Err...my miscellaneous ranting

2011-03-24T22:35:00.003Z

....so sad!

I used to think it was me and her against the world and then one day I found out it was her and the world against me.

2011-03-23T07:54:00.007Z

Evelyn and I had a very big and very serious chat about how much I don't like changing poopy daipers last night and she asked if it would make me happy if she used a potty. I advised her that it would make me very happy indeed and she had a practice while I read her her bedtime story.

This morning I sat her on her potty this morning while she watched TV and I went into the kitchen for a cup of java. About 5 minutes later she told me she had had a weewee in her potty and profferred the potty with contents as a sign of proof. There it was a little yelloow puddle in her pink potty. This is a first! I am so happy, this is the beginning of the end of what must have been tonnes of smelly landfill and morning change gag reflexes. Soon she won't be pissing and pooping everywhere like a Labour government Chancellor and life will be a paradise filled with the music of flushing toilets.

On another note I woke up this morning feeling somewhat slow and disconnected. After much rumination I concluded that aliens had landed on my terrace dressed as the Blendtec man and extracted my brain through a syringe with a long tube on the end and that after examination they put it through the standard procedure and squirted it back into my head through the other ear. Then I remembered that I had started my new job.

2010-12-25T01:02:00.006Z

Santa has just left the house. Or so it would seem. On a plate on the floor under the tree there are a few crumbs from a mince pie, the stump of a carrot and an empty glass. Evelyn's presents lie under the bejewelled plastic fern that holds so much magic, hope and promise to children and children at heart. Evelyn and I went carol singing tonight, I sang, she danced

I received a series of cryptic text messages from my estranged wife Laura on Wednesday, so I called and she told me that she had given up the legal battle to leave the UK with our daughter. A fax arrived at my solicitor's office as it was closing for the night. My solicitors, solicitor's clerks, barristers, attorneys at law and Queen's Counsel, for there are many and on both sides of the Atlantic, were all left dumbfounded, as was I. At Laura's request, I went over and we had a chat with Evelyn and tried to explain what was going to happen, I'm not sure what she understood. Laura had told her what was occurring previously, but when I was there, she was capering about the apartment on all fours, yelping and pretending to be a puppy. Laura was tearful and without the malice and bile I have become used to over the last eighteen months. Laura had already left for the airport when I picked up Evelyn the following morning from Laura's mother, who has been here since August and I became a single parent.

Evelyn was ordered to be returned to the UK in July at the orders of the Canadian courts and Laura came with her, the final hearing for leave to remove was to be in January. My legal counsel were passionate about our case for refusal and felt that we were in with a fighting chance of success despite the UK's traditionally outrageous bias towards maternal preferences over domicile.

There are a few legal loose ends to be tied up over agreed contact and holidays, but these are just routine. We will all then have to settle in to the new phases in our lives.

When I was in Canada in May 2009 on vacation with my wife and daughter and staying at the in-laws, plans were already underway to present me with the surprise divorce petition which has now been struck out. A few weeks later I discovered by e-mail that I was separated and five days later, discovered that the woman I loved had asked through the courts for a divorce, full custody of our daughter, approximately two thirds of my net income and a freeze on the bank account which had my the final deposit for an apartment I had bought off plan, effectively meaning that I would lose it. As if that wasn't enough I was told that Laura would rather see me in court than allow me the unaccompanied access to my child that I had had since her birth. I tried at the time to get them to see what they were doing, to try to do this the decent way, to allow some dignity and respect. They wanted my daughter, my money and my assets. I say they, as I don't believe that Laura was the sole architect of this, responsibility must also be borne by her mother, who seeks and sought to control everything, and her lawyer who seemed to have obtained her qualifications from watching daytime TV. It was the wrong thing to do, it would have been a wrong thing to do if I had not prevailed in the courts. Somehow they don't seem to understand that the responsibility for what has passed is their own. Laura could have done this so differently, I did the only thing I could.

I often wondered how Laura thought she was going to explain what she had done to Evelyn when she is old enough to ask questions.

And now we are here and my daughter is living with me permanently. I have missed out on a year of watching her grow up, with what contact I had spoilt by my estranged wife's mother, lost perhaps £150,000 in cash and assets and who knows how many years of my life. Laura has no doubt suffered too. My daughter has been denied the loving home with a mummy and daddy that she deserved and lost a year's worth of real contact with her father. I must do my best to be the best father I can be and make up for the distance of my daughter's mother. I must ensure that the contact she has with her mother and her mother's family is better than I was given and see what I can do to heal the wounds that have lain open too long. I want Evelyn to grow up happy and I'll do whatever it takes.

Thus ends one chapter in all of our lives and hopefully the next will bring peace, civility and respect to everyone. I hope Laura and her family find serenity and I'll do what I can to help them share in the joy of Evelyn's life.

Merry Christmas one and all!

2010-05-26T10:24:00.003+01:00

Around the corner I have a friend,

In this great city that has no end,

Yet the days go by and weeks rush on,

And before I know it, a year is gone.

And I never see my old friends face,

For life is a swift and terrible race,

He knows I like him just as well,

As in the days when I rang his bell.

And he rang mine but we were younger then,

And now we are busy, tired men.

Tired of playing a foolish game,

Tired of trying to make a name.

"Tomorrow" I say! "I will call on Jim

Just to show that I'm thinking of him",

But tomorrow comes and tomorrow goes,

And distance between us grows and grows.

Around the corner, yet miles away,

"Here's a telegram sir," "Jim died today."

And that's what we get and deserve in the end.

Around the corner, a vanished friend.

- Around the Corner by Charles Hanson Towne.

......................What are you feeling right now?

2010-01-30T13:12:00.001Z

How is it that for Subway to make a roll taste OK they have to put 5000 ingedients and 300 sauces into them whereas patisserie Paul will make something spectacular by opening a demibaguette buttering it and inserting a single thin slice of ham paired with a single thin slice of cheese?

The French just know bread and no other nation has ever really come close in this regard. Had Napoleon opened a chain of brasseries he would have had no need of military campaigns, world domination would have been a surety, we would all have been spared the high street blight which is Greggs and Emma Hamilton would have lived happily ever after. And how is it that the French have patisserie Paul and the British have Greggs? I ask you, we won the War of the Third Coalition! After Napoleon's defeat at Waterloo all of the patisserie Pauls in Paris should have been moved to London and all of the Greggs should have been moved to Paris, that would have taught them a lesson!

I love patisserie Paul, I love the understated shop frontages which would not be offensive anywhere, the wonderful cakes and tarts, the quiche, the baguettes, the staff, it is one of the few chains that there are just not enough of. Why isn't there one on Bishopsgate?

2009-07-15T21:12:00.002+01:00

On Friday June 5th the night before Laura was supposed to come back from Canada I received an e-mail from her wherein she announced that she would not be coming back from Toronto with our baby and had started 'separation' proceedings. For separation proceedings read divorce, equalisation of property, by which means, she wants half of the assets that I have accumulated from hard work before we met while I get half of the ZERO she has accumulated in a lifetime of excuses, and all sorts of other monies she somehow feels she is entitled to. There was no warning, no conversation, no explanation, no "I'm sorry but this isn't working." Just an e-mail stating she had started 'separation proceedings', she couldn't even be honest about that. At the same time as I was shopping buying treats and things for her and our baby, she was in court with a thick carpet of lies that she had woven from a very thin thread of truth. The last words she said to me before I received her missive was 'Love you too, miss you'. I never credited her with the capacity for deceit, treachery, mendacity, venality and spite that she has displayed with such sly artfulness.

Our home life had actually been very good over the last year. I shall probably never know what dark mental dances she had in April and May as she schemed the assassination of our marriage. It's sad. I loved her with all my heart and truly wanted her eyes to be the last I saw before I closed mine for the final time.

In the book of my own life I turned the page honestly believing we would both live happily ever and found the rest of the leaves torn away by the person to whom I had entrusted it.

In the last two days, I have spoken to two old friends. One has been dieing for years but is too stubborn to give in. To hear his voice, is to hear the fragility of his heart and I fear that every beat will be its last. The other has always seemed as strong as an ox, but has been given two years to live by his doctors.

"No man is an island, entire of itself; every man is a piece of the continent, a part of the main. If a clod be washed away by the sea, Europe is the less, as well as if a promontory were, as well as if a manor of thy friend's or of thine own were: any man's death diminishes me, because I am involved in mankind, and therefore never send to know for whom the bells tolls; it tolls for thee."

John Donne - Devotions upon Emergent Occasions, no. 17 (Meditation) 1624

2009-04-13T21:18:00.009+01:00

Easter Eggs and travel.

About three weeks ago I flew out to be with Laura and the baby who are spending some time in Toronto. They're staying there for a bit and I'm here in London alone. I'm looking forward to the return of those few distilled moments of perfect content and stillness that are bestowed upon me when my little baby falls asleep in my arms after her last bottle of milk of the night. I really miss them both, so I thought I'd tell my daughter a little Easter story, and here it is:

Sorry I can’t be with you for a little while, but your daddy has to be in England right now.

In the land where our people come from, thousands of years ago, there were no televisions, no books, no cars and life was much simpler. In the day the worked and hunted and farmed and by night they sat around their fires trying to keep warm.

They believed that the seasons were controlled by gods and goddesses and that the goddess of Spring was Eostre which is where our word for Easter comes from. They knew that the days grow shorter and colder in the winter and longer and warmer in summer. Spring starts when the day is longer than the night, it is warmer and the flowers start to bloom and lots of baby animals are born. The land that seemed so cold and lifeless in the winter seemed to burst into life, just like an egg hatching and the hares, which are like big bunny rabbits that were running around so madly in March settled down and all the baby hares were born. They believed that the hares would help Eostre bring in the Spring and they gave each other eggs to celebrate its arrival.

Even though our people no longer live that simple life and they no longer remember the reasons why we still celebrate Easter and the coming of spring, they still think of the Easter Bunny and give each other Easter Eggs. I have an Easter egg for you here which I’ll give you when you come back. I can’t wait to see you again. I love you so very much.

When I flew out to Toronto, I departed from Heathrow Terminal 5. Despite the terrible press surrounding the opening debacle it feels very much like a proper airport in the same way that Terminal 4 feels very much like an abbatoir.

I lunched at Wagamama there and, as usual, had the Chicken Kare Lomen, which is a spicy curry soup and their superb White Chocolate Ginger Cheesecake. The curry soup was only 50% successful, it tasted wonderful but unfortunately, I was unable to squeeze out a fart in the multifaith prayer room. That small opportunity to show my contempt for all religions thwarted, I went to board the plane. I like to think that it was perhaps because of my innate purity and godliness that on handing my passport over to the flight attendant, I was upgraded to business class.

2009-02-16T21:17:00.007Z

Today I had two comments from pals that are miffed with the absence of anything fresh on my blog. So I thought I might get on and write one.

New stuff: I have finally relented and got an IPhone and I have to say it is possibly the best invention since the mobile phone, MP3 player, Play Station Portable, Internet radio, pocket TV, PDA or maybe all of these things put together. It still doesn't stop me from loathing Apple's personal computers, but if they stick to this portable media stuff they will rule the world. I am worried about it's fragility in a way that I haven't really been about any previous mobile phone. It somehow just seems more personal. The bazillion applications that are on it keep me constantly occupied with news, podcasts, strategy games, books, music. With one of these devices the western world need never trouble itself with time for introspective thought or mental tranquility.

