Fame at Last

So, our article in the Daily Record came out today – a double page spread, under the headline ‘IN SICKNESS AND IN HEALTH IS A VOW AMBER HAS ALREADY TAKEN’. Hee! They used a picture that I’d thought looked OK at the time, but they cropped it, blew it up to massive proportions, flipped it round, greyscaled it, and also: photoshopped it to make me look like some madcrazy snaggletoothed troll – THE SWINES.

But that’s not the strangest thing. The strangest thing is this: EVERYONE IS LOOKING AT ME. Everyone. I mean, I’ve had my picture in the paper before. Hell, when I was a reporter I was in the paper every other week: receiving massive cheques from politicians, launching bonnie baby competitions, getting dressed up in the strip of the local football team so we could express our “support“… And you know what? I never really thought about it, partly because it was a local paper, so only local people would see the pictures, and partly because I have no idea why. Maybe I was crazy.

This paper, though, is a national red-top. It’s got a circulation of millions, and is probably the most widely-read daily newspaper in Scotland. Which is a bit…wow. I just keep thinking of all of those millions of people who have a picture of me and Terry in their houses today, who will have LOOKED AT ME, even if it was just while turning over the page and thinking, “Ewww, a snaggletoothed troll!”

And then I think about all of the pet litter trays we’ll be lining tomorrow and all of the bags of fish and chips we’ll be wrapping next week, and I think I may be trying to make some kind of point here – maybe on the transient nature of fame or something? – but I’ve only had one coffee today, so maybe y’all could just pretend you know what I’m talking about…

(Terry and I are currently looking after Terry’s mum’s parrot, Pepe. His cage is lined every day with newspapers. Now I keep imagining my face in a bin somewhere with a huge bird dropping on it. GOD.)

Anyway. The story was fine. We live in Edinburgh, now, apparently, and our visit to the Grand Canyon was “the trip of a lifetime!”, but hey, at least they didn’t mention my age. The one thing that does bother me is that they’ve said that Terry’s mum couldn’t donate a kidney because she was “considered too old at 63”. Now, that, my friends, is crap.

Terry’s mum wasn’t allowed to donate because during the final stage of testing, they discovered a problem with her heart which, although not serious enough to worry about, nevertheless made them not want to put her through such major surgery. They discovered this in the final stages of testing – they wouldn’t have bothered testing her at all if they thought she was too old. It’s a small point, I know, but I don’t like to think that people in their 60s might discount themselves as live donors after reading that.

Ah well. I guess if that was our 15 minutes, we’ve had it. Easy come, easy go…