fast food for thought

2006-05-03T00:31:00.000+01:00

Before you think the rant has been beaten out of this ageing old rug with a broomstick, and I was beginning to think so myself, think again.

I landed in Nice today for a conference in Cannes. I know this sounds exotic, but it's not. Nice looks, well, nice. Something is nice when it's not interesting. It is closely related to Blackpool and Durban, it's Durban in the late seventies with a twist of lime and a dash of Redbull. It's sickly sweet, caffeinated and tastes like shit. Too many graying old farts with ebony prostitutes and too much wearing of white. It's trashy, Las vegas à la française by the sea. There are shops providing lip tattoos and botox for the ladies, in plain view, lunch hour treatment.

The whole experience is a blast because it's a business expense, I'm officially here on a business trip for a software conference, so if you want to call it work, be my guest. The day consisted of a reception where we, the valued customers, the delegates got to mingle with each other and exchange fascinating technical jargon; 'So, how have you deployed your metadata integrator?'

I entertained myself by conducting a small critique on the canapes, which weren't bad since I went back for seconds and thirds. The wine was not bad either and I met up with a few old colleagues, we all joked about how the good old days were over and how hard life was. I was invited to dinner on a private beach for the Swiss delegates which was, well, nice; as in not very interesting. Once again I entertained myself with a small critique on the food. The food was good and the wine was superb.

My colleague from Cologne was interesed in investigating the nightlife in Cannes, which one would expect to be riveting and debauched, sadly it was neither. The only place we could find was an Irish pub, Morrisons. We decided to ask the very good looking blonde barmaid where the nightlife was and as the complex algorithm began to work her two blonde braincells into an answer, we realised we were not going to get one, it was clearly too much to ask. A drunk Frenchman, now the only thing more unreliable than a Frenchman is a drunk Frechman, decided he would direct us to 'downtown'. His directions consisted of 'Zis way zen zat way and Tack Tack Tack. I shit you not.

A few more propositions later led me to believe that what he was thought was nightlife was infact some paid for sex. We found ourselves back on the seafront with nothing to do. I proposed that we go back to hotel as my motto is if sleep is better than what you are doing at the time, then that's what you should be doing, sleeping. We found a series of bars and entered one of them. Another blonde in Burberry opened the door to let us in to the cavern of deceipt. We order two beers, pay 20 Euros and get on with it. I'm elsewhere because I can't hear a fucking thing except Eurocrap being pumped out of the sound system. I get the urge to ram a 1500W speaker down the throat of the Disk Jockey/Idiot to see what kind of output I can get. There's a group of alpha idiots chasing tequila slammers, they've hit the happy stage of drunkeness and they're hugging eachother, the love is all around. I fumble in my pockets for a spare handgranade, pull the pin and slam it down the throat of Alpha Idiot number one. My beer is nearing empty and we realise we never got any change back. 2 beers can't cost 20 Euros so we query with barman who conveniently doesn't understand a word we're saying. We get the messages through to him, short of drawing pictures and saying 'donnez moi 10 euros, cunt'.

He compensated the attempted theft with two free shots of Cointreau after which he stole our lighter. It appears the only thing more untrustworthy than a drunk Frenchman in Cannes is the place that's making him drunk.

Back to the hotel for some sleep. I shall report back.

2006-04-24T13:51:00.000+01:00

The cracks in Winter's face have appeared, her frozen mask has been shattered and spliced by the Sun. High Spring is here, it's beautiful. The turning gravel can be heard as lifelessness picks itself up and dusts down, brushing away the cobwebs of introspection and cryogenic contemplation that gathered in its wintery grave.

Saturday met me with warmth. I turned the steel shutters outside my bedroom window to let slender beams of light squeeze through, enough not to blind me but enough to mimic the rings of Saturn on my wall. Shades of gray vying for sparkle and brilliance splashed on the wall, dust particles float as if suspended by time. It's magical.

It would be a shame to let the day pass without making the most of it and since nothing in Switzerland is very far away from anything else we decide on a train journey to Luzern.

2006-04-21T16:14:00.000+01:00

Perhaps I’ll continue, in a more factual manner to write. Please note that if I do it will be for my own personal record. Going back and reading one or two years ago, even though it was in a more detailed and embellished way makes me see the value in writing it all down. So much slips through the cracks and the slightest whiff can spark the memory to pick up a scent on the time and place, who and where we were.

It never ceases to amaze me how quickly things can change, the pace of things causes life to streak and blur. As exilirating as it is there should be no need to let the delicious moments get lost in time or blend into the ever increasing span of our conscious collage. If we want to measure our place in time, we need givens, constants and variables. Take our past as a constant, our present as a given and the future as the variable.

The struggle of man against power is the struggle of memory against forgetting.

Milan Kundera

2006-02-20T13:09:00.000Z

It was pointed out to me that my last two posts contained, or started off with '... has come and gone...' - One of the occasions being Christmas and the other my birthday. I'm not sure if this is of any significance, that my life should now be measured by the arrival and departure of occasions.

The weekend came and went. My mother arrives tomorrow for a vist, she'll leave on Friday. I'm telling you this so that I don't repeat myself next Monday by writing that my beloved Maman has come and gone.

I have been experiencing a lull of late. I'm not sure if it's the weather that has been heavy and looming, the skies are constantly overcast, cloudy and gray. Climatic pressure that makes me feel lethargic, listless and in need of sleep therapy. I haven't had a holiday in the sun for a year now and even that wasn't a holiday enough, two weeks is simply not enough.

The rant is gone, in general, out of life. Maybe it's just dormant, sleeping and gargling through a long dream, nightmare maybe, getting ready to wake with furious anger when it shall then set upon any willing or unwilling subject for a roasting. I can't say it's the Alps and that there might be some magnetic force for the good of all peace and calm... now I'm talking shit. They say in Cape Town that the mountain, the mahntain is a great big lump of magnetized crystal or granite, that its effect is one of peace and calm, tranquility. This might ring true for all the Caep-Tahn-fully-mah-bru types having a toke on its sides every day. But what about all the others down in its shadow, stabbing and robbing, raping and pillaging. Make no mistake it's a wonderful city, but there's just too much shit going on for there to be any fucking mahntain force that governs peace and harmony.

2006-02-16T08:51:00.000Z

My girlfriend thinks this is funny...

2006-01-31T15:57:00.000Z

My birthday has come and gone and for the first time that I can recall, someone has placed me younger than I am. I got an SMS from my brother who told me that I was no longer a spring chicken, the big 32. A year younger than I am. So what should I do? Lie down and wait to die? It's all a matter of perception, since my boss told me that I was exactly that, a spring chicken. I'll go with the boss on this one.

I think culture shock is kicking in as I can't sleep. This has been going on for nearly two weeks. My dreams are more like nightmares and of the broken record variety. They get stuck in a meaningless loop and I'm aware of it. I'm asleep enough not to be able to get up and try to clear my mind and I'm awake enough to know I'm stuck in a loop and that I'm not really asleep.

I listen to the hurdly-gurdly of Swiss German around me, everything I see makes sense and it's all easy enough to traverse. I think moving on is easy, it's what you leave behind that's hard. The process of forgetting, not forever, but the little habits and trivial nuances that were once steadily part of our lives, are gone and are slowly being replaced by new ones.

I like new, I love it, it's refreshing. But that doesn't mean I can't wait to get up in the morning and get on with it. It'll pass, I'll adjust, we're animals and that's what we do, we survive. Besides, it's not like I've landed in dangerous territory, this place is the benchmark of civilization.

I bought myself a present, a nice big laptop. This way I can keep up the writing, capture these thoughts and process them, channel them into something else even. Although things are going to heat up at work and keep me busy, I don't see myself doing things like spending dedicated time with the idiot box. I don't understand any of it. Although this can be entertaining enough sometimes when you can indulge in a bit of making up your own dialogue. There is only so much time one can spend mindlessly flicking through crap. When I've got my apartment I'll be able to get the BBC channels, my umbilical chord to the Anglicised world.

Books are good, even the bad ones. I bought a pile of books at the corporate book sale, 5 Francs for 3 books so if the title read in English it went in the bag. I can report on the worst book I've ever read, other than 'The Celestine Prophecy' - who's readers should be rounded up and publicly flogged. The bad book in mention is called 'Bikini Planet'. It's about a cop in Las Vegas circa 1969 who is criogenically frozen by the mob for 300 years. When he emerges from his antique pod all this time later, much to his surprise everything has changed. And so he embarks on the worst space journey ever. I bought it for the blurb on the front of the book that said 'A billion monkeys working on a billion typewriters for a billion years couldn't have come up with this one' (Paul J. McAuley, remind me to skin him with sandpaper and paint stripper later) - it didn't take me long to discover that this was true. All those monkeys on all those typewriters, given a lot less time would in fact come up with something much better.

I think there should be an investigation into who writes these comments on the front of books. My bet is that they are false, made up by the drunk janitor in publishing houses. They forgot that in the evolutionary scheme of things we are those monkeys after millions of years and that any one of us could do better. So David Garnett, if you're reading this, your book is the worst I've ever read. To tell you how bad it is, I'm proud to say that I put it down and left it to gather dust some five pages before the end. I am ashamed of myself for having made it that far. You sir need to evolve as a writer or leave the fucking typewriter alone. Your work is not fit
for monkeys. To Mr Paul J. McAuley who wrote the blurb and who appears to be a writer himself, shame on you for having to stoop so low for payment. I shall make a point of never reading any of your books for fear of them being equally primitive. Paul J. McAuley should be publicly flogged as well.

