Hear the new hit single! Welcome to Bobland!

Here's the new song, Welcome to Bobland, in all its Garageland glory (what a great piece of software...if only I knew how to use it!). Download or just listen online, and remember, if you do meet Bobby Z on the Cairngorm railway, do tell him that Shot of Love is the great underrated album, Self Portrait will come to be regarded as a masterpiece, and that you know there was no motorcycle accident...

http://www.myspace.com/tommortonmusic
or click HERE

Income tax a-go-go

The tragic and very sudden death of my accountant, Bob, has meant that for the first time in a decade or more I've been having to pore over the income and expenditure of the Morton endeavours. Failing completely to understand anything at all about capital allowances, written down values and all that gubbins, I simply worked my way through the VAT ins and outs, copied Bob's old annual accounts, ignored the capital allowances and filled in the Revenue's on-line form. Slightly more than last year, but not too much. That's the Broons and Oor Wullie factor, I suppose. Goodness knows if they (the Revenue, not DC Thomson)will send the tax police after me.
Vast panic on seeing that the on-line tax calculator insisted I pay the tax for 2005-2006 and half the tax for 2006-2007 as well. But...but...I spluttered, I paid an estimate of the tax for 2005-2006 last year, so...and then I realised that I just had to make up the difference between last year's estimate, and pay half this year's. Or something like that.
Let's hope so, anyway. Otherwise I'll have to flee the country.
By the way, eBay have taken down the item I linked to in yesterday's post....which was something like 'One ship, slightly damaged, buyer must remove'. They've pledged to remove any MSC Napoli salvage from the site, though it seems the police were telling folk they could take what they liked from those washed-up containers (beats washed-up entertainers, I say).


Meanwhile, I'm fascinated by this. I'm obsessing over folding bikes at the moment, and I can neither afford a Brompton nor do I particularly want one (too few gears, wheels too wee, no good for touring. This chap Professor Yan Lyansky seems just to have taken his design to China and said 'make that', to tremendous effect. It's had fantastic reviews everywhere, Professor Yan replies to this emails personally, and they're cheap, even including shipping from the USA. I want one!

Scran!

Much as one deplores the activities of those Devonians who have been ransacking the containers of other people's stuff washed up in Lyme Bay...one can't help but be amused by this...

Something approximating winter...soup, a proper sale and Norwegian crime

...has just arrived. There is snow on Ronas Hill! It's cold and changeable but relatively survivable - one of these days when you really want just get on the all-weather gear and head for the remotest parts of Northmavine, such as Uyea, the Lang Ayre or the top of Ronas Hill itself.
Good to see Mark and Sam on Saturday, who had just finished a trek to the Summit of Shetland...they had been hoping, given the forecast, for something of an Alpine experience but alas, it was pretty wet and nasty until the upper slopes. We fed them Ainsley Harriot cup-soup (NOT Cuppasoup which is a registered trademark, like Portacabin). Far be it from me to recommend a commercial product, let alone one bearing the fizzog of the unbearably cheerful Ainsley, but this stuff is, if not in the home-made-reestit-mutton class, Very Acceptable; and it's not full of chemicals. I heartily recommend it.
It's too late to recommend the LHD sale (two days only) but my goodness, that's what ALL sales should be like.LHD is a marine supplies/chandlery in Lerwick, full of everything from seaboots and rope to satellite navigation systems and survival suits. It is also Shetland's prime source for trousers and jackets, ranging, oddly, from the frivolous and fashionable to the mind-bogglingly technical.
I didn't even know there was a sale on, but I was determined Martha and James, both prone to wandering about dressed in sub-zero temperatures wearing t-shirts and flimsy-but-groovy jackets, should get robust and warm protection from the weather. It was only after biting the bullet and agreeing that Martha should have that £100 Sprayway and James the £60 Weird Fish (the only jacket for sale in Shetland he would even think of wearing, he later informed me) that I noticed the discreet sign stating there was 30 per cent off every jacket in the place (20 per cent off shirts, trousers and everything else). That prompted me to buy myself The Best Lightweight Jacket Ever, the Sprayway Windbloc with extra waterproofing and hood. The, ah, third Sprayway of my life. As recommended initially by friend Mike, who ran across the Sahara wearing nothing else. Well, presumably shorts and shoes. Alas, I forgot to look for the freezer-trawler wellies with insulated soles that are, allegedly, the best footwear known to humankind for cold weather escapades.
And seeing as I'm in the mood for recommending things, let me say that I was inveigled into buying Jo Nesbo's thriller The Redbreast when I was in The Best Bookshop in North Britain Apart From The Bookcroft, The Shetland Times. I could not resist - I love police procedurals set in cold climates, and this is the first Norwegian novel I think I've read apart from Knut Hamsen's Hunger, which is only read by writers.
Set in Oslo, The Redbreast tackles head-on what I know is still a hugely painful issue in Norway - collaboration with Nazism during World War Two. It has some what I assume are weird Norwegian in-jokes on racial stereotyping via phrenology, and some other bits of translation that go awry, but on the whole it's a really tremendous read. It's ruthless in dealing with its very rounded characters in very unexpected ways, full of fantastic details about Oslo, where it's set, funny and brutally exciting. And the hero is called, ahem, Harry Hole ( pronounced, I think, Hew-lih)
Inevitable comparisons are with Henning Mankel's Swedish Wallander novels (Nesbo is funnier; or to be precise, is funny whereas Mankel never is)and with Maj Sjowall and Per Wahloo's much odder and more existentialist crime masterpieces (start with Roseanna). Nesbo's Harry Hole series is being published in English completely out of sequence, which is nigh on unforgivable. But The Redbreast has apparently been voted Norway's best ever crime novel, so perhaps it's understandable. The Devil's Stain is a sequel but was published here first. Never mind, I haven't read it yet!

Welcome to Bobland!

Lines on the occasion of Mr Bob Dylan buying a house in Nethybridge...

I was living in a caravan in Aviemore
With a rescue greyhound called Joe
And a Polish girl called Perdita
In the first of the winter snows
And the condensation fell like rain
Even the dog wore a plastic suit
Perdita went back to Krakow
She was suffering from trenchfoot

I was working for the Forestry Commission
Looking after their Christmas trees
Until a carbon monoxide problem
Affected Joe worse than me
I buried him out at Nethybridge
In a plantation that we’d cleared for spring
When this little guy came up to the graveside
And he began to sort of sing

He sang
Don’t think twice Joe it’s all right
There’s an endless highway and it's calling you tonight
If dogs run free, go now if you gotta go
If you see Davey Moore say I said hello

The stranger took me to his house
He said his name was Bob
It had 37 en suite bedrooms
And he offered me a job
He said I believe a hard rain's gonna fall
You could live here - it’s safe and warm
I said as long as you don’t use Calor gas
I could shelter from the storm

CHORUS

Perdita came back from Poland
and now she cooks for Bob and me
We bought three Lhaso Apsos
Called Lily, Jack and Rosemary
Bob's just bought Boat of Garten
Because Kingussie was a wee bit dull
He says he’s going to call it Bobland
And charge 25 quid per skull

CHORUS