Take A Chance And Support Those That Support Us.

Christmas with the family was wonderful, four days of food and laughter. A lot of fun but now I'd arrived back in my wife's home town and I ready to buy some music.

Sure, I can get most stuff back home and what I can't find I can always order online, but some of the more obscure stuff is not readily available in Australia and the postage from the UK can be as much (or even more) than the disc. So I decided to grab some of this stuff while I was here and save on the postage.

Last week in Glasgow I was in a fantastic independent music store, and they had some of the stuff I was looking for - but it was more than I expected to pay and the queues at the registers were very very long. So I decided to try again after Christmas, when I was down in England.

But here in my wife's town there isn't anything independent, and the chain store was the same as the other chain stores all over the world.  They had very little I was interested in. And then it occurred to me that this one store, this one chain pretty much controls the music the people in this town listen to.

Then I realised it wasn't that different to where I am in Australia. I am a little better off though, because I'm in the suburbs rather than a town, so I can get a little more by traveling a little further afield. And there is one reasonably local chain that has a fairly good indies and alternative section.

That's only one of the reasons why crap rules the airwaves and I don't listen to the radio.

Go into an independent store and buy some music you wouldn't normally listen to.  Take a chance, or play before you buy.  Help the independents, both stores and artists, and get some music with some bite.

Have fun, and enjoy the holidays. Topshop, Topshop.

Home Is Where...

I don't know the chap upstairs - I've never met him at all, but he has excellent taste in books.

I'm currently in Scotland, staying with a friend in Glasgow, and when I was going out today I noticed a few bags of recyclables and a bag of books - and lying on the top was a biography of Bill Hicks. Now this is a book I've seen before and wanted to read, so my friend knocked on the neighbour's door and asked whether the books were being thrown out. He very kindly told me to take whatever I wanted, so then I was free to dive down into the stack and have a real look.

If these books had been in Australia, and I didn't have to fly them home, I would probably have grabbed most of them.  Even though I have to watch the weight of my luggage, there were three or four books there that I've been looking for and decided to take.  And so now I have reading material for my trip.

I arrived in Scotland late last night - in quite heavy snow and bad weather. Much of Europe is under snow with many airports closed so we were lucky to still have a flight from Munich. Even driving from Edinburgh to Glasgow last night was very slow going.  There was a lot of ice on the road, lots of tailbacks, slow moving traffic and many people we felt sorry for stuck in jams behind jack-knifed semis. And there were several of these. Almost midnight on a cold and wet night you just want to get home, not sitting in a car behind other cars for hours at a time.

I don't know whether it's psychological, or some kind of weird collective unconsciousness, but I always feel at home here. I was born in Scotland and I emigrated to Australia as a young child, so coming to Scotland is a homecoming of sorts. I feel something heartwarming as soon as I land.

Today I wandered around town in the snow, just breathing in the atmosphere and soaking up the country. And the haggis, neeps and tatties and beer at lunch was amazing.

If you've never tried haggis, then you don't know what you're missing out on. Yum.