Vince Cable spankathon

The prominent news story regarding Vince Cable’s admission to two young women journalists posing as constituents, that he is declaring jihad on the dark overlord of all that is unholy, Rupert Murdoch, has had me weeping uncontrollably into my cereal even more than one might reasonable expect of someone who voted Lib Dem in the last election.

That’s not to say I’m holding it particularly against him. He reminds me far too much of the kind of cuddly grandfather figure you’d find in bad 80’s sitcoms for me to be able to muster any kind of vitriol towards him. And let’s not forget, whilst the previous Labour government were feasting on the gushing jugular of cash being created from thin air by the banks during the pre crisis days, this was a man who was predicting exactly what was going to happen. He called it, and that, in my opinion at least, gives him the fully earned right to strut into the middle of the house of commons and expose himself to each of the benches in turn, so a moment of indiscretion should be taken lightly.

Yes, the boasts about being able to bring down the government are cringeful and if he genuinely believes that then he needs to be institutionalised immediately. But this was a guy talking to two, supposedly admiring young women. If in that position there’s not a man on the planet who would be able to resist embellishing and flourishing the details of his power and influence. Put in the same situation I would probably have revealed myself to be single handedly bringing Africa off it knees whilst rescuing frightened puppies in my spare time. I’d have almost certainly gone on to nod in the direction of my crotch before stretching my arms apart in the manner of an exaggerating fisherman.

So it’s not the man himself that has me longing for a bottle of whisky, locked room and a shotgun. Nor is it the substance of what he said. A war against Rupert Murdoch and fierce, unending and if necessary self-sacrificing opposition to his unchecked poisoning of the world, like a syphilitic ape pissing in the village well, is exactly what is needed. In a time when the newspapers are essentially vehicles of expression for those with quantities of money so staggering that it’s frankly impolite, the plurality of the media and the opinions expressed within it needs to be protected as staunchly as possible. And to me this applies especially when the opinions splattered onto the world like a wet fart are as knuckle draggingly ignorant and physically nauseating as those espoused by the nasty, racist and hate filled organs of Rupert Murdoch (and naturally, The Daily Mail).

It is the fact that the sting operation against Cable, which appears to have so spectacularly backfired on the Telegraph, has led to the final say in the Ofcom investigation being handed to the grasping, sweaty hands of Tory culture secretary Jeremy Hunt (of hilariously mispronounced surname fame). C/Hunt’s links to BSkyB, his un-minuted meetings with them and expensive dinners are all documented in an article on the link below, and it will come as no surprise when the decision is called in favour Murdoch’s empire. http://www.guardian.co.uk/politics/2010/dec/22/conservative-links-murdoch-private-meeting?INTCMP=SRCH

This will be far from a death blow to British media, who should be proud of the independence and fair minded approach of institutions like the BBC (doubly so because they piss off The Daily Mail). But it will certainly be a step in the wrong direction whilst aiding an organisation that uses it’s might to push an intolerant and ignorant agenda.

Swiss robbery

Forget the theft of gold or precious artwork from Holocaust victims, the biggest crime Switzerland has ever committed is the robbery, with malice aforethought, of my public holidays.

This country, this allegedly advanced and developed nation, deems it a perfectly ok notion to prise from your grasping, desperate hands any public holiday that happens, through absolutely no fault of your own, to fall on a Saturday or Sunday. Makes the bile rise in the back of your throat doesn’t it?

So this Christmas for instance, has suddenly become a mundane normality, falling as it does, exactly slap bang over a weekend, something normally considered a right you’d think of as natural as oxygen. The only difference will be a slightly worse residual Monday hangover. And probably an even greater sense of weighty, crushing depression than is usual for a Monday morning, as you realise that yet another year of wishing whole weeks of your life away in desperate search of the next nourishing, healing weekend looms ahead of you. Merry Christmas!

In light of this, the next few days of holiday seem more valuable than the last nugget of crack to the crackiest of prostitutes. The fact it’s for a wedding is an even greater incentive. I’ve only been to one wedding of friends, and although a brutal reminder of how we are all doing adult things these days, along with buying houses, having babies or ‘not making jokes about paedophiles’, they seem to be great fun.

Wasting time in boobless hypnotherapy

Anyone with the slightest glimmer of a brain cell, literally only the faintest twitch of a barely functioning intellect can see through pseudo scientific fuckery like astrology without having to think much beyond the startlingly obvious fact that people clearly can’t be boxed solidly into 12 neat categories that determines to a very specific level their personalities. It is just one more checked box in a long, long list that in its entirety reduces my opinion of humankind to somewhere between that you’d have of a paedophilic rapist knowingly carrying AIDS and a fleck of feces caught under the foreskin of a war criminal.

How in 2010 can this be a functioning, profitable and popular enough industry to be represented daily in the many national newspapers? I’m sure that in most cases it’s not the case that the people keeping this going are unaware of the fact that people conceived on the same day don’t all share the exact same destiny from the moment they are born, an apparently obvious fact that should, if the general public weren’t for the most part a retarded tribe of rampaging chimps, bring the whole charade crashing spectacularly into oblivion. But it doesn’t. Because they are. I think instead that the majority of those profiting, directly or indirectly, are well aware of the fact it’s about as credible as a politician a week before a general election telling you that he will make your girlfriend’s tits bigger if he gets your vote.

Astrology you could argue is a relatively harmless past time compared with say, people who take money off the recently bereaved by claiming to be able to communicate with their dead loved one. Which is basically, in a roundabout way, like saying that breaking into someone's house and taking their money from their wallet is ok, because you could have done it after slicing their throats and raping their spouse in front of them as they bled to death. In my eyes, it’s basically still theft by fraud.

I’m writing this not just because I’m a deeply bitter and angry person who needs to vent on a blog like a socially inept teenager with a barely concealed psychological disorder, but because recently I went to have hypnotherapy. This, I hasten to add, was done to aid my second serious attempt to quit smoking, as opposed to help with something weird, like repressed memories of a violent sexual assault by my scout master when I was 15. For instance.

As well as thinking that it might help, and I was willing to try pretty much anything after the full brutality and suddenness of finally understanding that my will power is not so much a power as a feeble, fleeting thought process that is immediately and overwhelming crushed by my desire for instant gratification, I was also curious about the whole hypnotherapy gig. I thought it might be interesting.

It was not. It was intensely and utterly boring. I would have rather been watching an England friendly, it was that bad.

My immediate feelings weren’t actively discouraged by the fact that the hypnotherapist was a not unattractive woman. In the long run I’m not sure if this actively went some way to preventing my fully immersing myself in the experience, things were onto a downer as soon as I realised I would not be asked to slip into a deep hypnotic slumber by staring at the rhythmic jiggling of her massive sweater puppies. Instead I was expected to listen to her talk, slowly, in a thick German accent trying to tell me I was feeling sleepy and my eyes were feeling heavy. I wasn’t, and they weren’t, but I closed my eyes out of politeness. I literally conned her into thinking that my hundred pounds for her work wasn’t being wasted. Idiot.

Things continued like this for a while. I lay there and she told me to believe I was on a field. What sort of field I thought? Immediately I thought of a park where we used to play football when we were young. Our generation, along with those before and after us in the area have consistently referred to this place as ‘Dog Shit Park’ and a less relaxing environment you could not imagine. Be it the massive motorway running alongside it, the psychotic local hooligans that frequented its benches to smoke and drink cheap cider, or the frankly illogical amounts of excreted dog food that blended seamlessly into the mud and bare patches of brown grass, it is not the place that one would wish to lie in and slip into a state of sleep. You’d be mugged in a second.

At first I blamed myself for my inability to be succumbed by the power of her suggestion. God that sounds dirty doesn’t it? I thought I was doing it wrong, or that I was over analysing things in my head. It was only afterwards that I thought to read up a bit about the subject. Which, on reflection, is a bit like a man who’s never seen a bicycle, reading up about them after spending a lot of money on two tennis balls connected by a lollipop stick.

As it turns out, there is absolutely fuck all evidence that hypnotherapy actually works, and by evidence, I mean real evidence, as opposed to the kind of evidence that religious people use to convince themselves that a virgin woman gave birth after being convinced to eat a piece of fruit from a magical tree by a talking snake. It seems that what is going on, as far as can be determined, is a mixture of exactly what I was feeling, namely an unwillingness to offend the hypnotist by standing up and telling them that jack shit is happening and that clearly they are either abject failures at their professions or the industry they have dedicated their lives to is as valuable to society as a sugar pill, and what is called ‘the dodo effect’. This refers to the placebo element of someone believing in the power of the ‘treatment’ they are receiving along with the person delivering the ‘treatment’. Under these conditions you could, in all seriousness, have someone spanked with the corpse of a heron while reciting the script of the second series of Cheers and they would be more likely to recover from whatever mental illness was being worked on, than if they did nothing.

In short, how fucking weird are we?

Bestival 2010

Shitty weather, astronomically priced cider and fifty thousand people so fucked they can no longer think, this is what British festivals are all about. And so it was this year at the smugly named Bestival on the Isle of Wight. Presumably the locals are used to the annual invasion by now, but it must still come as something of a shock to the elderly residents, who’s quiet, quaint little island is brutalised like in the time of the Vikings.

