Versive

I just got back from a little shopping and something isn't right. I was wandering the Woolworths store here (Woolworths in NZ means supermarket rather than cheap and cheerful gubbins shop. In the States the same name belongs to another kind of shop altogether. I think they're still all owned by the same group, but as my internet costs have quadrupled and I'm being extremely tight-fisted with online time at the moment I'll have to get back to you on this one) looking for, I believe my mental list was "cheapo own-brand bread, cheapo own-brand pasta, cheapo own-brand tuna in bland cheap flavourless nothing juice, and two servings of meat so cheap it's begun a second life" but I was distracted almost immediately by some discounted peppers.

Now first off, the price of bell peppers - or capsicums as the rest of the world but the British would have them - is both outrageous and disgraceful, and if it wasn't for the fact they're so damn useful and tasty I would boycott them and possibly picket the odd supermarket to boot, and secondly I would love to know where all the properly sized ones go to; you know, the ones actual chefs use on TV and in cookbooks. I'll be buggered if I'm gonna believe the meagre little offerings in the supermarket veggie section are the best that capsicum growers the world over can manage, because when Delia stuffs a pepper just to pick each one up she's gotta use both hands, and they disappear to the elbows when she spoons in the filling.

Thirdly you may have noticed that my theme tune for the day was something like `Those old cheap-time rags-for-trousers blues` because I am, of course, bleeding money from a deep gash in my common sense.
So I did my shopping and inevitably became a little distracted again and again, and bought a few extra things, notably as I passed the gypsy-special-no-point-stealing-'em-it's-so'cheap tuna, I spotted the anchovies and remembered Piedmont peppers. I happened to have picked up red ones earlier in the store, and with anchovies as well all you really need are some tomatoes, oil and garlic, and I already had the last two.

Tomatoes tomatoes tomatoes.... they have to be small (very small, to fit into these peppers) and indeed there were only packs of 6 available in the right size, which is to say a size more closely resembling cherry tomatoes rather than the regular salad variety. Anyway I got to the till and paid. Or at least, I got to the till and there it all went a bit weird. You see, I was vaguely hoping to be able to pay cash, simply because I had a $20 note left and didn't especially want to spend more than that. With only three items left my total stood at a couple of bucks under twenty, and I hoped it would just scrape in - a half-kilogram of pasta I knew to be only 97 cents, which I remembered because that is less than 40 British pence and frankly I was impressed. There was a chance it would be okay, but with the final two tallied I was looking at the wrong side of thirty sodding dollars - a total of $30.36c, in fact.

Those bloody tomatoes had cost $5 and the peppers, which I suppose I should never have trusted in the first place the sneaky devils, were costing me more than $5.50, so even with some cheap own-brand bread I was unwittingly forced to part with half as much again as I wanted to. But this isn't the point: the point is that I also got two servings of meat that was not only well within its useable date but was also exceptionally cheap. A quarter of a kilo of lean pork for only $2.65 and 400g - the best part of a half-kilo - of BBQ marinated rump steak for just $3.88.
That's enough steak, at a push, to feed three people, admittedly with a bit of salad or potatoes or something, but the main part of a meal for three for £1.50 - and steak, too.

So what are people to think about nutrition and proper eating when they cannot buy half a dozen very small tomatoes for less than five dollars, but they can get a Big Mac for exactly 30cents less than that? That fresh meat is so cheap is worthy of applause but that it costs twice as much for some tomatoes which could maybe just about constitute one serving of food for one person, as it does for enough steak to feed three?

Most vegetables in NZ do seem rather expensive, it has to be said. But I suppose against a backdrop of meat so cheap it would frankly be rude to be vegetarian, and staples like pasta or rice that can feed families for a whole week for a couple of dollars, it almost seems like there is little room for honest-to-goodness veggies at the kiwi table, and I think that is a bit of a shame.

Here's a little exercise for you - try to say this word: Maori. I bet you wont get it right by the time you finish this.

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One of the most important things in life we can do, that everyone has done already and will continue to do, hopefully, until their day of departure, is almost never thought about.
Besides that dashed handy little breathing reflex we've got, it is probably the biggest thing anyone ever does and we do it without any decisions or contemplation or conscious choice - and anyway we bypass that automatic respiration doohickey all the time, like you have done just now after I made you stop and think of it. Sorry. Do remember to breath in again, wont you.

It happens automatically yet it is the one crucial thing that keeps about 95% of us stable, happy and secure about 95% of the time. It can cause us to agonise pretty much indefinitely afterward, true enough, but this isn't something we think about, just something we do.
We all make friends; and they in turn make our lives, in a very real way.

But we never really choose to - have you purposefully decided on meeting someone you have no objection to but don't especially like either, that you will intentionally make them into a friend? Do you approach different people in a group you come into and make yourself exceptionally friendly and useful to the person of highest social status? Unlikely. It just happens that you get on well with certain people and it either lasts or it is allowed to drift into acquaintanceship.

Unless you are me, of course. Being the mechanical, emotionally-stunted fellow I am I devise cold and vaguely cunning plans to ingratiate myself into places I like the look of, circles of people that offer me a value-based benefit, a quantifiable asset to my portfolio of social options. Of course a lot of other people do this as well; they are called `women`, apparently More specifically feminus nuptialii manipulatus.

Now don't go screaming your heads off because I can personally recall half a dozen times one of this breed joined a circle of friends and dated them in series, starting off somewhere around the middle of the pecking order and finishing off at the top of the food chain with the loudest, richest, biggest or smartest bloke, depending on what kind of group it was. And if I've known it you've all known it too; in any case it's a stereotype of a certain kind of woman and those things do come from somewhere, you know. Stop booing. I don't care how un-PC it is or how often it doesn't happen, it's true.