In recent years, well the last two in the UK anyway, I have oft lamented the absence of real seasons. But this year it will be different instead of the grey and rainy season and the very grey and very rainy season, we will have had the "February was 'king freezing!" season. On Tuesday February 3rd I was actually told to work from home. How morose I was, as I beavered away testing the Internet, discussed some reconciliation application bugs with my baby daughter and worked out that if only I didn't have to pay tax for all the people that get to do this every day and all the people in government that might as well do this every day what a happy and less overdrawn chap I would be. This is the first time that weather has ever prevented me from getting to work.
This was the sort of event that I craved every winter as a child when I saw the first white puffs falling in the morning, my nose pressed against the window pane, rubbing away the condensation to see the snowflakes melting against the glass and laying a thin white velvet sheet over the garden. Please don't stop, just another few inches, two feet of snow and they will surely close the school. But it never happened, well not until now. But now I have a taste for it. Once a year, just for a day or so, I could live with a repeat experience.

On to a less pleasant matter. The British Government recently banned Dutch MP Geert Wilders, the maker of the film Fitna, from entering the UK as it was felt that his presence would cause outrage among Muslims living here.

Having watched the film, I think it is sensationalist, but nowhere near as sensationalist as say..... blowing up London buses or flying planes into the World Trade Center. I think perhaps the Muslims that are offended by this film should ask themselves what they really find offensive about it and direct their angst against the fundamentalists that support just the sort of actions which Geert Wilders highlights in his film.

One of my dearest and closest friends, Anas, is a Muslim. One of the things that makes him such a great guy is that his warmth, humanity, decency and honesty come before his religion or any other beliefs. If only everyone was like that.

2008-11-07T03:38:00.003Z

A big week.

It was my lovely baby daughter's first birthday on Monday, a year ago she was handed to me by a nurse 00:33 after a really difficult birth. Eyes closed and crying. I can't remember which one of us that was, could have been all three of us I suppose. A year later she is an inquisitive child full of laughter and with a marvellous generosity of spirit. As she was born in England at 00:33 and we are in Canada where 00:33 GMT is 19:33 EST, and is the product of not only my demonstrably superior sperm, but also my beautiful Canadian wife's DNA and gestative care, she got two birthday parties. One on Sunday with her cousins where her emergence into the cold dry post-natal world was toasted at 7:30pm and another the following day.

She took her first few unaided steps today. So not only has she had a lot of loot from friends and relatives as birthday presents, she has also learned to walk. A big week indeed.

In other less important news, the United States of America have, for the first time in 8 years, elected a president who is not an asshole. Barack Obama, has, throughout his election campaign, acted as a statesman, a gentleman and an inspirational man of great vision. I truly hope he lives up to the great expectations that the whole world has for him. Lewis Hamilton has also won the F1 drivers championship, so perhaps the white liberal middle class pricks at the BBC can stop blaming absolutely everything bad that happens in the world on white on black racism. The BBC do not recognise races other than white and black, where white just includes Caucasians and Sir Trevor MacDonald, while black includes North Africans, sub-Saharan Africans (all tribes), Asians (oriental and from the Indian subcontinent), native Americans, Eskimos, non-Jewish Semites, indigenous Australasians, people from every island in the Pacific, Atlantic, Southern, Arctic and Indian Oceans and visitors from other galaxies.

2008-10-31T20:09:00.003Z

Airport Security

I was just checking in online for an Air Canada flight to Toronto and I think their taking the security questions a bit far.

It's the third question that concerns me. "Do you have anything in your hand baggage which is sharp or pointed or any item that could be adapted to cause an injury to another person?" I was thinking about taking a magazine on board, but as Jason Bourne used one as a cosh in The Bourne Supremacy and even an amateur could give you a vicious paper cut with one, I now doubt whether any reading material is allowed on-board.

My SLR is also a no-no as it has a long strap and could be employed as a very expensive, single use mace. More or less anything can used to cause an injury by a malevolent person. Perhaps I should turn up chattel free and naked, as clothes could in theory be used to smother the unwitting fellow traveller.

Or maybe the governments and the dicks that works for them are just taking themselves and their own cleverness a little too seriously.

2008-10-30T10:57:00.003Z

Don't forget to vote America!

Except all you people in the Jesusland states in the middle, you don't go worryin' yer purdy little heads about it!

2008-10-26T18:25:00.003Z

Food

Laura and the baby are in Canada at the moment, the washing machine needed a few days relaxation. I am just cooking myself a roast pork joint (with lovely crisp crackling), roast potatoes, runner beans and brussels sprouts which I shall wash down with a little Sauv blanc. While unpacking the shopping earlier I came across this:

I bought it for Laura, but she won't eat it. Probably for the best. I don't want her getting a taste for Authentic Jamaican Cock Flavour Soup.

2008-10-26T09:25:00.008Z

Last assignment in Amsterdam.....

Due to a merger at work, there is a lot of re-organisation and unfortunately, it looks like I have spent my last trip in Amsterdam for the foreseeable future. I love this city and would love to live in it.

Arriving on Wednesday night, the hotel welcomed me, as always with a little present. No-one has ever used this word combination to me before.

"Your present is cheese" seems also to some up what I believe were the unspoken words of the important person in my command chain who made the decision that I should look after some big budget stuff in London, rather than the small budget stuff Amsterdam where I am generally far more content. Laura wants to give him a kick in the Edams.

On Thursday night I had a few drinks with some colleagues in Amstelveen, a few more at De Bekeerde Suster in the old centre of town and a few more at Bourbon Street with some of the hotel staff after they finished work. These are places I will miss, as I will Castell, which you must visit if ever you are in the city. I've eaten here a dozen or so times this year. Their prime rib is superb and the meat falls from the bones on their ribs by giving it a hard stare. The last time I went their my palate had an orgasm.

Whilst on a postprandial stroll through the market in Amstelveen on Friday I noticed this:

I've used a Dremel before but never an ass blow case electric grinder.

After boarding the Fokker 50 at Amsterdam Schiphol to fly home to London City on Friday it all went wrong. London City was closed and all of the passengers from the 16:10 flight to City were herded on to the 18:15 to Heathrow. KLM staff in Amsterdam very kindly lied about our luggage coming on the flight with us and KLM staff in London lied about it being delivered to our home addresses on Saturday.

'The Flying Dutchman' was until recently the name of the KLM frequent flyer programme. As anyone acquainted with the legend knows, the Flying Dutchman is a ship doomed to sail the oceans for eternity. Much it would seem, like my luggage.

2008-10-19T15:34:00.005+01:00

Stating the obvious

Back in January I wrote an article on the Eskimo and the BBC website has finally caught up with me and done the same. Apparently, the Eskimo have 37 words for snow. Unsurprising when you think about how much of it they have and the preeminence of this substance in their lives. Less known is that they have no word for beer, for which we, in England are blessed with thousands of words. No wonder then that while they invented ice fishing, we invented the worldwide web that has enabled us to order a curry online and a couple of bottles of Kingfisher to wash it down.

2008-10-19T13:37:00.003+01:00

Attention Deficit Disorder

I have just started watching Pink The Series it is the first 'TV' series I have seen that was written from the outset for web broadcast. I get it via the Vuze network in HD but it's also available via YouTube. The production quality is superb, the acting, great, in a film noir comic style. It's about a female yogic gym addicted assassin in her late thirties or early forties who has agreed to do a series of government hits in return for being released from prison, which she wants to do so she can find a nice man to have a baby with as she's worried about her biological clock ticking. Each webisode segues between a scene in the present where our heroine Natalie Cross is either topping someone or being disappointed about the dearth of worthwhile boyfriend material and a flashback to her childhood with daddy teaching her to shoot, track, knife fight. For reasons I don't truly understand she reminds me of my friend Amanda.

The downside to this series and the reason that I probably won't continue to watch it is that each episode is about three minutes long once the initial commercial, credits and title sequence have been subtracted. So a series each episode of which is the same duration as a standard commercial break. A new episode is released once per week. On this basis it would take about three months to air an episode of Dexter and over twenty seven years to see the whole of the Sopranos. Life is just too short. I think I'll have a beer with Amanda instead, once down the pub, she always stays for more than three minutes and is, in general, much less likely to kill anyone.

2008-10-13T00:26:00.005+01:00

Sarah Palin, 'doencha' just love her?

Err...... no! What a terribly cynical ploy by the GOP to capture the popular vote of the idiocracy which is the United States. As if being a Republican isn't bad enough on its own, she is a young earth creationist and an anti-abortion zealot who hadn't left North America until her VP candidacy appeared. If McCain gets in and dies of old age, this vacuous bint could be leader of the free world. But it's OK for the Jesus crowd because she knows where Russia is located and can kill and cook a moose. Really! If that's all that's required they should install Crodocile Dundee in the Whitehouse immediately!

2008-03-10T10:24:00.003Z

You just don't see this in the UK....

I snapped this window display in a shop in Amstelveen last week. You just would not get this in the UK. You will note the two little boys are having a laugh, drinking what looks to be whisky and smoking a big fat cigar. This sort of thing makes me really angry, it is not the smoking drinking thing, which is fine, it's that French and obviously gay moustache the kid has drawn on his upper lip. Next thing you know Charles Aznavour will be touring schools and singing Village people numbers. This sort of thing must be stamped out, we should not be encouraging our children to be French, it's just not natural.

A big thank you must go to my pal Joe. It was Joe who introduced me to the phenomenal Hopes and Fears album by Keane ; The Killers' Hot Fuss ; the TV series Flight of the Conchords, The Riches and most recently the excellent Breaking Bad.

I am missing Evelyn and Laura. Laura will look about the same when I see her next, Evelyn has grown substantially and just had her first spoon or two of non-boob food and I am missing out on all this.

2008-02-29T22:44:00.003Z

The Scottish Parliament (the one in Westminster)

I read an article from the taxpayers alliance today, it summed up my thoughts on this government. The Labour Party's Scottish Presbyterian Leadership has decided that they haven't had any positive press recently and are going for the eco-idiot demographic with proposals to ban supermarket plastic bags that people use as bin liners. Leadership or incentives to switch to biodegradable bags has not occurred to them. They can make some new laws and any chance to make some new laws and look strong and clever, must never be missed.

They sense the opportunity for more legislation and another way to make England more closely aligned to the moral values of tax funded champagne glitterati of New Labour.

The machinations of thought are already conjuring dreams of a Plastic Bag Tzar, a raft of news plastic bag laws that will put a halt to the evil supermarkets giving away free plastic bags that end up in land fill and force people to buy plastic bin liners that will end up in land fill.

As if there isn't anything more pressing going on in a country where no-one can afford a home, where immigration is running at +500,000 per annum, where the hospitals can't cope and the schools pump out illiterate children with qualifications that mean nothing because every year the exams are made easier to keep the statistics sweet.

They truly are vacuous parasites, spending their time and my money dreaming up new ways to piss me off.

2008-02-23T13:58:00.004Z

No starter for me thank you.

I found this on the menu at the Corner Thai a hop, skip and a jump from Leidseplein. I think the translator must have opened his Thai-English dictionary at the section marked Synonyms.

Missing Laura and Evelyn. When Evelyn was just born she would curl up into a little ball on my chest and fall asleep. She's growing so quickly that I foolishly worry she'll be too big to do that when I see her next and I'll have missed out on all that early dadhood. We should all be back together in 3 weeks or so.

