Still your Beating Hearts, You Followers Of The Holy Rolling Stone!.....

Howdy, Pop-Pickers! Can I hereby offer my sincerest apologies to you, discerning denizens of the Blogosphere, who have waited with fingernails chewed to the quick, for this, your next dazzling installment charting the Ridiculously Self-Regarding & Funereal Descent into Stilted Mediocrity and Inescapable Anonymity of I, your Inimitable & Congenial Host, the S T o N e d h o l Y B L o G G e r! There are, may I assure you, several mitigating circumstances which go someway to explaining my extended absence from these virtual pages.

The 1st of these remittances is simply that, being the kind of browbeaten and dejected so 'n' so who is much given to loud hurrumphing and censorial finger-wagging as a means to absolve oneself of any culpability in their failure to prosper, I just 'couldnae be arsed!!' Opting instead to shelter my Wearisome Bones & Burdened Soul from all tumult and violent upheavals outwith the Glorified Halls of Stoned Holy HQ, which hang heavy, even yet, with sprigs of Holly & Ivy, and cosset myself by the bleezing Stoned Holy Ingle, sherry in hand and slippers on!

 Lately also, due, no doubt, to the ceaseless ravages of time upon the Stoned Holy Bod', I have suffered a bad bout of 'Cockney Lumbago'. This consists of the usual symptoms of pain in the lower lumber accompanied by the need to blurt out phrases such as 'Cor, lummy!' or 'Luv a duck!' in a cod Steve Marriott Lazy Sunday accent! Coupled to this, the Honourable Member for Stoned Holy Central hasn't been his eager and sprightly self of late. Though I acknowledge this may very well be a physical manifestation of my shortcomings and failures in the world at large, it has, undoubtedly resulted in a facial expression akin to a hyena chewing a toffee bar falling upon the otherwise angelic Stoned Holy Countenance!! Consequent to these afflictions, a Mood Indigo, not dissimilar to the kind that Nina Simone assured us go stealing down to your shoes, pervaded my daily discourse with the world and the downright dimwits and twits who populate it!! Bluntly put, I have been unmoved to pound the keyboard and knock off more of this execrable shit for the dubious pleasure of a ragbag of total strangers and loners out there in the shady basements, cobwebbed garrets and steaming wank-pits of computerland!!

Mercifully though, as you can clearly see evinced by the chipper mood permeating these very columns, my demeanour has lifted. The Miserable Old Git Scale reads level 2. The needle on the Crabbit-O-Meter has fallen back into the Green Zone - ie, posing no imminent threat to myself or any unfortunate souls who just happen to be part of the same queue in the Post Office as myself! The spring in my step has thankfully returned and once again I can be seen carrying myself with a rocking-rolling swagger through the slouching streets, bedecked in my dandified raiment!

The s t O N e d H O L y b L o G g e R posting Absent Without Leave from these pages can be further explained by remembering that there was, in these 'ere parts, the small matter of a referendum regarding Independence for Scotland. Tragically, maddeningly, mystifyingly, embarrassingly (and perchance, as many now believe, criminally!!) the vote was lost to the Soulless Forces of Fear and No Imagination! Lemme tell you folks, September 19th was a day of Stunned Disbelief and Dumbstruck Hopelessness! My own Stoned Holy Gibberbox rang hollow as my words tumbled out of it like sawdust!  We, the Dreamers, the Radicals, the Yearning, the Disgusted & Busted, played out the banal moments that fill the existential emptiness of all our lives........something as simple as getting on the bus was a pantomime performed by robots! But days have passed and wounds have healed. The Jocks Ain't Going Back In The Box!! Bitter feelings of division that put up fences between friends and family are now calmed with the realisation that the Political Shit-Storm blows up anew after the coming General Election and A Change Is Gonna Come!!