Incidentally I would like to add for the record, as I think one or two friends of mine might eventually read this, that I almost alway go about things in the prescribed manner and would not know any of the superb people for any other reason than that they are all rather brilliant. If, however, I have borrowed your lawnmower, your vacuum cleaner and your wife, yet have still never managed to invite you round for cocktails, the chances are in your case I have been a manipulative bastard

So it was this weekend after I finally got off my highly polished posterior and went into the woods to play paintball again (we'll call it paintball even though it's not. Long story, can't be bothered to explain yet again) and generally busied myself with the business of acquiring acquaintances that I discovered I can relate to real people again. You might not follow, or be able to imagine it, but I was up until recently going slowly insane through not having any real human contact. The tens of thousands of people who've been near me this past 11 months notwithstanding, I have felt increasingly alone in the world this year, mostly because everyone I have met has been a `single-serving friend` (watch Fight Club again if you have no idea what that means).

It being me doing the doing, as it were, I was shit at paintball but met a good bunch of guys and managed to find at least two of them who can potentially help me out in different ways, and of course I will help them in turn if I can. Just because one recognises the usefulness of somebody doesn't mean that is all there is to it; if my friend is a lawyer and I am a carpenter I expect a little free legal advice and am delighted to help fit his new kitchen. If I am a writer - and let's pretend for a minute that I actually am, it's my favourite game - and my buddy runs a restaurant then I would think it only proper to write her advertising copy for her and occasionally pop in for a free feed.

So with a bit of luck I've found some good chaps there. In any case, I've got a regular Saturday game with them if I want it, and going to the woods to run about like a smarties-crazed toddler for 6 hours every week can only be good news for my already impressive waistline (I stopped counting at 38", the numbers just became too big and too scary). Also it means I can justify buying another gun, which is going to be good for a laugh, although of course I will have to find full-time employment first, which is proving to have distinctly less comedy value. I was really hoping for more temping assignments than the, let me see let's count them...; than the entire one I have been given so far.

I have to say, actually, that what work I have done and the meagre but regular shifts at Shooters (that's `my` bar/club, Friday and Saturday nights at least) have been pretty damned pleasing, despite even the tedium of data entry and the jealous fury nurtured from watching hundreds of other people getting drunk and dancing like partially-tranquilised chimps.
The staff at Shooters are an exceptionally decent lot and they rather like a drink themselves, bless them, and I guess doing the last of the tidying up about 3:15am yet not managing to leave the place until 5:30 on Sunday morning, quite a bit the worse for wear thanks to Jack (Daniels) and Jim (Beam) just about says it all.

There is a distinct cultural flavour to `my` bar at `my bar` too; I have the front bar and am sort of in charge in a strange and pretty unjustifiable way, so thanks to my seniority of a whole two weeks I have been training a new girl; and it seems there aren't any Kiwis with us on that frontline but a damn Brit ("Hello!" *waves*) and an Argentinian, namely that new girl, one Mariel. To help this theme along there is another Brit on the back bar in the clubby part of the place and one more Argentinian girl there as well: bizarrely the two girls used to work together back home (and no, they did not travel together) and it's only a mercy that neither of them is really old enough to remember The War, although I am saving my emergency mocking material all about the Falklands and Diego Maradonna's cocaine habit for just the right moment. I do hope they take it well.
I'm also desperately trying to think of a gag or something mockworthy to do with Evita, but seeing as I can't actually bring myself to watch a musical with Antonio Banderas in it I will probably have to to leave it out.

When Sunday came it was late in the day, and as I seem to be switching to a vaguely nocturnal sleep pattern it's probably a perfectly good thing that I'm looking at the hostel I now stay in for a night watchman job, or rather a night porter, or something. I have yet to sit down and talk to the owners as they have been ludicrously busy this weekend, but am scheduled to do so tomorrow. That I have finally a good idea and now the full plot sketched out for a book - and a pretty darned good book, too, if I can write the thing as I have it conceived so far - could only really be called serendipitous. Mind you that's a dangerous word to spell, so I'll be careful not to overuse it.

If I was a no-good stinking hippy (which I sort of am, in a way, ish) I might think something into the fact that those Argentinian girls in the bar can of course help me in my quest to learn Spanish, and my quest has actually begun now after talking with Mariel and it turns out I do remember more than just the word for window (it's ventana, in case you were wondering), previously thought to be the very limits of my Hispanic lexicographical retention. Actually I did know what a zapataria was as well (though the spelling I'm not sure of..) and I need to spend time and money in a good one as soon as I can afford to.

I had many weeks previously noted a gig set for Sunday, a heavy metal group that sounded really rather good, a lot like early Pantera who I still rate as the best metal band ever, even if they are all rednecks, the lead singer is a total dickhole, and the guitarist is now dead after being - get this, I am not joking - after being shot in the back of the head on-stage in the middle of a concert. Yes, I was likewise upset, for different reasons. Only in America, as they say.

Being a bit of a metal fan I was excited as hell and of course started my evening early after a hearty meal - I have now added beef stroganoff to my repertoire; the secret to this one is a good beef steak like sirloin or fillet, shallots rather than onions, and not too much of the sour cream - and proceeded to drink a frankly disgusting amount of booze throughout the day.

Now, we all know my liver works about as well or worse than my brain, which is a sad statement in and of itself, and I would never use this space to brag about my prowess at what is basically a very dumb display of self-anaesthetising. But on Sunday I downed a truly heroic quantity of the sauce, I mean really it was impressive. Stupid, but quite impressively so, at least.
After having a whole bottle of red (a cheap but pretty charming straight Merlot, from New Zealand, natch) I went downstairs in the hostel to where there is a bar - and no, this is not the reason I am now staying here, I was unaware at the time of booking so shut up O voices of dissent - and consumed three pints of local poison while watching the first episode of the excellent new Attenborough/BBC `Life` series, Life In Cold Blood which is superb, as always from Sir David.

