Welcome to my weird world!

Random ramblings: the thin veil of civilization, and friends

"We are all civilized people, which means that we are all savages at heart but observing a few amenities of civilized behavior"
Tennessee Williams, from the fore-word to Sweet Bird of Youth

My housemate and I were having a discussion last night about whether there is really any difference between humans and animals. The centre-point of the conversation was the fact that basically, the sole purpose of any animal species (humans included) is to pro-create. Man-kind, however, is so successful at this that the world's population is escalating to unsustainable levels. This leaves us with a dillema: do we really have a purpose?

As a race, we have created for ourselves this whole set of values, and because we are capable of conscious decision-making, and the holding of morals, that supposedly places us in a realm above the rest of the animal kingdom. The bible, of course, says that we were put on this earth to rule over the rest of the animals, so for Christians, this attitude is perhaps excusable as a precept of our religion. What about other religions, though? What about those religions that state that we are equal with animals, and that nature is one body - what right do we have, then? What about people with no religion to base their status on?

Needless to say, last night's conversation didn't get very far, and we just ended up tangled in a knot with more questions than we started with. This may have had something to do with the lateness of the hour! I'd be very interested to hear anyone else's thoughts on the subject, though.

~~~

Having introduced my animals yesterday, I feel that perhaps I should give a bit of background to the rest of my household. I'm a bit fed up of referring to 'my partner', and 'my housemate', and would rather be able to use names!

I was born and grew up in Falkirk, in central Scotland, where my parents still live. For the first six years of school, I went to the local primary, and then went to a private school until I was 18. Incidentally, does anyone know why private schools in the UK are refrerred to as 'public schools'? They're not public: surely the state schools should be the 'public' schools??

Anyway, I finished school in 2000, and went to Lancaster Uni (in England) to study a BBA in Management, finally graduating last year. Whilst at Uni, I met my partner, Richard, who is from Loughborough in the East-Midlands area of England. He bought a small ex-council-house at the end of our First-Year, and we stayed there throughout the rest of our time at Uni.

As I approached graduation, Dad asked me if I would come back and join our family business. We had always intended that I would go and work elsewhere for at least five years first, but they launched a new product last year and needed someone to market it. I was just coming to the end of a management degree, and had some limited knowledge of marketing theory from my course. To be honest, having just spent hundreds of thousands on development work, they couldn't really afford anyone else!

Richard had finished Uni before me, and had started his own business as a garden services contractor three years ago. He had a small, but growing, regular client-base in Lancaster, but he decided to up-sticks and come with me to Scotland. I will be forever grateful to him for doing so, but he already wanted to move to Scotland and it has worked out rather well for him anyway!

Above the office was a flat that hadn't been lived in since 1989. Some of the rooms were briefly used as offices in the early '90s, and the flat has been used as a sort of emergency accommodation whenever any of the staff had problems with their own houses. Apart from that it was only used as a store (and boy, was there stuff stored up there!). Dad suggested that we may as well use the flat, as it is there anyway, and I asked one of my old friends from home (Carrie) if she would like to join us. She agreed, and Richard and I started work on the flat early last summer.

I say 'started work', because a flat that hasn't been lived in since 1989 needs a lot of work! The Living Room and one of the bedrooms had been re-decorated following treatment of dry-rot a few years ago, but even they needed flooring. We re-decorated two of the bedrooms; laid a new floor in the Living Room; carpeted another bedroom and a good portion of the hallway; completely re-decorated the bathroom including tiling, flooring and a new bath; laid a new floor in the entrance-way and gutted and re-fitted the kitchen, which also involved getting sparkys (electricians) in to do a complete re-wire.

As he clearly wasn't going to be doing a full season of gardening in Lancaster, Richard told his clients that he would be leaving, and instead signed on with an agency. At the time that we were decorating the house, he was working a shift pattern of four-days-on, four-days-off, with 7am-7pm shifts when he was on. In order to have the maximum amount of time to work on the house, I would drive us up here as soon as he finished work on the last day of a shift, and then we would drive back down on the evening of the day before he started back on again. This meant diving up and down the M6/M74 (trunk-route motorways between Scotland and London) every four days.

When we properly moved up here in June of last year, Richard gave up his agency job to work exclusively on the house. We stayed at my parents house (we're only 15 minutes drive away), and would be here from early in the morning until late in the evening. I think the earliest that we were here was about 7am, and the latest 4am, but we were normally here from 8:30/9am until after midnight. That was a knackering summer!

