Ruddy Sons Indulging in Ridiculous Repulsive Games,

The main problem with the 6 day working week is that people can ruin your only day off; however, I recognise that my grumbles will always be dwarfed by those of others. I attended a 2-day training course, titled “Introduction to Tutoring and Assessment”. At the end of it, I’m neither a better tutor nor a better assessor; such is the way of GRADskills. GRADskills is a scheme of training courses available to us for free; we’re supposed to fulfil a quota of them each year. They are poor, I think they cover themselves by naming each course “Introduction to….” ergo when the complaints arrive, they can claim that only an introduction to a topic was on offer. At least, they filled us with tea, coffee and biscuits.

Someone thought that I was French. I don’t know how I do this. I’ve been mistaken for being Scandinavian, which is understandable given my name, German, which is just about understandable for the same reason, and Welsh, which is just completely leftfield. Generally, I’m one of the few Scottish people cuttin aboot the Scottish yoonis. However, it was similarly weird when I was ranting in Embra one day, someone shouted from the other side of the room, “Aaahhh, we have a Fifer in the lab.”

I’m not really the kind of kid who goes down chutes too narrow. If 2006, was about My Latest Novel, 2005 was the year of The Arcade Fire and for me, the best of 2004 were Elliot Smith and The Shins. Having fallen out of love with The 4 Counts (they’ve sold out, man) and being in need of a 60s-style beat group, I’ve listened to Chutes too Narrow by The Shins quite a bit over these last few days, it’s a fantastic album, marvellous lyrically and rhythmically. I’m always in quite close touch with shins, I nurture mine through bout after bout of shin splints, so their new one, Wincing the Night Away, was eagerly anticipated.

It’s quite good, they’ve turned wistful. I should’ve have guessed from the title. The single, Phantom Limb, is the best song by far. I’ve loved it more and more with every hearing, I think the same could happen for the others. In many ways, Phantom Limb sums up the style of Wincing the Night Away, there are smatterings of the beat group who characterised the previous album; however, these have been toned down with wistfulness. Wistfulness is good (the video for this song is a corker and it epitomises the wistfulness and places it in dramatic context). For The Bellyaches massive who have decided to have the same record collection as myself, Girl Soldier is annoying because it sounds like something else, perhaps Life in the D by Brendan Benson from the underrated Lapalco album.