You may not know, or particularly care, but Begbie is an ancient and venerable Scottish name.

My lot were, according to family lore, first mentioned in 14th century court rolls (although we tend to gloss over the bit about stealing sheep).

They were in and about Haddington, just outside of Edinburgh, and didn’t wander too far off.

There was a rather nice Thomas Vernon Begbie who took haunting Victorian pictures of the Capital, that are still revered to this day.

Then there was Matthew Baillie Begbie, one of the more adventurous ones who became the Chief Justice of British Columbia in Canada in the 1850s. Okay, so he was called the Hanging Judge, but hey-ho, those were the days.

He was so famous, there’s a mountain named after him in BC. More to the point, today there’s a Mount Begbie Brewery at the foot of it (for some reason they won’t send me a T-shirt).

Anyway, back to the last century and Embra and one Isaac Begbie, a famed footballer who captained Hearts to the Scottish Cup twice and won four caps playing for Scotland (not in my gene line, clearly).

More up to date and today we have the acclaimed musician and theologian Jeremy Begbie, a star of Cambridge University’s Faculty of Music.

So, why trot you through all of this?

Because as of Friday it won’t matter a jot, not once T2: Trainspotting hits the cinema.

Nope, then it will be a return to the heady days of Begbie being synonymous with a psychopath.

Why thank you Robert Carlyle, Danny Boyle and Irvine Welsh.

I suffered this in the 90s after the first film went global.

Phone for a taxi and you got snorting laughter and “what, like Begbie fae Trainspotting.”

Book a restaurant and it was “we’d better hide the sharp knives then”, tee-hee.

Go to pick up tickets at the box office and it was “Begbie? You’re not going to stab me, are you?”

Actually, after the 10th time, I just might.

And here it comes again.

I blame Welsh, you know. I once asked him via Twitter where he got the name from.

At random out of an Edinburgh phone book, apparently.

There you have it, a capricious flick of a page and my family name is forever linked with a slash-happy, glassing, foul-mouthed thug.

So, this weekend I will choose a job, choose a career, choose a family … anything but choose to go to the cinema.

Could election be reason behind so many projects?

Wow, that’s some extensive list of potholes that are going to get fixed by the cooncil.

Hunners of them all across the city with a mahoosive £2 million investment

And, gosh, check out all the play parks they are looking at bringing up to scratch. There’s maybe as many as 17.

My word, there are so many new, affordable homes going to be built in the city, too.

Gosh, it’s enough to make you wonder what’s got into the powers-that-be.Like an election in May, perhaps?

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9UzpgF9NBNE

I’m sticking to good old days with my new TV gadget

You can’t turn around these days without someone waxing lyrical about their Kodi telly stick.

“You can get anything you want on it. Anything,” they enthuse about this TV and film streaming platform.

So, gadget boy here joined the Kodi club.

Right enough, various sites offer a dizzying array of stuff – including some dodgy things I won’t touch with a barge pole, like films only just in the cinema. The medium might be new, but piracy is still piracy and still wrong.

So, what did I end up watching when I could watch “anything”? Pilot episodes of Lost In Space, The Tomorrow People and Timeslip (Google ‘em, kids). Aye, you can update the tech, but not the tastes.