And lastly among these lame excuses for my extended furlough from these virtual walls and your glorious Hit of Curmudgeoness in the Mainline is perhaps the most telling.....in that I didn't have access to the Tinternet and its myriad of Steamy n Dirty Windaes affording one a grandstand seat viewing the wackiness and dark, mashed up, broken down heart of humanity! Oh t'is an arrow to my tender heart to think that you consider I have spent this period away from the Blogosphere doing not much of anything other than scratching ma Stoned Holy Bawbag and supping sundry real ales whilst fulminating on esoteric matters such as whether Trotsky was right to quash the Kronstadt Rebellion and could Scotland really have lifted the World Cup in 1978 under Ally McLeod!!!

So Still Your Beating Hearts you followers of The Holy Rolling Stone, normal service has been resumed....ahm back on line and in the groove. 2015 beckons.......

To The Toppermost Of The Poppermost!!  

Charles Bukowski : He Was a Fat, Old Man!

 Charles Bukowski once said 'The Days Run Away Like Wild Horses Over The Hills'....well, it's bloody lucky he never tried his hand at this Pop-Slopping mallarkey otherwise he might have said 'The Days Shuffle Past Like A Geriatric Tortoise with Chronic Obstructive Pulmonary Disease'!! Nowhere near as poetic or snappy, I'll be the first to admit, but more accurate!

The S t O n e D H o L y B L O g g e r must admit to feeling a close affinity to Charles Bukowski seeing as he too spent years buried in the Dead Letter Office swimming with intellectual minnows whilst punching 300 letters every five minutes into the Inward Primary Sortation frame! He too has frittered away years at low skill jobs taking shit from Soul Sucking Jerks just so he could, at the drop-of-a-hat, when dim lights, thick smoke & loud, loud music and fawning femme-types came knocking, tell the aforementioned jerk to 'Take this Job & Shove It!'  He has also cracked open many a fine bottled ale and enjoyed ham on rye!

Bukowski, in case you didn't know, was the beer-bellied, ugly son-of-a-bitch who, in the guise of his alter-ego, Henry Chinaski, chronicled the lives of the barflies n gadflies, down & outs n roustabouts, soaks n jokes, derelicts n drifters who live out their lives of emasculated n disenfranchised desperation, drug addled ordinariness and kerbside glory at the dog-eared corners and singed edges of Society.  His is the voice of the gutterpup snarling at the hand that feigns or deigns to feed it! And the City of Lost Angels didn't skimp on dredging up the muck to keep his typewriter busy, being, as it is, a huge, sprawling mash-up of sexual & social inadequacies and corruptions!

Bukowski was also the man who, after a troubled youth scarred by chronic acne and years of neglect and disregard from the literary establishment, seized the day when renown and notoriety and post pubescent college girls came calling! Nonchalantly swigging beer and reciting poetry as the giggling coquettes fluttered round his filthy flame like fireflies, with their pert little ricecakes jiggling and wafting their honeymuff pheromones! Perchance, readers, there's hope yet for a one man Pop Slop Flophouse like the
s T O n e d h O L y b L o G G e r!!    A man can dream, can he not?!?! There was a time, it may interest you to know, when first I ventured down the perilous & unfrequented path of the STONED HOLY ROLLER, a time when Punk Rock Immortality awaited me as surely as night follws day, that I fancied myself quite the libertine and entertained such notions as voluptuary excess and sensual abandonment......but oh, such comfortless nights lay ahead!

But back to Bukowski ; Once, when asked as to his modus operandi regarding writing, he replied 'Don't Try! That's very important : not to try, not for cadillacs, creation or immortality. You wait and if nothing happens, you wait some more.' The phrase appears on the stone which marks the spot where Mr. Bukowski is currently to be found in Green Hills Memorial Park, Los Angeles County, U.S.A. This once seemed like good advice to the S T o N e d h o L Y B L o g g e R.......but I've grown quite weary of waiting now for something or anything to actually happen after these long years, so Mr. Charles Bukowski can take his advice and shove it!!

And anyway, what gave this beer-bellied git the right to be so dyspeptic anywayz? He lived his life in L. A after all. Spending yir hours looking at horses (the ones that run round race tracks that is, rather than thems that speed away over hills!!) and in bars in chrome shiny, kick a buck, big breasted, speakeasy, 4-lane freeway America doesn't seem to be that bad a deal, does it?!!  I mean, 329 days of fukkin sunshine a year, for fuk's sake!! Imagine how miserable he woulda been had he been borned  in Scotchland!!

