Tuesday, March 9, 2004

Bad Cheese?

I had a truly awful night's sleep last night. I think it was something to do with the grated cheese and salad cream sandwich I had before bed. To start with, I fell asleep pretty quickly to harmless white noise that is Today in Parliament. But then I woke up, too hot, and with a head full of hatred for the Scots. Amazing how a bit of cheese before bedtime can drag out the horrors of school in Crieff, and Morrison's in particular, all the way back from the seventies. Added to that was my more recent experiences with the Tayside police's shooting-fish-in-a-barrel approach to speed traps. At 1:30 I tried a couple of shots of vodka to get me back to sleep. At 3:30 I leap out of bed ready to march to Carlisle and throttle the whole sanctimonious nation in its sleep. Instead, I went for a brisk walk in the moon light. That, or the Nurofen, must have helped. I remember seeing 4:38 on the clock, but nothing after that. I don't suppose many people will understand my deep seated loathing of the Scottish. It's all wrapped up in parents divorcing, going through five schools in three countries in three years, going from Johnny Come Lately to institutionalised public school bullying during school hours and beatings from state school gangs outside school hours. My four traumatic years in the schools of Crieff were made all the more hideous by the 'benign' neglect of my mother and step-father. They didn't have a clue what was going on and made no serious enquiries when I'd come home with another black eye. I was completely alone in my misery. It's really a mild case of post-traumatic stress disorder. I have managed to get on with my life and am even happy at times, but at any time, without warning, some silly little thing (like a piece of cheese) can trigger a cascade of flashbacks that I'm powerless to stop. Being head butted for no reason, just before the French teacher walked in the room and asked me what I was doing on the floor. A boot in the face from a little guy with a big gang behind him. Whispered threats about who's waiting for you outside the town hall when the disco's over, clutching my pocket knife with the blade open in my jacket pocket as I make my way from the front door to my step-father's car waiting down the street. Wild, frenzied kicks to my head, like you see on those CCTV exploitation programs, as I try and break the grip some mad bastard has on my hair. I later found out that this guy had just put a teacher from his school in hospital. The teacher was in his sixties, nearing retirement. The flashbacks just go on and on. There are four years of them to get through. And all the time there is this unvoiced question, screaming to be heard, "What did I do? Just tell me, what the hell did I do to invite this insanity down on my head?" It started when I arrived in Scotland; it ended when I left. Yeah, I was there during the character warping teenage years. Maybe things would have been the same in England, maybe I had some sort of invisible, but universally recognised 'Kick Me' sign stuck on my back that would have followed me where ever I went. But it happened in Scotland and I cannot separate the individual Scottish aggressors from the society that produced them, there were just too damn many of them. When I was there, Scotland had the highest murder rate for men 21-and-under in the whole of Europe. Wonder what the ratings are nowadays. Here are few quotations found in http://www.quotations.co.uk/ that apply to my Scottish childhood. There is no end to the violations committed by children on children, quietly talking alone. Elizabeth E. Bowen, The House in Paris In the little world in which children have their existence, whosoever brings them up, there is nothing so finely perceived and so finely felt as injustice. Charles Dickens, Great Expectations Childhood is frequently a solemn business for those inside it. George F. Will, in Newsweek and one from The Rules of Life: Benign neglect is an oxymoron. 12:26:55 PM

I wanna wysiwyg

I've been experimenting with all sorts to little utility editors on my Mac, trying to come up with an easy setup for wysiwyg blogging. NoteTaker lets me write just what I want, but it drops all the formatting when I paste the text into the Radio edit field. TextWrangler ought to do the job, but it doesn't seem to understand html. I think that's what it big brother BBEdit is for, but I'm not shelling out $160 for BBEdit when all I need is something that'll put a small selection of tags in my blog postings. Any suggestions? 12:16:28 PM