A SCOTTISH CHRISTMAS

I've just had my first winter Christmas, and it was delightful. With all of my Edinburgh flatmates moving out over the next few weeks, we decided to bring Christmas forward this year so we could celebrate together. The decorations had been up for a week or two just to get us in the mood, so by the time the big day (November 28) finally arrived we were all choc-full of Christmas cheer.

The day began with what I can only assume is a traditional Scottish custom: traipsing through the drizzling rain to buy food for dinner. It looked set to be a feast: we bought potatoes, pumpkin, turnips, parsnips, vegetarian haggis, cranberry sauce, and for the carnivores roast chicken, sausages and bacon. After all the hard work of deciding what to buy for dinner, I spent the rest of the day shopping for presents and wandering through the German Christmas Markets. Each year Edinburgh transforms the East Princes Street Gardens into a Winter Wonderland complete with market stalls, rides, a giant ferris wheel and an ice skating rink. It's really lovely, and all the bright lights and action happening down there of an evening help distract you from the fact that it's already dark at 4pm.

Returning home to help prepare the Christmas feast, I joined my flatmates in the great tradition of boozing up while cooking. We were awash with alcohol, courtesy of a former flatmate. She had very kindly left us her television set when she moved out, and as we were all about to move away ourselves naturally we sold it and used the proceeds to by a huge quantity of grog. We were drinking that tv well into the wee hours. As an indication of just how "merry" I managed to get, by the end of the night I was cheerily singing away to the christmas song collection that had almost driven me to pierce my own eardrums with a skewer when it was being compiled a day earlier. Not convinced that me singing is an indication of drunkenness? Mariah Carey was on that CD. Say no more.

The dinner was delicious and a huge success. We followed it up by watching The Muppet Christmas Carol over a glass or four of wine, then moving on to drunken charades, the Rizzla game and something called Consequences. The Rizzla game is where you each write the name of a celebrity on a Rizzla (which is a rollie paper) and stick it on the head of the person next to you. Everyone then has to guess who they are by asking "yes or no" questions. I came dead last. I hate Tom Hanks anyway.

Consequences is really fun. You each take a sheet of paper and write down the name of a man, fold it over and pass it to the next player. They then write the word MET followed by a woman's name. This too is folded away out of view and passed on. The next line is HE SAID then SHE SAID, then the final outcome. So each line is written with the author having no idea of what precedes their line. One of my favourites coming out of this game was the following:

Rod Stewart met Mother Teresa at Whistlebinkies (a grungy live music venue in Edinburgh). He said "when I was 5 I took swimming lessons and now I plan to swim to Belgium, want to come?" and she said "hold that thought, I need a wizz". Then they went cruising around the world and lived happily ever after.

So it was a fun evening full of delicious food, gooey desserts, chirpy Christmas music, free alcohol, great company and lots of laughs. The other Christmas in December has a lot to live up to!

A BRAVE NEW WORLD

John Howard is not the Prime Minister of Australia.

That sentence makes me so happy. Although I have to agree with Paul Keating that it's more a sense of relief than joy. I was desperately excited watching the election results unfold online. The minute I woke up Saturday morning I logged on to the ABC election coverage and discovered that Labor was only five seats away from kicking Little Johnny out of Kirribilli House.

Then I received a phone call from my (uncharacteristically tipsy) mother, who was hosting an election night BBQ in the back yard with practically our whole street in attendance, and we blabbered on while I continued to hit the refresh button on my laptop.

I'd been passed on to talk to my sister when Labor hit the crucial 76 seats required for victory. Hooray!! It was so good to feel hooked in to the actual election night experience by being on the phone to Australia at the moment that Kevin Rudd ousted John Howard. The ABC started calling the emphatic victory a "Ruddslide", which is extremely corny but it inspired me to send virtual cocktails to all my Australian Facebook friends to celebrate (mudslides, of course). Aah, victory is so sweet.

Naturally I don't really believe it's going to be a Brave New World; the wave of idealistic optimism washing over the country will soon evaporate when the reality of realpolitik starts to bite. For the moment I'm enjoying the feeling that a thumping majority of Australians have turned away from the divisive and dishonest policies of the Howard era and are looking for a new way forward.

PS. The cartoons come from www.101usesforajohnhoward.com and include from the top down: a barbecue starter, a fart in an elevator, a fossil and a toilet brush :)

MARY POPPINS IS EVIL

WORKING FOR THE MAN

"Thank you for calling Scottish Gas, how may I help you?"

For the last four days I've been the friendly voice on the end of a phone copping abuse from shivering old pensioners on behalf of the incompetent, uncaring, lazy collection of paper-shuffling morons that is Scottish Gas. I was offered a few days' work at a call centre, and having never before experienced the pleasure of being chained to a headset and a call timer I thought it was an interesting experiment to play on myself. I'd heard horror stories about call centre work: micromanagement, restrictive scripts, not being allowed toilet breaks. How would I deal with having no autonomy? Would I be forced to pee myself to protest against authoritarian control of bladder relief opportunities? And how on earth could I be bubbly and chirpy for seven hours in a row without the assistance of three pints and half a bottle of vodka?

