It was the long hot summer of 1976 and I was four years old. On this particular day, my Uncle John (I didn’t know he was crazy back then) had let me play in his car, parked as it was by the kerb outside our house. With no key in the ignition I could sit there and pretend to drive for hours and the family knew just where I was.

I don’t know how long I’d been out there, but the kid who lived next door, Tommy McLaren, wandered over after spotting me in the car. Tommy was a few years older than me and he was really into cars – cars and The Fonz. He was a good kid – his parents were friends of the family by virtue of our houses sharing one big back garden. He always had time for me and I never felt threatened by him like I did with most of the other older boys around the estate.

He was cool too, I suppose, but then at that age I guess all older boys appeared to be cool because they had better toys and bigger bikes. That last part was a sore spot because, being four, my bike had a little red saddlebag and stabilisers. Back in those days the cool bike of choice was a Raleigh Chopper and they were much too big for me. Tommy had one of those – I was never really keen on them, but I could appreciate why they were cool – with a big red gear lever in the centre console and a fat rear tire, it looked like a man’s bike. His also had a CB ariel sticking out from the seat pillar – bikes didn’t come much cooler than that in the mid 70’s.

After I wrestled down the window, Tommy asked if he could play in the car with me. I was delighted, but the problem was he wanted to do the pretend driving. I told him that Uncle John had let me be in charge of the car and that although he could join me, he couldn’t drive it.

“If you let me drive, I’ll teach you how to ride your bike without stabilisers.” Tommy said.

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Last night I went to see the new Star Trek movie with my brother Andrew up at Clydebank cinema. After buying our tickets from a machine in the foyer, due to the tills being closed, we went curiously unchallenged from that point on. Even stopping to buy some popcorn and asking the guy who served us which screen the movie was on didn’t make him ask to see our tickets.

This was possibly because there were only about six people in there, including ourselves. They’d probably be happy with folk wandering in off the streets in the hope of making some cash from the treats and sweets. Personally I kind of liked it being a near private screening, with infuriating inconsiderate teenagers putting me off going to the cinema most of the time.

The movie itself was great, I thought. It could have been paced better in places, but still – as an attempt to reboot the franchise it was certainly successful in my eyes. It was well cast, visually stunning, and in well trodden territory as far as Trek lore goes, especially in using time travel as a plot device and in glossing over plot holes without a second thought.

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Today I left work in daylight for the first time this year. Okay, that’s a lie, actually, because on Sunday I left work before 2pm and it was daylight then. I’m not meant to be there on Sunday, though, so for me that doesn’t count.

Not only was this a proper working day, where I walked out of the office before dark, but I made the 17:40 train and it was fantastic strolling down the hill to the station with the sun still in the sky. It felt like spring was finally on the way, although this being Scotland it’ll probably be back to lashing hail by the weekend.

The seasonal affective disorder sufferer in me yearns for the clocks going back, with building excitement for the potential that summer holds due to the near endless possibilities for entertainment that the better weather brings. Tennis, skateboarding, cycling, throwing the ball around in the park – the kinds of things that are so free, fun, and made all the more so by sunny skies.

Since I’ve been working such ridiculous hours recently, I’m even more impatient for those warm summer months than I have been in years. The first two and a half months of 2009 have been a bit like bad Japanese porn – the good bits have been few and far between and kind of blurry when they did happen.

Fortunately, there are two weeks to go before the end of the gruelling project I’m on. When it’s all over, daylight saving time will have arrived and I’ll take a few days off to enjoy the extra hours of light and take comfort in the fact that summer will be well on the way.

This week has been the most gruelling test of endurance at work, and included the first time I’ve gone to work of a morning and worked until the afternoon of the following day in a good long time. I think I was working nights stacking shelves in Somerfield while at college the last time that happened.

That Wednesday morning ’til Thursday afternoon stint was tough, for sure, but the real killer has been the return of the stress related stomach cramps I’ve not suffered for the best part of a decade. It was July 1999, whilst working under ridiculous pressure at Radio Clyde, when I was diagnosed as having chronic stress. For almost a year I had been told by my regular doctor that I kept getting gastroentoritis from all the junk food I was eating.

Sounded pretty plausible to me, because I really was eating a lot of crap at the time.
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