I am writing a monthly article for my local community magazine and I thought it interesting to bundle all the pieces together:

9: Music

I’m sitting listening to Armin van Buuren’s Unforgiveable from an album called Cream Future Trance. I love my Trance Dance music and, as I approach my fiftieth birthday, it seems that I am somewhat of a sad old man that won’t let go of his youth. At least that is what I’m told on a regular basis.
I’ve never been one to reach a period in my life and stop listening to new music. I don’t see the point. Sure I still listen to music from years ago – put it this way I’m going to see Status Quo, OMD and the Psychedelic Furs in the next few months – so I’m hardly rejecting my younger days. But, if I have a personal hobby horse (and I have many), I despair of people who not only reject, but actively avoid new music. You know the type. The Beatles fan who still thinks Dave Lee Travis is on Radio 1. The ABBA freak who thinks T in the Park is a picnic for old ladies in Rouken Glen. The people who perceive downloading as a fancy word for getting the trunk out of the loft.
iTunes has been a revelation to me. To others it is a product available from Boots to help them breathe easier. These are the same people that find music genres a mystery. Emo stars in Sesame Street – doesn’t he? Ambient is the temperature for a good bottle of red wine? Garage Rock is a collection of minerals from the trip to Ayr beach.
OK I can see why some people don’t move on. Why should you? You like what you like – right? But think of it this way. What if, back then, Mick and Keith had taken the same tack.
‘You now what, Keith? I like listening to the easy swing of Mr Glen Miller. Let us not form a pop group as I am happy with his clarinet and saxophone led tunes’
‘I agree. Mick. And, for me, the dulcet tones of Jim Reeves will satisfy me until I breathe my last.’
Your Rolling Stones fan wouldn’t be so much stoned as stoneless
iTunes just dowloaded its 10 billionth track. Not all of them are new but maybe, just maybe, there was the odd good one amongst the newer stuff. And maybe, just maybe, it might lead to a whole new world of music that you never knew existed.
I have a suggestion. If you know someone that lives in a musical time warp ask them to walk into HMV, go up to the assistant and say the following:
‘I am a fan of (insert your favourite band(s) name(s) here) and I am looking for similar music from new bands.’
No big risk there. No need to invest in the latest Chilled, Retro Boogie, Hip Hop, Rock fusion – just ask them to pop on the CD they suggest and listen. You can do the same thing from your armchair with iTunes – type in your favourite album and then simply click on the section that says ‘Listeners Also Bought.’ I just entered ABBA Gold and seemingly I would like Lilly Allen, Duffy, Black Eyed Peas, Mika, and Coldplay. And, if you are interested, Armin van Burren brought up OceanLab, Above & Beyond and John O’Callaghan – I have no idea who they are but my Visa card is already burning a hole through my laptop.
Go on try it – what is the worst that could happen?
Gordon Brown lives and runs his business in Clarkston. He is a published author with his second novel – ’59 Minutes’ coming out in August. If you want a bit more info why not visit www.gordonjbrown.com.

8. Holidays

My fifteen year old son has just put the last full stop on his fourth year exams. He tripped through the front door with a smile on his face and the look of someone who is just discovering what the phrase ‘de-mob happy’ really means.
I watched his demeanor and memories flooded back. It has been a while since I sat exams and I’ve forgotten what it feels like to hand in that final paper, and walk down a road that now seems to be more akin to a bouncy castle.
It has been much longer since I handed in a paper and knew that summer now beckoned. All seven weeks of it. Or, as I remember it from my school days, all seven years of it. The endless days stretching before me like so many dominos in a row – just waiting to be toppled in glorious slow motion.
What did I do with all that time? What would I do with it now?
I suspect that today I’d treat the school holidays a little differently. When I was young I would be up and out of the door before the birds had moved to full song. Today I’d probably lie in bed and sigh deeply. Back then I would play from dawn to dusk – stopping only to take on food and juice. Nowadays I’d drift from the bedroom to the telly, drink tea and contemplate the fact that the lawn needs done. As a kid I’d treat every day as an adventure. Now I’d treat every day as an excuse to treat tomorrow as an adventure. Off course tomorrow would never come.
But some things would be the same. I’d lose track of time. My thought processes would shrink to the point that my IQ score would be in single figures. Tasks would remain undone, beds unmade, hair uncut – goofing off the norm and I would revert to my youth at speed.
How can I be so sure? Well I have proof. Each year my friends and I partake of a lad’s weekend and, each year, I sprout acne, talk nonsense and act like a spoilt teenager – and that’s before the car has even left my driveway.
Wonderful.
Off course there is the downside to this. At some point, and it always seems too soon, it will be time to re-enter reality. A tight stomach, churning gut, gloomy head and a desire to find a way to extend the holiday ad infinitum. First day back at school/first day back at work – not much difference and then the countdown begins to the next break.
So would I really like to return to school holidays?
What do you think?

