Christopher Hamilton

It appears that Scotland is about to get it’s first Apple Store.

According to reports from MacNN, Apple are set to open their first Scottish store in Glasgow, in what used to be an old cinema on Buchanan Street.

I’m glad Apple have finally decided to open one of their stores up here in Scotland. After numerous new stores opening throughout England it was beginning to look like they were ignoring those of us North of the Border.

I had hoped they would have opened a store in Edinburgh, but to be honest I think they will do more business through in Glasgow, especially on Buchanan Street, so their decision makes a lot of sense. The main shopping locations in Edinburgh have become somewhat of a joke in recent years, either completely pandering to tourists with shitty Scottish theme shops, or converting shops into expensive boutiques and wanky bars.

I couldn’t see an opening date in the report, but I’ll certainly be heading through to Glasgow to have a look at it when it does open.

I just hope my bank account can handle the hit it’s probably going to take with an Apple store so close by.

It’s two days early, but I’m heading back up to Edinburgh on the train at the moment. Somehow we managed to do three days worth of work in a day and a half so we were able to change the train tickets, cancel the hotel early, and get the hell out of London.

I really don’t know how we managed to do all the work in such a short space of time, and I don’t know how I didn’t crack, although I did come close. I won’t bore you with the details of why I nearly lost it, but lets say plans were changed at the last minute without our consent.

The one plus point is that even though the last few days have been a nightmare, I get to have at least half of my weekend back. We were meant to be heading back on Monday night so getting home late this afternoon instead is a huge bonus.

We were taken out for a few drinks by a potential supplier last night. Those few beers turned into lots of beer, some shots of what I think was Sambuca, then topped up with several glasses of single malt whisky. Surprisingly I don’t have a hangover today. It may be because when I got back to the hotel I had a couple of bottles of water, one of which cost me £3.50. It was only about 300ml, which is a complete feckin disgrace. It was needed though so I had the mini-bar blues when I checked out this morning.

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Apparently it’s only just over 8 weeks till Christmas. Shit, that came around fast. Thankfully there are no big birthdays this year, unlike last year where my sister hit 21. Still it’s going to involve buying presents for people while I’m completely skint, which is never an ideal situation to find yourself in.

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One small annoyance with travelling on a Saturday is that the train takes so much longer. It stops at 5 or 6 stations more than the train I usually get, plus I have to change trains in Newcastle. Newcastle isn’t a bad station to change over since there’s a pretty decent pub if I have the will and the time to go to it.

From looking at my tickets I should get back into Edinburgh at about 4.30pm which means after a quick visit to the office to do a couple of little things and to drop some stuff off, I should be home by 5pm. It’s earlier than I thought I was going to get home so there’s more time to try to arrange a few beers tonight.

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I’m rambling in this post today. Puting any kind of thought structure together is completely beyond me at the moment. I’ve also noticed the post is a touch dull. That can’t be helped since I’ve done nothing of note recently except work my arse off. Plus I really can’t be bothered to go back and re-wriite any of it.

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I’m bored. The train is great for travelling in comfort, and wireless access is ace, but I really just want to get home as quick as possible today, and this journey takes over 6 bloody hours.

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I’m going to go surf the intertubes and see if there’s anything better than the recent funny stories about Hearts. Being a Hibs fan I find it all very amusing, but considering their recent history, not very surprising.

Up until last night I had no idea what my NaNoWriMo novel was going to be about. I had no characters, no plot ideas, nothing, zip, nadda.

Last night when I should have been sleeping, an idea popped into my head. It was only the basic frame of a potential story but it was something. To make sure I didn’t forget it I grabbed my notebook and quickly wrote out the basic idea for the main story arc. It was pretty rough around the edges but the more I jotted down, the more I liked the direction I could take the story. It had lots of possibilities, a few of which I made a note of too.

Sitting here on the train, I’ve spent the last couple of hours taking that rough outline and trying to add a little more substance to it. At the moment I now have a little bit of history to the story, a couple of decent ideas for characters, and most importantly how the story is going to end.

The outline I’ve written still leaves a lot of room for sub-plots, and development of the main plot and is still very flexible. The story might not even end up where I think it will. I know where I think it will end up, but it might take me somewhere else as the story unfolds.

The one thing I am sure of though, is that I’m even more excited about starting NaNoWriMo next week than I was a couple of days ago.

I can’t wait to get started.

With NaNoWriMo only a week away I’ve been trying to put together a few playlists in iTunes to write to. I tend to listen to a very broad spectrum of music, my collection has at least one album from most genres, so actually breaking it down to decent sized playlists has become quite a struggle.

It got me thinking. There are probably a couple of people that read this website that do a fair amount of writing themselves. So I have a couple of questions.

When you sit down to write, do you listen to anything specific? Or are there any bands/artists you would recommend I listen to in an attempt to get the creative juices flowing? Any genre at all, and all suggestions welcome.

I’m travelling on the train again.

The travel this time is once again for work. My boss and I are heading down to our London office until next Monday. The possibility of working over the weekend is not something I’m looking forward to, but we’re going down to do an office move so we may have to.

I’m hoping everything goes smoothly so that at least one day this weekend I get the chance to go for a walk around London with my camera. Normally all I ever see down there is the office, the hotel, and of course one or two of their fine drinking establishments.

No doubt over the next four hours, as I watch the world go by, I’ll have a few things to write about.