Versive

It's-a Tim, 'e's-a back!

2009-10-29T12:03:49+01:00

Hello, you. Yes I've been a naughty absent blogger, but I've been busy saving for the next trip, see - plus I bought a shiny new TV and a PlayStation 3 in the hope of actually saving money (bear with me here) by not going out.

In other words, I have regressed to my childhood and am little more than a huge unwashed videogame-playing nerd. But a nerd whose going to live in California for three months starting in mid-December! I also have the mightiest thumbs in the land and I'll step on any number of tiny Japanese kids to claim my title.

And so, in lieu of the long-promised gubbins all about Wellington, New Zealand, and also regarding the accounts of Switzerland and Austria (and Germany, but we don't talk about Germany..) currently in absentia and likely to stay that way at least for this week, I'm just checking in to apologise for my clocking out these past few months.

In Austria and Switzerzlandzville(z) some properly mentionworthy stuff went down, not least of which the time I got partially humped by a tiny horny primate (he really was just scent-marking me, honestly) and that occasion when.... actually, nothing dangerous or weird really happened, I spent most of my time in & around museums, cathedrals, palaces and medieval towns, and on the public transport between them. (and depleting beers, obviously).

I was trying to absorb lots and lots of culture in the hope some of it might stick, and happily enough I spoke to lots of people, got drunk with many of them and got a pretty good picture of life and the living of it over there.

But I'm not gonna tell you yet. I don't have my notes with me. Hell, I should probably be doing some "work" seeing as I'm getting paid to be in this office, peace out...

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Because anything about Parliament is far too serious for a Friday...

2009-06-19T18:59:35+02:00

Early to bed,
And early to rise,
Makes a man healthy, wealthy, and able to play Grand Theft Auto 4 before going to work. A good start to a Friday I reckon, nice to be back and walk straight into a job again. Again, For at least the seventh time.

This morning I had to keep myself entertained after going to bed far too early (I cannot admit how early, for fear of shame and children pointing me out in the street) and put the photos from my little European trip onto my laptop, ready to be shown off on Facebook in my best attempts at looking cool on the internet: the reason we are all here, after all

It turns out I had at the time been a relentless photo whore (no surprise there really) and of course I remembered all those places I forgot as I went through it all, but I also saw for the first time since it happened The Incident of the Humping Monkey, which I will now share with you all:

Enjoy! You mad, twisted crazies, you

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Diogenes' Mountain/Molehill Equation and the Farce of Westminster

2009-06-19T18:44:48+02:00

The Members of Parliament in the UK have not been 100% totally incontrovertibly honest. Well fuck me, get out the logbook, Martha, I gots to know wheres I woz when I heard this 'un!!!
The overblown coverage of this distinctly tepid series of events, events that have excited less interest in my household than the bowel happenings of the water-based insects in our birdbath, events that have already caused at least two of our cats to take their own lives through sheer force of mediocrity, such happenings that I cannot possibly have less interest in now my own toenails have disintegrated because the sheer, frank, undeniably vast non-enormity of it (did I already use the word `tepid`?) has cast them into chilly oblivion, these events and this coverage therof has made me a little peeved, as you may be able to tell.

I am damn sure these things are pointless in themselves, and in most ways and most cases something of a mask for the paper-based media who are surely guilty of much in this vein, and are shitting words in an attempt not to shit themselves at the idea that what has happened to the MPs might happen to them. On the flipside, and bearing in mind that the press and the Parties in this circle - MPs and the media's parliamentary correspondents - are deeply associated both in and out of the office and the commons antechambers, it may not be so shocking that the press has seized upon this chance to expose the expense claims they never enjoyed themselves but must have had rubbed in their faces over the years.

In any case, whatever the bullshit behind it and the backstabbing, sniping and woe-driven fecaloid nightmares of the slimy shits ramming it down all of our throats, it has always seem these past weeks that no-one left in Britain has any functioning sense of perspective.
An MP claimed some-thousand-£££ for a duck pond, or a duck house, or something. Wowee. More - and I stress that, MORE than 30 children DIED of AIDS in Africa every hour of every day of every fucking week last year, and if we so much as smack our kids or tell them they have to put their knives down before entering the classroom it makes the bloody paper.
But 740+ kids, babies and teenagers die from just one disease every goddamn fucking day and not only do we not care, but we don;t even report it any more. Nearly all of these deaths are preventable by the way.

Anyway it's all been too much bullshit, too much of a smokescreen and far too much of a cloud if virulent smug on the part of the media. I'm so disenchanted with the whole affair I could almost do something about it myself.

Well, I did some maths. The cost of the total transport claims for the past year has clocked in at about 6.2 million quid. We've all heard the reports of some MP or other claiming for 14,683 miles when his house is 11 miles from Westminster or similar, and the 40,000 mile claim for the woman living 50 miles away in one house and 5 miles away at the other, so generally we've been primed to call bullshit on it all - but even of this maybe half a million quid was justififed. But no matter - let's say it was all phony, outright naked theft by our ministers (and MPs are just soooo noble by default, aren't they? I amazed that anyone was even surprised by all this to be honest).

So, transport claims weigh in at a little over 6 million, duck houses, wigs and whisky must account for another couple of mil, so let's say, with all claims, and allowing for the genuine within the false (which is probably a far larger percentage than any newspaper would ever like us to imagine, that would almost amount to thinking for ourselves, after all) let's make a gross generalisation and say that the total naughty expenses of all 650-odd MPs comes in at £12 million. That would amount to an average false claim of nearly £18,500 per MP per year, by the way, which seems to me a little bit of an exaggeration seeing as we've only heard of a dozen or so outrageous £30,000+ claim totals, but hey. Let's err on the side of the media. Lets skew it all in their favour in the spirit of the thing.

Now, the total number of income tax payers in the UK last year was about 26-28 million, plus people who pay capital gains tax number around 1.4 million, and of course we all pay VAT and booze tax and petrol is around 60% tax (and we do love to burn through that stuff) and ciggies cost a fortune, around 70% of which is pure tax, and all the rest of it.
Given the nature of the tax we all pay, plus the CG taxpayers handing over tenfold the average man in the street, I think we can err a little on the side of `we unhappy few` taxpayers, and give a sort of rough working estimate that there are, in proportion to regular earners (each of those 26-28 million `normal` people who earn regular sorts of amounts and pay tax on most of it) a virtual taxpaying community of about 35 million individuals. I have to stress again that 1) this is a virtual figure used to approximate an average figure for the average taxpayer, to give an idea of how much it costs each one of US, and 2) this is once again being seriously generous to the media's side of the argument.

Basically, at the end of all this we have an average cost of this expenses scandal to you and I. re you ready?! Ta-da! ;

Real people, like us, are being forced to pay a whopping 34pence PER YEAR for all the MPs and their expenses put together, or to put it another way, about half the cost of a single copy of the Daily Telegraph. And I wonder how many of them this bullshit, hyper-inflated nonsense of a story has sold off?

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Oooh, shiny! Ooh what's that...

2009-05-14T10:31:14+02:00

You'll be pleased to hear this is only a short one

With the last post clocking in at around 8,500 words I not only feel thoroughly purged but a little guilty, too. Some of that was actually worth reading, you see, and the only weay to find out was to sacrifice your precious life-seconds wading through it all - so, let the record show I exhibit remorse for this cruel act.

All I wanted to do now was let folks know (if any of you still care) that I am off again to see and do a little more merry wandering; Saturday morning I leave for Austria and intend to spend a little over three weeks heading West to Switzerland, with an entertaining diversion or two along the way, namely Munich and Salzburg.

And I STILL have bloody post from New Zealand to get out. Honestly, I am ashamed, I really am.
It's pretty much a given that I'll lose interested, get distracted by something shiny (eg: Switzerland) and bang on about that without hide nor hair of the Wellington, Napier and associated witterings for months yet.

Still, in some ways it is for the best, I suppose. You wont have to waste that much of your existence again until the end of Summer.

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A week in the Life: Auckland

2009-04-29T18:39:13+02:00

I come to you know, at the turning of the tide. Drunk. Pretending to be Gandalf.
Oh, cheap wine, how I do love do thee.

I was in Auckland recently - can you believe it? The other end of the bleedin' planet, over in New Zealand, of all places. Amazing. I stop paying attention for two minutes and before I know it I'm 14,000 miles from home in a land full of kiwi fruits, or something. Remarkable.

I sat down and calculated (I need to, to do maths) that by the time I returned on the 1st of April I had been away from Blighty, and proper baths, for 511 days.
Five hundred an' eleven whole entire complete and unabridged days, each one to the order of 1,440 minutes long, although I certainly wasn't conscious for more than a third of them. I have been absent from duty as a resident of the British isles that I'm hardly even a limey mongrel pommie bastard anymore, although most Australians would disagree.

I am slightly smug that, now I check it with a calculator and a calendar, I actually got that little sum right out in my head. 10 points to Gryffindor - though have I been away from the UK so long that joke is no longer funny? Perhaps it never was.

Now, Auckland. That's why we're here. It's actually a bit of a bugger, as a certain nun used to say, because I wasn't at the time and still I am not sure the city deserves its self-declared status - but then calling itself `New Zealand's Greatest City` in large letters on billboards, in guidebooks and in every tourist office South of Bali it does rather leave the way open for some sniping.

I didn't really have the grand old time I expected (“Nay, deserved!” I hear you cry ) when held in comparison to other cities, such as Melbourne, just as an example, where I happen to be sitting right now awaiting the third flight of four in the international effort to get rid of me from the Southern Hemisphere.
*Of course I am not sitting there now. That would be a somewhat lax enforcement of security over at MEL*

Sydney and Nelson also stick out as good Australasian examples of more immediately and lastingly captivating places, and I'm left thinking a bit less of New Zealand as a whole having seen its `greatest city` and been less impressed than I was with, say, Birmingham the last time I visited.
Then again I have a lot to say for Birmingham, and if the old jokes are still being run then the joke's on whoever tells them; the city centre and canalside developments there are frankly stunning. Unless the whole thing has burned down in the last 17 months or something and it’s all back to slums and concrete hell.

Auckland is still an undeniably cosmopolitan centre of fashion, culture and commerce, is set in a pretty incredible location for trade and one finds oneself poised to try any number of world-class activities and locations simply by arriving there (though having a suitcase full of money helps), yet from street level and at least to the, ooh, the 8th floor up, it just seems to lack that indefinable vibrancy or concentration of genuine culture, and by genuine I also of course mean cheap - preferably free.

Never let it be said I don't investigate these things fully though, because I cobbled together enough places for a perpetual tightwad like me to see and do, almost enough to fill a whole week, and from various scribbles on SubWay serviettes, beer mats and notebooks It looks quite like I actually did things, and didn't just slouch around in bars cultivating an interesting new variety of cirrhosis.
And so this is what actually happened:

Arriving on a Saturday I felt obliged to throw myself straight into the club/pub culture of the city and get convincingly drunk. As a visiting Englishman it is only appropriate, after all. We gave these proud Pacific nations all bits of paper from the Queen/King, the right to go and get killed in any fights we started, their own flags or, at least, gave each of 'em three-quarters of their own flag and carefully passed on a very Anglo-Saxon predilection for getting thoroughly smashed.

As usual I convinced myself the following day that I had drunk a truly heroic amount of liquor, in all likelihood shaming the entire non-Russian-speaking world, but checking back on my bank account online (I absolutely cannot be trusted with cash on the first night in a new town, another vital lesson I have learned) it seems I was nowhere near as hardcore as I’d let myself believe - 6 Jagermeister-Redbulls on top of a couple of jugs of cheapo beer do not the stuff of legends make, even if those jugs are worth a couple of pints and more apiece.

I recall - of course I recall, that's what hangovers are for - taking to the stage and gyrating like a gorilla on bad acid, as I have so often been likened to, to the general horror of other patrons. Sponsored by far too much Redbull I managed this for some considerable minutes, possibly until kind people led me away, and under the posthumous command of Jagermeister and beer I engaged the next morning in a hangover where everything nasty out of the bible seemingly happened to me, from the after-after-afterparty at Sodom and Gomorrah to that bit where they nail the Hebrew fella to a couple of sticks.

Day Two: It was a Sunday, apparently.

Aimlessly plodding the city I went (despite the spirit of Roman soldiers hammering nails through important bits of me) to look at a few public parks and green spaces that were, according to my map, within staggering distance of my lodgings, which was this time a Nomads Fusion brand of hostel located handily in the red light district on Fort street. This was not a factor in my choice, whether you believe me or not, and as it happens Fort street is really the upper class red light district as it abuts the biggest street in the city at its most opulent and metropolitan (and well lit ) end.

The Nomads brand of hostelries are much like the Base brand, both seen in every major Aussie and Kiwi city and there are even a few in Fiji; they are generally clean and very busy, usually excellently located for the pub and club scene, and are where all the cool young things tend to stay.
I do not have the space here for either the vitriol or praise due to the various hostels in Australasia, nor likewise for the people who tend to frequent them so I will just let you know that the differences in both can be enormous, and in a wide variety of directions.

The map only lied a little. Nothing so flagrant as the dishonest offerings of the Lonely Planet so quite tolerable really, even while being metaphorically crucified about the cerebrum by the analogy of heathen legionnaires.
I was of course tramping my way around roadways and up and down urban hills in the hope of sweating out a special hangover mix of randomised fear, nausea and soul crushing guilt we all know and love. And guess whether it worked? Did it hell. No-one to blame but myself of course.

Now Auckland is a big old city, around 1.3 million people make their lives there and of course it includes the usual mix of classy bits, sleazy bits, and middley-classy bits; from distinctly upper class regions where plots are practically counted in integers of longitude and latitude, all the way through to utterly destitute quarters where a patch of soil larger than your footprint counts as a garden and if you can stretch in bed without legally trespassing you virtually have your own condo.

All of which combines, somehow, to make a city that is perhaps more sure of itself than it deserves. People of this city are utterly self-confident and visibly bristling in their day-to-day dealings, homeless folks notwithstanding, yet despite my eager attitude and will to see and do whatever I could within the short time (and cruelly shortened budget) I had left, I found myself spending more than one day with nothing of interest to do but walk the streets (no, not like that ) just to see where people lived and worked, rather than become engorged with culture and jaw-dropping scenery.
And that much one reasonably could have expected, given the way the rest of the country presents itself - doubly so when taking this city's continual boasts into account.

Not that it isn't a lovely place and, for example, somewhere I would far rather live, work and relax when compared to my closest cathedral-blessed conurbation, which happens to be Southampton in Hampshire. I mean we launched the Titanic there, for heaven's sakes.
That's about as well as you can expect most things in Southampton to finish up

Back on the byways of a hung-over Sunday, the second day at large in Auckland, I dedicated myself to not passing a drop of booze between my lips and did my tourist thing; a-stumbling the highways of the city attempting a passing resemblance of someone capable. Victoria park, the first and closest of my targets proved to be a flat, tree-edged recreation area of maybe ten acres, that served as communal cricket ground as much as it did mass transit engineering site: a motorway bridge runs directly across the centre of this green space, elevated 50 feet into the air by concrete and steel but relegated to as many millimetres from the nadir of urban planning by some foolish sods who approved the thing.
With dozens of groups practising batting, bowling and standing-around-smoking (formally an official position on the crease) the gargantuan cement pile seemed at odds with the perceived image of the city, which according to the local tourist authority presents visitors with breathtaking scenery, beautiful beaches, invigorating walks...
Strangely, no mention of the marvels of highway construction inside the city’s parks and gardens.

Second on my list and a rather wonderful surprise after Victoria, Albert Park was stunning in layout, charm and location. Huge ancient trees cast enormous boughs across nearby pathways in firm defiance of gravity, shadowing vast patches of ground from the midday sun and providing habitat for the furrier locals and a seriously nice lunch spot for the more bipedally inclined. A fountain there, in the centre of a small formal garden, is a glory of classically styled cast-iron and views of nearby skyscrapers through the trees bring about a new appreciation for those glass & steel masterpieces.

Sat on an inner-city volcanic hill Albert Park is peaceful and entrancing, and precisely what I needed at the time.
Bizarrely a couple of French blokes turned up in one corner near the fountain, seated themselves, lit cigarettes and between them began taking a series of thin tubes from a duffel bag and started screwing them together. At first I thought they were jugglers or spinners putting spinning staffs together, as seen in many English parks, but after turning to leave I heard the ominous strains of bagpipes and this it was that they had put together. Bagpipers. French guys. The bagpipers were French. Perhaps this is inevitable?
After all, the definition of a gentleman is a chap who can play the bagpipes and doesn’t.

Much walking later, including a trip across a gigantic urban motorway and I enter The Domain. Sounds scary huh?
To be fair it is the site of an ancient volcano, scarier still its last eruption wasn’t all that ancient at just a couple of hundred years ago, though in reality it is a giant city park with an awful lot of hills and highways running through it.

Also in the Domain is the Auckland war museum which was deeply excellent and somewhat poorly titled; more natural history and Maori/settler heritage exhibits than anything, they kept all the war upstairs almost tucked out of the way.
That said, the whole edifice and cenotaph outside is a monument to New Zealanders who fought and died in the two world wars, and of various other conflicts since, and four long corridors flank the long sides of the building on the uppermost levels, the walls on both sides displaying the individual names of every man and woman who died, carved in marble tablets 12 feet high. That’s an awful lot of names. That part of the place, as ever, was a little too moving for me fragile little me and after feeling suitably humbled I shuffled off into the lower levels again.

Despite my appreciation of all that has gone before I still have a childish affection for all kinds of sharp pointy things, boomsticks of mass destruction and all other kinds of armaments. The war museum in Auckland contains an amazing collection of weapons worth spending a few minutes of perusal, for nerds like me as much for the design of the artefacts present but also the variety, and for some extremely rare pieces, the details of which I shall not bore you with.

Again in The Domain I saw more evidence of that strange Auckland obsession with the motorcar and all its prolific outcrop of playgrounds; `roads` I believe you call them; as even though the Domain is vast and green and the central point of loveliness in the city it is still criss-crossed by some 15 kilometres of roads, and it is possible to reach any of the two-dozen or more attractions within the park without having the bother of manipulating your feet across all that bothersome grass.

At various points inside the Domain there are great formal gardens, Edwardian greenhouses full of orchids and subtropical plants, huge wrought iron bandstands and a variety of fountains, themed gardens, hills and hillocks of varying sizes, most of which are set alongside or amongst precipitous lawns on the steeper slopes of this volcanic mound.

Strange that all this historic wonder and lush display of nature should be interwoven with tarmac umbilical cords linking drivers with their petrol powered comfort blankies, even in a country like New Zealand: especially in a country like New Zealand in fact.

Wandering back that presented day no problems, but for the
budgetary concerns that started to become an obsession. I had an amount of money left that would leave a church mouse hunting for spare change, and worked out that, after outlays on a hostel bed, three SubWay `Sub of the Day` sandwiches and a drink (just one drink) I had around $15 left per day. I cried for a bit and carried on back to the hostel.

Monday, day Three: From Flora to Fauna.

I took a trip to the zoo. Whether you personally have moral objections to caged animals and their parading about for public entertainment, or you value the conservation work achieved through them, or even if you just don't care and never think about it, I am quite confident you would think Auckland zoo to be a fine institution, and an all-round bloody good day out.

