5 Questions

Ginny from the blog “A Long Way from Om” has been posting comments here for a while so I’ve been checking out her blog and discovered she has been playing a fun game so I decided to play:

The Rules
1. If you want to participate, leave a comment below asking to be interviewed.
2. I will respond by asking you five questions - each person's will be different.
3. You will update your journal/blog with the answers to the questions.
4. You will include this explanation and an offer to interview others in the same post.
5. When others comment asking to be interviewed, you will ask them five questions


Ginny’s Questions for Dave:

1) What prompted you to leave Scotland, and have you ever had regrets?

Well I actually left Scotland for the first time in 1989 to find work. The unemployment figures were very high in Scotland then (as they still are now) but relatively low in the south of England. Firstly I lived with my Sister Anne in Milton Keynes for a while, (a new town just north of London), then I lived in Southampton and the Isle of Wight (about as far South as you can go without moving to France) and then I moved to Reading (West of London, famous for it’s rock festival and for giving us Kate Winslet!).

Crap jobs were easy to come by - I did everything from dunking German sausages in a big vat of blood and guts (for flavoring) to delivering refrigerators and washing machines, to making 300 cups of tea for old biddies in a holiday camp.

I hated all these jobs at the time but I now look back with a sense of nostalgia that makes you forget what heaving a washing machine up five flights of stairs feels like! I guess I was at an age when you feel the most freedom; don’t like the job? Well just quit!

I went back to Scotland for a few years for college but other than that I’ve always been elsewhere. I’ve actually spent almost as much time away from Scotland now as I have living there (breaks down about 17 years in Scotland, 16 years other places).

I moved to NYC in 1999 when I got married to Alma. We kind of joined the pioneers online romance and it has worked out good for us. So no, no regrets…

2) New York is portrayed as having a lot of rude people. Describe a situation in which someone was very rude to you.

It’s not justified. I love New Yorkers, they are freaky, funny and friendly. The rude ones are just the same assholes in business suits that you get anywhere. As you can see above, I lived around London for years but never actually in it! The main reason for that is that I hated the place (with the exception of Camden Town), I always thought Londoners were rude and unfriendly.

I’ve had incidents in NYC of course, I remember one guy with a serious chip on his shoulder who was screaming at me because I had bumped into him. I had barely brushed the guy and it was so slight I hardly noticed. I apologized as soon as I realized. It was at the time when my eyesight was bad but I had not yet started using a cane.

He was screaming at me and I thought he was going to swing for me so I was being pretty aggressive back. It had the potential to get really ugly but believe it or not, an old lady stepped into the breach and calmed it all down.

3) China, soon-to-be world super power, or just a wannabe?

Definite superpower, and the world will be better for it. The loss of the USSR made America too powerful, we need some balance in the world. I only wish China would work on it’s human rights record and Tibet back to Tibetans.

I tend to think everything goes in cycles. The Chinese were one of the first superpowers, they gave humanity the printing press, gunpowder, the Great Wall, and MSG (only joking!). China will rise as the ass falls out of America and it goes back to being the frontier backwater that it is.

4) What clubs/activities/sports were you involved in as a child, and what did you like most?

I was the kind of kid who would deliberately forget his sneakers so he could avoid doing physical ed or sports. I still have a dislike of locker room machismo when I go to the gym. I do like watching football though and have declared myself a Glasgow Celtic supporter since moving to NYC.

5) In your opinion, what is the best thing the Bush administration has done?

Jesus, a hard question! I would normally say NADA! NOTHING GOOD HAS COME FROM THIS ADMINISTRATION!!!! However when I thought about it, I guess they have exposed the American press corp. for being the rightwing, groveling cowards that they are. No more harping about “The Liberal Media” agenda - every major news organization has been exposed as either rightwing propaganda or as too cowardly to publish the truth.

The British press aren’t that much better but at least they still question the motives of the government (even if it costs you your job like the BBC in the David Kelly affair).That is why bloggers are doing such a good job.

Here are some of the blogs I use for news:

Crooks and Liars
The Left Coaster

and the big guys....

Michael Moore
Greg Palast