I have to change the photos of them I keep in my wallet, copies of their passport shots, they both look like they were taken at a police line up.

2008-02-19T19:42:00.009Z

This is not a Drill

I have just finished reading "This Is Not a Drill" the funny and occasionally moving sequel to Paul Carter's "Don't Tell Mum I Work On The Rigs, She Thinks I'm a Piano Player in a Whorehouse" and thought I'd share a couple of quotes from it with you.......

'.....he's so scary. Apart from being a big man, Miguel has a face that looks like it's been set on fire a couple of times and put out with a cricket bat.'

'.....there are two things every man should hear in his lifetime: "I'm pregnant" and "We have the building surrounded".'

2008-02-18T21:49:00.005Z

The Netherlands, is funky!

See what you can buy on the streets here....

..... and what you can't.

Well that's fine for the adults but a young enquiring mind needs to be introduced to the big wide world slowly and what better way than through play? With the toy below you can introduce your kids to the fun and excitement of drink driving without having to worry about the hassle of car theft and getting the family motor trashed.

Amsterdam, is not only a wild stag night party town full of Eastern European prostitutes and coffee shops that don't sell coffee, it's also an enigmatic city of great depth and charm. But enough of that.........

I think this one means "No buskers!"

"Man, don't piss on the arch?" My Latin is very rusty!

I actually like this city a lot and so to this end I shall try to write another entry this week covering the following topics:

101 ways to carry the kids on a bicycle
How not to get run over by a tram
Canals, 18th century architecture and subsidence

2008-02-14T22:40:00.003Z

I'm in Amsterdam on an assignment for my company, Laura and our wonderful daughter Evelyn are in Toronto. I'm looking forward to us all being in the same place again. I checked my e-mail before I trudged down to my hotel breakfast and there was an e-mail from Laura that made my chest swell and my heart race.

It's St.Valentines Day and I love my wife.

2008-02-03T02:06:00.000Z

Well England were 10 points up at half time 16/6. But the team left their interest in the game back in the changing room when they went out onto the field for the second half 19/26. Bummer!

2008-02-02T14:24:00.000Z

I recently bought a Logik IR100 internet radio for the kitchen. I love it. When you turn it on, it downloads a station list from http://www.reciva.com/ which you can browse by genre or location. Currently there are 9,854 radio stations and 21,242 on demand streams such as those available from the BBC Radio 4 Listen Again service. Once you have registered your radio on the website you can store your podcasts on the website and save your favorite stations and streams on the site and the next time you turn on the radio they are there for you in a convenient easy to access menu option. I managed to get my nearly new one on e-bay for only £20 more than I could have paid for an absolutely new one from PC World or Dixons as the price in the shops seems to jump around a lot. Buying from e-bay did mean that I was able to use up the last of my Paypal balance earned from selling a few bit and bobs. I don’t regard a positive Paypal balance as cash because actually retrieving it from those money grabbing swine is expensive and awkward.

In truth, you don’t need the radio to get all the benefits of the web page and if like me, your PC is hooked up to your Hi-Fi, it’s fantastic. Having the IR100 just means I don’t have to force my listening choices on everyone else in house when I’m in the kitchen or turn my Hi-Fi up to wall demolishing volume levels when I’m cooking. This morning I was listening to Fuego FM, a Latin hits station based in the US and Alaireweb in Colombia. As all the stations are vetted by Reciva then added to an easy to search and browse website all that music becomes accessible. There are stations from 269 countries and I can browse those from Costa Rica as easily as I can those from the UK.

On an only vaguely related note, my internet service seemed to deteriorate and then stop completely only coming back after I rebooted my router. When I first got the IR100 it could only play a station for a couple of minutes before rebuffering the station. A bit of rooting around revealed that my Thomson Speedtouch 780 router is particularly sensitive to poor line quality and by disabling the linksense functionality in the router command line interface I might be able to improve matters. I tried it and now the radio reception is fantastic and uninterrupted and my internet access is solid and does not break down over time. Marvelous!

My prediction for this afternoon’s 6 Nations Rugby game between England and Wales is that England will win by 10 points.

Laura and Evelyn are in Canada, I miss them both terribly.

2008-02-01T17:34:00.000Z

Yesterday, at work, during a banal conversation about the impending re-organisation, a colleague astounded the assembled members of the team by announcing that he probably held The Land Speed Wank Record as he had tossed himself off on the Tokyo bullet train at 300km/h (about 180mph). It was competition between the itinerant consultants at the financial services company he was working at. He had been hoping for the World Speed Wank Record, having had one in Business Class on a Boeing 747, but failed miserably as someone else at the firm had had a supersonic wank at Mach 2.02 on Concorde (about 2,140 km/h or 1,330 mph). As Concorde is no longer flying this record will probably stand for quite a while, unless a space shuttle crewman can knock one out on re-entry of course, but this would likely remain a classified wank.

2008-01-21T00:50:00.000Z

Ikkiertok is the Inuktitut or Eskimo language word for 'feels cold' and before anyone gets on their high horse about 'Eskimo' being a bad word and the correct word being Inuit, note that Eskimo is a Cree word and used by many Inuit interchangeably, secondly I am not known for my political correctness. But I digress. It is commonly acknowledged that the tribes moved across the land bridge from Asia to the Americas over what is now the Bering Straight some 20,000 years ago.

The origins of man are believed by most to have been in what we now call Africa, homo sapiens appeared about 250,000 years ago and modern man arrived only about 50,000 years ago when he first started comparing gadgets with his mates and complaining about how oppressively hot it was. Unsurprisingly, this is about the same time the first of our predecessors left Africa to colonise the rest of the world.

During the migration of man people spread across Europe, Asia, Australasia and, about 20,000 years ago, began the push across Siberia to the Americas, some settling in Greenland, Alaska and Northern Canada on their way to more southerly climes. What seems more amazing than the inexorable spread of man, is the fact that at no point during the long march across the Arctic did anyone say "What the fuck are we doing here? Let's go back to Africa!"

2008-01-19T23:28:00.000Z

....... and the weather, I have said it once and I'll say it again, Canada has got too much of it. Coming back here in January is a good reminder of why I want to live somewhere else. It's -8C today falling to -12C tonight and there is a bit of a wind, which means that if you include the wind chill factor it feels fucking cold. I walked to the subway today with my father in-law Dave, I'm not used to the temperature here after 5 minutes my neat and tidy conveniently recessed ears turned blue, after 10 minutes they cracked and fell off. It was so cold my cheeks stung and my teeth hurt. Dave loaned me some ear muffs which I used to clamp the little icey discs of flesh to the sides of my head until they glued themselves back on. I really can't imagine what it must be like to live in a 'cold' part of this country, in Winnipeg this weekend it will get to -34C.

For people such as myself this is all far too cold, although I imagine that the residents of Yellowknife in the Northwest Territories are reading about the weather here today and are buying their flights and packing their swimming trunks for some beach time on the shores of lake Ontario. The mean average annual temperature in Yellowknife is -5.4C, tonight there it will fall to -39C after a comparatively baking hot -24C earlier today.

The coldest temperature ever recorded and confirmed in Canada was at Snag in the Yukon, a ghost town now (for obvious reasons), but back in 1947 a thriving metropolis of about 10 natives and fur traders and a dozen or so military staff trying to hold open the little airport on the Northwest Staging route when on February 3rd the temperature dropped to -63C (-81.4F). For the record, the coldest temperature reliably recorded on earth was -89.2C (-128.6F) on July 21st 1983 in the Antarctic by the Russian Vostok scientific research station.

Fortunately, global warming seems likely to make Canada an archipelagic tropical paradise, the tundra will melt, Mounties will politely police the happy populace from airboats and better still, rising sea levels will submerge large parts of Quebec.

2008-01-19T15:24:00.000Z

RANT MODE ON>
We are in Canada for the week, well I am in Canada for the week, Laura and Evelyn will be here for perhaps two months. With everything that has gone on we weren't paying attention while Laura's fiance visa ran out and even though we are married, the retards that work in and manage the Home Office said she had to go back to Canada and re-apply for a spousal visa that they actually have no choice but to grant as it would contravene European law to refuse it. Sorry, but it's this sort of thing that really gets me down about the United States of Scotland, Wales, Northern Ireland and that other place that no-one in the Scottish run UK government seems to give a shit about. Until the general public noticed what they were doing, the Labour party had a more or less open door policy to immigration from poor countries so they can grow their voter base in England. They covered what they were doing with crap about immigration being great for the economy stating how much tax the immigrant population had contributed without mentioning the cost of social security payments, healthcare costs, council/government/court translation fees, prison costs, available accomodation and housing stock depletion (with the consequent increase in house prices and non-availability of social housing) and the cultural destruction caused by large scale settlement of people that would prefer on the whole to change England rather than fit in with the indigenous population.

Don't get me wrong, this isn't a race thing, I feel the same way about a large number of the British ex-pats in Spain, but at least most of them are paying their own way.

If you can't positively contribute, (which means you give more than you cost) to the country you move to then stay home. Of course if you can, then go live wherever you want or move in next door, it's fine by me!

I have always worked, haven't claimed any benefits in 22 years, pay over
£40,000 per year in direct taxation (for which I get more or less nothing in return) and to keep my English speaking, fullied supported by me, wife in the country it has cost me:

Douglas Adams observed in the Hitchhikers Guide to the Galaxy that, "Anyone who is capable of getting themselves made President should on no account be allowed to do the job." The same could I think be said for most all politicians and the bureaucratic lickspittles of the Civil Service that serve no-one other than themselves. I have come to realise over the years that the working for the government is: the lazy man's alternative to a real job; like sitting on a cart laughing while someone else pushes you uphill; the governments mendacious way of reducing unemployment statistics or a combination of all three. It is not important which party gets in, once they have been in power for a while their tongues are so deep in the sphincters of the people that buy their favours they can no longer see or hear the people that they are supposed to serve. When will they realise that they should answer to the tax payers that work so that the politicians can sit on their arses thinking up more ways to asset strip the middle classes.

RANT MODE OFF>

On a different note I read a hilarious book on the flight over: the autobiographical Don't tell mum I work on the rigs she thinks I'm a piano player in a whorehouse by Paul Carter, buy it, read it and lend it to your friends, I'll be buying the sequel for my flight back.

2008-01-13T11:45:00.000Z

After my reference to George W McMonkeyboy in my previous post I was quite surprised to stumble upon the intriguing BushorChimp website, circumstantial yet compelling evidence for the theory that although humans and chimpanzees share 98% of their DNA, with Republicans it is closer to 99%. Furthermore, a little googling revealed that he has been nicknamed Smirky McChimp on both sides of the US political divide.

2008-01-09T20:26:00.000Z

Americans, don't you love'm!

Apologies to my good US buddies Tim, Karyn, Karen and others whom I really do love for the embedded sarcasm in the title. Further apologies to all my friends from non-US North, South and Central American countries that get upset when the word American is used interchangeably with the phrase United States citizen

Electroshock stun gun manufacturers Taser have just released a new product to pimp up their personal protection line, the new leopard print TASER® C2, the very latest in high fashion ghetto weaponry.

And that's not all, so as you don't get bored on the bus waiting for someone to attempt mugging you, you can buy a specially designed case for it, the TASER® MPH Holster, with a built in MP3 player. I shit you not.

