On the Beat

On my way home this evening, I bumped into a former colleague; he was meeting up with some other people later, so he suggested we went for a drink.

So I found myself in a bar in Rose St. Not what I had intended for tonight; I was going to spend a quiet - sober - evening; but it would have been churlish, unsociable even, to say no.

We had a pint and a half, and some very good banter; and then we went our separate ways.

I came home a cooked a simple, but delicious, supper: grilled aubergine, grilled courgette and a large portobello mushroom, with a lots of olive oil and lemon juice and coriander. Plus a salad, and some rather nice bread. And a glass of rose.

It was absolutely delicious.

And as I ate, I watched the sun sink in the west whilst the iPod played my favourite John Coltrane and Gil Evans tracks. I hadn't even asked it to - it just kept picking on my favourite tunes from a wealth of records.

Wonderful. Just wonderful.

The other night, I went for a drink after work with a couple of colleagues. This is actually quite a rare event, since with our complexes offices being miles from anywhere, usually people just head off home.

But circumstances of travel meant the A, E and I found ourselves propping up the bar in the Cumberland.

We talked about a lot of things, mostly about how fucked up work is, and how we cope with it, and what we think our colleagues.

A said how she doesn’t let people get too close – which I thought was quite a “close” thing to be sharing with someone she doesn’t know – and how she tries to keep space between herself and different people.

E said “Awesome!” a lot. (He is Canadian.)

Then today, another colleague explained how she had missed a plane yesterday, which meant she hadn’t seen her partner, and that had made her cry.

I thought this was the sweetest, most precious thing I had heard in a long time.

She also gave me a peck on the cheek as she left work this evening – not something many colleagues do.

Close can be good.

I had agreed to meet some friends from work in Bert’s Bar before we headed off to a party. We were dressed up – the invitations said “dress to impress” – so I was wearing my kilt. (The invitation also said “an evening of decadence…”)

Bert’s is a typical pub, in the West End of Edinburgh. It isn’t large, and it was already busy when I arrived. The small rooms off the bar were crowded, so we stood near the bar; people had to push past us to get to the bar or when they came through the door to the street; the bar staff were ferrying food to the tables, resigned to having to force their way through the crowd - us. (Bert’s is renowned for its pies.)

In a vain attempt not to have too bad a hangover the next day, I was drinking white wine, which seemed a bit weird in what is clearly a beer place. (I had decided not to mix my drinks, whatever I did.)

This old guy, maybe 60 or 65, came up to me; he had white hair, though largely bald, and a neat white beard. He was a fair bit shorter than me. He started to speak. In a foreign language. Gaelic. He babbled a sentence; I looked blank. He babbled some more, until I said in my broadest north Lahndahn accent, “Sorry mate, I’m Scottish by marriage, not by birth.”

He babbled some more – really – and I had to tell him that I hadn’t a clue what he was on about. He wandered off to the bar, where he picked up a copy of the Scotsman and stood reading it.

It was very strange: as one of my colleagues pointed out, most of the people who wear kilts don’t talk Gaelic. Most of the people who wear kilts aren’t Scottish.

And I would swear he was talking English at the bar.