Screaming into a void...

Sometimes I wonder if my Blog really is as popular as I like to imagine it is. On most of these occasions I slouch into my chair and bury my tear-stained face in my cup of tea and wait for iTunes shuffle to cheer me up. This is by no means a long term solution to such a conundrum.

Are my paltry few readers really worth the quite staggering length of time I spend not writing essays or studying for my degree? My last inspection revealed that my profile had been viewed 304 times.

Most of these were probably me.

I sometimes look at the Internet as an enormous apartment building, a gargantuan architectural phenomenon imbued with the combined eccentricity of billions. No two rooms are the same and the entire community is in a state of anarchy. Socialists and capitalists live next door to one another. Feminists and misogynists share laundry facilities. Angst-ridden pubescent teens chronicle their heartaches while people like myself stagger past in drunken stupors, yelling about Greggs or the economy.

It is a beautiful concept, a rich tapestry of poetry and society, knowledge and smut.

But whereas , say, eBay is enormous, spanning infinite floors of this building and constantly filled to bursting with visitors, I, in my shabby little study, spend my time typing, flanked by piles of dirty mugs. My humble webular abode is as appealing as an art class with Hitler.

My Revised Testament, the crack-baby offspring of my Standard Grade study leave, was extremely popular. It became a bohemian online hangout for my nearest and dearest. It was a place where the walls of the Guestbook reverberated to the intense beat of the discussions held there. If I failed to update regularly I was fiercely reprimanded by my readers!

Those were truly the glory days of my Internet antics, when I was a presence to be reckoned with! The church even posted advertisements on my pages, although I seriously doubt they would have approved of the content. Looking back, it was not well written at all. Its humour was vulgar and relied on shock value. Once the novelty of a mock-Bible wore off it was a fairly empty concept, devoid of flair. Although, on closer inspection...even as recently as 14th November entries have been entered into the Guestbook by DARKTHRUST! As clouds of sweet tasting nostalgia begin to envelop me in their trance-inducing haze, I sigh a little.

Will this ever be as popular as the Revised Testament?

Have I, as an Internet writer, wasted my one chance at greatness on a substanceless turd, the main purpose of which was, let's all wake up and smell the shit on our sheets, an excuse to make Douglas the incestuous villain?

Alas...Perhaps that is the curse of the artist! His most well known work is always his most commercial arse-gravy. When he actually sits down and produces something with taste, with depth, with PASSION, it goes unnoticed.

As I leave you to stew in your own mental juices, your every neuron reeling from the impact of my textual tripe, I have only this to justify my appalling back catalogue of Internet publication:

"The only excuse for making a useless thing is that one admires it immensely."

Jamie

P.S. Note how I capitalised "PASSION". That's technique right there.

"Now is the winter of our discontent..."

Given my usual predilection for light-hearted commentaries on subjects of dizzying insignificance, many readers may be surprised by the next few paragraphs. For the first time since the creation of "In Lamb We Trust" I, the Lamb in whom you trust, am going to deposit some crumbs of emotional contemplation upon the neatly ironed tablecloth of your collective consciousness. I know, I know. It's tacky and unbecoming and cliche, but I think that what will be said must be said.

I urge you to brace yourselves, dear readers. The sheer concentration of feeling in these words would surely be enough to take out the most robust emotional rhinoceros.

So.

What is the deal with Gregg's?

Many are the occasions on which I have ventured into their brightly lit bakeries, seeking refuge from not only the bitter cold of the Edinburgh winter but also from my own hunger. My insides practically scream for the embrace of a warm steak bake or a sausage roll. When they receive, instead of said embrace, the lukewarm grope of a three-hour-old pastry they are understandably upset. My stammered attempts at compromise go oft' unheeded!

"Give me ten minutes and I'll go back to the flat and bung it in the microwave for a while! It'll be fine!"

I can feel them forming their blasted gastric alliance in opposition to what they perceive as my culinary tyranny. My heretical schemes fall on deaf ears and I have no choice but to let my ninety pence meal slide like a gravy-coated leech down my throat. To resist would be to invite an internal mutiny!

