Lockerbie - It's not something to be famous for

I went to Lockerbie on Saturday.  For reasons I don't even understand.

I was staying in Moffat, 13 miles and a 35 minute bus ride away, and if I'm honest I probably wouldn't have thought of going to Lockerbie if it wasn't for the bombing and the resultant plane crash that happened there 24 years ago.

The journey there was pretty pleasant.  It was a nice sunny day, there were good views of the hills, it was all very Scottish, but as soon as I passed the 'Welcome to Lockerbie' sign I started to feel a bit strange.

And the strangeness continued when I got off the bus.  I don't think Lockerbie itself is strange. It's just like lots of other towns I've been to in Scotland.  There were industrial estates, an auction mart, people chatting in doorways, a man walking a dog, people waiting for buses.  And then there was me.  And I think it might have been me that had brought the strangeness.

The difference between all the other Scottish towns I've been to over the years, and Lockerbie might have been purely in my head.  It had the same kind of shops, the same kind of scenery, the same kind of people, all except for the fact that when I was looking at the town and the hills surrounding it I was wondering what it must have looked like when they were on fire, and the streets and gardens were full of dead bodies, and there was a massive crater in the middle of the town and bits of aeroplane everywhere.  And I thought to myself.  No town deserves that.

I didn't do my research properly either, I knew there were two memorials but I didn't write down beforehand where they were.  As a result I couldn't find either of them.  and I didn't want to ask anyone where they were.  It could have been a dead person's mother I was asking, or a dead person's son, and I didn't want to look like a disaster tourist, even though that's probably what I was.

I did go to the local church and there was a massive gravestone in the graveyard, much bigger than all the others, and I wondered if that might be the memorial, but there wasn't a path to it, and I didn't want to start walking over other graves to go and have a look, so I just stayed at a distance.  When I got home, I checked up and I wasn't even in the right place, so the one I saw was probably just belonged to somebody important whose family could afford a big gravestone, or one of the town's founding fathers or something.

I went to Tesco at one point, and there was a ghost in the entrance collecting money, and Dracula and some other people dressed as dead people were wandering around inside.  As it happened, they were Tesco employees dressing up for Halloween, but it seemed surreal to me to be wandering around somewhere so synonymous with death and tragedy, and to be seeing people dressed as ghosts.

But then again, if dressing up as ghosts is normal at this time of year, why should Lockerbie be any different?  Even though it's a place that's known for something so out of the ordinary, shouldn't it be allowed to do the same normal things as everyone else?

In the end, I only stayed a couple of hours in Lockerbie.  I had some fish and chips and I got the bus back to Moffat.  The feeling I kept having was that I was an intruder at the funeral of someone I didn't know, and it wasn't a feeling I liked.

The experience seemed even more incongruous to me, because I was spending the weekend in such a positive environment with loving friends and families, and to take time out from that to go see a place that's known worldwide because of something so terrible made me feel uneasy.

I don't really know what it means to pay your respects, I don't know if it's just empty words or not, but somehow by going to Lockerbie I'd felt like that's what I was doing.

For the short time I was there, I spent some time thinking about those terrible and tragic events, and how they must have affected, and still continue to affect the community where it happened.  I thought about the scars that must be there, even if they're well hidden,   Like the people of Dunblane and Hungerford, and others, it must seem at times like they're living under a terrible curse, and I certainly didn't envy them for living with that legacy.

But even though it felt strange to be there, and I didn't see any memorials and I didn't offer any condolences to anyone, and I didn't in any way acknowledge to anyone why I was there, by the time I got back on the bus I felt like I had at least made an attempt to understand.  Even if I came away thinking that what happened there can never really be understood.

One of the really inspiring things I read about Lockerbie before I went was about how the community had pulled together at the time of the tragedy.  For example, in the days following the disaster:

Volunteers from Lockerbie set up and manned canteens, which stayed open 24 hours, where relatives, soldiers, police officers, and social workers could find free sandwiches, hot meals, coffee, and someone to talk to. The people of the town washed, dried, and ironed every piece of clothing that was found once the police had determined they were of no forensic value, so that as many items as possible could be returned to the relatives. The BBC's Scottish correspondent, Andrew Cassell, reported on the 10th anniversary of the bombing that the townspeople had "opened their homes and hearts" to the relatives, bearing their own losses "stoically and with enormous dignity", and that the bonds forged then continue to this day

And when I got back off the bus in Moffat, I walked back up the road to the hostel where my friends were all gathered together, and I was welcomed back in, and we all had a meal together.

And the sadness I'd felt earlier in the day might have amplified the feeling, but as I sat there I felt grateful for my own community, and I was glad to be a part of it.

The future's not very bright, and it doesn't have any oranges in it

The government keeps telling me the retirement age is going up.  Last time I heard I was going to have to work till I'm 68.  By the time I get to 68 it'll probably be 80.

Well, I went to Scotland in May and I spent about half a day in the Co-op trying to buy an orange.  I've seen the future, and if it's going to be full of old folk working in shops it ain't that bright.

This poor old sod behind the till, he moved about as fast as the waxworks in Madame Tussaud's, and after giving him my money I thought there was a real danger of him expiring before the end of the transaction.  In times of soaring inflation, my money would have been going down in value while he had it in his hand.  Also, you'd have thought he'd have had some training with modern technology, but he seemed utterly baffled by the notion of having to use a scanner.  Eventually some young bloke had to step in and deal with me, otherwise I'd still have been there now.

If he's a sign of things to come when there aren't any pensions any more, I think we better get used to eating tinned fruit, because in the time it took him to sell me a fresh piece, it had already gone off.

