Happy Birthday, Lewis Stevenson

The first time I remember seeing you in a Hibs shirt was when John Collins sent you on as a second half substitute against St Johnstone in the Scottish League Cup Semi-Final on 31st January 2007.

You'd played for Hibs before that but your ability, versatility and work ethic would help lay the foundations that would cement you into Hibernian folklore as the only Hibernian player to lift the Scottish League Cup and Scottish Cup.

You're painfully shy and public speaking isn't your forté but you're incredibly well thought of by your team-mates as evidenced by the fact that you are surrounded by them and receive a standing ovation from the crowd on the odd occasion you score - credit where it's due by the way, I haven't seen you score a tap in.

At 29 years young it's been my long held belief that a footballer of your age is at the peak of his abilities. I don't know why this is exactly, it's just one of those things that gets handed down and assumed as fact such as The Great Wall of China being the only man made object visible from space. Perhaps there is some truth in it from the point of view that while you will undoubtedly continue to learn as a footballer, it'll just get that little bit harder for you to the respond to the physical and psychological demands that the game will place upon you.

Advances in medical science, diet, lifestyle and surgical techniques mean athletes are performing at the peak of their abilities for longer and to the best of my knowledge you haven't spent a great deal of time on the treatment table so if you manage to avoid serious injury and keep the heid doon, I reckon you'll be good for another 6 years. I wouldn't want to see anyone else occupying that left back position at Easter Road in the meantime.

Happy Birthday, Lewis. Don't ever change.

With all my love, Wild Bill.

The Eternal Battle Between Spiders and Humans

I was sitting at home the other night playing Fallout 4, the latest instalment in the post-apocalyptic wasteland computer game. My wife was at work so I was free to waste some time and immerse myself in the building of a settlement or freeing a farm from the clutches of gangs of raiders or super mutants.

The last thing I remember doing was making sure that the two pink plastic flamingos adorning the grass outside my ramshackle house were just right because immediately afterwards and out of the corner of my eye I saw movement on the carpet and watched as a relatively large spider scuttled across the floor and cunningly attempted to camouflage itself against the floor to ceiling wall unit we have. Spiders don’t have the ability to camouflage themselves against floor to ceiling wall units or any other types of units to the best of my knowledge (which I hope remains that way because the alternative is a terrifying prospect) so perhaps it had momentarily stunned itself or was admiring my pink flamingos.

Either way, now that I had the spider in my sights I began plotting to catch it and free it into the wild via the window but given the sheer size of the arachnid and the fact that I’d recently read that the changing seasons meant spiders were moving indoors and were horny, I didn’t want it to know that I knew it was there, so I pretended to continue playing the game while I kept one eye on the spider’s movements and another on trying to find things in the living room that I could use to catch it, lest it suddenly find me attractive and try to mount me.

With the glass that was next to me in one hand and a bit of cardboard from the back of a Deadpool comic in the other, just as I stood up the spider seemed to recover its senses and made a move for the relative safety of the darkened corner of the room. Maybe it’s because I’m 6ft 5”, walk on two legs instead of eight and weigh about 17 stone depending on which way the wind is blowing but my lunge with the glass was too slow and I succeeded only in trapping one of the spiders eight legs. I didn’t know what to do next as I was no further forward than when I started. There was nothing I could use to capture the remaining 90% of the spiders body and legs against the curvature of the glass and I know I wouldn’t like it if someone had pinned one of my legs so I let him go and watched him scuttle into the corner he’d been trying to reach all along. I pretended to go back to playing Fallout 4  but I kept my wits about me because I knew this wouldn’t be the last I saw or heard of my 7-and-a-bit legged friend.

It seemed a reasonable assumption that if the spider was going to come out of the corner and lie in wait before trying to catch one of us unawares, the most obvious place would be in the shadow of the blanket that was draped over a chair in our living room, so the last thing I did before leaving for work the next morning was fold the blanket thereby removing the shadow and denying the spider a hiding place. As I hadn’t actually told my wife about the large, horny spider in our flat I thought that if it was going to come out of its hiding place and make itself comfortable (the spider that is, not my wife) then at least she’d maybe get a head start if she had to run away from it.

