Pimp my Rickshaw across India!

Just set up the site for the new Dosa Boys project in which a physics teacher and a profesional gambler decide to buy a rickshaw and travel the length of India in 2 weeks. The rickshaw then goes to a nice home where it gives some impoverished family a means to make a living.

So there I was jsut thinkin that I haven't done anything silly for a while and I surf the web and find this lunatic idea to go 3000 miles in a rickshaw. I obviously apply to do it and set out to find someone dumb enough to agree to do it with me, being as I am utterly incompetent with any form of vehicle and prone to wandering and doing stupid things in Foreign countries.

Then Ivan rings.

Can you believe that. How often in life do you even meet anyone called Ivan!? Things were lookin up. Then he tells me he's a professional gambler and I think things couldn't get any better and we sort the whole thing out to get ourselves over to India and travel the length of the country in a rickshaw.

Now bear in mind that these things are actualyl designed to travel about 10 miles on short trips costing like 10 rupees and suddenly the idea of travelling 3000 miles across the impoverished landscape of India suddenly doesn't sound so comfortable.

Perfect.

So that's xmas sorted out then. All things being equal, we should be setting off on the 24th to spend xmas over in Kerala, where we will eat curry and pimp our ride.

After that, we'll head off on the trip (I feel very tempted to add the adjective "gruelling" in there for some reason) which we still need to work the finer details out for.

Chances are we will end up tryin to work out the finer points of rickshaw engineering (I don't think Hayes has a rickshaw manual but you know what I want for xmas now) and also the finer points of the Indian toilet system but you won't miss a moment of it on the new Dosa Boys website.

And while you're there, why not sponsor this madness and get your name on our ride! It's a wicked idea!

That was fast!

I've found a partner for the trip. He's a professional gambler.

WICKED!

So I'm going to India to travel 2000 miles in a Rickshaw. I'll be raising money for >>>this mental health charity in Sherborne.<<<

More details to follow

The Rickshaw Run over xmas - any takers?

Alright readers I've just stumbled across >>>>this<<<< on the net and I've decided to get a team together to run a rickshaw across 2000 miles of India this xmas.

So who wants to join me?

Quoted on the cuddle party!

Thanks to the new linkups from Sam, the Touch Ambassador and Laura in China. You've been duly linked back up.

Calling on the neighbours

I was listenin to Streetboy on Kiss FM the other day and he suggested sending a text to your "phone neighbour" and seeing what happens.

Your phone neighbour, for those of you who don't know, is the person whose number is one up or one down from yours, So where my number ends with 614, my phone neighbours are 615 and 613.

This sounded like a good idea, so I popped a text off introducing myself to my phone neighbours to see if they might have been up for a bit of textual intercourse.

"Hi" it said, "I'm your phone neighbour from the next number up the street. Want to be friends?"

The first reply, from 613 was short and brisk.

"Sod off"

And they say that manners are dying out in this country.

In real life I've never spoken to my neighbours so after 2 days wait, I had all but given up hope when the text came back from 615.

"Are you a girl?" it said, in a neighbourly kind of way.

"No, I'm not", I replied.

"Sod off then" came the quick reply.

Time to go ex-directory methinks...

A career or six months in the Bahamas...? A reflection on how life changes

It's funny how things seem to change in my life. Whenever I return from one of my global adventures and everything seems to have stayed the same, I wonder how the hell other people seem to keep things so damn stabel.

There's a WORLD out there you know!

I guess that my nomadic existence must look a little odd to some, the fact that in 2005 I went to 10 different countries, and I have been on more planes in the last 3 years consecutively than I have been on coaches I guess if there's anything that can be said about my life is it's unique.

So it was a little strange when, in January this year I put it all aside and threw my considerable energy into the pursuit of a career. Between January and July of this year I didn't manage a single blog cos I was so entrenched in work and I was gettin quite good at it too. All I wanted was to become a great teacher.

But taht all went a little wrong and for the last few months I've really lost my way. So determined was I to just be great, that I'd lost my sense of adventure and I found it pretty hard to pick up where I left off, when it all came to an end.

But it's pretty obvious now that I'm no great profesional teacher. All I want to do is teach kids something and on the way have a great adventure and it seems to me that schools aren't always set up for kids to learn something.