Enough of that, though; back to Richard and Carrie.

I started work with the company on the 1st of August last year, but for Richard the house was still his full-time job: we only got the heated-towel-rails up in the bathroom a few days before Christmas, the toilet-roll holder and a shelf only went up a couple of weeks ago (just before Richard's Mum came to stay!), and we've still not quite finished the tiling! In January of this year, we finally succeeded in selling the house in Lancaster (the sale had fallen through once already) so Richard started planning to re-start his business up here, and attended the business start-up course at our local Enterprise centre.

In March, my mum noticed a small advert in the local paper for a gardening business that was for sale. We got in touch with the seller (Eddie) and had a meeting with him to discuss the business, which turned out to have been running for 10 years, and had a regular client base who had all been with Eddie for several years.

Eddie already had someone interested in buying, but they had no previous gardening experience, and he wanted to ensure that his clients would be well looked after. When he heard that Richard had years of experience and had already been working as a gardener, Eddie told the other chap that the business was no longer for sale, and he and Richard signed a deal. This has enabled Richard to start up with almost completely full books, instead of having to spend a couple of years building a client-base. In addition, the rate of pay is higher here than it was in Lancaster, so, as I said, the move has worked out quite well for Richard after-all.

Carrie and I have known eachother since she we were children, and our families go back at least three generations together. My grandpa's father was one of 10/11 children, and the eldest were therefore having children of their own around the same time as their younger siblings were being born. Grandpa's cousin, Fiona, is only two years older than my dad, and she is best friends with Carrie's mum (June). The two of them are both around 5' tall, but they tell hilarious stories about "wee Finlay" (my dad, who is almost 6'), because they still remember him in his shorts and school blazer when they were two years above him at school! Before June and Fiona, Carrie's gran was good friends with another of my grandpa's relatives, Grace.

Carrie also went to Dollar (the private school), and although we had been friends since we were small children, we became very good friends only in my last couple of years there. When I went to Uni, we spoke regularly, and would see eachother whenever we were both in Falkirk. Ironically, we got together even more once she had moved further away to go to Uni, and she became my closest friend.

When she left Dollar, Carrie went to Dundee Uni to study an MA in Politics and International Relations, and she also graduated last year. This year, she has been doing an MSc in Criminology at Edinburgh Uni, and will be finished in a couple of weeks. Having vacated her flat in Dundee to move back to central Scotland to do her second degree, Carrie needed somewhere more local to live. Our flat is ideally situated for her, both for getting the train to Uni, and for driving to work.

Thankfully, Richard and Carrie have always enjoyed eachother's company, and our little trio seems to work rather well. We all share many of the same opinions (though we disgree just enough to keep things interesting!), not least in our preference for cats over kids. In the spirit of whoever coined the acronym 'DINKYs' (Double-Income-No-Kids-Yet), we have therefore christened ourselves 'The TINKS': Triple-Income-No-Kids. Full stop. No yet! The negative conortations of the word 'tink' are not lost on us, but we just find it amusingly ironic. Feel free to disagree: none of us have ever claimed to have a conventional sense of humour. In fact, we've never claimed to have a conventional sense of anything!

The other day, I mentioned the importance of having people with whom you can just be, and I seem to be very fortunate in having a few such people:
"If you have one true friend you have more than your share," Thomas Fuller

I count myself very lucky!

For those who like quotes, these are some of those that best illustrate our collective friendship:

"A true friend never gets in your way unless you happen to be going down," Arnold H. Glasow

"It is not so much our friends' help that helps us as the confident knowledge that they will help us," Epicurus; 3rd century BC

"The friend is the man who knows all about you, and still likes you," Elbert Hubbard, in The Notebook, 1927

"Constant use will not wear ragged the fabric of friendship," Dorothy Parker

"A good friend is a connection to life - a tie to the past, a road to the future, the key to sanity in a totally insane world," Lois Wyse

~~~

I am going away, this evening, to spend the weekend on a boat. I may be able to get online via wireless at some point, but in case I don't, have a great weekend all!

I know I've already probably overdosed you all with quotes, but I'd like to finish today with three of my favourite quotes on the subject of friends. In reverse order of preference:

"Lots of people want to ride with you in the limo, but what you want is someone who will take the bus with you when the limo breaks down"
Oprah Winfrey


"A true friend is one who thinks you are a good egg even if you are half-cracked"
Author Unknown


"True friends stab you in the front,"
Oscar Wilde


Such a cynic , but undoubtedly one of my favourite writers!