He has injected a little more humour than usual into this one, and it worked extremely well alongside yet more magnificent photography from all corners of the planet. Every time I watch a new `Life` series - and if you go back to the original `Life on Earth` from 1976 you will also be amazed, I am sure of it - I am deeply, deeply impressed and grateful to Attenborough and the BBC for delivering simply the finest documentaries ever made. In fact I feel increasingly saddened that the man is so much older than I am and can only do so much now after such an exceptional life. But I digress, as usual.

After working my way through the dregs of the last beer I plodded through Nelson to the Royal Hotel and found myself in old and comfortably familiar territory: a dark and sleazy heavy metal bar with inch-thick grease on the walls where everyone dresses in black and drinks like tomorrow isn't going to happen. Nice. I know so many places like it - leading me to the intriguing possibility that, like L-space in Terry Pratchett's Discworld (where all libraries are interconnected throughout every known universe, essentially all being parts of the same library) perhaps there could be something like Dinge-space, where all rock and metal bars are connected, perhaps by means of a portal in the mens toilets. It seems somehow strangely appropriate.

While at the Royal I consumed a truly ungodly number of drinks, I remember at least four pints but where I really showed my colours was the shooters, which are double shots of various sticky and colourful liqueurs with blatantly sexual names. The Quick Fuck was my favourite although it was closely followed in the towering-mindfuck-steeplechase, if not the appealing-nickname-hurdles, by the Cocksucking Cowboy. Brokeback Mountain has got a lot to answer for in my opinion.

I do remember having four at a time. I don't remember how many times I repeated the exercise, although I do know I punctuated this routine with double Jagermeisters and redbull, which is probably how I mainatined my verttical stature. Needless to say, I drank it all up and got wasted and, inevitably, got booted out of the place for being considerably drunker than is properly legal, as is my wont.

I dealt with my randomised hangover guilt today by a) ignoring it because I was still smashed when I woke at midday, b) denying it around 2pm as the pain started to set in, c) accepting it guiltily and realising I may have caused a little trouble when being asked to leave, I will go back in a few days and apologise if it's necessary, and d) ignoring it again because what's done is done and hell, just because I know some of them from Shooters and will have to deal with whatever I did this weekend doesn't mean I don;t have the perfect excuse: I was mindlessly drunk. The answer to everything.

On a very much less fluffy note I do know I drank to such legendary extremes because I know how much I spent. Bearing in mind that a pint is $6, a double-shot shooter is $7.50, and a jagermeister-redbull is $12, I must have dealt my liver a proper good thrashing because thanks to Sunday night, and after a bottle of red wine and a couple of pints, the Royal Hotel now has almost $200 of my money. And I certainly can't have got a taxi home because I'm only 5 minutes walk away and bizarrely I do remember coming up the stairs. Eeek.

Some time earlier in the evening I went for one of my very frequent unloadings of superfluous fluid (possibly also having an inkling about Dinge-space and hoping to emerge in one of the really cool rock bars in L.A.) to find a group of people, including one girl, doing some cocaine of their very own in the Gents. That there was a woman there is hardly worth mentioning as this is a highly frequent occurence in rock club toilets, although very rarely do I, for example, get to see the inside of the Ladies', more's the pity.
What actually startled me was that they were doing it at all - have you any idea of the price of coke in New Zealand?

Let me put it into perspective. In the UK a gram of cocaine is (so my sources tell me) about £30 - £50 depending on how nice your dealer is and how well you know him or her. If you only just met and he's a shifty bastard you'll be paying the top price.
In New Zealand dollars that puts 1 gram at $125, and given that most of everything is a little cheaper than the UK pro rata, I would conservatively adjust that figure to $110 to allow for economic disparity.
Unfortunately for the youth of New Zealand, and Diego Maradonna if he happens to be visiting, the price for a gram of Columbian marching powder is a wallet-numbing $450 - $550, around three to four times as much as it is in Britain, which is itself paying a hugely inflated figure because of the key middlemen who transport the stuff from the villages where it is manufactured to the coastal crews who get it over the seas and into the noses of metalheads, pop stars and investment bankers the world over.

Getting it over the seas to New Zealand is, of course, one of life's big buggers, at least for those who would like to sell more of it Down Under and of course the hot young things of today in Kiwiland as well. I mean, Australia is a bit of a bastard to get to, but New Zealand has only 4 million people and is another 2,000 kilometres out across the sea from even there. Pretty little market for a pretty big boatride, so I suppose it's no wonder the stuff costs so much.
Anyway I was astounded, not least by the fact they had it but also because a) they were making some seriously hefty lines of the stuff, inexpertly if I may say so, and b) the poor sad fools were knocking it up right next to the sink, and one drop of water would have really rather ruined things for them.

I say this as a lifelong observer of the life habits of others, naturally, and of course could never claim to be knowledgeable of these things firsthand. That would just be wrong.

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Oh and the way to say Maori is this `Moe-(d)Ree` (almost rhymed with `mouldy`) or that's as best as I can reproduce the subtle `d`-sound click in the middle of the word. Australians and pretty much everyone else pronounce it `maowree` and if that doesn't irritate on its own then try saying it with a strong nasal Australian accent. Maori get kind of pissed off about that. Just thought I would share

Fußball = most pointless of games. I have never seen the attraction, although of course we are all different and we're all entitled to our own bizarre hobbies and passions.
Still, it is offensively noisy and it takes a special kind of inconsiderate asshole to play it in the only quiet room in the hostel. It took a special kind of lunacy to put the damn thing in here, too; mind you, the players can probably be forgiven because they are Statesian Americans, and therefore congenitally incapable of feeling guilt about their actions.
If they could also leave the tuneless key-bashing of one or both of the little upright pianos out I would apprectiate it. Small children can do this, yes they are allowed to experiment. As soon as you are out of pre-school (`kindergarten` I believe it's called on Planet USA) however you need either lessons or a clip around the ear with a brick.

