Sometimes I feel a little confused.

The desk calendar of the receptionist at the office announced that Wednesday was 'Administrative Professionals Day'.

It was also the twentieth anniversary of the day Chernobyl self destructed. On April 26th 1986 at 6:30am Unit 4 at the Chernobyl Nuclear power station exploded spraying 120 tons of Uranium and 900 tons of highly radioactive graphite into the atmosphere to rain down over Ukraine and the rest of Europe. Lieutenant Vladimir Pravik and his firemen climbed ladders to the broken roof of the reactor to train their hoses on the fire in an attempt to control it. Without protective equipment they were subject to a lethal radiation dose every 48 seconds. After an hour, dizzy and vomiting they were rushed to hospital, Pravik's eyes had turned from brown to blue. Suffering from such massive internal radiation burns that their hearts blistered, they died and their radioactive bodies were welded into lead coffins for burial.

Twenty years on, a thirty kilometer radius around Chernobyl is sealed off and will remain so for as close to forever as makes no odds.



There are no reliable figures on the number of people that have died and will die as a direct result of this disaster. If you are interested, you can read more here, here or here.

So the other day I take the morning off work to sort out a driving license.

I don't want a Canadian driving license at all really, I don't need one for the car, I get off the plane, take a taxi to my apartment and the next day I pick up my Chrysler 300 from Budget which is a brisk five minute stroll from where I live. Three of four weeks later I take it back, get a cab to the airport the following morning and spend a week at home in Costa Rica. I'm happy because I like my vanilla white pimp mobile, although I am worried they may be letting other people drive it when I'm not in Canada. George the manager of the little branch of Budget in North York is happy, because I have rented a car from him for three weeks per month for the last seven months, although he is a little worried that I might figure out I could just buy one for less money. My boss is happy because Budget give me a full size car for sub-compact rates, although he is a little worried that rent-a-wreck might be able to do me one cheaper.

In fact I actively do not want a Canadian car driving license. All it would give me is the opportunity to receive speeding tickets, which on the whole I'd prefer not to get.

All would be simply marvellous if summer wasn't approaching and I wasn't suffering from the trauma of motorcycle withdrawal symptoms. It is different this time, On previous occasions, I have wanted a motorcycle but not owned one. Now I own two and can't ride either of them as they are both at Dave's in England after their tortuous shipping nightmare from Spain.

My Harley is a 1996 XL1200S on which I have spent a much time and effort making it fast; unlike most Harleys, it is not a chromosexual hairdresser's idealized vision of a one percenter's ride. Cosmetic changes have been limited to having shiny bits powdercoated black and the practical, a fork brace, a rack and a flatter saddle than the standard bucket. Motorwise there are many changes: Buell Lightning heads with XR750 spring kit, Branch Flowmetrics manifold, performance carb, cams, mufflers, ignition module, air cleaner, Dynojet etc. Needless to say, it is fast and surprises a lot of sports bikes. To quicken up the steering the forks have been lowered in the yokes and it has received a fork brace. I also replaced all the brake lines with braided steel items to improve feel. It still handles and brakes like a Harley though, which is to say much like an oil tanker. I have had a love-hate relationship with it for ten years now.

My other bike is a 2000 Suzuki GSXR600 SRAD. Which is a beast. I picked it up for a song in Andalucia off of a broke English guy. It handles and brakes by the power of thought alone, which is to say, if you have thought it, the bike has already completed the maneauvre. It is fast enough too and gets to the very bad side of 200kph in no time, much after that my adrenal gland runs out of power and I have to ease off on the right wrist. I'm not the boy I used to be.

Anyway, I can't import either of them to Canada. The rule is that they have to be either: over 15 years old or originally made for the US or Canadian markets. I tried to explain that there are only two types of Harley, California bikes and the rest but they weren't interested.

Renting motorcycles is extraordinarily expensive compared to cars and I just can't see my boss paying out the extra $2000 per month to cover my transport mode preferences. I could air freight my Harley over and insure it for six months via a US motorcycle tour company, but financially this is the equivalent of being anally raped by Genghis Kahn and at least sixty of his closest Mongol horde.

I could buy one, but to get license plates in Canada you need to get insurance, to get insurance you need to have an Ontario driving license. This leads me on to part two of my missive, which will henceforth be referred to as the 'pissed off bit about licenses'.

You can swap a British License for a Canadian one, but they do not recognise a Gibraltar license as British, which it is. I am only prepared to part with my Gibraltar license. My proper issued in England one, I want to keep. After all, it's not like I live here! Worse still the only category that you can swap the is the bit that lets you drive cars. The Ontario Government Driving License department or 'bastards' as they are referred to colloquially will only accept US motorcycle licenses for swaps and Swiss ones. Most US states will give you a motorcycle license if you know which way around you are supposed to sit on a bike. "Well done Mr Johnson you made the front from the back, here have a motorcycle permit". I took my California motorcycle test about 18 years ago, obviously the license expired a long time ago. I may have to get them to try to look it up. The Swiss license is apparently very difficult to obtain, the Swiss government seeing motorcycles as far too rebelious and motorcyclists as people that should really be legislated out of existance. I now believe that the Ontario government is trying to do the same to bikes. It is illegal for a bike to filter between lanes of cars here! Wankers! What is the point of having a bike if you have to queue up with cars. Sorry, I have to say it again. Wankers! Well as soon as my bike in Canada dilemna is resolved I know someone who will certainly not be complying with this asinine nonsense.