It is much like Singapore Zoo; very well presented, designed by Daedalus just before he went on holiday to Crete, and absolutely chock-full of well-contented animals of a thousand flavours. That the beasts of the fields and birds of the air are happy with their lot in there is easy to divine from quick observation of, say, the three or four white rhinos or half-dozen African lions, both of whom in neighbouring enclosures spent much of the time I was there beating seven shades of shit out of one another. As in: Lions were beating on lions and rhinos on rhinos. Quite dreadful to imagine the other, shame on you

The rhinos squared off and had a pretty decent scuffle over something or other while I was distracted by the lions (a kind of United-Animals-of-Africa Treaty was, I believe, worked out between them sometime before in order to confound tourists) so by the time I got my camera switched to movie mode and focused on the them the Rhino In Charge had established as much, and a throaty roar from back across the path told me the rhinos had upheld their end of the pact and created the diversion needed for one of the male lions to try a bit of a half-hearted shag with one of his compatriots, whom I can only hope wasn't his sister.
With three males in the same enclosure I concluded they must be siblings, and hoped this kind of thing hadn't been allowed to go too far.
Still, they made a lovely couple, and if the cubs have nine toes then, well, so be it.

Getting to the zoo, incidentally, I found another great thing about that country, in that bus drivers do not behave, as in England, as if you are the sole source of all that is wrong with their lives and that they have definitive proof you ran over their mother and shagged their sister.
I refer of course to the indigenous British species Omnibus Operatus Relucto, or "that miserable sod who is lucky enough to have a steady job, who you must manoeuvre past crossing their palm with silver for the privilege of being rattled into early Parkinson’s by their chaotic driving." I believe that's the Merriam-Webster definition, anyway.

Over in New Zealand they are, almost without fail, helpfulness itself and will tell you everything you need to know and more, and actually have to be sort-of forced to shut up as their bestowing of information gets to silly proportions and there is a whole bus there, bro, that's just not getting driven.
Really, you ask if they're going your way and if not you get the full skinny on which bus to get instead, the time interval of departures at nearby stops, the time of the last one on the return journey and how long it takes to get where you originally wanted. All the awesome ones will let you know where to go if, say, you are going near to Auckland Zoo and have asked as much, you will receive directions down the road to the zoo, and even the time (accurate, too) it takes to get there. All with smiles galore, and fantastic Kiwi chirpiness.

I say the awesome ones because I dealt with three in my time in Auckland and Wellington that were grumpy miserable shits - and you know what? The miserable lot were all pakeha; white European-descended guys; and all the rest I ever met, the majority I'm glad to say and including one I had a laugh and a chat for at least half an hour with after asking him in passing about another bus, were predominantly Maori*. Funny, that, I thought.

And here's another thing: waiting on Mount Victoria, the best lookout site over Wellington when I was there a week later, a driver had a wait of about 30 minutes before he was scheduled to leave. Standing around outside chatting to me a girl came down from the lookout point and asked him where he was going - nowhere near his routes for that day - but because he was on his break and didn't have to leave for 25 minutes he asked if I wanted to go on a ride too; and he bloody well drove that girl across the city to the bloody road she lived on and dropped her off specially, to get back 3 minutes before he was set to leave Mt. Victoria - just because he could help her out.

I bloody love New Zealand, and I bloody love New Zealanders I really do. I really wish we had more people like that in this country.

I must say I was enjoying myself immensely in the fifty or so acres of Auckland zoo, not all of them accessible on that day as the aquarium, a polar exhibit and several small enclosures were either empty of closed for repair or total renovation. I remember walking past the third or fourth of these and thinking in dismay how much I was missing, but then I managed to get a bead on the Byzantine arrangement of it all and found what I was really after, the Rainforest Walk.

I have a slight obsession with rainforests and the key thing - the big, main, central thing that I wanted to do on this trip - was get as far into the Amazon basin as physics and geography allowed, and so you may imagine why I am a little sore at having to come back so early.

Nonetheless I have seen the jungles of Borneo (and got satisfactorily rained upon) and been in near-rainforest territory in India, Cambodia and Fiji, so it has not been a complete failure. I still get a thrill from thinking of losing myself in one though, even an entirely synthetic walkway just a few yards long over suspiciously machine-made timbers, but still I think even a few seconds suspension of disbelief here is worth the admission price alone.

It did not disappoint, and led into an incredible spider monkey enclosure where the whole environment is open at one end, all that is stopping the cheeky simians from invading central Auckland is an nine-foot-wide perimeter moat crusted in jungle-strength algae, and since spider monkeys harbour a powerful natural fear of water this seemingly naive measure actually keeps them all perfectly contained.

Were they to escape they would be far less of a problem than, say, the hippo that escaped in 1976 (floods changed the terrain so much that one of these famously tetchy African water horses swum over its barricades to freedom) or the Leopard that they managed to mislay in 1925 (it turned up having a relaxed bath 13km away over in Mission Bay) though, and frankly I would welcome one into my house with open arms, an handful of small plastic bags and a dustpan and brush.

Back at the lions some time later, I managed to convince myself we would all be in trouble when I saw the whole gang at one side of their enclosure, the big males having a fairly serious go at what I must assume to be the door to their feeding station, into a large and, I must say, reassuring concrete building, for the terrifying pussycats were laying into the thing with some gusto.

Clearly pissed off with humans who should have fed them by now, two of them were up on hind legs pulling at a large bar laid across the portal, and watching their huge meat-stuffed muscles ripple under their skin as they gave it some welly was a little worrying, because nothing but a single sheet of glass separated us. Plus I was all alone in a barren corner, which is as nice a place to shit your pants with worry as anywhere, rather better than most in fact, and being less than fifteen feet from angry, hungry lions kind of cemented the deal.

Safety glass notwithstanding - really notwithstanding: the thing about glass, you see, is you can't see it all that well - when one of them padded up to the barrier and eyeballed me, not six feet away now and unnervingly tall considering he was low down using four legs to my deliciously fresh and fully upright two, I admit a little trickle of sweat cascaded down both front and back and later gave people the impression I actually did exercise.

Wonderful creatures though of course, and just because any one of them could reduce me to about eight kilos of of kitty poop in less than a day, and to a dead sack of bloody bones and offal in about two seconds flat, there's no reason to lose sight of that.

I was really enjoying myself of course, pretending to have close encounters with scary creatures does wonders for your self-esteem, so didn't in the slightest mind the usual zoo ground plan whereby you tread the same sections a hundred times trying to follow signs placed at calculatedly misleading angles so you can never be sure, from less than one turning away, how to actually reach any exhibit. The technique is one of highly selective dissemination of information, otherwise known as giving only half the story in deliberately awkward places. It keeps you guessing though, and certainly never feels like a linear experience which is what a zoo should be all about.

A big thing I wanted to see in New Zealand was, of course, the eponymous kiwi.
The little blighters are nocturnal though, and terrified of everything up to and including their own shadow (perhaps this is the reason why they are nocturnal) which is unusual for NZ fauna as most of it was so charmingly curious and unafraid upon sighting humankind that Maori arrived and clubbed the shit out of everything, even the huge and rather lethal Moa birds that ate everything else in the whole country; Probably even for fun. There were, and still are in comparative global terms, no significant mammals in New Zealand, and no mammalian predators existed at all until we came along.

When we did just about everything fell victim to Maori attacks. Mind you, theirs is a deeply physical culture and frankly if dragons, basilisks and 80-foot tentacled demons had been here it would still have ended in a draw.

Despite the kiwi's retiring tendencies the zoo has worked out a way for visitors to spy the kiwi doing its thing, although only just. Inside a darkened - extremely darkened - corridor one of the three species (plus one sub-species on the South Island) of kiwis available for our zoological contemplation could be seen, again, only just. Out of the red-tinted darkness I made out two of the birds, which were I believe lesser spotted kiwi, poking into the humus and leaf matter with their sword-like beaks, moving with a gait I can only call a... a gait, of some sort, some...some kind of type of manner of...thing.

Lame I know, but if you see them move you will understand. There is no word for the way a Kiwi bird moves, other than `cute`, although `adorable` works well, as does `endearing`. I will allow `loveable` also. It is not a waddle, not a stalk, not a trundle, a picking or poking step, or any kind of bounce. It is, and I believe it should be called this, a `kiwi`, for nothing else on Earth moves as they do.

I'll try and find a video at some point.

As you will hopefully see for yourselves at some point a kiwi bird is hopelessly adorable, and sadly quite hopelessly hopeless at staying alive in the modern New Zealand full of humans, cars, possums, cats, dogs, stoats, weasels and just about everything else with more cells to its names than an amoeba.

Bereft of forelimbs that are any use whatsoever, it has the appearance and manner of a bipedal egg with head and neck stuck on as an afterthought by a distracted Creator, and a beak that would be a bloody handy weapon if only the creature behind it had malice or bloodthirstiness enough to use it, which it very much doesn't. A kiwi would ask for the vegetarian option at a tofu banquet. It is possibly the nicest, most placid creature of its size ever known, at least to anything except another kiwi, which it will of course attempt to viciously murder if territories encroach on one another. Even the Easter Bunny goes postal if you squat his burrow.

So the kiwi has the world's cutest walk, and the real-life capacity for sense and overall durability of a chocolate teapot. 95% of all kiwis are fated to die in the wild, 70% of these, as immature chicks, will be eaten by stoats alone. Ranked among other predators lethal to the kiwi are cats, dogs, and possums, and frankly anything that can fall prey to a possum through predation (rather than TB, or any of the other dozens of communicable ills the things carry) needs all the help it can get. A possum is a kind of miniscule joke panda, an animal itself so useless it can only hunt bamboo.

Cute, but not really a competitive organism in terms of, say, not-going-extinct-'coz-you-spent-20,000-years-on-your-arse-in-the-forest-backing-yourself-and-your-kids-into-a-ludicrously-specialised-ecological-niche.

It was at about this time I started recalculating my budget every day. This was because I both thought of new things I couldn't get away with not paying for (airport departure tax, final night's accommodation, food to survive 35 hours of airports and airplane fuselages while crossing half the planet) and because I generally stopped off for a swift half in the afternoon after achieving things which quickly became three pints and a net loss of about twenty dollars.

Although I had little things like bus fares of $8 to irk me, and even with an entry fee to the zoo that day of $21 (plus of course essentials like afternoon beers) I still managed to hang onto the dancing thread of my finances enough to eat more or less regularly, which was largely due to the Subway chain of eateries and their daily offer of a pretty good-sized sandwich for less than $4.

More than once that week I made them breakfast, lunch and dinner. It's healthy! You know I actually stuck to wheat or white bread and had only the thin, gruel-like sauces that promised not to make customers explode in-store with cholesterol pouring from every vein and artery. That's got to make it healthy, right? I mean, Jared wouldn't lie to us would he..

I justify myself partly because Auckland has fifty-seven branches of Subway (I checked. Of course I checked.) many of which I personally tested, some of which are in somewhat intriguing places.

On Queen Street, the main drag with the main stores and malls, running from the quayside through the CBD and down to K' road (the scummy low-rent bit that still just about qualifies as central city shopping) I found, at the back of a small convenience store, operating at the end of the aisles between housekeeping magazines and a typically poor selection of canned goods, the smallest Subway known to mankind.

It was really just a counter about 8 feet long. Packed in (although it did require a kitchen that executed a full hairpin- bend) were bread ovens and prep areas and freezers and all the usual metallic cubes of humming cateringness that I hope never to understand properly, plus all the fillings and veggies and sauces you find everywhere else on counters four times the size. It looked and felt like Subway-4-Kids, or Yo! JAPANiSUB!, or something, but it worked.

Elsewhere, I loved this, there is a Subway branch installed in the ground floor of a building serving Auckland university as a halls of residence. Students do not even have to leave their HOUSE to obtain fast food. Thank God it's a Subway and not a McDonalds.
Elsewhere a former church has become a temple to the $3.90 Meatball Marinara, Sunday Sub Of The Day, my favourite day of the fast food week and all the more appropriate for that particular venue.
In New Zealand even SubWay is kinda cool!

A Tuesday (Day 4 came around and I tried to do nothing, which may be a mission statement in need of some work but still, I attempted a complete and thorough lack of attempting. Before this mighty feat I knew there was one real thing I had to do, and that was to book and pay for my flight home. A merry bloody chase that turned out to be.

I began negotiating two days before with the saintly family back home so that they might throw £400 at me for a ticket, and for some fantastic reason they gave me five. Gotta love those guys

I booked the only one I could afford with this, the payment was rejected online for `technical failures` unknown and unexplained, and the airlines automated systems promptly robbed me not only of the cost of one ticket, but also all the rest of the money in that bank account.

I had just paid for a ticket - with an instantly recognisable, internationally famous airline - and not just been refused but been utterly cleaned out. Robbed twice over. What should have been left in the account was completely unavailable to me so I could not book my next hostel, couldn't book another domestic flight I needed to get to the right airport for departing the country, nor pay for either of the two bus journeys I really did rather need to sort out. Fuck.

Not a good start to a day of intended relaxation, especially because I knew the spaces left on this trip were running out dangerously fast (I had harassed the poor folks back home to get cash into banks ASAP and right before most of them left on a little holiday themselves, because a panic isn't a proper panic unless everyone stands a chance to get fucked over Eeeeeeevvvil hippy....)

Anyway I wasn't having any of that so, what with it being St. Patrick's Day that Tuesday I went down to the first Irish pub I could find (and they are so easy to find, aren't they, everywhere? The Irish are incapable of going without Guinness for 24 hours it seems, and caches have to be left on every major street in every city on Earth lest one comes stumbling over the horizon gabbling desperately for "Like, a pint o' muddy water. No, muddier. And some weird fizzy white scum on top. Grand, givvit here..") and downed three pints of lightly fizzed mud with scum topping and went to work.

It had just cracked past 9am (gotta love St Paddy's day) and I was irritated at being robbed, irritated at having irritated everyone back home at such short notice, and downright furious that I had to get things sorted in order to be able to LEAVE New Zealand, pretty much the last thing I wanted to do in the first place (short of trepanning myself with blunt cutlery perhaps) yet was so cruelly manipulated into doing.

I kind of went a little over the top, threw a nice big status message up on Facebook about it (because, I don't know if you knew this but a lot of companies, and a great many employers will research names on social networking sites if, say, they are screening new employees or have a complaint issue with someone), emailed the airline, visited the airlines offices in the city, conveniently less than 300yds from my hostel's doorway, and the awesome, wonderful and hugely attractive people back home emailed them as well through another channel. I even emailed a few British tabloids with the general thrust of `Would you like to build something on the riff of "Foreign Airline Steals Last Of Brit Tourist's Cash"` in the hope that nothing interesting was going on in Britain and in the sure knowledge that some rabid scaremongering is always on the cards.
From that I'm sure you can guess which papers I contacted

My theory is make it loud, don't take any shit and make yourself very, very annoying, in every way possible. As I had lost access to my last, precious five hundred quid, which if never recovered I had no other bailouts, or if a bailout couldn't be arranged in time I would break the conditions of my visa and face costly deportation and criminal charges, I thought a little knee-jerking reactionary madness was justified.

It was something of a long shot that I'd actually overstay my visa, but had it happened in exactly the same way less than four months later then that's just what would have transpired.
This on my mind, it all seemed to work out satisfactorily within 48 hours although the explanation given was extremely lame, and even contradicted itself when what it said was impossible, happened after just a few further hours of harassment. Oh dear.

Now I am sure you are wondering which airline this is, and you will have to wonder evermore unless I'm not happy with my trip home. If they don't fuck up again then I shall not name names, if they do, I'll be complaining to those newspapers again and finding some others who have also been done over, and when I looked into it then I found PLENTY of people ready to make some noise about it.

Day 5, I Think..:
A thing one can't help but notice in all the country is the number of Sushi bars, and having been a bit of a lame foodie in not really trying them before I steeled myself for the experience and what an odd experience it is at first; one of conveyor belts, little colour-coded and texture-coded plates, and almost unbearably polite Japanese hospitality.

Given the hoo-rah of the restaurant experience I'm actually amazed that there was better sushi available back in Nelson from a street stall, and one such cart which habitually sat not even forty feet from my front door!
The little stand across the junction from my flat was bloody superb, and nowhere else did a beef and ginger (not pickled ginger, cooked with root ginger) or even a tempura prawn even halfway as good.
That little stand was gold, and I seriously hope it's there when I go back!

Along with the sushi bars there is of course a large Japanese population, especially noticeable in Auckland where one whole part of Queen's road to the south, near where it joins Karangahape Road (K' road) where one side of the street shows apartment blocks in an unbroken line for half a kilometre, with no roads in between save for small access courts for residents, and the other side matches it with an unbroken line of sushi bars, bento box takeaways and Japanese restaurants, and mixed in with these I recognised a lot of written Korean as well. Good job I read that Bryson book about it (think it was a Bryson) or I'd be awfully confused. Well, more confused anyhow.

Rounding off the day with an easy jug of cheapo beer in the hostel bar, and a fairly early sleep I was feeling like I'd accomplished something, not least being able to stop at one jug of beer.

Ah, no here it is; Wednesday, day Five:

In need of a bus to somewhere or other I found the oddest, most spaced out (literally) bus station I have ever seen.

It covers five or more streets, in and around the shops & crossings in-between, and is only very loosely hung together so the `station` part is a bit generous. It is more a large collection of urban bus stops, and though quite easily navigable it's still rather odd to have to walk a block and a half past a McDonalds and around a Starbucks to get from stand `C` to stand `D`, and I'm sure I'd not have been the first if I had missed an important connection around there.

As it was I didn't, possibly because I didn't truthfully have anywhere to go and didn't even need a bus. It's just that it was on my route- for almost two blocks it WAS my route - so I couldn't help but absorb a little of the weirdness.

This was a day for testing mottos, and Auckland calls itself the City of Sails, possibly because it was the clever bloke's day off. City Of Sails - it seems a bit of an odd one eh? Just about every harbour city and major port worldwide might also lay claim to the motto, if for some reason they wanted to. It's just not that evocative, at least not to this landlubber, and I wondered if perhaps something better might be needed as I made my way to the waterfront and eased my way along it like a laden tug (which I have come to resemble more and more lately) bumping the wharves on a leisurely scud into port.

Down the Western side of the CBD and sticking to the waterfront as much as possible, I wandered along docksides admiring super-elite yachts, around parts of the commercial docks where freight shipping goes off and around the cruise ship docks poking right up the line of the land almost into the CBD itself. All around there, more noticeable than in other, more focused residential or commercial areas there is a wide mix of architectural styles as of that visible in all relatively new cities. Unusually however Auckland has free public WiFi access along a section of marina apartments, right up against the waterfront people are encouraged to take their laptops and sit cruising TradeMe.com (the Kiwi version of eBay) and checking their spam mail for amusing grammatical errors.

Later that evening I found myself eating a mediocre meal, through no fault of my own I have to say but rather because the saucepans were rationed, and I didn't look starving enough, I suppose. The kitchen in that place was just maddening - with a capacity of nearly 350 guests, all supposedly self-catering, the Nomads Fusion hostel in Auckland has just one small kitchen of maybe 18ft wide by 35ft long - half of which given over to seating anyway.

With a mighty three hobs and two (count ‘em! Two!!) ovens - and only three sodding frying pans - for over three hundred people I think it's safe to say things are a little lacking. Are they sponsored by SubWay, perhaps? I begin to wonder.

