Friday Might Not Even Have Been Here at All
Mrs. Toad and I went out for dinner last night and I mentioned the fact that I have now been in Edinburgh for over four years – the longest I’ve lived anywhere since I left Vienna in 1987 after six years. That’s weird, really, because I kind of moved here by accident. Certainly I didn’t have it even in the back of my mind to move here back in 2003 when we first started seeing each other (we met in 1991, but that’s a different story).
At that point I had just divested myself of a particularly tenacious ex-girlfriend and was working at a pretty shite company in London and really had no ties at all. Basically, if I hadn’t accidentally got hammered and ended up in bed pawing enthusiastically at a tolerantly indifferent yet-to-become-Mrs. Toad, the chances are very good that I would have ended up somewhere foreign, quite probably in East Asia somewhere.
I am an industrial designer by trade, and judging by some of the unutterable guff coming out of China I could actually have had an extremely healthy and well-paid career out there by this point. Actually, fuck it, my career over here is actually pretty respectable anyway, it’s only because I am so focussed on music at the moment and because Mrs. Toad makes so much more than I do that I sometimes forget that fact.
I went to gigs down South, and I’d started writing about music online, but not to anything like this extent. I was a designer who fannied about with web stuff occasionally, not a musical muppet whose day job required monumental amounts of patience to tolerate his extra-curricular distractions.
So yes, it turns out that never mind her tolerance for all the work I put into this nonsense and her funding for my errant ideas, just meeting Mrs. Toad had a massive influence on the very existence of this website. Primarily I suppose because the dull, domesticated, middle class existence into which I was lured required me to find something to go a bit mental about because the other option was a mortal dose of cabin fever. Pick your madness.
1. Go back five or ten years, make some particular decision differently, and what would you be?
2. Which apparently trivial change has made the most difference to the rest of your life?
3. Where was the shortest time you actually lived anywhere properly?
4. Say you’re the Time Bandits*. Where would you choose to interfere?
5. You have regression therapy… who were you in your previous life?
Tom Waits – Anywhere I Lay My Head
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Burl Ives – Wayfaring Stranger
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Willard Grant Conspiracy – The Trials of Harrison Hayes
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*
1. Had I not finally got my first design job at Cambridge Consultants back in 2000, I could easily have been a maths or science or even an art teacher by now. And had I not moved up here I could easily have been in a swanky apartment overlooking Kowloon Bay.
2. Because I came back to Europe for a job interview I ended up in Manchester instead of Montreal when looking for my first job. That could have changed things drastically.
3. I think the couple of months in Montreal. I was there permanently in my head, but ended up leaving almost by accident a couple of months later.
4. I’d go back and teach my teenage self how to get a shag – be the devil on my own shoulder, so to speak.
5. I’m sure I used to be Harry Flashman in another life. Drink, fornicate, and run awaaaaayyy!
1. Go back five or ten years, make some particular decision differently, and what would you be?
When i was 17 i nearly signed up to the Navy to be a cook!
2. Which apparently trivial change has made the most difference to the rest of your life?
when picking a university to go to, i had a chat with an older friend that told me to get away from Newcastle/North east of England…….
3. Where was the shortest time you actually lived anywhere properly?
everywhere i’ve lived so far has always been for at least a couple of years.
4. Say you’re the Time Bandits*. Where would you choose to interfere?
no idea!
5. You have regression therapy… who were you in your previous life?
Karl Marx
Is that why you’re growing that beard?
Today is a bit difficult Matthew. I actually have to think and stuff!
1. I would not go out with the biggest idiot in Bradford Rios, a mistake that has had much wider ranging implications than I originally thought it would.
2. Andy Nonimage remaking me in the kitchen that I probably didn’t have the guts to quit medicine.
3. Stockholm for four months. It was great, but I had to return to begin my PhD.
4. I’d bump off Bramwell Bronte and insinuate myself into the family as the fourth sibling.
5. Ermmm…someone quite average & normal, I should think. I know I’m heading down the karma chain in my next one. Thanks go to the mouse foetus brain spoon.
Moving by Supergrass! Fucking top song! And I’ve lost my copy of it.. so yoink!..
1. Prison
2. Going to the pub instead of studying harder for my ‘A’ levels
3. India
4. I’d go back to early 1990s Essex and tell one particular young oik to study harder for his ‘A’ levels
5. An infamous highwayman!
yeah and it’s also the reason i sit around all day in libraries and send begging letters to my rich friends…..also it’s why i holiday, in West Yorkshite with my pal Friedrich Engels
Becky, thanks go to the Mouse Foetus Brain Spoon for a lot of things.
