Man vänjer sig.

11 August:
I left my home around 12:30, which gave me time to get some British money, post a birthday present to thette (Buffy the Vampire Slayer Season 8 #5) and buy a tube of prim for J and E (which they can't find easily in Scotland) before I jumped on the 14:30 bus to the airport and arrived just before check-in time. Then I spent the time before takeoff at 18:20 and most of the flight listening to podcasts and reading Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows, and almost managed to finish it before touchdown in a grey and rainy Scotland.
Then I had to wait for nearly an hour inside the damp and leaky unmanned station building for the train to Glasgow Central. At Paisley Gilmour St. I changed to the Inverclyde line, stepped off at Fort Matilda and walked slightly more than 600 m to the home of J and E.



My first sight of Gourock.


I was welcomed warmly, with a lethargic but extremely cute and cuddly cat, Chinese takeaway (beef with black bean sauce, I think), and a Bill Bailey video. (Much impressed with his slightly surrealist humour.) After that we sat around and chatted for a while before we went to bed. (They also gave me their spare copy of the complete DVD set of Spaced.)



Mim the cat. The only cat I have ever met to actually start drooling when you cuddle her.


12 August:
Slow day. J and E were tired after a long and exhausting week (job troubles that are outside the scope of this report, but things were starting to look brighter when I left), so we just sat around watching British comedy (Brass Eye and Big Train) for hours until we went out for a walk over to Flava, a local coffee shop.


 
I took a couple of pictures on the way. Even if the weather wasn't the best, the view was still gorgeous.


At Flava we met up with E's co-worker, a very pleasant Faroese lady whose name unfortunately eludes me at the moment. (We spoke Swedish, she spoke Danish.) I had a slice of banoffee pie, which was slightly too sweet even for my taste, and a large cup of black coffee. After we were finished we left and accompanied their friend home, taking the way over the hill.


Imagine what this would look like in full sunshine...


A cute little house on the hillside.

After this we went home, relaxed a bit more, watched a couple of episodes of Black Books, called a taxi and went to The Waterfront Cinema in Greenock to see The Simpsons Movie (very enjoyable, as I've said elsewhere). After that we took a long walk home, and got home just 30 seconds before it started pouring down. Otherwise it was a beautiful night, with the lights of the towns on the north side of the Clyde (Cove, Kilcreggan, Helensburgh) reflecting in the water.


August 13:
Both J and E were busy all day with work-related stuff, so I went off on my own. No matter; I knew from the start that it wasn't possible for them to get the whole week off for me at this time, and besides I'm a big boy now and can make my own fun. So I took the train into town.


A very nice rainbow over western Greenock, shot from Fort Matilda. I tried to get a better shot from the bridge over the rails, but the rainbow faded just as the camera was focusing.


When I arrived in Glasgow, I set sights on the Kelvingrove area, having heard about the Kelvingrove Art Gallery and Museum. It certainly was not a disappointment, even if my feet were killing me toward the end of the day.

The Main hall at the Kelvingrove museum.

Probably the only place in the world where you can see a Spitfire hanging over a moose.

The outside of the museum.

After Kelvingrove, I went on to the Museum of Transport, just down the street. I have a feeling that some of my family members (viz. my dad and my two young nephews) might enjoy it.

A reconstruction of a mid-30s Glasgow street.	An old tram.
A blue Ford Anglia. You can just about make out the white owl in the back seat.	The main hall seen from the balcony.

Got home, spent another night in front of the telly with J and E (watching Doctor Who), went on reading The Warrior's Apprentice, and went to bed.

14 August:
I decided to spend this day shopping instead of looking at parks and museums, so I wrote down a couple of addresses for record and book shops and started exploring.

The record shopping wasn't too good. Of the five promising places I had found, three had closed down since the list was last updated (in one case the whole house was gone), one was too far off, and the last one was a combined headshop and record shop, so I didn't even go in. As for books and videos, the prices were roughly the same as in Sweden, so I only bought Ink by Hal Duncan (which I haven't been able to find in Sweden for bloody months), with the thought of having it as a backup for the bus trip. I also dipped into the little second-hand record and video shop under the "Heilanman's Umbrella" and picked up Genesis of the Daleks and Momus: Man of Letters for a song. (If you read this, imomus: even if I don't dislike your three latest albums (apart from a few songs which I always skip and read the lyrics instead), I prefer your older stuff and think you're more interesting to read than to listen to these days. Sorry, but there it is.)
Finally, I went into Argos for a copy of their latest catalogue; I was sure my friends back home wouldn't believe the size of the thing if I didn't show it to them. After this my bag was getting heavy, so I sat around at Glasgow Central for about an hour and wrote a few postcards to friends and family before taking the train back home.

 
This view is one of the reasons why J and E have never moved into Glasgow. If I had this kind of view from my living room, I wouldn't want to move either.


