Poled

According to the Edinburgh Evening news around 20, 000 Polish folks have taken advantage of EU membership to move into the city to work in the last ten months, which is an awful lot of people in a pretty small city. Which may expain why I've gone from seeing one car with Polish plates on it in my street (usually incredibly badly parked) to numerous cars with Polish plates round town. Not to mention hearing more folks wandering around talking Polish - especially in Lidl where you can do your entire grocery shopping without actually hearing anyone speak English. I don't mean that as anything bad, just an observation since Lidl - at least the one nearest me - seems to be constantly full of migrant workers or foreign students shopping and I have literally gone right round it without hearing English spoken until I got to the checkout, where there was English, albeit it rather accented. The fun of the melting pot society!

Thanks to multiculturalism I can listen to couples arguing over which breakfast cereal they prefer in ten languages. I am intrigued by the Polish deli which opened recently but have no idea what Polish delicacies they sell and if they are suitable for veggies - guessing a lot of it probably isn't. I do wonder at the double standards of society though - can you imagine the outcry if 20000 Asian or coloured folks settled in Edinburgh? Funny how one kind of immigration is fine and others draw flak, when at the end of the day most are here to do jobs we either have a skills gap for in Scotland or to do something no Scot wants to work at, but still the colour of the skin on an immigrant affects how people see them.


Bang goes the ball

Bus drivers back from their one day strike which forced us to cancel the book club last night (thank you, LRT, so nice to have you out on strike again so soon after your strikes last year too - do I get a credit on my bus pass for that day??) heading into town this afternoon to go to the blood donor clinic and I can see on the busy main road ahead a bunch of idiots in sports clothing arseing around with a football. Bouncing it off the walls (which just happen to be people's apartments) and just missing the windows, laughing I wait for one of them to do the inevitable and let the ball go off the pavement into the traffic. Of course it does happen and one of the aforementioned eejits runs right out into a main road to retrieve his ball, naturally without actually looking.

Barely back on the pavement he demonstrates his cranial capacity for learning from stupid mistakes by doing exactly the same again but this time as he jumps right into the road he hears the bus approaching and jumps back. Luckily for his stupid ass the bus driver was watching and had obviously figured this was going to happen and had slowed down. From the top deck I can see the ball now rolling right into traffic, bus driver tries to avoid it but a double decker isn't built for sudden turns and suddenly there is an almighty BANG as the big wheels go over the ball. The idiots, all red faces and shaved heads, howl abuse and gesticulate at the bus because obviously it is the driver's fault that they were so reckless and stupid (maybe he should have run over the guy instead). And no, this wasn't a bunch of 12 year olds, they were all grown men in their late 20s or early 30s by the looks of it. Needless to say after watching their antics I laughed out loud when their ball got burst.