I left a review of the book on Amazon, perhaps this is my new calling, perhaps this is one way I can make a difference, If I can stop at least one person from reading such crap, I will have saved a life. Apparently I was not the only one who thought it was a total waste of time, I'm the in the majority. One other review muskateer called it Froth. You have to love that.

I feel much better now.

2005-12-27T10:01:00.000Z

As you know I’ve moved to Zürich, so far so good. It’s been a relatively smooth transition with the new company pushing the boat out, red carpet on board, to make sure I settle in and stay. With the costs involved in finding and keeping competence these days, it’s what they have to do.

I was very happy to get rid of my last corporate owner. Middle-management was the order of the day with generous helpings of pathetic process and general chaos on the side. You can only see things clearly once you move on, and since I’ve been gone I’ve realised just how bad things were with in-fighting, managerial bitches ready to scratch eachother’s eyes out in order to preserve their own little piece of the non-existent pie. It was a case of dying embers and who in the hierarchy was going to get pole position to keep their little asses warm and safe from the cold winds of change.

It’s funny how environments and situations carry themselves away. My last corporate owner was caught up in its own vortex, a dog chasing its own tail, a sick dog that needs to be put down and laid to rest by the great corporate vet. The company is booming on the NASDAQ, but the little people, the fraying ends who don’t matter at all are blinded by the dark hyponotics cascaded down from above. The little people believe that they are vital parts of the machine, that they count, that they matter, that they are important and irreplaceable. It’s only human to want to feel that you have made a difference, that what you’ve done matters,that you leave some legacy of contribution. It’s sad however that in this industry, IT, everything we work with is virtual, nothing really exists, nothing has a lifespan beyond 6 months – nothing really matters. So let’s all get a bit of perspective, get our heads out of our assholes and look at ourselves objectively, I am of course referring to my previous corporate owner. We are shit that doesn’t matter.

So long and thanks for all the fish.

Christmas has come and gone. Another one, another year-end looms and I look back with a sense of momentum and achievement, we learn from our mistakes. A year ago I started a new job that I saw myself in for at least 3 years but in the process I managed to exceed my expectations and jump the gun, I only had to serve a minimum of the time and I now roam amongst the Swiss. Slick bankers and their fur-lined wives who’s only worrry in life is what to buy next. Marvellous.

I spent Christmas in Basel with Alex’s family. It was a warm Christmas with plenty of good food, vin chaud, foie gras, aspic, sauternes, turkey stuffed with rabbit, liver and chestnuts, gratin cardon, pommes dauphinous and panetone. All of the above making great boxing day sandwiches and picky things. I felt self-obliged to accompany the family to church on Christmas eve. I did this for 3 reasons, 1) why not? 2) it would be strange to leave the boyfriend at home alone 3) in some fateful booze-fuelled accident I might have set fire to the tree and presents. It was the safest thing to do so for once I saught refuge in a Church.

The church was old and dark, lit only by candlelight as they were doing their bit for the environment by not using electricity. At one point we had to go forward and gather in a great big silent circle. A robed man came round offering bits of bread to the crowd, I stood behind, outside of the circle as I thought in circle language this would indicate that I was not intending to partake in the meal, I had just eaten half a turkey and was already about to burst. I held onto the piece of bread that was thrust upon me until Alex asked what I was going to do with it. Was I going to wait for it to become a doughy mess and then make little things with it? was I going to throw it on the floor? Did she want it? So I put the argument of what the little piece of bread represented beghind me and swallowed it. As the congregation stood in contemplative silence and the deafening silence resounded like white noise through the great big hall, the little piece of bread got stuck, my solar plexus went into a spasm and one almighty hiccup sprang forth. It started a fit of giggles that left tears streaming down my face and me looking for the nearest exit.

All in all it was a good weekend. I am over fed and over rested. I’m back at work now getting ready for a visit from the auld scotch piss artist next week.I’m looking forward to it.

2005-11-29T12:29:00.000Z

What's in a name?

I was recently contacted by a certain James Learmont. He lives in the UK, somewhere in Peterborough and had a few questions for me. I got an email asking for the names of my grandparents and where they came from. I replied immediately and within minutes he had sent me my great great great grandfather's death certificate and my great great grandfather's marriage certificate. I was amazed, astounded. James Learmont has been researching the Learmont line for a few years now and has put me in touch with Henry Learmont, a cobbler; my great great grandfather.

It was bizarre to talk to someone who knew the lineage of my family more intimately than anyone in my family, that I knew of. I know of old Bill Abbot who knows more than anyone else, there's Uncle Tommy who apparently knows a lot as well. The amazing thing about the Learmonts is that at some point our paths must cross, from Ayrshire, Kilmarnock, the Dumfries, we all have something in common; by blood and blood alone are we Learmonts

We identifiy, or I should say that I identify with my name, I feel to be a Learmont, I am interested in who I am and where I came from, if one wants to know one's self, you have to know your history, your ancestry, your blood line, your pride and heritage. I have written about Lermontov the scribe, Thomas the Rhymer, the true Thomas of Erceldoune for it is said that he could not tell a lie, the mythic Scottish prophet who was carried off to the Faerie land by the Queen, predicted the death of Alexander III of Scotland and apparently had powers to rival the great Merlin.

There are members of my family who I feel aren't interested, but I can't expect them to shift in the same direction as I do, we can't all carry the same weight, we aren't all alike and we can't all keep the candle of our identity burning. The few the proud. If you feel you need to extinguish what you are then so be it.

Two posts ago a comment was left by my ex-wife, one Petra Learmont. How strange it feels to see my name there, appended to someone else's name. I'll give you a little history. I was married for 6 months, happily so for two months, and bitterly for another two months, I then left and two months later I was divorced. That's a farcical peroid of time that I don't even remember, that has faded from memory, that has become meaningless and insignificant. But somehow this affiliation remains and I'm not sure I like it.

So I ask again. What's in a name?

My ex-wife has no interest in Tam Learmont's bakery, Henry Learmont's shoe shop, Thomas the Rhymer of Erceldoune, Mikael Lermontov the poet, James Learmont in Peterborough, my dead grandparents Granny Lady and Grampa Tom, my wonderful array of Aunts Isabel and Nacy and Uncle Tommy, my plethora of siblings, cousins, my neice and nephew. She can't possibly have any idea of what it might mean to be a Learmont, what it feels like to be a Learmont, she has no affiliation to the Learmonts, is not married to one, has no Learmont children, has no Learmont blood coursing through her veins, has none of the Learmont talents, in short, she is not and never will be a true Learmont.

So why would she continue to use it?

It can't possibly be because we were married for a significant period of time because we weren't, 6 months is 182 days is 26 weeks is 4368 hours, you get the idea. On top of that, it's been 6 years since we divorced. She has a life of her own, a child and a boyfriend and house they are building together. So why, after all this time does she need to continue to use the holy name of Learmont when it means as much to her as calculus to an apple?

Identity.

Some humans feel the need to reinvent themselves, in fact I think we all do that in many ways. But what we fail to realise is that a shift, change or growth occurs within one's self, that we are the masters of our own lives and identity, that we have ourselves to blame for who we are and that we have ourselves to praise for our accomplishments. Name theft is one way of cheating that process, it's much like buying a fake university degree online or a fake passport. The danger lies in when you begin to believe your new found identity, when you begin to make your own affiliation with it outside of its true domain, when you perform some bizarre strain of psychological home-kit alchemy and morph apples into oranges. It's simple logic, A = A, B = B, If A = B then A <> A. I am a Learmont because my heritage and blood tells me this, you are not a Learmont because you have no relation to my blood, you don't have my children and you don't know or care to further the Learmont lineage. You might as well pick any other random name. I wonder what her her boyfriend thinks, what her child asks her, 'Mummy, why do we all have different names?'

My sister's ex-husband, the lying, cheating, adulterous, philandering, stealing, murderous bastard took on our name. This is identity theft, name theft is for no other purpose than cheating either others or yourself out of the truth. Face the truth, face who you are, dump who you aren't.

Why is humanity so wonderfully interesting and so bizarrely flawed at the same time?

2005-11-07T22:39:00.000Z

see my photos on Flickr here

2005-10-22T09:57:00.000+01:00

I'm off to see Arsenal play at Highbury. This is significant because not only is it Arsenal's last season at the spiritual ground (they are movnig to a new stadium next season), but this is probably the last time I'll get to see them play. As many of you already know I am moving to Switzerland, so the closest I'll get to Premiership footie is on the telly. Those visits I've had to Highbury have been fantastic, the cold crisp air, the sharp floodlights beaming down on the green green grass of the pitch, making it all look perfectly manicured like some magnificent legoland cathedral in which we worship to Gods of football, the chanting of the 38,000 people in the stadium, the thoroughbred players thundering up and down in a battle that only ends in them falling over clutching some part of their body, wincing like great big jessies, calling out for their Mammas because the £100,000 they make a week doesn't compensate for the fact that it's too cold and they'd rather be tucked up in a blanket on the bench. They are more like prancing men-in-tights than hardened footballers these days, more like prima ballerinas than gladiators. But I love the atmosphere all the same. Arsenal are playing Manchester City who are my adopted team, my second favorit child of you will, only because they're not Manchester United. So I'm getting to see my two best teams battle it out while I enjoy a 3 course buffet with chocolates and coffee in the VIP section of the grounds, after the game we'll enjoy post game drinks.

I mentioned that I'm moving to Switzerland. I'm doing it for love, but it goes beyond that. On a professional level I've managed to exceed my expectations, the goals I set for myself three years ago when I returned to forge a career in IT in Europe or the UK (fog in chanel, continent cut off). I've landed a job in Zurich that is a big step up for me and is going to be a most welcome challenge. It will, I expect, be the most significant job on my CV and will put me in good stead to lead the professional life I have in mind until such time that I either devour it or burn out, drop out and find myself knee-deep in Laphroaig writing, or as a mature student studying the classics in some strange European university. Whatever it is that is set to happen, I feel confident and sure that I am doing the right thing, almost as if I haven't even had to consider it, it all just happened. My cosmic bank account is still clinking and jingling with the sound of karmaic dollars.

