Almost back to normal, and happy enough to sit and write a blog! Hoorah!

A couple of days ago we received our first ever mailing from Iran. An Iranian congratulations card from Alex, the manager of our local pizza delivery place, who wanted to wish me and Michele happy anniversery while he was on his honeymoon in Iran. Thanks Alex. Nice to have such a friendly relationship with our local businesses….do I sound like a local councillor ? Sorry….

Thanks also to the other Alex who has been keeping me entertained during my malaise with his most excellent blog.

Last night I wrote a shitty letter to the BBC complaining about a bit of tabloid shit that accidentally crept into their schedules in the guise of a documentary on the NHS and immigration. It was filth. They haven’t written back. I hope this is because they are too busy crying with regret, but I suspect not.

Michele had a job interview today. Sadly I decided not to follow the example of Alex and make my blog anonymous…pity, because I’d really like to slag off those involved. BASTARDS….

Humphrey was particularly cute today….feathery little thing.

What is Hell like ?

In Hell you are always too hot – there is no refuge from the heat, no way to cool down, no way to feel comfortable. You think you can bear it no longer, but you have no choice – the heat continues forever. Every drop of water is tepid, every breeze is warm and Hell-mart has perpetually sold out of air-conditioners.
Everyone has a chest infection that keeps them coughing and restricts their breathing, while sinus infections keep heads feeling ready to explode. Beacuse you feel so lousy, all you can do is lie about, whinging and watching daytime television…
Alright, you get the picture, I’m still feeling crappy after a tortuous weekend of overheated misery I’m off work. Many people may consider that taking a monday off work the day after the hottest day EVER in Britain was a tad dodgy. But believe me I would much rather be sitting in an ice-cold puddle in the rain, than be sitting in this humid, sweaty, posionous smog. So would my lungs. We have 1, 12-inch fan that is doing a sterling job, considering how it is now running on good will and vaseline…but not good enough. Michele went out to buy another fan, and just got laughed at. In fact, the woman in Agros told her that they hadn’t run out of fans, they just weren’t stocking them because, and I’m not making this up, they’re now on their winter catalogue. What a great business strategy that is. The hottest August ever on record, and all you can get from Argos are some woolly undies, an electric fan heater, and a cardie – although the latter would probably be useful to mop up the puddles of arse-sweat I’m leaving around the house.
…oh yes…I nearly forgot…the heavy, heavy depression. I don’t know whether it was one of the many infections, the weather or just the daytime television, but my illness has been accompanied by total despair and a feeling of hopelessness I haven’t felt for a long time. Thanks for that God – it really helped.

It’s seriously, no-messingly, indisputably

HOT

. And muggy. So muggy. It’s like trying to breathe jelly. People all over europe are keeling over with heatstroke, but England continues to firmly shun any suggestion that we should all be using air-conditioners, with the stiff-upper-lipped resoluteness that will probably result in my death later today.

Last night was Brodie’s brithday. The Fish Brothers played the Rosemary branch and many many people turned up and drank too much….including the man himself, who became very tired and emotional and it took three of us to get him upstairs and into bed. Good gig tho. One of Brodie’s friends who lives in Ireland was looking at the Fish Brothers’ website and noticed the gig in honour of his birthday, so came all the way over! He ended up staying round at ours as the host had an early bath.

Thanks to Andy, I now have a copy of the radio show from the other night. Have a listen. I don’t actually appear until about 28 minutes in to it, but the non-me bits are much better listening anyway.

Smile were kind enough to send me a copy of the fraudulent cheque. It was made out to somone with a name that can only belong to a Columbian drug baron or ficticious identity. Obviously I can’t publish this name, but suffice to say that his first name is “Pedro”….honestly…

Yesterday included one of those random injections of weirdness that makes life bearable. I got a phonecall from sebastian in the DoC (department of computing) inviting me up to their 12th floor barbecue. Apparently there was a “geek” there who wanted to see me. The geek was a thoroughly bloody nice chap called Andrew, and with him were Jenny and “Tyndall”, who turns out to know a friend of mine Peter. They wanted to know if I was interested in going onto the radio that night to talk bollocks. Seb and Claire had obviously tipped them off that I was very adept at it. Their friendly manner and the beer I’d consumed convinced me it might be fun so I agreed.

