4/30/2003

Hammersmith Police Station :  I love guessing games. I don't think anyone else enjoys them as much as I do. Except maybe small children at Christmas time, and weak minded fools who don't have the excuse of youthful exuberance. But I was quite shocked by the guessing thought processes of a friend last night on the phone:
"Hello, how are you?", I said
"Oh hello. Good thanks. You?", she replied.
"Fine, fine. You'll never guess where I am..."
"Er. Work?"
"Nope."
"A pub?"
"Nope."
"Fighting?"
"Nope."
"Errm...."
"Actually I'm in a police station."
"Oh."

posted by Garreth at 7:46 AM

4/29/2003

No interviews in six years can make you complacent :  The plan was simple. The goal - to secure a place on a conservation expedition which would ideally pay me to live on a beach and scuba dive for free each day. And not a beach in Scotland or France - a proper tropical beach with unlimited sunshine, an abundance of blue sky, and coconuts growing on trees. The sort of place where marine conservation is important, but takes a back seat to swimwearing and living in wooden houses.

How to achieve the goal? Well, it all involved dropping subtle hints to an experienced marine conservationist under whose acquatic wing I had undertaken some voluntary work a year ago. Someone known for her monitoring of great white sharks, her identification of corals, and her naming of new species. Most importantly, she is known (at least to me) for her acquaintance with the science director of Coral Cay - just the kind of organisation that provided extended conservation projects, say, in the beautiful Bay Islands.
The simplicity of the plan was its stength. Not only does she have a predeliction for drinking and talking, but she was keen to introduce people to each other in the role of mutual acquaintance.

The plan started with military precision - we both turned up with outrageous hangovers at a pub by the river in Hammersmith. Over a jug of fine lager, we caught up on gossip, and decanted ourselves to the lovely Riverside studios. Still on target, we liberally doused ourselved with wines, beers and anything else liquid and available. The plan was well underway, and it seemed appropriate to try to close the deal, and secure a favourable introduction.

By this point, my subtlety had not just eluded me, it had taken the kids from under my nose, eloped with my best friend, and sent me a polaroid from the airport.

"So you know the director of science and research at Coral Cay? Hic. Did I mention I'm keen to go to Honduras to do some conservation? I'm pretty sure they have a research station in the Bay Islands...Hic."
"Yes, I think I could put in a good word for you."
"Great, I was thinking of trying to get onto the staff this, hic, time - save a bit of money, and not have to work so hard."
"We could see about that, if you can remember your training."
"Oh sure, fish, coral, hic, diving. No problems."
"OK. So if you were asked, 'What are the distinguishing features of Acropora?' what would you say?"
"Er. Hic."
I think the following pause gave me away, but after a bit of defocused staring into space, and some wiggling of the fingers, I came up with,
"Lumps!"
"Lumps?"
"Er. Lumps with black dots."
"You spent ten weeks surveying and identifying coral, and all you can come up with is 'lumps' with black dots?"
"Well, there wasn't much Acropora around, I was, I was much fonder of, hic, er, say, er. Fish! Yes, much fonder of fish."
"Not much around? It was the most abundant coral where we were diving. Every survey you did should have had about 60% Acropora."
"Er. Ah. Hmm. Yes, well, there was. Er." It went downhill from there.

I guess I haven't been for an interview in a long time. But you probably have to prepare, especially if you're trying to blag your way into a job with very little real experience. And probably not get completely shedded, or choose someone with a lower alcohol tolerance than yourself and get them shedded first. Needless to say, I don't think there will be any science positions in Honduras with my name on just yet.
posted by Garreth at 10:18 AM

4/28/2003

High Performance Drugs :  I'm running again. Using ibuprofen in advance of each run to reduce any potential swelling in my knees. Do you fail a drug test if you're taking painkillers to help you train? Surely that's allowed?
posted by Garreth at 10:10 AM

My body knows what it did last weekend :  Apparently, when you 'detox' you put yourself at a huge risk. Toxins dissolve in fat. When you detox, you reclaim stored fat. All the toxins dissolve back into your bloodstream.