It's only a 1GB MP3 player though, so you had better not be too fussy over who you shoot with it or you might run out of rap before you zap.

My good friend John went back to Reggio Emilia for Xmas where he keeps his wife and kids. It is this hallowed region of Northern Italy that we have to thank for Parmigiano-Reggiano and prosciutto di Parma. When John wants some parmesan cheese he goes to the dairy that make it and tells them how much to cut from a wheel. When I want some I go to my bank manager. John pays about €12.5 (£9.36) per Kg, here in the UK it costs between €35 and €60 (£25-£45) per Kg. He brought back a 1.2Kg chunk for me. I was so grateful when he pulled my cheese out in the pub (fnar fnar) that I forgot myself and bought him a pint.

Now we live in a very nice part of town, next to a less nice part of town. I'm a big guy so I don't get bothered much, but it makes a man a little nervous walking around with that much cheese. Maybe I should get one of those Taser C2s, you can stop a big mouse with one of those babies!

And another thing, I'd like Hilary Clinton to be the next President of the United States, she is an intelligent, compassionate and thoughtful woman and would I think, do the best job repairing the financial, social and reputational damage inflicted on the country and the rest of the world by George W Mc Monkeyboy. I would also like to hear lurid details of new oval office sex scandals and as a Clinton, I reckon she is the best candidate for this as well.

Crocs Update: Don't bother with the mammoths! As they don't have a strap at the back your heels come out at every step and you feel like a hairy transvestite harlot wearing them. Not for me matey oh no!

2008-01-06T10:45:00.000Z

Well 2007, a year that could in many ways be likened to ducking for toffee apples in a barrel of vinegar, is finally over. Settling down again in the UK has been financially ruinous, my job has had more downs than ups and Laura hasn't been well a lot of the time. On the plus side: we had a healthy baby despite all attempts by the NHS to ruin it by prescribing Laura 1/5 of the medication needed for her hypothyroid condition and repeatedly losing her test results; we got married; things are much better at work, although that may all change in the next month or so as changes emanating from the take-over of my employer become apparent; my bonus in February should clear my UK debts.

2008 will be interesting, if all goes to plan:

We'll spend a month in Amsterdam while I attend to some issues in the office there.
Evelyn will get chatty and take her first faltering steps.
The current government will give up, call an election and lose mightily.
England will get independence from Scotland.

I truly despair of this country, additionally, I saw this sign on a shelf at Boots the chemist last week:

Sorry, but I don't think that anyone unable to work out what half of £1 is should be allowed out alone and certainly not allowed out to spend money, I have kitchen utensils that could work this out.

I have decided that I like Crocs. A lot. I bought a pair of black Jekyll Crocs in a Spanish supermarket last year figuring that I needed some as it was so hot and they were only about €7 which seems about the price that they should be. I now wear them in the house as slippers, out the house, to go to the pub and much to the consternation of Laura with socks if it is cold. I ordered a pair of genuine Crocs Caymans today and am waiting for a pair of Mammoth Crocs to arrive in the post so that I can do without the socks and dissing from my better half. My bank balance is a depressing shade of deep scarlet, but my Paypal balance is OK due to my offing some unwanted stuff shortly before Xmas, from which my feet will soon be reaping benefits. Laura hasn't missed out, I bought her some black and white Sassaris and some ruby Alices. There is an old army saying apparently, that goes "spend as much as you can on your boots and your bed, because when you're not in one, you're in the other". Buy some, your feet will love you and they don't actually cost that much, especially if you get a snide pair.

2007-12-25T03:25:00.000Z

Festive Greetings!

Christmas, not just a time for uber-shopping, as you can read in the reflective and somewhat spiritual Xmas post from my archive here. It is also a time when people that believe in ancient fairy tales celebrate the birth of a Palestinian political agitator that had his birthday moved to coincide with the Roman festival of Sol Invictus.

Fortunately for all those that live within it, Western Europe seems to have lost interest in all this mumbo-jumbo and no longer needs the threats and promises of archaic Semitic campfire ghost stories to cajole us into behaving. Of course, if your personal morality needs a little bolstering or you draw comfort from that not-being alone in the universe feeling that religion provides that's fine too. Or it is as long as you are not in a position to spend my tax money or start wars. Of course if Tony Blair (Bliar?) had said "I am a lying self delusional bastard with an imaginary friend in the sky that enables me to auto-justify anything I f***ing want to without recourse to parliament, the electorate or my conscience." then I guess we wouldn't have had him as Priminister for so long.

So it just goes to show, honesty really is the best policy, if either he or his sniveling worm-tongued spin-liar Alistair Campbell had been, we may not have suffered him this long. Still, at least now we are in the safe hands of Gordon Brown. Or maybe not. Nope it looks like we have another idiot with an imaginary friend in the top job, of course really he's been screwing it up for a long time, but now he's starting to get the credit for it.

Anyway, enough of that! Happy Xmas

Jesus, he's not just for Xmas you know!

2007-12-24T12:25:00.000Z

So I've been away a little while and you need an update:

We got married on August 4th at Marylebone Registry Office.

Evelyn was born, somewhat traumatically for her parents on November 3rd at 12:33 am.

Life has changed quite a bit. Laura who normally needs 14 hours sleep (every 12 hours) is finding our new schedule somewhat tiring as am I. Evelyn is fine, happy, alert, gaining weight and developing some truly devastating defecatory ballistics.

I apologise for not updating this recently and I won't waste your time with excuses, but I would like to wish you a warm and happy Christmas from the three of us.

2007-03-09T22:38:00.000Z

If you haven't seen Sofia Coppola's movie about the life of Marie Antoinette, don't. It is two hours of unadulterated directorial ego masturbation. I think Sofia was lent a copy of the excellent, tongue in cheek Plunkett and Macleane and thought she'd do a big budget chick flick version. Which might have worked, but she hasn't the talent. Self indulgent hints to her own over-inflated self opinion include a pair of basketball shoes in shot with the rest of Marie Antoinette's footwear. Every segway is an excuse to spin up another 80s rock or pop anthem. Sorry but it doesn't work, the only people that will like this rubbish are girls and homosexuals, and then most probably only for the costume and set design.

Laura is watching the end of the movie as I write this blog. I am now going to commit my words to the ether and settle down with the historically far more accurate Talladega Nights, The Ballad of Ricky Bobby.

2007-02-18T00:46:00.000Z

Hot Fuzz

Laura and I saw Hot Fuzz tonight, it starts a little slow, but there are some serious belly laughs once it gets moving. If you have nothing better to do, or are in a bad mood, go see it, you won't be afterwards. Not as good as Shaun of the Dead but a cracker all the same.

For reasons as yet unexplained, Laura came home with a bottle of this stuff. L's body temperature is a mystery; on getting into bed tired and wanting to sleep, she is sub zero, the moment she falls asleep the furnace goes on and her skin temperature rises to the point that the hairs on my arms spontaneously combust and I have to throw the duvet off lest it catch fire. On waking she is back to complaining about how horribly cold it is and refuses to get out of bed until the central heating thermostat is set to barbecue.

Anyway to see what this stuff is like she put a little bit on her finger and blew, it got hot. I think she plans to wait until I am at work, cover herself head to foot in it and stand in front of a fan.

2007-02-13T20:12:00.000Z

My boxers
While in Costa Rica I purchased some boxer shorts, no surprise there. I don't dress commando every day. Easy ladies! They were not expensive, in fact they were from Automercado, but I love them. In common with probably everyone occasionally I buy an item of clothing and love it so much that I know that if I can't get an identical replacement I will be distraught. The first time this happened to me it was a pair of Gaerne enduro motorcycle boots that ended up saving my ankles when I had a car interface, they still make motorcycle boots but not a pair like the ones I love. Latterly I have learned the lesson, in Canada I discovered a pair of walking shoes, trainers or whatever they were that were goretex lined and so comfortable that I could wear them all day and then at the gym after work, marvelous, after I had them a week I went and bought another pair, but now one pair are on the way out and the other pair although still in Canada and bound to arrive before the first give up the ghost will be the last, the manufacturer doesn't make them any more. Damn if I hadn't bought six pairs or maybe twelve. But back to my boxers.... I liked these so much I did actually buy twelve pairs or maybe more. What is cool about them is that they have an inside pocket attached to the elasticated hem.

Those of you that have spent time in Latin America will know that a $20 bill will get you a very long way in a taxi and a $100 bill will get you nowhere as no-one has change for such a large denomination and those that do, think that all $100s are counterfeit and will have nothing to do with them. The other week I found a $20 poking out from under the insole of some shoes, you can tell I've spent some time in dubious places. The shoe trick wouldn't have helped my pal Joe in Cuba as he managed to get his trainers stolen there, which is a serious crime. In Cuba a national can get 5 years for giving a tourist a nasty look. But as far as I know, one's underpants and especially Joe's are generally safe from intrusion. These would even have saved him in Colombia when he was kidnapped and taken for a gunpoint tour of local cashpoint machines. That extra $20 wouldn't have stopped it but it would at least have enabled him to spend the rest of the night boozing away his sorrows. He couldn't have got a taxi with it, getting a taxi solo in Colombia is exactly how he came to be kidnapped in the first place.

Anyway I like to think of these boxers as my adventure underpants and worried as I am about them wearing out and never being able to buy another pair, I keep them for special occasions and adventure. So now I have the other problem.....

I have loads of boxers but don't want to wear any in case they wear out, I guess I'd better go commando.

2007-01-04T11:21:00.000Z

New Sock Day!

Like anyone that works in an office I have an assortment of dark coloured socks that are missing a partner. There is the morning ritual of seeking a whole pair from those recently dried. Even when there are two that match in design, pattern and material, one appears to have faded more than the other, although quite how this happens I am not sure.

Every year or so I go on a sock buying binge to banish this hoserial curse. This year it was different, I did it by e-bay. I ordered twelve pairs each of two different kinds (just to be safe you understand). The first consignment arrived this morning and after test driving a pair all the old office-work-formal socks were binned. Hot sock tip: Either buy a lot of pairs of exactly the same socks, or pairs of socks that are so different that you can match them up in a dark room, in a darker mood, with a hangover, a cold sweat and only five minutes to get out the door. It saves frustration, workday embarrassment or both. Anyway, you are probably asking yourself why I am sock rich......

I start the new job on Monday which after six months off is much needed mentally and financially. Although we have had to pack up a few places and move about quite a bit since my previous employer shut. They still owe me a considerable amount of money, which is a pity as I think I'll have to sell my motorcycles and possibly my place in Gibraltar to finance the wedding and our condo in Toronto.

We bought a car yesterday so Laura will be fully mobile while I am at work and able to spend her time fruitfully traipsing the aisles of England's feminine footwear vendors' emporia and other such noble pastimes.

For those wondering: The shin befronting the muscular calf in the right foreground is my own. Ladies should use caution when viewing this photo as I am no longer available merchandise.

2006-10-29T10:39:00.000Z

About ten days ago I flew back to the UK. It was proving impossible to find a decent job in Spain given the political climate in the US that is impacting on the business sector I have worked in for the last five years. I have reluctantly left Laura with my friend Ken but she'll be flying here soon. I have had a few interviews and am waiting to hear if there are any positive results. I'm not really keen on anything I've found yet, but I've never really looked at work as something to enjoy, it's just what you've got to do to enable life.

