Versive

Up and down, story of my life or what? One day I'm lamenting a universe-bestriding lack of appreciation and wallowing in more than a little customised pity, the next day I can't stop thinking how damn wonderful this little country down under really is.

Some other people's lives are also characterised by what you might call up and down, but these are that other sort of bastard, who I envy constantly, who implement a more literal and vastly less family-friendly manifestation of the theme. One day soon I might get my act together and meet a nice girl, but until then I'll just have to keep up the tangential references until someone complains me into letting up. Can't see either happening soon, personally.

The reason I'm renewed in my chirpiness, especially considering it's now 3:30 in the morning over here? Well, obviously, I've had a couple of beers. No surprises there. But moreover it is because my one source of steady work here, the local installment of the Shooters Bar chain where I have worked for a little less than 8 weeks, has seen fit to put me through the duty manager program and wants to, among other things, pay for me to get a New Zealand manager's license and some other booze-related piece of papery bling so I can work like a donkey over Christmas and be able to look after the place whenever the rest of the management crew are either too dangerously spannered or lethally hungover to operate anything so complex as even a flush toilet, let alone a licensed premises for to poison the next installment of pleasure seekers.
Perhaps there is more to my being known as `superman` than a mere geeky appearance and shooting laser beams from my eyes.

But the thing that, besides all the above nonsense and lies, makes me happy? The sense of community I now appreciate and notice among the bars in town. Although it is still a pretty lowly post in the big scheme of things, the DMs of all the bars in town (except perhaps the two scummy places in town, not incidentally both of which I am no longer welcome in due to a hazardous night out some weeks back where I had to be ejected by force, as so often happens to both myself and her Royal Highness the Queen) share a common sort of clubby relationship where everyone sees to it that they every other duty manager who visits on a night out, or needs something while on duty, or any other reasonable little boon gets looked after properly. This invariably leads to much friendliness between all concerned at every door (front of the queue if there is one) and bar (kudos, respect and much social gratification to be had all round) and a certain drastic blindness when it comes to actually charging money for drinks required. Without naming names I happened to see given away no fewer than 36 double shots of some of the more expensive spirits and liqueurs to just one person on one evening, and that was just for the left side of Mr. Jagger's formidable cakehole.

Anyway I'm possibly more pleased with the sideline benefits of the job, particularly the even more friendly dealings that we (I get to use that kind of `we` now, too!) shall share from now on. Frankly it was hard to imagine most kiwis being even more pleasant than they are by default, but these deeply loveable people have somehow managed it yet again. The thing that probably kicks it into the happy house is that the idea was offered to me because I had, apparently, been seen to work pretty hard and were capable of all the stuff asked of me, and I couldn't help but notice during these past weeks that I was doing quite a few more things than anyone else from the pool of regular bartenders. It is, in other words, how I imagined a job would be when I started work at the age of sixteen and thought that as long as I worked hard it would be noticed and rewarded.
Sadly, very sadly, that is not how things work in England, at least not in any unqualified jobs and not even in my own field of quite hard-earned expertise.

New Zealand is a little like how the world should be, according to some subconscious text of wishful thinking. That definition makes it a little bit like a dream, I suppose. And I would not be the first person to have said that.

It's amazing that I haven't been posting up much here lately, because it probably seems to the outsider that I am doing nothing else with my life.

Forgive me, but I am very depressed this morning. I have tried for the second time to start the only full-time job I can get in this town (Production line drone in a fish factory. Marvellous use of my abilities!), but have again been turned back by the rumblings of my stomach and its express wish to redecorate the toilet bowls of New Zealand, however briefly, in alarmingly vivid tones. I do hope you haven't just eaten anything.

Ye gods it's not easy to find a job - and I don't mean just here, I mean anywhere, for me at least because I have no redeeming features an employer might value, if the adverts are to be believed. When I think of all the thousands of miserable, unhelpful bastards that hold down jobs in my home country, yet who surely applied to adverts requiring `self-motivated team players, with strong interpersonal skills and a genuine desire for excellence` I can't help but feel there are things wrong with the world that only runaway nuclear fusion can solve.