Anyway my mediocre meal faded into the background up there sitting on the hostel roof, the chiming metallic sounds of construction clanking through the ether from two ponderously rising skyscrapers, all in the glorious sunshine surrounded by several dozen scavenging but ever-so-adorable wee sparrows. Rays glinted off the glass and steel of a very cosmopolitan set of surroundings, and I felt for the first time in that city a lively, invigorating feel in the air. Being surrounded by hyperactive 19-year olds having the time of their lives probably helped this along, but I like to think that Auckland had started to come into its own

Day 6: Suburban Splendour:

University buildings seem to swallow lots of the city up, as they cover a truly vast area where often there seems to be no other stuff in-between, but of course there must be. Even in this land of marvels and wonder would there be enough dedication among students of all people to occupy a dozen whole city blocks. Unless at least half the floor space was licensed, of course.

Go anywhere east of Fort Street and uni buildings crop up on all sides and totally dominate every area. Further east into Parnell, things feel and look very much like a seaside town though, and a small, unpolluted English town at that - probably even one that has a beach devoid of red flags and mortally grievous industrial waste.

Parnell as a district is deeply pretty and maintains an atmosphere of calm totally at odds with the hassle and hustle of Queen Street, yet is only 20 minutes walk away uphill, probably a driveable distance taking only 5 or 6 minutes.
Small shops and discreet little half-touristy business' can be seen huddled together on only one side of the road, the buildings often patched together or linked by cutesy little overheard walkways and Japanese-style arched bridgeways lined with jacaranda.
The other side of the main street there seemed to be a solid string of small parks and timber framed churches and lodging houses, facing the masses of boutique shops huddling together for sheer the cosiness of it all; cobbled streetlets, more miniature walkways overhead that must be totally impractical but are lovely to see; and the shops all seemed to actually have a little class and were not simply full of tat, although maybe the glorious sunshine was getting the better of me by that point.
Land also rolls away on both sides of Parnell Street, and it can be easily seen down any side road that the land for half a mile around slopes away and rises up again, another remnant of the volcanic past that made the city the way it is today.

On the nearest coastal side (because both sides one, Auckland being sited on an isthmus) the trees and houses atop these hills are highlighted against the sky, a dead giveaway that the edge of the land is right there, but still behind it more rolls of land and further suburban hills follow the dipping and rising land and it seems rather as if your are on coast - but Auckland IS on the coast; the illusion here is, oddly enough, that this is not a coastal city but another major inland metropolis, and Parnell is just a charming, wonderful surprise.
Bearing left at a large cathedral, I wandered into residential streets of a very English milieu, all lined with European trees of oak, silver birch, cherry and sycamore unlike the mad swathes of eucalypts and ferns seen everywhere else, although on the edge of this area pungas, the occasional palm tree and even banana plants can be found.
Within these streets everything could be as from the most warm and satisfyingly fond summer days in England, streets with names like `Canterbury` and `Gladstone` are home to detached houses never more than two storeys tall, that simply sprawl at that level if they feel like it.

Sadly I had to come back to Earth of course, though on the way I noticed - as I had done at the marina the day before alongside all the free public WiFi - yet more water fountains which, as in Australia, sprout from the ground at plenty of useful intervals around the cities and are to be found at most junctions of major residential roads and all along every shopping district outside of the CBD centre.
Strangely, also as in Aussie (as Aussie is equally bizarre in this regard) there are many pubs and bars in every Kiwi city which have full-blown bookkeepers and betting shops within them - a dangerous combination to my mind, and I'm usually all for this sort of stupidity.
Having a bookies counter and race screens right next to a bar seems like a disaster waiting to happen, and drunk betting, and the subsequent gambling problems do occur on a very frequent basis - out bar in Nelson had a steady supply of people losing hundreds after hundreds of dollars, none of whom looked as if they could really afford it.

Gambling is a seriously big part of life Down Under, for good or for bad but certainly for the long term.
They call them pokie rooms (and the machines `pokies`) and the innocuous name and often swish, fancy decor seems to lure a lot of people in. But they are always separate from the bar areas with doors or half doors, because gamblers are encouraged to focus on pushing their wages into the little flashing machines and all given preferential treatment by the venue, in the form of free food and soft drinks and, if you are particularly ruthless, free booze. I personally got them smashed on a regular basis as part of my evil and cunning plans, and usually it worked very well, although I did feel a great deal of sorrow and remorse for at least 15 seconds afterwards.

Friday, Day 7:

K road, short for Karangahape Road so you can see why, is home to lots of faded facades, `Op-Shops` (the kiwi version of charity shops), the odd poorly camouflaged strip joint and all the good speciality shops like a real butchers, vendors of legal, and not so legal highs, and all the city's authentically dirty tattoo parlours, plus places where for a trade-in of decor and ambient smell you can get the same CDs as on Queen street for 2/3rds of the price.
Basically it's where I would spend much of my life if I lived in Auckland, and certainly where most of my friends would be.

I achieved basically nothing that day (finally: success!!) but got my stuff together for the next stage and booked a bus to Napier, a hostel in Napier, sorted out maps of that town and got together a rough list of stuff to do in Wellington. There was just one more thing to do and I was until I got back, just book one final night in Welly on the 31st of March and be ready to face the Day of Return.

I suppose one final thing to be said here is a further note on Maori culture, white (or Pakeha, according to Maori) culture and all the various nationalities and ethnic groups that have settle in New Zealand. In major cities and especially in Auckland almost all convenience stores - of which there are possibly thousands, seriously; they are on EVERY single street outside the suburbs, Kiwis being a very convenient sort of people - are staffed by Korean, Chinese, Phillipino or Japanese and the remaining few are where you can find an Indian lass or lad if ever you need one in a hurry.

They also all sell the same stuff, and in the case of Korean- Chinese- and Japanese-run stores you can always find at least thirty different types of instant noodles, so never let anyone tell you that Super Noodles aren't authentic food - more Asian people eat them (at least outside their home country) than they ever do rice or `proper` noodles.

With Maori and pakeha culture of course the rivalry over land and the various wars, either with each other or because of each other ensure that the situation really isn't simple, but generally the country is incredibly well organised into a genuine dual culture where both white and Maori politics, beliefs and history are accepted and well-known to everyone.

Of course old prejudices still exist, but in truth there are very few pure Maori left as the populations have been integrating and interbreeding for a good 150 years - though it is still bloody obvious who is who and roughly were they came from, biologically speaking.

Trouble still festers in places of course, and especially here in New Zealand's most populous, arguably greatest city there needs to be recognition from everyone of the differences, before similarities can be truly appreciated.
And on that note I shall pretend no longer to sound like I know what the hell I'm going on about, and leave you with this thought, again:

”A true gentleman is a man who can play the bagpipe and never, ever does.”

Comments

Stop me if you've heard this one..

2009-04-27T18:30:52+02:00

Okay folks, WTF? I mean reaslly, do I have to do this each and every pitiful time? Once again I look back across the smoke-strewn waters at a distant herd of Knopflersaurii and recognise another empty promise: articles concerning at least three cities of New Zealand have utterly failed to come forth. Even I doubt their existence - and I happen to know the skeletal forms of at least 66% of these things live on the desktop of my laptop, which in itself sits upon the desktop of my...desk..err, table, thing..... in my bloody room!

No kidding with the `chasing ghosts` thing: I'm feeling a little like an anthropomorphacised Catch 22 at the moment (just wait until I start spinning madly through the stratosphere in a vortex of paradoxes).

The point is that I have a new agenda: a new outlook: a new Plan, with a capital `P`, no less.

News to follow shortly - unless I'm as shit as ever and fail to finish my reports of Auckland, Wellington and Napier, not to mention London, Southampton and New Tim'sland.

I do hope I prove less awful than before.

Comments

Homecoming King

2009-04-09T13:42:37+02:00

So I have returned, and now sit in old England once more. I wish I had a seat for my kingdom here from which to rule, but frankly I'm glad of a seat to my trousers, a bed (with real springs! wow!!) to sleep in and supplies in the pantry for raiding 24hrs a day. It is, in so many ways, good to be back

I have plenty of unfinished bits and pieces, not least of which a handful of entries that are maybe approaching real journalism, I think, all about Auckland, Wellington, Napier and, I suppose, New Zealand as a whole. Better left cold this time, I think. It'll be interesting to see how things balance out when I'm writing in the past tense for real as if from a deep red leather chair amidst an oak bookcase-lined study, rather than making it sound like that even though I'm in a cheap hotel room, on the same day, in the same town.

I came back, and got my job back, because I am a hugely jammy bastard I suppose, also some luck with the timing of various people leaving helped me out, also because Summer is the busiest season, after all. There are as well plenty of things I can do at the old yard there that no-one else can; it's not their fault they're ancient and decrepit, and still think email gets delivered into the back of the computer by hand every morning, by little imps and demons or something.
I realise that one day I will be that new breed of technophobic antiquarian, the ones who think they know it all but only remember up to Pentium II days, helpless in the face of progress and staircases and unable to get to grips with the psychic memory implants or telekinetic international transport grid or something, in which case I shall have to do then as they do now, and give the young 'uns a galactic-sized dose of bullshit, ribbing and mockery on a daily basis

I've also started my slightly-cunning, mildly glorious mission to travel places without need of a passport, and with a bit of luck, no need to pay out too many hostel, hotel or even breakfast monies as I spend weekends touring England (and other connected territories) seeing people who need a good visiting from an ex-hippy. (Speaking of which I must change my name, the hair is gone and I no longer feel all that evil)

London sees me this weekend, in fact. Poor London. I've really no idea where to go or what to do, I have a whole afternoon and probably another whole morning to see very English things in our mightiest city and am pretty clueless, really.
London is extremely huge, you see. Biggest city I suppose I've ever been too - actually no, Mumbai is bigger, but I tended to hang around in Colaba like a chickenshit and buggered off after seeing The Gateway (and a few too many leprous beggars) so really this is gonna be quite unlike anywhere I have seen that recently.

And of course I need to learn a new language (" 'ere, 'ee ain't 'alf frog-'n'-paint around the spamckles, is 'ee! Me ol' china-me-lad-me-cock-me-octogenarian-gay-plutonium-rabbit" or whatever Cockneyese the've come up with lately. And of course an entirely new currency is needed, the `pound` being obsolete and the colloquial `Tenner` being in use, as in "Portion of chips - that'll be a tenner", so really, it should be a bit of an adventure.

Last time I went to London I caught the night bus back and was treated to a guerrila hip-hop outfit giving a covert performance of beatbox and MC all the way from Soho to Shortlands. It can be right proper interesting on that bus.

Comments

Approach Vector Auckland

2009-03-19T08:22:23+01:00

I booked a week in Auckland, because at the time I didn't know any better. It's not unpleasant, not even unloveable, it's just that I am deeply cheap and, now, genuinely poor, here at the end of my travels. Down to a mere NZ$50 a day after hostel fees - that's £20 English for food, entertainment, refreshment and back-of-sofa mislayings and forgetfullness - for every whole entire complete and unabridged revolution of the Planet. Not so easy when one is trying quite hard to see and do as much as possible before returning ignominiously to Blighty.
New Zealand's `greatest city` as it cheerfully calls itself, much to the chagrin of the capital Wellington, is not cheap but, in a strange twist of fortune, there isn't actually enough to do for whole week here anyway. Not enough for anyone unwilling to leave the city (and I mean leave by a good hundred miles, to the northernmost tip of the country at 90 Mile Beach or venture southeast to the centre of the North Island and Lake Taupo, or similar) so perhaps it is somewhat serendipitous that I am poor at the same time that the city has little to offer the casual tourist.
Of course that isn't true, but I don't fancy walking across the upper span of the Auckland Harbour Bridge (the standard, default activity touted to all backpackers upon entering the city limits, perhaps even by law) because I have seen many spectacular bridges and the Auckland Harbour one isn't, and anyway it costs a scandalous $150 and for that they can bloody well whistle, thank you so very much.
There are many other things to do but few unique to this city; I can see the latest films wherever I happen to be; I can eat in almost all of the same type and standard of restaurants in any major city in the world; I can be mugged and beaten by the criminal element of my choice wherever the wind blows me.

Now Wellington, the actual seat of power, politics and of course the real capital ever since about 1860 (though I bloody forgot it myself and mistakenly named Ol' Aucksville as capital on these very pages, ho ho such an idiot am I!) will, I hope and trust, prove different, more exuberant, much more vibrant and exciting, and to make certain that this is so I have booked myself a shorter stay there, because as we all know there is an equal and opposite force to Serendipity, commonly called shit-normal-fucking-evil-arsed-rotten-luck; a.k.a, as many will agree, Real Life.
In any case, back to the city, and the fact that Auckland derives its power, and at the end of the day the single reason it can lay claim to the title of greatest; pure size; from its geographic location, which is certainly fairly unusual. The city is the largest in Polynesia, as NZ does in fact lie within that region according to whoever makes these things up, and as is often said it contains quite a large number of ethnic populations, almost all from Pacific island nations, that are greater in size than those actually resident upon those isles, in which case one could argue that Tonga, Samoa, and many other independent countries are now de facto New Zealand territories, although not too loud in case of a sudden, localised plague of patriotic stabbing.

Auckland sits astride an isthmus and covers it entirely from coast to coast, and with a major harbour on both sides it is one of the few cities in the world to dominate local shipping on two major bodies of water, the Pacific Ocean to the northeast, and the Tasman Sea to the southwest.
As a city to live in it seems much like any other, like many others in fact; cosmopolitan to the point of madness, as often one finds oneself walking any street other than the main city drag (in Auckland's case one Queen Street) wondering where all the nice, normal European-descended pasty white folk have gone, as everyone on the road, in the cars, frequenting the shops and manning the cash registers within appears to be Japanese, Chinese or Korean, and there are six sushi joints you could happily pitch a stone into accurately. Not to mention the myriad other shops that you cannot even describe because the signs and everything in and around them are written in some kind of altaic, like kanji, or sintic form. And of course, again, this isn't even slightly true, it's simply that these things stick out to the pasty white gaijin mind, but on some streets it is amazing, really.

This mixture of life and cultures is one of the great things about Auckland though, and like London, New York and many others a rich community has built up for just about every nation who walks the Earth, and with a little encouragement and the occasioanl intervention of government they don;t always have to run about sticking sharp things into one another because of what their ancestor said about our ancestor at that big battle half a thousand years ago. In truth there is very little of all that that I have seen, and in about seven months living in New Zealand I have seen and heard of only a handful of racist, bigoted and otherwise fundamentally mornic discriminatory behaviour, much of it sponsored by alcohol, which is of course at the root of all evils within society (along with money, capitalism, communism, religion, greed, creed, colour, being a filthy foreigner, getting yourself born in the first place..)

Another big fact of life in this city, often mentioned in guidebooks and the like, is the Aucklander's love of the motorcar, a passion so deep and abiding it might seemingly even extend to a weird Toad Of Toad Hall-style of obsession that may or may not have historically seen residents scooting maniacally about the countryside painted green and running things over, but which certainly saw to it that urban planning for the better part of the last century pretty much excluded all the poor bastards not in possesion of their own fine motorcar, so that pavements in many areas of the city are a fairly recent addition, only cropping up in some places in the last thirty years or so. Also notable are the perhaps slightly even road markings in places giving rather too much right of way to traffic and rather less (i.e. none at all, at some junctions) to the footfalling ambulatory mortal.
That the Auckland Harbour Bridge, much as it does not impress me much (just call me Shania), which is undeniably one of the major symbols of the city and one of its key talking points, in such circles as might dwell on these things, does not actually provide in any way shape or form the means to traverse it by foot or by bicycle - that there is in fact no way to use the bloody thing without sacrificing fossil fuel deposits in some sort of motive engine - says a lot about historic attitudes in the city towards people, cars and the outright silliness of walking between places.
The bridge is now being extensively remodelled to include that portion of society that is a) concerned for Mother Earth and b) cheap.

Auckland boasts, and I'm sure it actually would, the second highest rate of vehicle ownership per-capita in the world - no shit, it really does. The first is almost certainly Mexico City, or New York, London, Paris, Beijing, Hong Kong, Tokyo, Los Angeles, Rio de Janeiro, Seoul....actually I think it is Paris. Anyway Auckland has all but one of them beat; can you believe that? I couldn't. Then I accepted it and came up with the ludicrously over-claused and convoluted paragraph above. See, that's what happen in the face of shocking statistics. Utter madness. Anyway Auckland, in its madness and general kiwi oddness, now presents its rate of car ownbership as 578 vehicles per 1000 citizens, which is very high indeed, apparently. It's certainly noticeable at street level where drivers are more irate than elsewhere in the country (they only wait 3 seconds for you to cross the road in front of them before shooting ahead, unlike the 10 second standard elsewhere. Gotta love that laid back Kiwi attitude) and traffic lights are even more brief in their graces in granting passage across the tarmac.
All that said, it is still a much easier, more pleasant and far more idiot-friendly (handy I was here to test it, then) than just about any city in the UK, and certainly than any I saw in India, southeast Asia or anywhere else I've been, even Australia. Perhaps especially Australia. They can smell a pommie at three hundred paces, or so it's said.

That bridge, by the way, connects downtown Aucland with the North Shore, apparently a residential outpost and smaller-scale fishing port, although of course almost everything is small scale compared to the major activity that throngs the dual ports of Auckland proper, nevertheless the North Shore is famous around the world for its seafood, and it is only shame for you, dear reader, that I am far too much of a cheapskate to go and experience it myself.
When I come back here, I'm totally there

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Farewell, Nelson; Hello Travels!

2009-03-14T08:12:12+01:00

If you had thought nothing has happened much in the last 5 months you would be well forgiven, at least by me. Given the infrequent and blatantly shite postings seen here since I moved to Nelson around the beginning of October I'd hardly be surprised if I was, now, only typing at myself, instead of the lovely folks who have been warm and generous enough to grace this page over the last year and a half. That's you, you lovely folks. You are wonderful you know.
In a court of law they call this sort of sycophantic behaviour `remorse`, effected for pretty similar reasons

My excuse? I have none. Long-story-short: I settled down here, life was good, I didn't need to emit tirades because I had a regular normal level of human interaction. Work then dried up, politics/bullshit/meh and I decided, last Wednesday, to bugger off from the city and see a little of the North Island while I was here.
Money is so tight I can barely afford super noodles and stale bread. Thank goodness water is free from the tap (but the house I drink it in sure isn't!) and so I find myself, now, at Nelson airport awaiting a flight to Auckland and a couple more weeks of life in Kiwiland.
Long-story-long: Here follows the usual waffle....

The last few months; gosh, doesn't it seem like a long time now, it went by in mere minutes from where I was standing; have been great for me here, I've had the pleasure to be able to build up a whole new collection of friends and acquaintances, many perfectly set up to be shocked and saddened by some disgraceful drunken behaviour of mine, but in this I at least have the real consolation that many of them have done worse but simply do not recall it, because I have been blessed with a shockingly acute memory, particularly when it comes to personal disgraces and generally regrettable shenanigans.
Not only but also: I have been living in a corner room in a flatshare for the past two months, and this corner overlooks the busiest road intersection slap bang in the middle of the city, right on Trafalgar street, no less, and so I've seen about a half-million retarded-drunk fuckwits stagger beneath my windows running, singing, collapsing, fighting, crying, in hysterics of a thousand flavours, and power-vomiting-while-still-walking-along. I am pretty sure that, no matter how smashed I ever get, I do not cry in public nor power-vomit, especially not through open car windows like some people I could mention.