2005-10-12T21:58:00.000+01:00

Never get between an Englishman and his crumpet
-------------------- oo0oo --------------------

I lay on my bed, in a daze, slipping in and out of an opiate induced sleep, noticing from time to time that Alex was there with me. The pain in my side (not Alex) was intense and very uncomfortable, the slightest movement, cough, or even clearing of my throat would send a spear into my groin. I had to be very careful to remain still and quiet.

I heard the background hiss of drizzle outside, another damp and gray London day; you have to love this tropical island we live on. Phil was home, off sick and as usual when he has a cold he puts on his cozy ware, which includes a wooly Arsenal hat and tracksuit top. I heard the plop of his flat feet make their way to the kitchen, I felt Alex get up off the bed and leave the room. A few minutes later she returned sniggering, telling me that he was sat in front of the oven trying to get the grill to work. For some reason, if the time is not set properly on the oven it does not function. Alex came back to bed and regaled how he became irate, swinging a chair across and planting himself steadily in front of the oven, I could imagine this perfectly. He had the instruction manual open and was doodling about with oven buttons and switches, eventually flinging the manual away. As we chortled about this I told Alex to be careful, please not to make me laugh as it was painful. Phil was in need of tea and crumpets.

Minutes later I heard a loud, dull thud and then a hearty thump. The flat seemed to go dark, everything fell silent, there were no mutterings coming from the kitchen. I called out to Phil but there was no answer, so I called out again. My calls were met by silence. I wanted to get up and take a look but I couldn't so Alex got up at which point there was an outburst of swearing as Phil went thundering past my bedroom door, I asked if he was OK and I heard him mutter something about a major electric shock.

Alex went to investigate.

Phil had been poking the reset button with a metal device and received a shock which had thrown him off his chair and on to the floor. The crumpets were still in the oven, cold and uncared for. Phil was on the phone to the landlord trying to get instructions on how to get the oven going.

Alex and I laughed so much that I began to cry from pain, begging her to stop. I think I was more impressed by the fact that someone who wasn't English could see that you should not get in the way of an Englishman and his crumpets, especially not on a rainy day. All of that for a crumpet and tea.

It was funnier at the time, but I cannot forget this as I shall laugh heartily at the thought of it for a very long time to come.

2005-10-11T21:53:00.000+01:00

I've been bad, very bad. I left my Blogging duties like an abandoned orphan, forlorn and neglected, undernourished and emaciated by the side of the information highway. I know, I should practice what I preach and should be hung, drawn and quartered. Nearly two glorious months shall fade into time because I have not noted them with my qwerty pen. Most of these memories have been dream-like and not for public consumption. They involve tales of love and passion, travel and nights in foreign hotels, steamy nights too (and windows), like I said... not fit for public consumption. These are mine to remember, mine to lock away in a safe place and bring to light when I need them. Like nymph's green glass beads, I shall not give them to anyone.

A lot has happened and the thought of Blogging it all is daunting, only because I want to do so in the finest detail, and to do that I'd have to take a month off. Sometimes the fine tuning of everything steams my brain, whether it is the fine tuning required for life to flourish on our planet over hundreds of millions of years or the fine tuning involved and incremented cascading circumstances that take place for two people to actually meet, let alone whip the magic carpet out from under each other and fall in love. The numbers are large! What are the chances? What are the odds? I'm not going to try and work it out and I'm not going to explain. As I said before, I'd have to take a month off and even then I might not succeed. Before you think I've gone soft, and had my acerbic core gently canoodled from my jaded interior, I'm fine, I'm as grumpy as the day I was born. I was born grumpy, I have grown into a grumpy young man and shall most likely pass away very, very pissed off (but still able to laugh at it all and break wind whenever I feel I've been offended to show my dissatisfaction, even in public).

I am very uncomfortable at the moment and I need to reach out and take two of my little pain-killing friends. I had a hernia repaired nearly two weeks ago and it still has me in occasional spasms and fits of old-aged moaning and groaning. I had an inguinal hernia on the right side last year and now I managed to herniate again, this time on the left. I’m not too sure what brought it on, however I suspect that I might need to deploy a new and safer sexual technique ; maybe a system of pulleys or some kind of fandangle, a homemade traction device. I was fortunate enough not to have to endure NHS treatment. I love private medical, within days of diagnosing myself with inguinal hernia I was booked in to see the consultant and had a surgery date two days later.

Self diagnosis was easy. I was standing in a pub when I felt a sickening feeling build up inside of me, no position was comfortable, whether I sat down or stood up. It felt like someone had punctured my lower abdomen with a hot poker, routed it down to my groin and was rummaging around my scrotum playing hot potato with my slowly abacinating bollocks. I left the pub and went back to work to use the toilet. I waited in the toilet until I came to the eventuality that I would have to attempt the journey home at some point; rather sooner than later. I shifted to the station, holding my groin and getting dirty looks for doing so. I boarded the train to Paddington by which time serious pain had kicked in, I was beginning to sweat and lose track of where I was and what the objective was; to get home. On the train I turned green and began to buckle from the pain, groaning and almost delirious. The other passengers were shifting about and looking at me as if I was another London nutter. I got home, ran a bath and woke up an hour later looking like a prune soaking in a tub of Alex soup.

I went to the doctor the next day.

Telling doctors your own diagnosis is always funny. They don't like it, they need to know better and always raise and eyebrow.

'I have a hernia' I tell her. She raises and eyebrow.

'What kind of hernia would that be?'.

'Inguinal' came my reply.

The only thing she could do to defeat me here was make me drop my pants and hold my testicles in her hands. She knows I'm right but I'm not going to make any bold statements with my balls neatly resting in her hands, it just wouldn't be appropriate.

Doc 1 - Alex 0.

She told me to return on Monday to collect the letter of referral for the consultant. When I went to see the Surgeon at St John and Lizzie's, he seemed quite pleased that I had saved him the time of having to diagnose me and immediately took my word for it that I had indeed suffered a direct Inguinal Hernia. He didn't suffer from the same professional inferiority complex that the General Practitioner seemed to suffer from (which might explain why she was not a specialist), he was safe with his knowledge and quite comfortable to let me share it. Strangely enough, he too made me drop my pants and held my balls in his hands, but he seemed to do so for purposes of professional demonstration as he made the effort to point out that there was a veinal blockage of sorts. I avoided eye contact throughout, you never know. I was to go under the knife in two days.

I reported to the hospital on Thursday ay 16:00, accompanied by Alex (you'll be introduced to my Swiss-French belle in more detail at another juncture). We were shown up to my room, and this is why mentioned earlier that I love private medical, I had my own room with a bathroom that had Sanitised just for you stickers taped over everything. I was glad that I never insisted on same-day surgery and had instead opted for the stay-over. A nurse arrived with a clipboard and 1001 questions. When she asked if I had any medical history I suggested that she take a seat. With every question that was asked I could see Alex rolling her eyes as most of them were redundant and repeated. The anesthetist was the next person to pay me a visit. He was brief and fun and had a good understanding of my concern for adequate pain control; he assured me that I would be well taken care of in this regard. He was enchanted to meet Alex even though she admitted later to not understanding a word that was spoken between us. The Consultant Surgeon came in next to inform me that I would have to change into a rather fetching theatre gown which was held together by flimsy strings, which was when I asked if I would be further humiliated by being given paper pants made out of the same material as kitchen wipes (good use for recycling here). The paper pants were optional.

Alex stayed with me until her fear of hospitals got the better of her, she became nausious and almost in need of medical assistance herself. I recommended that she go and reassured her that I would call at the first opportunity. I had time to watch an episode of The Simpsons, which if I was a deathrow candidate would be one of my parting requests. I was taken down to the theatres when my time was up, and given that I once worked there when I first returned to the UK, I was met by a small group of old colleagues and friends of Tor (my sister who works there) who made fun of me and made me worry about waking up with a new and marvellous set of breasts, all the gay nurses took the opportunity to tell me that I would be suitably molested. I said so long as no appendages were missing, I was more than content to deal with any surprises. The good anesthetist dosed me, I remember him asking me if I liked that as I groaned my way into the ever encroaching darkness. I could oly have agreed with him.

I was told later that I was not sufficiently dosed as I seemed to wake on the table, I apparently raised an arm and extended my middle finger as if to say, well, Fuck You. I was given a further dose of the marvellous sleeping agent.

I woke up in recovery and was greeted by another of Tor's colleagues who wasted no time in administering morphine to ease my pain. I woke up some time later in my private room, and to be honest it's all a bit hazy from here on out. I called Alex to let her know that I was still in one piece. I must have said good things because she still wants to know me. A rather usless nurse came in far too often to take my vital statistics, my blood pressure, temperature and pulse. I was close the requesting that she banned from my room as she never seemed to be particularly interested in what she was doing, even in my state I knew that the device used to take my temperature, which should be put into the ear would not yield a very accurate result if placed on the side of my head. She wasn't even looking at what she was doing, if I had all my faculties she would have been properly chastised and banished from my sight. I awoke later in pain and was given two pills. When I asked what they were the nurse told me they were paracetamol. I promptly informed her that the good anesthetist had assured me of proper pain control which was when she asked me if I wanted morphine. I was under controlled circumstances and being funded by private medical, did I really need to point out the obvious? Dose me damnit, I'm not paying for it, make this pain worthwhile. I slept very peacefully, as you should imagine.

