Did you honestly expect it to be quick? Fools.
Okay, I promise to whichever deity happens to be passing that the next post, material for which I truly am collating at the moment, honest, won't be about me again. Yes, that means this one is. If you really, really want to bend your face inwards with your keyboard at the prospect of another whinging idiot banging on about their `issues` on the internet then please, don't unsubscribe, I love you really, but skip this one over and just you get your Wanderlust valves loosened up for the next entry.
Until then this is your captain speaking, from the bridge of the HMS Lugubrious, for your comfort and convenience please engage your sympathy ports and uncouple your woe deflectors, thank you.
Every time, it happens every bloody time but still I don't quite recognise it: the seasonal cold.
Well, more truthfully, the tri-seasonal cold as I seem to get about a dozen miniture editions a year, but usually one or two of them truly knock me for six. The same thing happened this time last year and caused no end of misery for everyone within 2 miles from the blast zone - why the hell I should get one when my current environmental temperature averages 29º Celsius I can only wonder, although I would postulate a likely answer: those poxy tourists. I guess one of the dashed blighters came along from their frosty homeland (and we've suffered an invasion on a scale similar to 1944 Normandy these last 3 days) and spread about their sinusational woes (I'm allowed words like that, I'm ill) amongst their fellow man. The insurmountably inconsiderate gits.
Anyway this at least explains, in part, my self-piteous misery and lack of agreeableness, which I know must be sensationally nonplussing for you readers who don't even know me personally. Its hardly riveting for the poor fuckers who HAVE met my greasily pompous avatar upon the Earth, but hey, that lot are kind of obliged to give a damn by dint of being so dashed bloody politely British. I love inflicting Englishness upon the English some times, you can all share a bit more of this self-effacing deprecatory nonsense that Americans rarely understand and rightly often scorn, spread it out a bit, I have far too much on my plate thank you very much.
In fact, it is actually the cause of a good many of our own personal troubles and those of our fine country today as well, in this smoking-jacket-wearing padded-leather-chair-bestriding pseudo-intellectual's opinion, what? Harrumph!!
*removes stick from arse*
*descends from soap-box*
I would very much like to thank every one of those lovely people that do know me in the real world, whatever that is (isn't life all about USB sockets, serviceable broadband connections and alphanumerically chronicled vituperations, after all?) for all their worthy messages of help and support in the midst of my silly little upheaval recently. A fantastic thanks to you, I was impressed by the sheer number of kind words from all quarters, so here's to you *raises bottle; of TONIC WATER (honest 
)* A very happy 2008 to every one of you, you certainly deserve it.
It's almost true about the tonic water you know. Vodka mysteriously finds its way into most of the damn glasses as well, but that's not my doing, that's all Greg's fault
Colds: also known as Man Flu. I strongly denied for years that I was amongst those distinctly unmanly males for whom a cold represented a near-death experience.
Although I never complain (any more than usual) about the sense-stiffling blockages, crippling expenditures on tissues or the aches and pains in joints and muscles that most blokes do every time one of our kind gets the sniffles (as a smoker and direct descendant of Captain Catarrh [sorry Dad, these things do seem to be hereditary] a shameless public expectorator and also a foolish self-wounding drunkard & ex-manual labourer, these symptoms are either a constant feature of life or are total nonstarters, regardless of my immune system's opinion) I failed for a long while to realise the psychological impact.
True, for a few years now I have been able to identify myself and some others, especially my Dad, as having an impending cold up to 4 days before it became in any way physically obvious, it was in itself obvious to me by a stark downshift in joie de vivre and our usual joyous dispositions, but when you're feeling a bit shit about more important things - especially the most important things i.e. life, death, love and happiness - and in a climate that you are unfamiliar with, it is easy to attribute the weird night-time scratchings in your left ear as some alien insectoid beast burrowing unstoppably towards your brain with dark desires to feed her brood (which of course is about to be laid inside of your skull somewhere) upon your delicate cerebral tissues.
Well, it's easy to think that when you've got a bit of a fever and can't ever sleep for more than 2 hours together, so it takes a day or two to realise that it's not actually Lady Centipede and her thousand young but actually your own dear sinuses shifting their unwanted filling around in an effort to clear up your hearing and balance a little bit.
Good stuff for quietly shitting yourself late at night when you're all alone abroad and can't sleep though, I recommend it to anyone who wants to experience some good solid paranoia, really first class stuff.
So, as seem inevitable around new year's time, I let my own wicked immune system infect my mind with manifestations of it's own shitty issues, so yes, it's not as bad as all that.
Still not happy though, especially after last night's NYE party where, having got to know a whole load of people (which is a marked improvement on all the time since Christmas day) and generally chatting with lots of ladies, I found that even given my ludicrously lofty standards it was really only me that was wanting, whereas they all wanted someone a bit more cool. Damn these fashionable youngsters, with their lack of noticeable bodyfat and uncomplicated deficit of jaded worldly wisdom. Okay `wisdom` is a bit grand, I take that back. It did make the sentence run nicely though you've got to admit.
.
I tell you what I leanred last night, the old myths are a complete lie: what women want in a fella isn't intelligence, courtesy and kindness, nor is it anyone tall dark and reasonably not-too-hideously-hideous: it's actually just a little childish bravado and a falseness that comes across as some kind of confidence. I can see it (the falseness, the unwarranted swagger and the lies, the so fucking OBVIOUS petty lies argh!!!) in all these guys, and still the women last night all went off with them, and not me. Doubtless they all had a lot of energetic and messy fun. I went off before sunrise and had a hugely overpriced bottle of rum. Hooray.
Mind you, a lot of people at that party were totally whacked out on MDMA (an especially nice drug if I may so so) and Valium, a combination I'm sure is quite blissful, but as I was only drinking; and that not a lot of before I found my friend Rum; there wasn't a lot of point hanging about.
The talking had mostly been done - I have been to about a hundred too many all-night parties and had at least half a million too many drugged-up/drunk conversations in my short little life already and am pretty sick of hearing the same old shit from the same old drugs, merely through a different person - and everyone who managed to make enough sense earlier on was either somewhere nearby rutting away like beasts of the field, or were entwined around someone of their preferred gender and preparing themselves for same.
A quiet confidence founded on real life experience and, dare I be a little conceited here, an artistic soul - plus the fact none of these uncommitted charlies can dance for toffee and hey, I allow myself a little self-praise here because I know I'm good at at least 4 things in this life and dancing is most definitely one of them - count for nothing in the face of overtly happy lads 5 years younger than me and, I gotta admit, a whole hell of a lot skinnier.
Oh well - I've come to believe these last weeks that you gotta be very much like whatever it is that you very much want to get, so I guess that I want to lose 30 pounds, a quarter of my spoken vocabulary and at least 90% of my life's experience and/or cynicism.
Next issue: things apart from me, yay!!