‘Choose life’. ‘Choose life’ was a well meaning slogan from a 1980’s anti-drug campaign and we used to add things to it, so I might say for example, choose… designer lingerie, in the vain hope of kicking some life back into a dead relationship. Choose handbags, choose high-heeled shoes, cashmere and silk, to make yourself feel what passes for happy. Choose an iPhone made in China by a woman who jumped out of a window and stick it in the pocket of your jacket fresh from a South-Asian Firetrap. Choose Facebook, Twitter, Snapchat, Instagram and a thousand others ways to spew your bile across people you’ve never met. Choose updating your profile, tell the world what you had for breakfast and hope that someone, somewhere cares. Choose looking up old flames, desperate to believe that you don’t look as bad as they do. Choose live-blogging, from your first wank ’til your last breath; human interaction reduced to nothing more than data. Choose ten things you never knew about celebrities who’ve had surgery. Choose screaming about abortion. Choose rape jokes, slut-shaming, revenge porn and an endless tide of depressing misogyny. Choose 9/11 never happened, and if it did, it was the Jews. Choose a zero-hour contract and a two-hour journey to work. And choose the same for your kids, only worse, and maybe tell yourself that it’s better that they never happened. And then sit back and smother the pain with an unknown dose of an unknown drug made in somebody’s fucking kitchen. Choose unfulfilled promise and wishing you’d done it all differently. Choose never learning from your own mistakes. Choose watching history repeat itself. Choose the slow reconciliation towards what you can get, rather than what you always hoped for. Settle for less and keep a brave face on it. Choose disappointment and choose losing the ones you love, then as they fall from view, a piece of you dies with them until you can see that one day in the future, piece by piece, they will all be gone and there’ll be nothing left of you to call alive or dead. Choose your future, Veronika. Choose life.
I did steal the money, but they shouldn’t have been surprised. I mean, we stole from all sorts of people. Shops, businesses, neighbours, family. Friends was just one more class of victim.
Three months ago, I suffered what I been told was an episode of acute coronary insufficiency – like a heart attack. They put a – tube in here and I’ve got a metal stint in my left coronary artery. Good as new, apparently. Good as new. It should last another 30 years, they said. But, they didn’t say what to do with those 30 years. 2 or 3, 5, I’ll take that. I can cope with that. I can think of enough things to do to piss away what remains; but, 30? What am I supposed to do with that? I’m 46 and I’m fucked! I’ve got no home. I’ve got nowhere to think of as a home. I don’t really know anyone. And what’s the substance of our acquaintance?
This is the renovation and conversion of an iconic Leith building. We see it very much as being an artisanal Bed and Breakfast experience. A destination in its own right. Artworks by local artists on the walls. Locally sourced fresh food. Outreach programs to inspire children in school to think ‘outside the box’. To inspire in them a belief that: Yes, they can. There was a time when this port served thousands of ships around the globe. Now, it can rise again. And we believe our business will occupy a central role both physically and emotionally – at the heart of this new wave of regeneration in Leith.
You’re an addict! So be addicted! Be addicted to something else.