Alex came back to the hospital the next day to help me get home.

2005-09-04T16:29:00.000+01:00

It's been a peaceful day so far. I was intending to work this morning, pending my condition as I've contracted a cold from having recently been in airplanes, the virus and bacteria infested airborne flea-busses that they are. I also happened to ever so slightly over-indulge in fine Belgian beers last night, naturally the thought of sleeping till whichever undecided hour was far more appealing than dragging my congested lungs and sinuses onto a train and into the far off, dank and post-Friday-night-urine-soaked recesses of zone 3 for a few pounds sterling more.

So I did just that, I woke up at half past whenever, met Phil somewhere between the lounge and the kitchen and without a spoken word decided that the usual would be a good idea, brunch, frothy coffee and the newspapers. No need to even mention it; de facto Saturday constitutional.

The house has been toying with the idea of employing the services of a cleaner. It's not that we don't clean, well, the Learmont's do, we love it, we derive a great sense of sanity and satisfaction from it and it restores mental and domestic order. But why not get someone in for a couple of hours a week to do some deep cleaning that we can easily maintain, avoiding any resentment that might be incurred on account of all parties not participating in the practice of disinfecting in equal measure and with equal zest.

In the kitchen at work one day I mentioned that I was considering hiring a cleaner when one of my colleagues told me of someone she knew, a friend of hers was a cleaner and in dire need of more work. Now before I go any further let me deliver a little slanderous history on colleagues. When I first joined the corporation I was sent on a number of training courses to gain some supposedly deeper knowledge on the products I would be working on and supporting. I met two new colleagues there as well external delegates who has been placed on the same training course. There has been a particularly interesting documentary on TV the night before called The Power of Fear. It centered mainly on Al Qaeda not actually being, or having been, at the time of it's involvement in 9/11 a global terror organisation with the capability to mobilize itself with any devastating effect. That in fact there was no such real group called Al Qaeda who, run by the infamous bearded mountain goat that Osama Bin Laden is. That it was in fact America who invented this group on his behalf, named him as their leader and provided its virtual vastness and underground power. The mountain goat sat back picking sand and crumbs from his beard and thanked America for taking care of all the administrative red-tape involved in setting up Al Qaeda plc.

Politicians and the clergy have always used the power of fear to control society and use it as leverage for obedience and to gain our consent, under a hurricane of dizzying spin, to plan and execute whatever evils they would like in order to satisfy their own self-satisfying economic needs. In this case, we need not mention the securing of an oil pipeline in Afghanistan and the oil in Iraq, we need not mention the contracts dished out to those who flattened the place to rebuild it, using the oil as a down payment, the American administration divvying out varying proportions the oil to Bush and his oil magnate cronies. I won't go into a rant on Iraq, I'm sure, I hope that we are all in agreement here that the Bush administration is one of pure evil, their only objective is to make war, destabilize the world in order to push forward with a New Century of American Imperialism, along with the Neo Conservatives and the AEI to shove American democracy down the throats of the world, bombing them when they don’t swallow it and enjoy it. If not, please fuck off and never bother returning to my blog, you are not welcome as that would imply that you are a knucklehead Bible-bashing Bushite and in support of his destructive ways and you are contributing to the end of the world – I suggest that lock yourself away, read what’s out there, shave your wooly fleece and form and opinion, for right now, you are using up precious air that the informed amongst us desperately need to keep the Oxygen flowing to our noggins.

So, there we were sitting with our early morning coffees and Danish pastries waiting for the training to start. As I mentioned before I shot off on a tangent, to make the wait easier I got chatting to one of the external delegates about this documentary that I had seen, he too had seen it and had found it equally fascinating, fervent banter ensued. The two half-wits that I work with had not seen it and so asked for a brief explanation so that they could join in the conversation. First off, I object to this, there should never be any self-inflicted sense of social obligation to join in a conversation that is gaining momentum, it's quite acceptable to sit and keep your uninformed pie-hole closed if you don't know, don't ruin everyone else's fun by stammering along formulating knucklehead opinions on something that your being fed. Turn around, see the door? Now run, run until you can run no further, run a little more, just a little more, drop, wheeze, feel your heart flutter and splutter, feel the stabbing pain shoot up your left arm and walk undeterred and certain towards the light. I know I'm being biased, as I'm sure you can already tell that we didn't part the very best of bosom buddies.

The two colleagues deserve some kind of physical description so that I can henceforth refer to them with great unjust depravity. He is a gangly antipodean who knows nothing about everything and can’t leave a conversation between two people alone, feeling compelled to interject. He flops about like a disjointed rubber band, has little foamy bits of rabid spittle at the corners of his mouth and judging by his dress sense is a 30-something confused man trying to recapture or preserve some youth by wearing brightly colored sneakers and clothes that would have any basketball playing brother die of laughter for finally seeing a white man absolutely discredit the race. Now this might come across to some of you as hip, but this gangly insect who looks like he's about to swallow his own teeth in a fit of tetanus excitement shall here on out be known as Rabid Stick Boy.

She, well, I don't know where to start, think musty, think spinster, think split ends. She too has this crazed look in her eyes. She is a fundamentalist Christian who gets high on endorphins on Sundays and tops up on righteous radiation at her midweek get-together with her Bible-bashing Bushite kin and will remain in a state of preacher-induced hypnosis and ignorant bliss - a satisfied and I-am-going-to-heaven-and-you-are-going-to-burn-in-hell smile plastered across her face. She has been known to send spam emails to the entire company inviting us to church discos and the like. She has religious material plastered all over her partitions and is one of those who think Israel is for Christians when it is in fact property of those who believe Jesus was a rabbi and by no means the Messiah. She has a Star of David flag posted up to flutter about in the office. In retaliation I shall stick up posters of the Flying Spaghetti Monster, to whom I have recently pledged my allegiance, I have denounced the Jedi faith and become a dedicated follower and devout Disciple of the Flying Spaghetti Monster as, not too long ago, I too was touched by his noodly appendage. She shall from here on out be known as Frayed Ends.

The conversation having picked up momentum, the delegate and I were on the same wavelength, discussing the conspiracy, bashing Bush with our conversational batons. We discussed the lies we've been told, the secrecy, the blatant stupidity of America and Americans, Bush, bombs, oil, deceit and death. To quote a friend, I don't know what sound chickens make coming home to roost, but all this disaster in the world, seems to be it. Rabid Stick Boy and Frayed Ends start giving their two pence worth and it's not welcome. She starts going on about how the world is actually in danger of Al Qaeda, she believes they are a real threat to the world. Now get this, she starts telling us that George W Bush has been sent here to save us all, maybe even a God-send. I couldn't listen anymore, I had to be brutal and I withdrew my sharp tongue and lashed her with it. Opinions like those need to be dealt with severely. So I did just that, I stopped her like a sledge-hammer would a rodent. From that day on, until offering the services of her friend as a cleaner, she never even looked at me, never so much as acknowledged my existence. This arrangement suited me perfectly.

The doorbell rings out, I answer it in my usual brusque manner, it's the cleaner. I wait at the door, thinking that I've made an extra effort to clean the kitchen and house, I can't have her thinking we're a slovenly bunch. She emerges at the top of the stairs, a black head cloth and big hexagonal glasses with chains hanging down the side that cover her face. I invite her in and the first thing she sees is Phil marching about in his pants. Her goggled eyes scan the floors and peer round the corners into the lounge, surveying her potential mission. I usher her towards the passage trying to get her to the kitchen so that the meeting can resume. Phil retreats to his room leaving me to do the cleaner interview thing. I offer her a cup of tea or coffee but she wants water. Her eyes all the while scanning the corners of the kitchen, the surfaces, shelves and counters. I place the glass of water down on the table, make my cup of tea and start with light banter. I discover that she’s a Palestinian/Jordanian born in South America, hence the Spanish accent. Her age is indeterminate but I’d place her in the early 40’s somewhere. I look at her bag, on the side of it is written Astra Zeneca – mission to disinfect and I wonder if I’m dealing with a cleaning nutter. The conversation quickly moves to the point, what she does, what she doesn’t do, she doesn’t iron. She’s either cleaning or she ironing she tells me, if she’s cleaning there’s no time for ironing. Fair enough I think. She starts telling me that the place needs a deep clean, that it’s going to take several sessions of deep cleaning to disinfect the place. Jesus, and there’s me thinking that we’re clean-living people. She tells me that she works in a hospital and that the place needs to be bleached. I don’t like the smell of bleach and I don’t want my kitchen counters cleaned with bleach. I let the interview roll, she’s come all the way so I might as well hear her out. I can tell that she obsessive compulsive about cleaning. I ask when she would be able to come in and it turns out that her week is actually a full week with working at a hospital and studying and that she can come in over the weekend. This simply wouldn’t do, I don’t want some nutter in a mask and extra thick rubber gloves bleaching my house while I’m trying to do brunch, read the newspaper and drink coffee. The only other time she would be able to come in is on Monday afternoons, for four hours. Four hours? How long could it possibly take to clean the communal areas, the kitchen, lounge bathroom and passage? I don’t want to be home, padding about some obsessive compulsive cleaner in full nuclear fallout battle-dress frantically disinfecting my house. She keeps telling me that she has a condition that she needs to use the shower after she’s cleaned the house. I play it straight as if this is a normal request. She rattles off a list of cleaning materials she needs, several pairs of extra thick gloves because the bacteria found in the bathroom is not the same as the bacteria found in the kitchen and so on. This woman knows her bacteria; it must be some kind of love/hate relationship. She keeps running off and looking at the cleaning materials stored in the bathroom, then under the kitchen sink, looking the broom cupboard. I would need to buy cleaning cloths and towels and she doesn’t reuse anything, everything needs to be replaced, everything is disposable, the gloves, the towels, the cloths and I’m thinking this woman is going to cost me a fortune. She even wanted to size up the vacuum cleaner to see if it was up to her standards, it’s new I tell her, sucks like a Soho hooker who’s just been paid £10.