I haven't eaten much today for one reason or another. My detox equals retox theory is what I'm using to explain how I feel. Everything I have forced into my bloodstream in the last few months is coming back into play. Like a kind of Judgement Day for the lymph system. Everything I've done to poison myself is flashing in front of my eyes, sometimes quite literally. I am hallucinating, my phone appears to be behaving strangely, and I bounce between wanting to punch people and to fall asleep. This not eating thing is real Value For Money. Or Purgatory if you're trying to get something done.
posted by Garreth at 8:40 AM

And today I detox :  The events below happened to a friend of mine this weekend. It really wasn't me. I was with my Dad. I have witnesses. Mr. Salter - so called because of his proclivity to spill red wine and try to avoid staining with copious amounts of salt - reports the following sequence of events:

Snogged two colleagues(ladies)
Fell asleep on train
Got robbed
Woke up half way to the midlands and a bit confused.
Proposition by a hooker and a pimp
Started fire in car park (twas cold)
Fell asleep in grit dispenser

And all because the laddy had four pints of stella in half an hour. Nice.

posted by Garreth at 7:37 AM

4/24/2003

Generation Game :  Having your dad and his wife come round to stay at your flat can be a mixed affair when you're a grown up. I'm actually enjoying it this time - we've had no major arguments in the first five days. First off, I had to get up with a stonking four day bank holiday weekend hangover after only four hours kip and clean the place before they arrived. And the place did look good. But it's been getting cleaner and more repaired by the day now. Every day I come back from work, and things have been mended and tidied. Marvellous. A little investment in the beginning, and things just get more and more shiny. Hopefully I can get my dad to re-tile the bathroom before I get home tomorrow.
posted by Garreth at 1:38 PM

4/16/2003

Roof Karma :  It would be tempting to think that having your roof fixed by a burly bunch of roofers at great expense would be a bad thing. Not so, if one is prepared to look for the silver lining of the cloud that will hopefully not be pouring water into your bedroom any longer. It might turn out that there is enough flat roof at the top of your flat to pour thousands of pounds worth of bitumen, asphalt and lead onto. That thousands of pounds is arguably a bad thing. But it means that the area is surely big enough to lie down on.

Oh the potential opportunities - lying in the sun with a bucket of fruit and and a baseball bat, showering the streets with vapourised apples. Or wearing ninja clothes and sniping with an air rifle at the strangely twitchy and paranoid customers of the crack den next door in the middle of the night. As John Travolta said - "Ah, those summer nights."
posted by Garreth at 7:29 AM

4/15/2003

Fairy candy :  Small children are impressed by jewellery made from sweets. A classic example is the candy bracelet. This is a nasty piece of thin elastic upon which hollow compressed lumps of sugar and colourings are threaded. The elastic is tied into a hoop, with the coloured lumps resembling jewels along its length. They look like fairy lights if you stretch them across the screen of your laptop.
posted by Garreth at 6:34 AM

Cussin :  A friend of mine has gone for an ascetic existence, having denounced the demon drink, and even resolved to stop swearing. His point was that if he really needs to swear, if he really needs to make a point, then the impact will be far higher if he is not normally known as a foul-mouthed cusser who could swear for the Ireland professional truck driving team.

Personally, I like swearing. Swearing is a gift, if done properly, if done verbally. I reckon that all of the etymologists and their genealogy of profanities are full of horse manure. Quite frankly, profanities survive and become more popular if they have the right shape, the right combination of vowels that you can elongate indefinitely, and incongruous harsh consonants that you can abruptly start or terminate them with.

As a member of the Master Guild Of Swearing, I have been through a rigorous training programme. We learn to string together obscenities in unending streams by studying transcripts of the great Derek and Clive. We learn to change a cuss word from a noun, to an adjective to a verb as required. But my abso-bloody-lutely favourite way of swearing is to use bastardised tmesis - the splitting up of a compound word into parts, and then slotting a rude word in the middle.

posted by Garreth at 5:00 AM

4/12/2003

Tottenham Court Road Less Travelled :  Living in San Francisco, it is hard not to get swept up in the waves of good vibes crashing against the famous car-chase hills. That's my excuse for going through the books in the 'self help' section in a local bookstore when I used to live on Market Street a few years back. In SF, reading 'self help' books seemed as appropriate as munching on organic farm produce, and as natural as lifting iron at a gym that was open 24 hours a day with an outrageously camp and immensely over-muscled personal trainer. This is how I came to read The Road Less Travelled. I think I may have grown spiritually for a bit, and then shrunk again. All I can remember about it now is that it talks of delayed gratification in a positive light. Years later, I remember this book each time that I consciously don't delay gratifying myself in whichever ways I can. My life is all about gratifying myself as fast as possible. As soon as I have an idea about gratifying myself in some new way, I'm at it. But having read the book, I now realise this is why my life seems so empty and my existence so shallow. And so much fun. I may be spiritually bankrupt.