7. Exercise

Hands up if you currently have a membership to a gym. Keep your hands up if you have any of the following equipment in the house – running machine, dumbbells, running shoes (that you actually run in), exercise video (or DVD), book on exercise or any form of aid to fitness?
Hands up if you have a copy of Paul McKenna’s ‘I Can Make you Thin!’ or ‘Fifty Ways to Fill Your Stomach and Not Get Fat.’ (I made that one up).
Now hands up if you said yes to all the above but don’t use the gym membership or the equipment and only utilise the diet books to prop up the wobbly kitchen table?
Well for your information I am both dieting and exercising, and have been since Christmas. As a result three stones of fat have vanished and a touch of muscle has appeared. I am also an official pain in the backside because I will regale this story to anyone who cares to listen.
As a result I am now losing friends.
I have discovered it is perfectly reasonable, maybe even desirable, to belong to Green’s but never darken the doorstep or to own a book on low calorie options but still eat like a horse. It is not, however, acceptable to actually get fit or lose weight and expect people to be happy for you. People do not want to discuss weight loss or fitness unless they are fitter and slimmer than you – in which case they boringly want to waffle on about how much fitter or slimmer they are than you.
I’m still waiting on someone to say well done. But it isn’t going to happen. It’s why this whole exercise and diet thing is so tough. Those who are thin and fit just make you feel bad and those who aren’t, temporarily ostracise you. As a result I have now concluded that I should sign up to the gym for another year but forget where the building is situated and purchase one hundred books on diets while still eating a portion of ‘Death by Chocolate’ three times a day. That way you make everyone else feel good – regardless of their current physiological status.
So in the interest of regaining some form of social place in the world I am going to visit the fridge, or better still get someone else to do it for me, and tuck into that Scotch Pie that I know is lurking on the top shelf.
Brown sauce anyone?

6. Drip mats

I’m sitting in the local pub chatting with my friends and one of them informs me that he has read the latest  ‘A Brown View on Life’ and felt it was a bit of a random rant. So I ask what he would he rather I wrote about and, after two seconds deep thought on the subject, he points at the drip mats on the table and says ‘Write about them’.

I was about to tell him where to go when I stopped, thought about it a little and realised that you don’t really see drip mats as much as you used to. When I first entered the hallowed halls of the Beechwood (the pub that supplied my first legal drink on the day I turned eighteen) the place was awash with them. Beer brands spread them around like sweeties at a fun fair. Cigarette companies dumped them into pubs by the shed load. Spirits firms used them as if they were going out of fashion. Now they are rarer than a Eurovision song contest win for the UK. Cigarette companies are banned, beer companies, if they do them at all, often charge for the things and – even if they are made from recycled material – they don’t fit our new environmentally friendly world.

To top it all I Googled the word drip mat and found that there are ‘Real’ ones and ‘Fake’ ones. The article even suggested that calling it a drip mat is an affront to some people – seemingly it has to ‘beer mat’.  I leave it to you to look up the web and find out how in the heck a drip mat, sorry beer mat, can be fake – it really isn’t that interesting.

Today’s drip mats have been transformed into a social advertising medium for the likes of sexual health or help the elderly – dull as dishwater to read when you are supping your pint.