I am leaving this fine city this very morning, in around two and a half hours from now although it will likely take me two more days to finish this and post it to the site, as ever. Some things are unlikely to ever change. I have a few scrappy notes from this little live-in session in Nelson, so for the sake of completeness, and to get the things done and written and off my mind, here they all are together, in no particular order and with no apologies for repetition, temporal misalignment, or stupidity.

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Received wisdom has it that moving house is the second most stressful thing people are ever supposed to experience. One must asume that the most stressful thing is dying or getting married or some other similar trauma, and not, as would be more reasonable and likely, being homeless, or getting divorced, bereaved, paralysed, drugged, stunned, stuffed and mounted, or nailed to your perch while John Cleese beats a tabletop with your face. Sorry, I may have drifted off into the dead parrot sketch there for a minute.
Anyway I moved house the other day. I barely noticed. I do hope I never forget to attend a funeral of mine at any point.
To be fair I only moved in two loads, carried mule-fashion on my own two shoulders, and have been living out of backpacks for a while now so I may not be able to pass comment on other folk's habit of accumulating a houseful of stuff and getting shady characters in duster coats to truck it about the countryside, but still. As long as you get all your shit out of A and manage to have the keys to B at least ready by the time you get your weary and delapidated arse into position at maison nouveau then I can't really see the problem. Just wait until I have a houseful of my own junk and try it, it'll be hilarious.

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So there I was at work, drunk, and getting a bit hazy with it so I started being shady with the redbull I was serving, and keeping a little back from every can when I poured them. Yes, you can call me a thief if you like, but I am working hard until 3:30am on Friday and Saturday nights for the same wage as a toilet cleaner gets during the day, and he doesn't have to deal with customers or risk a $5,000 dollar fine if he doesn't check the age of the toilet's bowl to see if it can handle the disinfectant, and so what if people are paying $13.50 for a Jager-Redbull? That's my hourly wage here, and if it just-so-happens I'm a bit drunk because I just-so-happen to have been slipping vodka into all my drinks all night then hey, I'm gonna need another little freebie from the company because, frankly, I'm a little fed up with it here. I'm largely doing the job of a duty manager but am getting no credit and this fabled `promotion` has been dangled over my head for over a month now, and I am becoming deeply fed up of giving more than should be expected for the meagre scraps I receive from the almighty table of employment. Plus I have the morals of a snake, so fuck them anyway. Twice, and with a meathook, too. Yeah.

Anyway last night was quite amusing besides all that, I ended up having so much Redbull that I visibly shook while I was serving, and what with all the Jager going into customer's drinks a goodly amount of it made it into mine as well, and I ended up almost as wasted as everyone in front of me.

But not as wasted as the area manager who plumbed new depths of depravity, and although he hooked up with one of the mangeress' sisters last weekend, in her own bar right in front of her, no less (and he IS married and his wife DOES work for the same company..), he topped it yesterday by stumbling into the back corridor obviously the worse for wear, puked lavishly into his own hands, and subsequently achieved the garden where he promptly took a piss in the corner, in full view of, ooh, at least a dozen customers, many of whom know just who he is, too. Well done.

It seemed to be an especially wasty night as the staff from our sister bar just along the road all came in and, as ever, were riotously trashed. I believe the manageress of said sister establishment fell over face-first on the dancefloor yet did not stumble or flinch at all, simply went vertical to horizontal in a fluid movement, and was still smiling benignly when picked up by the security team. She's an awesome lass, that one.

I learned last night as well that one of our duty managers has been fired, ostensibly for drinking on the job (oh come ooonnnnnnn......) but probably due to some bullshit politics, and also that everyone in this bloody company is a bloody stoner! Mind you, that might just be a generic Kiwi thing, or equally likely given the nature of reality, a human being thing. Still a bit surprised to be offered the magical herb by so many colleagues, though.

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The staff party after which everyone pretty much got fired. Well not quite, but oh my did some shit go down that night. Errm, it's probably best to start at the beginning, yes?

The plan was simple enough: everyone who wanted to get smashed for free (duh) was to go to the Grumpy Mole one Monday sometime in the afternoon, where the whole venue had been turne over to us, rather than them, the plebian masses of customers who plagued our doors and our lives. Between the three bars in Nelson and the Turf Hotel out at Stoke, about 50 people piled through the doors, 30 or so staff and a score of partners, lovers, hangers-on and hastily drafted dates. Needless to say I was not in need of my +1 but at least that wasn;t the point, for once. The point, purpose and drive for us all was to get as much free drink down our faces as quickly as possible and then to cause trouble, both of which everyone managed admirably.
Just to put it into perspective, everty time we got ourselves a drink we were to press a button on the till, which added $4 to the total booze consumed. The last time I remember seeing it it was sitting on about $3400 at about 9pm - we didn't get there until 3, and people only started drifting in in serious numbers by around 4:30, so you can see what kind of debauchery we got up to.

Some bright soul had installed a paddlng pool, large enough for ten or twelve people to sit around easily, in one corner of the gardne, and we had been instructed to bring swimming togs/bikinis/boardies aas appropriate. I think two of the lasses managed to get down to bikinis and pretty much no dude at all got as far as fitting himself in suitable board short style attire before they had been carried, in many cases physically lifted above head height against their will and thrown headlong into the pool fully clothed. Every single person present was dunked unceremoniously into the pool in their full party attire, the area manager, a fairly big fella at about 6'2" and with an ex-rugby player's build, was first thrown in at the hands of at least nine people. He's a fighter, that one, and with good reason because they totalled his phone and everything else in his pockets as he had to be captured by team effort while sat unsuspecting at the bar indoors.
The second time we got him in he was held horizontal - literally fully parallel to the ground - by six or seven peopel with his arms locked in a death-grip around one corner post of the outside bar, and it fell to me to prise his hands off the post myself, and I shall never forget the grimace on his face as I finally pried him free and all seven of them collapsed gracelessly into the pool on top of each other. Happy days.

As night wore on the carnage continued, and we all walked off with injuries of one kind or another that night. Jane, the manager at my bar who had just resigned and had been, generally, fairly straight-laced and utterly cold-cool-professional the whole time, got proper smashed and she and her boyfriend/fiance/fella Matt, a mate of mine from me drinking in his bar across town, well they got raucously pissed and started beating me right on the arse with, I don;t know, a stick or something. Jane would come at me from one side, beat the shit out of my poor buttocks, and as I turned to repel the attack I would be violently assaulted about the cheeks once more by Matt coming in out of the sun from the other side, presumably armed with another, larger stick. The bastards had me cornered, and this went on for some time by all accounts.
I do vaguely recall Jane and I sort-pf playfighting, and me getting a little carried away and landing a real punch to the ribs that winded her proper, only for Matt to swoop in like the avenging angel of darkness and headlock me to the ground ina sort of pro-wrestling flying neck tackle. It was most amusing, according to eyewitnesses. All in good fun and good taste in the end

Not so for some others, such as that area manager again (he does get up to some stuff, doesn't he?) who, at about 2 in the morning after waaaay too much drink, made some disparaging comment about one of the staff from the Turf Hotel, a lass, who promptly turned around and punched him right in the gob, leaving him with a split lip for the next week. Unfortunately for all concerned (except, in the long run, that lass from the Turf) he fought back, the poor silly bugger, and as a result, eventually, he was fired, she was fired, after the party five more people resigned, possibly because the sheer horror of what their colleagues were actually like became too much for them, and I resigned a month later, all `my girls` left the bar - all the staff I had trained, which was all of them - in the subsequent weeks (for the same reason I left soon after; that the new manager is the Poison Dwarf She-Bitch from the seventh circle of Hades) and the manager of one of the three main bars in the city also left to go back home to England in the days following events at Grumpies that fateful day.

Other highlights from the night included: Jane, ex-straight-lacer, physically picked up one of our 16 year old glass collectors (there on honourary status of being an adult, and because she's more mature than most of the rest of us anyway) in a vertical grip, and joined the battle upon the dancefloor using Cynthia, the little 16yr-old glassy, as a moshing tool. She was pretty much using her as a club, in fact. Seriously funny.

I danced like an utter lunatic and lost my shoes, as so often happens, as I believe they were flung to the corners of the room as I thrust my way around the room, as also so often happens, sadly enough.

The area manager (him again) ordered a drink from the Grumpy Mole's manager, the inestimable Jess, asking for the dirtiest, nastiest thing she could think of. She made a nice little drink, something we call the Dr. Pepper; a whisky tumbler filled 1/3rd with coke, 1/3rd with beer and a third empty, and a shot glass of Amaretto to be dropped in a la the famous Jager Bomb; but in the face of this awesome and tasty drink he baulked, insisting that she make something truly despicable with which to assault his liver. Such is the behaviour of drunken bosses, you see.
So she made a pint glass full of a bit of every spirit behind the bar, a full 568ml of full-strength poison which must have worked out at about 30% alcomoheekomohol, and on tasting it he immediately ran for it, straight to the toilet to be copiously sick.
It was about midnight at this point, or so I am told. I too was at the bar, witnessing these events with a cheeky smirk, and, according to everyone else, for I was far too wasted to remember this section of the evening, I swiped the Pint Of Doom and downed it in one without slowing.
This has done wonders for my reputation as a filthy drunken bastard (and I would like to say here that I had, of course, been lavishly sick myself that day at least once, many hours earlier) and which seems to have cemeneted my monicker of `Superman` firmly in place.
Apparently I didn't even try to drunkenly harass any of the girls that night nor make any sleazy advances, something I always deeply fear I may do one day, so it looks it was, once again, Liver 0 : 1 Tim.

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NZ Versus UK:

In New Zealand:

People in adverts swear a lot. This rocks. Not because swearing is big or clever (even though it's pretty obvious to any sane, sober person that it is) but because people just don;t give a shit if the advert for a national chain of hardware stores has the odd bit of light swearing, or whether the local paper carries a half-page ad with the word `shit` in it in the context of dialogue. Foks have better things to do and don't see any need to worry about this - and kids are not running amok with machineguns or happy-slapping grandmothers for YouTube; not any mroe than is normal in any civilised country, anyway; because the fabric of society is not held in place by the pins of puritanical rectitude. You c**nts.
Incidentally both Kiwis and Aussies are kind of in love with that word, and if you find yourself called it a couple of times a week, by total strangers, then, well, that's about normal, really.
Amazingly, it seems this does not lead to the kind of mass disorder and anarchy we have been led to believe....

There is a largely informal approach to all basic, unskilled jobs, as there should be, and the hard-ass overserious attitude is usually reserved for tougher, better paid jobs, again, as it should be. Why the hell people actually take most jobs seriously, as if what they do really mattered, is beyond me. Professionalism and anally-retentive strictness are two very, very different things, and Kiwis have largely recognised this.

New Zealand appears not to be managed by a potato-faced, slack-jawed, dyslexic shitsack of a Scot. I'm sure there is nothing whatever to the notion that Brown is purposefully undermining the English way of life in his own personal Bannockburn. At all.

The smallest coin in NZ is a ten cent piece; there is no messing around with pennies, tuppenies or fivepences. All businesses use Swedish rounding on every purchase (if you've never heard of it, SR rounds the total up or down to the nearest ten cents, anything up to -5c goes in the customer's favour, anything -6c and up goes to the shop) , and it all works out very nicely indeed, thank you very much.
Not Only But Also! -
The excess pennies everyone pays on the Swedish roundings-up almost always become charity donations; every four, three, etc. cents that go in the shop's favour DON'T actually go in the shop's favour, but go to good causes instead. I think that is, in a tiny way, rather wonderful.

People really are friendly, at least in the South Island, and will be sure to smile at strangers, be extremely polite in all their dealings, and be helpful rather than spiteful in the workplace. I am dearly looking forward to going back to England and seeing just how happy/miserable the average Brit is. I'm sure I have quite forgotten how godawfully depressing it can be back home, and I intend to inject a good gigantic dose of cheer back into the bloody country if I at all can.

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And so concludes the antic of myself and other shameful characters in Nelson, city of sunshine (and drunks) and the conclusion of my time on the South Island of New Zealand.

Sharper-eyed readers may have noticed that I have fallen in love with the hyphen this morning, for which I can only apologise. It's just so damn cute and useful, and there do seem to be an awful lot of running-together phrases these days. There I go again.
I also have to take this opportunity to apologise for any offence caused to Scottish people, as I am sure that, as always, comments regarding Gordon Brown can be taken with a pinch of salt as it is hardly the fault of the noble Scottish people that the lying, irresponsible, lardbellied fucktard Brown is one of them. He sure as hell isn't One Of Us.

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A Short Message (Of Hate) From Our Sponsor

2009-01-15T14:31:16+01:00

Goodness gracious me, but wasn't that a debauched weekend. It was - I actually can't say quite how debauched because it was possibly a step too far even for me - I have survived though and feel all the better for it.

Anyway, someone who shall remain nameless seems to think that travel blogging is somehow low-rent or cheap and common or something, and to him I say: `Nameless, play nice now.` Yes, travel blogging is available to all and many, and too many, but really what is the alternative; Proper Journalism (with capitals)? Researching facts and figures, places and people? Well yes, that I could do. But here in Nelson, a quiet and peaceful city in a quiet and deeply non-controversial country, there are no stories I could relay to you that wouldn't get both myself and several other people into trouble. Names are to be changed to protect the guilty even if this happens anyway, naturally. The real stories are so life threateningly interminable (paronomasia-laden double negatives included for effect; words like paronomasia doubly so) that I can consture one right here and now without fear of being contradicted - and not just because none of you lot are going to watch Kiwi news broadcasts:

"John Key (leader of the National Party, won the election in November) has said today that he is willing to go on record in regard to the most pressing issues of today at a unique conference, headed by his representatives through which he will deliver his messages on issues relevant to all the people of this country, which will be decided upon at a series of preliminary meetings to be announced at a later date after consensus actuations are taken and collated by dedicated teams of National Party subsidiary volunteers, at a date yet to be announced." And so on.
Plenty of proper stories also make the news over here, but they are the usual occasionall murders, attacks, crime figures, housing prices, global doom prophesies and the odd story about brain-damaged kids acheiving at high levels in school or various other random feelgood items that occur on at the end of television news and mired deeply within pages of doomsaying in newspapers. I begin to see the appeal of "TV Life!" and "Weekly Gossip!", "Massive TV Woman's Metropolitan Sex Cheating Scoundrel Wow Mega Weekly OK!!!" and all the others.

Anyway none of the things that make it into even this kind of publication interest me, so I can't imagine why anyone else would care. If David Beckham elopes with Owen Wilson while Angelina Jolie smokes crack in Shia LeBoeuf's house, all on live TV, then everyone who ever met them gossips about it in Cosmo, I could frankly give a lot less than even the most miniature conceivable shit.

And if taxes go up by 2% - oh yes, all this is utter bollocks as well, folks - then fuck them and fuck all who set store by them, let them do what the hell they want because two things are certain with regard to all the financial inanity that besets us on all sides like the iniquities of the selfish and the tyranny of evil men (thanks, QT ), and is presented as being oh-so-god-almightily important: One; there is nothing any of us can do no matter how much hand-wringing takes place, so deal with it or leave whichever country you think is being run so terribly badly (but of course all that free health care and clean running water is okay with you, yeah?), and Two; if you stand to lose so much money when the per cent increase, even when compounded, can be given in single figures then you have enough money to do with already, and I do not care for any arguments to the contrary. Oh, it's hard to pay off £40,000 in taxes every year, but then you are by definition in the richest 5% of people on planet Earth. Put down the designer jacket, the car perpetually at only 25% occupancy, and the £300 mobile phone, and stop bloody whining.

That's my fucking job. Grargh at you all.

I may have a little residual grumpiness from the weekend's excesses.

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Idle Curiosities

2009-01-05T23:51:00+01:00

Now I have settled into a routine of sorts, I'm confronted with scarce little chance for comment. It isn't the most interesting lifestyle to relate, you see, when it's much the same as yours. So I will have to collect titbits and snippets of more interesting existences, such as that of the Boeing 747 airliner, one of the most recognisable and well-known aircraft in the world, which looks the way it does because Boeing actually designed it as a commercial failure.

It came about at a time (1965 to 1970-ish, these things take a while to knock together y'know) when Boeing and most sensible contemporaries believed regular passenger jet aircraft were about to be usurped by supersonic commercial flights, a la Concorde, and thusly thought any new planes travelling at normal old speeds of just five or six hundred miles per hour were never going to cut it carting impatient bloody humans around the planet and so had to be able to take freight to pay their way.
So the most famous passenger plane in the skies today has a damn great lump on its head and a vastly extended upper cabin because the nose was designed, with as little modification as possible, to hinge right off to enable to loading of heavy freight straight into the fuselage. So now you know.

Now I'm not sure whether you know (or care) but there is also the story of that unavoidable and rather overated song from the movie The Bodyguard, which Whitney Houston sang from the number 1 spot for fourteen weeks whether we liked it or not; you know, that three-minute warble that simply says `I will always love you` but required a few million dollars of movie and/or stage baubles to get the sentence across.
The thing is that Whitney, even in the midst of her most creative crack sessions, did not write this song, for it was created by none other than Dolly Parton a good few years before (1974 in fact). But at least I have worked out one thing that is true - none of you actually did care

More poignant and a lot more seriously, I recently read an article by a scholar of sociology and various other humane sciences, that highlighted something purely plausible, highly likely and extremely important for millions, if not indeed the whole world. The thing is that in the United States of America, which is of course the only country of any importance to anyone whatsoever , black people consistently perform very badly in school, college and the world of work, very badly indeed in fact, and you can put your white hood and robes back in the drawer right now because first off, this sociology scholar happens to himself be black, and he's one (one of the dwindling few) of that number with a serious amount of skills and education; and they happen to be exactly in that area under discussion.

The problem with black people underperforming in the United States has a lot to do with hip-hip music, the author asserts, and not in that cliched vein where hip-hop is a violent form of music that causes gang problems, but rather that both the music and the appalingly low levels of performance across US black culture as a whole are in fact symptoms of the same problem: namely, that African Americans are unique among all cultures in developed nations in that they largely take their social cues and structure from street culture rather than from high-acheiving scientific and academic culture, the political sphere, from spiritualistic or moral ideals or any other admirable focus of human acheivement.

Essentially the problem is what has been called `cool-pose culture` where the influence for social behaviour is directly or closely based on street gangs and young and powerful, and usually criminal, black men who go against the grain of society purposefully to establish themsevles as unique, and more often than not uniquely bad. That only a tiny proportion of black Americans come close to that definition, yet millions upon millions are addicted to its imagery and narrow-minded, self-destructive ideals is the most saddening and tragic thing of all.

Just as maddening and unfortunate is that the idea of "keeping it real" and staying close to black American street roots - basically glorifying the poverty of inner city ghettoes and the infamous housing projects - is something noble to uphold. This is most heartbreakingly manifested when intelligent and high acheiving black kids are socially demonised, cast out, even physically attacked for doing well in school, for no other reason than that they are `acting white`.
To be seen to be in any way smart, focused or gifted is, for black kids in millions of streets across the US, something that must be hidden through a very real fear for their safety, and even their lives. I can't think about that without feeling a sense of rage and frustration.

It is such a huge problem that a black kid from anything but the most affluent slice of society in the States, who works hard and wants to have a college degree and a decent career, will more than likely be beaten up by fellow black students because those aggressors feel, fundamentally, that behaving as the white kids do and doing well, in order to acheive good things and attain and happy life, is betraying their underacheiving and downtrodden roots. That this has bizarrely become the thing to model your life upon if you are young, black and American.