When will Gregg's realise the pain and suffering they inflict upon our world, blighted by disease, poverty and corruption as it already is. Why not expend the meagre sum necessary to keep their food warm? Why further intensify our feelings of helplessness? Why deny us one simple pleasure amidst the furious tempest of domestic misery?

I fall 'pon my bloodied knees and beseech you, oh mighty Gods!

Once more my words are denied a sympathetic audience... Yet I maintain my hope. I have a dream, a dream that one day I will order a ham and cheese pasty and it will seer the skin from the roof of my mouth with its purifying heat! I fear though, that this dream's fulfillment will be a long and arduous struggle against economic forces outwith the simple confines of my understanding...

Keep fighting the good fight readers!

Jamie

An Upcoming Confrontation With My Nemesis...

Having only been at University for somewhere in the region of two months I am currently in a state of suspended terror. The impending December exams taunt me fiendishly from the dark, unexplored caverns of the near future and the multitude of very thick books with very thin pages arrayed on my desk seem to be boring into my skull with their dead stares, ravenous for the soft, grey, fleshy (and probably delicious) knowledge within.

What defences do mere mortals such as myself possess to defend themselves against such fell creatures of the academic nether realms?

Well... right now the second movement of Mendelssohn's Violin Concerto in E minor is doing a pretty good job of taking my mind off it all. Apart from that my only option is to put all my chips on hard work and natural intellectual flair. Yet as I rummage in the back of my mind to find said intellectual flair, what do I find?

...

Ah... That's right... Just a small, dusty pile of dead brain cells. All forensic evidence points towards "death by gross neglect". It seems an essay every few weeks is not enough to maintain the health (or even life...) of your brain. The lesson here? Simple really: Preserve your brains by pickling them in alcohol.

If you'll excuse me, I have some academic ass to kick.

Jamie

Tank Me Up Scottie!!!

A terrible crisis looms on the horizon. A grin spreads across its slavering maw as it contemplates the tiny band of youths poised to defend their God-given rights. What are these rights you ask? Why, the right to pass out on the floor of a stranger, stained by your own vomit! The right to say extremely rude things to extremely unpleasant people without fear of reprisal! The right to cavort in a most indecent manner with people who would normally make you wretch! All these things and more have come under the scrutiny of this aforementioned monster. It casts its baleful gaze across the vast expanse of teenage enjoyment and says: "Enough!"

The identity of this monster: none other than our own government. None other than the Scottish nationalists who so nobly abolished tuition fees so that Scotland's young scholars could learn without the dark cloud of yet more debt threatening them with its cascading torrents. God forbid this was an attempt to soften our resistance! God forbid in equal measure if they expect us to thank them for their new plan! Now, sit back and allow my finely distilled, single malt argument to wash over you...

SNP. Scottish Nationalist Party. The party dedicated to the well-being of our country and preserving its cultural identity. The very same party who desired an utterly independent Scotland, free from the greasy clutches of Westminster. This concept was, of course, miscarried soon after conception, but Mr. Salmond clearly failed to notice the death throes of his political love child, writhing inside him. Scottish independence, despite the support of villain-thwarting, cocktail-recipe-specifying, dragon-voicing Sir Sean Connery, was a tremendous flop, which was an immense relief to anyone sensible enough to oppose it.

Let us hope this pattern of political dunderheadedness continues.

