Sit Yourself Down Weary Traveller, I Have A Tale To Tell...

This blog has a weird name. Many do, as a matter of fact, but this one seems near-unintelligible upon first glance. There are actually reasons for this, and I'm going to strain my fingers in an effort to enlighten you.

My name is Gavin, and my middle initials are N and A. GNA. Gna. And yes, I do have two middle names. It's not a sign of snootiness. I don't look down on people with just one, or indeed no, middle names. I'm not selfishly hoarding names from the International Naming Fund out of selfishness. This is flawed for a number of reasons:

1.) The International Naming Fund doesn't exist.

2.) Names aren't really a finite resource. Unless names were not allowed to be re-used... In which case we'd all have weird unique designations like GEFFO1995 and there'd be wars over who could be called normal names like Allan or Katie. What an interesting thought...

3.) My parents named me, so if you have to throw rocks at anybody, throw rocks at them.

4.) Also, they're the names of both my grandads, so I think it's justified.

But I digress.

The 'blag' part comes from my friend Andy, following this Facebook conversation regarding the ceiling of my flat, which had been recently leaking murky water quite horrifically:

Andy: "Oh, how is your flat? Is it alive?"

Me: "It's currently having surgery, but it's holding steady. The floor had dried up and the pipe wasn't leaking when I got back (from Christmas holiday) anyway."

Andy: "But there is a hole in your roof."

Me: "Currently, yes, but there are builders patching it up right now, trapping me in my room. Which is bad because I just came back from the gym and need a shower. Quite badly. As in, my overflowing bin is staring at me judgementally for stinking it out. So now I'm eating biscuits to pass the time."

Andy: " :L You should definitely have a blag of simple things like that."

Me: "A blag you say? A blag appeals. A blag. Hehe."

And so a simple typo brought about Gna's Blag, for better or worse.

I should include at this point a message directly to Andy: Yes, I did polish up our spelling, grammar, and punctuation from that conversation. It was bad. And this isn't Facebook any more, this blog has standards!

(Also, "simple things"!? Since when did I ever do things simply Andy, you know I always accidentally make life hard for myself! Sooo... if I deliberately make this hard for me, I'll accidentally make it easy... right? Right? Anyone?)

Onwards and upwards (Well, downwards really) to the purpose of Gna's Blag. Maybe at some point I'll draw up a Gna's Blag Declaration of Intent or something, but for now a brief run-down of what the heck is/has/will going/gone/go down on these humble pages will do quite nicely!

Gna's Blag is going to be a place for musings, ramblings, and hopefully generally entertaining anecdotes. It will be by-and-large light-hearted, but sometimes if there's something bigger on my mind, I'll try to express it in an engaging way which will hopefully act as food for thought.

I'm into history, politics, journalism and writing, but won't burden the blog with too much heavy histopolnalismiting, because I appreciate it's not all that thrilling all the time for everyone, and my inclusion of things like that in my facebook and twitter feeds left it with a bewildering multiple-personality disorder. This led to little or no boundary between the pat-your-shanties hilarity and the oh-god-those-poor-poor-people seriousness. I may include links to other sources or my own journalism at some point, but for the sake of Gna's Blag: it's gonnae be pure mental lyke!

(Confession #1: Despite my incredible Glaswegian typing skills there, I'm not actually a Weegie. I was actually born in the Vale of Leven, about ten or twenty miles out. I'm a fraud! I admit it now!)

Right, now that that's out of the way: the odyssey begins! I hope you enjoy the journey.

(This is me gazing wistfully at all the possibilities laid ahead. And also spying on the interesting characters emerging from the crisis centre I live above.)

UPDATE: Andy has since informed me that he apparently didn't use blag accidently. I think he's wrong. Nonetheless, here's a comic from xkcd proving how funny the word is. Enjoy!