...and one thing about Scotland that is not so awesome

Before any of you get all hot and bothered about the title of the post, it's not about 'the people' or the traditions or the culture or the right to be independent or anything like that. In fact, unless you or one of your loved ones works at the Apple store in Glasgow, there is nothing in here that you can or should take personally, so, you know, cool your jets. (ha)

Although I was somewhat loathe to come back to the UK after two hot, blissful weeks on the island of Sri Lanka—by all accounts, paradise—I’m now quite happy to be in London. I always forget how much I like the place until I’m back; I’ll be striding along happily with hordes of people, coffee in hand, when I realise, Oh, right, I actually really enjoy it here. When Natasha and I were sat beneath a creaking ceiling fan watching the tuktuks of Unawatuna whiz by in the bold equatorial sun, I had questioned my sanity about the decision to move here next year and made a note to start looking into something based in Honolulu, but false alarm! I think I’ve made the right call.

Another reason I’m genuinely excited about moving here? The Mac store. Specifically, the one on Regent Street.

Generally, I have a hard time caring about technology (my mobile looks like something you would get with a McDonalds Happy Meal, made worse by the crack that appeared in the screen after I got it back from Tel Aviv airport security), but I love my Mac. A lot. Love isn’t even the right word; at this point, it has actually become an extension of me. The Chinese word for computer, diannao, is better suited, as it literally translates to ‘electric brain’, and my laptop is just a part of my brain that is outside my body. Thanks to the time my little electric brain and I have spent together, Apple has effectively hooked me for life. I could put something like ‘once you go Mac you never go back!!!’ here, but it made me cringe, so I’ll just leave it at that.

The trouble with living in St Andrews and Scotland in general is that the only Mac store is based in Glasgow (ominous music).

I will admit that there are some nice bits of Glasgow, yes, but for the most part, it’s difficult not to kind of despise it. Obviously there are no direct trains from St Andrews, so the only other choice is a two and a half-hour coach that takes you on a tour of the heart of Fife, and as you go through the heart of Fife, the coach accumulates a lot of people who, frankly, you would rather not sit with in an enclosed space. One of my more recent rides on the X24 saw a herd of about twenty-five local women in their late thirties embark, absolutely wasted, at about ten am from the beautiful town of Glenrothes (a total lie. Glenrothes is an armpit, has always been an armpit, and will always be an armpit.). It was their friend’s fortieth birthday, apparently, and they had decided to celebrate by being tremendously irritating. Armed with balloons, plastic water bottles filled with booze and luridly coloured mixers, pungent cheesy snacks, bad dye jobs, and a lot of excess flesh, they proceeded to make life hell for the next two hours. The low point? Either when they all started singing ‘Single Ladies’ at the top of their drunk Fife voices or when a particularly robust one started to perform a striptease (a shudder just ripped through my body). That was a particularly bad journey, but even without a flock of drunken chavs, it’s long, it’s boring, and it’s made worse by the fact that you know, at the end, you’ll be deposited in Glasgow. I’ve done it a few too many times and appear to have developed some kind of visceral reaction to the thought of it.










I suspect these people are in fancy dress, but they should give you a good picture of the kind of thing one has to put up with on the ride to Glasgow

So there’s that, you know, the whole five-hour return trip through some of Scotland’s shittiest parts. Not technically the fault of the Apple store. The same goes for the people soliciting for charity who roam the length of Buchanan Street every weekend, the very ones that scare the hell out of me by approaching purposefully with a big Joker-esque smile and leave me shrieking excuses about ‘important appointment pleasepleaseplease get away from me’. The Mac people can’t do anything about them, I don’t think.

But! The sanctuary provided by the modern and spacious floorplan and the gentle whirring of Macs en masse is deceptive, because it turns out that the people working in the Glasgow Apple store are kind of incompetent. Actually, really incompetent. Nice enough, most of them, but if their jobs are to help people with their computer needs, then they are painfully bad at their jobs.

The laptop saga is long and generally uninteresting, but the basic issue was that my poor little Macbook had to have its logic board replaced (I think this is the thing with the ethernet port and all that—very important). After being quoted a price that made the blood drain from my face, I left my electric brain in the hands of the Glasgow staff for a week. After a long seven days I made the journey back to Buchanan Street, where it was presented to me all new-looking and shiny and happy and functional. I took it in my arms and promised to never leave it again. Forty-eight hours later, it convulsed and then died. Made nauseous at the thought of going back to Glasgow yet again, I had it examined by a guy down in Edinburgh on my way to the airport who pried it open and said, ‘Jesus fucking Christ’. Apparently the logic board had been put together shockingly badly. Like wires crossing things that they shouldn’t, screws that were the wrong size, things that were making the topcase bulge outward as though an alien were living under there. I put in a few calls to the Buchanan Street store, during which I listened to a lot of easy listening whilst on hold and was then promised that someone would call me back. Needless to say, that never happened, so I bundled up my electric brain, which had now become a very expensive, delicate and cumbersome paperweight, carried it through Sri Lanka, and vowed to avenge its pathetic death by booking an appointment at the Regent Street store in London upon my return to the UK.

After showering off the grime accumulated from a three-hour train ride through the tropics and twelve hours of flying, I bounded out into the sunshine streaming through all of London and made my way there. Compared to the torture of getting to Glasgow, it was so easy I could have wept. It seemed as through one minute, I was hopping on the tube at Sloane Square and the next, I was making my way up the trademark translucent aqua stairs towards technological salvation. I’m never living in the middle of nowhere again.