The attendance this year was increased to fifty thousand from thirty five, which resulted in the camp site looking and feeling more like a refugee crisis zone than somewhere people have paid to stay. Space between tents was non existent so laying awake at night you would become intimately involved in the sketchy, bullshit conversations going on next door. It also meant that navigating your way through the mire of pegs and ropes was like a pissed version of the crystal maze. That I didn’t fall through one of the things onto someone and get accused of attempted rape was itself a miracle.

The music was great, but was probably secondary to the fact that we could legitimately wake up and immediately start getting hammered. The frantic intoxication added to the surreal nature of the whole event, with bikini wearing girls on stilts, giant robotic spiders spouting fire and thousands of strange costumes not helping. On the first morning on the way to the already hellish toilets I saw a midget in a clown costume vomiting onto a fence. I had to stop and think long and hard about what I was seeing.

The first day went as expected, with everyone getting too excited and over exerting ourselves a tad. By which I mean I entirely lost my grip on reality and failed to sleep. Returning to the tent in the early hours I attempted to join a circle of neighbours, but ended up staring at them in silence, occasionally blurting out something that had absolutely no relevance to the conversation. The next day, running on fumes, I had to take it fairly easy so stopped partying around 2am after a quiet day of comparatively minimal, but varied, narcotic abuse.

Best act of the festival, up against contenders like Dizzy Rascal, Hot Chip, The Prodigy, and Rolf Harris, were four blokes wearing cricket outfits doing covers with ukuleles.

After four days I was ready to go, having had about as much fun as is physically and chemically possible. With washing having consisted of a wet wipe, and having collecting grime, sweat and blood in serious quantities, the bath I took once home looked like the BP oil spill, but was a screaming relief after dancing in mud like a tit non stop for the majority of the time. It did take some time to adjust to using a proper toilet again though, instead of just pissing where ever I stood.

London, SW4

Once again the bank holiday weekend has chewed me up and spat me into an oblivion of regret. Landing back in London on the Friday, already carrying a hangover like a soldier carrying the bloody corpse of a best friend, I was immediately sucked into a lifestyle that whilst I miss with every fibre of my being, would have left me either dead or a pair of sunken eyeballs sitting defeatedly in amongst a vaguely human shaped mess of rotting, yellowing flesh years ago.

Comparing the drinking cultures of Londoners and the Swiss is like comparing a tennis shoe to an exclamation mark. If you put the two next to each other it wouldn’t be so much a case of unrecognition as it would be an inability to register each other, like alien worlds that develop a certain form of perception, they just wouldn’t even know the other was even there.

Working in London city, alcohol is treated with roughly the same importance as oxygen. There was a bar in the office and the beer was free. Thursdays are the office drinking days, regardless of family and other such irrelevances. On my first day in the office in Switzerland, in a local restaurant, I asked for a small glass of wine at my welcome lunch. I may as well have grabbed the waitress and raped her on the table, slapping her arse whilst screaming the national anthem for the reaction the request got.

South West Four festival was on Clapham Common over the weekend, and it reveals the drug culture of the place like a flare gun in a bat cave. Clapham is basically a place where university students go to die in their current form and grow up into the surface level, tenuously respectable grown ups we all fear we’ll become when in our teens. Suddenly though, at this time of the year, at around 11am every single late twenty something stumbles into local bars and inhales cocaine, booze and ecstasy with a ferocious enthusiasm. Every trip to the bar for another round of drinks means another two or three best friends, as people turn and ask if you are off to the festival, which your planet sized pupils and twitching, eager smile would have already revealed to every sober person on the planet. And then you fall into a conversation which concurrently covers both your upbringings and the last 5 years of life, before, a minute and a half later, the drinks arrive and you leave your new soul mate to return to the group, who will now be in a conversation a world away from the one that was being shoveled out when you volunteered the round.

The festival itself is an awesomely confusing mess of mud, filthy techno, fairground rides and non sensical chat. The hours go by as seconds, and before you know it it’s all over; and you are sitting in a near by pub talking with passion about the importance of chair legs.

School boy humour

Shut down the humour workshops, close the satire magazines and fire all the stand ups. The absolute pinnacle and utter zenith of all comedy has been reached and it happened last night when the global spotlight fell on a football team called Young Boys who play at a stadium called the Wankdorf.

The world will now surely be darker place from here on in. Sure, we'll still be able to see guys getting hit in the balls by their children on You've Been Framed, and we may even manage to raise the odd smirk at the sight of a monkey masturbating on an internet link your colleague has sent you, but at the back of all our minds we'll have the heavy resignation that sexual innuendo about pre-pubescent boys thrown into football commentary has now been done and will never be bettered.

I was lucky enough to attend the game, taking place near the Swiss capital of Berne, in a little place called Wankdorf, in the Wankdorf stadium. I knew Wankdorf existed of course, but have, for a reason that I cannot begin to understand, never actually visited Wankdorf. If you'd have told me I would one day live within two hours train journey of a place called Wankdorf, I would reply that surely if that were to be the case then I would have no choice but to actually move into Wankdorf itself. I would take fresh pictures of the train station sign everyday, and begin to send postal letters regularly just so I could sign each letter 'in case of non delivery, please return to Wankdorf'.

The game itself was a blur of talk about being tight at the back, playing with spunk and keeping clean sheets. Afterwards I collapsed, a deflated and exhausted wreck. I think the football was supposed to have been pretty decent too.

The point I think I'm making here, as the lithium starts to kick in, is that to laugh at such things is not necessarily an indication that you have a ready built Friztel cellar in which you keep a selection of boy scouts for each occasion. The British press, reporting on the game, were the worst of all offenders, with a lot of the headlines feasting on the opportunity like a bulimic after a particularly cutting insult. But perhaps most of all, it's comforting to know that so many others sense of humour has evidently also stopped developing around the same time they starting crapping in a toilet.

Apparently in some cases, now that I am growing old and embittered, such jokes are 'inappropriate'. I strongly suspect that I'm not the only person who sometimes feels like the have woken up a decade or so after school, in an adult world in which they don't truly belong. I can do my job ok, even occasionally without the sort of incompetence that could bring the company crashing into oblivion in a heartbeat, but I am sometimes struck by a belief that at any moment someone will come around the corner, drag me out of my office and tell me that the game is up, this job isn't for someone who still secretly laughs at his own farts.

It was a relief therefore to see that this game with the unfortunately named Swiss team, seemed to reveal a similar outlook in humour from most people. And if you don't agree? Well you can address your letter of complaint to Mr A. Hole, Around the Corner and Up my Bum Street.

Beer Festival: Facial Hair and Regrets

I write this the morning after the Great British Beer Festival and have a message for those people who seem to think that real ale doesn’t leave you with a hangover. I say to them, come take a deep smell of my overpowering body odour and nauseating breath, behold the dark, viscous urine I am liberally splattering over the toilet seat, admire my reddened, sunken eyes and renounce your views forthwith. The stuff may be a far more pleasant drink than your standard tinned piss that is a Fosters or Carling, but I could be told right now that I was drinking poison direct from the fangs of the world's deadliest snake and I would believe you without blinking.

I attended last night with half a mind on Oktoberfest, the world’s largest meeting of liver haters, which is only a few weeks away. It’s important to try and avoid injuries and this would be a good warm up session, a chance to loosen up the drinking arm and see if I can push on to a more beer festival acceptable C cup before the main event.

We have though been going to the British festival since we were 17, before the weight of the world and full time employment broke and raped our spirits before being acquitted in court of all charges. This is still the one annual event that has us feel that glimmer of childhood excitement, the kind you used to feel before a birthday or Christmas when you were allowed out of the cellar and the beatings would subside just long enough for you to fight the dog for spilt leftovers. Good times.

Most of the charm of the event stems from the startling eccentricity of it all. It slaps you in face from the moment you are greeted at the main entrance by an old man wearing a deer stalker and a handlebar moustache, screeching in an impossibly high pitch voice that people should not linger by the doors. This bat-shit madness is further apparent in the bizarre, invariably sexual names, given to the beers by all the ancient breweries in attendance. Old Scrotum, Titty McCockle, Old Stoat Wobbler etc etc. The strangeness of the beers is seconded only the by the strangeness of the people. For some reason all the oddest of the nuttiest mentalists are attracted, dragging their ponytailed, pot bellied, cloak wearing arses from every small village and wood cabin in the country. These are the sort of people who would normally be ostracised from mainstream society, chided for their morbid obesity and fondness for wearing 18th century clothing. At the British Beer Fest though, these men are kings. Some of the examples of facial hair you see leave you no choice but to stand up and applaud.

The auction is always one of the highlights, during which the organisers ruthlessly exploit the inebriated, highly excitable groups of men, who invariably end up bidding hundreds of pounds for a collection of dirty beer mats or a rusty tray. Last night for instance, I came away the briefly proud owner of one ticket to a tour of a brewery, to take place mid week at a place hundreds of miles from where I am going to be on the day. In a different country.