I used to work in the beer industry and, to me, drip mats were sometimes a source of creative genius. I clearly remember a Guinness campaign where they encouraged you to build a house of drip mats in the same way you would with a pack of cards. The Tennent’s Lager girls graced them  – wearing just enough to make you flick over and see if there was a better picture on the other side. There were quizzes, stupid facts, puzzles – there was even a cigarette firm who scribbled the words shopping list and the name of their brand on one side – leaving the rest of the drip mat blank for you to write down the weekly messages. John Smith’s Bitter produced ones that you couldn’t tear – and much to my surprise they really were tear proof. I also remember a set by a whisky firm that contained giant letters – encouraging you to play a Scrabble type game. The fact that the letters were designed to spell their brand didn’t stop you trying to make rude words from them.

So for the friend who asked me to write about drip mats can I say a big thanks – as this has been a short, and pleasurable trip down nostalgia lane.

Gordon Brown lives and runs his business in Clarkston. He is a published author and if you want a bit more info why not visit www.gordonjbrown.com.

5. ‘Maybe.’

Things have been fairly manic of late.  I always thought that life would calm down as I got older. I’m not sure what made me think that this would be the case but I know why it isn’t happening. You see I’ve fallen in love with a very seductive and tempting mistress. Her name is ‘Maybe’ and she is the ultimate forbidden fruit.

‘Maybe’ is a divisive mistress. She revels in being non-committal and teases me into thinking that I still retain some vestige of decision-making authority.  But she is a cheap, two-faced charlatan who so easily, against my deepest desires, transforms into her alter ego – ‘Yes’. The solution to this wicked lady is to court and marry her brutal sister ‘No’ – but being wed to ‘No’ would make life so much more confrontational.

Take the following example as proof of my dilemma

Mother that is a friend of a friend – ‘Do you want to come to see my baby daughter in a five hour singing and dancing extravaganza of mind numbing blandness and non-existent talent on the same night that Scotland are playing in the deciding qualifier match for Euro 2012 – to which I believe you have a VIP ticket?’

Me – ‘No!’

Same mother, but now indignant – ‘Sorry but did you say no? This is my daughter we are discussing. The shining apple in my basket of life. What is wrong with her? Why would you insult her, my family, all my ancestors, and myself by declining such a rare and generous opportunity.  Even though I understand that the said game of football is being played out in the wonderful city of Prague and that you have been offered both a complimentary flight and hotel room, along with free alcohol and food. So I will ask you again. Do you wish to accept my invitation?’

Me – ‘Maybe.’

You see the problem.  I think that by saying ‘Maybe’ I can postpone the moment of pain involved in using the word ‘No’ knowing I’m going to say ‘Yes’ anyway. I have tried many times to break my relationship with ‘Maybe’ but she draws me back time and time again. So I have developed a cunning plan. It came to me after watching the Jim Carey movie ‘The Yes Man’ in which Mr Carey discovers that life can be far more interesting if he says yes to everything he is asked to do.  Following this theme I think we should declare a ‘National Day of No’. For one day in the year we should say ‘No’ to every request – just to prove we can live without that vixen ‘Maybe.’

‘Do you want another slice of cake?’ – ‘No!’

Easy.

‘Do you want a complimentary ticket to see the ‘Best of the Eighties’ tour that is town?’ – ‘No!’

Still easy.

‘Do you fancy a free round of golf at Gleneagles?’ – ‘No!’

Harder but I’ll live.

‘Do you want a gratis, all inclusive four week holiday in a five star resort in the south Pacific with a thousand pounds spending money thrown in?’  – ‘Maybe!’

My ‘National Day of No’ is doomed from the start.

4. ‘Them.’

I was invited to take part in a blog debate on the way that modern technology is invading our lives. A colleague of mine posted the following on the site:

“Starting from our very email address, a hidden host of psychological manipulators will profile us and every digital movement we make. They will track us around the web and they’ll know every sordid little thing we are up to. Every weakness, every failing, every hidden desire.

They’ll analyse every purchase we make, every specialist interest website we visit and each specific page or even word we dwell on. They’ll track us around every dating website we join and every naughty photo we look at. And then they’ll pounce. But not in our faces. Behind our backs.