I am very grateful to my friends who have really pulled for me recently, Ken, Dave and Amanda are all helping. It's hard not to feel a little dispondant, but I know something will turn up soon.

I'm looking forward to getting back on a motorcycle after a year out of the saddle and looking forward to seeing my wonderful soon-to-be-wife at the airport later in the week.

2006-10-02T14:50:00.000+01:00

Laura was running a mop around the bathroom the other day. She moved the laundry bin and behind it was a little Gecko. He, a presumption as I am not able to determine Gecko genders, was so scared he dropped his little tail and scampered off to hide, leaving his now detached tail wiggling on the floor. A little while later, Laura caught him and released him in the living room. I could not get a rational explanation for his release in the living room rather than outside, but she has a thing about creatures, desiring to touch, hold and make friends with anything that isn't a spider. Personally I think that with the sole exception of cats, any creature inside the house should be hot, dead and covered in gravy.

Unless something somewhere warm turns up soon, I think that we may have to return to the UK, where I shall prostitute my brain for the filthy lucre in IT contracting. Which to be honest, money apart depresses me enormously.

2006-09-30T10:25:00.000+01:00

So apologies for my prosaic hiatus. The company I worked for in Costa Rica that kept me in Canada shut down. So I packed up my apartment in Toronto and moved all my stuff into Laura's parents house, tripped down to San Jose, Costa Rica said goodbye to some friends and packed packed my chattels into four suitcases, flew back to Toronto and helped Laura pack up her apartment. The available ground floor space in Laura's parents house has been reduced by 50% and their lounge reduced to an assault course of our bags and boxes. We left three apartments in the space of three weeks and flew to the UK to say hello to the family and then on to Spain where my friend Ken has very kindly put us up while I look for my next job.

Ken is working on Laura's health issues and has her taking Vitamin C every eight hours, CoQ10, Evening Primrose Oil, ginseng and Silibinin. The current train of thought is that the root cause to Laura's vast array of medical issues is liver malfunction. Although what caused this is unknown. These supplements seem to improved Laura's thyroid function. When Laura and I first met she used to get heart palpitations and shake when she was tired, which I recognised as a calcium deficiency due to her diet. When we applied the SCD diet and and started her on increased Vitamin C and Calcium amongst a general vitamin and mineral regime. This sorted out her heart palpitations, shakes and showed some improvement in intestinal problems. Her thyroid seemed to improve a little and her Doctor suggested a decrease in her thyroid supplement from 180mg per day to 120mg. This left her tired and listless but she was OK on 150mg. After being on the Ken regime for two weeks Laura has been able to reduce her thyroid supplement to 60mg per day, with no ill effects so there are some definite improvements. We hold out hope for a complete cure.

Anyway, we are in sunny Spain and taking day trips out to various places of interest. We recently visited a Moroccan festival at a town in the hills near Monda. The street lights were all turned off and the town was lit by candles every few inches along the sides of the road and lining the balconies. The town squares were filled with stalls selling all sorts and there was a magical air about the who affair.

We have tripped out to see Seville, Ronda, Gibraltar, Castellar de la Frontera and other nearby sights. I had a couple of interviews last week, but no news yet and I am still being courted by a start-up in Canada that still don't have the money to run the project. So we'll hang out here a little longer. If nothing has turned up in Spain by the end of October, I'll renounce gaming and go back to IT contracting for financial services companies in London. The gaming world pays well enough to keep us in a warm country with a low cost of living. But if we go back to the UK then I'll go back to the far more lucrative world of banking.

2006-08-26T17:24:00.000+01:00

A while ago I received this handy good wife guide. It was in the hands of an angry female colleague shocked at the subservient domestic home goddess approach displayed therein. I started reading it and became not a little impressed with the sound advice offered by the author. Then I noticed that it is dated 1955. I hope attitudes haven't changed since then. I must show it to Laura and pin it up on a wall in a prominent place or something, after all, we will be getting married and I hope she gets it tight. Click here or on the image to see the full version.

Something that Laura will definitely not be allowed to see is this. It is a sad and shocking indictment of Christian womanhood and perfectly explains the demise of religion in the West. Well it does if it's true.

I have left Costa Rica for the last time, for a long time. Someone new will soon be enjoying the views over Santa Ana from what was my terrace. It was sad to leave, somehow I feel cheated, I never had the time to get that motorcycle and explore the mountains as I had wanted. I left some things at the apartment, the landlady said goodbye to me and gave me a painting from the apartment that I had always liked.

I got to the airport and the problems started, a change in dates meant a charge had been added to the already enormous excess baggage fee and this needed to be paid in cash as my credit card doesn't seem to work at San Jose airport, even though it works everywhere else. This was sorted out by Pauline, the formidable yet diminutive New Yorker that arranges all my travel. She is phenomenally cool at fixing flights and someone that should you work in the industry, you should treat with the greatest respect. It took two hours to sort this out and in compensation they upgraded me to Business Class. The company I worked for always flew me cattle class, the Directors however were unable to lower themselves for this economy and most of them were unaware that there was anyone sat behind the curtains on the plane. Due to the recent terrorist scare in London, security had been tightened to the point that the queue stretched out of the airport. On arrival at Toronto Pearson airport at the centre and unconnected terminal, I positioned myself on the bus to terminal one so that I would be at the front of the queue at immigration control. I wasn't. I had landed just after two Jumbo jets full of visiting school children from China and Singapore. Everyone of whom was sent through to the interview room to have a chat with another one of the semi-evolved chimps of the Canada Border Services Agency as I was. Most of them were in front of me in the queue and I had to wait an hour to repeat the same thing to another one of these mentally subnormal cretins, that unable to get a real job, decided to work for the gorvernment. I couldn't phone Laura, who was waiting for me as they block cellphones in that room. The CBSA guy did, he asked if she knew me and what I did for a living and other questions that would safeguard the country of Canada from IT Project Managers and other people that know what they are doing. Eventually he stamped my passport for 6 months as they always do and I went through and answered the same question set with another group of these sphincter probers at customs. Two and a half hours after landing, I finally emerged from the arrivals doors to be greeted by Laura. She was looking phenomenal, elegant and refined in a black dress and some rather naughty shoes she had bought before I'd left for Costa Rica the previous week.

Between the two of us, we have moved out of three apartments in the last three weeks. Tomorrow, we leave for the UK and by the end of next week we'll be in Spain where we shall enjoy the last rays of summer while awaiting the next job. Which could be anywhere.

2006-08-20T17:55:00.000+01:00

For those of you that found the timing of my last two posts confusing, I am actually in Costa Rica as we speak (or more correctly, as I write). I woke up this morning with agonizing pain in my right leg and serendipitously happened on a couple of intellectual blogs of note from opposite sides of the political spectrum while researching a new hobby of my father's; Tug Boat Potemkin which lead me to Catalaxy . Both the authors appear to be in Australia. While surfing the links therein I came across something unusual. People that work in IT (Information Technology for Mac users and other technologically challenged folk) have long had a bit of an image problem and to counter this the wiley Ozzies have released a hot babes in IT calendar. I fear that this will have done little to reform the nerdyboy geek image of the trade if this crew of snarling sheep farmers' daughters are the pinup ladies of the profession.

This got me thinking about other vocation specific calendars featuring the people that do the job. The hose fondling British Firefighters, beloved of a distant ex-girlfriend, UK housewives and gay men the world over. I mean it's not as if fireman are short of shags regardless of their gender preferences. But it is in a good cause I suppose. Obviously, the excellent Rylstone and District WI calendar which featured in the Calendar Girls film comes readily to mind. This has raised a substantial sum for leukemia research. I am in fact so inspired by the success of this charitable venture that I think I will make a calendar of my own this year in order to raise money for London Pride, which is a fabulous beer.

1) Any offense given to Mac users was purely intentional for an explanation of just a few of the reasons why Macs are crap go here.

2) Not all firemen are gay, not all Yorkshire women are willing to get their kit off for a camera, buy the calendars (except the butch Ozzie IT girls one of course).

2006-08-14T23:57:00.000+01:00

As I write, my exceedingly beautiful ex-girlfriend is getting changed in the bedroom. Laura and I haven't split up or anything, it's just as she is now my fiancee having been promoted two weeks ago to her current position, she is no longer my girlfriend. But I digress...

Laura is currently on the fourth change of clothes in the last quarter of an hour. There is a crisis forming, you see we will have to go out of the house where people whom we don't know and we don't care about will see us. If we are not paragons of up to the minute yet timeless sartorial style, the shame will be immeasurable. Not only clothes, combinations of clothes, make up, lipstick and hair style issues. This attitude is of course not confined to Laura, it is nearly all girls, girly-boys and some men (not real men of course oh no!). Things are different if you are a bloke.

Let me explain......
Girl getting ready to go out: Into the shower, feel the relaxing warm water and worry about whether it will dry out your skin; wash body all over except for face with pH neutral body milk type soap and body scruffing glove, sponge or flowery thing; step out of shower and snatch boyfriend/husbands shaving cream and razor. Use whole can of shaving soap shaving legs, armpits and possibly trimming the lawn, but not too much as there is a Doctor's appointment later in the week, nothing too adventurous, can't have the doctor thinking that sort of thing oh no! Worry about cellulite and legs being too fat. Shampoo with correct combination shampoo suitable for dry/greasy/normal and blonde/brunette/redhead hair. Wash hair thoroughly, gently massaging the scalp and cleaning the hair from the root to the ends. Worry about split ends and whether the hairdresser will have a slot free on Thursday. Apply correct conditioner type for hair type light/normal/dark, blonde/brunette/redhead, normal/fine/damaged. Leave conditioner on as specified on bottle or last week's article in Cosmopolitan. Reach for clean fluffy towel and dry off being sure not to abraid skin before applying moisturising body milk to stop skin drying out. Remember that you want a wee, have a wee, get back into shower, showering from waist down only. Worry about too much tummy fat. Dry off, and reapply mosturising body milk to waist down. Inspect toenails and decide against varnish as you won't be wearing open toed shoes that night. Towel dry hair. Wash face with exfoliating scrub, wash face with pH neutral face soap. Worry about pimple and whether other people will notice it. Clean ears with cotton buds. Dry hair thoroughy with hairdrier. Worry about split ends. Style hair up, style hair down. Apply makeup, a process too complicated to be described by modern science. Leave bathroom for use of boyfriend/fiance/husband. Tell man to stop playing on the computer and hurry up or we'll be late. Select panties, select bra, select blouse, change bra because it doesn't match the blouse, change panties because they do not match the bra. Select shoes. Select skirt/trousers (pants if you speak North American). Tell male partner to stop playing on the computer or we'll be late. Worry about whether it will be cold out. Decide better safe than sorry and select jumper/shawl/jacket. Realise that warm article doesn't match shoes, change shoes, change trousers or skirt to match shoes. Change blouse to match skirt/trousers, change bra to match blouse, change panties to match bra. Put on lipstick.

