Personal Blogs

It's festival time here in the 'burgh, the town is full of metropolitan types. I met a very nice couple, of such, today who needed directions to, "Dairy". It took me a while to realize that the destination required was Dalry.

I know Dalry very well and as I gave them the directions I was wondering what they were going there for. It was some time later that the penny dropped and I knew that they must be headed for St. Brides.

A couple of hours later, I was walking home from work, I was preparing to swing-down onto the canal when I noticed a half-eaten poke of chips lying on the bridge. Odd. I could hear a guttural disagreement taking place under same-said bridge. I looked over the parapet.

There was a man, grey-haired, sixty-odd I should say, wearing nought but black swimming trunks, raging against world.

He was very, very, verry drunk.

I took a moment to take a second look. You do that if you are going to have to walk past shouting, gesticulating drunken nutters.

He was splattered with mud, his hair was wringing, he'd been in the canal for sure. Those swimming trunks were his underpants [I now spotted that his clothes were strewn about on the tow-path] and he seemed to be having a conversation with the workies across the canal. He was ignoring everyone else.

"You didn't even &^** try to help me...", although he was a wee bit more pithy than that. Well, as pithy as a man clad only in soaked boxers can be with the world watching. I could see the workies smiling but they weren't saying anything.

From which I took two things:

• I was OK. He didn't seem to want to mess with me, and if he did he was going back in again.
• A possible time-line of events

I've swan dived off this bridge myself. But it was late at night and I was trying to impress girls. In the middle of the afternoon, however drunk? Nah.

But I might have dangled my legs over a bridge to eat my chips. And then from drunken incompetence fallen in? That might happen.

What I wouldn't do is to make a huge scene about it, clad only in my skanties. I hope.

He was older than me. Perhaps this my future?