So, when a job came up in the Bahamas, I initially thought, "Jesus, what a poor career move that would be." but as time has gone on, I am starting to warm to the idea. I mean shit I've made so many poor career moves in the last few months that I could write a book, and at least this one would land me in the sun for the next few months where I can write some damn good blogs!

So my career would be in tatters, my CV would look as bitty as Bitty Mclean, but I think would have spent 6 months in the Caribean, during the coldest UK months of the year.

...what would YOU do...?

Art Spiegelman - Also God

Just finished reading "In the shadow of No Towers" by Art Spiegelman. I've been a fan since Maus and if you find yourself stuck for some books you need to pick up Maus (and Watchmen, and Bone).

But if you don't manage to pick up a copy of No Towers, do yourself a favour and look up work by this guy:

>>>gustave verbeek<<<

He was one of the earliest innovators in comics whose short stories, "The upside-downs of Little Lady Lovekins and Old Man Muffaroo" were an ingenious experiment in compression in which the story would begin in the start of the strip and then halfway through the strip, the reader would turn it upside down and the strip would continue til the end. It was like Escher writing Snoopy. Amazing stuff.



Check this out: >>>The Thrilling Adventure of the Dragon<<<

Not a good idea part 1

>>>Thanks to C++ for sending me this one. As if we ever needed a warning not to stick fireworks up our arses...<<<

99% of everything is crap. It's official. Alan Moore says so

I've just been reading an interview with the mighty Alan Moore in Mustard magazine in which he makes the following comments about life, which I subsequently found myself verifying.

On being asked about Hollywood and the movie industry (which he hates because they have consistently cocked up all his books, e.g. League of Extraordinary Gentlemen, V for Vendetta and Swamp Thing) Alan says something along these lines...

"And so yeah, you will occasionally get a good film that slips through the net, but that leaves you with a medium where 99% of the product is shit.

Now, as my daughter says, 'Yes dad but then 99% of EVERYTHING is shit. It's Sturgeon's Law'

And I quite agree. There are a lot of shit comic books, novels and record albums, but they don't cost 100 million dollars to make and when you're talkin about sums like that, which is probably what the education budget of a small emerging nation then that's where it starts to cross the line from being a bit distasteful to actually being evil"

As this is the mighty Alan Moore speaking then to me this was the word of God. I mean no messin about, as a fan of Alan Moore, to me even the words of the offspring of the Alan Moore are holier than the Koran (there that should piss my Kuwaiti readership off some...). I soon found myself applying Sturgeons logic and realised that he is absolutely right.

Nicking an idea from Ryaninja of putting links to my favourite blogs so far in the sidebar, I had a rummage around the archives. And lo and behold, most of what I've written is indeed crap. So much of it in fact that I've decided that, this being the 300th post, I could only put about 15 links in the side.

So it's official then. 95% of my site is crap. Alan Moore and Mr. Sturgeon were absolutely right.

Wooohooo! 1000 visitors!

I missed out today. Although I probably visit the site 8 times a day or more to check up on it and to flatter my stats a bit I missed out on being the 1000th visitor to my own site. When I logged in and saw that the counter was on 1001 my heart sank. Does that make me a saddo?

In other crap blog anniversary news, my next post will be my 300th. Hope it's better than this one. Which is crap.

Spot the mischief part 2

Is this the top of my head on >>>the cuddle party facilitators website?<<< I only ask cos I assume it is but I can't honestly say I've ever seen the top of my head, as it's inconveniently located at the top of my head...

Answers on a postcard or in the comments please

India in recall 2 - That's one DIRTY wallet fella...

I was makin my way across India in the summer of 2001 and, other than the Eunuchs and strange local folk who managed to stare unbroken at us Westerners for a FULL 34 hours there was one thing I just won't ever forget.

The bogs on the train were a bit more of a state than the ones here, even after I've forked all over the floor.

Basically they were just a hole. I mean like literally a hole in the train floor through which you could see the tracks going by at high speed. Somehow though, despite the fact that your shit and piss just went straight onto the tracks the toilet stunk to high heaven , maybe from cling-ons or more likely from people like me forking all over the place. Dirty bastard.

The train had stopped in the middle of nowhere and I needed a walk after about 20 hours sitting on my arse so I headed to the bog where I had to wait outside for the geezer inside takin a crap.