Yes, they’ll sneak up on us by delivering covert and clandestine digital messages that will get to the very heart of our secret fears, hopes and dreams. And by Christ will they make us part with our money? And we won’t even know they are doing it.”

Paranoia is a dangerous thing and If I had a penny for every time someone told me that ‘they’ (whoever ‘they’ are) were watching our every move, listening to our every conversation or controlling our every desire I’d have a couple of quid. 
 I bet good money that the first person to send a letter was scared that ‘they’ would read it. (More likely the first tablet sent in Egyptian times – or before) 
But there are two things that occur to me that give me hope for a future where I’m not a victim of Big Brother:

a) There are 6.5 billion people on this planet to track – a number growing at a rate of knots.

b) There is a wealth of communication channels – Facebook, Twitter, Bebo, Myspace, this blog, e-mail, MSN, other blog’s, websites, forums, live chat, video conferencing, mobile phones, landlines, broadcast radio, local radio, internet radio, You Tube, web TV, snail mail, conversations in the street, debating societies, rock god’s pronouncing on the world, film etc etc etc – and the number of options is also growing at a rate of knots.

My hope lies in the fact that there is a simple equation that will protect me from ‘Them’.

The ‘Them’ equation:

(The growing number of people on the planet) multiplied by (The growing number of channels available for communication) =  (An inability for technology to track everything we do and say).

In essence people AND technology will defeat people WITH technology.

Now I’m off for a quiet lie down in a lead-lined cell – underground – but then again I hear the CIA have attached detectors to worms that can translate my thought waves at a distance of one hundred miles and through a mile of granite rock.

3. ‘Facts.’

“I’m a bit of a freak when it comes to reference books. Take this Christmas – among my stocking fillers were titles such as ‘How to Make a Tornado – the strange and wonderful things that happen when scientists break free!’, ‘The Lucky Bugger’s Casebook – tales of serendipity and outrageous fortune.’ and ‘A Mess of Iguanas, A Whoop of Gorillas… an Amazement of Animal Facts.’ I love the things. Can’t get enough of them. Our house is full of books that are crammed with trivia.

I can bore the world in nonsense. Trust me – my friends and family will happily back me up on this. For instance do you know that the FBI can identify an individual by the jeans they are wearing. It seems that if they get a good enough quality photo from a CCTV that shows a close-up of a pair of jeans they can identify and match the weave – just like finger prints. Or that bats almost always turn left when they leave a cave. Or did you know that the period before the Credit Crunch was known as the Credit Binge?

I’ve no idea what the attraction is in such inane gibberish. I can waste hours reading titles such as ‘Why Don’t Penguin’s Feet Freeze.’ or ‘How to Avoid a Wombat’s Bum. – (the former is to do with the blood vessels in the legs and the latter doesn’t tell you to how to avoid it only that the animal has a habit of running flat out and then stopping dead letting any pursuing predator smash into its bum bone).

Do I really have to know that Jeremy Clarkson’s mother made her fortune from Paddington Bear merchandise. Why would I need to be aware of the fact that an average metal coat hanger is 112cm long when straightened? Would anyone care that the British Associations of Toy Retailers Toy of the Year in 1965 was the James Bond Aston Martin die-cast car?

In what part of the world will I ever find use for the fact that there is no single English word for the back of the knee or that it is quicker to say ‘world wide web’ than ‘www’ (three syllables versus nine – try it).

I’m sure that my kids were once fascinated to know that your skin weighs twice as much as your brain or that some snails have their reproductive organs located on their head. But it all gets a bit much unless you are careful. And it’s dangerous. Very dangerous.   You can look a king sized wally if you quote something that is wrong.

It is not true that a duck’s quack has no echo. Running in a zig zag will not help you escape a crocodile. Coca-cola will not dissolve a tooth if you leave it overnight. Bob Holness of Blockbuster fame did not play the saxophone on Gerry Rafferty’s Baker St (although if life were fair it should be true).