Someone wrote, that I recently read, that when a European is faced with any problem the immediate thought whether expressed or not, is `What's wrong with me?`
An American faced with the same problem will be thinking `What's wrong with this guy/thing/place/whatever?`
I'm liking the sweeping statements today as I need to make easy sense of the world without too much equivocation and as few niceties as possible, for today I am Finding Work and it's a bit of a bugger.

Having approached half a dozen shops in town and been rebuffed at every turn but one, I'm only glad that the lady in the Nelson Mail office was so helpful and has given me a cunning idea, namely to present the most professional possible CV ever to be passed around the departments and hopefully viewed with some interest. I'm thinking spiral bound, hard covered, 4 or 5 page offering including a sample of various styles of article and both large and small colour photos clipped inside the cover. they are big on photos here and every CV and application seems to want one, so I might go to the trouble of getting some decent shots.

Aaaaanyway, looking forward to a medical tomorrow where I probably will be told a number of disquieting things about what I should not have done and what I now have to do to make it all right again, or possibly be diagnosed with some treatable infection and/or a horrific illness. I'm looking forward to it with great relish, as you can imagine.

Still trying to find the all-important themes and settings and events for this book idea too. And as I have so little adventure to report I am reduced to filling in this post with all the trivial mindless bollocks above, so tough turds, folks, sorry.

It's all a bit weird over here. First off, I am ill, not ill in a boring normal sniffly way, nor anything especially colourful, but I am ill like a plague victim awaiting the merciful blow of Eric Idle dressed in rags to finish me off.

Well maybe not quite that ill (" I think I'll go for a walk!") but I have been so tired the last few days I've slept for something like 13 hours of every 24, which is just not me, sorta thing.
I have started a new blog, by the way. I intended it to be a mroe refined, more professional version of this one (no swearing, magazine-style articles in a proper journalistic vein) but I can't find the enthusiasm for it yet, and I re-read the first proper thing I wrote; a summary of Queenstown made in competitive stylee for www.Suite101.com but I really just don't like it. Have a look if you like but I have missed at least a half-dozen bloody obvious errors and I think it's a bit poo, quite honestly.

Mainly I wanted to leave blog.co.uk as it happens, and move to Wordpress which is the weblog site du jour and stands to get my ramblings to a far wider audience. The fate of Versive was sealed after I read the `featured blogs` on the frontpage of this site yet again, and was yet again dismayed that a spastic monkey had been given a virtual medal for yet again trotting out yet more annoying A-level socialism, again.

Please, please can we all just recognise that it won't work and let all the naive idealist commie pinko bead-wearing fuckwits go back to pretending to read Russian philosophy?
Thank you.

I moved hostels as well, and carrying only half my stuff across town this morning all but killed me. Doing it twice, and I was glad I was passing the cathedral I can tell you, in case I did as I wanted and dropped dead on the steps at least I stood a good chance of a decent burial.

Oh yes, I am really trying, really trying to start a book properly now; I have some pretty good stuff to begin with and have spent two days trying to fight some sense onto the page through a fog of lethargy and constant 1940s evacuee style midnight/midday flights to the safety of the bathroom from the menace of the, well, the forboding rumblings of an incoming low-level bomber, not to put too fine a point on it.

The Western has been hselved pending proper characters. I have a good style and setting and some good events, but my puppets are still shit in that play. The new one seems to have real people in it that can go places and do stuff, all I gotta do is think of some really good stuff for them to do.

What else? Ah, I have been trawling my online photos and am harvesting the best for Facebook, and will get the best of the stuff since Vietnam up here at last right after that. Having a data- entry job has been beneficial in unforseen ways, as I no longer get into a furious rage sitting at a computer doing the same boring thing over and over, so I can at last tackle the onerous job of sifting, saving, uploading and posting several thousand photos. Twice.

I'm still working the bar in Shooters every Friday and Saturday and the rest of the staff are wicked-cool, which is nice. I may even have a job doing something relevant to my experience with a property developer, but I have to stop now because this seems to me far too much like settling-down talk, and is unlikely to lead to many thrilling adventures anytime soon. I miss thrilling adventures. It's been ages since I was in any kind of seriosu trouble.

Peace out, I'm off to the doctors for a medical to see what is broken. Every time I make an apointment here it's going to cost me $35 - $50 just to be seen, and today I'm forking oout about $200 as an initial Who-the-fuck-and-What-the-fuck-is-wrong-with You.
I will never complain about the NHS again.

You may mock, but I think almost all books, music and films are good. Without even appealing to the notion of Perfect Human Imperative - that every person on Earth always does the best possible thing, for them, as far as they can know and perform - I am lucky enough to be able to appreciate and enjoy almost any film, book or piece of music from any time or place; provided the books are in English, the music is vaguely original, and movies have a half-decent pace or suitable action or, failing that, a bit of female nudity.
Chuck a couple of topless shots into a film with a title like The Toxic Avenger VII: Toxopathic Beach Terror and I will probably be in it for the duration, as much for amusement at what `actors` and effects technies can get away as as for the odd bit of female chest-jiggling. I can even enjoy foreign language films totally devoid of subtitles, even ones without nudity. Yes, I really am that lucky, and irritatingly pleased with just about everything.

Books are the best example: I often hear the phrase "Must be a good book!" from passers by, because I often read paperbacks while walking around town. I can be observed in pubs and bars reading a book as well, especially standng at the bar after ordering, captured for ten minutes by a particularly good chapter or scene, and get as many similar comments again from fellow patrons who, it seems, have no-one to talk to either and but don't have a contingency plan or decent reason to be there. Well of course it's a good book, I feel like yelling; why else would I be reading it anywhere let alone in the bloody pub? Do you read only bad books yourself?
Really? Maybe you're going about this `literacy` thing the wrong way, if so. There are no points awarded for trying, and you're not doing yourself any favours.