Bloke getting ready to go out: Walk into bathroom when girlfriend/wife is in the shower. Wonder whether it is time for romance. Get told that it isn't or 'we'll be late'. Go back to computer. Ignore requests to get in the shower as it will be at least another hour before she's ready to go out. Go into bathroom while female is applying makeup naked and wonder whether it is time for romance. Get told that it isn't or 'we'll be late' and go back to computer. Involve oneself in matters of vital national importance on news sites, ebay etcetara. Notice lady of the house in state of semi nudity, wonder if it's time for romance, realise from the hard stare that it is not and go into bathroom. Shrug off clothes and step into shower and feel the relaxing hot water, look down admiringly. Realise you want a wee and wee, try to hit plughole no hands. Hope that noise of shower will mask indiscretion. Wash all over with first bottle that comes to hand. Wonder about why the soap doesn't seem to work and realise that you have been trying to wash yourself with light blonde normal hair conditioner. Reach for dark coloured bottle of manly showergel or any other detergent. Wash everything, well not that thing, at least not too thoroughly, there may be time for romance later! Wash hair with fluid from any bottle except the one with conditioner in it. Step out of shower and dry off with towel previously used by female. Rub hand through hair and consider it dry. Look in the mirror admiringly. Wet face with water from basin in preparation for shaving, look all over for shaving cream, find can in the shower, be confused about why you'd have left it there of all places. Attempt to squirt shaving cream onto palm of hand but there's none left, ask lady of the house if she has used shaving cream and razor and on hearing the answer decide to forego the shave. Notice spot on cheek and squeeze it until a satisfying pop noise and squirt of puss are achieved. Wander about the house/apartment aimlessly without clothes on for a bit. Walk into bedroom, put on underpants, socks, look at the jeans you were wearing yesterday, sniff them, put them on because the smell does not making you gag, stand up, notice curry stain on thigh, take them off. Select new pair of jeans from closet, put them on and grab shirt that will probably not look offensive with the jeans. Put on shoes and feel confused about why you are ready to go out when your better half is halfway through her third change of clothes. Wait for her to be ready to leave, walk to the door together, quick check (Wearing trousers? Yes! Keys? Yes! Wallet? Yes! Mobile phone? Yes!) and it's off to the supermarket.

2006-08-14T13:56:00.000+01:00

As I have mentioned previously, the company I work for has had a couple of issues. After much legal mastication and machination the company has terminated its operation in Costa Rica. I got a call from my boss explaining the situation on Thursday. The company has said that it will try to fulfill its contractual obligations to employees. Which means in theory, I should get paid in lieu of notice and a sum for repatriation, when this will happen however, is another matter.

I'm heading back to Costa Rica on Wednesday to pack the things from my apartment in Santa Ana, submit my expenses for the last time and close off the utilities accounts. I don't think that I'll look for something else there. There was something reassuring about working for a publicly listed company, rather than a privately owned affair and the public companies in my industry will be shying off the US market after what has happened. Laura will fly out to meet me wherever I am in a couple of weeks. I'm not sure quite what happens next.

My friend Ken has offered use of an apartment he owns in Gibraltar for as long as it's necessary and that might be a fine option. It's above a marina and close enough to Spain for the shopping, beaches and restaurants. It would be nice to see my friends Kay, Ken, Anas amongst others and pay a visit to my family and friends in the UK perhaps.

There are opportunities to be had in a few countries, so we'll wait them out in the warm I guess.

Tomorrow I am packing up my chattels from the company apartment in Toronto and carting the boxes off to Laura's parent's place to await shipping to the UK, Spain or wherever. It feels like the last few years have been nothing but moving home and moving country. I'd like to settle down for a bit some place. I mentioned to Laura last night, that so soon I'll be homeless again and she reminded me that home was wherever she is. Which is handy really, as Laura is portable.

2006-08-04T15:40:00.000+01:00

I took last Friday off work and Laura and I drove to Niagra on the Lake. Laura didn't know it but I was going to propose that day. It was her birthday. I have often said to Laura something to the effect of, "so shall we get married then", she always responds "yes" and asks if it is a proposal. I say "no, maybe, do I look like I'm on one knee?" But this time it was going to be for real. We had discussed it, but as my job is in a perilous position right now, we had decided that it would not be sensible to blow a large chunk of money on a ring and you can't get engaged without a ring. So we were going to wait until things were a little more stable financially and professionally. At least that's what she thought.

I had driven round to her parents house on the Wednesday. I left work a little early, went ring shopping; my wallet is still bleeding and drove over to ask her dad's permission. A little traditional, but a nice touch I thought. Laura's car was parked outside, I cruised past, parked and called her. "I'm just driving home, where are you?" "I'm at my mum and dad's, I'll be leaving in ten minutes." This was a Laura ten minutes, so I stopped by at a florist and picked up some flowers, read Popular Science for quarter of an hour and drove back. The car was still there, the ten minutes now being thirty minutes old I gave up, knocked on the door, handed Laura her flowers and made an excuse about getting lost after leaving the freeway to avoid a jam (which is believable for me). Her dad, Dave, offered me a beer and I suggested we have it in the garden. As I am a filthy smoker, this all seemed natural. While Laura and her mum Judy were in the house chatting about girly stuff, knitting, make-up, Brad Pitt, shampoo or some such I imagine, Dave and I went out for the beer. I asked permission, got the all clear and the plan was underway.

We parked at the little airfield and walked into the shed labeled 'Terminal' and jumped on a National Helicopters Bell 206 Jet Ranger. I have never been on a chopper before, but Laura likes it. (Ooh Matron!). The take off was smooth, it seemed to flutter into the air. Initially I was filled with trepidation, as my only experience of helicopters is from watching American Vietnam war movies. "Charlie don't surf, we're hit, going down, mayday mayday." I chilled a little and thought about the ring in my camera bag. If anything happened and it looked like we were going to die, I'd have to get it out quick, propose and get the ring on her finger before we hit the ground. The scenery was magnificent. We flew over Niagara Falls, the town of Niagara on the Lake and twenty minutes or so later landed safely back at the airfield. Heart still beating wildly from the adrenaline we got in the car and went to the Prince of Wales Hotel.

After lunch at a pleasant cafe' I suggested we take a meander about the town and down to the lake. It is a beautiful place, every house a little different and each a quaint expression of the traditional wooden North American home. Spoilt perhaps only by the cars driving up and down the main street.

Our stroll took us down to the lake shore and we sat on a boulder looking out at the blue horizon. I was a jangle of nerves. We were sat together, I stood up, got down on one knee and asked "Will you marry me?" She said "Yes" as she had so many times to my test drive not really proposing proposals; I took the ring from my pocket. Then the realisation grabbed her cheeks, a brilliant smile erupted; she saw me on one knee in front of her with the ring in my hand and knew that this meant it was really happening. She slipped the ring on, I sat back on the boulder and we kissed.

2006-07-22T10:59:00.000+01:00

After our vacation Laura and I went back to my apartment in Costa Rica, which truth be told, for me, felt more like a vacation. I love my place in Santa Ana, it is peaceful, warm, the views are great and there is something reassuring about it. We had a couple of days off that I found truly relaxing. Which was good because I got back into the office on Monday caught a rotten cold and found out that the CEO had been arrested by the FBI who are also indicting the company. By Tuesday afternoon the company had voluntarily ceased trading pending legal moves and everyone was worried about whether the next pay cheque would be the last. It might be. This on top of an unwelcome appointment made by the boss two months ago that has put a lot of noses out of joint and caused many to consider their resignation.

Tuesday saw a few drinks at Jazz Cafe which temporarily relieved the symptoms of my cold. Laura got to meet a couple of my pals and we flew back to Toronto on Wednesday. Arriving late we dropped in to Laura's parents to pick up her car and drop off some the presents which we had bought at a roadside shop (well a little house on a country road that sold stuff) on the way back from Arenal. They had a sign up outside that offered free "agua de pipa fria" I stopped as I knew Laura would not have had any before, at least not the Latin American way.

Agua de pipa is the water from inside an immature coconut. You put the cocunut in it's husk into a fridge, then pull it out when cold. Holding the coconut in your left hand jam a bowie knife down into the husk penetrating the inner shell, twist the knife to open the knife hole a little, withdraw the knife and insert a straw into the hole. Then suck. (Proffesional Tip: Try not to stab your left hand through the coconut.)

We are very much in love. While cuddled up on the sofa watching a TV program about Americans I did have to mention that if she got big and fat we would have to split up. I mean love is one thing, dating fat birds is something else entirely. Laura countered with "Well what if I get super-fit and you get fat?" Well I gave it to her straight "You should love me for who I am, not the way I look!" This is the advantage of being superficial, different rules apply.

2006-07-16T02:08:00.000+01:00

So Laura and I have spent the last week on vacation in Costa Rica. A volcanic black sand beach on the Pacific coast with a couple of days in Arenal.

There is a lot of restructuring going on at work and it has been difficult to take my mind off of it. It hasn't really felt like a vacation to me. It's the first time in Centro America for Laura and as we might have to move here full time, I have been worried about her enjoying the place too much to appreciate it myself. After a couple of days in the office and a weekend at home in Santa Ana we hit off out for the coast with no real aim in mind. We arrived in Puntarenas and realised it was a postindustrial dump that had fallen on it's knees since the railroad was torn up. Looking in the guide book we arrived in Playa Hermosa just south of Jaco. We stayed at an extortionate hotel for three nights and were bitten mercilessly by the fleas of an itinerant cat that begs food from the guests at the beachfront restaurant.

The place is mostly occupied by surfers escaping the commercialisation of Jaco. They speak a completely different language from normal humans... well dude it was toally gnarly and the super-mutant back wave ride ...... We didn't understand a word. There were a few trips away to coconut plantations, other beaches and some jungle trail off-roading in the rented 4x4.

After three nights we drove to Arenal and stayed in a spa. It was cloudy with a lot of rain, so we didn't get to see the lava red glow of the top of the volcano, which is normal for this time of year, but still dissappointing. Whilst driving we encountered some strange long nose cute creatures, some monkeys and some alligators under a bridge. It rained sticks most of the time in Arenal and we decided to head out for home for a couple of days rest before work.

We are flying back on Wednesday, unless something big has happened at work that I don't know about yet.

2006-07-08T19:54:00.000+01:00

I wore a new pair of briefs yesterday, I got up last night to have a wee and there was a sticker on my thing that read "Large".

2006-06-14T17:16:00.000+01:00

So.... Montreal was fantastic. Well Old Montreal was fantastic. It seems to be experiencing a renaissance with many of the old buildings being renovated, the last of the old street names and hotels have been converted from English to French by prefixing them with "Le" or "La" such as the excellent Hotel Le Saint James in a desperate attempt to eradicate the obviously Britannic roots of this marvelous city by Quebecois pomposity. Laura and I had a marvelous time and continued to fall ever more in love with each other, much as we do on a daily basis but with more eating out.
Montreal was the most populous city in North America in 1860 and the richest city in Canada until the Quebecois started demanding independence. The declaration of French as the only official language of Quebec together with the linguistic and cultural ethnic cleansing of English by the Quebecois stripped Montreal of its economic powerhouses as the both the successful companies and individuals left for Toronto (including the Bank of Montreal).
What was once a thriving and wealthy city has really been turned into a quaint has-been of a metropolis that makes money from tourists coming to visit Canada's second pretty French place. I am however willing to forgive the Quebecois a little bit as they cook better bread than anyone else in Canada.