Plans have been drafted and research meticulously carried out with regard to improving Scotland's appalling binge-drinking problem. The idea is that anyone under the age of twenty-one will be forbidden by law from purchasing alcohol in off-licences, supermarkets and the like. They will still be able to purchase a pint in a pub (accidental alliteration...there I go again...) but, of course, this shall be at the discretion of the publican. There are numerous angles from which to observe and criticise this. On the one hand, these plans should do a fair job of digging out the troublesome problem of twelve-year-olds having their older friends buy their half bottle of vodka for them. This is a good thing really. Inebriated twelve-year-olds are unsightly and can really spoil a pleasant evening stroll through a park. Yet, what of the eighteen-year-olds who can currently buy alcohol for themselves. Twelve-year-olds drink in parks because they cannot possibly drink in their own homes. Social services would swoop down upon their unsuspecting parents, eyes blazing with bureaucratic fury behind comically large spectacles if they did. Eighteen-year-olds can, in many cases, drink in their own homes. They are unlikely there to selfishly unravel the fabric of society. In the comfort of their own homes, eighteen-year-olds can have a relaxing drink with friends, learning respect for alcohol and obtaining valuable experience and knowledge of their own tolerances. By the time they are twenty-one they will know their limits and will by-and-large stick to them. Of course, on certain special occasions one might be permitted to venture into the no-man's land beyond the boundary set by one's liver. This need not be a problem...in one's home! In a pub! A pub presents all manner of unpredictable variables. A sensible eighteen year old girl can have a glass of wine and retain almost all of her common sense. The same cannot be said for the greedy opportunist waiting for her to leave her drink unattended. There are rarely potential rapists in one's home. Unless of course one is a potential rapist. Similarly, a young man may have a pint with his friends and on his way to the bathroom, upset a grizzled drunk with a trivial bump to the shoulder. Despite profuse apologising there is no assurance that this drunk will not create a bit of a scene. Grizzled drunks are also a rarity in most homes. Are Scotland's young people really safer in a pub than in their own front rooms?

Yet this new proposal of the Scottish Parliament appears more about protecting our livers. Groups of eighteen and nineteen-year-olds cannot really afford to get drunk in a pub regularly. That would be financial sodomy! It follows suit then that they will get drunk less often if they are denied access to Somerfield's shelves of cheap booze and buy-one-get-one-frees. Fair point.

But not everyone who buys two crates of beer intends to become paralytic by dawn. Two crates of twenty beers between ten friends equals (I shall insult you intelligence by telling you) four beers each. Not exactly going to provide for a hedonistic orgy of boozing and unprotected sex is it? It will provide for a relaxed atmosphere and, depending on the friends, an evening of sterling banter! Are our leaders intending to deny us this small trifle? Do they really seek to rob us of this simple pleasure? To do the same in a pub would cost anywhere in the region of a tenner a head! It's simply barbaric.

Let's also, please, not forget the social and cultural side of this topic. Getting drunk is fun. There. I said it. I have said, and it is here for the entire Internet surfing world to read should they find it, what nobody would dare say in opposition to these new proposals. Drinking is the cornerstone of student life. How else to escape the suffocating pressure of exams and homework assignments and Olympian workloads than a relaxing drink in a friend's living room.

A point put forward in a column of a student newspaper a short while ago drew attention to the fact that Winston Churchill, Theodore Roosevelt and even Oscar Wilde all enjoyed a drink. It is as integral a part of human culture as literature, music or any art form. It is one of life's completely unnecessary pleasures. The human race could have survived without Mozart, but it would have been fairly dull. We could survive as a society without alcohol...but would it be all that great?

I have a theory. Any and all comments are welcome on this theory and here it is. Government would have you believe Scotland's youth is plagued by three ills: obesity, sex and alcohol. This seems reasonable.

Now, for years we have tried, as a country, to promote healthy eating. School canteens have gone through vast changes to accommodate Government legislation but the only real result was the emotional upheaval of thousands of spoiled and portly children who were given salad instead of chips.

Campaigns to encourage the use of contraception appear to have been thwarted rather ironically by their own impotence, unable to fully enter the collective consciousness of ravenously horny Scottish youth and ejaculate their important message.

Unlike these two mighty social leviathans, alcohol failed to evade the binding chains of Parliamentary power. To pass laws on eating would make a mockery of human rights. Despite laws forbidding sex before the age of sixteen, there is no way of preventing it, again, without defecating on the notion of human rights. Alcohol, however, was caught unawares and imprisoned in a labyrinthine prison complex of law and order. Despite being a "major cause" of both of the above (I shall denounce this fact shortly) it was the only one which the government could control...and it prepares to do so with a new ruthlessness. The government cannot control the other two and so, as much for the sake of its global image as anything else, is cracking down on one of them in a blatant display of discrimination!!!

