{"id":1655,"date":"2009-04-06T13:20:00","date_gmt":"2009-04-06T13:20:00","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/ink.verticalplus.co.uk\/archive\/?p=1655"},"modified":"2009-04-06T13:20:00","modified_gmt":"2009-04-06T13:20:00","slug":"jon-taits-looking-at-birthday-balloons","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/inksweatandtears.co.uk\/archive\/jon-taits-looking-at-birthday-balloons\/","title":{"rendered":"Jon Tait&#39;s looking at birthday balloons"},"content":{"rendered":"<p><font size=\"2\"><span style=\"font-weight: bold; font-family: Courier New,Courier,mono;\">Birthday Balloons<\/span><br style=\"font-family: Courier New,Courier,mono;\"><br style=\"font-family: Courier New,Courier,mono;\"><span style=\"font-family: Courier New,Courier,mono;\">The first time I saw this girl I once knew she was blowing up birthday balloons for her sister\u2019s surprise party in a fashionable bar all chrome and glass in a former bank building sat on a stool with a tall skinny tattooed Scotsman who was coming down off black microdots and twisted his face in disgust when I ordered a bottle of McEwan\u2019s Export <\/span><span style=\"font-style: italic; font-family: Courier New,Courier,mono;\">hell yeah<\/span><span style=\"font-family: Courier New,Courier,mono;\"> that brown liquid swirling into the schooner like a swollen river full of spawning salmon &amp; as I kept glancing over at her big blue eyes long lashes face freckled by the African sun and blonde bobbed hair &amp; our gaze finally locked I was struck by the thunderbolt of Sicilian legend so when she asked if we wanted to help I said <\/span><span style=\"font-style: italic; font-family: Courier New,Courier,mono;\">sure<\/span><span style=\"font-family: Courier New,Courier,mono;\"> &amp; didn\u2019t realise in those first awkward moments that our paths would become intrinsically linked for a while by her sister &amp; months later she\u2019d say that we were soul mates but then her star sign was Cancer &amp; she felt a certain empathy with a bum like me who saw beauty in the light bouncing off those red balloons the empty bottle with foam crawling slowly back down the slender neck the torn beer mats &amp; the lingering lonely fragrance of perfume on an empty pillow.<\/span><br style=\"font-family: Courier New,Courier,mono;\"><br style=\"font-family: Courier New,Courier,mono;\"><br style=\"font-family: Courier New,Courier,mono;\"><span style=\"font-family: Courier New,Courier,mono;\">* <\/span><\/font><font style=\"font-family: Courier New,Courier,mono;\" size=\"2\">Jon Tait is a former sportswriter and was the press officer at now defunct Gretna FC in the Scottish League.<\/font><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>Birthday BalloonsThe first time I saw this girl I once knew she was blowing up birthday balloons for her sister\u2019s surprise party in a fashionable bar all chrome and glass in a former bank building sat on a stool with a tall skinny tattooed Scotsman who was coming down off black microdots and twisted his [&hellip;]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_et_pb_use_builder":"","_et_pb_old_content":"","_et_gb_content_width":"","footnotes":""},"categories":[7],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-1655","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-prose-poetry"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/inksweatandtears.co.uk\/archive\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1655","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/inksweatandtears.co.uk\/archive\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/inksweatandtears.co.uk\/archive\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/inksweatandtears.co.uk\/archive\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/inksweatandtears.co.uk\/archive\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=1655"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/inksweatandtears.co.uk\/archive\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1655\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/inksweatandtears.co.uk\/archive\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=1655"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/inksweatandtears.co.uk\/archive\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=1655"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/inksweatandtears.co.uk\/archive\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=1655"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}