Still, be grateful he wasn't....otherwise nobody would've heard of him! And I don't care if he was an alcoholic bum running with the lowlifes because inside a warm, human heart was beating!.....and if yir passing Green Hills Memorial Park why not crack open a tin and pour the contents on the sod that covers him...it's what he woulda wanted, ahm sure!! Maybe that's the time also to recall these words "We're All Going To Die, All Of Us, What a Circus! That alone should Make Us Love Each Other but It Doesn't. We Are Terrorized & Flattened by Trivialities, We Are Eaten Up By Nothing!"

Seize the Day, Pop-Pickers....Seize the Day!!

.......maybe some day soon I should take my own advice!!

Yes, We Can....but Naw...Youz Cannae!!

How fitting that this is my 50th post. This is my Hawaii ; last State to join the Union! I say fitting because Ahm here tae talk aboot America!!.....or more accurately President Obama's recent nickel's worth regarding the Scottish Independence debate.

What's a Pop-Slopper (and a failed one, at that!) doing entering the fray of Politics, you might very well ask. But, understand, gentle reader, that the
S t O n E d H O L y b L o g G e R was formed in the Raucous n Rowdy-Dowdy days when Punk Rock held sway in Pop Land. His febrile young mind was weaned on the Scowling Outrage of Johnny Rotten! The impassioned, Garageland Gravel of Joe Strummer was mother's milk! Indeed, it was from taking his inspiration from such as the Sex Pistols & The Clash and various other Beat Combos of his Thatcher benighted era, like the Anarcho-Doggerel of Crass and the Super-Smart Agit-Prop of Gang of Four that set the S t O n e D h O L y b L O g g E R down the lonely furrow he still tramps today ; a ravening, cynical dog prowling the political wasteland of Her Majesty's Sinking Ship Britannia, foaming & growling, tenaciously intent on getting my canines into something!...whilst still wanting to BOOOOOOOOOOGIE at the same time!!

But enough of wistful strolls doon Bitter Memory Lane. President Obama has steamed into our ongoing Independence stooshie with his considered opinion that the United Kingdom 'has worked pretty well' so voters in Scotland should vote 'No' to Independence. Kinda ironic, don't you think for the President of the United States of America to make such a remark seeing as the nation he represents was founded on the very thing he's advising Scots against - Independence from Westminster!!! Leaving aside the stark fact that there is no 'United' Kingdom, somebody needs to remind him about the old Colonial rallying call of "No Taxation Without Representation!" Maybe a little 'Tea Party' of our own where American coffee imports were dumped into the murky waters of Leith docks would jog the Presidential memory!! Will that be a regular or large riot? Have a nice day!!

Now, the old Stoned Holy Memory Banks may, very well, not function quite so effectively as once they did but even I can recall the days of 2008 and Mr. Obama's campaign to take stewardship of the keys for 1600 Pennsylvania Avenue. You may recall his campaign slogan : 'Yes, We Can!' Well, it seems that the poor & huddled masses of Scotland CAN'T!! Maybeez seats on the United Nations Security Council and nuclear submarines in the Firth of Clyde and losing an ever ready military ally clouded his view!! For shame, Mr. President, for shame!! Maybe, with the 4th of July looming, you'll have recourse to reflect on your shamefaced statement this 'Independence' Day!!

Of course, his slogan was filched from Cesar Chavez and the United Farm Workers union and their struggle, in Arizona in 1972, for the right to strike..... I'm damn sure Cesar would join me and aw the folks in Scotland in rebutting the shortsighted remarks of the President and replying emphatically "Si, Se Puede!'......or tae put it in the Guid Broad Scots, 'Aye, We Can.....n yes, we're gonnae!!'

For We Hold these Truths to be Self Evident ; Sometimes, in the course of Human events it becomes necessary for one People to Dissolve the Political Bands which have connected them to another and to assume the Separate & Equal station to which they are Entitled!! How d'ya like them apples, Mr. Barrack Obama?!?! Recognise any of that, at all??!!

This Land Is Our Land! 