I had a hard time getting rid of her and it was only when she complained that we wear shoes indoors and that in her culture it’s different that I raised the volume and made it known that the interview has reached a state of completion.

We all discussed the matter over dinner last night and had a good laugh, the more we looked back, the worse it all became. I’ll call tomorrow and tell her we won’t be requiring her services.

2005-08-29T12:05:00.000+01:00

I returned from a great weekend in Basel last night. It was my second trip, the first of which has yet to be blogged and I hope the memory of it all hasn't lost its potency. It's all a bit of a dream anyway, so if what actually happened and what my mind saw differ, don't worry as you'll never know. If however you pick up on some embellishments, forgive me.

Low budget airlines are getting to me. Airports are hell-holes, at least the UK airports. Smaller European airports are easier and more efficient. As usual something set off the alarm going through customs. I had to remove just about everything and it still went off, I even had them inspecting the soles of my shoes. I got the usual shakedown and cold stare examination by the customs official. They look you straight in the eye for a little longer than is necessary, which I don't mind since I have nothing to hide. So I give it back, let them have it and they love it. They probably think there's some kind of customs official extra-sensory perception that not everyone has, that you need the nose for it, that somewhere in your bloodline granny had it off with a German Shepherd and your sniffer dog instincts tell you that this one, this motherfucker here with the nice Lusitanian shoes is packing. I let him sniff around my groin for a few seconds while he has a good feel at my ankles. Maybe they left the ice-cream scoop in my head when I had my surgery, I don't know.

It's not so much the airports themselves that I despise as they are after all cement shells, buildings, and ugly ones at that. I have never seen an aesthetically pleasing building. I guess it's like expecting a comfortable Lumbar puncture. It's the people that infest the buildings that piss me off. People turn into animals and the planes are their cages. I always think to myself, let the animals out of or put them back in to their cages when I see how they behave in places like airports or train stations. Low budget airlines have a first come/first serve policy, which is all bullshit anyway. The plane is equally uncomfortable wherever you choose to sit. It also happens to suit me to be the last to check in, actually. For some reason people want their precious window seats. I don't understand this, maybe it's midget mentality, with my long legs I need the isle seat and being seated in the isle and towards the rear of the plane, where one inevitably ends up being seated when you are one of the last to board only means that you are one of the first to exit the plane. I have a theory about being the last to check in as well, if your suitcase was among the last to be stowed away, surely it will be one of the first out, and hence one of the first to appear on the luggage carousel. So far I think I'm right.

Queuing breaks my balls when it comes to airports and low-budget airlines. Because of the floods of people there isn't actually any point queuing. The lines are broad and people spill out. There is always a category of total asshole who pretends not to see anyone and thinks that they are special enough to skip the queue and march up to the front, pretend they are confused, which in essence they are, much the same way as little crossbred dogs are because they've been stripped of all instinct, and then play stupid until someone relinquishes their place in the queue. Which is why the queue has become diffused and which is why this is all taking longer than expected. Such people need to be lashed until they drop and then gassed. What always amuses me is that they think they are going to get to where they are going faster. It's a plane, the plane is not going to leave as soon as your Highness, King or Queen of Preposterous Stupidity has boarded. So it's best to leave the animals to fight over the cage, to let the crowd demons possess the tortured souls who are panic stricken in this purgatorial portal of peregrination. I cannot help but feel amongst the dregs of humanity when in an airport, all of them on their way to a global idiot convention somewhere.

The flight from London to Basel is short and relatively painless, it only takes a little under 1^1/2 hours and given my sleeping condition it seems almost like a teleportation gone wrong. I think because of the trauma of airports, by the time I get on the plane, I can't stay awake and I feel like I've been dosed with enough Rohypnol to render a baby elephant unconscious. My one good ear goes into shutdown because of the pressure so I can't hear anything and I fall into an almost comatose state, periodically waking to hear babies wailing or people talking. Last night I jolted awake only to pick up bits of the conversation going on next to me that seemed to swing from dentistry to Camomile tea. Some people have a remarkable ability for inane conversation and drivel.

The plane was late going both ways. I think they are taking the piss as the pilot's apology was clearly read from a cue card and very well rehearsed, it was also the exact same message that I heard going both ways. I want to write a letter of complaint, but nowhere on the site or anywhere else can one find an address for complaints, which implies that they think they are above this and do not dish up shit. They do however have a page where you can submit rave reviews on how wonderful you think they are.

2005-08-23T15:13:00.000+01:00

I have just been for lunch. After unceremoniously sacking Carluccoi’s, I’ve been forced to seek out new feeding holes in Ealing. A Japanese restaurant I have found not only provides an affordable lunch menu, enough free green tea to keep the Imperial Japanese Army quenched, novelty sunken tables that no matter how uncomfortable they are to pry yourself out of, provide a certain charm when the waiter gets down on his knees to take your order or replenish the tea, but also has good food. No doubt I’ll do my usual and eat there day after day until a hair appears somewhere in either my food, the table, the napkin at which point I’ll develop a new neurosis and sack the place. Never to eat there again. I hope the romance lasts longer than the average lifespan of a lunch restaurant for me.

Every time I go there, which is nearly every day I ask to be seated at one of the sunken tables. The same waiter who always serves me always makes an attempt to seat me at the Sushi bar. I decline the invitation and he always responds appropriately given that I’m 6’3” and in comparison a giant with a voice that cannot be used silently. So when I mean to gently say ‘No, I’d like to sit there’, it’s boomed out over the restaurant and I’m granted my wish so as to probably avoid any further embarrassment as a result of an uncouth and possibly disrespectful Western trait.

Not today, no, today I left late for lunch and was not granted my usual sunken table. Today, despite my objections even I could see that there was no other choice but for me to sit at the Sushi bar. The waiter was most apologetic, administered a calming green tea, took my order of a Set D, Ramen soup with BBQ Pork and left me with my book.

Last night, whilst buckled in pain from either a burst appendix, a ruptured spleen, inguinal hernia, lack of alcohol or just a severe case of swollen testicles, I picked up a book that I bought some time ago on Amazon and started reading. I found it instantly readable. The book in mention is A Confederacy of Dunces. I only read about 10 pages before drifting off into an anesthetising sleep. So at lunch, when I always take whatever book I’m reading at the time, I resumed reading Confederacy. My soup arrived and I started to laugh as this was turning out to be, as far as my memory serves, the funniest book I have ever read. Well, apart from Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas, Withnail and I or All Families are Psychotic amongst others. I was crying, with my mouth full of noodles and pork, soup sloshing everywhere and from time to time I had to use my napkin to clear soup off the pages. Laughing is healthy, however I’m sure it wouldn’t take a Japanese monk to tell you that laughing hysterically while eating can’t be that good for you.

I was breaking out into fits of laughter mid mouthful, making it very difficult to swallow so I’d hang my head over the soup bowl, tears dripping, trying to chew, swallow and stop looking at the next line in the book as it would only make me erupt into another fit of suppressed laughter. Those times where my mouth was free to laugh, I chuckled and laughed heartily. I never want this book to end, it’s one of those.

A woman was seated next to me at the Sushi bar, she placed her handbag on the chair between us and ordered. I couldn’t contain myself and considered leaving the book but I couldn’t, I even considered taking the afternoon off work to finish reading it. This book requires, deserves a dedicated sitting. As I broke out into fits of laughter, people were looking up or over at me and I couldn’t bring myself to look at them, so my face remained buried in the safety of the Ramen bowl, spluttering, tears streaming down. She began to look at me nervously and moved the chair with her bag on it away from me and closer to her. I don’t blame anyone there for thinking I was a regular nutter as no one was aware of what was making me laugh.

I managed to get through lunch without choking or being thrown out. I was even promised that I would have my sunken table back, maybe it’s better for the restaurant if I’m left alone, at the back, half buried to cry and sob into my bowl.

This book, by the way, was written in the 60’s. The author, John Kennedy Toole wrote it and committed suicide at the age of 32. His mother found it nearly 10 years later and got it published. I can’t understand how a book that could in my opinion cure manic depression, that a book that funny, or that someone responsible for such a funny book could kill himself. The book won the Pulitzer prize and is a masterpiece, John Kennedy Toole not only destroyed himself, but also destroyed any chance of us getting more. Strange.

2005-08-21T12:13:00.000+01:00

Something has gone wrong with my blog, the archives for March, April, May, June, July and August are not available. They are there, but not through the Archive links. I am working to get them restored, but it looks like I might have to redesign the entire blog.

I've just had brunch, a funny one too. There were no eggs, other than quails eggs, so our fry-up looked like a Nouvelle Cuisine brunch with roasted cherry tomatoes, Quails eggs and bacon. Beggars can't be choosers, can they?

I tried to watch television last night. I have been preoccupied with better things lately and have been neglecting the idiot box. There's nothing on, it's crap, total and utter crap. It's a great big flat-screened monstrosity of technological idiocy spewing out beamed anesthetizing bullshit for the nation. I watched Pi on DVD which was both interesting and disturbing and inspired me to drop the fascination with numbers and the golden section. It doesn't help that I to have it tattooed on my body. The poor fella in the movie ends up taking a drill to his head. That is going to hurt in the morning son!