We exchanged these messages on WhatsApp the following day

"By the way" she said "I killed a massive spider in the flat today, I moved the game chair and it got crumpled underneath it. Like, HUGE".

"YASSS!" I said "I tried to catch that fucker earlier in the week but it got away. I did injure it though which might have helped you catch it and I've been keeping an eye out to go round two with it ever since".

"Are you fucking joking? she asked "It could've got me!".

This isn’t the first time I’ve ran into a spider who didn’t miss leg day at the gym. A few years ago now I stayed in a flat on Slateford Road in Edinburgh and one morning I woke up in a daze (to be fair, I wake up in a daze most mornings, who doesn’t?), went into the bathroom for a wee and out of the corner of my eye saw a large, unfamiliar presence in the bath. I did the only thing I could; pretended I hadn’t saw it, finished my wee and tucked myself back into my boxers before turning on the shower, hoping to flush the spider down the drain.

Imagine my horror as I watched the spider spread its enormous legs over the plug hole, brace itself and then start power scuttling towards the opposite end of the bath. “I’ve just tried to drown my spider flatmate” I thought. “If he makes it to the shower and turns it off he’s going to ask me to leave. I’ll be out on the street at 8am in my boxers because there’s no danger I’m hanging about for that conversation. There’s only one thing for it, I'll need to fight him to the death”.

In an effort to cheer myself up and fill the long, lonely hours at home after breaking up with my girlfriend, I’d been watching a lot of war films that I’d picked up on DVD out of ASDA; Saving Private Ryan, Full Metal Jacket, We Were Soldiers, Kelly’s Heroes and Where Eagles Dare to name but a few. None of these helped in actually defeating the spider since most of them were about defeating Ze Germans or the Vietcong but I did have Richard Wagner’s ‘Ride of the Valkyries’ from Apocalypse Now in mind as I turned the shower up, closed the plug and started water bombing the spider into submission with cups of water that I filled from the sink. “You can run from some water” I said, chillingly “but can you run from ALL the water?”.

Daa-da-da-da-DAA (SPLASH!)

Da,da-da-da-DAA (SPLASH!)

Da, da-da-da-DAAA (SPLASH!)

Da, da-da-da-daaaaaaa (SPLASH!)

Instead of standing outside in my boxers looking every inch the embarrassment to the top of the food chain I was, I danced around the flat paraphrasing Robert Duvall’s character from the same film. “SPIDERS DON’T SURF!” I shouted “I LOVE THE SMELL OF TOILET DUCK IN THE MORNING, IT SMELLS LIKE LEMON FRESH!”

After a while the spider stopped moving but I continued to watch it intently just in case it had been watching over my shoulder when Owen Wilson’s character from Behind Enemy Lines plays dead under a pile of bodies in a mass grave.  Satisfied that I’d won (and if you wanted to get really philosophical, are there ever any winners in war?) I opened the plug and watched the spider make its final journey.

And then swiftly closed it and every other plug in the flat for the next three weeks.

Punching babies in the face

***Originally posted on the Hibees Bounce website in response to a discussion about a 5 day old baby getting punched in the face by a 63 year old man in a branch of Tesco in Manchester - felt I had to share it with a larger audience***

I read about this at work yesterday and laughed in spite of myself. Then I told someone else at work about it and they laughed in spite of themselves too.

It reminded me of a situation recently where I was tempted to clout a wee shite on a train or plane I was on. They'd been causing all kinds of grief on my particular mode of transportation and I thought "Fuck this, I could just skelp the wee fucker. No-one will be more shocked than the bairn or the parents. No-one will believe what they've seen and with the right amount of confidence I could probably get away with it. Skelp your bairn? Fuck off. Who does that?" It'd be like the flashy thing in Men in Black but a balled fist of punched your bairn in the face induced amnesia instead. 