But the search for iPod pleasure is different. Last time I went on the road (/ rail / river / yak trail) I took only a few CDs and no player. Despite having amassed 38GB of MP3s, I listened to practically none of my music for six months. So next time is going to be different. Hence the desire for an iPod - the sleekest, best designed yadda yadda yadda MP3 player around. Instead of buying one as soon as I thought of it, I decided to wait. To see if I would grow spiritually. For over a week. I grew spiritually each day my gratification was delayed. Then today I went to Tottenham Court Road and its world famous electronic gizmo and gadget shops. Rejection after rejection met my requests for an iPod. I tried fourteen shops, before I was finally able to extract some useful information from one unsalesman. Apparently Apple aren't supplying them any more. Can I really wait for another month until a newer version is released? I doubt it. By that time my spirit will have experienced more delay to its gratification that it can handle. I might explode.
posted by Garreth at 11:02 AM

Fan Club :  When I was a nipper, "the Fan Club" was synonymous with good times in Leicester. The Fan Club would let underage drinkers dance to mad music from Manchester amidst a gaggle of goths. Doormen, and I use the term loosely, were less interested in the age of the fun loving criminals within, and more interested in occasionally taking the club owner hostage and robbing him blind, or leaving him tied up in a room behind the bar while they made an exit with the door money.

But now, the fan club for me means my personal fan base. These are the people who send me presents, send me emails and buy me drinks in bars. And occasionally point out that I shouldn't be drinking lager during lent. Once more, last night I may have lapsed with the lager abstinence. Friday evening rules meant that after beer o'clock, eating was cheating, so I can't really recall too many of the details. But finding a packet of peanuts in my top pocket, and 500,000 turkish lira in my back pocket when I wake up on the sofa is always a bad sign...
posted by Garreth at 5:40 AM

Tacks and thorns in my side :  "Taxation itself has become a metaphor for philanthropy and a generally perceived panacea for all society's ills", or so they say.

Tax is complicated. Tax is no fun. Tax isn't very exciting. Bunch of arse.
posted by Garreth at 5:29 AM

4/11/2003

Conservation :  A bunch of ex-Balak Greenforce volunteers hooked up in Richmond this week. Predictably enough, the police took young Joe aside after he showed them his arse. Predictably enough, people forgot to eat anything as they quaffed fine lager (sorry Jesus).
posted by Garreth at 11:15 AM

Bleeding eye sockets :  Being in a sauna when someone throws water on the hot coals is painful. Your otherwise useful skin, which kindly keeps your blood on the inside, now becomes a source of intense discomfort. There's a burning wall of steam which envelopes your body, threatening to burn through the very fabric of your body, then to heat up your vital organs like one of those boils-in-the-bag meals grandparents unwittingly buy for their student grandchildren. Steam scalds the inside of your nostrils and you become aware of the tightness of the bends in the curves of your nasal passages, as these turns force the steam into contact with your sensitive membranes. Its like snorting Deep Heat. The less robust sauna inhabitants start to fill the sauna with a burble of profanity, as they pray that their eyes don't boil and explode.

Now, it is a widely held view that saunas are good for you. This is probably the result of extensive advertising by deep undercover scandinavians anxious to shift lots of pine. Its like vegetables. People think they're good for you. Why? Because arable farmers tell you so. Because vegetarians tell you so. Are these people to be trusted as impartial? Certainly not. Anyhoo, I believe saunas have regenerative effects, especially as they can take your mind off stinking hangovers. By making you want to get out of your burning skin.