Suddenly the guy bursts out of the bog, jumps out of the carriage down the stairs and throws himself under the train.

"Strange" I thought.

A few seconds later, he emerges with his wallet in his hand, covered in little bits of shit, which he briskly rubbed off with his other hand. Happy that all his money was in there, he put it back in his pocket and got back on the train.

I was so happy for him I nearly shook his hand. I feel sick.

Oh and I tell ya what reminded me of that little gem. >>>Apparently the mesiah was born last year in a similar way...<<<

Still a bum, but a bum with a job!

I had an interview today. I've waited nearly 2 months for something decent to come along that didn't involve gettin my head kicked in every day and teaching chavs, and today a reasonable-sounding position in a school I'd never heard of before came up so I headed down there.

All mornin my piss had been forking, ya know what I mean, where it just goes out in two sprays and neither of em hit the bowl. Usually when piss forks in the morning that's a bad sign for the rest of the day. I think Confucious said that.

The trip to that remote part of the world this morning took nearly 4 hours and I'd managed to procrastinate planning the show lesson til the train journey (maybe I need to join the group) and on the way there I realised I had very few decent resources to teach with, I didn't know the subject and I was badly dressed. So I texted up C++ and asked him for some life-saving information by text around which I managed to plan the entire lesson around on the way.

To congratulate myself on doing such a great job I took myself to the train toilet for a celebratory slash and proceeded to piss all the way up my inside leg. With a lesson plan that was knocked up in 10 minutes and a dripping, smelly legfull of pee I was convinced this was going to be a bad day.

Obviously having just planned my lesson on the train like a daft git, my worksheets were pretty well, ya know, singular, and lo and behold the photocopier at the school chose today to break down. The computer then refused to recognise my memory stick and the mouse didn't work.

Great.

But somehow I done it. Maybe it's cos the urine had dried up, but they didn't notice my clumsy impromptu maths cock up on the board (I'm crap at spontaneous calculations) or maybe I really am the last physics teacher left in the country.

But I got the job.

Way-flippin-hey!

Missed the flashmob though. Did anyone else make it?

Anarchist cockup

I've spent a bit of time tryin to find out about anarchist activities or at least stuff that's not very mainstream to do. I've been looking at Circle line parties, various anarchist groups like space hijackers and guerilla gardening.

Finally I found out about somethin called flashmobbing recently and on their site found out that there was one like this month and figured that that must be like NOW. I was well excited.

The idea of a flashmob is that you just turn up somewhere, a station concourse for example and just mingle amongst the commuters. At a designated time, everyone whacks on their walkmans and *bang* instant public/private party! Dance away to your hearts content while bemused commuters look on.

Spent the next hour ringing all my friends and telling them to get to Vauxhall for 4:19pm, then got dressed up in my best gear and started drinkin at 1pm to get myself in the mood. By 4pm I was absolutely rat-arsed and sitting alone outside Vauxhall station. The tension was almost too much to bear, and I was eyeballing everyone with headphones to see if they knew about it. It all felt rather covert.

When 4.19 slipped by and I was still sat there like a twat, pissed as a fart, I got up, shook my arse on my own then looked at my phone which had a helpful text from C++ tellin me that the thing was actually tomorrow. And that I am a twat.

So anyone who can make it to Vauxhall tomorrow at 4.19pm with a walkman, I'll see you there!



Tuuuuuuuuuuuuuune!

Just as soon as I get round to it...

A new pasttime is looking through meetup.com and finding out the funny things that people actually meet up to. In today's update, I joined the London Procrastinator meetup group.

What on earth do they do!? How did they even get around to putting up an ad! As Somee says "Call themselves procrastinators!?! They've actually put an ad out! Amateurs!"

A Kuwait Legend

This man right here is my man in the Middle East. I'm gonna keep his name under wraps, cos the authorities in the 'wait probably would have his ass but if it were not for this man and Ed, Kuwait would have been unbearable.

You see this man was the organiser of the underground dance parties that I found out about and of the people I met out there, this man was one of the most fascinating. For the purposes of the piece, we'll call him DJ Jack.

I can't remember how I came to hear of DJ Jack and the secret dance parties of the desert nation, but after being there for a few months it was all starting to get to me. I hadn't met anyone but teachers and morons and people who would fit into both categories for months and the loneliness was startin to get a little claustrophobic. Partying in Kuwait is illegal of course, and you could forget about beer, dancing and girls - my three favourite things in the world! Why the fuck had I agreed to come to this god-forsaken shithole anyway...