Why this should be so when the civil rights movement was led, and rightly so, on the basis that white and black people are capable of equal greatness and all people should strive as hard as they could to acheive the best of all things. Sadly something, somewhere in the works seems to have gone terribly wrong.

And you will have noted, I hope, that no-one ever complains about hip-hop lyrics advising the listener to do badly in school, to perform poorly in the world of work or to have an unsucessful life, and rather that the music has become poster boy for the apparent glory of street culture and has in fact been used by, rather than informing, this senseless and bitterly cruel ideology.

Anyway, that's what I read the other day.

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Amusing tales

2009-01-02T03:47:31+01:00

Hello! Thought you'd seent he last of me, didn't you?
I just haven't felt the need to rant incessantly about whatever platitudinal nonsense I've been up to recently because I have real live humans here to bore to death instead.
That was by way of explaining why I haven't been very talkative lately.
Now the next bit is by way of telling you what's been happening anyway, because everyone here has already been bored to tears. And in any case i need to record what's been going on so I can rember it better. After all, it would be a sad state of affairs if I did a load of cool stuff then could never remember any of it when trying to impress people in future.

Things at the bar have gone well, perhaps a little too well in fact... They want to not only make me a duty manager but also it seems there is a need for a full-time 2IC - that's Corporatese for 2nd in charge - for the whole place and/or the possibility, hopefully, of getting to be full manager of one of the places - and it is a national company, so there really is both hope and scope for that and not just the airborne pastry dreams of a hippy. It's not confirmed whether the higher-ups are definite about needing a 2IC here just yet though, so I am keeping my pies of conjecture safely aloft just in case.

Speaking of dreams I have had many and various involving the bar and the people there and a few more of note, including one I was most impressed by that intentionally confused me into waking up. I think that's quite an acheivement, personally. I'm told that I make cameos in the dreams of some people back home myself, so maybe mystical hokum is afoot -- or perhaps we're all just human, who knows.

Some of these thoughts are from way back. When Rob, a barman originally from Yorkshire and at the time in charge of the back bar, left the company some months back (yes, I have been a lazy boy) we stayed after work and drank, ooh, many many bottles of scotch and several others that `needed finishing up`, and as a christening glory and departing gift a certain manager who shall remain nameless emptied a few kilos of flour over his head - amusing, certainly, but I was holding out for the slops bucket containing the dregs of every horrible drink abandoned throughout the entire day.

And I have now run out of impetus - I don't know what precisely, but something is just missing from life right now that doesn;t in the slightest make me want to write about anything. I think it is because I know that, truthfully, nothing I am doing is much worth reporting and while I do delight in making the inconsequential sound thrilling or at least engagingly debonair, I'm pretty suspicious of my motives. I am just not so sure I need to try and impress people anymore, although I guess this is because I'm doing it for real at work, mostly. Oh well. At least two of the girls at work are making no secret of their intentions either, possible even a third may throw her hand in to confuse matters further, so I may finally be doing something right

In brief, and in barely more elaborate form than my notes, I have in the last month or two been up to the following:

Boozy after work sessions. When the last bar manager was in charge we at the bar were all leaving the place eventually at about 6am every Friday and Saturday night,Saturday and Sunday morning, seeing the break of day from the wrong end and generally making the very most of the fact we worked in a bar. These sessions have now stopped, by and large, although we do occasionally have clandestine reasons and meetings for many an post-labour pint or seven.
New year's day I rolled into the hostel at 7:30am, for example

I have been getting into many fights lately, too. It has been a pretty one-sided affair however, and the only weapon used thus far has been the common or garden house-pillow; my roomates beat me shitless with them for snoring, you see. This often does nothing, of course, and I wake up with a sore throat as they depart with a sore look. Meh, it's a hostel, whaddya gonna do?

NB: In fact since making these notes, I have actually been kicked out of one hostel for snoring and comiing into the room at all hours. Well, honestly. What a bunch of utter fucking fairies, that's all I can say.
I'm back at the YHA and loving the fact I can cook a casserole at 4am without incurring the wrath of the hostelling gestapo and half a dozen over-cautious nancies who don't seem to realise the difference between a hostel and a 4-star hotel. Happy days!

Little mishaps happen as we trundle our lumpen forms blinkingly through life's murky corridors, and little things happen to me often, because I am a drunk and often incapable. I woke one morning last month, padded into the kitchen, up to the sink and proceeded to wash my hands in boling water, an exercise I plan not to repeat.
This was, I must add, not water from the hot tap that was very very hjot, but boiling water, H2O at a temperature of at least 98 degrees C and ready and waiting to strip the skin from foolhardy Englishmen who couldn't quite distinguish the tap in the sink which he uses every day from the tap in the water boiler mounted 12 inches ABOVE the sink which he uses everyday as well.
An easy mistake to make, and a bit of cruel trap if you ask me. By way of explanation; hostels here do not have kettles to boil water in but catering-style independent boilers that provide freshly boiled water 24 hours a day in lavish quantities.
That was an ouch and no mistake.

Later that day I went to the supermarket and the trolley guy, poor sod, took a good twenty or more of his charges and rammed them right into the edge of a large set of automatic sliding doors, misjudging the angle in a very expensive manner as they bounced out of their tracks and went straight up to silicon heaven right there and then. All the little blinky lights went off and they made a noise not unlike a gearbox mincing itself. I wonder if he was English as well.

I have tried to make this nice, but it bugs the hell out of me still. I have a bit of a gripe to make about cleaners and I am going to be rude, sweepingly offensive and narrowminded, but frankly it appears to me that there is a metality required to be a cleaner and it is not one that might even remotely be called positive.
We shall set aside the fact that the cleaning lady always, always, ALWAYS fucking hoovers wherever I sit within five minutes of my arse touching down. We shall even ignore that the daily cleanup must be timed to coincide with my waking patterns and if I rise at 7am there the cleaning lady is, yet when I rise at 2pm there she is also, hoover in one hand, rubbish bag in the other and the visage of a small-minded satan facing out front and centre, ready yet again to tell me to move my stuff, tidy my food up in the fridge, or clean out half the room I am staying in myself.
I'm sorry, I thought that was your JOB? I wonder how far this attitude would go in any other line of work...

Every fucking day no matter what time, there is a little cleaning person with a little cleaning person's mind willing someone, anyone nearby to do anything that steps within tiny cleaner's mind's circle of authority. They also have an incredible talent for shutting down whatever it is I want to use, especially the kitchen when I have a meal for ten people to prepare - this happened well outside the allocated hours a few weeks back and we were all but ordered to not even enter the kitchen to put food in the fridge. As this would have involved the wastage of $50 worth of cheese, the corruption or $40 in steak and chicken, and the death by strangulation of on obstinate lobster-brained cleaning lady I managed to barter safe passge for our foodstuffs to a waiting refridgerator, all the while wondering just how hotels, bars and hostels (not to mention schools, concert halls, youth centres and any number of semi-public facilities) manage to find the same petty, lazy kind of person all over the world.

cleaning ladies in general are a special breed. Assuming more authority than all else they dictate the rythym of hostels despite being, well, just the bloody cleaners, not to put too fine a point on it, they seem frequently lazy or clinically obstinate, and are generally quite dumb. If that makes me a bastard, then sign me up and give me my badge - the people who clean stuff up after others are mostly thicker than a yard of lard and looks about as healthy. There was a special case at the last hostel, poor thing, obviously a few bricks short of a barbecue, yet still she did, amid the awkward and stilted conversation she insisted on striking up with everyone within 20 yards, manage to do just as good a job in the same time as the other cleaning lady whose barbecue appeared to be fully bricked.
If that doesn't say all that's needed then please take into account that the compos mentis one was the lazy type who shut down the kitchen for an extra hour or more while she slugged through the cleaning routine, and was also the only one of the pair who harassed all guests at all hours.

No matter what you say on the subject of stereotypes there is a special kind of person that becomes a cleaner and never stops, taking it on into middle age or beyond. I have met many people and consider myself a pretty good judge within cultures that I know, and have to say that generally, cleaning ladies are usually either stupid, lazy, or are annoying little jobsworths who wont do any more thah the absolute base minimum of their job and won't ever go over their prescribed boundary to help someone out, and that's a `quality` I really can't abide.

Less bitching, more relaying. A thing that's impossible to not notice here is the predilection of Kiwis to go about the place barefoot everywhere, in any weather, if necessary. Now it is so sunny here in Nelson I burn within ten minutes of stepping outside, there are absolutely hundreds of men, women and children mooching the streets, parks and shops sans footwear, and it is almost all pakeha (descendents of white Europeans) who do it and not Maori, which I suppose you might have expected, you poor Northern hemsphereans, you Generally it's pakeha anyway, Maori tend to wear rather more clothing in general in fact, and in case you were wondering those grammatical arrangements there are correct. There is no difference in singular or plural in the description of Maori or pakeha from the Maori language's point of view.

One funny thing that keeps happening, and funny because it not only reveals one of the older traveler myths to be hypocritical but also because it makes me a bit of a hypocrit is that I get pissed off, a little tiny bit, with people who come into rooms I am staying in and joking and laughing that I sleep during the day as if I am wasting my traveling expereince. I consider these people to be snobbish and exactly as narrow-minded as they probably think me to be, because frankly, what I do is no concern of theirs but so often they make it so.
A little banter and a chat is all to the good of course, but one too many times I have had groups of people all traveling together come into my room for one or two nights, and pretty soon be laughing and joking that a guy is sleep at midday and hasn't even got ONE mutlicoloured handknit Nepalese-style ear-warming hats; to which I say: everyone who thinks they're some seasoned worldly-wise travel guru has one of those hats, you all look fucking ridiculous anyway, and I was out drinking until 6am this morning so you know just what you can do with that hat, a pencil, and a thimbleful of vinegar you inevitable stumbling cliche of a git.

I really hate those bloody hats though, don't you? I can't see the point at all in looking like a stoned alpaca with multicoloured, badly-knit dangly ear flaps that make the wearer look like Dali sketched out a bloodhound and then vomited between the lines. Just because it's made in a tiny village in the mountains in a foreign country doesn't mean it's any GOOD.

Anyway I'm feeling there's a lot of hate in the room, so I'm gonna calm down now

Comments

Hostel. No, not like the movie; it's quite nice here actually.

2008-12-04T01:56:59+01:00

I would hate to be so predictable as to stay in this same town here on the South Island for much longer, but sadly this seems to be the case, over the Summer, at least. That means through December and into about, say, March or April, and despite being reminded of this reversal of seasons it is still more than a bit weird to think that on Chrismas day this year I will probably be having a barbecue in the sunshine wearing shorts and optional T-shirt (irrespective of the public outcry this could cause), toasting steaks and fresh lamb shanks in the company of people of a dozen nations.

These nations are thinning out a little now mind you, although I hope our dear departed sisters will return for the Xmas Barbie. Our resident Scot is about to bugger off to...somewhere in town (or `tooon` as she would have it) and we have thus far also mislaid one Texan (mention G.W. Bush and you'll really wish you hadn't, poor lass has had to put up with the complaints and whinges of everyone she meets: as if she hadn't done all that already herself years ago!) and one of our Germans, although in fairness we have traded her for another.

Most of us who know us, you see, are long-term residents. Along with the above mentioned deserters there are myself, an Englishman who answers to `Pete` if accompanied by a long whistle and a biscuit, and his Taiwanese girlfriend by the name of Sofia, or rather by the anglicised and completely arbitrary name of Sofia, anyway. You know how Chinese and Taiwanese people in the UK (and often Indian, Japanese, Korean etc.) have English names? And you probably thought they were equivalents or translations: not one bit. They are randomly assigned by English teachers in class when they are learning the language of money [That's our language, folks]. Sofia was graduating from her English classes at the time the movie Titanic was released and came within a whisker of being called `Rose` for the rest of her Anglophonic life.

And so we have the daily life and almost a routine to things, although I'm pretty sure I still don't quite qualify. It looks like, now, after a bit of on-again/off-again with various other staff members that I will be working on reception here at this fine hostel, and of course doing the duty manager thing at ze bar should, between the two, give me at least 5 and with a bit of luck a full 7 days of work each week, which would be pretty spectacular. Odd hours of course, but I really wouldn't have it any other way. I think I might be naturally inclined to work until 4am and then again later in the morning and just have a nice long siesta and one or two meals a day. Being busy could cure so many `ills` if I get lucky with the hours

And of course there are the barbecues, which are never less than delicious and sometimes are spectacular. The first one I did I spent $50 - fifty freakin' dollars - on cheese, althoguh to be fair this did make up the majority of the food as the goal in mind was halloumi kebabs for all, which was acheived and appreciated, thank the gods.
People still seem to like my cooking (McTims: "Less than 1 dead already!") and I have been battered for my recipes for both apple strudel and sweet and sour chicken/beef/whatever. Having learned how to make sweet and sour sauce from scratch is wicked cool by the way - you'll cut your Chinese takeaway bill in half if you do
Kung Pau and maybe homemade black bean and oyster sauces to follow. Watch this space, as they say.

And beef wellington is a breeze to make too, against all previous conceptions. Just make sure you have an oven that works properly, and it would be nice if I didn't have to make that qualifier, but hey. Ours is volatile and highly vindictive, you see, and I believe it has a problem with humans and doesn't want to see us fed. You read those books/see those films about artificial intelligence rising up against us and the war with the machines beginning with just one petulant device going sentient and malevolent all at once? This cooker would be a good one to keep an eye on, is all I'm saying.
It has just two settings; Off and Cremate; and aside from using all sorts of tricks to make things work out alright like pre-cooking everything that goes into it to just the right degree so that the outermost bits don't get incinerated, it is also becoming a little wearisome running around after new arrivals if we see the beast in use to find out who's dinner is fast becoming elemental.
Still, it'd be bloody boring if everything was easy, eh? And at least we have a cooker, unlike most hostels (even if we do have to negotiate a peace treaty with it every time we fancy a baked potato).

One more thing I can't help but notice about this country is that, for all intents and purposes, there are no spiders in New Zealand. Oh, I'm sure there are some little eight-legged arachnids out there in the bush somewhere and perhaps even in the odd plant pot and domestic corner and cupboard, but I'll be buggered if I could find you one if you asked. I have seen, quite literally, perhaps two spiders in the 3 and a half months I have spent in the country, a ratio of `Fuck All : 1` which I can very happily live with. In India and Indochina there were more lizards than spiders and would welcome the trade very happily as I'm rather fond of lizards irrespective of their insectivorous lifestyles, but when they do have spiders over there, they tend to have them in a big way.

Here there is practically no need for them and, miracle of miracles, while there are indeed sandflies here there are practically no mosquitos, even right next to ponds and lakes. How awesome is that?!

And there are many other little things here in Nelson that make it worth staying for a few months, especially over a glorious Summer; like the little semi-pedestrianised bricked sections on almost all the streets and abundance of pelican crossings everywhere - cars in the city centre positively invite perambulating humans to cross their path and, on the whole, slow down well in advance of anyone approaching any of the dozens of crossings on every street in town.
Another lovely little feature on the streets are angled parking spaces on the main thoroughfare, Trafalgar street, all the way through this little city. That people can park next to shops and right on the main street is a rare and extremely homely feature, and that the four main squares on either side of Trafalgar as it bisects the city centre are half given over to flat carparks means that literally everything is within easy reach of everyone. No multistorey abominations and plenty of free space, no-one uses their horn much, and all traffic recognises pedestian right of way at almost all times including when crossing the entrance to side-roads. Nice, very nice indeed.

It has taken me so strangely and in many ways completely that I have started to dream in Kiwi, as it were, and whatever weirdness goes on inside my slumbering brain there is a half-and-half chance of it being played with thick New Zealand accents.
If only I had a proper career-type job this place could well become my home. Actually, no it couldn't, despite the sheer ease of everything. There is just no way I could settle down here without seeing South America and Canada and the United States; and much of Europe, and China, Japan and of course Russia; and then there's Africa to think about and, well, I hear Dick Branson has a new little sideline opening in a few years and wouldn't that be something to do on a rainy bank holiday

Comments

Self-Promotion

2008-11-27T16:24:28+01:00

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.

Comments

NewZealexicon: The F.M.L.

2008-11-16T18:51:06+01:00

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 " class="middle" border="0"> ) 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

Comments

Things To Do In England When Your Not Dead!

2008-11-05T07:03:48+01:00

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 " class="middle" border="0">

*** 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.

Comments

"Don't worry, Lois. He'll be here in time! Excuse me a minute..."

2008-11-04T00:09:52+01:00

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!

Comments

What Price, My Peppers?

2008-10-28T03:16:44+01:00

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.

Comments

Something From The Weekend

2008-10-27T14:00:13+01:00

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.

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.

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

Comments

Wednesday Nothingth of Oct.

2008-10-22T04:41:57+02:00

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.

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Flux

2008-10-21T03:24:27+02:00

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.

Comments

Easily Pleased

2008-10-13T23:53:26+02:00

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.

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.

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Lord (Tim of) Nelson the 1st

2008-10-12T02:28:13+02:00

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.

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 " class="middle" border="0">

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.

Comments

Small glories, Big difference

2008-10-02T01:59:47+02:00

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.

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

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.

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.

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

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.

Comments

Homecoming

2008-09-27T13:06:27+02:00

There's no place like home, there's no place like home, there's no place like home....holy shit Todo, it worked! This still doesn't look like Kansas though.

My ruby slippers weren't even needed, and in any case I saved the dressing-up for the weekend - and home is what I'm calling New Zealand for the time being, in case you were wondering. Checking out Nelson as a place to live and even a poorly paid job with less than proper hours would pay about three and a half times the weekly rent needed for a flat in the city centre, including in most cases all the bills and often such bonuses as internet access! Looking pretty good so far, I must say.

It's really so very lovely this country, and I would dare to say in some ways Kiwis are as friendly or even more so than the Fijians, less likely to cheerfully engage you as you walk down the street perhaps, but ask them for anything at all, from a helping hand with directions to specialised advice, they really do excell.

I wondered idly what the origins of the country's name was the other day, in the way I did as a kid when first properly cogitating over such ubiquitous names as New York and New Jersey, and as you might already know you clever, clever things, the original Zealand is the largest island of Denmark back up over the equator in Europland, although I believe most of it is now known as the United States of Euwwwww.
It was practically news to me that Denmark had islands but hey, it does, and Zealand is where Copenhagen sits which is of course the capital. I knew that without even looking it up, and you'd only have to jab me once or twice with pins to make me admit I double checked.

In Fiji, I had spent an inordinate amount of time at Nadi airport for one thing and another, and I found that I was worryingly familiar with the place as I waited to go `home`; and seeing as we're vicariously back there for a paragraph or two I can share the explanation for something that baffled me and I forgot to explain.

The profusion of overly effeminate men in that country is weird, weird with a capital F, in fact. There is not a strong gay community there as first I thought, far from it in fact - it is one of the serious sources of tension in the culture with the torture and murder of known gays cropping up in the news and public life a few times every year. Nasty old business, but anyway; the supremely camp gentlemen seen all over the place, especially often in airport reception parties and resort kitchens, are called fa'afafine and are men who in childhood `choose` to be raised as female, in many cases highly encouraged, persuaded or coerced into to doing so by parents who have usually had male children, and few or no girls.