   

TO HELL WITH POVERTY!!

You, my fellow users n abusers o the Blogosphere, may have the impression that most Pop-Sloppy Drop Outs, such as the S t O n E d h o L Y b L o G G e r, are, if they're not eating pussy, subsisting on a diet of baked beans straight from the tin, take-away pizza and beer. We here at Roller Central, being the quintessential square pegs in round holes that we are, choose to buck the trend somewhat....though, it must be noted, our lack of pussy eating is a regimen forced upon us rather than one proactively adopted!!  Be that as it may, we mostly eschew the kinda vittles mentioned above in favour of fare more refined or rustic in nature : delicately crafted beetroot chutney on home baked sweet potato & roast red pepper loaf are more likely to be seen on the Stoned Holy Smorgasbord than the kinda nosh furnished by yir local take-away outlet.

The sink in the Stoned Holy Scullery is as yet precariously filled with a haphazardly assembled heap of  the assorted crockery and utensils used in preparing our evening repast.....and oh, what a plateful it was!  Time now to take our ease bethankit and bemoan our flagrant lack of restraint as our swollen bellies threaten to rive.....or, seeing as Politics is never off the menu here at Stoned Holy HQ, take time to ponder on the poor souls, less fortunate than we, who ate tonight thanks only to the charity afforded them at a food bank. Or, heaven forfend, went hungry!! And what a howling outrage and damning indictment of Humankind it is that there should be even a one in this ill divided world who is not afforded the Justice of a Meal!!!

Let's ignore all the claptrap about over-population ; Hunger is a Political problem! Hunger exists because of the stunted imaginations and pitiless hearts of the Cretins & Creeps who run the Political Systems of the world. Morally Bankrupt, they preside over a world prepared to spend untold billions in its never ending mania for Death! Mentally Deficient, they wave as their armies parade before them in their sterile and mechanised uniformity as millions die for the want of a glass of clean water!! See their happy faces as their high tech toys and updated technologies fill them with self-importance!! Choke at their mock solemnity, marvel at their loathsome hypocrisies as their instruments of destruction are propelled onto their malevolent trajectories!! "Come, Ye Masters of War. You That Hide Behind Walls, You That Hide Behind Desks. I Just Want You to Know I Can See Through Your Masks!!" These were the vitriolic words spat out to call them out by Lord Bob of Dylan...before motorcycling accidents and Visions of Johanna & Mortality prompted him to dabble in various world religions and, generally, go a bit rubbish!

Meantime, in our Disunited Kingdom, a lot of people won't get no supper tonight. Maybe we should remember when we hear about fuel poverty or food poverty or this n that poverty that these are just good old-fashioned POVERTY! Happening right now in what is supposed to be one of the most 'developed' countries in the world. And all this whilst the Fat Cats get fatter and the Big Shots get Bigger and the new Super-Rich Elites indulge their Soulless, Spiritless, Pointless and ultimately Meaningless Fetish for MORE! More Objects! More Commodities! More Trappings! More Belongings! More Depravities! More Debasements! More Degradations! More Social Decay!

The Trickle-Down School of Neoliberal Lies & Cack- Economic Deceits tells us it is these 'wealth generators' who make it possible for the rest of us to eat......without their get-up-and-go all economic activity would grind to a halt ; it is their entrepeneurial spirit that provides employment for the rest of us : and so we are consigned to stumble lost through their hard, remorseless financial deserts looking for a stream where something can 'trickle down' to the likes of us. We wander in search of our fatted calf.  We wait, cowed, for our Manna from Heaven, sops thrown down from on high as benefaction from our False Idols.  Modern day alms-giving from the New Gods of Greed. We wait, wide-eyed and covetous, to be showered in good things from  the shiny piñata dangled above our heads .......maybeez now is the time to remember that for the piñata to give up it's contents it has to be hit HARD with a stick!!

So, Pop-Pickers, in these Armagideon Times, we must

REMEMBER TO KICK IT OVER!!

TO HELL WITH POVERTY!

The Noggin, The Napper, The Nut.......& Magic Carpet Rides!!