8pm I was waiting on Charing Cross Road, full to the brim with dutch courage and a paranoid feeling that the whole thing was probably a wind up, but they arrived and up we went into the cramped studio of Resonance FM 104.4, situated in the roof of a curry house. Even though it’s a legit station, it had such a pirate feel to it with everyone shuffling past each other, pulling cables about, and knocking things over while someone was trying to do a radio show. It took about 15 minutes for the “sound engineer” to get the desk working properly – which of course was 15 minutes of airtime. As a result the output must have been pretty bizarre, consisting of the same gamelan tune twice and “busy line” by Rose Murphy played through a flanger…..but hey, this is art radio! All the better for it. The programme was called “Big Ears” and although
I never actually heard the final output, it was essentially a peculiar soundscape of ambient noises, strange music and a chat between me and Andrew, where he asked me all kinds of jocular tech questions and I gave jocular bullshit answers with the sound of running water over it. Good fun tho’. After an hour and a half we made way for the next turn, who appeared to be a large Turkish family, and went to the coach and horses for a couple. Ian, who’d been in the west end for teh past few hours, met up with us and was in a tired and emotional state. All most amusing.

A perfect day. Zap called me at about 10am to see if I was up for goint to the computer fair in Sratford. The prospect of yet another day in, working, or rather pretending to work, while the sun’s out, persuaded me to accept his offer. What a wise choice.

The weather was HOT. We went around the fair getting a handle on the prices, and eventually Zap bought a SmartCard reader while I bought some RAM and then we went to the pub.
A couple of pints later we went back to the fair.
If you’ve never been to one of the computer fairs, you’ve missed out. They’re reminiscent of middle-eastern bazarrs, only more high-tech. There are almost no white people working there. It’s essentially middle-eastern, Indian, African or Pakistani people who are selling their warez. Whilst people haggle over the price of motherboards and RAM with women in muslim dress, kids behind the tables solder, strip and chip people’s playstations. Haggling with people over the price of hard-disks, DVDs and all kinds of hardware really does make for a good holiday.
After our hagglefest we got on the DLR, scanned a few wireless networks and reired to the Gypsy Moth in Greenwich for a nice sunny drink. Beautiful.

A trip to Eltham to visit my parents followed. The 286 brought back many memories, mostly tedious, but Stella managed to cook a splendid Salmon dinner and we ate, drank and laughed until hometime. Cathy and Kate from next-door came round too – altogether a nice evening.

Primary Colors could be summed up as:
“Power corrupts,
Absolute power corrupts absolutely.”

Firstly, I wish to apologise to Kate, the person who in a previous bolog convinced me of something totally ridiculous – that there are people in Argentina who castrate sheep with their teeth. It turns out she wasn’t joking – they really do bite the bollocks off sheep. How do I know ? I’ve seen the pictures…and it made me feel very uncomfortable, and slightly nausiated. Sorry for doubting you Kate, but come on, you must admit it does sound unlikely….

Tonight BBC 1 had a new reality TV game show where you could vote for or against a asylum seekers. Sadly they couldn’t swing it so that the general population’s decision was final because that would have given it the edge it was sadly lacking. Instead the cases have already been decided and all we could do was compare our results with what the “experts” decided.
To make it more interesting there were panels of people who would also vote and either support or enrage the viewer. The panels consisted of

1. Former Asylum seekers
2. Legal Experts
3. Middle England
4. Anachronistic Gary-Bushell-style neo-nazis

So what did we learn ? Well not very much. In summary:

• The british public are very stupid
• The asylum seekers tended to support other asylum seekers
• the nationalists were even more odious than we imagined possible

One of the ex-seekers, a stunning turkish girl is now my hero for managing to put the dialetical Doc-Martin into the Gary-Busshells whilst smiling all the way. Nice one girl. The only other person to stand out was a vicar who was actually really sound…but then again he was probably a gay, paedophile, leftie so he doesn’t count. Interestingly the Littlejohns had several different arguments they could apply to just about any situation. Firstly if the story sounded unlikely then obviously it’s a rejection. But if it sounded believable, it might not be brutal enough to justify entering Britain…rejection again. Finally if it was believable and brutal, then why come all the way to England when there are plenty of other countries between Africa/Eastern Europe/South America and here. Why can’t they try all the other first ? eh ? Why come over here and nick our jobs and NHS beds ? Let Pakistan take em…rejection again. Needless to say they rejected all of the contestants.
At the end of the program I was foaming at the mouth and feeling very glad that I haven’t been given any sort of political power because I would turn into a total dictator. All asylum seekers, immigrants and anyone really would be welcomed into Vegworld. Even if they said they’d come here to leech off the state. Good on you sirs. Have our money. We’d only spend it on killing people who are threatening the financial interests of the rich otherwise. Go and buy yourself some food. You see it’s very, very simple. As Ghandi [supposedly] said “There’s enough in the world for everyone’s need, but not for everyone’s greed.”

