Yup. I'm off to somewhere else for a while indefinitely. See ya!
14 years ago
April has started off with a real bang and I thought I'd just round up quick.
Have been a little busy since the forth month rolled round, which is definitely a relief, as I like nothing less than sittin around doing nothing and things are starting to fall into place.
With my place at Roehampton now confirmed for a september start for my PGCE I was already pretty chuffed with April and I strolled in from my kung fu class just as April rolled into town.
I'm a big fan of April as I'm not really a big fan of being cold and April is about when it starts gettin acceptable for my hairless body and also I really dig the idea of encouraging any form of childish prank.
In a fit of spontaneous prankness I texted Tal three words "I got laid!" and waited for his respose which was an instant call in shock and elation for me. "April fool!" I laughed with delicious irony as he went from ecstatic adulation for me to genuine disappointment. I couldn't help smirking at the idea of being so sadistically single that I find my own torture a real laughing matter. It was a great start to any month.
Ambitious men recognise their failings and strive to rectify them. Happy men recognise their weakness and smile.
Later I had to lightly point out to Skiv that the channel 5 news report that he saw in the morning about Mayor Ken introducing a 2 pound 'pedestrian charge' in Oxford St was probably not quite what he seemed. Sometimes when you laugh hard enough the world just resonates with that sound.
Work has been cool, I get to sit and surf the web reading Spinningchairs which is, in truth about the only site I can access which isn't blocked by the automaitc blag-sensors. The sun is shining again and I get to take a huge lunchbreak in St James Park and feed the ducks and it feels good.
After seeing Pericles at the National Theatre on Thursday night, which is arguably the theatre event of the year it has to be said, I was sat on the train back into Thamesmead with a bunch of drunken lager louts who were returning from the England game in Sunderland. Which happened the night before. Following the match this lot had clearly decided on the wisdom of continued drinking and were still celebrating a good 28 hours after the match had finished and were absolutely fucked. Good on em I thought as the loudest one got so embroiled in his singing that he missed his station (Westcombe Park). He was really funny about it though and announced the fact to the whole carriage who had a laugh at his expense - it was a great night out.
I'll hold my hands up though and say that Character week was an abject failure, although I intend to start a character collection, following up my USA work with pictures of and from real people right here in the UK, although more as a personal project than as an addition to this diary.
Today I found out that Stu is in Basra and I'll be popping a letter in the post to him as soon as I get his address, and I went round to Sarahs to hold her new adorable bundle of 7 day old in my arms. It's been an interesting week.
Today, hoping to finally complete my first full weeks work, I headed to the train station to find that all trains were cancelled due to a broken rail and hence I ended up getting in at 11, thus putting off any chance of a really respectable full 35 hours for another week. I really can't believe it.
Now, jobless once more I head to Nottingham on sunday indefinitely, until I get a call to return. With Si out of work too though I feel that if this period of unemployment is gonna be a long one then by eck it's gonna be a good one. But let's hope it doesn't come down to that quite yet, cos I have mad projects that need finance right now.
Aaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaargh!
When I reported in my travels the bizarre phenomenon of the self-flushing urinal complete with cock-gazing perverted midget, little did I realize that I had glimpsed the future of terror in the form of a strange perverted voyeurism that was soon to be the scourge of us all.
Passing away the idle hours of my lunch break in St. James' Park today watching the ducks float by I built up a good head of piss. Before I knew it I was needin to go and, given that th esun was out, I decided against going back to my office toilet and opted to go and find a nice secluded place in St James' Park to relieve my aching bladder.
Rushin about blindly trying to find a convenient tree to hide my naked weiner I stumbled across a building that lookked uncannily like a toilet, complete with every possible disguise right down to the little men and women signs on the front.
Fooled, I took the bait and walked in, loosening up my urinary sphincter muscle in anticipation as I stepped over the the threshold.
It was too late when I realised the truth, that I had actually innocently walked into a gay midget voyeaur hellhole. Attached to each urinal at cock height were the dreaded midget windows and I was powerless to stop the stream.
I thought through my options, which were
1) being the masturbation fantasy of a depraved dwarf
or
2) pissing myself and going back to the office smelling like a tramp.
I bit the bullet and, cursing my tiny bladder, I whipped out my chipolata and done what had to be done, gurning and frowning into the camera to put the little bastard off his stroke.
and as a result I pissed all over my shoes.
Sat in the work canteen today clutching a cup of that horrendous brew that passes as hot chocolate these days i set to work thinkin about exactly where we in the west had gone wrong and realised that the answer was right there in my hands.