1. Thankfully I chose to be civil to the US border guard when he refused to let me back across the Texas/Mexico border, otherwise I might still be an illegal immigrant trying to swim across the Rio Grande every day. My foolish host family told me it would be safer to leave my passport at home and just use my Texas state ID when we went on a day trip to Mexico. Then my host dad promptly told them I was British on the way back in. Twat. If anyone’s read Vernon God Little I got slung in exactly the same holding room that’s in the book while my host dad went on a 4 hour round trip to get my passport. Actually it turned out ok cos they let me back into the Mexican town, so I ended up nailing margaritas and having a jalapeño eating contest with my host mother while we waited for my passport to arrive!
2. I wouldn’t have met my darling lady wife if I hadn’t taken a temp job at the Scottish Executive. Either that or if I hadn’t gone to aikmans in St Andrews one particular night I might never have met a certain blond singer-songwriter belting out his tunes while wearing a slinky little black dress. (in fairness it was Halloween so it was all fancy dress anyway)
3. Texas for 6 months.
4. I’d go back and make damn sure the Jeremy Kyle show never got commissioned.
5. I’d love it to be David Niven but he died after I was born, and I’d never be as cool as that, so it’ll have to be someone clumsy. I’d probably be the chap who accidentally started the great fire of London or something. D’oh.
Great Tom Waits choice btw!
1. I probably would have done more at university. Not necessarily studying or working hard, but I seemed to have a lot of spare time on my hands that I managed to fill by playing Mario Kart or getting drunk, which probably could have been put to better use.
2. Shaving.
3. I lived in Glasgow for about a year and a half. It was hellish. They eat their weans, you know.
4. I’d probably just go back a generation. I have a theory that, artistically, western civilisation peaked in 1977. So I guess I would have liked to have been doing stuff then. Just so long as it didn’t lead to any kind of weird Back to the Future-style oedipal shenanigans.
5. Linus Van Pelt
1. About four years ago I found a small but mysterious lump in an unexpected place, and I chose to see a doctor right away rather than wait to see if it went away on its own. Had I chosen differently, I might be dead by now.
2. I switched from 1% to fat-free milk, and so now I’ve got strong bones and teeth, but without that heavy bloated feeling.
3. I’d rather take a beating than move, so like Chutters I’ve typically stayed put for at least a few years every time.
4. I’d go back and stop Jack the Ripper. It’s really just awful what he did to those poor girls.
5. Vernon Smalley, haberdasher, 1890s Kansas City.
1. I could still be in Harrogate working in the parts dept of a Nissan dealership (phew that was a lucky escape !!)
2. Turning 30 (is that trivial !!)
3. I lived in Carlisle for about 10 months (it trully is the wild west down there, at least it was near the lake district)
4. Tough question that being an archaeologist. I’d like to say to the time of stonehenge to see what they were really up too, but i really want to say 1972 and i’d poison the referee of the European cup final so he couldn’t cheat leeds United out of loosing to bayern Munich in the final (bastard)
5. probably some poor bastard working in the coal mines
1. I would have been a lot more confident and assertive in my first years of teaching and not had such a hard fucking time for so long – all is absolutely fine and dandy now but I wasted three or four years really getting into this (and three or four years of kids’ education, one way or another).
2. One evening towards the end of 1988 I decided to go for a drink rather than sit down and make myself write an essay. Without the essay on time I got the lowest pass mark for the course and with that mark I was removed from a four year degree to a three year one and lost the chance to go to college in the US for a year (in fact just to be be nice to me the darlings asked us where we wanted to go, told me I could have my first choice, and only then told me that i couldn’t go). And so everything changed…
3. When i was an undergraduate I lived somewhere different each year, although they were all dotted around Norwich, most of them around one area in the north of the city. Other than that I lived in Canning Town in East London from 0 to 2, that’s the shortest time anywhere else.
4. I’d go back to myself in about 86, the morning after seeing the ‘After Dark’ show with tory grandees all naming the nobody ‘John Major’ as the likely next Prime Minister, and put a lot of money on it happening.
5. Noddy Nobody, as a quiet protest against the fact that every-fucking-body who has identified some previous life they’ve lived just happens to be somebody famous.
in addition to my answer to NO. 2. I was 30 when I decided to get the hell out of Harrogate go travelling and go to university and get a more interesting job. Which worked out just excellent
1. Go back five or ten years, make some particular decision differently, and what would you be?
Christ. I’d have buggered off to Paris for that telmarketing job at the International herald Tribune instead of getting a job in tax and moving in with a fairly dull corporate lawyer prone to bouts of drunken cross dressing.