So the hotel selected for our sojourn in Copenhagen was sauna-positive. We saunaed now, we saunaed then. There was much dehydration to herald a new dawn of drunkness. Endurance limits were surpassed, and then came the vodka sauna. A big impression had once been made upon me by some Russian engineers. They showed me photos of themselves in a sauna, wearing fur hats, and necking vodka shooters. Thinking about it, it seemed obvious that in the same way that you had a grade of wine suitable for cooking, you would also be able to get a similar calibre of vodka. Saturday morning thus saw our intrepid trio, in the sauna with an ice bucket and a bottle of Dansk vodka - the nearest I could find to cooking vodka.

Throwing vodka on the sauna coals. What a great idea. It makes you feel faint. It makes your eyes sting. It burns your throat. But best of all, it makes you drunk in about five minutes. Wahey.
posted by Garreth at 11:11 AM

4/07/2003

Boat Race - "Have it!" shouts unruly pundit :  In a rowing race between two crews evenly matched in their dramatic lack of ability, Oxford's team prevailed over that of Cambridge, in yesterday's annual battle. Viewing the race from the banks of the Thames is billed variously as "Splendid, what ho!", "Full of toffs", and "A good opportunity to strew drinking detritus on a riverbank." I quite enjoyed myself at the event I must say, though I didn't manage to see any boats, despite forming a human pyramid with two chums. I didn't even find out who won until this morning. But what my gang of revellers, (which peaked at three in number, but was punching far above its weight) managed to achieve included:

• winning several teddy bears in a skittle competition
• torturing a teddy bear
• decapitating a teddy bear
• burning a teddy bear
• burning everything that wasn't nailed down until an angry man came and shouted at us
• throwing a teddy bear upstream in the river, and then dramatically rescuing it
• kicking many things from atop a wall into the water
• kicking a wall by mistake
• mixing Pimms, cider and bitter inside a human

Not everything was successful though. I personally failed to push over a portable toilet that some f*cker was inside after he tried to push the one I was in. I failed to get past the bouncers at a riverside pub, being unable to walk, focus or communicate intelligently. But I did succeed in getting home and passing out by about 8pm, though I have no idea how, or what the plant pots are doing strewn all over the floor of my flat. Interesting.
posted by Garreth at 7:11 AM

4/03/2003

Product Review: Walls Micro Sausages :  Who isn't a sausage lover? Even those muted vegetarian types have Linda McCartney sausages. How did they get so much sausage from one woman? No-one knows. Now, it's tempting for serious meat munchers to pour scorn on the vegetarian sausage, and indeed on the vegetarian herself, but take a minute to think about it. The more vegetarians there are, the more meat there is left over for everyone else. Scarcity of decent meat is a big problem.

Most people are now aware that there are just too many people on the planet, and its getting worse with people fornicating all over the place and begatting left, right and centre. There's not enough sausage to go around. There are a few ways of tackling the impending global sausage crisis. The first, harping back to ancient times, is to encourage major religions that sausages are the devil's work. More recently, whole swaths of society have been convinced that sausages are in some way unhealthy by-products of mechanically reclaimed carcass offal, and likely to result in heart attacks, clogged arteries and extensive cross-dressing in bad shoes.

A second approach to avoiding the looming crisis is to simply reduce the number of mouths competing for sausage. A large number of agencies are trying to cull the people population. Out-and-out war is one of the blatant culling techniques yet hardly the most successful in terms of numbers. More effective population control techniques involve spreading allegedly incurable diseases in the developing world, the destruction of family values in the west and the consequent auto-euthanasia of ageing senior family members faced with the prospect of life in retirement homes. Less immediate forms of genocide are the widespread government-supported distribution and sale of narcotics to the vulnerable members of society. Ecstacy, which in the UK is subject to minimal state-taxation and is available for less than the price of even quite a nasty cocktail, is reported to be a major factor in dropping fertility rates amongst wide-eyed hyperactive youths.

Not all of these measures are enough though to ensure a long-term sustainable and agreeable sausage-to-person ratio. So revel while you can, before you're having to queue up for seven hours outside a heavily guarded hot-dog shop, just to watch a celebrity polish off a banger. Make hay while the sun still shines - and fork out 99 pence for 275 grammes of Wall's Micro Sausages. For your quid, you get just under 73 grammes of pure fat, and some other stuff with scientific names too long for most people to pronounce or remember, which I guess is the point of long scientific names. Within a minute of opening the packet, you can feast on a microwave cooked gristle sack, a steaming, articially-browned offal tube.