We left having sampled barely a fraction of the thousands of available beers. The worst of which was a 12% European ale which might as well have been a melted car tire poured into a glass. Which reminds me, I must go for another piss.

The unbearable lightness of idiots

The ability of people to believe things that are patently untrue, to convince themselves of a phenomenal degree of utter cod-shit, is second only to the continuing existence of gerkins as a popular food source in it’s ability to amaze me.

Christians will happily tell you that a Jewish zombie, born of a virgin mother, can offer eternal life and protection from evil forces. Evil forces that exist mind you, because a talking snake convinced a woman to eat an apple. Muslims believe that 72 virgin, and therefore most likely ugly, women are waiting to perform what would presumably be pretty amateurish blowjobs on them in the afterlife.

At least though, the lunacy of these ideas could be argued to be at least somewhat offset by the length of their existence. Kind of like the way I argue that the rapidly perishing boxer shorts I’ve had since college should not be thrown out. They’ve earned their right to exist through perseverance.

Some of the crap that is kicked about though, has no excuse to be raised beyond the level of credibility you’d offer to a drunk, schizophrenic tramp telling you he’s the Queen of the Nile and will raise an army of crocodiles against north Kent unless you give him 20p for a cup of tea.

Step up and take a bow Scientology. The fact that this circle jerk of retardation has become such a massive, and, most critically, rich organisation is more depressing than watching a 14 year mother buying beer with food stamps at 7am on a Sunday. If I were the clichéd alien visiting planet earth and discovered this, I would have no choice but to assume that the population was made up of one over whelming majority capable on no more basic reasoning skill than your average pot plant, being ruthlessly manipulated by a small elite of utterly evil bastards, bleeding the idiots of their money like the gushing jugular of a slaughtered pig.

You’d have thought that the fact it was created by a man, L Ron Hubbarb, who was most prominent for writing science fiction would have been an insurmountable hurdle to becoming a popular religion in itself. It’s like someone trying to sell you a laptop, and in the opening spiel telling you it was built by a person who doesn’t normally build computers, but instead paints pictures of toasters. And not very good ones by all accounts.

But of course being a science fiction writer doesn’t automatically preclude you from being the chosen vessel through which an all powerful creator decides to reveal his existence. You’d like to think that any profession wouldn’t shut the door entirely to that possibility, but you’d also have to credit God with a well developed sense of humour to choose the writer of fictional stories to spread the message. You’d have also thought that he’d have done at least a little bit of due diligence, which would probably have revealed that Hubbarb was an habitual fraudster, having lied about his supposed Native American upbringing, his qualification in nuclear physics, or lack of them, his war record and his use of drugs. Fuck it though, God must have thought, if this guy can’t convince Tom Cruise that 750 million years ago billions of people were brought to earth by space ship before being piled around volcanoes and killed with hydrogen bombs, then NOBODY can.

Anyone with the faintest twitch of an intellect knows that these bullshit institutions are all about money and the subjugation of people either so desperate to believe in an after life that they are prepared to ignore all rational thought, or too stupid to think for themselves. Optimism in the decent abilities and intentions of our fellow humans are all well and good, but that we are outnumbered by idiots should never be forgotten. The viewing figures for Britain’s Got Talent and Dancing on Ice terrify me more then any description of hell you could throw at me.

On an entirely separate note, here is a donkey paragliding. Obviously no-one this side of a ruthlessly cruel tyrant would approve of actually doing this to an animal, but I see it in much the same way as the horrific experiments the Nazi’s performed on people during the war. To not laugh at the sight of the donkey flying gracefully into the sky under the parachute, would be to say its suffering was for nothing. It’s what Eeyore would have wanted.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hEep5BrexT0

Sweating like a pregnant nun...

Summer has hit Zurich like a cop hits hippies at the May Day riots. With full force and near total approval of the general public. It seems to have been in or close to the 30's for a fortnight now, punctuated occasionally by storms of an intensity that I'd never seen in the UK. Storms in Zurich, rolling down off the goddamn Alps and streaming through the valley into town, are the abusive uncle of the storms you see in the UK, bigger, badder and capable of becoming violent without any warning, leaving you hiding under your bed, screaming that you couldn’t possibly take another beating.

Working by the lake has immediate benefits in that we’ve taken to spending our lunch breaks swimming, sunbathing and general frolicking in the ridiculously clear water, under the mountains, like idyllic Enid Blyton children before the advent of postmodern cynicism made such things seem homo-erotic and sinister. And now that I am engaged I’m happy to report that I no longer even notice the local college girls sunbathing topless. I swear to god they didn’t make tits that big when I was that young though. My guess is that when our generation reaches old age, we will talk less about how easy our grandkids have it with technology, what with their flying hover boards and automatic anus cleaning toilets, but instead will focus our bitterness on how our 16 year old Grandsons are dating girls with chests you could launch aircraft off.

There are some note worthy differences between the UK and Switzerland when it comes to summer and the weather in general. Most psychologically haunting is the eye-ball melting tendency of European men, in even the slightest bit of sunshine, to reach immediately for the Speedos, or in some cases that remain irrevocably damaging, thongs. Another thing I’ve noticed is that three days of sunshine doesn’t seem to constitute front page news over here. It’s not that the Swiss press won’t find other excuses to show hot girls in little clothing, like the English press does in instances of hot weather or the annual A-level results day, but they have clearly leapt to the outrageous conclusion that people do not need to be informed about how sunny it is when they could peel their wart-ridden arses off the sofa and take a look in the vague direction of the sky.

Perhaps the best element of the summer is being able to cycle into work, alongside the lake, laughing like a mad man all the way as I think of my friends struggling workwards as their faces are consumed by the sweaty flesh rolls of a fat man’s pungent armpit on the northern line of the tube. It’s a well known fact that it is illegal to transport cattle at the temperatures the London underground reaches on a hot day. Less known is the fact that the people who charge thousands and thousands of pounds for the right to use the abomination of a transport system, can’t blink or stand still for even a fraction of a second, for fear that the momentary pause would allow them to reflect on the inherent evilness of their existence and cause them to go instantly insane.

It’s not to say cycling into work is without its problems. Twice I have been stopped by the Swiss Gestapo as I peddled along, angelically making my way to the office. The first time I was committing the act of cycling in an area that was pedestrian only, but as it was entirely unmarked as such you were understood to know this as instinct, like a baby turtle heading to the water after hatching. The second time I was fined for running a red light. Technically I was bang to rights, but as it’s the second time I’m going to claim victimisation.

Indecent Proposal

I decided this week that I really don’t fancy receiving blow jobs in the long term, and so, approaching the situation in the most direct manner possible, proposed to the girlfriend.

Considering I’d just arrived back after a 17 hour flight, unshaven, barely coherent with tiredness and smelling like a loosely bowelled tramp, I wasn’t entirely convinced that I’d receive a positive response. I thought perhaps I should follow the traditional path when going through this and take her out to a good restaurant or a romantic location. I could surely stack the odds a little more in my favour by lacing the event with a degree of class, and perhaps her drink with some form of drug. As it turned out, I was too scared to hold onto the ring any longer without losing it and so dropped my bag of dirty travel clothes on the floor, got down on one knee and waited for her to come out of the loo. Perhaps I should have at least waited in the lounge, but I was easily able to blame the emotion of the occasion for my watering eyes, rather than the open toilet door.

Up there at the top of things you don’t want to hear when proposing to your girlfriend of 3 years, alongside ‘not with your face’ and ‘I’m fucking your Dad’, would be the word ‘no’. This was the first word out of her mouth. ’What in the name of fuck do you mean,”no”?’, I asked her, as calmly as I could manage – which was roughly as calmly as an aircraft passenger in a plummeting, burning plane would ask a flight attendant what exactly was happening.

Luckily by this point, it became clear from the fact she was crying, screaming and jumping up and down on the spot like someone caught on a powerful electric fence, that she had either said no out of shock or was having the most conveniently timed epileptic fit in the history of mankind. After a couple of firm back handed slaps to the face (we’re getting married, I can do that now right?) she calmed down and starting trying to asses how much I’d spent on the ring.

The next few days were spent trailing around various groups of friends and family, her basking in the rapturous attention and me explaining to disbelieving people just how much one diamond can apparently affect a girl’s reasoning skills.

The End of the World Cup...

The last week of the World Cup trip was dominated by an epic drive from Jo'burg to Port Elizabeth, via Durban. This brought home to us in no uncertain terms the sheer vastness of the country. Nothing will ever be as soul crushing as hearing our Sat Nav smugly tell us to turn right and go straight for 600 km. The initial stage to Durban was painless enough at a mere 6 hours drive, and the time flew as we appealed to our not so inner child, trying to find amusing street names in the map. Boner Street was a clear winner.

Once in Durban we spent the night with the family of one of Charlie's colleagues. The mother became my new personal hero in not allowing our beers to become less than even half full and bringing a continuous supply of dried meats and nuts to within our reach. The only down side of the overnight stay was drawing the short straw and having to share a bed with Tony. In damage limitation I insisted on going head to toe, from which point the others referred to as 69'ing. The experience of seeing this hairy fart machine closing the bedroom door, undressing and sliding into my bed isn't one I wish to dwell on. The spooning was adequate at best.

