I read this post yesterday on the Bella Caledonia website, and I found myself watching Aztec Camera on YouTube later, doing this version of “Somewhere in My Heart”.
I was only ten when this song was a massive hit, but I can very clearly remember loving it, and having a massive crush on Roddy Frame. I think I may even have kissed his lips on the telly when he was on it (not bad taste for a ten-year-old!). It’s twenty-two years later,and this song still speaks to me.
It’s 12:40 PM on Monday night (Tuesday morning) and I’m no longer in my quasi-suicidal mode. Today was an OK day at school (I’m buoyed by the thought of having five days off for Thanksgiving) and I’m now half-pissed on a bottle of Yellow Tail Cabernet Sauvignon (aye, classy lady!).
The wine is making me melancholy and nostalgic, as is the Aztec Camera song. What the fuck am I doing living in this desert wasteland thousands of miles away from home?! I’m not cut out for this climate. My skinny bones love the heat, but ah cannae handle the dust. I had to go to the doctor last week to get a fucking steroid shot in ma arse to reduce the inflammation in my asthmatic lungs. Oh to breathe the pure air of Scotland! It’s the end of fucking November, and yet ma oxters were reeking like a badger’s arse today -it’s that hot!
The Bella Caledonia website is also making me a wee bit depressed. All these talented Scottish people (or at least Scottish-based people) with so many interesting things to say about politics! I’m interested in politics, but I could never imagine putting together a whole blog about it. I’m just not that erudite. I just tend to witter on about, um, myself really. I realize that’s a pretty narrow focus but I just can’t seem to get beyond myself. I feel left out when I see blogs like Bella Caledonia. I imagine that all the contributors are one big happy family, and that they get together in pubs, and have fascinating conversations. I’d like to belong to a group like that (a kind of salon, you know) but I don’t think I’d fit in.
Right now, I wish I was back in Glasgow, in a pub somewhere, basking in the glow of that drunken friendliness you can probably only ever find in pubs in the Celtic nations. It’s probably a fake kind of friendliness but, ach, everybody means it at the time, and sometimes that’s all that matters. As I think about this, I realize that there is nothing I would rather like less than to take MM with me to Glasgow. Glasgow is a world he doesn’t belong in, and I don’t ever want him to see it.
That’s quite fucked up really. This is the man I’m married to, and I don’t want him to see who I truly am, or where I come from. He’s fast asleep on the sofa right now, sleeping off the wine, and he has no idea about half of the shit that runs through my head. I don’t think he really knows me. Maybe ( brace yourself for cliche, reader!) nobody can ever know you (yawn). I say it’s a cliche, but the fucking scary part is that maybe it’s true. At least for me.