I'll confess that after 6 months of utter abstinence from the good stuff, I missed dancing more than anything else. Of course I like a nice beer with friends and damn I appreciate a nice pair of titties as much as the next man but there is something about the dance I can't put into words. I just missed it.

I heard it though the grapevine that I could get my fix. Word on the underground was that a fella had organised a party boat that set off and jetted out beyond the coastguards reach and the party was a goodun. I put out the word that I needed the number of the man who organised this clandestine party and I wanted to be part of it. By that time I definitely had no friends left at school, where my unorthodoxy and youth pissed off the establishment so I was more than happy to be breakin out of the mould.

It wasn't long before I tracked him down and we chatted long on the phone and arranged a meet up soon after at the Metro Star cafe down the road from my war-damaged block and we stopped for a few hours to swap stories.

Part of my reason for choosing Kuwait as a place to go straight after my PGCE was because I have a strange fascination with the depths of brutality which mankind can show to his fellow man. I guess this comes from being a child of a war myself, Vietnam having altered the course of my life, and the after-effects of war have always fascinated me.



As we swapped stories DJ Jack told me about himself - he was from Nigeria originally and had relocated and loved the country. He then told me of atrocities from the first Iraq War in 1991 and the death of his best mate. Even though I'd seen tanks and the heavy artillery rolling out past me on the way to Basra, it still wasn't obvious to me that actually this is a country that has recently seen war. On the ground which I walked there stood Death and even as we spoke the army was patrolling the streets just a few hundred miles north of where we were. Had I been so naive? The Iraqis had killed his best mate years earlier and while we talked of UN intervention and the US jumping the gun to depose Saddam, the man before me was just relieved that that bastard was finally being brought to justice for killing his friend. I could remain neutral no longer and that's when I started to realise that we victims of war can see things in black and white. We just want justice.

A few days later the first party went down. It wasn't on a ship but in the basement of a large block of flats. It was a weekday night and people would show up and covertly ask where the party was. There was no alcohol which didn't bother me at all, I'd long since decided that this was a dry country and only an arsehole would come over and flaunt the law and anyway I was tehre to dance. And that day I learnt the cha-cha-slide. Well some people call that dancing...


Half way through the night the strangest thing happened when I stepped out into the desert for air. Just standin there and cooling off, I struck up a conversation with the bouncer,

"Be careful in there, kid" he said, "you're new here yeah..?"

I asked him what he meant. I could look after myself and there was no-one in there that I didn't think I could charm out of a fight or kick in the balls and run away from.

"The police are crawlin all over the place" he said

What the hell?! It turned out that while we were in there, the underground party wasn't quite as down-low as we thought, but the police knew about it and were there in plain clothes. They had drove up, changed clothes and come in to watch for anythin untoward, and would just arrest anyone if it got out of hand, probably to throw them into Kuwaiti bum-rape hell.

So what were they lookin out for exactly? I had to know. In the UK you might be lookin out for a gun or knife, a bit of the old illegal drugs, maybe a bit too much sex on the dancefloor that sort of thing.

"They're lookin to make sure that no-one kisses anyone"

Well fuck me. That was pretty unexpected! They were also lookin for any alcohol. Maaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaan! No wonder they see us Westerners as immoral! They should see Leicester Square on Saturday night with the teenage slappers chuckin up their guts on the pavements and having sex in the phoneboxes.

I went back in, done the cha-cha slide one more time and stayed the hell away from having sex with anyone, then decided that I'd probably be better off dancin around my front room rather than gettin banged up in a Kuwaiti prison. After I left there was a fight with some drunken twats and the place went to shit.

DJ Jack has stopped running parties now and has gone pretty spiritual. We're still in touch and it's all good.

I've just been on msn to him and it seems that over the last few months we've both been unemployed. Whereas I thought that the local gladiator academy was a challenge (I've now found a job in somewhere pretty nice actually - fingers x'ed) DJ Jack has nailed himself a REAL challenge...he's going to Iraq with the British Army to be a translator!!!!

And I thought I was in the firing line! I will never complain of a shit day in the office again!