Actually, they don't taste too bad. If you thought McCain's Micro Chips were actually a nutritious contribution to convenience cuisine, they could be right up your alley.
posted by Garreth at 10:57 AM

Three Musketeers in Copenhagen :  Copenhagen is a great place for the dipsomaniac visitor. The mood for our recent visit was possibly set when we were handed free Baileys at about 8am at the airport heading out there. That's where it all started. After that, I tried to take a photo of every round of drinks. Some we bought. Others were curiously delivered to us free of charge by a Danish landlord. On our way somewhere on Saturday afternoon, we stopped at the first pub we came to for a swift half litre. The pub had a pin billiards table, and draft Tuborg. We stayed for a few rounds, and then were befriended by a succession of Danes.

The free drinks commenced at the landlord's request. He reasoned that everyone in the pub should get a free drink when Denmark scored a goal in some national football match. A combination of Saturday's voracious thirst, and the landlord not counting on the Denmark football squad's tremendous ability to score goals, left the pub out of draft Tuborg in no time. I was mildly disappointed myself, given that I had given up my lager abstention specifically for the Copenhagen trip. Lent could wait, I was in the home of Carlsberg, where Special Brew is made by appointment to the Royal Danish Court. This was a country that knew its pils from it pills, and I was not about to miss out on the yellow fizzy stuff of legend.

Harmony with the local Danes who had tought us Danish billiards and brought us 'Fish' led us to stay, despite the Tuborg shortcoming, at least until the end of the football match, we reasoned. Never look a gift horse in the mouth and all that. Besides, there was bottled lager. And more 'Fish'. Fischerman or 'Fish' is a liquorice based spirit, foisted on us by our new friends. After necking several free shots provided by the landlord during an unprecedented streak of Danish scoring, we were told that it wasn't required to put the Danish delicacy down the hatch in one swift motion. But it was too late. The shots were away. Given that food for the day had consisted of peanuts from the bar and the odd tiny toasted sandwich (ham and cheese - natch), given that Denmark were scoring faster than a sailor on shore leave, and given that we had done nothing but drink since 3pm, I was feeling rather worse for wear after about four hours of the relentless onslaught. When Denmark scored us a fifth free drink, I almost couldn't bear another Fish.

After the football game and my liver had finished, our friendly Danish pub mates had informed us that another tradition was to smoke hashish outside the pub. Luckily for us, (for anyone of any sense knows that uninterrupted lager quaffing over a six hour period followed by hearty joint toking will lead to confusion at best,) we had been informed the previous day that the Danish dealers had downed scales, and were on strike. Saved? Not really. Danish Brian insisted on giving us a lump of hash anyway which he sent someone to procure at short notice from a scab dealer. He then proceeded to invite a friendly hippie over to roll us a fiendishly strong joint. Against better advice, joints were partaken of, toilets were collapsed in, and lampposts were clung to for dear life.

Though I think not looking a a gifthorse in the mouth is fine in theory, next time I'll try to check the teeth of any Danish Hippies bringing spliff.
posted by Garreth at 6:22 AM

4/02/2003

Copenhagen and the Friendly Danes :  We joined an anti war march that was passing our hotel. This gave us a great opportunity to follow people who would lead us to the town centre (a bonus when lost in foreign parts), while allowing us to be counted. Hey, when I was one of a million London marchers, I made only a small difference, but in Copenhagen - I personally boosted attendance by about three per cent. The friendly demonstrating students with their bicycles were terribly polite. They explained all sorts of things. They even told us of a pushers' strike in Christiania. This is basically an old hippie place where hash cafes are tolerated. The details are at best sketchy, but the fact that the local dealers were on strike, and someone had been kind enough to point that out to us within a few hours of touching down in lovely Copenhagen sticks in my mind. They even gaves us beer so that we could "drink against the war". Very sociable the Danes. And prone to giving away beer at the drop of a pastry, as we were soon to discover...
posted by Garreth at 1:49 AM