2. Which apparently trivial change has made the most difference to the rest of your life?
Deciding to stop off in London for a night out en route to Vienna rather than flying straight there. Hence pawing by Toad. Clearly, I play hard to get.
3. Where was the shortest time you actually lived anywhere properly?
I lived in a grubby bedsit in West Hampstead for about 6 weeks. It was comedy small/horrid.
4. Say you’re the Time Bandits*. Where would you choose to interfere?
I’d tell the chap that planted that bomb in the Tories hotel to pay more attention to his placement. No, thats nasty, I liked Dennis Thatcher. He drank gin with panache.
I’d go back and administer sound precautionary beatings to anyone involved in launching Jordan/Katie Price’s career. And tell Diana not to get in that fucking car because, if its possible, we hear more about the silly cow now than we did at the time she was alive.
5. You have regression therapy… who were you in your previous life?
I’d be a bloke. Not anyone famous necessarily as I really just want to check out what having a willy is all about. And balls too. Balls are odd.
1. didn’t make a phone call to a girl, thank god mobiles weren’t about. Stayed with and married real girlfriend instead.
2. I applied for about 20 jobs in the early 90’s and for one got intervied by a bloke with a god almight hangover on a monday morning. He’s now one of my best pals and we run a reasonably successful business together. So a bloke I didnt know drank too much whisky and it turned out lovely.
3. Sheffield for about 3 months, it was too hilly for Mrs C.
4. I’d have not played the gig and stayed up till 3am the day before my maths A level.
5. I think a crofter is most likely as I bloody well hate doing stuff for myself now..
Have a good weekend and I’m the bloke in the green young republic T shirt falling about Edinburghs streets on Saturday..
Dennis must have had a shed load of gin on at least 3 occasions I can think of, panache or no panache that’s a big job for anyone.
1. Dead.
2. High-fibre breakfast cereal.
3. I still live in the city of my birth.
4. Shoot Milton so he wouldn’t write bloody Paradise Lost.
5. A cot death.
Cogstar, that there Toad was going to email you re drinks and drinking locations. Rotten bastard will be having a two pint lunch right now I imagine but he may stir his lazy backside once replete.
1. Go back five or ten years, make some particular decision differently, and what would you be?
Thought about deferring uni for a year, didn’t because I knew if I didn’t go then, I never would. Did my teaching course and am now not sure if I want to stay in the education system at all. Did I waste four years of my life for nothing? We’ll see.
2. Which apparently trivial change has made the most difference to the rest of your life?
I’m 26. Ask me later.
3. Where was the shortest time you actually lived anywhere properly?
A student house over the summer – I carted all my crap there, so I guess that counts as ‘properly’.
Will you notice if I don’t do the last two?
Cheers Mrs T, I’ll pick my emails up when I get to hotel in George Street so that might work.
Get a bloody ticket for Stiff Little Fingers for him as well…you won’t regret it and it’ll freak his precious indie folk ears.
Oooh, thats cheating Agnes. You wouldn’t let your students away with that (maybe you would, I used to have a teacher that let us nip out for fags if we were getting on his tits).
Chop chop, last two.
Agnes – RULES!
Cogstar – there must certainly be pintage on Saturday. I’ll email you.
1) This one is too difficult. I was a free lance soundguy for 6 years! Lucrative tour vs move to the states, job in Boston vs jon in New York, Southampton tour vs small theatre. Stay with girl in city I’m in right now and give it a shot (versions 1-4).
2) I hate musicals with a passion but they were really the only place I could find a use for my skill set. Then I happened across a job for a small Opera tour. Bongo!
3) Cape Cod. Did three years of summer theatre. Each stint was about three months but it felt like I was moving there every time.
4) I’d tamper with my inability to ask women out or not go into a blond panic if they suggested something beyond a quick drink. Thing is I ended up with right one so that would probably be very stupid. Sorry Toad, I’m not responsible enough to have this power.
5) Jules Maigret. Solving crime and eating and drinking well while doing it. And he loved his wife a lot. I would have gone with Sherlock Holmes but I can’t bring myself to aspire to that level of misogyny.
Sticklers!
4. Say you’re the Time Bandits*. Where would you choose to interfere?
I’d advise Mr and Mrs Hitler to invest in some contraceptives.
5. You have regression therapy… who were you in your previous life?
Someone with poise and grace. Someone who’d never dislocate their knee while dancing, or walk into stationary tables, or smash their shin on a giant towbar as they walked across the carpark this morning.
My favourite method of Hitler-elimination is to get his father to loose the lawsuit allowing him to use the ‘Hitler’ surname. Can you imagine anyone taking ‘Adolf Schicklgruber’ seriously?