The journey the next morning was a solid 13 hours of pained misery. I get bored fairly easily, but during this period I transcended bordom to a hellish state of purgatory. I imagine it's a similar feeling that you hear about from people who are put into waking comas for decades, who end up creating minutely detailed novels and plays in their own heads. I didn't go that far but came up with at least a couple of exciting new sandwich ideas.

Once we finally arrived, staggering, unshaven and resembling pitiful, nomadic desert people, we headed to yet another steak house before collapsing. By this point I had eaten nothing but steak, chips and winegums for nearly two weeks and, feeling the onset of ricketts, begrudgingly ordered a vegetable side dish. Clearly this was not a frequent request, as the waitress had to actually go to ask what vegetables they served. As it turns out they were so pumped full of cream I might as well have ordered green ice cream with a side dish of heart failure.

The next day was the final England group game, where only a win would offer a boundry between embarassment and outright comedy. The fact that most people were not convinced we would walk the game, against an opposition that have existed as a country for the same length of time as most of my boxer shorts, should provide a good idea of the level of expectation. In the event, I got a little carried away by the weather and fact I could finally wear one of the several pair of shorts I'd brought, and may have slightly over imbibed in the insanely cheap local beer. Slightly, to the point I spent the first ten minutes unwittingly cheering for the wrong team.

The next morning, the victory in hand alongside a force 10 hangover, we made our way back to Jo'burg through the unending nothingness of South Africa's middle territory. Slight kinks in the road became noteworthy after hundreds and hundreds of straight, shitty road. It was after several hours of this when we came across something unbelievable. There, slap bang in the middle of an empty, massive desert, having gone for miles with no sight of another car, was a goddamn traffic jam of such proportions that people were out of their cars and wandering about. We got out to investigate and found that things were far worse than we had imagined. Rather than heavy traffic, the delay had been caused by the only road being closed down for repairs, in the middle of the world cup, in the middle of the day, 70 km back to the nearest town, which was about 20 km more than our remaining petrol would take us. We were going to die. After frantic requests for information we found out to near orgasmic relief that the closure was temporary and, we the lucky ones, had joined only 30 minutes towards the end of a 2 hour wait for those at the front of the queue. Life had been handed back us, colours were brighter etc.

The only other point of note for the entire journey were properly African towns in the middle of nowhere, of such undiluted shittiness that they made Aldershot look like a wonderland of ecstatic beauty, to be heralded as a pinnacle of human achievement in any and all fields throughout the epochs of time.

World Cup continued

One week into the trip and spending so long in cramped confinement with four guys is beginning to take it's toll.  The homo-erotic jokes have now moved beyond the territory in which they could be safely labelled ironic.  I am half expecting to walk into our room and find Tony ironically masturbating Paul.
Left without any females to try and impress, we have reverted to communicating primarily through the medium of farts, dick jokes and the giving of dead legs.  Our meals have consistently been formed of nothing but meat for breakfast, lunch and dinner.  Happily this seems to be the accepted practice in South Africa, where steak houses appear to exist in their millions.  Truly, this is God's own country.

Our hostel is fairly basic but acts as a good base.  It is run by a clearly mentally disturbed local woman who randomly bursts into song while in the middle of conversations and walks around with a permanent manic grin.  We keep the door to our room firmly locked at nights.

My research and preparations for the trip have proved somewhat flawed.  Apparently Africa gets very cold in the winter and I have been unable so far to fashion more appropriate protective clothing from the 7 pairs of shorts I packed alongside the t-shirts, flip flops, single pair of jeans and a light fleece.  The last 5 days of the first week barely got above  6 degrees and the jeans which I have not taken off at all so far are beginning to develop mushrooms.  This wasn't helped by a spectacular fall on the crumbling roads which left me with no skin on my left (thank god) hand and the knee of my jeans caked in blood.  Washing clothes has so far been impossible due to travelling and laziness, but I finally managed to find a clothes shop yesterday.  The choice was limited though and I now look like a 15 year old gangster.  

The games we've been to so far have been consistently awful.  Other than the England games we went to Denmark vs Holland at Soccer City, which is a great stadium but does resemble an aging turd when viewed from a distance.  On paper this should have been a great game.  In reality it was roughly as interesting as a long weekend in Milton Keynes with an eldery relative.  

We also continued following England, this time to Cape Town to see them against Algeria.  For anyone who doesn't know, Algeria have the same footballing pedigree as a washed up whale carcass and the badly needed victory was assured.  But, of course no, once again the pathetic shower of over paid, over praised and over rated fuck bags that make up the England team conspired to barely bother putting on their pink boots and prance their delicate little legs with any discernable energy at all.  It was the most pathetic performance I've seen from the team and that is ranked against a long list of possible contenders.  Having travelled so far and spent so much money, I felt positively raped and booed until my vocal chords bled.            

On a more postive note, we did the token African tourist thing and got up at some outrageous hour of the morning to go on Safari.  The first hour or so was spent with all eyes pinned to either side of the car in tense anticipation of what we would spot.  The first ten times or so we would stop and reverse to investigate what turned out to be a vaguely lion shaped rock, but after a while the animals started to oblige and we saw a decent variety. I had half expected, considering the amount we'd paid, to have the animals brought directly to the car and made to dance or juggle, but it was still a good day out.  The highlight was unquestionably the rotting corpse of hippo, of which we took more photos than anything else.  Our guide was legendary, both for his telescopic vision and habit of pulling over passing vechiles and telling the occupants with an immaculatly straight face that futher up the road a giraffe was eating a lion.    

World Cup - Day One

My expectations for the long journey to South Africa were low. These expectations were met and with enough change left over for a solid kick to the nuts. It started with a battle through rush hour on the tube, which is horrifying in the best of cases, but with a back pack the size and weight of a small planet it was an ordeal I shall be seeking counselling for.

When we arrived at Gatwick, gushing sweat and already exhausted, we were questioned by police, who were preventing the hooligan element from travelling. This seemed reassuring, but on further thought I wondered if other countries were going to the same lengths. If not, I suspected we could be left as the only viable punching bags for foreign firms. My plan in the event of violence is to cry and plead so much that any potential attacker will be too disgusted to hit me.

Trouble with the journey continued as Charlie's bag was incorrectly labelled as someone else's when checked in. Having discovered this and informed the airline just before boarding, the entire plane had to be unloaded, much to the vocalised annoyance of everyone but Charlie. We were told to watch the unloading from the boarding gate window and shout when we saw his brand new, unnecessarily expensive bag. Shout he most certainly did, as his bag sailed past the others being delicately unloaded by conveyor belt, having been thrown out of the open bay door of the plane, and smashed onto the concrete several meters below, tearing the solid metal handle and rendering it near impossible to carry around. As you would expect, we were nothing but sympathetic.

Once we'd picked ourselves off the ground and stopped laughing, were able to board and begin the 13 hour flight via Libya. On reflection, I have no idea how I survived the experience. I have resolved to never fly any airline that I can't pronounce again. First issue was that my monitor wasn't working. To be fair they were quick to reboot all the screens, which as well as fixing mine, broke Charlie's previously working one. Excellent. To compound his misery, Charlie was next to a heavily snoring man who was inexplicably wearing two pairs of trousers and a watch the size of a hubcap. It was only when the turbulance started in earnest that I understood the need for the extra trousers.

Getting off the plane in Libya was like stepping face first into the flame of a blowtorch. I've never experienced a wind factor that actually increases the heat. Security in the airport was clearly taken seriously as we were all carefully ushered through a metal detector that was quite obviously turned off. So by the time we boarded the second plane several hours later, we were emitting visible stink lines as the sweat began to ferment in our clothes. I verbalised the possibility of shitting ourselves in an effort to improve the smell.

The second leg of the journey was no better than the first. The food would have been an insult to vermin, the service would have been considered too abrupt for Auschwitz, but worst by far was the utter lack of alcohol. We assumed the airline must have been Islamic, and this was confirmed as the already terrible films available were further worsened by the electronic blurring of any on screen cleavage. It's amazing just how crap you truly see a film for when no longer distracted by Megan Fox's jiggling tits.

I can never sleep on planes but none the less tried fooling my body with a neck pillow and blindfold. My body was having none of it though, insisting it wasn't going to play ball in the best of conditions, so certainly not while sober. After a while though I felt myself lolling into a state that while not sleep, at least had it comfortably on the horizon and in which I could happily drift along. Then BOOM, the lights went on full blast like a punch in the face. My instinctive thought was some form of emergency. It's 2am, we aren't due to land for 3 hours, there must be something wrong with the aircraft, fuck I'm going to die and I've not even made it to the World Cup. I've not made enough of a mark on humanity to die, I'm too young, by god, I still have that expensive Cuban cigar I've not smoked, this is unfair on so many levels.

The emergency, as it turns out, was a choice of luke warm soft drinks. Because who doesn't like to be woken with a spot light at 2am for a nice warm pepsi?