Alcohol, were it human, would no doubt be portrayed as a combination of the horrible rapist mentioned above and the grizzled drunk, similarly mentioned. I believe this is wholly unfair. Alcohol does not change you. There is a reason why there are things you would say drunk that would soil you mouth were you sober. Alcohol does not, cannot, change you. It enhances you. It intensifies you. It creates pure you. Pure you without the dilution of social etiquette. Every drunk thing you do is entirely in character. Every single word, every action, every nuance of behaviour is flat-out, no-holds-barred YOU.

How?

Why?

Well, we are all extremely complex. We are all dice with infinite faces. It is just that we choose to stifle certain parts. I, for instance, try desperately to hide the pompous, grumpy bugger hiding just below the surface of the painstakingly polite and considerate gentleman you see on an everyday basis. Many very macho men, amongst whom I cannot count myself, hide quite extreme sensitivity beneath their shaved heads and barrel-like chests. The "I Love Mum" tattoos? The fingers covered in rings? All are outward signs of inner sensitivity. If you don't believe me then please do not try to prove me wrong. You may well manage to, but you will be horribly disfigured in the attempt.

My point, from which I seem to have strayed considerably, is that alcohol is not to blame for society's problems. Alcohol is a liquid microscope which reveals hidden problems too tiny and hidden to perceive with the naked eye.

Scotland is not a hot-bed of knife-crime because of alcohol. It is a hot-bed of knife-crime because there are many angry people living here, and because there are twisted people willing to exploit this for profit. British crime is actually at its lowest in decades. Only knife crime stands alone in its own category, so vast a problem is it. But the government should spend more time fixing deep-rooted social problems and freeing people from restrictions rather than imposing new and more rigid barriers. They should target the parents of twelve-year-olds who knowingly allow their children to put themselves in danger, and the parents of the teenagers who hide knives in their rooms. These problems are not so insidiously subtle as we are often told. They are obvious on the streets, they must be obvious in the home.

I have very much tired my brain with this Blog entry and the typing has reduced my fingers to bloody stumps... I hope I have not been an incoherent mess throughout all this and I hope equally that you understand my argument. It is pointless restricting the majority to cure the minority.

Well, it is a Saturday afternoon and I may have a nap before I go out...then I shall revel in the beauty of one of the few universal cultural pleasures in this world. Or, in the words of a good friend of mine: "Famous an' Coke please!"

'Til next time.

It's Life Jim...But Not As We Know It.

I am well known in the world, or at least in my own little section of it, as a rather mild-mannered chap with not-so-mild-mannered tendencies. It is a fact. That is who I am. I cannot, despite a multitude of unsuccessful attempts, break away from this reputation. I epitomise the sort of young man who is adored by peoples' mothers. It is a curse I admit...a terrible curse. Yet over the past eight months I have settled into a comfortable niche in the universe, satisfied with this shirt-and-jumper, corduroy-jacket-wearing, floppy-haired, tea-drinking, Bach-and-Books image. This quintessentially British chap is soon to move to a residence in Edinburgh.

Good times.

But this involves re-settling. A necessary task at which I am not particularly skilled. Waiting for me in "our nation's capital" is a five person flat. Four new people...Four new people who have never been exposed to the raw force of tweed-clad nature that is Jamie Lamb. And so I am riddled with doubts, plagued by anticipation of a potential social disaster.

In a situation such as this one has the opportunity to reinvent one's self. Should one? Is it right to knowingly lacerate every square inch of personal and emotional development you have ever undergone for the sake of carving out a shiny new reputation? It is a delicate conundrum to be certain.

Personally I intend to rely on my own flawless social conduct to settle in. Surely that will work.

Is it possibly a bad omen then that I live surrounded by towers of stacked books and CDs...with a cup of tea, an iPod and a Blog?

The End Of A Very Pleasant Somerfield Era...