I'd had a headache for two days and nothing seemed to cure it. I've been drinking enough water, several litres a day and no amount of paracetamol eased the pain. I found some Nurofen and had a nap, which helped. I had a dream, in a Monet landscape, bright brushed fields and a French female presence, the dream was even in French which I must have understood at the time, but don't ask me for any translations now, it must be mon petit oiseau seeping in to my unconscious. It was nothing short of marvellous.

2005-08-20T10:58:00.000+01:00

The end of another week and I’m still feeling a certain calm after my break in Switzerland. I have started blogging it, but it takes longer than anticipated. There is so much that has to be remembered, so much that can’t be said, not here, and so much that should just be for me. I’ll give the facts, the occurrences, the places and the people – the rest is exclusively mine.

Yesterday was the corporation’s 15th anniversary and we were obliged to attend a BBQ and softball game. I was willing to make myself available for the BBQ, only because there was free food (which I knew would horrify me anyway) and drink. Yesterday’s rain made for a change of plans and instead of a sports day, we would hold a pub quiz. After receiving an over enthusiastic email requesting our passionate participation (???) – does this imply that we are to stuff our faces and drink as if possessed by drunken demons, well, they need to take these things into consideration before using terminology like that, you never know who you’re addressing.

I went, reluctantly, Friday’s aren’t good for me, not always, they carry with them connotations and only leave me feeling like I’d rather be somewhere else in contemplation and quiet tranquillity. A colleague suggested that we take his car as we were also expected to make our own way to the venue. Since neither of us bothered to print out the directions on how to get there, and given that he had left his GPS Navigator behind, we found ourselves getting lost, much to our amazement. We made several attempts to find the venue, and on our last attempt we decided that if we weren’t successful, we would do the right thing and go home.

Of course, we weren’t able to find where we were supposed to be and we were on the cusp of going home when I saw a sign planted like a lonely lunar flag in the middle of a roundabout. Without thinking, I pointed and said ‘there it is!’ at which point we both realised, with great disappointment that we were now obliged to go as we could never say that we got well and truly lost, that would be lying. I let myself down, I’m not supposed to be that attentive on a Friday afternoon.

At lunch time I made sure that I went out for lunch as I know by now to expect nothing but shock and horror at the food that would be available at something like a corporate BBQ. Walking along Ealing Broadway I was accosted by yet another person trying to get me to sign away a certain percentage of my life’s earnings to save humanity. The council hires out sidewalk space to organisations participating in professional begging. Antipodeans are recruited to help raise money for them. They are lined up, at distances of about 30 metres apart, and they descend on you with such enthusiasm that you can’t help but think they must be paid per signature. There is no way these young and dirty street urchins could possibly even know who they were begging for. They must be trained up in the morning TGI Friday’s style, and I can imagine some English version of an American optimist and energising sales enthusiasm booster getting them all pumped up for the day’s begging. Why do these scamps feel they need to behave like jesters in order to make you stop and chat? Flopping about, telling you to smile, can you stop and chat. There are two things you should never tell me, one is that I ‘Have to’ do something, the other is ‘Smile’. I’ll wipe the smile right off your face.

I regularly have to stop and tell the little mongrels that I work here, on this Broadway, and every day when I step out for lunch there is always an army of infected clipboard wielding clowns begging for someone else, that they are not the first people to ever blemish the street-space with their special brand of ‘caring’. I test their optimism and hope to the last, I give it to them straight and they are obliged to tell me to have a nice day. If they don’t, I’ve won you see - but what they don’t realise is that they never can. They might as well go and sell plastic shit made in china by walking around London neighbourhoods like a dirty little Dickensian chimney-sweeps with a great big overloaded bags of fake Swiss army knives breaking their backs, a well practiced greeting spewing from their hungry little gobs, getting door after door slammed in their sooty little faces, only to have their resolve tested time after time and eventually broken down to the point of dark and miserable depression. Have a nice day. Yes, I will thank you, nice kindly fuck off and leave me alone. Mind you, if this did happen to them they would only be replaced by another organisation begging to help save them from the sorry depths to which they’ve submerged.

Back to the BBQ – We arrived and made straight for the bar. People were hanging about looking as disjointed as I was feeling. I can never work out if its interesting or infinitesimally boring how people take on certain roles in groups, like alpha monkeys, beta monkeys, jokers, sages and bitches. The quiz was followed by a brief and infinitesimally boring (of this I am sure) history of the corporation. It was clearly compiled by two people, the guy delivering the questions and someone else who had to have been from Germany. All the questions were about the corporation and the rest were about German football. I was expecting questions like ‘How many people died in WW1? And name them.’

Thank God we were plied with cheap Champaign as this assisted in blocking out the pain and helped make the table cloth more interesting. We were then told to go and get food from the BBQ, one person from each team at a time, that way none of us could actually sit down and eat together, and that’s exactly what happened, we all got to sit in a rotation of watching one person eat, and as each person got to eat the others either sat with a finished plate or no plate at all. By this point I had given up and stopped thinking about it, now it was funny and the urine was there to be extracted. This was indeed the most interesting eating ritual I had ever seen. When I saw what was coming back from the BBQ, I shuddered and said a small prayer thanking Saturn and its beautiful moons that I was not obliged to eat. Everything, including the scrapings-from-the-abattoir-floor burgers and pumped-with-antibiotics-concentration-camp-battery-chicken kebabs were completely charred, black, properly burned, to a cinder, I’m not joking, they were actually burned, black.

I had a bread roll and a raw vegetable kebab. It was neither delicious nor satisfying, at least I could exercise my right not to get cancer from carcinogenic and charred fuel. Strangely enough, the building next to us on this sports ground had recently burned down, and the gutted and charred remains were there in all their glorious and hellish splendour, and I wondered if this was where they grilled the food, or at least used it as a source of fuel for what they called a BBQ.

I convinced my colleague that it was time to leave, so we did. I remained in a state of bewilderment as to how these people can think that we like doing this kind of thing, it’s as if we’re their ‘Sims’, or loyal little hamsters. Either that or I’m just a grumpy young man, a corporate Atheist, a non believer.

On a lighter note, as we all know, 6 months ago the daddy of Gonzo journalism blew his brains out because he couldn't take the pain in his broken leg, well...

Hunter S Thompson's ashes are to be shot into space by a cannon, read about it here

2005-08-16T18:03:00.000+01:00

I have not been blogging because I've been away for over a week, and what a glorious week it was. I had been scraping the bottom of the barrel of sanity, searching for morsels of patience, reason and purpose; I was in dire need of a holiday. My threshold was thin, gossamer thin and I was scared that rant would turn into a glorious and satisfying murder. For weeks I had become an insomniac with an eating disorder and not even the sight of my weekly deluxe box of organic vegetables could inspire me to do anything. I realised how dependent the household had become on my usually dedicated culinary habits. Good vegetables were being thrown away, tossed, neglected and forlorn, withered and wilted into the bin. I simply could not have been bothered. The remnants of fast food and the cartons became more common, sometimes piling up as the faces of the inhabitants of flat 192 became increasingly confused and discontented. Grumblings of people being hungry could be heard, when I simply could not have given a fuck. They can feed themselves I thought, I was falling apart and putting myself together again, fumbling with the loose bits and pieces of my being, looking at the stripped components and not knowing what to do with them; cooking was not a suitable therapy.

And what was it that was stripping me down to nuts and bolts? What was it keeping up at night clogging the flip-flop logic gates of my mind? For once I won't blame the seasons, not as we know them, but I will put a lot of it down to the seasons of life. I was hit by a meteor with a celestial body, a comet with a devastating diamond-dusted tail wreaking havoc with my evolution. Let's just call her baby bird.

----oo0oo---

3:00 AM, Saturday 6^th August

The familiar yet distant buzzing of the alarm wakes me and I'm brutally pulled from the stratum of semi-consciousness that I've been skating, the thin ice of floating dreams cracks and I'm plunged into the ice cold waters of the shower. I get dressed, check my bags, passport and wallet; everything's in order. I double-lock the door behind me on the way out, head downstairs and wait in the darkness of Maida Vale, quiet and peaceful as the neighborhood remains blissfully unaware of my movements and I appreciate the fact that I'm invisible and anonymous. My taxi arrives, I get in and tell the driver to take me away, far from here and step on it.

The bus stop is outside Lords and I swear that in the dawn light I can see the shadow of 'It's only Rock 'n Roll' still painted on the wall, a homage to the Rolling Stones. I love London when it's asleep. The bus rolls up, spurts its hydraulic sigh as the door opens, I pay my fare and watch London roll by as I imagine where I'm going. Finchley, Brent and on to Luton.

I've never been to Luton airport before and it's like any other London airport, small, busy and dirty. There are England football shirts everywhere and everything everyone is wearing is blue, red and white. When you leave London and prowl its perimeters, the outskirts, you'll see England, London is not England and Luton is not London. I don't like what I see. The men are rough, tattoos on every forearm, faded, jaded, blurred and run, indistinguishable and there is a serious lack of worldliness and intelligence. I'll be the first to admit that intelligence has got nothing to do with survival, and that in fact you're probably best to have a few IQ points deducted for general ignorant bliss. The women are gritty, they crunch like the grime beneath my leather soled shoes, they're rough as fuck, peroxide hair and mullet haircuts, cigarettes hanging from their mouths, the voices grinding away and their faces haggard, battered and cut from holidays in the Costa del Sol and Greece, like old saddle bags. Their kids are set to become crack addicts and criminals, little bastards with no proper fluency in any language, thugs with shaved heads and fringes that curl over - a haircut fit for an idiot indeed. In between the dregs of humanity is the odd clean looking European obviously going home, making the great escape.