A fa'afafine, like a daughter by tradition, custom and, arguably, genetics, will take care of their parents in their old age when all their sons are presumably off raising their own families, drinking, philandering, playing or at least noisily bitching about sports and farting in a conspicuous and time-consuming fashion, as all men are biologically compelled to do, as we all know.

Unlike Hijras in India there are, as far as a little internet research can tell me, no eunuchs among the fa'afafine, and few or no of the intersex designation, which is what we all basically think of as hermaphrodite although technically that's rather inaccurate.

All in it's a bit confusing yet strangely interesting as it certainly puts a tick in the `novelty` section, and I just had to share so I don't forget it myself. The best way to learn is to teach, as I believe they say.

I made it through the evil and sinister airport at Nadi with their typical nazi-like drinks policy (you can't take even sealed unopened water through the security area but you can buy as much as you like on the other side, I wonder how many zeroes that generates in global sales revenue) and found their expertly concealed entrance to the international departures wing cunningly screened from almost all view on both sides by office dividers, and flanked by vibrantly coloured stores selling overpriced books, production-line ethnic carvings, soft toys and all the usual merchandising tat.

International departures at Nadi international consisted, in fact, of one standard width door in a side wall without label; an overhead sign placed an appreciable fraction of a mile away down the terminal, and another slightly ambiguous one (saying `Planes/People` or `Humans/Animal Skin Containers/Minerals Less Than 1000kg Or Smaller Than A Big Box Whichever Is Lesser` or something equally thought-provoking) pointing roughly towards the murky portal from the middle of a sizeable concourse. The actual doorway to go through boasted no sign itself and I had to cheerfully ask the first person past the threshold if this was in fact where I wanted to be to catch a plane out of the place. Sometimes I think naiively that airports don't want you to actually catch planes, but then of course I realise that's the point and that they far prefer you in the terminal spending some more of that lovely money of yours, you rich tourist, you.

I went aboard after the usual routine, amazed possibly the twentieth set of security scanners at the metal detectors by walking through in huge combat boots without a single peep from the machine, and whiled away my Air New Zealand flight to Auckland over a happy four hours in a smallish seat surrounded by small, pleasantly banal talk, avoiding an even smaller kind of movie which was a bit of a bugger as I'd been looking forward to films on planes again, not having had the luxury more than once in my last dozen flights.

I'd greedily absorbed a proper full-screen showing of Iron Man on the way out which is a hugely watchable movie, the first time I'd seen the proper version with the full ending having bought copies in both Indonesia and Fiji that were both sneakily filmed in a cinema somewhere. Returning to full civilisation and a country with more than a million people in it, I was stuck with something called Mrs. Shitbrown's Large-Arsed Friends Bitch About Her Grey Funeral, In A Small Grey Town In A Plague Of Grey In 1970s Romania: Special Edition Fully Remastered With Never-Before-Seen Grey, or so I assumed its title to be from the odd painful snippets of dialogue I snatched as I cruised the inflight radio stations.
That must have been the first music I had willingly listened to for more than 20 minutes in years, and it thankfully didn'tt offer anything by Bob Marley (much as I love the guy) or any twinkly pseudo-traditional Fijian folk songs which had begun to grate long before and while in the country had refused to go away.

Auckland international airport is a bit odd to get around - the airport planning demons at work again had done their best to confuse us all into mindlessly emptying our wallets into the nearest cash register, not to mention deploying the standard play of making the corridor itself between immigration and transfers/exits into a gigantic perfume shop. I hate that, not just because I am a cheapskate and I smell bad, but mainly because I know one day I will knock over a thousand quid's worth of Chanel No.5 and have to flee huffingly from the place with all my flapping baggage and lots of ill grace before they try and bill me.

Mooching through more ambiguously signposted doorways and walking the half-mile through carparks and private road systems, past complicated-looking antennaes closeted behind white palisades and chainlink fencing, following a little blue and white line painted on the earth which takes all applicable bipeds to the domestic terminal, I arrived and became immediately more relaxed, as internal flights aren't really flights, are they, not in the sense I grew up thinking of them as.

Yet having allowed for this extra level of bureacracy, immigration staff at Auckland impressed me in every way as they were excellent, real human beings despite the fact the job description practically requires you to shove a sharpened plank up your arse every morning to get you in the mood for passengers. All the check-in and security folk are great too, every person employed in the airport is in fact about ten notches above their counterparts in every other country I have been to, even being far more friendly and, well, human than the first folks you meet in Australia. .

Charmingly, I Didn't even have to wait to get back to New Zealand to feel warmed and happy as a dog with two tails as the head steward on the domestic flight spent as much time cracking jokes as he did on the safety brief, with the whole cabin chuckling happily more or less every time the P.A. sounded. The whole flight back from Auckland to Christchurch was comfortable despite the compulsory miniature seat, because I knew I was re-entering a country where pleasantness, friendliness and good cheer was not an exported image, not an oft-forgotten and now hard-won part of the national psyche, not a qualifiable elitist notion, and not an overplayed and often untrue habit of the people. In New Zealand it's the custom, practice, almost the duty of citizens to be cheerful, enthusiastically helpful, and pleasantly (and refreshingly) intelligent.
The countries that really could do better from what I know of their peoples, if you were wondering about my list there, are Fiji, the UK, the USA and Australia, respectively.

Comments

The Yasawa Islands

2008-09-18T00:04:06+02:00

If you want to feel better about yourself, go to Fiji. Almost everyone treats you as an immediate friend, making you feel guilty for having a hangover and dealing with them as if they were some kind of talking vertical cesspit, but at all other times this is a marvellous feature of society.
Taking a trip to the Yasawa islands requires amazingly little planning or effort, although in hindsight this was perhaps a bit of a warning sign, for anyone who might not like being managed and directed to go everywhere at all times.
Despite a couple of minor rebellions though, I was happy to live under the rule of Awesome Adventures, the larger of two companies that cruise from Denarau, near Nadi, to tour the nearby island groups of the closer and smaller Mamanucas, and the distinctly larger and slightly more distant yasawas.

All inter-island transport is conducted aboard a single flagship vessel, a large catamaran of maybe 60 tons named the Yasawa Flyer 2, leading to inevitable dry ruminations on how the YF 1 was sunk and which senior position that captain now holds in the company. The first leg aboard took me through the calm and shallow waters, by pacific standards at least, to the top of the group and my first resort whereupon a small motor launch took a group of us ashore, between the twin house reefs and across almost inconceivably glass-like water.

In fact I spent so much time on boats that week I practically had a right to walk around on land like Jack Sparrow rather than just the desire to. At least every day I had been on one and most days been on three or four different craft, very good for the old English seafaring spirit, or something like that, and all thankfully on calmer waters than the shark dive amid heavy rollers back in Bega lagoon. That really was something else, believe me. In fact I'm going to post the vi- yes, in fact I just have (this time- travelling of tenses is fun, isn't it?) posted it.
But of course you already know that by now

Throughout the Yasawa island group, resorts are dotted along the more accessible parts of the coast usually near or even built in to villages where the company draws most of its employees from for each site, although many of the frontline staff on the travel desks, activity guides and the resort managers were from Suva and Nadi on the main island, probably due to there being more chance and more candidates from those parts who speak fluent and business English, the latter being something I have no knowledge of myself, thank the good lord; sing his praises eternally.
Resorts here are the better kind - authentic huts, dorms and offices made by hand from locally cut trees and thatched with woven coconut palm leaves, all tied together with coconut-husk twine and open to the air, although unfortunately open to the mosquitos. Also spiders, as I found a three-inche-long dead one by my bed one morning, apparently I had squashed it from this existence when I trotted to the bathroom in the night. Yes, Fijian spiders are poisonous, but only a bit. English and an internationally-sponsored fighting weight seemed to win.

I may have been unlucky in getting to the best resort first, but hopefully the guys I met there (Vanessa, and a Kiwi of uncertain provenance and unchartable cynicism using the name Graham), both of whom recieved my appalingly cheap `business cards`, will get in touch. It'd be nice, so when you read this guys, drop me a message.
And I'm sorry, Graham, I made some of that up. It sounded good.

Having two nights at a place could have led me to think I could take things easy a few months ago, but I know better now and know that two night means one usable day, and consider yourself lucky if you get anything more than meals and a nice view on days you travel. That day at the Coral View resort was pretty splendid though, taking a trip with a boatfull of other guests to the caves used in the filming of some old film called Blue Lagoon from the late '80s or early '90s starring Brooke Shields, and endlessly rammed down the throat of guests by everyone on the islands employed by Awesome Adventures, which is everyone.
I am a huge film fan (nerd) and have seen really rather a lot of movies (because my name is Tim, and I am a geek; It's been three hours since my last screening) yet I have never seen Blue Lagoon, preferring only to watch films that are good.
Or at a push, slickly bad enough to be entertaining.

Such things as Night At The Museum are okay, because they are very bad films with very good effects and a few passable actors committing only slightly bad acting. Ideal hangover material, or for those times when you don;t want to really watch a movie so mush as see some animation in front of your eyes while you think serious thoughts.

Anything with Brooke Shields in contains at least one very bad actor and no-one involved with the projects possessing balls enough to tell everyone else about it, and probably tries to be serious when all it should do is try to be over. So no, I have not see Blue Lagoon and do not know how famous these caves could almost have been, although they were very pretty, and there is a short underwater dive from one cavern to another which I would never have been able to do had I not already learned how to scuba dive. As it was it was amazing how briefly I was underwater, and not just because the tunnel was only about five feet long.
I can't tread water very well though, being for some reason a natural sinker, and so it would have been nice if the guide hadn't stoppped to give the lecture inside the second cavern while I was the only person without a space on the walls to hang on to. Still, did me some good, I'm sure, to be constantly on the edge of panic while in an almost pitch-black cave

Back at the resort after the half-hour ride in another speedboat, and I raced to hire some snorkelling gear (mask, fins, snorkel, childlike sense of wonderment and childlike ability to sense danger, as we shall see) because I had for that wonderful day been granted the ability to see. It was a miracle, a wonderful working of some higher mysterious power, and had I not been held down by two people again while a third (Vanessa, to whom I am forever slightly in debt) shoved contact lenses into my eye sockets I might have started believing something was out there.
Again we went through the circus that is me trying to see like normal people, and again it was marvelous and amazing and wonderful in every way, apart from the first bit when my eyes water like taps as other people poke my eyes, albeit in a kind and helpful fashion.

Out above one of the house reefs there were another great multitude of fish to see, almost none of which I could name and even less could I care having seen them as it was, as always, an amazing and beautiful experience, more so now I have become comfortable with diving and happily thrust myself down through the water half a dozen feet to get a closer look at various underwater sights.
I saw a massive number of blue sea stars there which were sometimes massive in themselves, and I think I finally twigged the difference between starfish and sea stars, obvious as it may be to anyone looking in a book, but never have looked in a book, just at a couple of each in the wild. It is ( I think) that the stars have five (or more, brittle stars have up to twelve, or something like that) `arms` radiating from their centre, equal in thickness all the way and without any larger mass at the centre, and the arms of starfish come out in a classic pentangular star tapering to smooth points, making them chunky, as opposed to spindly like sea stars.

Less fascinating and a good deal more dangerous was almost being hit by the propellor of a boat as I lazed around on the surface. I was absolutely in the wrong place, but where the boats went and where snorkeling was supposed to be enjoyed were explained in a way I can only call assuming, i.e. various people assumed I'd been paying attention on the boat on the way in, assumed I could take directions as well as a child, and assumed I wasn't the type of person to see dozens of other ways to interpret things due to an annoying habit of noticing extra details, such as people using the wrong words to describe things and not telling me where important things were. Anyway the water was so clear the pilot could easily see me and stopped well in time, although I had heard the engine and was quietly pondering what the hell it was as I gazed at the aquatic scenery. The people of the boat told me to go on the other side of the barrier, which I did, and successfully managed to nearly be struck by another boat two minutes later, which they did not tell me to do but I seemed to want to try my luck that day. I dived to see a particular fish and must have propelled myself beneath the rope barrier several feet below, I can only assume.

Straight afterwards, still with my contact lenses in (and did I tell you about getting them, in Suva? Long bus ride in, long ride back, demented wheelbarrowing men attacking the luggage ports as we pulled into the station? Oh yes, I did tell you.) and not wanting to waste the opportunity of real eyesight, I carried on the watery theme and went diving, not too far down just to a depth of about metres (49 feet) or so, and supposedly on a drift dive whereby an established and predictable undersea current would drift us - myself and two local divers, one of whom is by custom and practice (if not by law) qualifed at least as a Divemaster - about 120 metres along and around the edge of a large reef.

The ground at that depth was disappointingly barren and the sea life was nowhere nearly as abundant as the other dives I had been on, but there were a huge number of giant clams, and although not quite as massive as the imagination may once have painted (I read the wrong kind of novels about the South Seas as a kid, like the ones that appeal to a child's imagination, or, in adult terms, lie completely to the reader) they still are pretty giant, some of them getting upwards of a foot across and with hugely crimped lips to their shells. I have yet to see ones a metre or more wide, but hopefully will one day.

What was extremely cool was a small school - a classrom, if you will - of hunting barracuda, and they really were big. At least 4 and maybe up to five feet long, 7 or 8 barracuda were stalking shoal of a hundred or so smaller fish, surely waiting for the moment to strike although unfortunately they didn't think it timely to attack while we were there. Shame, would ahve loved to see fish hunting fish underwater, make me feel almost like a proper travel hack or something

The only slight technical hitch apart from needing an extra weight on my belt as alway seems to happen, was that my BDC (Buoyancy control device, in reality the waistcoat-like jacket that plays host to your entire set of gear, but essentially a couple of bladders linked to your air tank via a low-pressure hose and a couple of switches to inflate/deflate it) was leaking, hardly an ideal situation for a number of reasons I won't go into, but basically I ascended far too fast near the end of the dive; an inadvisable practice that can lead to paralysis and death on deeper dives; and came within a metre of being struck by yet another speedboat, and this one was going far too fast in water far too impenetrable to be able to do anything to avoid me.
Again, a number of boring, complicated proximate reasons were behind this, the primary one being leaky equipment. Almost a very sad day, a damn good job the divers I was with were quick with their frantic underwater signalling.

Back on land for the second night and a feat of championship-standard drinking, Graham and Vanessa and a couple of English lads out and about around the world all sat around and we all got mightily sloshed, there was a great auctioning of hermit crabs - grab a bunch of them from the beach and paint a number on each of their shells (different numbers help ) and pop them in a circle drawn on the floor and see which one makes it to the edge first, and you have a crab race - where our table of five drunkards bought nine of the sixteen or so contender crabs, leaving the other ten tables to scrabble over the rest and us to eventually take all five top prizes, of which I believe we left all of them on the table at the end of the night. The fact I can remember no more of things that evening, apart from Graham entertaining us with tales of his batty fishing mate Bill who loved nothing more than piloting a shitty old boat out into the Pacific currents with no spare fuel and no radio or any other way of saving themselves if the engine conked out, just about says it all, really.

Leaving the next day was easy and pleasant, no cruel early morning wake-up calls or any nonsense like that and I was off and away to a cruise on the Wana Taki, which was largely a non-event once I got there. Aboard, and a huge boring man gave the five of us who had hopped off the Yasawa Flyer 2 a huge boring lecture without saying anything at all new, and I knew then once he had started that I had made a bad choice in coming along for this thing.

Nevertheless there were a couple of distractions; a launch from the Wana Taki out past the bluff of a nearby island to view the sunset, and later that night a few interesting games, not least of which a crab race which I won having sneakily assessed the field by looking at the bowl of crabs beforehand, and picking the one with the biggest leg-size-to-shell-size ratio that was giving a good go at escaping, and comfortably won. There were some other things to do, the ultimate forfeit being that the losing team was sent to dance around a support pole in the manner of those ladies who dance 'round poles and remove their clothing in order to part men from money. They gave it a jolly good show, I must say, and that Japanese guy seemed to really know what he was doing, that's all I'm saying.

The four folk I got on with were a funny lot really, and it only took half an hour after the lecture for them to start going on about the food at every place they had been to - now really, I have to stop you there, folks. As I had been talking about with Graham the night before, it seems to me absolutely insane to go on holiday for the food. It is a nice bonus to have great food and interesting new styles of cuisine, yes, but to actually plan where to go based on that??! What the bloody hell is wrong with some people?! Halfway around the globe and they will actually refuse to visit a whole country - an entire country - because of their perceptions regarding food there.
And, perhaps even more insanely, people will go to a foreign country for nothing BUT the food; and basically see fuck-all of the entire nation outside of a handful of restaurants and a hotel or two.

Nevermind that there are a dozen different things to eat in even the most spartan and single-minded of places, nevermind that it's a vital part of human experience to try things out of your comfort zone, nevermind that you can eat absolutely any cuisine style and dish from any and every place on Earth in every Westernised country - why not go abroad to stay in the same little bubble you've always known. Muppets. Crazies. Candidates for a Damn Good kicking every one of them.

So I transfered late the next day after a seeming eternity left aboard the Wana Taki, and took to the YF2 once more by way of a couple of short trips on motorboats skipping again over the staggeringly crystaline waters that distinguish Fiji as one of the most beautiful places on Earth. Gliding into the next resort was a solo affair for me, or rather a solo affair for tourists and only three Fijian locals to accompany me, one of whom was to be my guide and general nefarious accomplice for the next few days, although I could almost never then, and cannot now, accurately recall his name. My excuse, as always in these circumstances is that I don't know how to pronounce the local language or spell the word, the one necessitating the other, which hardly excuse me for not sitting down and learning it of an evening, but still.

WayaLeiLei was the third resort, second island, second dive site and second best of the lot, and pretty damn marvellous it was, even if the kitchen/serving crew had seen a few too many tourists for their own good by the time I arrived. Ashore once more after a day and a half over waves and, with the sun shining, I booked myself in for the morning hike to the summit of a massive boulder outcrop atop the hill, this resort being perched on the side of what must have been a massive piece of volcanic fallout, as all the boulders were fully formed blocks of hardened stone, probably expelled as one of larger islands was formed as a surface-breaching volcano.

Cool thing about the Yasawa group is that they are entirely volcanic islands, one way or another. Every one was directly or from subsequent ash and explosions formed by volcanic activity, or as I like to think of it, truly unimagineable power right here on Earth including big massive way-cool explosions an' lava an' stuff. Just imagine it. A volcano erupting, I mean. I'm so very terrified of natural forces, I have to see one

The summit trek seemed like a bad idea almost as soon as it started. 04:45 in the AM saw me walking across the resort between bures; those same traditional hand-built huts seen in all the resorts and elsewhere throughout rural Fiji; to the kitchen and eating area, being molested by frantic dark shapes in the tar-black night which turned out to be a couple of the resident dogs, apparently having had their Pedigree Cocaine already they were unbelievably enthusiastic and a little terrifying as they tried to climb up my front and back simultaneously, and then I noticed a couple of dim lights and found the little group preparing to make the ascent.
Five of us altogether went up, my faithful guide in the rear and the male compnent of a German couple in the front, storming up the cliff in the darkness with the help of his torch, the lady of the outfit behind with hers, the idiot boy (guess who that is) very close behind her with no torch at all, relying on her second-hand light and footsteps in the blackness, and then our guide and a little Glaswegian girl who struggled with it all, and was being helped and occasionally hoisted up the rocky track by our guide. I'm gonna call him Bob from here on in just for the sake of convenience.