Another thing about old folk, they're always having to go for scans.  I'm only 44 and even I've had to start going for scans and tests, and to be put in a lead box and have lasers fired at me.  One of the jobs I worked at, where the staff were all in their late 50s, every week there was someone having a camera sent where the sun doesn't shine, or having a brain scan, or some other sort of test.

Can you imagine trying to staff a place with only old dodderers?  What a nightmare the rota would be.  What the government doesn't seem to realise is you can't just keep working people till they keel over.  They need to be at home struggling in and out of Shackleton's high seat chairs, and spilling dinner down themselves for a few years before they pop off.  They shouldn't be trying to sell me fruit and veg.  What if I tried to buy 5 pound of potatoes off someone with osteoporosis?  I'd hand them over to be scanned and their arm would probably snap off with the weight.

At the moment I mostly work with young people, and their main problem with work seems to be getting up for work early enough after going out getting hammered the night before.  Sometimes they don't get in till 5 in the morning, and then they have to be at work for 8.30.

Well, old people are always up at the crack of dawn, maybe they could just do a job share with one of the youngsters, just do a couple of hours until the 20 somethings have had time to down 15 pints of water and a sausage sandwich and get themselves out of bed.

You never know, it just might work...

Goldfinger - the low budget remake

I've just had my bones scanned by possibly the most humourless woman on the planet.

I wasn't expecting cabaret or anything, but a bit of friendly banter would have been nice.

Considering I had to unfasten my trousers and have a laser shot at me (which is a slightly unnerving experience) a few words of introduction would have been nice.

It may have been the fact that I've been talking about action movies all afternoon but the above scenario did remind me a bit of the scene in Goldfinger where James Bond aka Sean Connery is about to be lasered in half, and he says to Goldfinger 'Do you expect me to talk?' and Goldfinger says 'No, I expect you to die, but I'm not hanging around to make sure it happens because I'm off to blow the shit out of Fort Knox, and even though it would be a good idea to make sure that any enemies I've got are six feet under before I start, especially if they've got a licence to kill my ass, I'm not going to bother to put the effort in and wait 5 minutes for your body to be cut in half, so I'm off. See ya!'.

I wasn't expecting this poor NHS woman to enter into some sort of action movie role-play with me, my expectations of hospitals aren't that high, but it would have been nice if she'd just passed the time of day  with me, and said something like 'I just need you to lie down on this bed for a bit while I fire a laser at you, it totally won't hurt and it will only take a few minutes and there's absolutely nothing to worry about'.  Just something like that.

I didn't want her to ask where I went for my holidays, or if I've got any pets, like she might have done if she was cutting my hair, but just something.  By the way, I have a theory about hairdressers, which is that they make conversation with you to help ease the awkwardness which arises from touching a complete stranger's head.

And if there's a small amount of unease which comes about from being touched on the head, imagine if you will the slightly larger portion of unease that is felt by being asked to unbutton your trousers, empty your pockets, lift up your shirt and wait for a laser to be fired at you.

Under the circumstances, establishing a bit of rapport with me first would have been nice.  I haven't felt so processed since I went to the all you can eat Chinese buffet at the Banana Leaf in Middlesbrough.  By the time I crawled out of there heaving under the weight of barbecued spare ribs and overpriced drinks I could barely fold myself into the car to drive home....I felt positively violated.

But that's another story...

If Looper's the future, I think I'm off to Dignitas

I went to see Looper last night.  It was set in the future but it was all dusty, and people were driving round in beaten up old cars, and shooting each other with blunderbusses.  This is not the future I want.

I want the future like in I Robot where I can get a big smooth shiny Audi that drives itself, and a personal slave robot who, until he goes mad and tries to kill me, does whatever I ask him to.

I don't want a future like in Waterworld either, where people are going round on boats collecting soil and living on rusty oil tankers.  I want tin foil everywhere, shiny stuff and frickin' lazers.

And that wasn't the only thing about Looper.  To make it almost impossible for him to act the main actor Joseph Gordon-Levitt had been given a prosthetic face to make him look more like Bruce Willis.  I haven't seen such an unconvincing mask since Vanilla Sky.  Even my favourite actress Emily Blunt couldn't save the film.

It was so bloody loud as well.  There was hardly a minute went by without some poor sod getting blown away.  Most of the victims were bound, gagged and hooded and just got gunned down as soon as they landed in the past.  At least there's normally a bit of running about before folk get shot, this was like watching somebody shoot fish in a barrel.

It was totally and utterly humourless as well.  It was like watching Terminator 2 or Back to the Future with all the humour taken out.  Bits of it did remind me of other films but I found that mostly depressing too because they were all films I'd rather be watching instead.

It's rare that I dislike a film before the opening credits have finished but I think I managed it with this one.  And not since Justin Timberlake in In Time have I seen such wooden acting.  They could have got a plank to play Bruce Willis, and by the end I was wishing I'd hit myself with one.  Films are meant to be escapism, but with this one I could actually feel my life slipping away minute by minute.

Ruth mostly slept through it, she said it was such a monotonous shoot-em-up-athon she thought she'd just skip the middle two hundred shootings and just wake up in time for the ride home.

The sad thing is, I generally love time travel films.  I like getting my brain scrambled by shit like the Grandfather paradox, but with this one, I couldn't even be bothered to do any thinking.  I remember going to see Timecop with Jean Claude Van Damme about 15 years ago, and that certainly wasn't the best film in the time travel genre, but it was like Citizen Kane compared to this tosh.

If I had a time machine myself, if I could cobble one together out of bits of old bike and half used tins of paint out of the garage, I could do a lot worse than go back to yesterday, and go see something else instead.....or failing that I could just stick my head in a bowl of custard for two hours.  It would probably be just as good.