I'm early so I decide to get a coffee, a little bird told me that they have good coffee at the airport and I need it. I get in line. A creature with black greased hair and yellow homemade tints in it, tight snow-washed jeans and trainers that stepped right out of the early 80's keeps trying his luck, he's trying to get in front of me and I want to squash him, I'm waiting for him to make a decisive move before I let him have it. He's a Balkan midget and I'll fucking lambaste him if he tries that one more time. I want to tell him that I'll stuff him with Bulgar wheat and drown him and his family in yoghurt if he steps over the line. He gets the message and backs off. I finally get served and I order a Caffe Latte and watch as the beast behind the counter takes to someone's coffee with a squirty cream gun, it's empty and spluttering shit all over the place, I want to run away, but I can't give Balkan boy my place in the queue. The beast looks at me after a few seconds and asks if I'd like milk in my coffee. I remind her that it's a Caffe Latte. I'm not surprised that she hasn't considered looking for work beyond this dump, beyond serving the primordial ooze that squelches around Luton airport at 5^AM

I make my way to the newsagent to buy a notepad and paper so that I can make a note of the horror I see. I pay and leave and head for the check in queue. Baby bird told me to check in early, these low-budget airlines have a first come first serve, or seat policy. I wonder how many people could possibly want to go to Basel of all places. You’d be surprised. I don’t know what some people are thinking, I’m standing in the queue and some roving crusty with dreadlocks that haven’t been cleaned in years stands next to me and slowly starts edging himself in front of me, I keep blocking him off and I’m not in the mood for his beggar, free-loading antics. If he’s not careful he’ll end up in the vat of yoghurt as well. Eventually he realizes that he’s not going to get anywhere and backs off. Does he really think he’s going to get anywhere faster by not abiding by the simple rule of waiting your place is the queue? Rabid and feral little runt and I think someone needs to domesticate the animal. I check in and make my way upstairs.

It’s like a neon casino up here. People hanging around to go everywhere, by the looks of it they’re all off to Greece and Spain. There’s a hall pumping out the sounds of fruit machines to get them all in the mood, it’s just gone 5 and people are already getting tanked, lager for breakfast, Jesus. I can’t wait to get out of here, on a plane and fly away, forget about the world, lose myself elsewhere. I get stuck into Voltaire’s Candide, it’s a roaring laugh, tragic, but so much so you can’t help but laugh. My flight is called, my time is up, heaven awaits and I pass through, into the light.

2005-07-29T16:18:00.000+01:00

It's the arse-end of Friday afternoon and it's been a trying week. A new system has been deployed at work, and never before have I seen such a supremely bad effort. I've decided that in most situations, the powers-that-be are fuzzy muppets. I need to become a process efficiency expert and sack half of the world. Swoosh-Swish-Hack-Schlop - heads roll, and it's for the best.

I had yet another spat with Carluccio's this afternoon, and it's my fault for going back and giving them my money expecting a fair return, like a decent fucking meal. They are on the verge of receiving a letter from me, and I might just do that for the fun of it, just to see what Fuzzy Muppet has to say. I know I keep yammering on about the failures of the service industry, I know they can't help it, which is why they are there in the first place, the service industry is where talent goes to die, where gormless half-life's make there beds, roam faceless, pallid, anemic and without any sense of awarewness through rows of people wanting what they are there to deliver. They don't get it, they just want the paultry sums of shrapnel from my pocket, my loose change, which, if they are not careful, I might actually stop throwing in the bin and start putting it on their little silver begging bowls.

I had a pasta there yesterday, which to their credit was tasty, and a perfectly measured portion. I don't like too much and I don't like to little. Today, because of the fatigue incurred over the week, I decided not to put any effort into my food plan, and I went back to Carluccio's. So unwilling was I to put any effort into my choices or thought, I ordered the same thing.

It came, quickly too, but so quickly because only half of it was there. I decided not to say anything, being the spineless squid that I can sometimes be, and thought I'd eat it anyway, full of resent and brimming with ever increasing anger, towards myself for eating it and towards the chef for plating it, and towards the plate-carrying camel who brought it to me. It was an embarassingly small portion, my seething anger didn't last very long on account of the pasta not being enough to last more than a few minutes. It was tasty though, whatever morsel was there on the plate. Once it was finished the waiter came along to remove the plate. I took the opportunity to tell him that we should all be shot, me, the chef and him. I asked him to convey the message to the chef, in my words, and to tell the chef that he should think what his Mamma would say if she saw a sad and pitiful plate of pasta. I'm sure Mamma would do nothing short of cut his balls off. Was there something she did wrong in bringing him up? Was he not Italian enough?

On second thought, that might be the probem, maybe he wasn't Italian, maybe he was from the Russian Steppes and used to surviving on a diet of Yoghurt and rat salad, scraps of breadcrumbs for croutons. When I left I had a brief conversation with another waiter as I couldn't wait for the one who served me to collect his begging bowl. The one who looked like a resurrected roadkill Koyote from a c-grade Zombie movie.

My hand twitches as Zombie Koyote encroaches, lumping along, leaving a trail of rancid waiter juice on the floor, green and slimy, his face peeling and grey, the dark rings under his late-night-working-coke-sniffing eyes make him look more like a Raccoon, the Russian Roadkill Raccoon. My hand twitches and in the split second I see Russian Roadkill Raccoon look longingly at my neck, he wants to suck the life and intelligence out of me, before I know it, he's splattered against the walls of Carluccios, ripped to shreds by the hail of bullets released by the trigger when I squeezed it.

I snap out of it, waiter boy, who was actually Tweededum from my last adventures in restuarant wonderland is talking to me. He's telling me that he's been released from coffee duty and has been set loose, like a stray dog on the floor, to serve people, to advise them on what's good to eat. He's thinking that he's been promoted from coffee boy to bus boy, but I know that he's been suspended from coffee making duty because the coffee machine had a higher intelligence quotient. He's complaining about his hamstring because now he has to walk the floor, he's telling me with his droopy eyes and sagging lips, his face like a lump of lard with palsy, that he's going to develop a good ass. I turn around, hold my face and rub my brow, there's a couple of kids sitting at a table, banging their knives and forks together, over, and over, and over, over, and over and over again. Their mother doesn't register, I lean in, really, I lean, raise my finger to my lips and tell them to be quiet, they stop and then look at me, with 4 year old 'fuck you' eyes and do it all over again, only this time at 3 times the speed. I admire the little bastards because they know, they know and sense that my present state of mind is on edge and that any attempt to stop them will be totally ineffectual.

I turn back to Tweedledum and tell him that the chef is taking the piss and that there'll be no tip. Chef fucked you OK. Now go and tell him. He tells me to express my discontent to the manager, I turn and see who he's gesturing to, it's the crocodile, still basking in the mellow glow of her own stupidity. I decide to walk, to get out of there as soon as I can.

The rest of the afternoon in the office was soothed by the nutty French lady, Hermine walking about with a bowl of lavender oil in water, waving it like the wee Catholic altar boys do their incense. Revitalising the workers, the busy little workers.

It does make me laugh really.

2005-07-22T08:27:00.000+01:00

London is losing the plot. This morning a fight nearly broke out at Ealing Broadway Station, over nothing. This is great, so now everyone turns on each other. Yesterday there were 3 failed bombs on the Underground, by failed I mean they failed to kill anyone. A bus was also bombed.

My general paranoia and anxiety is rising.

On a lighter note, scientists have created the matter that filled the universe milliseconds after big bang. By forcing gold atoms to collide at near light-speed, a liquid was formed and not the gas they expected. The liquid is said to be 'pefect', it is more free-flowing, it moves 'as one' - much like a school of fish. Read all about it here

'and the spirit of God flew over the face of the waters...'

A man was chased by 3 plain clothes police officers in Stockwell this morning, they managed to bundle him into the ground. Police are now trained for head-shots, as bullets could set of explosive belts. 5 shots were heard, can you imagine...

I've received a mix of replies on an email sent to the enitre office with regard to this morning's shooting:

Dead and guilty until proven innocent. As long as our "freedoms" and "ways
of life" are stoically unaltered.

Mr Whitby, told BBC News: "I saw an Asian guy run onto the train hotly
pursued by three plain-clothes police officers.
"One of them was carrying a black handgun - it looked like an automatic -
they pushed him to the floor, bundled on top of him and unloaded five shots
into him."

Some people thought it inappropriate, others loved it.

2005-07-20T11:47:00.000+01:00

I slept the sleep of the dead last night, it's been a while; my mental furniture is being moved about, the nights are filled with the grinding and creaking of wants and needs, the dusty halls of my primitive psyche are buzzing with demands for immediate satisfaction. Desdemona dusting me down, picking through the crevices of my mind like mental floss, finding hidden pearls and waking dormant desires. I am divided, unstable, yet content that my once, supposedly stable platform is being rocked. Life is happening.

I was talking to Tom Waits, right there, shooting the breeze. His voice like warm meat , freshly ground, the smell of whiskey permeating the smoky air. Dark and dimly lit by the overhead, shaded lamp carving a neat line in the black background, swirling pillars of blue smoke, alive and dancing disappear into nothingness. We talk about St Christopher, the drunken piano, Romeo and the fact that he’s bleeding, we talk about the girl with the sun in her eyes, and he tells me my heart was not meant to be tamed. I believe him.

‘Can I kiss you, and then I’ll be gone…’

-----------------o0o-----------------

I woke this morning feeling rested, ready to face the day. The days that have been grinding me down, inch by inch, battering at my spirit with a wrench, twisting me every which way, cranking me up to maximum torque, ready to strip my thread and come undone, then loosening its grip, on my reality, so far that I spring a leak, spray my feelings in all directions and I feel like I’m going to burst like a whistling boiler, steaming and screaming and dreaming, burning, red hot, like a pressure cooker ready to splatter everything in sight with bits of me, my very fibers left scattered, floating in the air like a million feathers, swept every which way the furious winds that blow command them to.