I was struggling too, seriously so. The path was all uphill on an angle of maybe 30 - 40 degrees, 45 minutes almost totally solid smashing ourselves up through the trees and over the rocks with only three breaks of two minutes. Calling it a path was, in places, very generous as well because after the first half or so any kind of trodden or smooth surface gave way to the results of the most recent landslide, and we were climbing on and over boulders and shale - in the middle of a jungle mind, dodging half-seen trees and branches placed treacherously at neck height in the pitch-black-to-very-dim morning light, and being in that jungle with an almost perpetual canopy above meant we were in the darkness, and a better quality of darkness at that, for longer than the world outside.

Breaching the forest at last, just 20 metres from the summit and lookout point at exactly 06:00am we all nearly collapsed and waited for sunrise, or at least the girls and I collapsed, the German fella would clearly have liked to have been going faster but had to slow enough for his girlfriend to keep up, and of course Bob hardly noticed he was even moving, let alone climbing a bastard of a hill under cover of darkness. Bob went up to the peak almost ever single morning, and, would you believe, the dogs went with him as they had done today, and it seems their favourite pasttime is in fact to run up this hill and stand atop the Easterly pinnacle of the summit rock to watch the sunrise themselves, and feel the wind racing through their fur. I have photos of them looking like doggie pioneers up there.

Going back down Bob asks us if we want to go the `man's way or the woman's way` with a cheeky misogynist's grin. I elect for the group the way of the small crippled girl-child, to general agreement, and Bob takes us back halfway down through easy gentle slopes across rolling fields at the back of the hill. In the inky darkness, the cheeky bugger had led us up the most difficult route. Total git.

Later on I tried to go kayaking but no-one else wanted to, althoguh there was a guided tour set out in the promotional material for that day and I had, after all, paid for the all-extras-included package, the summit trek being one thing also the cave tour from the first resort, and the kayak tour another one. But hey, I went o the dive shop to reschedule and they rescheduled me, doing the dive as they were a couple of hours before we had planned.

Out over the reef and things were vibrant and teeming as anything I'd yet seen, with the added bonuses that 1) My BCD and gear in general was not leaking, and 2) My two companions were doing a spot of underwater spear fishing in order to try and attract and feed some sharks.
After skewering a couple of rainbow runners and something else I couldn't identify, and thousands of small fish from the size of matchboxes to that of shoeboxes having come and pecked and munched recycled their fallen comrades, a couple of white-tipped reef sharks appeared and lazily hung about the reef a few metres below us, only making one pass to grab food from our diver thatI saw, but they came close enough and were small, but magnificent nonetheless.

White-tip reefs don't get very big and these ones were maybe four feet long nose to tail, but it still adds another shark to my scoresheet, as it were, and they have the most amazingly lithe way of moving that their bulky bigger cousins can never manage.
Unfortunately I had not been wearing a wetsuit - the water was 29 degrees C after all - and, wearing trousers rolled up to the knee which inevitably unfurled themselves, I had been propelling myself about underwater for the best part of an hour with a massive extra resistance thanks to the heavy flapping trousers, and when I reached the surface I got the most evil cramp and had to float about uselessly near the boat while I sorted it out. I really should have thought about that, expecially after an hour and a half of early morning trekking that day and, well, there was no way I could do another dive, and I had a strained tendon for the next few days.

And the next day, yet again aboard the YF2 and off to South Sea Island for one night, the smallest in the whole group being only about 130 metres from shore to shore. Nice little place with some agreeable folk, but the bedbugs were something evil. Lovely sunset though and wide coral-strewn beaches refreshingly free from coconut palsm, for once.

The next and final day and I went aboard the last of my paid-for included extras (after a trip on the YF2 again and a couple of motor launches, natch) which was a sailing tour of the Mamanuca group aboard the Seaspray, a sailing yacht of maybe 90 feet, with about 40 guests and an open bar, or at least an open cool box stocked with beer and a few bottles of wine and champers, to which I settled down having struck up conversation with a young Aussie bloke and then another Aussie couple of Japanese extraction and two Brits, who between us polished off every bottle of wine and champange in the cool boxes bar one, and as much beer as everyone else. Yes, we were bastards, but if it's any consolation I got a near-fatal round of hiccoughs and had force myself to throw up lavishly in the head, for the sake of ot hiccuping out a lung.

More beer and some cruising later we fetched up alongside a lovely little island with a delapidated reef but some lovely scenery, and I managed to snorkel-swim to shore with the rest of the lively guests despite having to stop, tread water and empty my mask of water every 15 seconds thanks to my glasses forcing the sides away from my head, not having brought my contact lenses or really trusting any of the feckless drunkards aboard with my eyes either, really.

Back aboard, a bit of sunburn and a lot of drunk and disorderly later, then back out to sea to rendezvous with the YF2 for the final time, then into port and off to a single night's stay at the Kennedy near the airport and back the following day on a plane home.
Well, I call it home for now. New Zealand really is the most agreeable and homey place I've ever been to, and you shall see why very soon.

Comments

Culinary diversion of little to no point

2008-09-17T17:28:19+02:00

Unrelated to travel, but a thought just occured to me. In England, Australia and New Zealand there is a subtle common theme to eating habits, namely that, so far, each English-speaking country has a favourite flavourless fruit. Vegetables must be included but not if they're staples, so potatoes, for all their tuberous might and gustatory indifference cannot be counted, and anyway, everyone eats them like mad the world over.

In Aus and NZ, I have just noticed, they are obsessed with the avocado, although for the life of me I can't imagine why. If it cures at least five major diseases then fair play, stick it in everything and munch your way to flavourless victory, however I suspect its healing powers are somewhat less than that.
I just had some of that supermarket sushi, handed to me by the Irish girl I was sharing a room with as she left for an early morning flight (and yes, I am allowed to eat sushi at 03:30 in the morning. I am ill. I have a note). This sushi contained a miniscule sliver of avocado - and, it almost goes without saying, a virtually negative value for fish - which is hardly enough to cure even one small spot even if it were the miracle food we've all been waiting for.

It also routinely finds its way into burgers, abetted by humans, who in the Southern hemispher so far seem unable to control themselves, and whack a thick slab of the flavourless green goo in between burger and bun without so much as casually vomiting. Very strange.

In England we have our own beloved and completely flavourless favourite, the cucumber, a food with less point than a sphere and as much flavour as a glass of water, which it basically is, plus some vibrantly snot-hued rind.
In cucumber sandwiches (kill me now) with tuna and salmon (kill the cook) and in any kind of salad (I'm gonna kill you if you try and feed me that) it is the most futile of fruits, and it's one of those bloody stupid annoying ones that people will claim to be a vegetable on account of it not tasting sweet.

It tastes of purified condensed fuck-all, why would you expect sweetness from it of all things?

The crucial thing that links these is that they are completely superfluous to the actual food, being slopped in or added for `garnish` or whatever, unlike, say, rice which is the most important and often only food in huge parts of the world.

So, the question is, does the United States have a favourite flavourless fruit or veg, one that sneaks into every kind of cuisine and dish?
How about Canada? Any other little ex-colonial outposts of anglophones?

I'd just like to know.

Comments

Yay for small boats!

2008-09-17T02:40:09+02:00

Continuing the video series of transport to shit your pants to, and with another bonus look at me, looking at you, wearing what I like to call the `stunned mullet face`.
I never had the camera ready during any of the big swells, unfortunately:

Comments

Island hopping mad

2008-09-14T21:32:09+02:00

The week falls away before my sandaled feet and I come closer and closer to re-alterpatriation, bipolymigration, repetimmigrasidence or whatever a good made-up word might be for reentering a country that is temporarily taken for one's home. I'm sure the correct word exists. It usually does.

Terminology for such complicated things and myriad bewildering alternatives for established speech tend to prey on the mind after having read anything by Stephen Fry, as I have been doing (The Hippopotamus, not for the weak of spirit, Fry 1988) which is entirely inevitable. Inescapable. Ineluctable, in fact.
Subsequently one is left feeling a tiny bit inadequate merely as a fellow anglophone, not to mention a fledgling wielder of words, and not just a little bit relieved, appalled and amazed as well. Interesting book, you see. Really not for the weak of spirit or prudish of morals (or language) though.

And now I'm in Christchurch again. Aren't I fast? This is what happens when you start something and don't immediately finish it, of course: a mess of tenses I simply can't be arsed to clean up

I was pretty much lying about the sandaled feet by the way, mine broke on a beach in Pacific Harbour after a night getting leathered with a crowd of locals, although I may have told you as much already. I cannot imagine why I thought it was interesting the first time, except perhaps to highlight my hatred of flip-flops, sunbathing and the beach mentality both individually and as a whole loathsome package, so perhaps the timely destruction of just one of these just made me so perversely smug I had to share.
On the night in question I might have passed out on the sands in the clasp of midnight and much rum, but I had in fact lain down for only a minute or two to have the ocean lap at my feet. The sandals bought on the first day in Nadi were not up to much, being mere flip-flappy wastes of otherwise useful atoms and cosmic fluff, and fell apart for no particular reason save that their very existence was a minor insult to me. Weaving back to the party I could hardly tell the difference, anyway. So for the most part boats and bare feet have been carrying me around the place.

All this talk of errant footwear is terribly thrilling, I know, but I really must tear you back to the facts of my last week of freedom, as I have come to think of it, before I jet back to Christchurch and thence to somewhere else to be a proper person again (as I have now almost done; the jetting that is, I'm in Auckland airport at the moment awaiting a transfer; I suppose the proper person idea will have to wait again) and go back to some kind of normality and routine. I would hate to disappoint you however or become bored myself, so I will try and do at least a couple of dumb or dangerous things every week, just so I have something to fill this space with. Suggestions are welcome. Bear in mind I am an abject coward at heart. I'm now mindful that this would make anything very silly or stupid immeasurably funnier, but I'll go out on a limb and accept anything you can think of.
Except a bungee jump or canyon swing.

It will probably be Nelson (my next location and pro tem place of residence) at the very north of the South Island, pretty much because I like the name and it has a population size I think will be to my liking; and into the immoral and greasy machinery of the employed shall I descend once more. Or ascend, depending on how you look at these things - I certainly won't be getting any warm remarks from you, my lovely audience, for not having had a job for the past 10 months, but if it's any consolation I am now poorer than a Soviet church mouse in the midst of a vodka famine and will soon be engaged in much toil, to the amusement of, not least of all, you lot

Enough already!! Five paragraphs of nonsense and I haven't even started on the final week in Fiji, the Island Hopping Tour on and around the Yasawa islands which, possibly, is the first proper content yet in this post, Jesus queuejumping Christ.

I have to admit that I almost got annoyed with the legendary Fijian friendliness at times, as hard as that is to believe and as much of a grumpy old bastard that makes me sound. The fact everyone is so aware of this legend is most of the problem - for this sort of thing to work a little more grace is required for it to...work.
I wasn't actually pissed off you understand and not at all with any individuals, just a little weary from hearing that people are so friendly here sometimes from very drunk and very friendly Fijians, or listening to the same welcome/farewell song for the 13th time, or from being mobbed by staff members at every place because I have DVDs, something akin to flaunting hard currency about in the former USSR if you are to judge from the reactions of most locals.

At some points you don't want to have to explain yourself or where you come from yet again, and you might not like being coerced into appreciating the culture more or less at the point of a knife (or at the point of practically infinite friendliness, which in a way is far worse) and have traditional music, dance and art thrust inavoidably before your defenceless sense organs.
And particularly, because I'm ranting now and this needs to be said because almost all you humans have so far been unable to recognise this, particularly one might not want to be interrupted while watching a film. Why do people talk to me when I'm watching films?

It's like interrupting a deep conversation between two entirely absorbed strangers, never with anything important and usually some inanely trifling nonsense anyone else could help with. Is it assumed that because I'm in the middle of a movie I actually want to meet someone for the first time or engage in some whimsical bollocks of no account, or even talk about the movie itself when I am halfway through? Surely this cannot be a sane assumption, but if experience counts for anything then 10% of people I've met in my life are partially unhinged.
Actually that's quite a conservative figure given the many colourful ways people I've known have been deficient of hinges, but the movie interruption thing is one of the more consistent warning signs.

That singing thing is a famous and unmistakably Fijian feature of any holiday there - it is carefully designed to be so, a cynic might say - where each place you stay at apart from busy hotels and resorts welcomes each batch of new arrivals with an choral song performed by the massed ranks of staff. It can get quite impressive, with the Coral View resort where I first stopped sporting a choir of about 30, and a full range of singers from bass to soprano to the confusing womaney-man who helped out in the dorms. But more on those guys (or gals) later.

It's great when you have been friends with the people for a couple of days who then, for example, seranade you as you leave. That is charming and warming and supremely friendly. But when you have hardly said a word to anyone at all and have been there for just a day, possibly not even a ful day and much of that spent sleeping or talking only to the barman, and it has, for the sake of argument, even all been a bit shitty there and many of these same said people singing you off have been gruff and rather less than friendly, then it just smacks of something terribly false and even belittling to all the other wonderful people you have met. I speak mostly of just one place, but really there are three drawbacks to this island-hopping lark and I mention them here for good, even fluffy reasons:

item: On arriving at the port of Denarau where all these cruise thingies depart from, things are immediately confusing because you have to check in your main luggage, but are never told where or with whom. Two companies operate from the adjacent booths and their staff all wear the respective company garb, yet only one company apparently has anyone to deal with luggage so you (well, I) am left drifting uncertainly with all your (my) gear as the time of deperture creeps ever closer. The check-in staff offer no help, they just take your money and look weary and a bit pissed off, and you eventually have to track down fellow passengers to find that your luggage goes with the other company while you stay under the less-than-close wing of your own. Great exercise for your anxiety glands as you give your stuff to people you are apparently not even dealing, with and wave it a mournful goodbye from the quay as it disappears into thickets of dockside workers.
The check-in staff there were the first unfriendly Fijians I had met as well, which didn't improve my impressions.

item: You are almost constantly hurried about the place, unnecessarily as it usually turns out, and it seems you are always being told what to do which isn't much of a holiday, let alone one that's costing you as much as three weeks elsewhere.
This is linked to the strange and hugely overplayed notion of `Fiji time` which became an irritation not because you might be late (the idea being that it's all very relaxed over there and no-one cares much for times and schedules) but because everyone seems to think it so bloody funny, clever, charming or whatever. That it was almost never noticeable that anything was ever even late made it all rather banal, and achingly trite.
The meal times were always maintained to the very second, and were regimented enough to disprove the idea of Fiji Time entirely. The food was bloody good, and most were buffet-style affairs ideal for big fat greedy buggers like me, but they were at the same time every day which I can't get used to after years of making it up as I go along.

What actually became a problem was that it often ran in reverse, and we were all sent scurrying around far too early to do things such as when we were sent off the Wanna Taki cruise ship (or at least they tried to send us off, myself and a bloke from Kerala rebelled and refused to take part in their enforced shore leave, both claiming ailments of the leg, but really presenting classic symptoms of an irritation of the wallet) for mysterious cleaning purposes. A few days later my scheduled afternoon dive at The Pinnacle, just off the Wayaleilei coast, went ahead a full two hours before we had arranged, and had I not busted in on them to rearrange matters due to the promised (and paid-for) kayak tour of the lagoon not being run, because no-one could be bothered to do it, I would have completely missed it.

item: The Wanna Taki cruise was boring as fuck, quite frankly. It also wasn't even a cruise at all, because we arrived at a moored ship, the Wanna Taki, departed from that ship still moored and had not moved at all in the interim. It was, in fact, like being on any other island without any benefits of an actual island, such as a beach, some jungle or some room to walk ten feet without hitting something. Of course I could have gone ashore at the prescribed time, but refused on sheer principal because the staff came in at 9am and all but frog-marched us out of the dorm, claiming that we had to leave so they could `spray` inside, although all they could have wanted to use were deodorants and air fresheners, which I can quite happily cope after all my years inhaling more fruity and pungent airs.

Also the bloke in charge was the most boring bloke in the history of bad choices for blokes who run cruises. I once had a brilliant job as a salesman ("during the war....") where I was earning very well and was, in fact, pretty bloody fantastic at it being the highest earner not only of the people in the field, but of those in the office on the phones as well speaking to literally foour times as many people as I was every day. When some other guy came along with more training and experience than me and earned and performed even better, I didn't mind being second best because I was still damn good.
Then along came a guy called Bret who simply knew nothing of the world of sales, a world where spirit and attitude are everything and the very best can be brought low by the wrong kind of person. The kind of person who tells you a joke and then explains why it is meant to be funny - and the joke wasn't funny anyway. The kind of person who will talk at great length but do so just a little bit too quietly, so you are forced to pay attention, and you find after twenty minutes of your life have passed that you'll never get back that he has said the same thing he did yesterday, in four very slightly different ways, and it was never worth saying in the first place.

A stater of the extreme obvious, a crude and crass misfit with the social skill of mucous, the antithesis to the salesman and a cringingly bad communicator who could not read a dissatisified look if you wrapped it around his neck and pushed him from a gibbet, which is of course the kindest thing to do to these people.
I had to share a car with him for up to two hours each way every day for three weeks, to then be informed he was being made the permanent field sales manager. I quit the next day.

This big boring man with his big boring introduction was exactly like Bret, and any high spirits we may have had on entering the boat were taken from us and disassembled slowly and painfully before our eyes. That there were only nine guests on board, and that of these there was an Aussie girl with in infection of a dark nature and everyone else set to bitching and moaning about the food at another resort as soon as they sat down (and like I discussed with someone just the day before, it amazes and saddens me that a lot of people only seem to travel for the food; this is the most terrifying form of madness) only really made things worse.
I did my valiant best to rectify things though getting hugely drunk as soon as it seemed acceptable, and took part in the evening games and generally made the best of it including adopting (and subsequently killing, natch) my very own racing crab, but in reality I would rather have been almost anywhere else.

Anyway besides that, and the annoying fact that drinks were expensive throughout, and that the brochures and staff lead you to believe you will not have to pay for anything extra but you do in fact rather have to, it was a bloody good week. And now I have done all my complaining in one post, all the good stuff is coming in another. Hence the fluffy

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Whitewater Shark Deathslide

2008-09-08T21:56:14+02:00

I lied slightly about the delayred post thing. I ahve managed to transpose this much. Don't expect any mroe favours though

Obligations, I still feel I have a few. This blog being my favourite one, it has become strangely difficult to fulfill lately, not because I'm necessarily too busy but because I rarely find myself in quite the right mood for it; you need a touch of peace and privacy for this sort of gig (not as easily found in Fiji as you would imagine), but of course one can't be so far out of things as to feel like the only human left alive.
That said, deserted beaches are just fine. I haven't been to one yet for more than half an hour, but still. I should be on my first sometime today with a bit of luck, or at least one I only have to share with a few dozen people.

On the other hand, deserted parts of decidly low-rent backwater town are not so fine (and often, in fact, no-rent, what with that marvellous Fijian habit of lying down to sleep anywhere you might feel like it; on grass verges near the road, slightly out of the way on one side of the bar, perhaps at the bus stop or on the beach: and why not?). It can be surprisingly tricky to find such a place, but of course I wouldn't want you to think I was complaining
Either way I'm seriously looking forward to having my own space back in New Zealand, some true lasting peace and quiet, but not so....how shall I put it? Barren dark uncomfortable and shitty. Yup, that sums up just about every hotel room I can afford at the moment. Oh and food that isn't fundamentally related to lard by less than 1 degrees of seperation is gonna be pretty sweet too.