Firstly I found myself cursing the man who invented the machine that froths up milk, injecting it with bubbles while simultaneously taking out all the flavour leaving a sort of organic sponge with no discernable benefits. This machine, I realised, takes perfectly good milk, removes all the flavour and replaces it with air, which they then sell at a ridiculously inflated price (excuse the pun), the ultimate embodiment of style over substance or perception before reality.
The ancient greeks are still held in high regard these days for their thinkers, such as Aristotle, who deduced that heavier objects fall to earth faster than light objects. he was wrong, but given that the Greek society didn't generally dirty their hands with such trivialities as experimentation this fairly central point (gravity) was accepted in it's incorrect form for thousands of years.
With Blair pushing for more people to go into higher education the move into the information age looks set to transform the nation (which is a microcosm of the west at large and more to the point a little america representation) into a nation of thinkers and abstractionists, and in the long term filling up the ranks of bureaucrats and managers at the expense of real hard workers.
Although we do indeed live in a time where information and education are of great importance I feel we really need to keep some perspective. Higher education costs time and money that can be used equally well gaining world experience, but it seems that in the information age, it is only the accumulation of information that is respected. With this accumulation of information comes an arrogance that world experience does not append. It's an arrogance of "knowing more" than your fellow man and hence not wanting to dirty your hands on the more menial tasks life may throw your way.
The overpopulation of the information hunter-gatherers is already showing now in the city, with the big companies laying off staff in the financial slowdown, and techies everywhere having to submit themselves to the mercies of the humble hardworking dole administrator down the jobcentre.
Meanwhile teachers are massively in demand, nurses and dctors, bus drivers, pharmacy assistants, electricians and plumbers are thriving with no end of vacancies.
People have been lured by years of promises of a better life through higher education that the value of hard work has been lost behind the image of an information oasis. We have been led to believe that if we study hard enough there will come a point of critical information mass where *bang* we suddenly have better lives.
But in truth we have to work hard to get far, and that goes for wherever we choose to stop on the information acquisition highway. This idea of a quick fix in which we can use a fast lane through books to where we want to be is a myth and in truth this route is actually completely the wrong road for some people.
I think I may have missed my turning some time back, but in life we must keep moving forward. If we know we're on the wrong road don't keep going hoping you will get to your destination but turn towards the right one always moving forward.
Coming back to coffee we see the whole picture again in clarity and it all makes sense. Once there was a fine drink made with time, care and attention. Then someone invented that dried up shit like Nescafe and people settled for a substandard product in order to get a quick fix (of an inferior product) faster. Convenience culture led to a watering down and acceptance of an inferior product. Meanwhile, to save time and moey, comanies amalgamated/coagulated to form less personal but more efficient business models. Layers of management and automation began to creep in.
Then came Starbucks, an automated completely bland enterprise, efficient and tasteless, the embodiment of expresionless contempt for individuality. As layers and layers of managers sat in air conditioned offices away from anything like hard work, designing business plans and looking at marketing strategies they distanced themselves through their education, from the actual product. in short, they forgot what a good cup of coffee actually tastes like. The information age had arrived and the degree-holding information-bearer then recruited the non-educated heathens into his slavery and got them to implement his business strategy.
The opportunity for individual expression was taken away, because the precious education teaches us that efficiency is king, whereas the university of life encourages free expression and individualism.
Becasue this is, as Bill Gates puts it, "the information age" then we look at contempt with those without and in doing so risk running into a bland world of efficiency and perfect business plans run by super informed graduates and staffed by downtrodden hard-working honest people. But what fun is a world without mistakes?
About as much fun as drinking a cup of hot chocolate that tastes like water.
My entire body aches and burns, protesting at the jolt of life that has been administered. The more I think about it the less it makes sense; how could I, of all people, succumb to lethargy!?!
My muscles growl their disapproval and my legs seem to be on strike, but through the flood of lactic acid I glimpse salvation.
Yeah Legs, you're killin me now but admit it, you loved her as much as I did. You couldn't contain your excitement when you saw her curves in the midday sun and felt her warm skin brush against your boots.
She made you feel like there was nothing else in the world for the 90 minutes you chased after her. Yeah it hurts now, but when you look at it the thrill of the chase, the passion that she stirred up in you was somethin else weren't it. Yeah she was good.
Yeah, said Legs, stubbin his cigar out on my calf muscles, she was somethin beautiful for sure.
With the thought of her round leather skin and her tender touch burning in our mind, Legs and me sat there incapaciated, blowin smoke rings as the day faded away.
Yeah she was somethin special.