Toronto is a city segmented by the nationality of it's immigrants; there is a Chinatown, a Little India, a little Greece, two Little Italys ( the original one around College Street and the newer more affluent one around Woodbridge); a huge Korean population around Yonge and Finch and a centre for just about everyone else except the French, English, Irish and Scottish who have dispersed into and formed the first white populations in the Toronto area. The land was purchased in 1787 from the local Missisaugas (Native American Indians) for 1700 pounds sterling and some goods by the British Commander Lord Dorchester in Montreal. John Graves Simcoe, the first Lieutenant-Governor of Upper Canada arrived in the Toronto area in 1793. There was no city or street plan at the time, it was just some land by a lake, the area called Toronto by local Iroquois is actually about 2 hours North by what is now lake Simcoe. Lieutenant Govenor Simcoe spent three years here and during this time had a ten block town layed out with modest buildings for parliament, court and religious services and called it York after the Duke of York. York changed it's name to Toronto in 1834.

The first phase of my project went live but a change in the financial certainty of the product I was replacing has undermined the budget for the subsequent phases and I lost three embers of my team so the last few weeks have been somewhat fraught at the office and I feel geographically uncertain about the next few months.

Laura and I more or less live together now and this has given me the opportunity to flex my cooking muscles; she can't eat disaccharides or polisaccharides. So I am cooking to rules laid down here which is quite a stretch, but fun as I love juggling pots and pans.

We are back to Costa Rica for two weeks on Wednesday with a week on vacation in the middle... can't wait!

2006-05-25T19:14:00.001+01:00

So a quick update as I've been a little slack recently. I went back to Costa Rica about three weeks ago to launch the first phase of my new project. It was rough, but we got there and succeeded where a few attempts by our competitors have recently failed. I had planned on spending a month in Centro America and checking out Guatemala, but as the more observant among you will have detected from my previous post I have met someone very special, Laura. So I hightailed it back here to be with her on Monday.

Laura had picked up the keys to my new Toronto apartment while I was gone and met me in the arrivals lounge at the airport. She looked so very beautiful. On Tuesday I rented a GMC Envoy 4x4 from Budget to haul my stuff from the office to my new apartment. It is roughly the size of Brazil and had no problem swallowing the boxes and cases. I tried to swap it for my standard pimp-mobile 300C yesterday, but I think George has been letting someone else use it. The only thing they had was a Ford Crown Victoria and as I am neither an off duty cop nor over 60 years old, I am unable to be seen in one. So I'll drop the GMC off tomorrow and get something more sensible on Monday or Tuesday.

On Tuesday night I met Laura's parents for dinner. It was a fine night out and in a recent opinion poll among almost six friends are relatives of Laura, 97% thought I was the most likely candidate to carry her across the threshold (margin of error +/- 3%). After dinner we got a cab back to my part of town and Laura suggested we nip into a pub called the Jersey Giant. Outsider it was nothing special, inside it's all whitewash and black oak beams supporting a vaulted ceiling. But there in a corner of the bar was a vision of ecstasy. I rubbed my eyes, I was obviously hallucinating, maybe it was some sort of mirage. So I asked the barman... "Does that hand pump really have London Pride coming out of it?" About a nanosecond after he had finished pronouncing the word "does" I announced "This is an emergency! I need a pint of London Pride and don't spare the horses!" I ordered a port for Laura, who was at that moment was elevated in my estimation from her previous status, "most divine creature ever to have walked the earth" to her new status of Goddess. Paying for the drinks I walked out to the terrace with the best girl in the world in one hand and the best beer in the world in the other. Bliss! We spent an hour outside chatting and watching the constant stream of loonies that seem to oscillate from one end of King Street East to the other before going home.

Tomorrow we are off to Montreal for a long weekend.

I'll add some pictures when I get a mo...

2006-05-07T21:23:00.000+01:00

Positives and Negatives
As many of you already know I am back in Costa Rica. This was going to be for a little over a month which under normal circumstances I would absolutely love. However, a short time ago I met someone that changed my perspective and now I am looking forward to getting back to Toronto. So much so, that I am willing to ride the undercarriage on the way back if there are no seats available. The Ticos I occasionally fly up there to work for me don't like the place due to suffering the cold there in the winter months. They don't believe me about the weather changing, so I have started referring to it as Hawaii Del Norte so they'll agree to more work in Canada.

So my project has had some setbacks which is annoying but other than that, life is good. My apartment is wonderful as ever and I have joined the gym under the office here so as not to let things go. I am going there every day and have decided to remove the dietary staple alcohol, from my regime for a week or so to help cut back the calories.

I left my credit card in an ATM machine one evening last week, which would normally have been a massively disturbing, given that the new one needs to be sent from the UK to Canada and I'm on the other side of the Americas. The following morning I went in to the bank with the ATM outside and told them about it and they returned me the card on seeing my Driving License. Disaster averted! Banks will not do this for you in the UK.

Yesterday I took a taxi home from the office, the taxis at the side of the building tend to be driven by sedate, somewhat confused old men, that drive you to random destinations they remember visiting as a child before the dementia set in. The taxis at the front seem to be driven by wannabe Ayrton Sennas. They cut the seatbelts out of the back of their cars, lower the suspension so that bumps larger than an ant dropping become impassable and mount disturbingly large fire extinguishers on the passenger side A pillar so as to guarantee facial disfiguration and death for the copilot when combined with the non-functioning inertia belt in the event of an accident.
I elected to use the clean and undented vehicle at the side. There were seatbelts in the back and the driver seemed quite a pleasant old chap. After a small nap, he took off in the direction of Santa Ana. He asked for directions which he ignored and took the wrong turn off of the autopista. After a detour through a small town in the countryside we ended up back on the right road. Apologising profusely, he stopped the meter at 5000 Colones and told me that I would not have to pay any more than that as he had made a mistake. If I hadn't been sat down, I would have fallen over. This is not the behavior of a regular taxi driver. He got me home and I paid him the 5000 he asked for and another 2000, because I didn't want him losing out for being decent. Besides there are far worse things than a taxi ride through Costa Rican countryside at night.

I discovered a flattened scorpion about 3 inches long just inside my front door the other day and wondered whether I had trodden on it on the way in the previous evening before banishing it from my thoughts and presumably into the dustpan of the maid a little later that day. Yesterday I decided to have a night in. While I was cooking this "Shadowy Thing" started darting about the kitchen. On closer inspection the thing revealed itself to be some amphetamine fueled grasshopper too fast to catch under a glass. A couple of squirts with the first household spray that came to hand, slowed and confused him enough to allow transportation out to the terrace. I had just resolved that Centro America has entirely too many creatures turned away from my cooking to watch a very un-flat scorpion trundling across my kitchen floor. This guy spent the night under an inverted glass before being carried to the terrace for his portrait and thence to the garden that he may continue to pursue whatever mischief he wants. If I found myself bitten by him, his next trip to the garden will be as a martyred warning to the rest of his phylum.

2006-05-01T16:13:00.000+01:00

Contrasts

Three million people in Darfur depend on food aid from the UN. Due to lack of sufficient funding the UN announced last week that it will be halving food rations from May to 1050 calories per day. A normal person needs between 1300 and 1500 calories per day to survive. So this amounts to a diet plan for the starving and undernourished.

The International Federation of Competitive Eating has four events listed for May, people from all over the US will gather to gorge themselves on sickening volumes of tamales, bologna (current record 2.5 pounds in 5 minutes), Shoo-fly pie and hot dogs (current record 53&1/2 hot dogs and buns in 12 minutes).

2006-04-28T16:40:00.000+01:00

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.

2006-04-23T18:06:00.000+01:00

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.

2006-04-16T05:55:00.000+01:00

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.

2006-04-14T06:26:00.000+01:00

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!

2006-03-28T17:45:00.000+01:00

Panama..
I love the buses in Panama and Nicaragua. They all have custom paint jobs, individual names and chrome exhaust pipes rising vertically from the rear bumpers.

Just to let you all know I'm still alive, I'll post more on this when I get back to Canada but here's it:
I'm staying in a small hostel in Casco Viejo, Panama City. The people are friendly a mixed crowd from Europe and North America.

The area is reminiscent of Havana vieja by which I mean a run-down slum that was once an area of envied affluence. Totally unlike Havana, some of the houses have been restored to a candied pastiche and if you move a block or two outside of Casco Viejo, which is crawling with various styles of police, it gets dangerous as it is a quaint old colonial slum surrounded by an unpleasant graffitied 20th century slum. Havana is also safe as Cubans caught giving tourists a nasty look can be jailed for an indefinite period, Panama isn't like that.

It's hot, humid, there is no sound of gunfire, all the bars shut early on Monday. It has a tropical down-at-heel decomposing feel about the place, which if you have never been to a poor place in Centro America is difficult to describe.

There will be more photos later in the week.

Casco Viejo is a place trapped between poverty and wealth, where western tourists and businessmen pass each other by on the same streets in different worlds.

2006-03-15T04:29:00.000Z

I joined a new gym on Sunday March 13th and had an unfitness assessment. At the time I weighed 202 lb and was apparently 27.4% fat, which equates to 55 lbs of flesh not suitable for making pies.

Me: What does this all mean?
Trainer: You're a fat bastard!
Me: I want a second opinion!
Trainer: You're ugly too!

I have been to the gym every day since, I now have a personal trainer and a nutritionist.

On the scales a minute ago I registered 205 lb.

After the gym I have studiously undertaken further training at the pub. You don't get a body like mine without extreme maintenance!

The cigarettes are now under control and I intend to make my lungs a smoke free zone, they are just so good with beer though.

I have enjoyed several happy evenings boozing with my friends Kevin and Nora. Kevin has recently enlightened me with several hypotheses of his which I have found most interesting.

1) The violent, misogynistic behavior exhibited by rap singers and lauded in rap songs is very similar to the racist stereotype espoused by the Klu Klux Klan. I was in the pub during the academy awards when Three 6 Mafia won their Oscar for song "It's hard out here for a pimp". During their acceptance a Nigerian in the bar was vociferously complaining about the standard of their English.

2) The primitive, violent, theatrical slugfest which is the WWF is not entertainment. When I say WWF here I mean the WWE, the 'World Wrestling Federation' had to rename themselves as they tried to hijack the initials of the 'World Wildlife Fund' but the 'roid pumped sphincters failed and the World Wildlife Fund won their right to their own initials back in court. It is an abominable role model for the mistreatment of women, a proponent of might equals right pugnacious conflict resolution and gang fighting. For me it all this and additionally yet another example of the US using the word 'World' when it should more appropriately use the words 'United States'. Another notable example being the baseball World Series which translates into the US and Canada Series, in an attempt to rectify this there is now the World Baseball Classic which actually has teams from other continents. The finals of the first of these series were yesterday and Japan beat Cuba 10-6. It really screws up the results when you put the world into these world sporting events!

3) Mobile phone companies bend time. In an experiment with his wife Nora and their two cell phones, they discovered that a 3 second call on the receiving phone is a 16 second call on calling phone. I felt momentarily sad for Albert Einstein on hearing this, fortunately he is not alive to find this out for himself as it blows the theory relativity to bits.

4) I would lose more weight if I used the upstairs toilets in my local pub as they are further from the bar and require mastering the stepping action. I can't argue with that.

I recently purchased a Leatherman tool thing. It is one of those bloke must have type items and I have missed the Victorinox Swiss Army knife I have had since it fell through a gap between two sea lashed rocks whilst I was out fishing last year. So now I have had the both I shall give you a lightning comparison review:
Victorinox Swiss Champ: Fantastic Quality, 4079 functions including the great scissors, useless pliers and a corkscrew.
Leatherman Wave: Fantastic Quality, 17 functions including superb pliers, usable scissors, but no corkscrew.
The result: Buy the Leatherman Wave and a corkscrew!