Finally arriving in the very early hours we were met by a country poised to ease the mechanics of the world's greatest competition and the administration of the hundreds of thousands of visiting fans. Namely, power cuts, broken ticket dispensing machines and a two hour wait for the hire car. When we finally got sorted and arrived at the hostel we were near comatosed and nobody had spoken or looked at each other for hours. Only a total lack of energy prevented the tangible hatred from spilling into a fist fight. Even better, we could afford only a two hour sleep before we had to climb back into the car and drive two and a half hours to the first game.

Best not discuss the game itself, but the atmosphere and stadium were incredible in the cool South African evening. Unfortunately, any positives were quickly forgotten as any organisation or preparation from the authorities in aiding the 45,000fans to escape the small city utterly failed to materialise. It took 6 hours to get to the car and drive back, by which point we'd had 2 hours sleep in as many days and were, to put it mildly, fucking furious. This will only get better...

Bachelorhood

It is now one week since the girlfriend was ordered back to London for three months, at the fleeting whim of one of the overlords at the corporate empire for which she works. No doubt her work there will be a role in some appalling plot to extract every last bit of profit from innocent, impoverished locals, probably in the most cartoonishly evil manner possible. Churning orphans into puppy food and then poisoning it or something.

“I don’t work in that area of the company”, she’ll say which sounds like something you’d hear at the Nuremburg trials doesn’t it? “I only drive the trains”.

At first, although hysterical with grief and certain that my heart would burst with longing (she reads this), I’ll admit to a degree of thought that living as a bachelor for three months would not be entirely a bad thing.

I could avoid the nightly torture that is being made to watch Eastenders. Watching this shit-fest since I’ve met her has been a steady drain on my already limited faith in humanity. I’ve found myself starting to nod in thoughtful agreement when I hear about high fatality disasters on the news.

I could have the flat looking how I want. Namely: untouched by human hands in either attempt to decorate or clean. I am far tidier than I used to be, a fact which uniformly horrifies anyone who has seen my office, bedroom or general appearance. The fact that I used to be worse is normally taken as a sign that I once lived in a permanent state of dirty protest. Despite this, my enhanced domestication under her guidance has only reached a certain level. I still fail to understand the need to clean a towel more than once a fortnight. She, on the other hand, would prefer to burn them after use and buy new, whiter, fluffier ones. I still find fabric softener a pointless luxury. I still feel uneasy when everything is bare and ordered. And I still hate fucking Eastenders.

So although I was going to miss her, I wasn’t appalled at the idea of being able to come home from work, strip immediately to my pants, eat something so lacking in basic nutrition that it might as well be a building material and splat into the arse shaped groove on the sofa, not to move until I wake the following day, late for work and caked in my own filth.

It seems though, incredibly, that after several days of this, certain draw backs develop which I don’t remember from my glorious days of bachelorhood. It seems I may have grown accustomed to the benefits of having a feminine touch around the place.

Food for instance. Forgot that doesn’t actually materialise in the fridge. It’s been a week and I’ve already licked all available moss and weeds off of the patio. I tried cooking a couple of days ago but…well it doesn’t matter. This cleaning of clothes business as well. It’s a good job I’m on holiday next week as work were starting to disapprove of my potato sack with plastic co-op bag for shoes ensemble.

And remember the toilet scene from Trainspotting? That’s what the kitchen looks like. I no longer approach the sink unarmed.

In short, I will most likely have returned entirely to nature by the end of the three months. I will be communicating with wild animals, competing for scavenged bin food with stray cats and defacating in the corners of rooms. They will have to reintroduce me into society like that feral boy they found in India who had been raised by wolves.

Growing old with 'dignity'

People over the age of 40 currently have a monopoly over the right to bitch about getting older. In my self-righteous, bleating opinion, this is an injustice which needs to be corrected. I often complain about the vast swathes of previously unexposed forehead that now prominently mocks me every time I look in the mirror, the noticeably longer time it takes to recover after pathetically brief periods of exercise and, most acutely, the fact that hangovers now have a habit of lingering like a particularly disliked party guest for days at a stretch. But voice these grievances to someone over 40, for instance my grandmother, and they will spit in your face, tell you that you can’t possibly complain about aging before you’ve even hit thirty and order you to go get them a fresh bottle of gin from the corner shop.

This doesn’t seem right to me. Surely the beginning of the path from our toned, sexually insatiable peak towards incontinence, senility and death is the most painful? Ok, those first few hairs left in the comb might be met with overconfidence, but when you first realise that there is a very definite, lonely island of hair forming, it’s a defining moment that has you crunched in the foetal position, crying hysterically, smashing mirrors and screaming at people not to look at you. So I’ve been told.

Similarly, it is the first realisation that the morning after a game of squash you can no longer walk without looking like a man who has had an erotic experience with a horse that hurts the most. By the time you reach your later years you should long have come to acknowledge and accept this. My point, if there is one in amongst this drivel, is that it’s the proximity to the prime you are moving away from which intensifies the snivelling, bed-soiling grief. I should therefore be well within my rights to complain loudly and continuously next week on my birthday, about how I can no longer eat what I want without ballooning into a morbidly obese freak and how I’m older than far too many professional sportsmen. I suspect this will make for an excellent evening for everyone I’m with.

Along with the imminent approach of the next annual milestone to my death, I was reminded of this subject by the fact that midweek I had considered something that had happened in the year 2000 and had instinctively thought of it as being not so long ago. It was only after a worryingly long period of further reflection that I realised this was ten bloody years ago. A decade. How the fuck did that happen? The only logical conclusion is that I’ve been in a coma for at least 6 years and nobody has gotten around to telling me yet.

Gaddafi could win England the world cup

In three weeks time I’ll be on my way to South Africa, where, according to a thousand news reports and gleeful warnings from family and friends, I can expect to be mugged, stabbed, shot and most likely raped within moments of setting foot off the plane. My Dad is clear in his mind that I have no chance of surviving the trip and has not been shy about gravely informing me of my imminent demise. That said, this is the same man who believes that anywhere further than the boundaries of Chichester is some form of post apocalyptic, lawless waste land. Mad Max was a documentary about Guildford in his eyes.

Normally I invest far too much hope and emotion in the England team prior to major tournaments. This has, without fail, been paid back only in crushing disappointment and vehement anger as the latest shower of wasters to wear the England shirt break the spinal column of my hopes and piss over the twitching corpse of my dreams. This time, conscious of prior heartbreak and certain that my physical presence will serve as a poisonous curse, I am solidly expecting nothing but miserable failure. It’s not that I am superstitious. People that genuinely believe in the factor of luck are clearly in the same league as Voodoo shaman, Scientologists and Christians. I just think England are far more crap than I generally believe they are when we start approaching a tournament and I want to set the bar low.

Another factor which adds to the bizarre sense of ominous foreboding that, now I think about it, I wouldn’t normally associate with two weeks paid holiday, is the fact I’m stopping in Libya. Nothing personal against the place, despite the instant connection you’d make with planes falling out of the sky onto Scottish villages, but there is a currently a raging diplomatic bitch fight ongoing between Libya and my country of residence. To sum up the situation, the son of Colonel Gaddafi, the esteemed, self titled leader of Libya and his charming wife, beat seven shades of shit out of a couple of staff in a luxury Swiss hotel. The two were arrested and held, before, as is obligatory for rich and famous people in such situations, all charges were dropped and they were released. Gaddafi, acting with commendable restraint and dignity, then responded by withdrawing billions of assets from Swiss banks, cancelled flights between the countries, had Swiss people in Libya arrested for no reason, shut down Swiss subsidiaries and, as a final, totally understandably flourish, called for Islam to declare a jihad on Switzerland and it’s residents. I shall therefore, in all likelihood, not be wearing my I ♥ Zurich t-shirt during the lay over

...unless of course you believe in fate, luck and the inevitable failure of any team I support in a tournament I am attending. In which case I will happily hand around a petition in the streets of Tripoli, calling for Gaddafi's son to be expedited, whilst eating Toblerones, yodelling and performing any other manner of offensive stereotype you can think of. That should do the trick.

Robin Hood

Spoiler alert. If you have not watched the latest version of Robin Hood I am about to reveal a central and key point of the film. It is a reeking pile of fecal matter. Had I not needed to use the cinema’s toilet, the entire affair would have been a gratuitous waste of time that I’d have still been lamenting on my death bed.

The first words Russell Crowe spoke as Robin Hood genuinely made me laugh loudly from my seat at the back of the cinema. His take on the midlands accent makes him sound like a mixture of Sean Bean with throat cancer and a broken food disposal unit.

There’s really no redeemable feature to be found anywhere. The plot is a fresh take on the story, but only in the way that dropping a bag of saucepans is a fresh take on a Mozart piano concerto. The new angle serves only to provide an agonisingly slower plot route which bypasses most opportunities to provide some form of relief in the form of brutal battle scenes. Those that survive are almost spoof like in the way they disappoint, with slow motion screamed ‘noooooo’s’ producing troubling volumes of spittle and dissatisfyingly little blood.

Asides from a comically bad plot, poor acting and terrible direction, the editing stands out as a monument to awfulness, having been performed, it appears, by an autistic chimp with a chainsaw. Characters appear at seemingly random points in equally random places and previously unmentioned points take on sudden significance, leaving you with the impression that someone has sat on the remote.