Who thinks of these phrases anyway? Buzzwords are seldom less than irritating and all too often are the base layer of unhappiness in the workplace: millions of jobs are built on fundamentals that are false and unattainable - every position requiring the least bit of team leadership, "Oi! You lot do this. No, shut up, get on with it. Or you get a written warning/clip round the ear with a brick/nice cigarette up against the wall, that's why", or cursory experience in the same field demands that applicants be on top of the world and generally fantastic in every way.
And how many people can you honestly say are like that at work, even 50% of the time?

I am lucky in that I spent 6 years around immensely happy, cheerful, personable and interesting people, to the point that members of the public often pretended to be customers just to hang about at the counter to listen and join in the banter, but even so there was a large counterweight (in the shape of near-terminally skinflint boss) and despite the good cheer and constant laughs there were still clear undercurrents and shameless facades everywhere to cover the basic negativity at the heart of (most) things.

Anyway, I am pissed off with not finding a full-time day job to go with my bar job, pissed off that we have swapped out awesome duty manager (Jess) for the Shrew Bitch of Nelson (Jane) and work is no longer fun, am mildly concerned that my ear almost exploded and I started losing my balance on Saturday night, and am eternally pissed off with myself (I warned you I was depressed!) for not having the skills or qualifications - any qulifications at all - that might provide the means to better employment.

`Oh, if only there was something I could really get involved in` I cry - but of course I fell into the same trap as many of my generation, and had so many possibilites in life every single one of them paled into the smudgy vision that was The Future, that now it seems to be becoming The Past at a frankly terrifying rate.

One small dot of self-pity that really is justified, unlike, I am sure, every word of the above, is that people do not want to employ travellers no matter how many bibles and torahs and qu,rans we might swear upon that we are actually staying and will not fuck off to Auckland at the first sign of trouble or a better job.

You have to see where employers are coming from, of course. In most cases the positions offered are a little more involving than the menial rubbish I hoped would be my backfall, but not so, because those employers are places like newsagents, supermarkets and basic retail shops and the like, who must have a pretty high turnover of indigenous local staff anyway, and still I have got nowhere, still I am not allowed to operate anything so taxing as checkout till or a food trolley for these towering behemoths of commerce.

Now I happen to know I'm getting shafted because of the colour of my passport, because when I worked in a very small supermarket when I was 16/17 we used to get about one person every month who would work two shifts then depart from our lives forever; and that was a little country town Co-Operative with a peak-time team of staff of about seven.
That the local Countdown or Warehouse or Woolworths (remember Woolies over here is a supermarket) will not give me employment is a pretty sad state of affairs. I used to co-manage a multi-million dollar business for fuck's sake, wrote and imaged a website that brought praise and cutoms from hundreds if not thousands of people, yet unfortunately I don't have any qualifications after leaving (read: being asked to leave ) school; but who would have though I needed them when I was living and working and earning a better wage than many people with specialist degrees?

Over here, despite the lovely attitude of people, the usually glorious weather (this morning we had a rainstorm but it's not common) and ease of life, it is still hugely dispiriting to not be able to do anything, to be losing money every day, to be getting closer and closer to the point of failure where... well, where I'm pretty fucked, actually. As it is I don't have enough money to go home, so I'm really rather in a spot of trouble - and even if I did what is there for me there, for my future?
Nothing. That's why I'm here; bit of a vicious circle isn't it?

Ah, fuck my life! That's a favourite phrase of the kiwis, and actually I think it's more of a safety valve and not to be taken literally. My life is pretty amazing on the global scale of things, it's just that, probably unlike all of you lovely lot, I have no career, education and skills, and while I don't actually want two out of the three, I do rather need to eat and travel and party.
Hmm.

I'll be saying "Ah, fuck my life!" with a wry chortle a lot today. I may mean it or I may not. We shall see how things go by eveningtime

Finally it is over, no more will we have to hear the banal twitterings of a thousand soap-boxers, no more shall the hideousness that was the election process in a country patently not ours be thrust upon us from every radio, screen, and piece of paper. He won, and He probably gets to keep the capital letter for a little while at least. Thank god the neo-con-hitlerjugends didn't get in again. We can all smoke a victory joint and publically dance in groups of three or more. Woot and way-hay.