I'm prayin for you big guy. And believe me, in this godless country where I live, that's a big deal. Take some good pics bro and tell me all about it when you chat up in a month. See ya then.

Warwick in recall - pimps and gorillas(!) party in Amsterdam! Damn!

This is one I wrote ages ago on another site and I thought I'd best preserve it for posterity. After all it's not every day you get to meet a gorilla with a strap-on ballbag is it...

What a bloody crazy trip! I of course mean that in more ways than one. What can I say? Well all that everyone actually knows about is the Gorilla incident, and I'll get to that in time. But first let's get some background on this whole thing.

The trip was organised by the Warwick TaeKwonDo Club to blow the final funds. It's a wicked club and always has money left over at the end of the year so this year decided to actually do something with the money so treated us to a crazy bender in Amsterdam at a reduced price.

So we get to Victoria at something like 9PM, Thursday to check in for the coach which leaves at 10. I suggest that with an hour to wait we could and should get some beer down us so Me, Chris, Ash, Pete and a couple of other guys head off to the nearest pub and knock back three pints each as a nice bit of warming up. Chris then suggests we get some spirits and take them with us on the coach too, which obviously seemed like a great idea, so we knocked on down to Threshers and got a bottle of Bacardi and 2 bottles of Coke between the 4 of us. I vaguely remember someone saying that that worked out at 8 shots each or something. By the time I got to dover I was convinced that Paul wanted to fuck me and apparently tried to shag him on the floor at Dover before we boarded the ferry.

On the ferry I apparently went missing for 45 minutes. I don't even remember where I was so I must have been lost. I do remember playing Time Crisis 2 with Ash though and getting further than I'd ever got before, which says a lot about how good I am at it. God only knows how I found my way back to the coach as next thing you know I was awake in Amsterdam wanting to throw up.

After about 2 hours sleep the lot of us decided to inflict ourselves on the town and headed straight for Amsterdams main tourist attraction for students and pubescent boys alike, The Amsterdam Sex Museum. What a fucking great (and rather twisted) place. It was a really professional museum actually and had some quite good displays and things, not quite the sordid excuse for a museum that I was expecting. I got a bit of a surprise from this chair that gives you one up the arse when you sit on it (while watching a porn movie may I add) and had quite a good all round laugh. There was a pretty sick shock too in the fetishes and weirdos section, where I saw a load of weird shit like this woman taking a pig and another of this bloke putting his end away in a horse while a bird is giving it a blow. Not pleasant but my not that shocking as my mate Jon showed me a load the other day anyway on the internet that he stumbled across, and it's on sale in all the sex shops we went into afterwards in the afternoon.

The evening rolled on real quick and after yet more continued drinking we decided to go out to the Red Light District and I suggested that we go to a live sex show. Chris, Ash, Pete, Dave and a couple of other guys were up for it so we went around, shopping for the best price, but soon found out that all the fucking places were owned by the same company the Theatre Casa Roso had a fucking monopoly. So we ended up going to the Theatre Casa Roso surprisingly for 50 guilders a head, but not until Pete talked the bouncer into giving us a free drink.

So we get in there and find all the seats taken up. The bulk of the crowd are a bunch of ODB's (Old Dirty Bastards) and there's us, tanked up like walking brewerys and out for a laugh. Anyway we ended up having to take the best seats in the house, the ones that no other wanker would take, right at the front next to the stage.

So the show starts and you get this woman on who gets jiggy with a candle. All very amusing stuff and there's us at the side pissing ourselves. The next act was this Brazilian whore. She's dancing around getting naked whatever and then she turns to us lot at the side of the stage and points to Pete. Pete, pissed as a fart can't believe his luck and is on stage faster than you could say "Somebody stop me!"

Next thing you know she's rubbing her norks up and down his face and starts stripping him off! He's visibly shitting himself and the front of his pants are filling up too, when she gets the concealed dildo out (Where did she hide that?). She get's him to lay down and sticks her muff in his face, and when it comes off his tongue he's grinning like a cat in cream (bad analogy to use I know). Then she inserts the aforementioned into you-know-where.

We are pissing ourselves right the way through the next 3 acts (one of which involved a nun and a monk-I thought they weren't allowed to do that sort of thing...) and taking the piss-Pete was convinced she quite fancied him, all thinking that we were home and dry. How wrong we were.

