Flashback

I may have said it before but having a kid gives you flashbacks. Childhood memories long forgotten or repressed come back when you do childhood things.

The other day I am with my daughter at the swing park behind our house, she is running around, attempting to defy the laws of physics by sliding up the slide and generally causing her own brand of harmless mayhem. I am merely there making sure she doesn’t fall down or hurt herself.

It’s then that I notice I am standing on a small hole in the ground where the pole that grounded the middle of the roundabout used to be. The roundabout is long gone and the hole is filled with rainwater now. Somewhere in the back of my mind a voice is reminding me that roundabouts are dangerous and have probably been banned by our governmental overlords.

It’s then that a memory comes flooding back to me.

I see myself , probably between the ages of 7 and 14, playing this game: You would lie down on your belly, securing your feet to something on the roundabout whilst your friends spun you as fast as they could. Another friend would then crush a coke can (or with it being in Scotland, more than likely it was an Irn Bru can) from the top down so that it looked like an ice-hockey puck. He would then kick this can underneath the fast spinning roundabout and you would have to try to reach under and grab it.

It was incredibly dangerous and incredibly stupid and the best kind of fun. Something that only a kid who believes he/she is indestructible could appreciate (don’t all kids think they are indestructible?).

There are three possible outcomes to this game: you could retrieve the can, you could lose an arm under there or you could fly off through the air like a clay pigeon and sandpaper your nose and chin along the ground.

Just to make it more interesting, I will also point out that in playgrounds in the town where I grew up, the roundabouts were made from rusted steel with (often) rotted wood bases. They were also almost inevitably covered in broken glass from the previous nights drunken teenage shenanigans, especially underneath where that golden prize awaited.

All the ingredients you need to make a really good trip to the hospital.

It’s fucking mad that more people weren’t killed or maimed. Then again, maybe they were and that is why the roundabout disappeared.

By the way I tried to find a good photo of a Scottish roundabout online and the best I could do was a Soviet one which I guess says more about the upkeep of the playgrounds in my hometown than I'd care to admit but here ya go:

Vicky Hamilton RIP

The news story that broke my heart this week is that Vicky Hamilton, the Scottish teenager who went missing in 1991, has finally been found dead in England.

Ths story hit me harder than most because I was living in Falkirk at the time, a short distance from where she went missing. I was only 3 years older than she was and I remember the picture staring out from "Missing" posters in shops all over town.

I had also only left high school 3 years before, at age 16 as well, and that picture of her, forever enshrined in her school uniform, burned itself into my brain. She looked like any 1 of 100 girls I knew at school.

I watched the story as it periodically resurfaced after I had moved to England in 1994. The local paper in Falkirk would report any new leads and they would sometimes trickle south of the border to the broadsheets but as the leads died out so did the story.

Somewhere in the back of my head that picture was always there. When I first moved South and was working kitchen jobs and holiday camp jobs I would run into plenty of Scots and Welsh who had run away from home for a variety of reasons, some of whom I'm sure were listed as missing somewhere. I think a part of me hoped that maybe she was down here somewhere too. Perhaps working in a kitchen or some crappy holiday camp just like me but it wasn't to be.

Now they have found her. The last light of hope has gone out.

I am a Father of a girl myself now. Something in that fact makes the story harder still to bear. I cannot begin to imagine what her Dad is going through. I can only hope this discovery brings him some peace.

Rest in Peace Vicky.

FloriDUH

Florida came and went and I survived... just.

It really is a strange place, I got off the plane at Fort Myers after flying over the manicured swamps that have been turned into alligator infested golf courses where leathery prehistoric lizards wait around to tee off and risk being eaten by the other leathery prehistoric lizards.

Having been here once before, I admit I came with a bad attitude from the start but it seemed to lift a little when we left the airport. There is something about Florida that just gets under your skin. Sure, it is a shithole filled geriatric New Yorkers and redneck bible thumping fudnockers, but when you see a blue heron standing by the side of the road only a few yards from the multi-story carpark filled with hire cars, you realise that the weather is actually quite nice and that your are standing in what was once a pristine, Garden of Eden like landscape. It's just unfortunate that Herb and Ethel decided they had to shit all over it.

The week got off to a bad start; on the way down, I suspect somewhere at 35,000 feet over South Carolina, my ear started to bubble, and not in a good way. Is a bubbling ear ever good? I don't think so.