I have found out that if I find the odd tome that actually pisses me off, chances are that a) it's still a good book because I learn just how contrary my and the author's views really are (and they often become particularly good resources for understanding one's enemy) or b) I do have the sense to return/replace/immolate the damn thing before too much of my life is wasted.

Personally, while I do love walking, I refuse to waste the time it takes trotting between most familiar places or to aimlessly trek long distances through bland terrain, not being especially keen on whiling away precious seconds and minutes staring at nothing, gaining nothing, absorbing nothing interesting. I just wish other people could get their minds around the idea without pointing and staring.

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Now. While I genuinely enjoy most things in most mediums there are occasional glaring exceptions that I still, probably for reasons of testing my own endurance levels, force myself to sit through to the bitter, wretched end. The film Alexander is one.

God almighty what an awful piece of shit that is. Oliver Stone? What are you doing to us, are you trying to make us hate you forever??! Once was a time he was good; Platoon was excellent, Wall Street, excellent, Natural Born Killers pretty damned good even if Tarantino (who created the story before he achieved serious fame) would have made it a lot more more coherent and punchy and geeky cool.
Even that lame duck JFK was at least well-acted and strangely absorbing; a film that set out to reveal the truth behind the `big-whoop` story of the century (c'mon, he was just another politician) but basically went right back to where we started before watching the thing, thereby nullifying the purpose of its existence but hey, who's really paying attention after 3 hours and 8 minutes? I believe one particular couple met, married, and birthed their first child during a screening.

But the celluloid abortion that is Alexander needs to be taken outside, shot, hung, nailed to a pair of crossed timbers and left out in the merciless desert sun for three days, whence it can be cut down, ground into a paste, smeared on the gums of plague victims and be left to go through their tortuous death alongside them - and then the whole sorry mess to be buried at a crossroads at midnight inside a sarcophagus made of garlic.

God fucking almighty would not sanction the production of that movie, and he signed the chitty for the crusades, for christ's sake.

Ridiculous. Agonisingly long-winded. Contained almost no battle scenes - a movie about one of the four or five greatest warriors or military leaders the world has ever known - and half of the ones it did contain were filmed so needlessly close to the action as to obscure it from all comprehension. Most of the rest, of what little there was, is shown through an overpoweringly pink filter that bleeds all details into one writhing rose-coloured mass. Yes, we get the idea of blood-drenched sadism and animalist bloodlusting carnage, but it goes on - and you really can't see a thing but a block of pink covering two-thrids of the screen and itinerent limbs and weapons poking out form the top of it - for something like 4 straight minutes. It is very, very annoying to say the least.

The Alexander in this movie is neither powerful nor commanding, not even inspiring or eloquent. His rousing speeches are shit and he is shown to be halfway to whimpering every time he talks in public, which hardly lends him an air of credible authority. He is even shit in a fight and regularly gets his arse handed to him throughout the movie. He cries, a lot.
This is not what anyone wanted to see, even the hard-bitten cynics. You may think that Ghengis Khan, Julius Caesar, Sun Tzu, Hannibal, Napoleon, maybe a few others were equal or greater leaders or strategists, but this dude is still up there amongst them. Napoleon may have been a short-arse Corsican but he was still an amazing general.

It does not end there though, I'm sorry to say. Washed out, cheap looking, cringingly homoerotic in the most flimsy way, this films fails on almost every level. And, just to confound things further, most of the army including Alexander himself is apparently Irish!
It seems they cast Colin Farrel and then just stopped bothering, turning one of the most important historical figures ever to influence the Near East and a guaranteed Sout-Eastern European into a celtic nonce, if I may be permitted a little un-PC name-calling.
The thing is, in this film he is not just bloke who happens to be gay, but an overtly femininised character who, very literally, spends all his time not arguing with his Mum or being beaten up by the common soldiery of his foes either kissing or climbing into bed with various men. Yes, he would rather have a boy than a girl, we understand that Oliver. We do not need to see it repeated over and over in place of worthwhile action, believable exposition or events of actual interest.
We all know that the Greeks of the day were largely bisexual, or so the surviving accounts often tell us (the fact that they continued breeding for the next 2500 years does rather suggest this has been given undue weight and attention, incidentally) but it would appear from Alexander that they had more or less forgotten what women were for, aprta from fetching and carrying things or, in the case of Alex's ol' Mum, keeping a lot of pet snakes.

Coupled with the fact that there is almost no attempt at covering the gaelic accents of half the cast, this would be enough to see this movie off the parade ground and straight to DVD, preferably straight to VHS in fact, in order to minimise hazardous exposure.

But there's even more! Angelina Jolie is in it, as Alexander's Mother, even thoguh, yes, she looks almost exactly the same age as him. She isn't as bad as the rest despite a cumbersome and innappropriate accent of her own (Serbian? Polish?) because her parts of the script require her to pretty much simply to talk funny and wrap limbless reptiles herself, her furniture and in the early stages around her son. Yes, we get the Hercules/Heracles comparison, we see what you're driving at, Stone. Stop now. Oh please stop.
The age difference and even accent isn't too much too a bugger while still being massively inconsistent, as it is hardly notable aginstt he background of dreadfulness that is the rest of the film.
Val Kilmer as Alex's Father, the old king, is excellent, in fact. Be comparison at least. And when you have to say that the best actor and character in the whole film - by a mile - is Val Kilmer, you know something was seriously wrong with the water on that set.

I go on because the film goes on, about 3 hours, again, from Oliver Stone and it seems to be almost completely wasted. It is probably the only film where you start looking for your overnight bag before the main events have even begun to take place, and hopefully the only one where your razor starts to look pretty good as a means of escape.