See if the old boy had stuck with the "I never punched your baby" line, it could have been one of those stories he told on his death bed "Pull your chair closer young man, let me tell you about the time I punched a baby and got away with it". Instead he's probably going to die old and lonely because he punched a baby in the face.

It's not funny but it really really is.

Disclaimer: I do NOT condone punching babies in the face.

The Naked Attraction

The Naked Attraction is a minefield of a show and I've absolutely no idea what to make of it. Culturally speaking I can't decide if it's a good or bad thing for television, dating, society, men, women or anyting else for that matter. Not that anyone would actually listen if I could.

It is, however, a great opportunity to see folk in the scud that you wouldn't normally have had the opportunity to. That's the attraction of the show (pardon the pun), the free pass for everyone sitting on the sofa to have a gander at whatever Channel 4 have served up for your viewing pleasure. Big knobs, wee cocks, shapely breasts, big tits, labia, scrotums, nipples, the whole shooting match. Only the people with a thing for bleached arseholes or otherwise miss out.

I understand the premise of the show, you strip away everything until all you're left with is a physical attraction and a desire to fuck the naked person standing opposite you with none of the other things that make us reject potential partners getting in the way. Which is fine but no relationship will ever be sustained that way because it removes the key element that can often see two people bumping uglies  - a decent bit of chat. Yeah, Channel 4 get them dressed and send them all on a date to the same bar they sent all the other 'couples' to but the only way any actual fucking is taking place is if these people get along.

Maybe it's the enforced nakedness causing some nerves, maybe it's the cameras leaving people tongue-tied but some of the chat on offer doesn't leave me with a lot of room left to wonder why these people have resorted to enforced nakedness to try and get their Nat King Cole. What's the last of your last resorts, folks? Payment?

Tracy, a mother of two and 'contestant' on the show, hasn't been in a relationship for three years and described the dimensions of her vagina as being a bit of a jam jar. I don't care what you look like (blonde, pretty, nice smile), how fake your tits are (credit to her surgeon, good job) or how big or small your vagina is (strawberry preserve apparently), if I'd been one of the two well hung gentlemen she'd whittled her choice of a date down to, I'd have simply walked the fuck off the show because that sort of chat is absolutely brutal and I wouldn't want to put my cock anywhere near her (from a visual point of view) self-described "beef sandwich". 

Mass Hibsteria League Cup Final Special - The Unpublished Article

I've been fannying about with old blogs I never meant to publish and likening them to Oasis' B-Side album 'The Masterplan' when I should in fact be writing something for the Mass Hibsteria League Cup Final Special.

I've no idea why the powers that be allow me to do this because all my writing to date has been a random collection of pish that I continue to force upon friends, family and a small circle of Hibs fans I've never met but befriended on social media anyway. The poor bastards probably wish that Hibs don't make a Cup Final because they know as soon as the Semi-Final whistle is blown and the Cup Final Special is announced, I'll be keener than Adam Johnson with a fans phone number and a signed shirt.

If nothing else tonight's wee flurry of activity might have actually forced me to get the finger oot and get writing. I've been trying to get something, anything down on paper for a few weeks now but various other things have gotten in the way; basically everything that doesn't include writing. Hey, look, a squirrel.

For everyone else submitting an article there are 96 hours (give or take) until submissions are due which in reality is 24 for me because I'm at the Hibs game on Wednesday night and fly out to Berlin on Thursday morning for my stag do so if I don't do it now then there'll be no appearance of the Clown Prince in your MHLCFS .

There's a teeny-weeny part of me that thinks "fuck it, dinnae bother because the last time Hibs were in the League Cup Final you weren't in Mass Hibsteria either" and I'm really superstitious about not doing anything to harm Hibs chances which in itself is a powerful incentive to re-insert my index finger back up my rectum.

The other selfish (so, so selfish) part of me thinks "You could be in Mass Hibsteria when Hibs win the cup in the same year you get married" which is the same bastard that said "You could be in Mass Hibsteria when Hibs beat Hearts to lift the Scottish Cup" and we all know how that worked out.

