Start Again

Whooooeeeee. Well, everyone else seems to be blogging like crazy, so I guess it'd be rude for me not to resurrect my own little corner of the internet.

So I thought I'd start a clean slate and explain who I am and what this blog will contain.

This is me:

I write this blog from my room high up in a tower above the beautiful city of Edinburgh, the capital of Scotland. It's an amazing city to be in, and I will no doubt yammer on about it ceaselessly in posts to come.

I make a living working in a chemistry lab, where I mostly take bits of goo and put them through horrible chemical ordeals in order to make sure the people in the adjacent factory are doing their job properly so that we don't poison anyone (the goo gets used in medical applications). I have the usual complaints that many folk have for their jobs: monotony, poor management, crap holidays. On the up-side, I love the cycle commute and the job's pretty undemanding, plus I can smugly approach it in a thoroughly half-arsed fashion smug in the knowledge that I have no intention of keeping a career there.

I started this blog so that I could show off all the big words I know and also have the odd rant. So what can you expect to read about here?

Well, I love the outdoors, particularly climbing (rock, ice, whatever) and cycling (on or off road). Much of my free time gets spent travelling to what I can only describe as big grown-up playgrounds where I can indulge in some mild derring-do. It's all actually a lot less dangerous than it sounds and a lot more fun than it should be, and I get to see some truly amazing things that you just don't get to see unless you go a bit off-piste. Like this:



I also listen to music endlessly. My tastes are fairly broad, but I have no time for bad music, or worse, mediocrity. Be warned that I may loose all sense of proportion when praising/damning some music, but then what's music for if not to get passionate about?

To that end, I will end this post with a short playlist of what's been rocking my hungover Sunday:

Mogwai - My Father My King
Sufjan Stevens - Sister
Malcolm Middleton - Fight Like the Night
Nelly Furtado - Maneater
Simian Mobile Disco - Sleep Deprivation
Caribou - Melody Day (Four Tet Remix)
Daft Punk - Da Funk
Fujiya & Miyagi - Transparent Things
CSS - Music is My Hot, Hot Sex
Prodigy - Charly
Idlewild - In Remote Part/Scottish Fiction