Now I'm sorry if that last post was a touch negative, actually very much so, and I just had to start out this one with a whinging session too. My hackles are up this morning after being summarily failed by a taxi driver, an ATM, a large part of the southern Pacific international banking network and the very first unhelpful Fijians I've yet met. It is not even 9am, so you might imagine how I would get this nonsense sentence off my chest rather than nurse it for any length of time and get on with the bright new day ahead Needless to say a taxi driver who is late by a factor of 5 (or is minus 500% effective, or who failed by a ratio of 5:1 if you prefer) will not and never shall deserve my custom.
ATMs apparently not connected to the international financial network and unable to recognise not just the money I know to be in my account, but not even the most elementary mathematics or trials of logic either also deserve nothing less than being struck repeatedly about the processing unit with extreme prejudice (and a big hammer). When such a technological charlatan claims that I have no money when I have at least, well, considerably more than the amount I was after, let us just say, but which then allows me to take 500 of these phantom simoleons from its greasy recesses yet then fails to make the deduction on my receipt, and still after refuses me to repeat the process even though the advertised limit is for twice the total I was aksing for, well, I'm just happy that I had those chicken feathers and all that superglue on me at the time. There's a machine who wont want to piss off its customers again in a hurry, I can tell you.

Now the last time you heard from me I had a minor cold/insanity combo going on, which is my only excuse as colds always make me a pissy little bitch, I'm afraid to say. Again, traveling and living with no-one but me for company (and I can be such an ass to live with ) tends to bring that sort of thing to the fore as well, plus I was, of course, probably having my man-period. It happens about once a month, or, as often as one realises how long it's been since the last one.

Not incidentally now, my travel plans have changed a little bit, most notably I have now fixed Canada as a definite destination even at the cost of almost all the US of A, if necessary. The only parts of Unitedstatesland that are exempt being those where I am either obliged to visit because, well, it's the bleedin' Grand Canyon or it's freakin' New York, for instance, and of course there's a certain place in Kentucky to view if Mr. Gregory is back home at that time, because if nothing else that flimsy bitch owes me free digs for a while
Gosh I hope he isn't reading *trembles*
I also have a possible diversion in Idaho and I would dearly love to see something of New England in the Fall, or `Autumn` as we so much more sensibly call it
Honestly they may as well rename them New, Hot, Fall and Chills, jesus shitkicking christ...

Canada is being added so emphatically because of the stark difference in attitude that have come to my attention lately, and while it was always there under the surface, a few folks I have met recently made it all clear to me.
I went whitewater rafting on Monday, as anyone who knows me on Facebook might have noticed, and was involuntarily elected to chuck my lot in with a family from Toronto, although it should be noted that I expected as much, going to the thing on my lonesome and all. As it turned out I was rather lucky and, not merely because I know they might be reading it has to be said I was really impressed by the manner (and manners) of all hands on our vessel, save perhaps my unruly self (mind you I was pretty well behaved for once. No-one got pushed in and I don;t think I caused any lasting injuries, unless everyone was being supremely polite..) and it reminded me of a little undercurrent of thought I'd lately been subconsciously sculling, namely; Canadians are just so much easier to be around than Statesians

I will use that term because, a) a guy from California really pissed me off the other day and I would like to get back at him in some tiny way, not having taken the opportunity to rake his eyes with a comb while he was there, and b) there are at least 22 countries in the New World and it has always seems rather selfish - not to mention self-important - for people stemming from the former British colonies to assume such a title on behalf of all people's and countries across two whole continents. Touch greedy, what?
It was even more rude when they manipulated half of them for, ooh, shall we say fresh fruit profits or guaranteed cocaine production to fuel various lucrative `countermeasures` or for good old fashioned power, greed, or a paranoid sense of national pride, but let us not get bogged down in petty name-calling Yes we Brits did it too, but the keys things here are i) we did it better than anyone else, so nyerr nyerr nyerr, ii) we started off genuinely disadvantaged from a tiny island rather than based upon the most resource-rich country on Earth, and iii) we gave it all back.
And the next Irish guy who tells me I invaded his country is gonna get a potato somewhere personal.

For the lazy type who'd rather not live the high-powered life in the crazy world of work in America, this seems to me a damn good reason to spend more time in picturesque, unhomicidal Canada rather than in a country obsessed with work to the point of insanity, insanity to the point of rationalising therapy, and meals so formidable as to be capable of inflicting paralysis or death at a single sitting.
Not that I wont love the United States of Lovely Lovely Dollars Please Now, but I think the people will get on my tits rather more quickly than the denizens of Canada.

So back in the real world of today, well, this week at least, I found rafting on the Navua river from more or less the centre of the main island, Viti Levu, down to somewhere nearer the South Coast via the most incredible canyons and narrow, vastly high gorges cut through moss-trewn limestone one of the most beautiful places I have ever been to. The water was clear and, where required, fast and bubbling or flowing and falling, taking our little inflatable over rocks and rapids and even the occasional small waterfall (very small, but it did tip someone out of every boat but ours. Yeah, we were that good), all the while showing us the real interior of the island and a kind of jungle and bamboo forest I had never seen before. There was something in the richness of the greenery and the stateliness of the bamboo thickets as it shot out over the river that seemed more full of life than anything in India or Borneo.

And if I do it again (read: when I do it again with bigger, stronger rapids) I will have to get an underwater camera sorted, as I will be doing anyway for further diving, which I am growing rather fond of I must say, even if the more recent outings have been a touch frustrating. Still, it has to happen now and then and I'm very much looking forward to going just with a buddy rather than a whole boat-full of people, and not least because they are all bewilderingly more qualified and experienced than I am

After a couple of hours paddling only on the command of our skipper, Joe 2 (and yes, there was a Joe 1 as well, on another boat) and listening to his stories about the scenery, history and culture, most of them probably even true we fetched up at the mouth of an adjoining tributary and five boats-worth of us unloaded ourselves onto the shore, largely fell over a bit on the ludicrously slippery stones and, as our head tour guide Moses stepped across the water, watched him instantly disappear before our eyes.
Quite a trick, he walked onto a patch of water in the stream - which was, let me be clear, merely a stream over some small rapids, not more than 8" deep anywhere it seemed - and dropped completely from sight, plummeting vertically into a sinkhole to reappear seceonds later in an adjacent pool, having gone through an underwater hole connecting the two. Of course we all had a go, even me with my fear of water and drowning and seeing anything on the surface let alone beneath the icy liquid, and after just a few seonds of mortal panic I managed to step off, sink with the best of 'em and grapple my way through the hole which was strangely lower down than I had thought. I can't imagine why I thought it would be a bit shallower as that would have meant it was less threatening, guess I must have some unbridled optimism left in my soul.

One of our boat, Stef (or Steph) the daughter of John and Robyn; and I bloody hope I both remembered the names and spelled them correctly by the way; who between them made up the other three quarters of our crew's tourist quota, threw herself into the pool maybe half a dozen times, or at least quite a few, and rightly seemed pretty impressed. Fair play to her; I was playing the odds and allowing myself some freewheeling cowardice myself, reasoning that the more times I went in the lower the chances of my not smacking my head into gaudily coloured shards on some rocks was going to be. I know my limits. I am exactly the kind of guy who does something once just fine and then breaks something important doing the exact same thing again.

After that, and lunch, and more paddling and rapids which Joe, bless him, managed to mostly throw us through at least sideways and more often than not spinning rapidly so as to maximise the splash, we arrived at what they called Free Massage Falls, where one could indeed get a free massage of sorts by laofing about in the waterfall, assuming you didn;t mind not seeing anything for the duration. I have photos to prove I was there and everything, and in about a thousand years you might get to see them too

I had been wasting time, money and small parts of my liver for 5 days at the resort I was at already, so I had decided to make good use of my time and get out of there and do stuff. Stuff isn;t cheap, explaining in part my reluctance to get out of the groove for the best part of a week, but stuff also doens't happen everywhere and I'm unlikely to be nack in Fiji for a good few years, possibly (but hopefully not) ever, so if nothing else I had to do some more diving. This meant I had to be able to see, a rudimentary question many of you may not appreciate, although many of you will.

Wearing glasses can be such a pain, if you don't have 'em you might not appreciate or if you have been able to wear contact lenses you might not appreciate so much either. I cannot wear contact lenses, or rather I can but it takes three people to put them in, and no I'm not joking at all, in the slightest, whatsoever. I have, bizarrely, and somewhat uselessly, extremely good reflexes and can avoid hidden obstacles and catch falling objects and otherwise twich my porky body in unlikely displays of dexterity should the need arise.
This is wonderful if someone accidentally drags a Discman off a table and I can grab it before it is yanked all the way to a splintery end, or when walking in darkness and finding myself facing imminent facial trauma at the convenience of a low bridge or tree branch - I manage to twist myself either out of or into the right position to deal with such things perfectly, and I deeply wish I could do this sort of thing in a social context.
This is disastrous when trying to insert contact lenses as the blink reflex overpowers all, and the fact I have a very low threshold for irritation and a barely suppressed kind of animalistic rage is waiting for me whenever I try anything so futile as an hour attempting to wear one contact lens, it really isn't the thing for me, not unless you dope me with valium and give me a litre of rum. Tranquilised and thoroughly sloshed, I suspect a good diver I would not make.

So the trials began, two hours on a local bus to Suva, the capital of Fiji, where I saw a real indicator of the level of poverty but also the ingenuity of the people: a bus here is really like a coach, although with 6 seats squeezed into each row normally occupied by 4 and most of the windows don't open, and has arrayed along its length below the cabin a series of luggage compartments a la the standard coach model, and these are accessed from outside and at all times left unlocked.
When a bus pulls into the mess of stalls and angled pull-ins that function as lanes at Suva's man bus terminal, and especially when, I suspect, white passengers can be seen at the windows, the last few hundred metres of its journey are accompanied by a small army of young men with wheelbarrows, running alongside the vehicle and fighting each other - all but coming to blows - with their wheelbarrows trying to edge in and be closest when the bus halts and they can cease treadling the potholed road to throw open the baggage lockers, and load up anyone's belongings left inside.

This was pretty disconcerting as hardly needs explaining, even though I had nothing in there myself it was certainly something to note for future adventures in public transport and it soon became slightly impressive in my mind, even if it did come from a desperation for money and lack of other prospects. At least these guys are out there, trying, although quite frankly if you are both unable to carry your own gear and are willing to let a strange man with a wheelbarrow take it for you; almost certainly guiding you by his own route to his own friend's hostelry; then you are probably not suited to travel.

Finding an optician and paying an inflated premium for just 10 pairs of lenses later, and after a cursory saunter into the only McDonalds for just a meagre few Big Macs and a slimming chocolate milkshake, I got back on board the Bus of Infinite Stops and wound my way back to the resort, a place called Tsulu where the staff are fantastic, and the surrounds are wholly artificial. It was a nice enough place and I paid for a dormitory bed yet got a small room all to myself, but there was absolutely nothing real about the place, and no cooking facilities either so it was either restaurants or starvation for me the whole time, and even McSinburger with cheese is a welcome break after the same kind of ghee-based, triple-fried meals day after day.

So, at length, I was almost ready to see the world without glasses and thus be able to dive, but first I had a tuesday appointment with the ziplines of doom, althoguh they be know by the rather better title of `deathslide`, and the infinitely more lame one of `flying fox`. In any case it's a bit bit of metal string stretch out between two tall thing and you in a pulley sort of affair rattling down it.
It's pretty cool but hardly super-mega-uber-thrills entertainment, even though the lines are long and the heights are impressive: 200 metre long lines up to 30 metres above the ground, and twice in each run you cross the lower reaches of a river at the fullest limits of the course's height.
Eight lines overall and I have video to prove all this as well, some of which might one day find its way here. It is a lovely jungle scene and I got footage of me zipping along a couple of times, and after all was said and done I only cut my hand on the wire about three times when I got stuck and managed to just about avoid the nasty mid-air collision, although possibly a video of that would have been funniest of all.

The shark dive..... yes, I was looking forward to this a bit. Really, it was the main reason I had come to Pacific Harbour in the first place - as I say I'm here now in Fiji, of all places, and unlikely to return for a long time, and so the opportunity to dive with up to 8 species of shark (including bull sharks and the formidable tiger shark) was just too much to resist. But first we had to go to go through the circus of getting me visually up-to-scratch, and by we I mean the three people as well as myself required to get my contact lenses in.

I was patrolling the resort with increased agitation for a couple of days before the dive in order to press some unwilling stranger familiar with contact lenses into service for me, typically enough it was about as quiet as the resort ever gets and I could find no-one, and the staff down at the shark diving operation; one Aqua Trek of Beqa lagoon, Pacific harbour, Viti Levu, Fiji, in case you ever want to try it yourselves; were unable to assist or, really, to understand as the subtle linguistics required were not among the vocabulary of local Fijian dive instructors, sadly.
In the end on the morning of the Big Day I scrabbled about desperately in reception as was becoming a habit of mine (the poor staff had been dealing with me and my vast lists of queries for days already, and, stars that they are, had answered of deftly fielded every one) for some help in my hour of need.

This day one of the counter girls called Loni flagged down an Aussie bloke who was something senior in the place (probably owned it all, in fact) and he in turn called upon a Fijian bloke who was a gardener or labourer or something physically demanding, and while he held each of my eyes open with both hands as I lay prone ont he couch in reception the Aussie guy carefully jammed a lens into each aperture through the waves of teary fluid my eyeballs offered in self-defence, and Loni stood about the edge alternately offering tactical eye-poking advice and quietly cackling to herself.

It must have made quite a picture, and I'm left wondering now how many customersmight have tried to check in to the place only to see the manager and two staff members forcibly pushing things into the eyes of a paying guest. I do hope I didn't scare anyone off.

And it all worked. I was collected and taken to the office down the road, met my fellow divees and kitted up, although most of this was taken care of for me and I pretty much just put my gear on and took it off as required throughout the dives (for those of you who don't know it, if you are Scuba diving even on holiday then generally you have a bit of setting up and checking to do, none of which happened this time at all, and in truth if you were self-sufficient quite a lot of setting up and planning beforehand as well, not least of which filling your tanks with air ). After a 10 minute boat ride we stopped in the choppiest waters I have ever been in, and as we pitched and rolled about so much as to make at least three of us feel very sick, we waited an agonising 20 minutes for some other dive outfit we were now apparently sharing the site with to get their arses in gear and get on with it, which they failed to do for quite some time, thus earning them my eternal hatred.

We did get down there of course but the heaving and rolling of the boat was bloody severe, and waddling about wearing the full (heavy) gear (weight belt, bloody steel tank full of compressed air, my ample stomach) on board a small boat with a soaking wet deck, pitching about like an epileptic rodeo bull and all while wearing fins on board the boat which is pretty much against all the rules, it was at least mildly taxing and irksome. For some insane reason I was elected to go in first and I'd never gone in like this before, off the back of a level deck, and while taking one big stride into water is is the easiest of entries - and hardly sounds like a tricky maneuvre - do bear in mind my general dislike of a) falling b) water - but indeed it was a day of firsts.

The first time I had ever worn contact lenses; okay, I wore them for about six hours on new year's eve 2006 for the midnight party on London Bridge, but as we had downed a bottle of champagne and much, much wine on the tube from Finsbury Park, and I was out of my tree on something else I couldn't possibly disclose here, it is fair to say that was not a valid experience. I don't remember my friends forcing them in, nor prising them out at the end of the night either, so that really doesn't count ;P ); the real true genuine first time I'd dived independently without an instructor; first time jumping off a boat in a heavy swell; first time being,/strong> in fucking boat with swell that heavy; first dive with a group; first dive with sharks; and the first time I lost three pounds in pure fear and a further six pounds when I shit myself inside my wetsuit. Okay that last part isn't true, but it could have been. Oh, it was close.

The dive itself, `wow` would be a good word, also `fantastic` and `awesome` spring to mind but, more importantly, it was completely New, and that is my favourite word of all. Now I have to disappoint you all here and admit that I did not, in point of fact, actually see any tiger sharks. This is because there were not any tiger sharks. There were some bull sharks and possibly some smaller white tipped reef, black tipped reef, or grey reef sharks, but if so they were small and generally keeping themselves to themselves. In any case all these interesting predators kept their distance, were so fleet as to be essentially absent as soon as one got out the register and the green biro, and were anything but numerous. No matter.

What there were were hundreds, absolutely hundreds of humpheaded wrasse, a pretty sizeable fish of the blocky and squat school of piscine anatomy, each maybe three feet long and two feet high, and a couple of truly frighteningly large New Zealand Groupers, a fish so large and so stupid as to occasionally take pieces out of divers, such as their calves or half their hands, if particularly unlucky. They are not predatory fish and would never attack anything like a human despite being approximately twice the size and weight of an adult man, but they are just so depressingly dense they cannot tell the difference between dead aquatic carrion and a live, multicoloured biped.

Also in the mix were a vast number of a barracuda-like fish again maybe three feet long, but only around seven or eight inches high or thick. These were fast, curious and hungry, as were all our underwater friends that day, and curiously featured mouths on the upper side of their snouts rather than near the bottom. The top of their heads in fact seemed hinged flat so as to pivot from parallel to the ocean floor and back again when they fed. Funny looking buggers, but fascinating, as were the thousands and thousands of rainbow fish, clown fish, angel fish of a dozen varieties and some amazing creature that was laced with vivid purple and green lines and had, I kid you not, a perfectly day-glo luminous pink patch at it's forehead and looked for all the world as if it had just been coloured in by the people who make Post-It notes. Amazing thing it was, like many of the others it was a sort-of medium-sized thing, about the size on a medium-sized fish

The star of the show, however, were the nurse sharks, and they were massive, graceful, playful, curious and friendly, and there about seven or eight of them down there with us, the largest around thirteen feet long - about 4 metres - and best of all, we got to stroke them, which was amazing on many levels. The really are lovely things, hardly threatening at all except for their size and mostly because they do not have the stereotypical shark's mouth of vicious-looking teeth set under the snout awaiting your arms and legs, but have mouths more like that of the manta ray, although they are certainly carnivores and were devouring the contents of that wheelie-bin full of dead fish like no-one's business. Yes they brought a wheelie bin full of dead fish. As you do.

In fact they do because these sharks - or sharks very much like them, possibly their friends and relatives - get fed every single day at around the same place, which does lend a certain element of unreality to the thing in principal, but in truth it all happens near an ancient reef and the fish are all certainly wild, about as wild as you can get being in the waters of the South Seas. The only thing down there not entirely natural to the environment was us, yet the fish did not mind in the slightest. They are the most amazingly curious creatures, fish, and the wonder of diving comes from the wonderful fact that we as humans have managed to not totally fuck up at least one environment on this Earth, a fact which we can all be proud of I think, even if it was kind of done by default, what with the whole not-breathing underwater thing, and all that.

-

And so I left Pacific Harbour a day or two later and have found myself after a brief overnighter in Nadi - and no, there really is nothing wrong with it at all. It's quite pleasant actually, even the down and dirty parts. I don't know what anyone was going on about - I boarded the Yasawa Flyer catamaran and was whisked away to some distant islands, which is where I write this from, overlooking a vast crystal-clear stretch of water, in an aquamarine bay on an island girdled by a huge coral reef, and as I sit here, finish this paragraph and this beer, I can't help but say to you all: I wish you were here, it really is bloody marvellous

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