All in all, I would recommend that you avoid the biting frustration I felt at having wasted two hours of my precious weekend, and do something more likely to offer a satisfying evening, like pouring lemon juice into open wounds.

Amsterdam

Amsterdam is a strange place. Part of my weekend was spent there, in a cloudy haze from which, two days later, I am yet to fully emerge. Dispatching forward planning and foresight with contemptful disdain, I was left a week before the trip with the option of remortgaging or taking a 9 hour train journey. Not having a mortgage, I went with the train. It shouldn’t have been that bad as in a masterstroke of adaptability that would have shamed the bastard love child of Ray Mears and Bear Grylls, I loaded up the laptop with films and programmes and prepared to nest myself in for the journey. Which would have been fine, had I not forgotten the goddamn train was European and the goddamn laptop has a goddamn Swiss power cable. What’s the point really? One additional little prong was standing between me and 9 hours being pleasantly tucked into my carriage, watching films and being brought tea. Now I faced 9 hours of looking out of the window and waiting until I needed to go to the loo again to break the monotony. I hated that prong. The prong was worse than any Nazi peadophile at that moment. In my mind I tried playing out all the political explanations which have kept the Swiss from joining the EU and thus adapting to the uniform plug socket convention, so that I could nurture and dwell on the hate, but realised I knew nothing of the subject so instead looked at my watch, which indicated it was midday, and resignedly headed for the train’s bar.

Once I arrived and joined up with an assorted group of reprobates and degenerates the rest of the weekend took a predictable turn. Perhaps the most interesting point to be made is the astounding difference between a weekend spent drinking and one spent smoking heroic quantities of cannabis and, as a direct result, treating alcohol with the well earned suspicion and caution that 3 years of university ensured I was aware it deserved at that point. I woke after the first night having slept like a corpse, as fresh as a heavily drugged daisy. The rest of the time was spent wandering from one coffee shop to the next, with a wait of at least a few minutes at each junction or cross road as we stood, utterly confounded by this sudden choice in directions, in a futile wait for someone in the group to make a decision on everyone’s behalf. The fact that much of Amsterdam looks the same, combined with the availability of high grade concentrated weed makes the place a perfect storm for getting lost and we ended up covering every inch of the city.

One of the highlights of the apartment we stayed in, other than the proximity to a store full of crisps, cakes and other munchies, was the guest book in which hundreds of the previous guests had left messages. These messages perfectly illustrated the vast spectrum of madness, brilliance and retardedness of people in general, but especially after a weekend in the Dutch capital. I have copied some highlights below:

The philosophers:




This made me sit down and ponder the question for half an hour, before being distracted for the subsequent 45 minutes by a small crack in the ceiling.

The jokers



In case you can't tell, that yellow area which the reader is being encouarged to lick is some form of powder stuck to the page. There is a good chance that this was a small quantity of MDMA or similar drug, but a better chance that at least one person had subsequently rubbed their penis over the area.

The group of 'lads'





I have never been more certain about anything. Whoever wrote this buys Zoo and / or Nuts magazines on a regular basis.

The artist



Smoking, bearded, semi-robot man. You have to love the Finnish.

Sick sick sick

Just as I suspected, spending 8 hours sealed into an aircraft with hundreds of others people’s germs, farts and opinions does you absolutely no good. I am now spewing bile like a high pressure hose from my nose, mouth, ears and tear ducts. I’ve spent the last two days slouched like a paraplegic on the sofa begging to be euthanised in the quickest manner available. Each passing moment feels like I’m being orally raped with a sandpaper covered chainsaw.

To add an additional layer of cack to this shit sandwich, the universal law of chance has bummed me once more by requiring me to fly again tomorrow morning, with no chance of reprieve. At some unearthly hour of the morning I must drag myself to the airport, no doubt leaving a slug like trail of mucus behind me as I go. This time I’m destined for Mumbai, home to the Gateway to India, the famous Juhu beach and one of the highest cholera rates in the world. I was there in January and spent roughly 98% of the time stuck in traffic, the sheer volume of which seemed to be the only thing keeping anyone in a vehicle alive. At any moment when actual movement was possible, at least ten motorbikes, cars or motorised vegetable trays would make a suicidal leap for the available space. Traffic lights, road signs and other desperate measures to control drivers were openly mocked.

What struck me most about Mumbai though was the sheer, ball shrinking poverty. You could absolutely be forgiven for assuming that the national sport is lying by the side of the road and starving to death. They could challenge anyone at this, the kids there are all into it.

Anyway, back to my problems. The hideousness of this 9 hour journey by itself is enough to turn the stomach, but combine it with the chronic sickness I’m so cowardly suffering through and I can genuinely not trust myself to repeatedly crush my head between the back of the seat and the dinner tray until either unconsciousness or death. The only option was to go to the doctors, something I normally avoid at all costs, fearing both mandated man on man touching and the potential for having my allotted whining time cut short with medicine.

So this was my first trip to a doctor in Switzerland and it turned out to be a productive one. I had forgotten of course, that over here everything is paid for by the insurance companies, so it is within the interests of the people treating you to offer as much treatment as possible.

The blood test for a throat infection seemed over the top, but I was instantly appeased when he began to fill out the prescription form for drug after drug after sweet, pain relieving drug. I decided to push my luck.


“Did I mention I’m taking a long flight tomorrow?”, I nonchalantly enquired.

“Oh really, Herr Cook?”.

“Yes, and I am just terrified of flying. I think I might need a little something to, err, help me 'relax'”.

I didn’t go so far as to use air commas but I reckon I definitely could have gotten away with it.

“Well why didn’t you say so Sir. I’ll go get you the good shit”.


So tomorrow I shall be blissfully flying in more than one sense on my way to Asia, no doubt sensing profound messages being conveyed by whatever shitty chick flick they are showing and asking overly personal questions to the poor bastard who has to sit next to me.

American wet dream

I write this from a business park in the mid-south of America, having achieved a long held ambition in defeating an erupting volcano. I’m not getting too cocky though as it might yet trip me up on the return leg, the horrific consequences of which would be a weekend in New York paid for by my company. Those African kids just don’t know what they are bitching about.

I arrived in the States last Friday, with the intention of being looked after by a group that are friends of a friend. I wasn’t sure what to expect, not having travelled here since a trip to Disneyland when I was kid, my most prevailing memory of which is agonising crotch chaffing after a day spent running around in wet shorts at a water park. I had no expectations in so far as what this group would be like, but from my vast experience of American sit-coms I thought there was certain to be witty jibes, whacky misadventures culminating in a moral life lesson, and at least one member of the group would be semi-retarded.

What I got, as I walked into their flat at around 10.30am, was the sound of one girl vomiting in the bathroom, and a beer cheerfully offered to me by a hung-over Australian with visible teeth marks on his shoulder. I knew at this moment that these were my kind of people.

The rest of the day was spent visiting museums, going to various tourist spots and seeing some splendid examples American architecture. No, just kidding, we went to a load of bars and got wasted. Of the blurred memories that have stuck to me, I recall on several occasions breaking the promise to myself to not discuss politics, aware as I was of the deep dividing lines over here, and the fact that the standard punch I’d receive in Europe would most likely be upgraded to a bullet in the face. I can however report that Republicans, as I have witnessed them, do not all have hideously oversized foreheads, nor do they seem to feast on the children of brown people while reciting Nazi literature. That said, I’ve only been here a few days.

The group holding my hand through the NY experience were all fantastically open and friendly. There are Swiss people I’ve known for two years whose marital status I have no idea about. Within literally minutes of being introduced to the Americans I was aware of the fact that one of them is currently seeking via the internet a small slave boy for the purposes of sadomasochistic domination.

Anyway, I was extremely sorry to leave New York to head to my office in Princeton. Not nearly as sorry, however, as the driver of the car who picked me up on Sunday morning and had to scrape me into the back of car, a quivering mess on the precipice of a vomit session which would have filled his massive SUV to the brink.

Election madness

Like a Dickensian nightmare on acid, any trip to High Wycombe is one to be endured, suffered and squirmed through until the agony subsides in the form of a taxi journey sped by screamed encouragement at the driver. Shopping trolleys in canals is an urban cliché, but there they’ve made it a trademark. Unfortunately it’s where my UK office is based so occasionally I’m forced to visit it, with all the enthusiasm of a teenager breaking from a weekend of masturbation and Xbox to return to a particularly strict military school.

This was the last of my trips in the UK and it was with some relief that I landed back in Zurich, met as ever by the cold, dead eyes of the immigration official. In the UK at least they show a degree of hopeful enthusiasm that they might get to turn away some desperate asylum seeker fleeing certain death, break up a family or two or even better, witness the armed police riddle the skull of a terrorist with blunt ammunition. I get the impression that I could walk up to their Swiss equivalents with frankfurters strapped round my waist, dripping blood from a freshly cut palm onto a copy of the Koran and they wouldn’t give one solitary shit. Still, at least you get out quickly.