Zeus save us all from this film. I'm just glad I watched it so I can warn the rest of the human race.

I have been slack lately because I have been productive and busy. I have actually been working, you see.
And the atmosphere around me has been somehow less than condusive to work and effort anyway, for no real reason other than mind and body being slowly dulled by drink, once again. It builds up after a period of grace and easy lifestyle and starts to tint everything a bit grey. Oh well, back to the tea for a bit I think

Nelson as a city is as charming as ever, not least because working here is, if not effortless, at least highly pleasant. And please do bear in mind I have been up to some pretty dull stuff to earn my crust.

The agencies in town here are likely my only real source of income, because no-one wants to employ an upstart like me who is only in the country for six to twelve months, even one as dashingly brilliant, handsome and polymathamatical as the glowing star whose words you now read. Suggestions of arrogance are not even to be entertained and you may address such piffle to the head butler at the foyer of my Winter palace.

I do have a regular spot at one of the fashionable bars in town every Saturday night, neatly allowing me to avoid costly splurges at least one night of the weekend and also to take poignant note of the habits and haunts of the citiy's drunkards. I have to admit it's actually one of the less fashionable of the so-designated bars, but it's actually quite a lot of fun, even if I do have to ask many people to reiterate their gurgled orders up to nine times (I counted).
There are some certain patterns to speech here where words that I would have thought as vital to coherency are left out. It's hard to think of an example but sometimes a sentence is cast towards me with less information than I, personally, need to not look like a wretched moron, which I have of course been doing a fair bit. It happens, often to me. Yes, of course it's other people not me. Of course it is.

Things on the phone have been easier and I beieve all the calls I have taken in this town so far made intelligable sense right off the bat, so perhaps I'm just missing a little something in the office or the bar or am just getting distracted by shiny objects, as so often happens. On the phone side of life, by the way, there are strangely only two mobile networks in the whole country, and one being an outfit called simply Telecom who use outdated technology and the other being Vodafone using, well, current technology global marketing and lots of seriosu men in dark suits with very thin watches, the latter essentially has a monopoly, though no-one seems to give a damn at all.

I've also been on a short contract working for the City Council doing possibly the most proper office job of my life so far, and my gosh aren't they a sweary bunch over there? Proper New Zealand charm as only they can do it, but bugger me if the managers aren't wittily cursing their oft-shitty luck in light-hearted fashion all through the days, the pleasant fuckers.

My laptop might have tried to conspire to get me into the working groove as it had small identity crisis recently, perhaps confusing itself with an etch-a-sketch by the look fo the screen, and (rather melodramatically, if you ask me) tried to exit this void on a tide of unnerving display malfunctions and a severely twitchy series of reboots.
It was not a happy moment watching what my only friend for 2000 kilometres rapidly decay into a broken children's toy nailed to a steamrolled typewriter, but I do get points for even noticing because I had just drunk two and a half bottle of wine by that point. Suggestions that I imagined the whole thing are unappreciated in the extreme and in all likelihood actually true.

I'd like to know why I drank quite to much that night, I have no idea myself except that it seemd a good idea at the time (and how many unplanned parenthoods and vehicular accidents have been coached at that school of thought?) but I woke with a hangover fit for Olliver Reed after a night out with George Best and thoroughly enjoyed my nine subsequent hours entering data on forms and stuffing envelopes at Nelson City Council's offices. Actually it passed more quickly than the previous day, possibly because I had a lengthy series of miniature strokes throughout the day in between data entry sheets that never became a real part of memory, and whatever the case it wasn't so bad.
Having a very nice bunch of people to work with makes all the difference, in fact it's a lot more important than the job, up to a certain level of extertise and/or commitment.

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I have also moved on from carbonara; it is behind me. The dish I now need to perfect is stuffed peppers, though I'm not sure that is quite the right copula. I've never tried them from a proper recipe before so now Delia is helping a fellow brit through the magical ether of the interweb and hopefully I'll have a couple of recipes cracked and ready by the end of the week. I'm trying to add string to my bow, as I feel it is perennially stringless and, as we all know, there never is a pile of goat's intestines to hand when you really need them. Hence the learny cooky stuff; soon to follow, when I get a longer contract, are weekly (at least) yoga classes and Spanish lessons.

The yoga really is becoming important as my poor dumb back (initially powered by my poor dumb brain when, years ago, I cleverly slipped a disc or some other such idiotic thing in my spine that needed to be snapped back into place my a medical professional) is starting to rebel against the cause, the cause being me, of course. When you get a nasty pain from walking or, my favourite, just standing still for twenty minutes, you know it is time to reach for the nearest hippy and start brushing up on your vedas.

But yes, I am still slightly obsessed with food these days because I have still not found many real friends (ones not contactable only by email, and with names like `AstroLord1976` and `W4rl0Ck`) and so, concentrating on eating and drinking, not necessarily in that order, have been scurrying around supermarkets clutching slightly arcane and frankly extravagant ingredients with which to construct mere handfuls of stuffed pepper halves.
The last one was pretty good but eventually it too was behind me, as all food is fated to be. That was the politest coarse way of saying I was ill again at the weekend, and I hope you all enjoyed the imagery

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From the Less-Lethal Desk (news not concerning me or my cunsumption habits) it seems that Nelson is the place to be this summer, oh yes. It should hit temperatures of, ooh, about half a billion degrees in places, and all nice-looking women are required by law to wear bikinis or less throughout the summer months. I may have made that last bit up. Apparently I may as well not have though, which is marvellous.

Even better, according to the rules I just made up, all nasty-looking women are bound by a strict 12:01pm curfew (and strong rope if necessary) and are not permitted to walk the streets before 9am either, making all but the very largest and latest of parties easy on the eye and even easier on the.... well, you figure it out. This is a family website, after all.
Not like the Manson family though. That would just be wrongheaded.

