About Me

There not really a lot to say about myself, and I don’t really like doing it, so this will be quite brief.

I live in Selkirk in the Scottish Borders, UK. That’s not England, as many people seem to believe, but Scotland. Unlike most other Scots, I don’t really care one way or another about England – I’m not opposed to it, I just think that the country should be honoured with its own name, in much the same way as you wouldn’t call Belgium France, and shouldn’t call Northern Ireland Ireland.

I’m not a particularly good Scot by any account.  I don’t like bagpipes because the sound of them goes straight through me.  That’s not to say they’re always bad; even I can appreciate them when played well; but I feel they’re overdone, and I believe buskers should be fined for using them in Edinburgh as they are generally an assault on the ears.  I also don’t like kilts, because tartan is not a particularly nice material, and because let’s face it: it’s a skirt.
I lived with someone from Inverness while I was at university, and he claimed that I was practically English because I lived so far South it didn’t really count as Scotland.  This to me was obvious ignorance.  I am Scottish: I’m 6’5, ginger, bad-tempered, and able to drink my (rather hefty) mass in scotch.  Besides; as I pointed out; if it wasn’t for us “practically English” people in the South, the English would have taken more of the country.

Education

I don’t have a very high education level, unfortunately. I spent 6 years at Selkirk high School, struggling the whole way through. After school, I spent 3 years at the University of Abertay Dundee – Scotland’s most infamous university. My first year was spent on a Civil Engineering course, which I hated with a passion. After that I swapped to a Computing course. After a further 2 years on this course, I left university, extremely disappointed to have spent so long on a course in which I feel I never learned anything. For once, this wasn’t my fault, as I just couldn’t justify getting myself further into debt to constantly be taught things which I could already do in my sleep.

Overall, I often feel quite screwed by my education. Everyone always goes on about how great university is for you, but this is far from my experience. University, for me, was 3 years of struggling to cope, in the pursuit of a goal which more often than not, doesn’t help you in any way.