MSU

Before the pandemic, the missus and I would drive out to Oakville for the weekend, see British movies that never seem to make it to the US and hit the UK Grocers that seem to be scattered around the other wee towns in the area. We got haggis and square sausage poutine out there once, which was amazing. Things like that sway me greatly.

At this point, it's practically performance art.

Ha! No, the only place I've been where that was a thing was New Jersey which nearly got me into some bother when I didn't realize. Michigan also has the good sense to have those wee clippy things on the pump trigger that keeps it depressed. Connecticut doesn't have that, or at least it didn't, and it used to drive me mental that I had to stand there, depressing my own petrol pump trigger with my actual own fingers like a fucking neanderthal.

I love Ontario and have tentative plans to move there at some point. The most I've been confused in a long time, tho, was at BP in Canada where I was trying to convert Canadian Dollars per litre to US Dollars per gallon to figure out how much petrol to ask for.

What a great thread. For my part, I moved over here in the summer of 2012 but it all started in January of 2011 when me and Wife #1 split up. She bought me out of the house we had in Alloa and I got myself a nice wee flat above a Ladbrokes in Stirling and booked myself a holiday in Boston. I write a wee bit and had arranged to meet up with some writer friends I'd made online over the years, actually pretty much 10 years ago to the day. One of those friends would go on to become Wife #2. I went back over to see her a couple more times and decided to give it a bit of a go. At the time I worked for an insurance company in Stirling who had a sister company in Michigan. The first time I looked at their job board online, I saw something that was 95% the job I was doing. So I applied, got an interview, and on March 1, 2012, as I was sitting in Morrison's CBC, I got a call from their HR department offering me the job. There then began four months of immigration hell and waiting around and I learned more about applying for a visa than I'll ever need to know again. Like, when I applied for a visa, I wasn't really applying for a visa, I was applying for a petition to apply for a visa. Because the job I did in Stirling was fairly niche, and it was the same in Michigan, we were able to bombard Immigration Services with paperwork describing the positions in glorious terms so they eventually granted the petition. The next stage was a meeting at the embassy in London. On the advice of my Immigration Lawyer, I got suited and booted and jumped on the sleeper down to That London. In those days, you weren't allowed anything electronic in the US Embassy but there was a wee chemist nearby that would hold on to your stuff for a tenner or whatever. That place must've made a fucking fortune. When I dropped off my electronics, I was aware that I had made one mistake, which was wearing a new pair of work shoes that were sawing their way through my achilles as I walked to the embassy. The second mistake was being told at the embassy that my paperwork hadn't been submitted. Someone had forgotten to hit the COMPLETE button on the form. That someone was probably me. So I had to walk back to the chemist, that was also an internet cafe, log on and hit the button. I limped back to the embassy, stood in line again, only to be told that the paperwork wasn't through. So I hobbled back to the chemist where I checked, it was complete, but one of the chemist staff, who were all experts in US Immigration, told me that it can frequently take an hour for the updates to filter through. My shoes were now filling with blood as my razor sharp shoes went about amputating my feet as I squelched back to the embassy, stood in line, saw the immigration officer who confirmed the application was now complete. He asked me three questions: what's your name, what's your date of birth, what company are you going to work for in the US. He stamped a form and my visa was approved. I crawled back to the chemist, retrieved my phone and bought some plasters for my poor feet. A week later, and I was standing in Edinburgh airport saying goodbye to my mum and cousins and as I walked to security, because for four months I'd been just waiting for something to go wrong and f**k everything up, I remember thinking, "Well, I guess I'm moving to Michigan." So the first time I was in Michigan was the day I moved to Michigan, wife #2 joining me from Connecticut a little later, and we got married that September. My new company put me up in a hotel for a couple of months while I found a place to live, eventually settling in a town I'd never heard of, which is where I am now. I became a citizen a couple of years ago and now have two passports which, along with raging misogyny and a violent approach to the preparation of vodka martinis, makes me feel a bit like Jimmy Bond. Nobody tells you how much it costs to live in the US and while lots of things are cheap, there's plenty that's ridiculously expensive. My mobile, Wi-FI, car insurance, health insurance etc are all far more than I expected and for the first few years, money was really tight. And starting again at 38 as I was at the time with no credit makes life a bit more difficult than it should be. Winters are shite here and Summers are hot and humid. But between traveling with work and general wanderlust, I've been to 44 states and visited the graves of 28 former presidents around the country. I've only been back to Scotland three times in the last nine years, and I haven't been back since 2015, when my mum passed away. I've no real family left in Scotland so I don't know if or when I'll be back, and I've made my peace with that. I do miss my friends back home, I miss square sausage which I've tried and failed to recreate a hundred times. I miss Irn Bru. I miss the NHS. I miss Raads kebab in Alloa, Falcone's chippy in Carronshore, I miss getting off the work's bus outside Morrison's Cold Beer with every intention of going straight home and then ending up in the pub until 9. Again. I miss public transport. I miss being able to drive by the house in Carronshore where my family lived from 1950 and which was always my sanctuary and safety net. I miss that last one a lot.