On that note mind you I probably have to reign in what can only be called my dark sense of humour, black as sin and pitiless as the grave as it is. I'm not sure that making friends is so easy when the first few jokes cracked in conversation make large mention of popular child killers and amusing references to Hitler, and so I shall try to at least not visit any more prenatal classes or nunneries in my quest for companions.

Apparently even fairly normal people also find this a little off-putting, so I may just by myself a load of trendy sports gear, disengage any sense of humour whatsoever and talk about little else than easy girls, awful booze and ridiculous cars and find a local gathering of slovenly retards with which to make acquaintance.

Or I could go back to my e-Buddies on the internet and compare sarcasm and dead baby jokes. I haven't decided yet.

After returning a little over two weeks ago I am still impressed with something just about every day. The novelty of everyone I deal with being well-informed, helpful and supremely friendly will surely wear off one day, but hopefully not any day soon. That most people I talk to are clever and nice about it is a further refreshing bonus.

I'm so pleased with almost every encounter that I sometimes quite forget I'm going broke fast, and have to now settle down and slave away like a mindless automaton for the next half year.
There are many little habits of life for people here that bespeak an underlying sense of thoughtfulness and even benevolence, I just have to list a couple here:

Little things like the city centre of Christchurch, where every fast food outlet is within 40 metres of each other, many as neighbours. Inconsequential? Hardly.
Burger King is right next door to McDonalds, possibly creating a weak spot in the fabric of reality sufficiently dense and greasy enough to allow the coming of the antichrist, but I'm willing to forgive them just this once, and directly across the road is the city's only KFC. Almost next door to KFC is Subway, and the two souvlaki joints, both independent Greek takeaways, each sit a shop away from these franchises. Having the Big Two global burger chains on the same block is a marketing catastrophe in most places, as far as managementdom is concerned anyway, but there it just makes sense to people.

It's supremely easy for mere consumers, if they fancy stuffing some styrofoam flavoured almost-foods down their gullets, which is not to say I am very good at avoiding its oleaginous charms I have to admit. The point is though that everything is together for convenience, and there is no petty squabbling or competitive worry about siting your grease gfactory too near their grease factory. And for consuming mortals, you just pick your favourite Styro-Mealⓒ, you pays your money and you takes your heart disease, nice and simple.

The useful purpose of this, of course, is that by avoiding just one section of just one street in the city centre, citizens can avoid even noticing any fast food outlet while spending a whole day shopping, working, or just hanging out there. And nowhere else for almost a mile in any direction are there any primary-coloured backlit signs to be seen promoting American fast-food chains, and there is certainly something to be said for that.

Apart from one or two smallish clothing stores and a dozen little buildings hosting camera shops, print/copy places, skateboard stores etcetera, everything in that little segment is devoted to selling food, none of it very good for people, although it is all very convenient. Likewise the 24-hour store next to Burger King which, among much else, will sell you alcohol 24 hours a day, and doesn't resort to the annoying hatch-based dispensing habit so beloved of petrol stations and amateur drug dealers.

That place also vends a variety of hot food of its own, and while it is of course about as healthy and nutricious as a Happy Meal (such delights are available as wedges, deep fried spring rolls, the curious Australian delight of a square of lasagna that has been likewise deep fried in batter, which is every bit as weird as it sounds, and even whacking great shanks of lamb in thick gravy, available to anyone with $7.50 and a large appettite at any time of day or night) it is very nice to have the alternative, and at least the lamb shank is unarguably real food.

Various other outlets for the big two burger `restaurants` (the moniker is a gross breach of the trade descriptions act, it's always seemed to me) exist around the city, obviously, because it's never enough to have only three Maccie Ds a KFC and a funeral home within toddling distance of a creche, but they have remained somehow less conspicuous than in other places, and they are all in semi-industrial areas surrounded by a protective perimeter of carpark; perhaps to give more thoughtful children time to turn back should they find themselves aimlessly following their noses.

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Still on the the food, and yes, I know I recently complained about this sort of obsessing but while going to new places for short periods it is of little importance, it's a big thing for me now I'm here for the long haul and in a country that's similar to my own fair Blighty, so less poking of the culture and prodding of the locals is really needed.
And anyway, with the benefit of useable kitchens I spend far too much money on the stuff, even though I'm actually pretty good in what I do eat, by my standards anyway.
It's got to be confessed here that I've eaten carbonara five times in three days now because I'm trying to get my recipe right (thicker cream, hotter plates, find pancetta rather than use bacon; that's my current tweak list) although now I think I might give it a rest for a week, after all those semi-raw eggs I'm a bit carbonara'ed out.

In Christchurch and Nelson there are a good range of restaurants (Korean, Japanese and Indian seems favourites, a few exclusively French-speaking french-ordering-or-you-can't-eat-here places as well, in typically arrogant style ) and an exceedingly large number of Fish & Chips shops, `hot bread` bakeries and the ubiquitous pie ovens that are seen in every convenience store. The one thing almost missing are international pizza franchises, with almost no Domino's branches and very few Pizza Huts, for the simple reasons that smaller chains or individual stores do it better here than they can. It is a fantastic thing indeed to have real Italian-style pizza available where normally all one could get would be bland Dominos, and the biggest national chain here not only does good, real, thin crust discs of Italio goodness with fresh and tasty toppings, but is also the winner of the name game being titled Hell Pizza - in fact when you call them their system message begins with "Welcome to Hell" in suitably grim and forboding tones delivered by some gravelly-voiced Shakespearian type actor. Again, NZ has pulled off a little coup without anyone really noticing that other places have to put up with something inferior.

