikini but in her pants and bra. My brother's mates would stop in their tracks when they came to visit, aghast at the sight of mum Manga in her M&S best with her face turned to the sun. One warm afternoon we were sitting out - she in her frilly knickers, me in shorts with my pasty teenage legs out for the world to see. MASTURBATION she says and turns to me, I choke on my irn bru. Yeah? It doesn't make you blind you know - it's fine. Ok mum, thanks. Oh the humiliation...
(Mon 15th Feb 2010, 21:49, More)

» Common

Buliiiindah Datah is for common scum
Wasn't allowed to watch ITV because it was for common people.

And it wasn't like i was living in a 10 bedroom mansion with valets to wipe my pre adolescent bum clean of posh poo.

No, i was living in a nice, ordinary Bovis house in an estate. Admittedly all the streets were names after poets, so that's quite highbrow. Does you street name rub off on you? Don't think so. I don't think Marketing twats rate you according to the semantics of your address i.e. white collar but lives in 'High Street' therefore chav.

Anyway. I missed out on blind date, the A team, Airwolf, the Equalizer, Starsky and Hutch and that other one with a car and two men and a woman with breasts. It was shit. I lived on finger mouse, play school and that weird Box of Delights programme that i secretely loved (and still do - it gives me shivers)

So yeah - all of you who watched ITV as kids - you're all scum according to my mum. Weirdly my mate Nic at Uni wasn't allowed to either. Needless to say the glut of BBC programming enriched our blood with a bluer hue than you common bastards.
(Tue 21st Oct 2008, 14:12, More)

» Will you go out with me?

Cheeses and me
Cheeses of Nazareth decides he fancies my pants off one day at his work (he used to work for a big charity for whom i volunteered), nicks my personal email address of their DP protected database and sends me flirty emails and his phone number with a promise not to send inappropriate drunken texts from the pub. He lied.

Now we have a baby cheeses and we're really very happy. Love is great.

Length - not as long as his sound engineer hair
(Tue 2nd Sep 2008, 20:25, More)