Campbell MacKenzie Campbell

I have great difficulty absolving myself from the charge of pretentiousness. I do feel, however, that there are certain things I can allow myself without my glasses bothering my pudendal nerve. Some examples:

I can sense whether a book has been translated from French, Russian or Italian into English.
I know the names of the Muses.
I can tell you the story of Turandot.
I invented a story that has become accepted as true by tour guides in a certain European city.
I know the Greek alphabet.
I support Partick Thistle.

Now, any one of these statements might compel you to utter the "all familiar suggestion". And yet each is true. Well, I haven't tested the first one in a while. But it is the last that perhaps gives me most difficulty.

You see, I've met so many people who are Thistle fans (usually 'Partick' fans, actually) because they are not fans of the Pope's Own Rangers or the Crown Defenders of Celtic. These are usually Glaswegians with degrees, career prospects and a bizarre accent that is at the same time broad and syruppy with confidence. A mix that betrays the working class origins of their fathers and the middle class futures of their children. Imagine how James McFadden's kids will speak after 2 years at Gordonston.

I have a recurring nightmare in which I awake as usual, walk to our kitchen and make my wife a caffe latte from our Gaggia machine, stop to glance at the Guardian crossword from the night before and OH MY GOD IT'S HAPPENING AGAIN!!!

To provide a modicum of sanity and to halt this inevitable decline to smug snugness I have designated a part of my personality - an annex - to a character I call Campbell MacKenzie Campbell LLB. He represents everything I fear I could have become - and still might. He buys Art, he is in the Jags Trust, he watches foreign cinema. He likes to learn a bit of the language when he goes abroad. He goes to Pixies concerts and eats sushi.

I check everyday to see how close I am to Campbell. I see in him my destiny, a gradual loss of identity to a monological world that demands my indivduality.

I bet Campbell would keep a blog.