“So you think if we stopped letting asylum seekers in, the NHS would be back working again and we’d all be happy ?” Asked my new hero to a pensioner in the Moseley group. “Don’t be ridiculous” they responded. Indeed.
There really are enough resources to end poverty and hunger, with a bit left over for a curry a week and a pint or two. The problem is that Bill Gates and Rupert Murdoch have them all.
So why don’t the lamebrains get as angry with the leeching-rich-fatcats as they do with the asylum seekers ? Well Michele answered that by quoting one of her social-policy texts. The gist of it was that it’s far harder to cope with someone seemingly getting something for nothing, than it is to cope with someone being extremely rich.

Back to work after such a nice weekend. On Saturday Brodie and I went down
to Dorking to see the pub he’s in the process of buying. Not having much experience of Surrey I was expecting the place to be like Bromley or Oprington, but it wasn’t – it was really quite rural with spectacular countryside. We met up with Charlie who took us to a little pub hidden along a tiny path half way up a steep hill. Fantastic. Badger beer, a ploughmans and a breathtaking view while we ate and drank. After lunch we walked to another pub just along the way and had another pleasant pint each. Wandering around little villages from pub to pub on a hot sunny day is one of my favourite pastimes – I wonder if there is any way to get a career doing it…hmm.. Anyway, we eventually made it to The Cricketers and spent the afternoon chatting to the present landlord. It’s a snug, friendly little pub with a nice walled garden. What a great place to come and visit that’s going to be.
The journey back was bizarre. South Central make Connex look like an efficient bunch of experts… first leg…dorking to Sutton. At the platform a bloke approached Brodie for a light which was a cue for Brodie’s joke de jour. When he’d finished and the laughing had subsided, the guy apologised and explained he had a light all the time. He took his wallet out of his pocket, opened it and it burst into flames. We were slightly shocked as you can imagine, but not as much as we were when he calmly closed the wallet, extinguishing the flame and returned it to his back pocket. We got chatting and he turned out to be in the magic circle on the way to do a stag party, and was kind enough to entertain us with some really rather excellent card tricks while we were waiting for the train.
When it arrived, he said goodbye and sat at the far end of the carriage. Don’t blame him really – it must be a right pain in the arse having to spend your entire journey doing your act. However, more entertainment was coming our way in the shape of a couple of little kids who decided that Brodie would make an excellent dad. “Will you be our daddy ?” the asked. He replied that he was already busy with daddy tasks and so couldn’t. “Will you be our daddy ?” they asked again. Again he politely refused. “Will you be our daddy ?” they persisted. The children’s mother sitting nearby explained that their dad was dead and told them to stop. They didn’t stop. They just moved along the carriage and started to ask other people. The mother really didn’t act surprised leading me to the conclusion that this was a common occurrence – you never know, one day they might get a “yes ok then” and he could turn out to be a handsome millionaire…or something.
The kids worked their way up the carriage towards the magician. “Oh yes that’s agood idea!” Brodie shouted, ” go and ask that guy to do some tricks”. For the first time in their life probably, they obeyed. The prestidigitator turned round and gave us a cold stare and then came down to where we were all sitting and went into a full on magic routine. The kids were in absolute awe. I had to take picture to capture the look of innocent amazement on their faces. The family got off at the next stop, but the magician was on a role and asked if he could do some more tricks for us.
Obviously we answered yes and he entertained us until we reached Sutton.
It was then that the journey changed tack from bizarre-entertaining to bizarre-fucking-irritating. Of course, after 6:30pm South Central don’t run any trains from Sutton to New Cross. London bridge yes. Victoria yes. But not New Cross.
My ticket was to New Cross Gate and from bitter previous experience I knew that I wasn’t permitted to go to either of these stations. So Brodie suggested we go to West Croyden, and then walk over to east Croydon. Not having a better suggestion I agreed and we waited what seemed like hours for the next train.

Up until the train arrived at West Croydon, the weather had been spectacularly good. As soon as we put our feet on the platform it started raining – not just drizzle, a full on thunderstorm. There’s no nicer place to be during a thunderstorm that walking through Croydon in shorts and a t-shirt. We eventually got to the station – of course my ticket wouldn’t go through the gate and so I had to ask the guard. He looked closely at the ticket, and as the water dripped off my nose I warned him that I wouldn’t take kindly to him questioning it because I really didn’t want to be there in the first place. He let me through, joking that in that case he would question it…very amusing young man…very amusing..

Sunday morning was another one of those classic “modern” Christian praise programs where everyone sings uplifting songs holding their hands in the the air. It was so inspiring that I did more work on my Uplifting Christian Song Generator. Later we had a splendid roast chicken dinner at my mum and dad’s, getting back in time to watch the Sunday Big Brother omnibus….ahh…perfection 🙂