And I said I woke this morning feeling rested. In some bizarre way, all this turmoil is revitalizing. Maybe even some day, I’ll understand.

-----------------o0o-----------------

Croissant and Coffee...

I went to Carluccios for breakfast this morning; I was hungry and felt I could actually eat something without wanting to wretch from the anxiety that has consumed me. The place was disorganised and if I worked there in any authoritative capacity people would be crying, flying out the door, doing the 100 m hurdles to the nearest job centre; there would be sackings. The world has gone soft, soft and fuzzy.

It's past 8am. Usually the nice lady from Sanremo is there to ease me into the day, tolerate my broken Italian as I ask for the usual, Caffé Latte Milano and a Croissant, the only variable being the ham I choose to have on it. Usually the fridges and deli counters are packed, handsome and inviting, berry tarts, cheeses, hams and salami call my name, the Mortadella, however, sits there like an orphaned, unwanted lump. The nice lady from Sanremo is part of my program, she helps smooth over glitches, patches any cracks that may appear, makes me more compatible with the day ahead.

She's not there today and the counters are missing the usual medley of meats and cheeses. No mini calzones and pizzette to tempt me. I stand and watch two Muppets fumble with the coffee machine like two gas station attendants confounded by the pump, like two plumbers attempting a hip replacement. It’s all out of kilter and I think maybe they ought to dose themselves with some of their own caffeinated beverage, and lots of it, double it up… By the looks of the service staff, the human sales interface needs a pipe shoved in their arms, drips of pure espresso squeezed into their veins, a bus parked outside with jump leads ready to be applied to their chests and a few thousand volts rammed through their listless bodies until they scream, scream ‘service anyone?’, until their consciousness begs to serve those who pay their salary.

I finally manage to get one of the plate-carrying camels’ attention and the Gaggia coffee machine is still getting the better of the two fools trying to get it to work. I’m already dreading the coffee I’m about to ask for, but I need it, gasoline. I’m tempted to suggest that the manager buy them a Meccano set to help them learn simple mechanics of how to get the coffee into the handle and the handle into the coffee machine in less than 20 steps.

I ask the plate-carrier who’s now addressing me where all the meats are. She tells me they’re in the fridge. I’m tempted to ask her what they’re doing there, and instead of mindlessly standing about looking for the long lost brain cell that oozed out of her. Why doesn’t she wake up and get the meat from the fridge into the deli counter? Maybe so that I can see it? Maybe so that I can have some? That is, after all what’s supposed to happen here. My grandmother moves faster than you, and sadly she’s no longer with us, I want to tell her. But it’s not my job to tell her that, it might well be my duty to tell her manager, who I recognise as just another comatose crocodile basking in the mellow glow of her own stupidity. All sign of life has been doused by the damp blanket of below average intelligence.

I can see the clockwork ticking over, the rusted and broken gears of her thought process stammering into place, slipping back, jerking forward, 1 jerk forward 2 slips back, clunk-eek-clunk, the dimmed glimmer in her eye, like that of a dead fish, the smile on her face, not because she’s feeling particularly perky, it’s one of blissful ignorance, people who grin for no reason are either cooling their teeth or are not up to the challenge of thinking, much like a dog moronically bearing it’s teeth for no reason with a look in it’s eye, searching and pleading for meaning, ‘please tell me what I am, please – help me make sense of this, give me context, give me a purpose and a reason for being…’

She’s not aerating her teeth, because it’s not hot today.

I order a croissant with baked ham. She begins by playing some kind of snap with the colour-coded cutting boards. There’s a white one, a brown one and a yellow one. I can see the point of the white one, it’s for dairy, brown, ok – it’s for cooked meat. But the yellow one, it’s for raw poultry. If I saw one of these supremely uneducated and unqualified deli farm-hands cutting raw chicken here, I’d break out into a venomous rant. She then decides to clean the board with cheap, bleached paper toweling, at which point I’m intrigued because now she’s on auto-pilot and doing things to fill in the vast chasmal nature of her consciousness. It’s almost very good artificial intelligence, almost.

She retrieves a croissant from the pastries tray, which is about all there is on display, and places it down on the white cutting board. I can see confusion hit her and it’s the last thing she needs, she stares at the croissant for the better half of a minute, wondering how she’s going to go about this. She’s got two items to consider; a croissant and ham, and I think maybe I should encourage her, with her severe lack of mental capability to make a list, because mentally, she’s a black hole, dark matter and I slowly step back, step away. What if it grows and becomes all consuming? Anything more than 1 item is a list my dear, croissant, ham. Mise en place.

I make my presence known, it’s hard not to when you’re waiting for a fucking croissant and a coffee and you’ve got Tweedledum and Tweedledee behaving like stone-age man over the coffee machine whilst Gaping Chasm of infectious dark matter stares at the piece of layered, crispy basked pastry in front of her, as if it was an alien life-form.

The sprockets move and clunk once more, clunk-eek-clunk. She picks up the croissant and moves it, now you think I’m joking, but I’m not. I was beginning to think that maybe it was an intelligent croissant, well, it’s more intelligent that her anyway, but maybe the croissant is intelligent enough to open itself up and invite the baked ham in to peacefully co-exist as a delicious combination, it’s purpose, by design to fill my stomach before it fucking eats itself and I collapse in a shrivelled and spent heap on the floor of a trendy London Italian food store. Imagine that, dying of starvation at the hands of someone with an anvil for a brain, on the floor of a food store. Marvellous.

I catch myself being infected by the dark matter, I was right, it’s infectious. I step away.

‘A knife’ I tell her, a subtle hint as I don’t want to be too direct. I could see her contemplating using her two left hands to open the croissant. Had this happened I would have gone berserk and would most like be in prison for Grievous Bodily Harm.

She turns, looks at me and I sense the mildest panic from her, this must be one of those moments when the gaps in her consciousness narrow and she can almost think and realise that she’s not coping. She leaves the croissant and I’m making a treaty with the vehement torrent of hunger brewing in my stomach. She’s in the fridge now, but the fridge where the meat shouldn’t be, now she’s doing what she should have done 45 minutes ago. I wonder if I could cram her in there, maybe if she knew how it felt to stay there over night, she might have a better understanding of why to get the meat out and into the deli for display. She finds the baked ham I’m after and lifts it up onto the counter. She dumps it on to the yellow board. Now I know you don’t know what that is, you scavenger, but it’s not a live fucking chicken, is it? She then moves over to the meat slicer and I’m filled with two emotions, depending on which way this goes, one is to leave; in which case I would be filled with rage because I’m just never going to get what I want, the other is to witness the death of a black hole by her becoming tangled in the wheel of a fast spinning blade; in which case I would cheer out of sheer delight as justice would have been done.

Is this what I want first thing in the morning?

Believe it or not, but the two fools all the while have been trying to make coffee.

I am about to leave because it's going to be messy, I had a good night's rest and had this been any other day, something would have happened. Tweedledum leaves the coffee machine because for some inexplicable reason he can tell that she's not coping. She looks at the slicer, and I think that if she is incapable of fathoming the croissant, well, using the slicing machine would be as easy as piloting the Millennium Falcon into infinity, at the relative speed of light.

Tweedledum is managing not to prepare himself for inspection under a microscope and I see reams of ham fall from behind the blade. One step closer on the evolutionary ladder, I think to myself. Gaping Chasm is back, staring at the croissant, she sees a rack of knives in front of her, stuck on a magnetic strip screwed to the wall and pulls one down. I know knives, sharp knives, I’ve nearly lost fingers many times over and the fact that I’ve got fingertips left almost makes me believe that there is a God with a big bushy beard and a penchant for flowing robes. I can see the knife is not the right implement of destruction to be used on something as delicate as a croissant, something serrated would be more appropriate. She is going to use the knife on the pastry and I’m about to have a heart attack; imagine you go to the hairdresser and she’s wielding a pair of garden shears, well that’s how my croissant is feeling, remember this is an intelligent croissant, it’s beginning to shed it’s layers, like a lizard loses its tail, it’s hoping to distract Gaping Chasm in hope that she’ll go for the quivering flake instead.

There she goes, like a lumbering fool, cutting the croissant and I say to her ‘You might want to consider using a serrated knife on that!’ she turns and stares at me with dead fish eyes. She turns what remains of her attention to the croissant and proceeds to hold it down, making sure it does not escape. ‘You’d be better off using the back of the knife’ I tell her, she turns and smiles, she thinks I’m joking, Jesus, she thinks I’m enjoying the demolition. That’s my fucking food you’re assaulting there! She doesn’t understand that in order to get any use out of a knife, you need to slice, back and forth, not push, don’t push, a croissant does not require brut force.

At this point the chef appears and places a plate of roasted peppers and tomatoes with basil into the deli counter fridge. ‘Chef’ I say, ‘you need to give them a serrated bread knife’ – he stares at me and I can see he doesn’t understand me, I’ve stepped into the twilight zone, they’re zombies, all of them. Chef leaves, and I see that Gaping Chasm has opened the croissant, much like one would open a baguette with a blunt spoon. It’s been mauled and molested and I see her in a new light, she’s a croissant pedophile, she’s just raped my croissant and it’s lying there sobbing, defiled and dirty, damaged and beyond any salvation.

She stuffs it with the ham, wraps it up in a warm paper blanket, as one would a rape victim, some comfort that is! Tweedledee has managed to magic up a coffee and I just want out, get me out of here. I pay, Jesus, am I soft, I pay? I leave, confounded.

Who would ever think that buying a croissant and a cup of coffee could be so difficult? Please, Ms Sanremo, come back!