I may have to take a motorcycle test again, which will not only involve learning Canadian road law, but I'll also have to ride within it for the duration of the test! Ontario has three levels of motorcycle license. M1 - no passengers, no freeways, no alcohol, daytime only; M2 - no alcohol; M - you can have a beer(Yay!). I think I will be able to go straight into the full M license once I have taken a test, rather than have to wait two and a half years due to having had a motorcycle license in the UK for so long, they give credit for the experience but not a license.

So, now I have bored you with this rubbish, I shall go shower and hit the gym! For my next post I may ponder as to why first generation immigrants to a country gravitate towards employment in the Immigration departments of the host country of their parents.

The Panama Canal
Panama earns a great deal of money through the canal which can save as much as twenty days on a journey from the west coast of the Americas to the east which equates to 18,000 miles from a journey between San Francisco and New York.



It is a phenominal work of engineering and a great tribute to American ingenuity of the last century. It was finally completed in 1914 and after ten years by 56,307 people led by the US Army Corp of Engineers, records from the French period of construction are uncertain.
From the time it was started on January 10th 1880 until the day the first traversed it on January 7th 1914 as many as 27,000 men died in it's making.



Over 18 years the French moved 30 million cubic yards of earth but their efforts finally succumbed to tropical disease and financial ruin. The US Army waged a war on malaria and yellow fever; removed another 238 million cubic yards of earth and finally completed a work first dreamt of in 1524 when King Carlos V of Spain ordered the first survey of the canal route.



It is a marvel to watch the train guided cargo ships being raised and lowered in the locks. If you ever have the opportunity, go to Miraflores locks and see it for yourself. If you are interested in the history, have a look here.

Firstly, apologies to you guys that have been looking for a new post from me and not seen one in a while. Secondly, here is the excuse:

As you may have read in my post before last I joined a gym. It is now one month since I joined. Since I started I have gone from seeing a personal trainer once per week to twice per week and other than my week back home in Costa Rica and Panama, I have been every night except two.

I have lost an inch from my capacious waste, 5lbs in weight and more importantly gone from 27.4% body fat to 20% fat. This equates to a lard change from 55lb to 40lb. After work I saw my nutritionist who gave me the second interesting piece of information in the space of two weeks; the first being that you should only eat carbs early in the day as the body cant do anything with them late in the day, as the day's work or workout has already been done and so all any fat you eat can be instantly laid down to expand the waistline while you burn the small number of carbs between the last meal and bedtime; the second is that for health reasons, one should eat about a gram of protein for every kilogram of bodyweight.

For every 30 grams of chicken, beef or fish you eat, you only get about 8 grams of protein, a cup of peanuts will give you 37 grams of protein. All this stuff is available online so I won't continue to bore you with it. If you have a heavy workout schedule, you need to up the protein by another 40%. So at the advice of my nutritionist, I have started using protein and calcium supplements.

After a month of getting me used to the right movements and technique, my trainer Simon switched me for the first time on to serious weights. This time last month I had difficulty managing three sets of 20 repetitions on a leg press machine with no weights on it. Today he loaded 6 weights the size of truck wheels on to it. I managed the same number of repetitions. It hurt though. He pulled the same trick on a bunch of other machines and started me on a punishing bench press regime.

After an hour of tortuous training with weights and resistance machines I died and was reincarnated on an exercise bicycle. Forty minutes later I was wondering how my whole body had been turned to jelly in one hundred precious minutes.

After hobbling back to the locker room I had a cleansing sweat in the steam room for 15 minutes, went home, ate a salad and then met Kevin and Nora down the pub to undo some of the good work.

I fear my fondness for six packs may prevent me from developing one.

I have much more to tell you about Panama and a recent visit to a dark, old German mansion house in downtown Toronto that is now a restaurant called Carman's where the waiters point a flashlight at your steak so that you can ensure it is cooked to your liking when you cut into it. But I will save all this for another time.

I would however like to take this opportunity to wish you a happy Easter. For those of you unfamiliar with the history of Easter, it is named after the Saxon mother goddess of spring and fertility Eostre. Easter is the time of the spring equinox, when the first flowers appear in Northern Europe and the time of the rebirth of the world after the darkness and cold of winter, which is why it is associated with eggs and that most procreative of creatures, the rabbit. I think the Christians reappropriated it for something, but I can't remember for what.

Blessed be!