Of course the big news is that it's my one year anniversary today - I left the shores of Blighty (well, Heathrow terminal 2) one year ago today bound for India, and an as yet unanticipated, unexpected and extremely ill-planned adventure. In about 19 hours I can celebrate the anniversary of my first international stitch-up and soon after the annual commemoration of the four people who scammed me, ripped me off, or took advantage for personal gain of a poor, misguided Englishman at large in Bombay. Meh, good luck to 'em though, we all gotta make a living somehow - and at least they only wanted a bit of money!

So I started compiling a list of stuff to do when I get back home. This isn't going to happen for at least another year yet, I have Plans, and they deserve the capital as well. When all these shenanigans are done with, however, there are a bunch of things I miss or have missed about the UK, and for my purposes as much as anyone elses they are listed below:

*** Drive around Hampshire in the Summer, because it's gorgeous when the sun shines over fields of golden-coloured wheat, through antique the windows into the sultry interior of country pubs, and on acres of bright green grass rolling over the landscape, and other such farty bollocks as a drugged poet might use to describe the place.

*** Visit Norwich because I was born there. So they tell me, anyway.

*** Visit cathedrals in Norwich, Salisbury, Durham, St. Pauls and Westminster abbey, Canterbury cathedral etc. Not for any reason besides that the big man of Christianity does get some of the best pads.

*** Go to Scotland, for various and nefarious purposes. I'd like to scuba dive Loch Ness and get to the highlands for those famous heather-strewn hills and mountains.

*** Get a girlfriend, for once. Like, it's about fucking time, I think it's fair to say.

*** Go clubbing in Manchester and Nottingham, and dance like a mad bastard for hours and hours in small darkened rooms listening to beepy electronic noises. A lot like playing pac-man on acid, in fact.

*** Go to Newquay festival because I've missed it at least twice in the past and haven't ever got down there, for any reason.

*** Go to Dartmoor in Devon. I remember the tors and marshes and, well, if I plan it out right and bring a large dog, a revolver and something phosphorous, I can pretend to be Sherlock Holmes. Oh, read the bloody book if you don't know what I mean.

*** See everyone I am friends with on Facebook in person. I think this is a rather brilliant idea, personally, with a couple of obvious qualifiers i.e. only people who actually are in the UK, and all of those who are actual friends, and not subscriber groups or similar. Also people who I actually like and not those few who are there because of some social weirdness, none of whom would be reading this of course

*** Sail on lake Windemere in the Summer - because it's supposed to be bloody mental with all the mad speedboaters and yacht-types and jetskiing lunatics zipping about threatening to convert tourists into sushi.

*** Have my friend Wayne, who is a blacksmith, make me a sword. Come on everyone secretly wants a sword, even some of you hippies

*** ...and...go to Africa on a subsequent and glorious trip, in the usual excessive manner

*** And go to Europe, likewise excessive and ridiculous in scale and composition.

There, that about seems to cover it for now.

It seems I have sprouted nicknames. It's a bit odd but I can hardly complain; the other long-term hostel guests have taken to calling me The Cook, as I found out on Saturday, for reasons you can probably guess. I am thinking of running a free dinner gimmick thing some nights - I always cook too much, so I thought if I stick a poster up in the kitchen advertising one free dinner at an rough time, to be supplied to the first and only person to put their name down on it, that would be a nice way to share the bounty and do my daily deed of righteousness.
Also a cunning way to chat up girls, fnar!

And, this is just creepy-nice kinda weird, the guys at Shooters have been referring to your humble servant here as Superman behind his back, evidently for some weeks now. Yes, it's the red pants I always wear over my work gear, obviously.
I think it's more a reference to Clark Kent because, let's face it, I am the supreme glorious lord-high chief of the geeks, or at least I look like him, but oddly it seems they're edging towards the more complimentary side of things because they think I'm all helpful and stuff - I have trained a new bartender I suppose, and of course I do have that ever-so helpful/dumb and innocent posh British accent, although perhaps a little more is really required (Laser beams from the eyes? Strength of a thousand men? Flying perhaps??)) for this role.
Frankly I'm only just barely awake half the time there as it's too damn quiet, but it is nice to appreciated, however so.

Is that ending a thingy on a wossname (sentence on a preposition?)? Possibly. I never went to school, personally. Too busy growing up on a farm in Kansas.

So I remind people of the Big Blue Boy Scout. It could be a lot worse!