Pete's bird comes back on for the finale and she's into her audience participation. And guess what? She obviously didn't much like the idea of having one of the other greasy motherfuckers from the audience on stage. The guy on the opposite side of the stage had a beer in his left hand and more froth on the end of his right I presume, by the way his right seemed to be pumping like a fucking piston. So she looks our way again and points at 5 of us, Me, Dave, Ash, Pete and some other guy. Chris was left in the audience with his mini camera conveniently.

So we're standing on stage (I'm dancing about obviously-I'm not about to pass up a spotlight like this) and Pete decides he'll try his luck and starts chatting her up for fucks sake! "So Love, where are you from?", "Brazil", "What's your phone number?"-The rest of us cringe. At which point she whispers into each of our ears, "Get your trousers down!". Oh shit! But before we could actually do anything she had 'em down for us. So the five of us are in a line looking like an A J P 7-ball parade. And as if that isn't enough, she makes us dance round the stage in a line.

Now things started to get interesting. Out of nowhere, this gorilla jumps on the stage, with a 12 inch strap on dildo. Things couldn't get any more surreal if I made it up. And this gorilla joins in the trousers down dance thing at the end of the line. Pete decides that he's gonna deck him too, but i think he was probably just being protective of his woman. I think Chris was busily snapping away and I'll post the piccies right here if I get enough demand but who the hell would want to see me with my trousers down, prancing about on stage with a gorilla and a topless Brazilian Whore anyway? Weirdos.

And for the finale, She pulls out a concealed banana (again I can't be too sure where she actually hid it. And anyway after reading what happened next I'm sure you'll agree, I don't think it matters.) and shoves it in and peels it. Dave's the first up and has to take a bite and while he's down there the gorilla jumps on him and starts giving him one! And we all have to go down one by one.

Obviously, being up for a laugh I decided to give the gorilla a little surprise of my own. I took my mouthful and the minute I felt it on me I turned round and started giving it myself. I kind of shocked her (the Brazilian said it was a bird inside apparently but I couldn't really tell through the gorilla mask) but I earned myself quite a bit of extra time on stage. Admittedly it was spent shagging a monkey with a dildo but stage time is hard to come by these days.

We ended off the night drinking in a student bar and walking home for 6 in the morning. What an amazing night. The rest of the weekend could never live up to that night so I won't bother to tell you about our visits to coffee shops the next day or the trip home, but I'm sure you can imagine it.

China in recall 7 - A joke on the runway

The flight from Shanghai landed on the tarmac at Heathrow in the evening of August 11th. The flight had been a long one, maybe about 9 hours but I had made good friends with a couple, Courtney and Pete, who I'm still in touch with now. On landing an announcement came over the tannoy that there were a few delays and that the plane would be held on the tarmac for 15 minutes.

After an hour of waiting, me and Courtney, with our miniscule attention spans were starting to go a little stir crazy and having pillow fights with those miniature in-flight pillows.

I looked out the window of the plane one and half hours after that announcement and saw a British Airways plane being brought into the terminal and said loudly,

"I can't believe it, Courtney! Would you look at that! The British Airways plane gets to park up but they leave the Air China plane stranded! It's RACISM that's what it is!"

to which I was greeted with a chorus of disapproving "tut"s. Little did I realise, as I had been in the mountains around Sichuan for the last month, that just a few days earlier there were some serious terrorist threats on transatlantic flights! Is that a foot in your mouth sir...?

The Vietnamese Alphabet (abridged)

I was out at the zoo with Panda Jen and she was tellin me about her time in Vietnam.

"It was when I travelled from Hanoi to Hoi An" She said wistfully, "That I realised that the Vietnamese probably don't have that many letters in their alphabet."

With wit like that and the fact that she got me a (rare) Lao Airlines sickbag for my collection, Panda Jen now joins my list of all-time favourite girls EVER!

An escape to anywhere

After Olga suggeseted the other day that maybe we should do a joint blog and photo trip, I couldn't get the idea out of my mind. It's been FAR too long since I had a damn good adventure, met cool as hell people and woke up wonderin where the hell I am. Right now I'm just stewing and gettin unbeliievably bored. My new Gumtree ad says it all

I'm fed up. Completely dang well fed up of workin in London, schools are full of brats and I need to escape somewhere very very far away, at least until January when some decent jobs come up but I'll be honest if I could escape for longer I would.