I was glad to be back in the UK while the election was announced. It reminded me what a horrible time all those people left behind are in for until May 6th. I’m not politically apathetic, but the squealed posturing and vacant, half begged promises are enough to make you want to vomit up your own lungs. Prime Minister’s questions, the weekly event in the House of Commons where the parties are supposed to discuss matters of importance to the country, are normally akin to a rowdy inner city school on the last day of term, but the nearer you get to an election the more they start to bear a startling resemblance to the gang rapes you see performed by packs of chimps on nature programmes. It would not surprise me if we eventually see the leader of the opposition start openly defecating and smearing his bare chest while the Prime Minister stands on the benches screaming encouragement for his party to set fire to the Houses of Parliament and attack with their teeth and hands all who stand in their way.

Of course whenever you have the degree of tribalism that you find in politics, things are going to get ugly at points, but it’s the childish, snideyness that will eventually drive me to walking into a voting booth and publicly using my vote as a suppository. At the last break of parliament, after the date of the election had been announced, there were hundreds of shouts of ‘goodbye’, said in a mocked threat that was supposed to suggest the other side had no chance of winning (which they don’t, but it’s not really the point). They probably followed this with giggles and shrill screams of delight as they skipped back to their playgrounds. These are the people who are supposed to lead and shape the country, the social elite. They act like a bunch of hyperactive schoolboys with severe learning disabilities.

I prefer the Australian parliament, where it is not uncommon to hear things like:

“He’s a Grade A arsehole”
“Fucking animals”
“He will be lucky to get a job cleaning shithouses if I ever become Prime Minister.”

I’m not making this up, these are actual quotes.

http://www.ausculture.com/2004/08/30/paul_j_keatings/

This is after all, from a country whose current Prime Minister got caught going into a strip club, and his approval rating went up. Now that’s the sort of politics I want to be involved with.

Barbarous

The experience of going to a hairdressers is normally an uncomfortable one, the event is so unbearably intimate that you feel you almost have to speak to them, much like, say, visiting a cancer patient, or a prostitute perhaps.

Eventually though, when I grow sick enough of people offering me spare change and church goers trying to take me in, I will relent and prepare to visit one of the ghastly places of inane, pointless chat about holidays and weekends. Such, unfortunately, was the case today.

Taking a seat in one of those surprisingly comfortable swivel chairs, I made a note of a) the possibility of trying to drag it out of the door unnoticed and b) the throngs of stunningly attractive hairdressers that filled the place. Things were looking up. Luckily I had the protective cover sheet hanging down to my knees already.

So, waiting with the giddy anticipation of a man in need of a transplant witnessing a multiple pile-up, my heart plummeted to my shoes to see a thunderous land-beast chaffing her rolling thighs in a wheezing effort to reach me. Like the scene from Jurassic Park, the bottles of mousse and hair gel rippled in uneasy anticipation of her arrival. Looking back, the safest thing to do would have been to run screaming immediately, but it was too late as she hacked up a phlegmy cough into her arm and rasped, “what’ll it be then love”, in a voice deeper than Brian Blessed could ever hope for.

Smile frozen to my face with a fear tinged with traces of morbid fascination, I gently thrusted a twenty pound note at her and whispered, “err, one haircut please..……love”.

I could see I’d cocked up the etiquette of proceedings immediately from the look on face, which gave the very distinct impression that I’d just asked if I could mutilate her first born for some sort of corporate event.

“How Do You Want Your Hair Cut?” was the reply, said in the manner one might speak to a particularly despised and disabled step child. And it was at this moment I realised, ‘Shit! I’m back in the UK!’. Where service providers have to pretend to take your view into account. If I tried to direct a Swiss hairdresser in how my hair should look once they’d finished, they would have no hesitation in disemboweling me with the scissors and dragging me to the gutter by my entrails.

I had no idea what to say. Eventually I stammered out, “well, err, mostly I guess, like, shorter?”.

At least this meant the rest of the experience took place in stony, beautiful silence. Next time, I’ll simply walk in wearing Batman pyjamas.

Easter weekend: assualt of the liver

Emerging from the bank holiday weekend like a survivor of a nuclear attack, dazed, confused and fairly sure that my body has been poisoned, I am hereby swearing off even being in the same room as an alcoholic beverage for the rest of my existence. From now on I shall consume nothing but wheatgrass and vegetables handpicked by Jesus.

Trying to piece together what happened seems to be a fruitless exercise, but rummaging through the pockets of my torn, shit-stained jeans I can surmise from the comically lengthy receipts that I have spent this year’s bonus on lager, shots of sambuca and enough rum to kill a bull elephant.

One fuzzy memory to emerge from the whole debacle, like a wounded soldier from a jungle of pain, is stumbling into a bar in Soho that appeared to be run entirely by vampires. The tables were, I shit you not, fashioned from coffins, everything was painted dirty black and the toilets were an unspeakable horror. This hell hole of depravity was called Garlic and Shots, and was populated by Goths and various other sub-cultures who choose to make a statement to society about avoiding the mainstream and individuality by all dressing exactly the same and pushing lumps of metal through their face. So my falling into the establishment and, shouting over the death metal, ordering a glass on chardonnay in a posh, Surrey accent went down like a fart in a space suit. I can say with a degree of confidence that nobody had ever ordered anything close to wine in the place before. The look of the face of the bar maid was so confused it clinked.

At some point in the evening, one of our group bought a round of something called ‘blood shots’. This was a mistake of significant magnitude. Consisting of tabasco, chilli, garlic and alcohol, I am still struggling to comprehend how anyone could believe this would ever be purchased for consumption, as opposed to, say, military use. The thing tasted like a thousand poisonous ants had mistaken my throat, lips and stomach for a very serious threat. The burning was accompanied by an intense wave of nausea as lumps of garlic hit the congealed contents of my stomach, that had by this stage not received any form of sustenance beyond pork scratchings and cigarettes for days. How I managed to prevent myself from projectile vomiting over the table is a miracle to rival a resurrection.

So having learnt from this unholy episode and the chronic agony that has resulted from it, I begin a new chapter of innocence and purity. I will set my alarm for an early morning jog tomorrow and shall start injecting pureed super foods directly into my veins. This can’t possibly go wrong.

Smugless smoking

Having spent the last couple of days trapped indoors by the incessant dankness of the British weather, I’m starting to understand how people could use seasonal affective disorder as an excuse for a cathartic killing spree. For over a week now, I have travelled to three different parts of the country and in each have been met with unremitting, pissing weather where the day before it was sunny. Within minutes of leaving each place, we have been gleefully informed that the sun has returned, which has me suspecting that this has gone beyond the point of coincidence and that there is indeed some higher power, whose sole, untiring focus is on driving me to insanity. Being based back at my family’s home doesn’t help much. The first hour or so is all home cooked meals and lovingly made cups of tea, but pretty soon the walls are closing in. Eventually there will be a demand for me to perform some form of excessive manual labor like moving my shoes and I’ll be twitching for the high calibre rifle.

Certainly it’s given me time to reflect on the differences between the two countries. The most striking it seems to me, except, clearly from the great big fucking mountains everywhere, is the smoking ban in UK pubs and restaurants. In Switzerland, it’s legislated that all nationals must start smoking at the point of being umbilically separated from their mothers. This is reflected in the industrial levels of smoke that are emitted in pubs and restaurants. I’m not, for a change, complaining about this. It’s allowed me to claim I’ve given up, when in reality I’m simply feeding my pangs with the astronomical levels of nicotine and tar, hanging in the air like an oil slick. Back in the UK, I don’t have this luxury, unless I hang around grotty local pubs demanding that the semi-feral alcoholics smoking outside breathe directly into my open mouth. And even then you are eventually asked to move on.

I do prefer the situation in the UK in general though, and applaud the recent decision to move the same way in Zurich. Though I can’t claim to have my finger on the pulse on the local populace, I am yet to witness the screeching levels of protest about civil liberties and promises of an armed up rise which greeted the move in many parts of Britain. Though I’d take the Swiss far more seriously if I ever heard them threaten such a thing than ever I would the Daily Mail brigade of paranoid mentalists, I suspect we will all look back and wonder how it was ever allowed in the first place. And on that note, I’m heading back to my pedestal of purity and innocence, to wallow in the warming glow of self-righteousness that ex-smokers secrete through every pore.

The meeting

So, contrary to popular opinion and the large wagers placed by my friends, I have survived the meeting with my girlfriend's father. With at least 12 hours still to go I don't want to get too cocky, but thus far the experience has been remarkably free of thrashings, beatings or any other form of the sort of violence that can easily add an awkward element to such occasions.
I was fully expecting, after several weeks of being mercilessly tortured with exagerated claims of the man's beastly character, to be welcomed not with a cup of tea, but to be forced to my knees with a shotgun in my mouth. In fact though, I've been quite taken with the guy. The continuous smoking of filterless, high tar cigarettes and barked threats to small, passing children add an appreciable air of charm to the old fella. Listening to the radio just now, and the pained sobs of an obese woman who was blaming the untimely death of her husband for her weight gain, he brilliantly quipped 'sit on him did you?'. As well as heartless cynicism, we've also found common ground in abusing the lady who has brought me to him. Most of the last couple of days has been spent with us cackling and delivering barbed jokes at her expense, with the odd congratulatory high five once her back is turned.