Liking the Twilight movies and reviewing them like he was being paid by the studio was very much a line in the sand for me.

Mayflies by Andrew O'Hagan. Given the rave reviews, and recommendation a page back, I was surprised by how much I hated this book. I just took against the characters from the start, so by the time we got to the emotional second part, I was already wishing them all dead. I think it just reminded me of a couple of stag dos I've been on and how I really don't want to read a novel about those stag dos. A Small Revolution by Jimin Han. Quite an interesting tale of a college hostage situation, set in the 1980s against a backdrop of political upheaval in Korea. A very short read told in a couple of threads in time and a debut novel, I understand. Decent stuff. I'm now on to The Thursday Murder Club by that tall chap off of out of Pointless. I'm not far in but the writing is so crisp and effortless and engaging, I have high hopes for the rest of it.

If I hadn’t read her other work and loved it so much I’m sure I would’ve enjoyed The Glass Hotel more, and there’s still plenty to admire in it. I’ll be interested in your thoughts on Station Eleven once you get round to it.

Thanks for the recommendation. After The Sense of an Ending, I can see me working my way through his stuff.

Been on a bit of a binge over the last week or so. The Glass Hotel by Emily St John Mandel -- follow up to Station Eleven. It's probably my least favourite of hers. Beautifully written but way too much navel gazing about the operation of a failed Ponzi scheme. 3/5 Ruthless Women by Melanie Blake -- apparently this is a bonkbuster. It's been all over my Twitter feed so I gave it a go. Fiftysomething women involved in the world of TV and soap operas, all with perfect breasts topped with perfect nipples, all of them never more than a passing rumbling truck away from multiple earth-shattering orgasms. Quite amusing in places, not always intentionally. Utter trash. 2/5 Phrase Seven by Chase Hughes -- one of my Lockdown Rabbit-holes on YouTube has been The Behavior Panel, a group of body language experts who pass opinion on interviews by celebrities and royal nonces and highlight their giveaway red flags. Chase Hughes is one of the panel, has signed up for Dan Brown's Masterclass, and come up with a high-hokum bit of people running around explaining the plot to each other which secret phrases are enough to hypnotise, corrupt, and even kill (dum-dum-dum). 3/5 The Sense of an Ending by Julian Barnes -- pick of the bunch, a super short novel about memory and refelction and reliability and betrayal. My first foray into Julian Barnes' work and I thought it was something of a triumph, let down my a frustratingly obtuse event in the denouement. 4/5

Might hang about for that Crouchy shite now.

We don't get many tornadoes in Michigan. We get the occasional Tornado Watch alerts but this weekend we got only the second Tornado Warning in the nine years I've been living here. I dunno if it's fear of the unknown, or that you're at the mercy of nature, or that IT'S A FUCKING TORNADO but I found the whole affair pretty terrifying. In the end, one did touch down but it was about a mile outside of town and headed north through fields rather than south through my house. Some amount of rain, though.

Keeper's got to do better there.

Remains of the Day and Never Let Me Go are both gorgeous books. Quite similar in a lot of ways. Hundreds of pages of people not saying what they feel has never been so good. Finally got round to starting The Glass Hotel by Emily St John Mandel. I've had it to read for more than a year but I loved her other books, particularly Station Eleven, so much I was kinda scared I wasn't going to enjoy this one. So far so good.

They had a Man vs Food Marathon over here one weekend a year or so ago and you could watch him just fucking balloon in time-lapse fashion over the course of an afternoon. Poor c**t.

Yes, sir.

…and nor had her agent. Or her publisher.

Talking of final lines: https://www.theguardian.com/books/2008/jul/05/saturdayreviewsfeatres.guardianreview26

I've had tattoos on my upper arm, inside arms and calf and probably the only one that was actually painful to the point where I was ready to boot the guy's pie was the one on my calf. The others have been more like someone dragging a sharpish nail down my skin for an hour. Getting an ingrown toenail removed, in my experience, was much much worse.

Yeah, I spotted that too. I can't think what the connection with the tooth is, tho.

I was about three paragraphs into why I thought this was the weakest episode in two series of This Time but I started contradicting myself and then remembering other bits I laughed out loud at, so I'm going to watch it again before suggesting something so controversial. I guess in summary, I found the last five minutes laugh-free and none of the Princess Anne stuff really landed for me except Simon asking him why he was speaking Shakespearian.

The twitter account that trolled Jennie has been hiding in plain sight.

That was a quality series. Great bunch of contestants and a much better vibe than last season when Daisy's apparent hated for Richard right from the start kinda ruined it a bit for me. Mike just cemented himself as an al-time top contestant and surely has to be the best one ever not to win. So between setting me on to Mike and Charolotte in Ghosts, this series is right up there as one of my favourites. Had there been a proper audience, it might have been the pick of the bunch.

Season 12 line-up announced.

I expected Lee Mack to walk most of the tasks because he's got such a sharp head on his shoulders, he seems made for the show. I listen to the aftershow podcast and a few guests on there have mentioned that he frequently goes off on long riffs that they end up having to cut. But he does seem a different Lee Mack to the one on Would I Lie To You, f'rinstance.