Unfortunately, instead of arriving at 3.40 for the appointment I had booked from the hot confines of a Sri Lankan internet café, I arrived at 4.40. My timezones had been well and clearly scrambled by the overnight journey and daylight savings time, and as the laid-back guy in the official blue shirt told me that, erm, actually, my appointment was for an hour ago, I wanted to kick myself. However, he immediately promised me that he would make space and that I would be seen anyway—something would never happen in Glasgow.

I waited for maybe twenty minutes when he came rushing back to sit down beside me, sympathising, ‘You’ve been waiting for ages, huh?’ Considering that I had been without a laptop for a month, twenty minutes hardly seemed that long, but I proceeded to tell him the whole unfortunate tale, including the fact that I was leaving London on Tuesday and would either need it done by then or shipped up to Scotland. As transit-induced exhaustion started to set in, there was a great deal of hand-wringing, eyes cast upward in despair, some tears that were definitely more real than strategic, and a plaintive ‘I just want my laptop back’ to conclude. Now thoroughly mortified at my inability to tell time and to not cry in front of the Mac employees, I was led over to another laid-back guy in a blue shirt.

I braced myself for the worst.

His nimble and technology-friendly fingers danced over the machine a bit, and after a minute or two he looked up and said, ‘We should be able to finish this within a day, probably. As long as we have the parts.’ He checked to see if they had the parts. They did. ‘Okay, so that’s that.’ This is going far, far too smoothly, I thought. Suspiciously so.

Warily, like a fawn approaching a mountain lion, I asked him if I would be charged the £400-plus I had been told a new logic board cost.













How I feel when I ask about the cost for computer repairs

‘No, of course not. It should be ready by the time you leave for your flight on Tuesday. If you want to speak to anyone, call this number. We’ll get it fixed, thank you very much, and have a nice day.’ And I was walking back out the doors, blinking into the sun that was beginning to set over Regent Street.

It was so easy! So incredibly, unfathomably easy! After I had spent the majority of four years living in an isolated and wind-blasted little Scottish town, and with Shanghai seeming a world away, I had forgotten how gloriously accessible everything is when you live in a proper city. As I slid the key into the lock of my aunt and uncle’s house, which has always provided a lovely temporary home when I’m in London, I thought of all the wonderful things that accompanied life in civilisation. Indonesian food. Nightlife past two. Supermarkets other than Tesco and clothing shops other than Jack Wills and H&M. And, of course, a massive Apple store filled with people that actually seem to know what they’re doing, right at my fingertips.

(Art, music, theatre, diversity—all that is good too.)

Nine things about Sri Lanka that are awesome

Yes, 'awesome'.

1. It's hot. It's sunny. It's so humid I barely have to moisturise my legs. My hair is returning to its rightful shade of blonde, my skin has sufficient colour so that I no longer look like I have some kind of wasting disease, and my stores of vitamin D are no doubt being replenished. The tropics are a thousand times better than any chemical drug. I am actively NOT thinking about how people start wearing shorts when the temperature in the UK climbs to a mighty ten degrees, because really, that is horrifically depressing.

2. Everyone-everyone!-waves and says hello and much of the time, they don't even want to sell anything. My suspicions are that the vast majority of the country is so chilled out because of the tropical weather. It's even more amazing just how friendly and smiley everyone is when you think about the decades-long civil war and the tsunami that recently hit.

3. There are monkeys everywhere. I know, I know, they're annoying, vicious, thieving pests, but in the same way that visitors ooh and ahh over the wild garden-destroying deer that live in Northern California, I find the monkeys wonderfully entertaining. We spent a good two hours watching a troupe of them swing from vines and chuck coconuts at our heads. Prepare yourself for a lot of pictures of monkeys. The other thing is that they look so ridiculously human. It adds to their odd and novel appeal, but they look so human as to be kind of revolting. The babies all look like little old men, and monkeys of all ages have those unnervingly human little hands and fingernails.

4. All the tropical fruit I dream of when I watch the rain lashing my window is spilling out of fruit stalls just waiting to be bought and eaten. There are the ones you just don't find in the west, like mangosteens, rambutans, custard apples, soursops, durians, and Chinese guavas, which are ridiculously delicious. And there are the ones you can technically buy in your local Waitrose-pineapple, bananas, mangos, papayas-but the ones here are so sweet, juicy and ripe that the ones you can buy back home seem like a different species. When I die, entomb me in a giant coconut. I actually love tropical fruit so much that if people knew the full extent, I would be deemed mentally unstable.

5. The rest of the cuisine here is actually spicy enough to put a bit of colour in my cheeks. It has been a long, long time since that has happened, and the burn feels fantastic.

6. Is it insensitive to mention that it's cheap? Well, it is. It's rather great to dine for about three pounds a head. The only exorbitant prices I've seen were for a box of cornflakes (530 rupees, about 5USD or three quid) and, oddly enough, a pack of spiced cashews.

7. Even though Sri Lanka lost the cricket World Cup to India last night, people were still celebrating by chucking firecrackers around and having dance parties on the beach. When I offered my condolences about the match this morning, no one really seemed terribly distressed. The most dramatic reaction I got was (wait for it!) a shrug. It's hard not to love a place like this.

8. The crows are for some reason very sleek and robust. Much better than crows elsewhere. I have no idea why this is.

9. The beaches of the southwest are exquisite. If I believed in intelligent design or God or any of that, I would say that he had a soft spot for this island, because the golden sand and turquoise water of Unawatuna are dreamlike in their sheer perfection. It is utterly unsurprising that the people here seem like they're in such good moods all the time.

You might have asked yourself, 'Why nine things?' That is because I wrote down nine things and then, to be honest, felt like drinking mango juice and reading my book. Oh, tropics, you beguiling thing, you.