Stephen Fry and QI have even turned ‘fact bashing’ into a hit TV show but will I stop reading this rubbish? Absolutely not. Why would I? I might be reading the world’s most erroneous statements but come on – be honest – how could you live not knowing that Billie Piper made her TV debut impersonating Posh Spice or that rubber bands last longer when they are refrigerated or … well you get the idea.”

2. ‘Books.’

I’m sitting on the edge of my Gran and Grandpa’s creaking old brass double bed It fills every inch of the room and it is where I will divvie up the Scottish Cup tickets for the North East of Scotland for the nineteen seventy six cup final between Rangers and Hearts (3-1 in case you wanted to know) – my Grandpa was connected to the Scottish Football Association. It’s the late summer of nineteen seventy-five and I’m three floors up on the corner of Cross St and Mid St in Fraserburgh and the smell of the fish gutting factory is heavy in the air. I’m thirteen years old and I’ve just finished ‘Tom Swift and His Cosmotron Express’. Tom and his friend Bud Barclay have just seen off the evil VIPER and I’m clean out of books. I’ve read every Hardy Boy, Tom Swift and Famous Five book going and my Gran walks into the room

‘I’m going to the library. Do you want anything?’ she asks.

‘A book,’ I mumble.  I’m so a teenager.

An hour later she returns and drops James Herbert’s The Fog on the bed. I pick it up and read the first line – “The village slowly began to shake off its slumber and comes to life.”

Life changed.

People lopping off other people’s private parts – blood – violence – SEX. I was hooked and the fact I read it from cover to cover that afternoon and went out the next day to get James Herbert’s first book – The Rats – told me that Tom and the Hardy Boys were history.

Since that moment I can’t remember a day that I haven’t had at least one book on the go – more likely three or four. I was, and still am, a book junkie.

It is all so prescient now – right now – as I’ve just had my first novel published – Falling – and I can trace it all the way back to that day in Fraserburgh. Without my grandmother’s efforts to please her eldest grandchild I reckon my life as a novelist would have been stillborn.

Thanks Gran.

1. ‘Stuff.’

It’s nearly Christmas and for many people it’s time for the attack of the ‘pressie panic.’  What should I get for Gran? Does my son really need an X Box, a Playstation AND a Wii? When will I start shopping?  A friend of mine is a Christmas Eve shopper; in fact it’s now a matter of pride that he waits until the last possible moment to buy anything as he knows it winds up his partner.

This got me round to thinking of Christmas presents that stand out. Presents that I really appreciated. And that’s where I started to struggle. I’m not being ungrateful but presents that I remember with affection are a bit thin on the ground and that’s a bit of a worry. So I talked to my wife about it and the conversation shifted to all the stuff we have bought over the years and what items we value. We started to draw up a list and it took on an interesting slant.

Take for example the double, collapsable buggy that we bought when our youngest was a few months old. It was a star – three trips to the US and my eldest, by now five and the size of a seven year old, happily flopped into it with his sister when the going got tough at Disneyland. Designed for a a couple of light babies – good for ten times that. Brilliant. Or the fold away cot that is still in use today with my brother’s newborn – fifteen years after we bought it – a multi coloured gem that has provided a string of children with a play area and bed non stop since the day it was removed from its box and shows no signs of being retired to the bin just yet.

What about the folding card table that we inherited from my mother in law. Forty years old, cheap as chips when it was bought, repaired within an inch of its life and now serving as a table for the barbecue food – genius. Then there’s my waterproof radio for the bathroom. Shaped like a penguin; eyes for tuning and sound, bow-tie for selecting FM or AM, mouth for speaker -  it has faithfully worked for years whether it is in the shower with me singing or sitting in the rain as I repair the garden fence. And, to top it all, bathroom radios recently won the award for the most useless item in the house. Voted on by WHO? Useless! My penguin is crying at the insult.

So what will I be looking forward to this Christmas? A thigh massager for the car? A holographic picture frame that changes colour? A four foot high Rubick’s cube? I have no idea but, as you open your presents this year, just take a moment to think about the stuff that has made a difference to your life. The stuff you look at and think – now that is a great thing to own. I bet you’ll be surprised.