The Internet Has Sex With Itself

An announcement in a recent edition of the Oban Times caught my eye.  Sitting alongside adverts for funeral directors and a memorial sculptor was “a respectable matrimonial notice.”  This wasn’t someone declaring the happy news of their marriage.  Rather, it belonged to a 32-year-old American lady who was besotted with the idea of marrying a Scotsman and had placed a personal ad in the local…

After you’ve lived somewhere for a while, you become familiar with the sounds associated with it.  More than eight years on Combie Street has made the wheezing of passing traffic and the groaning of the bin lorry on a Wednesday morning almost second nature.  I barely notice the close door creaking open followed by the footsteps on the concrete stairs anymore.  You get to know other people’s…

Sitting under the rainbow of Instagram-friendly umbrellas at Propaganda Pub on Freedom Square, Nikšić could be any city in any European country.   Music gently hums from the bars around the pedestrian terraces.  Families stroll between the statues, spooning gelato into their mouths.  In a quiet corner by the fountain, an old man sits reading the newspaper.  Little wooden sheds open up like…

With the world as it is at the moment, people have been finding different ways of taking their minds off things.  Some have picked up a new instrument, started a large gardening project, or painted the ceiling of their living room.  Others have taken to kilt shopping in Aberdeen or gone wild camping on the rural coast.  Anything not to think about the price of electricity. I’ve recently been…

For a few days in March, my street was the main topic of conversation in Oban.  It’s rare for Combie Street to attract that kind of attention.  Since the Lochavullin closed, hardly anything happens at this end of town. Other than a drug raid in the pub, the last notable incident here came at the start of the pandemic in 2020.  About a week before the lockdown, graffiti appeared on the wall of…

The news that Argyll & Bute local authority would be raising its rate of council tax by 10% from April gave me pause for reflection.  As of January, I entered my ninth year of claiming the single occupancy discount on my bill.  These days, there isn’t even a box on a form I need to tick to let them know that it is still applicable.  It’s as if all parties have accepted that my single occupancy is…

I spent around half an hour preparing a sweet chilli prawn stir fry on Tuesday night.  Just as I sat down to enjoy it, my phone alerted me that I’d made a new match on Tinder.  My fork had barely stabbed into the black, tar-thick sauce when I heard the ping.  Google’s AI had suggested a teaspoon of honey for stickiness, and it was not wrong.  I’d been thinking about the meal all day, but it was…

Monday, the nineteenth of January, felt like a big day so early in Oban’s year.  As if the town’s Christmas tree in Argyll Square finally being cut down wasn’t thrilling enough, the west coast of Scotland was treated to a stunning glimpse of the Northern Lights. I arrived home from playing indoor football shortly after 9.30pm.  It was the third consecutive week since the break that I’d managed…

On the morning of my trip to Belfast, I could barely pull on my new Christmas socks.  The seasonal sickness that had struck everybody else finally reached me with a sharp pain in the left side of my lower back.  Twelve years of working on my flexibility through yoga, and it still took me a quarter of an hour to work out the least distressing way of tying my shoelaces. I’ve always fancied going…

My sleep routine has fallen apart this December.  Everything has been keeping me awake lately.  If it wasn’t a neighbour across the street blaring music at 3am on a Wednesday, it was the yawning realisation, night after night, that I had yet to make a start on my Christmas shopping.  Christmas shopping became more of a concern when my niece hinted that she had moved on from Taylor Swift.   Over…

I’d convinced myself that things were going to be different this time.  Years of experience doing the wrong thing would surely have taught me how to be better.  I talked it over with friends and even asked ChatGPT for advice.  It felt strange using AI for such matters, but everybody seems to be doing it these days, and on the face of it, the bot’s suggestions looked sound. My intentions were…

When Scotland last qualified for a World Cup, it was 11 October 1997, the day of my 14th birthday.  I was a socially awkward teenager who was incapable of talking to girls without turning red enough for the Met Office to take an interest.  I struggled to make many friends, while the only way I knew how to impress my peers was by typing up stupid jokes on the family PC at home.  I would then bring…

Over the years, I’ve gotten used to the pitfalls of using dating apps to meet new people in Oban. Since turning forty-two, though, it’s been worse than ever.  The selection of potential matches is so shallow it’s tempting to believe that every single woman on the west coast of Scotland has set their desired age range at no older than forty-one.  Things have been dire enough lately that Skyscanner…

After being battered by Storm Amy at the start of the month, Oban in mid-October was, by comparison, calm.  By the time I’d left work each night this week, the temperature had dropped enough for it to officially be beanie hat season.  I’m not usually a hat kind of guy; I’ve always felt awkward in them.  Like with dating, they never seem to fit right or look good on me.  Wearing one invariably…

Try as I might, I couldn’t find an exciting way to use my last remaining day of annual leave before the year reset in October.  Why our holiday year runs from October to September and not January to December, or April to March like you might think, doesn’t seem worth getting into.  Let’s just leave it at that it does.   There were no gigs taking place in Glasgow or Edinburgh that took my fancy,…

There’s barely an emergency service presence on Combie Street these days.  Certainly since the Lochavullin closed there have been fewer flashing blue lights stopping in the neighbourhood.  So when a couple of fire engines went blazing through town on Thursday afternoon, and word began to spread around the office that there was a fire on Soroba Road, my thoughts turned to the possibility that it…

My new, more serious dating app profiles haven’t attracted as much attention as I’d hoped they would.  Despite removing most of the sarcasm and attempted humour, the summer passed without me receiving so much as a match.  Even on my latest break to Bosnia and Herzegovina, where I usually find a date about a third of the time, I got nothing.  I did almost get lucky in Zagreb, but that was down to…