Yesterday I discovered that Inna, one of my colleagues at the 'Field, has left. I cannot explain in words the veritable truck of despair which smashed into me and left me as roadkill upon the cracked tarmac of reality upon seeing her name on the Holiday Calendar rubbed out. She hadn't been at work in rather a long time but I, in my infinite ignorance, assumed she was merely on holiday. Not so.

As the tears stream down my face and threaten to cause irreparable damage to my keyboard, I cannot help but reminisce about how wonderful she was.

For those of you who are blind and stupid and also deaf, I can inform you now that I work in the Delicatessen of Somerfield, Crieff. The vilest place in the world by far, it has slowly been sucking my soul out for nearly two years. Each chicken sold is in exchange for a fraction of what it is that makes me me. Each single slice of turkey (the most loathsome of orders) is like a paper cut to the tongue of my youth and optimism, which are in staggeringly short supply anyway. There are few things which can alleviate this enormous spiritual burden, but it can be safely said (provided high visibility jackets and hard-hats are worn during the saying of it) that Inna's assumed aura of mutual boredom and general fed-up-ness was one of them. She was like the older woman in films and what-not who mentors and looks out for the naive young man. The street-wise, jive-talkin' ghetto dweller who takes under her wing the lost and lonely boy fallen on hard times. There was a genuine sense of camaraderie between us. A real feeling of "we're in this hell-hole together". We were both slightly disadvantaged, she because of her nationality and language and me...because I'm quiet, polite but ultimately useless. Her ever-dependable friendship was something I found most welcome in contrast to the bi-polar treatment one receives from management, who are your friends if you can do their extra shifts but who ignore you otherwise. Perhaps this environment served to enhance my image of her as one of the sweetest people in the world.

Quite possibly the most wonderful person I have ever met while working at Somerfield, she could speak only very broken English when she first arrived. It warmed me to my grievously wounded soul to watch her improve with the rapidity of a young child. Whereas before my comments were met with a polite nod of understanding (the case with many people who have spoken English for years), before she left we could have quite pleasant and understandable conversations. She was immensely funny as well, a trait which I have always been worried was lost when donning the mantle of a foreign language. Surely it is impossible to retain your own characteristic sparkle and panache when speaking French. Would a Spaniard in a bar really get a truthful portrayal of you as a personality if you were both speaking Spanish? Apparently it is possible. Very possible.

So I was always delighted to arrive for my shift to find Inna stacking milk. With a cheeky wink or a genuinely happy wave (something of a rarity in these darkly unsociable days) Inna could successfully lay a carpet of elation for me to bounce clumsily upon for at least the first ten minutes of working.

Before I knew her name I would, as Alice Jones will attest if she remembers, refer to Inna as "pretty Polish girl". Of course, a more appropriate term of endearment would have had to be "pretty Polish woman", although I'm sure Inna would not be in the least bit upset that I referred to her as a girl.

So there you have it. What you have just read is a rather awful and inadequate testament to the wonderfulness of my colleague, Inna. If Somerfield construed some form of microcosm (a term I learned in Advanced Higher English) for an ordinary person's life then along with Kevin, the goofy friend, Liam, the almost endearingly Glaswegian, despotic manager, Nan, the grandmother figure and Daniel, the ever-dependable shelf-jockey companion, Inna would have to have been the object of my adolescent romantic desire.

And I can't think of a lovelier woman for the job.

Getting My Blog Thang On.

Unable to (or more accurately, unwilling to make even the vaguest attempt to) have any sort of inner musings printed in a physical publication, you find me resorting to Blogging. It is very popular, as anyone who has ever Googled anything will be all too aware. It can be tiresome when your carefully refined search returns nothing but doe-eyed parents waxing lyrical about their new baby boy. Yet, as they say, we live in a free country and I am throwing my lot in with the Bloggers. Here is where I shall do my very best to offer a cosy refuge from the storm of opinion, argument, politics, pornography and social networking that is the interweb to any poor and lonely wanderer, intellectually weary of watching teenagers fall off skateboards on YouTube (rib-tickling though this may be...).

So come in, sit down. I've just boiled the kettle.