If you are as fed up as me, have a great sense of humour, itchy feet and a few free months on your hands then lets get out of here and just hit the road to anywhere, nowhere and everywhere.

A bit about me - I'm a Vietnamese Londoner, teacher by trade and compulsive blogger www.andytgeezer.blogspot.com Travellin would be a great chance to write some blog and just get this silly country out of my mind for bit with it's chavs and crap schools. Grrrrr!

I've travelled to Kuwait (I was pissed when I accepted the job) and Romania and a bunch of other places, India, Nepal, Thailand, Vietnam, too many too mention. I travel anywhere at the drop of a hat and get involved with everything. Some people even tell me I'm quite a laugh.

I'm not up for just goin on a Worldwide pub crawl, let's go out and play chess with the locals, jump naked into lakes and sneak on trains. I reckon if I could get a gang of 4 like minds up I would be the happiest man in the world.

So come on you bums! What are you waitin for contact me and let's bust out of this joint as soon as we can!

A day in the gladiator academy

At the end of last term I thought I had finally done the impossible and got a job. It was a local school, pretty bog standard and to all intents and purposes average or below average as state schools go.

They interviewed me ages ago before the kids had come back from a summer of terrorising local residents and collecting ASBOs and gave me the job on the spot. The agency had said that the first CV on the head's desk on Monday morning would get the job. This wasn't lookin good.

I arranged to see a lesson, just to get a feel for the place before commiting myself to what I knew was going to be a young-offender-infested pit of Hades. Yes I really was that optimistic.

As I crossed the river Styx into that place, suited and tied I began to get a feeling of what it was like to be a gladiator in ancient Rome. Specifically I felt like that one in the film Gladiator who wets himself before going through the gate. From what I recall of the film, it was that man who promptly got a large spiky metal ball through his face pretty much as soon as he walked through the gate.

...and that's pretty much what happened to me really. I had just entered the classroom, not even introduced when one of the kids, takin a look at me and decidin that he didn't like my face or some other thought that probably didn't need too many brain cells to process, strode over and proceeded to kick me in the shins.

Now if this bastard had done that outside the school gates I probably would have chinned him . But as it was I had to let it slip and just sat there aghast. Of course, the next thing this shit does is decides to push the issue and sits there taunting. Well I was just watching the lesson, I could have been anyone off the streets and this is the sort of thing that he deems appropriate.

Things got worse from there.

After an hour and a half (the kids had completed a wordsearch by then -pretty much the only taks they could get through. Seriously) and were getting restless. Well alright they had been restless the whole time, shouting, screaming and throwing items of furniture across the room but they decided to get worse. So one of the girls jumped out of her seat, runs across the lab swearing like erm well like me I guess only worse and using lots of the REALLY dirty ones about fannies.

She grabs one of the quiet girls by the hair, smacks her head on a table throws her on the floor and kicks her in the teeth. The teacher in charge and myself ran over to break it up and the other kids whooped and cheered. It was like feeding time at the monkey enclosure.

So I left that job before I even started. It was never really ideal, I mean I didn't want to teach science, just physics and they'd not really made it clear if I was to be brought in as a teacher or a boxing referee.

Broken homes are spilling out broken kids and there's not much any teacher can really do when given a class like that. When you see this sort of thing it reminds me of why all my mates think I must be mad to teach and why I say I love it. I'm beginning to wonder myself if it really is worth it.

Credits: Thanks to Chris for sorting out the photoshop up top. A big improvement on my effort.

I've just about had it with your CRAP!

You gotta love the Romanians...

But what ELSE is in the Mid-Atlantic!

I was chattin to a mate the other day and said she had to sort out that American accent she had.

"It's a 'Mid-Atlantic' accent, I've been told" she said.

"The only things that live in the Middle of the Atlantic are fish" I replied, "and they don't have the neccesary vocal apparatus to possess an accent"

That shut her up.

Oh the irony...

So the last post was about how I despair that less people seem to be interested in the genius of Alan Moore than in the vacuous big-breasted delights (I presume) of Mandy Moore and the number of hits I get suddenly increases. On closer inspection though, it turns out that most the new hits are from people carrying out searches for, yes you guessed it...

Mandy Moore.

What is this world coming to!