It does lack a certain amount of authority!
1. Married.
2. Deciding to “find out what this buddhism stuff is all about”.
3. Canada (minus 2 years) – planned to go – never did – not bothered.
4. I wouldn’t, because we all know that if a butterfly is trod on in the past, it starts a fascist state in the future, which is the present once you get back there (so to speak).
5. A person wondering how my future self could be so gullible as to believe in past lives, and then realising that if ‘me past’ is criticising ‘me future’ then ‘they’ must be onto something, and wishing i hadn’t dismissed the Time Bandits quite so readily, and trying to work out how i might be able to access tomorrow’s racing results today.
1. Well, I decided to go on exchange to Dundee during my undergraduate year. (I had never heard of Dundee at the time, didn’t even know it was in Scotland. I thought it would be a less competitive exchange program than Australia or somewhere like that. I was right, what a shithole!) Got in, had a great time, went back for my PhD, now live in Scotland permanently.
2. Changed my undergrad major from Drama to psychology. Didn’t seem like a big deal at the time, from one mickey mouse degree to another. But now it looks like a career in psych beckons…
3. I lived in Cambridge for three weeks. That’s maybe too short to count as living there, but it felt like I lived there.
4. Apparently real scientists have decided that that’s not possible. The shocking part is not that it’s impossible, but that REAL SCIENTISTS say it’s not possible.
http://www.slate.com/id/2225223/
5. Ross, from friends. Sad, but true.
Ben, that’s a world class typo. A ‘blond’ panic?
I just realised, tomorrow is my last ever mouse foetus brain spoon day! Maybe this PhD thing is actually going to come to an end in the not too distant future…
Discuss
I would Chutters, but I’m so impossibly intellectual you wouldn’t even be able to read my answers, never mind understand them.
Actually, I’ve long thought A&R men were for the chop. Honestly, who needs them? To scout Scotland all you need is to keep you eye on a half dozen or so websites – say the ones in the thread yesterday, for example – and ta-daah! it’s done for free.
The information is all out there pretty much in the open these days, I really am not convinced you need to actually have a lot of real, full-time staff doing that sort of scouting.
1. My degree – it serves very little purpose now and should really have been confined to a hobby. I can see now that there were a couple of other things that i was much better at and should really have pursued instead.
2. Walking into a certain pub one lunchtime casually looking for work – sounds melodramatic, but it changed everything. Almost everyone i know and love now has become a part of my life through that pub, and those that haven’t have learnt to love it too!
3. A flat shared with about 10 people in Elm Row. It only had one bathroom
4. I would go back to have a chat with my 12 year old self and tell her that being tall shouldn’t make me stupidly shy and easily picked on, it should have made me go up to those short snotty nose bitches and tell them that if they put my school bag in the bin again i would be sending them arse over tit in after it!
5. is it worrying i can’t think of any dead people that i think i could have been once…. Probably not, it is Friday after all.
I just realised, tomorrow is my last ever mouse foetus brain spoon day!
Will you be keeping it up as a hobby?
i would love to be a kinda of freelance A&R guy
1. I was going to say I wouldn’t have gone to uni however that would’ve meant that I’d never have met my girlfriend & all my brilliant pals so maybe I would have gone and just tried bloody harder.
2. I borrowed a pen from a man which sparked up a brilliant friendship. I have since borrowed clothes, money, food, pints, exam notes and his flat.
3. Galway.
4. I’d probably do a Biff Tannen, steal a sports almanac and give it too my younger self.
“Hey kid. Say hello to your grandma for me”.
5. Just a regular lad doing what he could to get by. Oh, or the rodeo king.
BIRTHDAY DRINKS FOR DAV!!!!
Becky, is there going to be some sort of mouse foetus day of celebration in honour of the retirement of the brain-scooping spoon of doom?
Shonagh, I think I married one of those short, snotty-nosed etc etc. Nasty piece of goods she is too.
ANY OLD DRINKS ARE GOOD ENOUGH FOR ME!
DRINKS!!
FECK! ARSE!
CURTAINS!
Nah, Matthew – I have grown up to realise that i could have knocked those twats into next week! I would be concerned with even suggesting i was capable of taking your good lady!! (Please don’t throw my bag in the bin Mrs Toad, sniff sniff)
Birthday drinks for Dav in the Wark so i can at least pretend to be part of the crowd…
shit i am in the kitchen tonight!
I feel there should be some kind of celebration, but I’m not entirely sure what’s appropriate! Maybe I’ll bake myself a spoon shaped cake, but the angles might prove tricky.
spoon shaped cake
Why not do a mouse foetus brain shaped cake? It’d be easier.