Still on food, it has to be noted that meat and fish, normally the part of the meal we feel we have to skimp on, is very cheap indeed, at least compared to the UK. I have here a blade steak, organic in origin and weighing about 200g, with a price tag of just $3.75 where I believe it would cost at least £3.75 in the UK - more than two and a half times as much. Meat from butchers as well is staggeringly cheap; for ten bucks - that's £4 - I walked away from one next door to the hostel in ChristChurch with something well over half a kilogram of lean steak mince and a massive chicken fillet, itself about the same size as what I was paying £3 for in one of the cheapest (and nastiest) cities in the UK; and that was several years ago too, well before Brown got his pudgy little hands on the premiership ( I recall I actually visited John Prescott's house during that period, spoke to his wife for half an hour and politely attempted to switch her gas and electricity supplier for her, such was my shameful business at the time).
And it's all free range, most of it organic, and it actually tastes like real meat again - I was so surprised when started eating meat here I almost ripped my shirt into a loincloth and began painting stick-buffalo on the walls.

And yet I think in this country they would rather either not keep or keep pigs, if you follow me; they don't seem to have much pork on the shelves or even in the sausages (maybe 80% of sausages on the shelves are beef, and of the pork ones they usually have beef in, anyway) and there seems to be a strange fondness for the snuffling critters, because every hostel I've been in has a scrap food bin for the benefit of some local pig or other. I don't know if there's a national collection service and one big pig farm somewhere near Wellington, or whether a shady porcine mafia exerts pressure on local humans to provide for selected pigs of prestige and influence in every town, but more likely than both of these is that some people, somewhere, and just about everywhere, like to keep pigs and they like to keep them around.
It is rather a lot more fun to imagine them in pinstripes and fedoras, toting Chicago Typewriters and

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Of course there are more things to life in New Zealand than just eating. We are also allowed to drink in this country too, neatly avoiding a 100% national fatality rate and severe shortage of two-leggers to take care of all those sheep, and one little place in Christchurch says a lot about the people and the culture; a bar called The Stock Exchange where patrons can literally play the stock market every time they buy a pint.

The bar serves selected drinks, slightly different from other bars in the area but it still does everything you could want, and as the value of these drinks changes as dictated by the ebbing and flowing of the stock market (or rather, the value of the companies that produce the drinks changed during the day just gone, or the value changes on the US market, or some other contrivance to allow for the fact that the markets in NZ are closed most of the time the bar is open. The manager assures me it is real and tied to each day's trading, but I was far too drunk each time I left to recall the specifics of it now) the price of the drinks also changes in the bar. Prices fluctuate for every drink in the bar all at once for a minute or so, and those figures are then frozen for a block of three minutes to allow for ordering, whether the computer system behind it then dips back into the markets in `real time` or whether it pauses the data then jumps back into it could obviously allow for an awful lot of mileage from really very little information and for minimal variation in prices, or on the other hand, allow for anyone who was paying attention during the daytime to possibly clean up in the evening.

It is a cool little distraction from the tedium of the bar - and often the tedium of your fellow drunks - and one that can, if you are both careful and lucky (either being plausible but the both together deeply unlikely while drunk ) provide the means for a decent and cheap night out.
It may well all be a gimmick - by the true definition of the word it is exactly that whether tied to the markets or not, gimmicks aren't negative after all - but it works, and is a delightfully different way to teach your liver a firm lesson.

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The bus stations here don't look like bus stations - they call 'em exchanges to begin with, and they look and feel more like the very nicest of modern railway stations thanks to their clean indoor environment, multi-levelled carpeted concourses and rows of cashier windows. Being a New Zealand bus station of course, the people staffing those windows are friendly and helpful and go to the trouble of explaining all the stuff they know that might help, rather than bark out the same tiny few words and sentences to every person they speak to, every day, possibly for all of their lives...
I would imagine the average Kiwi ticket seller is a lot happier than the average Brit ticketeer, and certainly more interesting to talk to.

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If we were to be base and common about it all, we might turn our appraising eye to the sex trade in this country, although it wouldn't take much oscillation of the peepers because it's visible just about everywhere. This is a good thing, and not just because I'm a guy and genetically required to justify it

Every town I've been to has quite visible strip clubs, rather than having them tucked away in odd corners and semi-industrial districts they sit on the high streets next to bars, shops and restaurants. There are also a few of them, as in a few more than I realised most towns and cities must have as in Christchurch I recall certainly three, perhaps four places on different streets around the town centre alone, one of them quite memorably next to an upmarket coffee shop and almost directly facing the biggest department store in the city across the road.

This is not a thing the Kiwis seem at all ashamed about and they also seem positively tripping over themselves to establish and lingerie shops, and in fact now I remember walking the half-mile to Hoyt's cinema a few times, there were at least, at least half a dozen shops I passed on the way purveying a wide and all-embracing (perhaps quite literally in some cases) swathe of things made from PVC and leather and rubber and various other wipe-clean surfaces. Beyond that I can say nothing, out of qualms.

Perhaps best of all, for cynical bastards like me, is that the red light district in Christchurch runs along one of the streets that encloses cathedral square - which contains the city's cathedral, as strange as that seems - meaning that while the catholic church in New Zealand can ostensibly fight a doorstep battle it is also conveniently, happily, quite within skulking range of the enemy's stronghold

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And there are numerous other little things that delight such as the smallest coin circulating is the 10-cent piece, rather than having any 5c, 2c or 1c coins cluttering up purses and wallets. All shops use Swedish rounding to calculate totals, even though prices are of course marked as $13.99 whatever the cashier will always ask for fourteen dollars, it all works out about even in the end and with no fiddling penny and tuppence nonsense.

Yesterday, I had a call back from a job agency I had left a message with, merely to say that they couldn't help me as they are government-funded to help people with disabilities only, but wanted to let me know which other agencies I could approach, and essentially just wish me luck! Talk about bloody nice folk.

It is certainly good to be back here.