We All Live Inside Our Head!....or, as Tommy Hall, the Soaring Psychedelic Evangelist of Houston's finest, The 13th Floor Elevators, put it, back in '66, "When You Finally Find Your Helpless Mind Is Trapped Inside Your Skin, You Want To Leave But You Believe You Won't Get Back Again." And it's true, ultimately, we do all live inside our head - there where the grey sludge oozes & the occipital lobe throbs, there where the synapses fire and the slobbering madman that is the libido Blabbers n Smokes!

 The Noggin, the Napper, the Nut ; this is where Reality is constructed. Sadly perhaps, cultural orthodoxies are loathe to leave us be and snipe at our heels incessantly like salivating dogs! There is, alas it seems, the tiresome business of actually dragging our sorry arse through the 'real world' around us regardless of what subjective paradigms we inhabit in the undulating folds of the cerebral cortex. Even if you are one of those blithe spirits who has soared angelic after ingesting LSD-25 and decided, like Roky Erickson, that you didn't 'ever want to come down,'' the 'real world' does seem to have the nasty habit of getting hold of you and kicking you hard in the seat o yir breeks!! I'm damn sure Roky can't have been best pleased with his time inside the Rusk State Hospital for the Criminally Insane! If you are one, such as Syd Barrett who has waved Auf Wiedersehen to 'Reality' and crawled into the Dust Bowl of your own Psyche after, say, protracted exposure to the T.H.C onslaught of the New Super Heavy Skunks developed by Stoned, Dutch Hydroponic Boffins, you will still find the 'real world' sticking it's nose in your business and insisting on pigeon-holing or pathologising you! Brian Wilson may very well have strolled down Golden Strands of Californian Sand beneath Shining Sapphire Skies inside his nut-box but to the rest of the world he was just a man with a sandpit in his living room who liked to butter his head and put it between two slices of toast!!  Julian 'can't' Cope got fried and Screaming Jay Hawkins could hear voices - when he wasn't impregnating enthusiastic female members of his fanbase - but they still had to exist, to a fashion at least, in a world of bank statements and out of date MOT certificates, council tax payments and putting the bins out on Wednesdays! Yes, it's all very well singing "Every Day Can Be A Magic Carpet Ride," whilst you're playing in jingly-jangly rock bands, smoking puff and banging hippy girls......but, cmon, if you live on the 18th floor of a crumbling 60's tower block just off the Paisley Road in Glasgow and yiv just had a letter fae the DWP informing you you've been sanctioned again, Ahm guessing the chances of you regarding life as a fantastical and enchanting excursion across the Heavens on a rug which can defy the Laws of Newtonian Gravity are slender to say the least!!

The S T o N e d h o L y b L o G G E r though, is contented that, no matter how ramshackle his affairs in the world of actually walking about with real spending money in his pocket, somewhere, deep in the inner workings of the Stoned Holy Brain Box where the gears & cogwheels grumble n grind, there is a  Land of Milk & Honey wherein he walks on Gilded Cobblestones along Paths of Glory where Gamine Dancing Girls in Diaphanous Drapery await at the roadside with Goblets of Frothing Ale & Sundry Comestible Delights, ready to bear him forth to Secluded & Languid Pools hung with Eglantines and Woodbine. Here, these Darling Creatures can Balm the Wearisome Traveller's  body and initiate the Seeker into Goaty Mysteries of Pan and his Dark & Ancient Woods!!

Meanwhile, back in the everyday realm where money and the people who take its tawdry illusions, venal hustlings & sordid corruptions seriously holds sway - where most of us are forced to spend most of the waking hours of our lives complying to its Conventions, Constructs & Codes - the world is overseen by boring, lifeless, pernicious, self-seeking little turds who play their stupid little games whilst telling the rest of us it's a 'serious' business they're engaged in. This World of Politics and Politicking is the ultimate revenge of the dweeby and nerdy little shits at school, who though academically gifted had no empathetic intelligence to utilise with regards to their relationships with their fellow human beings! Theirs is a world where tender & fragile souls, like Syd or Roky,  don't 'cut the mustard' and are left to flounder as the artistically bereft crack on with the money making business at hand,  exploiting their fellows and cocooning themselves in objects and things as their dehumanising fetish demands!! These are the people who have held us back since day one ; these are the people who populate the corridors of power ; these are the people who command armies ; these are the people who sit in boardrooms ; these are the people we are told to look up to and admire...Are these the people who are defined as 'Sane'?