Well anyway, by the time we landed I was deafer than Beethoven with an ear full of playdoh. Bear this in mind when I say the only reason we went to FUCKING Florida was because the Mother-in-law has a house with a pool, and now it seemed I had to keep my head out the water for a week.

I tried to swim that night but the cold water in the pool was really bothering me, then the baby decided that the pool was a place of fear and anytime anyone kicked their legs or disappeared under water she would scream... and scream and scream...

Next morning my ear was killing me so I decided to go to a walk-in doctor's office, this is despite my Mother-in-law protesting that there was no such thing. Considering the population of the island we were staying had the average age of the combat soldier being ninety... ni-ni-ni-ni-ni-ninety, I found this incredibly hard to believe. A quick skooshie of the phone book brought up a walk-in doctor name almost immediately.

My friend Jeff had this to say in an email when he heard this part of the story: "Healthcare in Florida is particularly bad. Every doctor who can't get Board Certified or find a job elsewhere makes their way to Florida.And I suspect that many of them obtained their medical degree in the Islands. An HMO doctor in Hallandale once told me that you can't prevent illness. He said, "If you're gonna get sick, you're gonna get sick." He proceeded to ask me if he could cook me dinner".

The guy I ended up seeing was hilarious but I found it hard to believe he was a real doctor. Also, I think the only patients he sees are people with the clap.

He walks into his examination room and immediately says "Aha, someones been chasing those Marco Island ladies, those Marco Island ladies are NASTY!"

I haven't seen anyone under the age of 70 in the past 2 days so I've no doubt he's right if grab-a-granny is your thing, I'm slightly befuddled by this statement so I weakly say 'No doc, just a bit of an ear infection....'

He then notices my Buddha tattoo and says 'I see you have some ink!'.

I reveal the rest of the tattoo and he say says "FUCKING HELL! THAT MUST HAVE FUCKING HURT!"

I've never heard a doctor say "fuck" in the examination room before, and I never expected to before the inevitable day when someone tells me I have an incurable disease by saying "Sorry pal, I think you're fucked!". It's disconcerting. I now believe that two words doctors should never utter in the presence of the patient are "fuck" and "oops!".

It also didn't really help that he looked like Richard O'Brien from the Rocky Horror Picture Show:

Anyway, he eventually looks in my ears and tells me what I already know. I have an ear infection.

He says "I'll write you prescription, it'll be something generic so it'll be nice and cheap!". He seems to emphasise the word "cheap" a little bit too much for my liking but I guess it's better than my doctor in New York who says "Oh they don't make that generic brand anymore, here is a named brand that is twice as expensive and half as effective! Oh, and did I mention that the company that made this sent me on holiday to Aruba this year? They did! It was great!! Have a nice day!".

Next day we went to the beach and it was empty. It was the second last week of October and most of the snowbirds hadn't arrived yet, by the first week of November and the flying-v formations of 747's would be bringing the colostomy bags and oxygen tanks.

We baked in the hot sun for a while before deciding to try to get the baby to enjoy being in the ocean. Bad move....

The waves were not exactly crashing onshore but they were big enough to make a noise, she hated it. Well she hated it when Mummy went in the water and I stood on the beach with her. She would scream and scream. If Daddy went in the water and Mummy stayed on the beach she was calm and seemed to be saying "Enjoy your life in the sea Daddy!".

Later in the week anyway we took a catamaran out into the Gulf of Mexico to go shelling on a remote beach. Well, actually more like the remnants of a remote beach as two years before Hurricane Wilma made landfall on the very beach we were standing on and washed it all away. It was more of a thin sandbank.

The captain of the catamaran, Captain John, was an Ernest Hemingway look-a-like with a bad Hawaiian shirt and an annoyingly large collection of Jimmy Buffet CD's. He blew on a conch and reminded us all that gratuity is not included in the price of the trip and that if we didn't give a decent tip he would be forced to sell his first-born to a Haitian voodoo priest in return for a few kernels of magic corn.

Even allowing for Captain Cheeseball, the catamaran trip would have been great if it wasn't for the fact that it was overcast and the sea was very choppy. I sat still and kept my eyes on the horizon but it didn't really help much. I didn't puke but I wanted to most of the way out. We did get to pick up some nice shells though and add our footprints to the destruction of the Florida coastline! Herb and Ethel would be proud.

I leave you with this signpost I noticed right after I left the doctors office, somehow it just sums up the fucked-up-ness of Florida to me: