Yearly Archives: 2009

Boldly Going

Friday June 19th 2009

Last night I went to see the new Star Trek movie with my brother Andrew up at Clydebank cinema. After buying our tickets from a machine in the foyer, due to the tills being closed, we went curiously unchallenged from that point on. Even stopping to buy some popcorn and asking the guy who served us which screen the movie was on didn’t make him ask to see our tickets.

This was possibly because there were only about six people in there, including ourselves. They’d probably be happy with folk wandering in off the streets in the hope of making some cash from the treats and sweets. Personally I kind of liked it being a near private screening, with infuriating inconsiderate teenagers putting me off going to the cinema most of the time.

The movie itself was great, I thought. It could have been paced better in places, but still – as an attempt to reboot the franchise it was certainly successful in my eyes. It was well cast, visually stunning, and in well trodden territory as far as Trek lore goes, especially in using time travel as a plot device and in glossing over plot holes without a second thought.

cinema, clydebank, movies, Star Trek

Daylight

Tuesday March 17th 2009

Today I left work in daylight for the first time this year. Okay, that’s a lie, actually, because on Sunday I left work before 2pm and it was daylight then. I’m not meant to be there on Sunday, though, so for me that doesn’t count.

Not only was this a proper working day, where I walked out of the office before dark, but I made the 17:40 train and it was fantastic strolling down the hill to the station with the sun still in the sky. It felt like spring was finally on the way, although this being Scotland it’ll probably be back to lashing hail by the weekend.

The seasonal affective disorder sufferer in me yearns for the clocks going back, with building excitement for the potential that summer holds due to the near endless possibilities for entertainment that the better weather brings. Tennis, skateboarding, cycling, throwing the ball around in the park – the kinds of things that are so free, fun, and made all the more so by sunny skies.

Since I’ve been working such ridiculous hours recently, I’m even more impatient for those warm summer months than I have been in years. The first two and a half months of 2009 have been a bit like bad Japanese porn – the good bits have been few and far between and kind of blurry when they did happen.

Fortunately, there are two weeks to go before the end of the gruelling project I’m on. When it’s all over, daylight saving time will have arrived and I’ll take a few days off to enjoy the extra hours of light and take comfort in the fact that summer will be well on the way.

work

No Guts, No Glory

Friday March 6th 2009

This week has been the most gruelling test of endurance at work, and included the first time I’ve gone to work of a morning and worked until the afternoon of the following day in a good long time. I think I was working nights stacking shelves in Somerfield while at college the last time that happened.

That Wednesday morning ’til Thursday afternoon stint was tough, for sure, but the real killer has been the return of the stress related stomach cramps I’ve not suffered for the best part of a decade. It was July 1999, whilst working under ridiculous pressure at Radio Clyde, when I was diagnosed as having chronic stress. For almost a year I had been told by my regular doctor that I kept getting gastroentoritis from all the junk food I was eating.

Sounded pretty plausible to me, because I really was eating a lot of crap at the time.

life, stress, work