I Reject! I Refute! I Refuse! Shine On You Crazy Diamonds...Ah'll see yiz aw next time.... 

Musings on February...and its superfluous letter R!!

February has blown itself out! Maybe it was angry at its inability to rid itself of that superfluous letter R it carries in its name!  Well it certainly Huffed n Puffed n Blew n Raged n A-Hey & A-Ho & Blew the Man Doon!....not quite in biblical proportions it has to be said, not quite 40 days n 40 nights but it certainly came doon! But all to no avail - For that pesky letter R is there still ; useless, abandoned....yet resolutely hangin' on!  Somewhat like the S t O n E D H o l Y B l o G G e r ! !

But here it is March and Ahv shaken myself loose of the jailhouse clutches of the Stoned Holy Duvet and lifted myself, like the dancing, icing sugar white Snowdrop, into the Bourgeoning, Tumescent, Sap Rising and Bracing airs of Springtime! Maybe, Punxsutawney Phil style, I'll quickly scamper back doon ma steaming burrow....but the important thing is, just like our Groundhog Necromancer, Ahv made it through another winter....and can feel the pulse quicken imperceptibly as the Stoned Holy Corpuscles throw off their Wintry torpor and deliver a rush of Righteously Indignant Red Blood Cells into the Stoned Holy Mainline!!! Yip, there's Grousin' n Grouchin to be done!! Lemme hear ya say Hell, Yeah!

Yes, I could, like the recidivist felon, sink back into familiar behavioural loops and in the manner of re-offending find myself thinking on every dreary year wasted, on this, my Tragical History Tour through livin', as being but another dreary tread towards the cold, loamy inevitability of the grave......but methinks not......leastways not today! Yes, I could ruminate further on my ongoing failure to prosper in this World of Fools, where Man's Inhumanity to Man never fails, on consideration, to dampen the spirits and point the way doon Desolation Row! For of course, our record regarding our fellow creatures is woeful - those fashioned from Space Dust and such matter as the Infinite Universe itself is comprised off, much as we are ourselves!! And if we were to broaden our ambit somewhat and include our 4-legged compatriots, who share with us this Cerulean Blue Space Bubble on which we all hurtle through the Unceasing Emptiness of all Creation, it won't be long before we must surely reach the conclusion that Humanosity is a Failed Genetic Dead End Street and the better it will be for Planet Earth for the bombs to drop swiftly and give the cockroaches n bugs a chance at doing something better!! And to think, there's some that think the Empathetic Impulse is hot-wired into us from birth!! Hmmmmm!

But today the Litany of Human Failures will trouble my tender, Stoned Holy Heart Shaped Box but little ; I shall gaze upon the lucent blue haze that girds our goodly Earth and think on snowdrops joyfully nodding neath the creaking boughs of Birch.......I shall glory in the green tips of wild garlic that soon will rise and festoon the banks of singing streams and dappled wooded lanes and fill the air with the juice of a vast army of stinking, pale green bulblets........and thence bluebells will come, profligate in their heady-scented sensuality........who could resist? Not I! I surrender!! Surely, does it not make you wonder, though : Why is there all this killing goin' on in the world when the bees are buzzing and the little birds are singing in the trees!!    

Why is there a Robert Burns Avenue in Cheltenham?

 

As the Blowings & Lashings of January continue to hurry themselves along tarmacadam streets and up and over the concrete ravines of the moribund metropolis, thoughts can be bleak. They can also wander lonely as clouds or trudge through muddy fields like the heavy boots of Ploughmen Poets!!