15 August:
After a quick breakfast, E and I took the train to Glasgow and made a quick visit to Forbidden Planet. Didn't buy anything, as it would be too heavy to drag the bloody stuff to Manchester and back.

At 13:10 we boarded the bus to Birmingham, with stops at Preston and Manchester, for our five-hour journey. E slept most of the trip, while I either read "The Mountains of Mourning" or watched the landscape. Southern Scotland and northern England are breathtakingly beautiful; unfortunately I couldn't take any pictures, because as soon as I managed to focus on something it was gone.


  
We made a half-way stop for 30 minutes at Westmorland services. Nice surroundings.


In the end we got to Manchester and made our way, with help of a Google map, to Manchester Academy.

I insisted on taking a little detour to the place where The Haçienda used to be. The house was torn down some years ago and a luxury block of flats was built in its place; only the name remains now, and the memory. I had read that there was a small spontaneous memorial to the late Tony Wilson outside, and sure enough, there it was. (E and I wrote a short letter of thanks from "two Swedish fans" on a leaf from my notepad and put it in one of the flowerpots.)

Having paid our tribute to a sometimes great, sometimes borderline incompetent man, we went on our way down to Manchester Academy for tonight's concert.


  

The support act, Miami musician Otto von Schirach, was loud and noisy as hell and much more entertaining to watch than to listen to. My spontaneous impression of the sound was "Whitehouse covering The Residents". Most of all, Otto looked like Superman's evil brother, and was sometimes joined on stage by the mysterious bananaSLOTH and a red-haired girl who made slightly threatening poses with a melon. (ObPythonQuote.)


  
  
 

And then the main act came on. As usual with Skinny Puppy, there was a lot of props, fake blood, video projections and generally bizarre behaviour from Nivek Ogre. He didn't even show his face for the first three songs, but performed them as a shadowplay behind a white screen. I might write a more thorough review some day, but that will be a separate entry. I'll just give you the track list: Anger, Ugli, Dogshit, Tormentor, Politikil, Rodent, Pedafly, Worlock, I’mmortal, Dig it, Amnesia, Hardset Head, Fascist Jock Itch, and Haze, with the encores Social Deception and Testure. (In other words, they played something from every album except Remission and Last Rights. Not bad.)

Oh, and I loved it.

E and I walked back to the bus terminal and waited for the bus back to Glasgow for an hour and a half. Apparently there was a Gay Pride festival going on; there were rainbow flags at a lot of pubs, and we got a compliment from a couple of transvestites: "You guys rock!"

16 August:
The bus finally came. Contrary to what we'd hoped, the bus was mostly full, but we found two empty seats at the back. And that's where the nasty part started. My problem is that I can't fall asleep on buses and trains, unless I am much more tired than I was now, but neither could I keep awake after a while. There was no chance of lighting a lamp to read a book, and when I used my iPod the light from the display stabbed my eyes. I spent most of the trip drifting in and out of a kind of half-sleep; when I was more awake than asleep, all lights left long trails when I moved my eyes. The night lights in the ceiling looked like long, luminous ropes. Towards 3:30, we stopped at what must have been Southwaite services, where we had a cup of awful coffee that kept me awake for almost an hour before I started dozing off again, for about 20 seconds at a time, and then jerking awake every time the bus shook. And the things I saw... Calling them "dreams" would be too charitable; "hallucinations" is closer to the truth. Some were misinterpretations of the real world outside the window (for example, that moving hand stretching over the horizon turned out to be a bird with a wind turbine in the background), but others I'll never know where they came from (such as the stuffed hippopotamus head with motors in the jaws that I saw, clear as day, mounted on the wall of the bus). It was rather unpleasant, and I was happy when the sun came up and people started waking up.

We got back to Glasgow at around 6:30, and took an early morning train to Gourock, where I crashed for a few hours.

In the afternoon, we went into town, checked out a rather bigger bookshop than the ones I'd found on my own, went back to Forbidden Planet (where I bought a bottle opener), and had an excellent dinner at a very nice Italian restaurant whose name unfortunately escapes me at the moment (possibly Dino's).

On our way back to Gourock, we stopped at the huge Tesco in Port Glasgow to do some shopping. I took the opportunity to buy a few single malts on sale (70 cl of Laphroaig Cask Strength for darnia).

17 August:

A short walk in Gourock before it was time to pack up and leave.

  
The weather could have been better.


Kempock Street, the centre of Gourock. Flava, the coffee shop I mentioned earlier, is just up by the bend.

 
A collapsed pier.




Finally it was time to leave, so I took the train in to Glasgow, walked around for about an hour, and then took the train to Prestwick.

 
The weather was much better this time.

The trip back went smoothly. I arrived in Stockholm just in time to see half of the last song of Twice A Man's concert in Kungsträdgården, but that is another story.