The only real issue with the visit has been the utter remoteness in which he lives combined with the monsoon conditions which have swept the country, as has become traditional whenever we return. The first signs of trouble emerged on the infinite train journey down here. I had been somewhat prepared for the endless nature of the journey, but thought this would be offset by the pleasant nature of the stroll through English countryside, which in my head was to take place on an old-timey train, possibly steam driven, but definitely with a pipe smoking gentleman in the same carriage who would offer cider and regale us with stories of scrumping apples in his impoverished youth.
In reality, we were met with the full force of a shit storm of an intensity that can only have been mustered throughout human history by British rail and possibly the Nazi party at it's worst. The train we were excruciatingly lugged here by was certainly ancient, but more in a way that instilled a fear it was about to collapse into pieces, killing or maiming everyone on board, than in any pleasant sense. Our fellow passengers didn't share anything other than terrible music played through mobile phones and the vague threat that we might be stabbed at any moment.

After what seemed like decades, we finally limped into the end of the line, and disembarked bearded, clothes tattered, desperate for food and water. What greeted us was a level of civilisation not seen outside of Mordor. Simply put, there's nothing here. We went for a walk earlier, through the pouring rain, and got genuinely excited to see another person. They actually waved at us. You'd be institutionalised if you did that in London.

For the most part though, our visit has comprised of sitting around a fire, looking at the rain streaming down the window and wondering when would be an acceptable time to start drinking.

Violent introduction

Every once in a while, when we need to restock the things we can’t find in Zurich, such as decent bacon, sausages, or sarcasm, we head back to home to replenish our supplies. This has the added benefit of reminding us of the things that keep us from returning permanently. Within a minute of dragging my girlfriend’s gargantuan suitcase onto a hellishly packed tube, from whichever squalid London airport we’ve eventually fought our way out of, I am screaming oaths to never return again and demanding to know who I have to marry to switch nationalities.

Currently we are on one such misadventure. This time, we have been begrudgingly released from work for an entire week. At first I had grandiose intentions of spending this glorious escape from my office engaging in the most soul-nourishing of pursuits, namely lying horizontally on a sofa, watching football at every waking moment and occasionally replenishing my beer. My better half however, master of the diary that she is, had other ideas. Apparently after two and half years, it is time to meet The Father. So, stopping at my parents on the way, we are making our way to the outpost of Cornwall in which he lives, and I am prepping up on how sensible, likeable, sleeping-with my daughter type people are supposed to behave.

I have a history when it comes to bringing her on visits to my family. Although I suspect they have all liked her far more than they ever have me from the first meeting, I can normally be relied upon to make some gaff or error of judgment which cements their position still further. Last Christmas for instance, I thought I’d fire a party popper at her. As well, however, as failing to notice that I was probably too close to perform this in the jocular manner in which it was intended, I also had not been informed that this was the year mum had replaced the normal party poppers with anti-aircraft artillery. The thing detonated in her face with a shockwave that nearly blew me out of my chair. Once the mushroom cloud of glitter had subsided and she had pulled the shards of paper shrapnel from her eyes, I was left with a very upset girlfriend and a feeling of deep remorse. Things were not helped when during the same meal I managed to make each of my two younger sisters cry, with ill judged comments about phone bills and an excellently aimed throw of a piece of salmon. The look on my mother's face as she glanced down the table, to see me surrounded by three weeping girls, couldn’t have been etched with more disappointment if I’d just announced my intention to quit my job to start a satanic church of bestiality.

Once again on this visit I have not failed to disappoint. On a trip to walk the dog earlier today, I slipped and managed to push her over in saving myself. Judging by the looks of horror held by my parents and grandparents as they took in the blood soaked, sobbing picture before them, it must have seemed like I’d simply decided to throw her to the ground for kicks.

So, having made every effort once again to disinherit myself, I move on tomorrow to meet her ex-military father. May God have mercy on my soul.

Beer and Boobs

Most people think that Switzerland is going to have excellent beer. The kind you can drink in quantities that would kill a bull elephant and still feel fresh the next morning, because the ingredients are purity defined. I expected this also, and felt certain that the water would be sought only from the most pristine of the highest mountain tops while the barely and hops would be collected from quaint valleys, by angelic Christian children who’d never known the sin of a five knuckle shuffle.

Once again, my impressions have been pissed on. Almost literally in this case. The standard beer here has more chemicals than George Bush’s wet dreams. I wake most mornings after a night out feeling like I’ve been drinking a mixture of petrol, asbestos and the tears of dying children.

That’s not to say there aren’t excellent beers around, just not in the variety or availability that one would expect of somewhere that is so close to Bavaria. Talking of which, I have enthusiastically booked tickets for this years Oktoberfest. This time I have set myself the challenging target of coming away with some memory past 5pm, but considering the stiff competition I’ll be facing in the form of litre upon litre of some of the world’s strongest lager, I’ll be content with not soiling myself before 7pm.

Last year was a truly spectacular experience. The first time you look down the hilled road and see before you the aircraft-hanger sized tents, stretching one after another out towards the horizon, and you realise, in an epiphanal moment, that those fuckers are filled to the rafters with the finest lager you’ve ever tasted….well, it was enough to make me fall to the floor and weep joyously, thankful beyond words.

Once you are picked off the floor by understanding locals, and you make your way through the uncountable throngs of people to the tent of your choice, it takes a frustratingly long time to actually get in. The policy as I understood it, is that as one individual in the tent keels over dead, and their body is dragged outside, one more person is allowed in. Last year it took about an hour of waiting, with me impatiently bouncing up and down and anxiously looking at my watch with an irrational frequency before we got in. My god was it worth it though. The tent felt endless, with wooden benches filling every conceivable space and each bench crammed to bursting with men, women, boys and girls. As well as having all possible spaces taken on the seats, each had at least 5 people stood on the tables themselves, invariably either passionately singing along to the orchestral Oompah band, or beating the living shit out of each other. The security were taking a relaxed approach to say the least, generally allowing the fights to pitter out as the participants forgot what they were hitting each other for and wandered off for another beer. Did I mention this was 11am by the way?

As if this wasn’t about as close to any heaven anyone could possibly experience, I started to notice something else, something so truly wondrous that I may yet be turned to the path of religion. Cleavage. It was everywhere. Each way I turned there were bouncing breasts desperately attempting to escape the minimal confines of their traditional dirndl, like puppies fighting in a sack. Around that time I must have passed out, but this year I’m taking a video camera.

Law and disorder

I was led to believe before I arrived here, that Switzerland would be a crimeless paradise, populated entirely by friendly nuns. People, I imagined, would spend months tracking me down to return small change, they would leave their cars and houses unlocked, children would be allowed to play wherever they wanted, with parents untainted by the belief that a leering paedophile is waiting on every corner for the faintest of opportunities. Generally I was expecting the entire populace to spend each day holding hands and skipping together against a scenic, rainbowed backdrop.

This, astoundingly, has turned out to not quite be the case. There is certainly a more secure feeling in general, helped most likely by the undercurrent of stern authority which has you suspecting that if caught crossing the road in the wrong place, you´d be put up against a wall and shot. However, after experiencing no worse than the odd drive-by tutting for the first few months here, my bike got stolen. As did the replacement a few weeks later. I´ve never felt such untethered rage. I wanted the bastards strung up and publicly disembowled.

Despite this, it still makes me laugh hysterically when I say where I live in Zurich, and locals respond with concerned faces and encourage me to take care. Apparently our flat is on the edge of a ´dangerous´ area. I come from Streatham, I tell them. There, it was perfectly normal to step over piles of knifed corpses each morning on the way to the train station, where you would be mugged first by the local heroin addicts and then again by South West Trains ticket pricing policy. Here, I tell them, is a blissful utopia by comparison.

Their concerns stem from the fact that a nearby road is well known for its use by prostitutes and drug dealers. These concerns never seem to be entirely diminished when I assure them that I considered this to be a major plus in my decision to take the place.

Squash Hulk

Occasionally, when self-flagellation comprising of whipping myself with a thorned branch becomes tiresome, I’ll play squash instead. If I want to heighten the punishment to biblical proportions, I’ll play my girlfriend.

I should, to maintain the health of both my physical and sexual life, point out that in all normal situations she is charming, erudite, polite and sweet to the point of timidity. She also has awesome tits. However, take this same, lovely girl, place her in a squash court, and you create a monstrosity of such terrifying scale that you will shit blood. I can say, without a trace of exaggeration, that I’ve not witnessed swearing, screaming, cheating and sheer brutal violence since I last watched the French rugby team.

Today was a good day. She cried only twice and the racket missed my head by a good ten inches. Normally I can expect at least a continuous stream of highly debatable calls, verbal and physical attacks, not to mention recommendations on protective accommodation from the horrified on-lookers.

This, of course, is the only reason I insist on losing occasionally when I play her. Our relationship is a beautiful thing and it would be a ten month therapy session if I ever won.

The Swiss Kiss

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