Or thoughts can, as in the case of the 

s T o N e d h O l y B l O g g E R - forever struggling to fill the yawning hours of idleness and distract myself from the ever present existential terror of simply being - become  mired in such burning topical issues as 'Why is there a Robert Burns Avenue in Cheltenham?   Looking tae fortify myself against both the Blasts O Winter and Philosophical Desolation, it is with a welcome sigh of relief that Ah get to use any excuse to reach for the whisky bottle and pull out the stopper...........So split that Warm & Reekin' Haggis open - it's Burns Night again!! When better to devote serious enquiry into the question just posited above!

Here at Stoned Holy HQ, it is our wont to forego all the 'Och aye, Jock McKay' and the 'Donald, Where's yir Troosers'   for a more down home doff o the Stoned Holy Bunnet when it comes to honouring the memory of Scotland's National Poet. We're pretty damn sure the Blessed Bard himself would appreciate this approach more than the Codified Pantomine played out in his name at the formal 'Burns Supper' and  its skirling of the pipes tae a large puddin' consisting o the heart, liver n lungs of a sheep packed intae the poor wee beastie's stomach as it makes it's way from the oven tae the table and then the groanin' trenchers of hungry chiels and coofs!!

It is also that time when we exhort all those within the Blogosphere to lift a glass to the Libertarian & Libertine Burns who we here assembled in Stoned Holy HQ salute as a Stoned Holy Roller of Yore!! We do so again, but briefly ; for this year, seeing as the
S T o N e d h o L y B L O g G e r  has spent a part of it promenading in his periwig doon the Regency boulevards of Cheltenham Spa in Gloucestershire, we thought  we'd shine a light on the little known connections between that particular toon and Burns and why there's a street named in his honour here, deep in the belly of the English beast some 250 miles over the Scottish Border.

Now, tae the best of my knowledge, Mr. R. Burns (late of Alloway, Ayrshire) tiptoed but once on English soil, briefly setting foot in England whilst on a tour of the Border country but he most definitely never tethered his Auld Grey Mare, Meg ootside any of the drinking emporiums of Cheltenham Spa, that's for sure. His sons however, William Nicol Burns & James Glencairn Burns (nae mare than snotty nosed bairns when their Auld Man breathed his last!), both retired tae Chelters after careers in the sub-continent with the East India Company (rising to the ranks o General and Lieutenant General respectively!). Fraternal bonds were obviously tight within the family for the brothers ended up seein oot their days living next door tae one another in 3 & 4 Berkley Street.

Willie died issue-less but Jimmy's loins were fertile.....though, it has to be noted, not as prodigously so as those of his poor, lamented Auld Yin!!).  His daughter Sarah (Burns' grand-daughter) emigrated tae Australia wi an Irishman, losing her 3 young children on the journey oot there. They were obviously made of sterner stuff in them days for her womb was fruitful once more in her new antipodean home. After the Irishman pegged it she returned tae her native shores with her youngest daughter Margaret in tow. Returning to take the spa waters and enjoy the refined promenading of Montpelier along with her sister Annie, the three ladies bided in with Uncle Willie in Berkley Street before decanting tae the urbane surroundings of
7 Pittville Lawn.  Sarah died in 1909, her daughter in 1917 and her sister in 1925. The three of them are buried together in St. Mary's Church, Charlton Kings. The S t O n e d h O L Y B l o g g e r went tae search for them.....and there they were ; nestled amongst auld sodgers whaed fought at Waterloo and the enterprising young men of Victorian Cheltenham who'd gone out tae India looking for careers within Empire but found nothing more than scarlet fever or malaria. Willie n Jimmy were more elusive however. Further online reading reveals they are interred in the 'Mausoleum' in Cheltenham but my inside sources are blowed if they know where this is!! Another time maybeez we'll track 'em doon.........

Well peoples, there yiz have it. The shortest peep at the connections between the Burns family and a toon in Gloucestershire....and why, the next time somebody asks you 'Why is there a Robert Burns Avenue in Cheltenham you'll be able to say 'pull up a pew n fire up a brew and Ah'll tell yi aw aboot it'!!......now, time for that whisky bottle ah mentioned earlier........

Here's tae Rob Burns and aw his issue and Old Long Since!!

& here's a wee linkie tae a photograph of Willie n Jimmy in all their stovepipe glory! 

Willie n Jimmy