In the end it didn't turn out to be as awful as I had feared. The folk at the call centre company were really friendly and easy-going. No asking permission for toilet breaks, no being yelled at for letting a call continue for more than two minutes, in fact, there was no shouting at all from the management. The old dears on the phone weren't averse to hollering down the line though. Although to be fair, you couldn't really blame them. Basically, they'd all been promised free central heating under the Scottish Government Central Heating Programme. Each of them had just received a letter advising when they could expect it to be installed, and the dates ranged from some time in December right through to June 2008. Now I realise patience is a virtue, but in order to qualify for the programme the heating in their home had to be inadequate or non-existent. So we were flooded with calls by freezing eighty-year-olds who had no heating or hot water, had already been waiting seven months, and were slowly solidifying into granny-sized icicles in their highland homes. The Sunday Mail describes the situation here.

There was really nothing we could do except pass on their complaints to Scottish Gas (who would no doubt ignore them) so it wasn't the most pleasant of helplines to be working on. Although I was tempted at first to tell the oldies to stop whining and pay for their own damn heating instead of sponging off the young Scottish taxpayer, I was quickly won over to their cause when it became clear Scottish Gas had f*cked so many of them around so badly. So now I'm firmly on the side of the Grey Army in the battle against the Big Evil Corporation. Four days out in the big wide world of work and suddenly I have opinions...what's the deal with that?

Lessons learned by me this week: the sun rises about 8am, time drags when you're sitting in a cubicle, Scottish Gas is full of muppets, commuting sucks, old people can be very nice, and four days' work is quite enough for one month thank you very much.

A GOOD NIGHT OUT IS...

...hobbling home at 5am with no voice, a sprained ankle, a stolen banana in your handbag and a half-eaten chilli in your pocket. Pass the Berocca, please.

EXPLODING FOOTPATHS ETC

It's much more exciting over here than it is at home. I don't think I'll ever be able to top the story of the building across from work in London spontaneously collapsing into rubble onto the street below or the related experience of looking up from my desk to see a motorbike flying past the window. Two more things happened recently that aren't quite as exciting, but worth mentioning.

Two nights ago at around 5.30pm, one flatmate and I were at home when the power blacked out. Luckily I wasn't in the electric shower with shampoo in my hair as I was the first time the power (and hence the water supply) ran out. Assuming it was our fault for not charging the electricity key, I wandered out and noticed that the safety lights were on in the stairwell, meaning the whole building must have lost power. When I poked my head out the window I saw the entire street had blacked out, and house alarms were wailing out into the black night. And just to assure my southern hemisphere readers, the Edinburgh night is indeed already black at 5.30pm.

I read in the paper that about 15,000 properties blacked out because of a fire at an electricity substation. And the best part is that once it was switched off, another substation overloaded and a huge fireball exploded through the pavement into Morningside Road. What I wouldn't give to have been Nick Rees, 23, who witnessed the fireball.

So that was the night before last. Last night I was walking home through the Grassmarket just after 9pm when a police car screeched past me. It was quickly followed by a fire truck and as I rounded the corner I could see lots of gawping people gathered around a bus that was on the wrong side of the road and appeared to be parked against a block of flats. As I got closer I could see that it wasn't actually parked against the flats but had run smack into them, demolishing a bus shelter in the process. There was glass strewn all over the road, lots of excitable people on mobile phones, but nothing really interesting going on. Nothing short of dead bodies could have convinced me to join the crowd of onlookers. Not that I'm morbid or anything, but it was too bloody cold to stand around staring at broken glass.

After the adventures of the last two nights I'm primed for more excitement now. I wonder what fascinating happening tonight will bring? Maybe Edinburgh's extinct volcano will inexplicably erupt again, or a UFO will be spotted hovering over Arthur's Seat. I'll admit it's a bit of a leap moving from a substation fire and a bus crash to concrete evidence of extraterrestrial life, but you never know your luck in the big city. Stay tuned.

CODE MONKEY CLIP

There's no story here, I just really love this song and think the Sims clip is great. I'll dedicate this entry to all my code monkey friends :)

HALLOWEEN

I've never been a fan of Halloween. I've always thought of it as an American holiday designed to line the pockets of confectionery companies and dentists whose Easter-related workload has started to drop off. I wasn't expecting people in Scotland to make a big deal of it, but they certainly did. There were Halloween costumes and decorations on sale in almost every corner store, bright orange pumpkins suddenly appeared on supermarket shelves, and every pub or bar in town seemed to be hosting a Halloween costume event or at the very least offering 'spooky' drink specials to celebrate the occasion.

Walking down the street the last two nights I've encountered one blood-spattered doctor carrying a machete, two vampires (although one might have been a walking corpse), a gorilla, a Playboy bunny well on her way to frostbite, a zombie and a superhero who I couldn't quite place. My Scottish flatmate was really into it too, she carved the pictured jack-o-lantern, decorated the house in cobwebs and bats and made some yummy-looking toffee apples.

I've since learned that it was actually the Irish and Scottish who took the tradition of Halloween to North America, and its Celtic and pagan origins make very interesting reading. The jack-o-lanterns (originally turnips) were carved to resemble devil faces so as to scare off the spirits. Although trick-or-treating is American, it probably comes from the Scottish tradition of "guising", where children were disguised as spirits to help them blend in with the souls flying around that night and provide added protection. Sorcery, druidism, rituals, phantoms, pagan festivals: I don't know why I haven't gotten into this earlier!

I was merely an observer this year, so unfortunately I've missed my chance to predict the future through communing with the spirits on the one day that the line between the living and dead becomes blurred. Now that I've scrubbed away the cynical Australian conception of Halloween, you can bet I'm going to have a huge one next year. Of course I have no idea where in the world I'll be this time next year, if only I had asked the Halloween ghosties...