I've spent as long thinking as it's taken me to realise that absolutely nothing I do will impact on the outcome of a Hibs game. Not the music I hear, the route I walk to the ground, the 'lucky' green socks I wear or the programmes that I refuse to buy because a Hibs losing run ended when I stopped buying them and haven't bought since.

The only thing that will matter is that a good Hibs team takes the field on Sunday 13 March 2016 and plays full tilt, baws oot, Cup Final fitba. If Hibs can do that then we're all going back to Leith, baby!

'Mon the fucking Cabbage!!!

Shopping trip

Was in Lidl earlier for a couple of bottles of Crabbie's Ginger Beer and vanilla essence and ended up coming away with pretzel rolls, bananas, cashews and chocolate chips as well. The cashews at 95p per 100g were the most expensive item and it turns out that two large scoops is about 469g. Much cheaper than cocaine but not nearly as good a night in (so I'm told).

I've got a really bad habit in supermarkets of looking at what people are buying because it allows me to imagine the kind of lives they lead. I observed a guy recently who bought two 100g bars of chocolate, two bags of kettle chips, two bottles of pepsi max, two french sticks and a single punnet of cherry tomatoes so I imagine he was single, a virgin, probably an internet troll and if not diabetic now it was definitely in the post.

I got to the checkout and started loading up my essentials and impulse buys when I notice the woman ahead of me is midway through packing her shopping so I discreetly had a look at what was in her trolley; milk, bread, cleaning products, small boy of around 7 years old, carrots, pizza....what the fuck, a small boy of around 7 years old? She must have got the last one because I didn't see them anywhere.

Poppies

Opinions are like arseholes, everyone's got one. Whereas in the past these arseholes didn't have a medium through which to express themselves nowadays they have cheap and easy access to the internet and social media in particular.

Maybe I'm becoming less inclined to entertain bullshit the older I get but it seems to me that whenever you log on to Facebook or Twitter for a bit of lighthearted relief you find that where there used to be videos of monkeys falling out of trees after smelling their own shite, someone has shared a Britain First post. It's all become a bit tiresome* so thank goodness for blog writers, am I right?

The big debate as we approach Armistice Day is poppies. Why we should wear them and those who choose not to wear them justifying their reasons. National treasure (I.E. Used to be on the telly but no-one gives a fuck about you anymore) Barbara Windsor thinks you can "sod off" if you don't wear one. And now that that's been cleared up we can carry on with our lives.

Except it hasn't been cleared up. All it does it create unnecessary division between people and forgive me for saying but, isn't that how wars start and lives are lost?

I don't wear one and I haven't worn one for some time but that was more to do with the fear of stabbing myself in the finger or chest than any ideological point of view I might have. I did have a small and simple poppy that I'd donated some money to the salvation army for and had left sitting in my car as an almost permanent reminder but it had started to curl at the edges quite significantly, so when the car went in for its M.O.T. I binned it (the poppy, not the car). Shame on me, eh?

I reckon my abandoned poppy is probably doing fine though because everywhere you look these days poppies are bigger, brighter and more elaborate than ever. That didn't happen by accident, so poppies have obviously become self aware and created a support network that'll show an abandoned poppy how to iron out its curls and find a new car to sit in. It might even have advice on how a poppy can become one of those enormous poppies that are so big that they dominate the fronts of cars and vans, so much so you'd be forgiven for thinking it was a Comic Relief Red Nose and that they feed on exhaust emissions. Curiously, they do seem to be bigger on Volkswagens.

It seems to me nowadays it's not enough to show your respect, you have to be seen to be showing your respect and what better way to do than with a poppy so large and deep and round that if you lay on your back in the mountains of Puerto Rico and pointed it at the sky, it could double up as a radio telescope and scour the universe in the Search for Extraterrestrial Intelligence (SETI). Yes, lady in Costa coffee this afternoon, in the highly unlikely event you're reading this I'm talking about you.

Wear one or don't wear one. It needs no more discussion than that really.

*I say this fully aware that during the referendum campaign I saturated Facebook and Twitter with pro-independence articles and opinions and I was a tiresome bore also.