That would be a tiny cake!
Yeah, Anotherdave’s got a good point.
Then you could eat it with your mouse foetus brain cake spoon.
Mouse foetus brain shaped, not 1:1 scale model of a mouse foetus brain made of cake. Though that might be a cool Halloween food.
Oh, wait. I got confused.
All this talk of brains is making me hungry.
Indeed, a scale model may not quite do my massive appetite for cake justice. They also look so much like prawns that I haven’t been able to stomach prawns since I started. I’m looking forward to them enlivening my stir frys again soon!
Mmm, brains
Yes, there was a bit of confusing simul-posting going on there.
Fortunately all the comments were equally silly so it didn’t really matter much.
I barely even noticed. Stir-fried mouse foetus brain shrimp cake spoon mentalism.
how realistic would it be to get found to record mouse foetus brain spoon to alsatian gull scene. it must be done! id buy it.
1. If I’d listened to all my friends at the time who said M.Chut was too classy and boring for the likes of us, I’d still be bohemian (piss poor and in shambles) and a complete, uneducated wreck, squandering my life away on loose women and hand rolled cigarettes in the desert of Arizona.
2. One class in uni, taught by a grad student, who came highly (not)recommended, aptly titled “Deviance”
3. er, moved back home with the ‘rents for about a month at age 21 out of pure desperation. I schemed my successful escape, never to return!
4. Most definitely the day John walked into that art gallery. That whole meeting Yoko debacle really should have been prevented, for the good of all of us.
5. your best friend’s girl… if your best friend was a 1800’s shopkeeper in Munich and wore a gold pocket watch.
I thought the better typo was my use of the classic celebration ‘Bongo!’.
Bloody iphone!
I now know what it feels like to be American & way, way behind the time zones coming in late to the party & all…
1. Go back five or ten years, make some particular decision differently, and what would you be?
Had i told my current boss at the time he offered me this job 6years ago that, no, I AM going to take those 6 week holidays I had planned after my redundancy, then I wouldn’t have been offered this job & I’d probably be slogging away in local band/gig promotion & American exploration & travel would have been but a dream.
2. Which apparently trivial change has made the most difference to the rest of your life?
I’ve said it before but 2 accidental same-team challenges that more or less destroyed my knee & ankle strength at 14/15yo took me out of pursuing football as a career. It was, looking back, a pivotal moment – had that path even been part traveled I wouldn’t be typing this now.
3. Where was the shortest time you actually lived anywhere properly?
I’ve been in the same house for nearly 18years. That’s longer than my family ever spent in one town when I was growing up. Anything or anywhere else has been a succession o short term leases or rents no longer than 6-12months.
4. Say you’re the Time Bandits*. Where would you choose to interfere?
Dinosaurs!
5. You have regression therapy… who were you in your previous life?
Someone very placid & calm.
Ignore wife’s possible affair and become another cliche nice guy with way too much to offer production designer on Long Island in a crappy marriage.
coin flip to decide between art history teacher or designer
Syracuse for 6 months
I’d have swapped out Jim Morrison for Steven Tyler
I would be Tart, “squandering my life away on loose women and hand rolled cigarettes in the desert of Arizona.”
1. I would have married my ex fiance and be living in Florida with two kids miserably.
2. I stopped going to school to work in retail full time. I got sick of retail and landed a job at an advertising/marketing firm. I decided to go back to school for business and have worked in the same field ever since.
3. When we first moved out to California my husband and I lived with two of my friends for 6 weeks in San Marcos.
4. Not sure…
5. A rockstar–not sure which one, I just know I was one.
I’m going to Arizona for the hand-rolled women and loose cigarettes!
Andrew – good call. I’d never put up w… no, actually I’m completely spineless and would clearly let Mrs. Toad walk all over me if she so chose.
when life gives you lemons..I say F@%# the lemons and bail.
Great 5 by the way.
Yeah, they’re variable when we do them pished. Either great or dreadful.
You were pished at half-past-ten this morning?!
That’s a remarkable effort even by your impressively debauched standards!
Andrew, you can be me any time. Oh wait… did I say be? I meant do, of course.
And see?, DC… there’s so many disadvantages to being over here.
Dylan, we wrote them at about two on Friday morning, just changed the publishing time to half ten.
I guessed as much, but you know me. I’m not one to let dull trifles such as the truth get in the way of a good ribbing!
really chaps you live in this town and you missed SLF play Alternative Ulster
it was a fantastic gig tonight ,what did you chaps do that was better?
They printed 200 album sleeves, ate burgers and recorded a heavy metal podcast.
I fell asleep on the couch with the cat.
Yeah, we’re wild here.