I am flying back to Costa Rica tomorrow and have my tickets to Panama, where I'll be from Saturday until I get back to Toronto on the 29th. I am really looking forward to it. It will be great to get away for a bit.

Remarks that may have sounded anti-American are not intended to cause offence to any U.S. citizen, unless you voted for that chimp in the Whitehouse in which case, offence is fine. There are a lot of you people living in Jesusland Inc. that I quite like, Karyn, Stephanie, Monica, Tim etc

2006-03-12T04:00:00.000Z

Now marginally cheerier than a while ago...
I arrived home about five minutes ago and decided to open a bottle of Amarone I bought in the LCBO earlier. Amarones are always a treat, rich, very strong and sweet, almost like a port. In the book Silence of the Lambs, Hannibal Lecter selected a rich Amarone to accompany a victim's liver and some flava beans. It was switched to Chianti in the screenplay so that the audience might recognise it as a wine. I can't speak for his main course but on the wine front, for me at least, Chianti is never such a treat. The screw in the corkscrew in my Toronto rental apartment died of metal fatigue with barely an eighth of an inch of cork out of the bottle. I was not in the mood for an emergency of this magnitude. Gripping the spike of metal protruding from the cork in a scissor action with my can opener and resting the nose of the can opener on the edge of a kitchen unit with the other end supported in my muscular(ish) fist, I was able to pull the bottle down and ease the cork out. Disaster averted! For a few worrying moments, I thought I might have to stay sober.

I wasn't at work today, I had planned on grafting from home, but failed abysmally. However, I have been working six days per week most weeks since November and I need some chill time. One day per week to relax is really not enough. I have started reading New Earth by Eckhart Tolle, checked out the internet for the details of the local gym and where in I can take up Krav Maga again. Perhaps there is a moment of epiphany coming on.

My Harley was supposedly delivered to Dave's last week after 6 months in transit! So in theory both of my motorcycles are safely tucked up at his now. I have to decide what to do with them.

Earlier this evening I encountered a craving for lobster, giving in immediately I jumped in the car and hit out for the only venue I could think of that would have some within reasonable distance, a chain restaurant called Red Lobster. On parking in the small Asian shopping mall I noticed a small place called Lobster Royale, there being a forty minute wait at the chain restaurant, I went in. It's a rather dingy hole decorated in the style of your grandmother's dream bathroom with maritime accents and plastic lobster crawling across the walls. The service was languid, the food however, was great. I went for the 1&1/2 lb lobster dinner menu. The clam chowder was fantastic, the garlic rolls were great, the French fries were crispy on the outside and fluffy on the inside, their salad was nothing to write home about which is why I haven't mentioned it. The lobster was fresh out of a huge tank that dominates the inside of the dining room. It was cooked wonderfully and this is the first time since I've been here that I can say that I've eaten better than I did in Spain for less money. Not that it's cheap by Spanish standards, but fresh lobster in Spain is ridiculously expensive. I think I'll go back there next week and gorge myself on Alaska King Crab Legs.

Earlier in the week I had lunch at a Szechuan place with some colleagues. I opened my fortune cookie at the end and there was more than one fortune prediction.

For those of you wondering where the photos in my last morose post were from, I took them on a Sunday drive to Niagara Falls last month.

2006-03-07T06:17:00.000Z

Just a quick post and somewhat unusually, a personal one.

I'm back in Toronto. I went to a "Pimps and Hos" fancy dress party on Saturday with Kevin and Nora, as a pimp obviously (photos to follow). The rental car agency picked up a Chrysler 300 for me, which was nice so I have the car for the outfit I was wearing.

Work is crazy as ever and I'm attempting to juggle the requirements of my boss, the corporate deadlines, the management of the Toronto operation, the team in Costa Rica and some third-party suppliers .

I don't get much time off, work six days per week most weeks and late most days. The pressure from all sides is grinding me down and I need a vacation, not necessarily a go somewhere vacation, but some do nothing time. That and to sort out some personal stuff, the refinancing of my apartment and tax in Gibraltar, buying a place in either Canada, for investment or Costa Rica, to live in, sorting out the some new furniture for the place in Gibraltar, finding out where my motorcycles are. Just some time off where I will allow myself no excuses not to hit the gym every day for a couple of weeks. I have put on far too much weight working here. It feels like I am on this treadmill and will be on it for another six months and I cannot actually imagine what it will be like when I get off.

Must remember my mum's birthday and Mother's Day, which is on the 26th of March in the UK, in the US it's the 14th of May. I know because mum reminded me, so there will be more internet shopping to be done or will have to run the guilt gauntlet for a whole year.

The other night I had a vivid dream, my friend David and I were riding bright orange KTM off-road motorcycles through lush tropical woodland in Costa Rica, popping wheelies and laughing, we were young again without a care in the world. I was so happy in my dream, somehow after waking up, it made me so very sad.

I miss my family; friends Amanda and David in England and so many more; John in Italy; Kay in Gibraltar; Ken, Anas and his wife Lourdes in Spain. I spend moments missing Lucy in Australia, missing Karyn in the US, my cousin Mark in Wales and so many others whom I hold dear and the chances are, if you are reading this, you are one of them.

2006-02-24T00:58:00.000Z

Maridos De Alquiler...
All over Costa Rica you see signs which read Maridos De Alquiler, this confused me initially as literally in translates to "Husbands For Rent". I wondered what these rental husbands were used for and whether it might provided an alternative and more interesting career....

Scene A, an obviously irate woman punches a number into the keypad on her phone:
Rental Husband: Hello Husbands for Rent, how can I help you today madam?
Woman: You're a waste of space, you really are, sitting around the house loafing all day watching television, you haven't mown the lawn, you were going to decorate the spare room before my mother came to stay, have you forgotten what day it is? Our anniversary, that's what and all you can think about is the football, when was the last time you took me out to dinner, but not too busy to spend all night down the pub drinking with your mates ogling that barmaid with the big chest, oh, no! I don't know why I married you, I really don't my mother said you weren't good enough for me and she was right, given you the best years of my life I have and you can't even put the toilet seat down.
Rental Husband: Thank you madam, that will be fifteen pounds, seventy five pence, will you be paying by credit card?

Scene B, mid thirties woman, in scarlet lipstick talking on phone:
Woman: Hello Husband-U-Like, I'd like you to send one round about 8:30pm, dinner will be served at 7pm and left cold for him, I'll be wearing a see-through negligee, if he could just sit down in front of the television with a can of lager, smelling of curry, fart, belch, ignore me and then announce that' he's off to the pub, that will be fine. I'm a professional and marriage wouldn't really fit in with my career.

Maridos de alquiler,I have subsequently found out, are all purpose handymen and carry out DIY functions for husbands that prefer to leaving, plumbing, electrics, shelf fitting etc to a professional, or semi professional. I imagine that when IKEA arrive in Costa Rica they will all be millionaires.

2006-02-16T07:20:00.000Z

The home country
There are a few things I miss about England, the beer, which I have mentioned on numerous occasions, bacon and many more that I will not go into right now. Although there are numerous cultural differences between the English, Scottish, Welsh and Irish, bacon is one of those things we certainly have in common. The diaspora of the British Isles, will, when gathered together in foreign lands, occasionally give voice to the things from home that they long for and chief among them is the rasher.

British bacon is completely unlike American bacon, having more than 70% less fat, neither is it like Canadian bacon, nor is it anything at all like the 'English bacon' available in Canada. Loins of pork are cured in either brine, also known as Wiltshire cure or dry cured in salt. It may also then be smoked using a number of different woods, prior to the moment when it is grilled or fried and becomes breakfast ecstasy.

Most every country today has restrictions on the personal importation of food stuffs, so unless you are in a place that already caters for the British or Irish ex-pat, you are destined for a life of breakfast time disappointment. The US already has this angle covered and Spain is also not a problem due to Gibraltar and also it's proximity to the UK. Canada is not so similarly served.

A chat on this subject erupted with an Irish couple I know, Kevin and Nora a marvelous couple. They too suffer from bacon and sausage withdrawal and going cold turkey is not an option. They told me that the Irish in Canada have resorted to smuggling. Planes with suitcases stuffed with sausages, bacon and cheese and onion crisps ( a flavour combination that is legal yet unavailable in Canada) arrive every day from Ireland. Bulk packs of bacon are split up into individual packets and spread amongst the luggage so that even if the customs people do catch a pack, hopefully a few will get through. Apparently, as long as the bacon is for your personal use you can get away with it, but they can get quite heavy on anyone suspected of being a dealer. The customs guys apparently turn a blind eye to flights from Dublin as they know it goes on.

Nora also brings in sausages as she can't find any she likes here. I suggested she make them herself. I explained that if sausage skins aren't available, then perhaps Trojans natural, non-lubed of course, could suffice and then the world is her banger flavour-wise. But she didn't seem keen, maybe the idea of ribbed sausage with a teat at one end was offputting.

While we were talking about this I had visions of guys in black uniforms and dogs specially trained to sniff out bacon and sausages walking past lines of Irish people. An otherwise innocent looking man in a Guinness T-shirt with ginger hair sweating profusely, worried about what will happen if one of the sixteen condoms full of dry cured streaky and smoked back bacon he swallowed before getting on the plane should split. Breakfast would be ruined, that life of fear that is the lot of a bacon mule.

An empty, darkened warehouse near lake Ontario, the sunlight scatters through broken, dirty panes of glass and lands glimmering in the puddles on the floor. The 'Butcher', a heavy set Irishman in a black Hugo Boss suit and white polo neck jumper, with close cropped hair and two days stubble, looks coolly at the disheveled lad in the shamrock sweatshirt standing on the other side of the desk. Staring up at the younger man, he flicks his cigarette butt away and reaches for the briefcase that is resting closed on the desk. A bead of sweat runs down the temple of the youthful courier. The twin clicks from the locks of the black leather case echo off the walls of the silent disused dockside building. Opening the case, the Butcher, puts his Giorgio Armani sunglasses down, looks inside and snaps his fingers. A skinny man in his fifties wearing a white lab coat and bifocal glasses scurries over to the desk. "Check it!" the Butcher commands. The technician pulls a rasher from the case with some tweezers, brings it to eye level for closer examination and hurries off. The Butcher, looking up from the case and into the eyes of the courier says quite slowly, coldly and deliberately, "If you've cut the streaky with Oscar Mayer, you've had your last Full Irish..."

2006-02-14T21:33:00.000Z

Valentines Day
I shall be spending Valentines day in a less than ideal way. My cunning plan to stage a modern rendition of Much Ado About Nothing with Kate Winslet cast as Beatrice and myself as Benedick on Valentines Night 2006, in my apartment in Toronto seems to have gone awry. Love is such a fickle mistress.

During a Roxy Music tour in 1977 Bryan Ferry called girlfriend Jerry Hall at the Camelturd Ritz in Morocco to ask how she was. What she didn't know was that Bryan was reading about the affair she had just commenced with Mick Jagger when she popped backstage after a Stones concert. What Mick didn't realise was that she really wanted to be with me. If only the ice cream wafer she had posted me anonymously with her Peckham phone number on it had not crumbled in the envelope, if only I had reached puberty by then, it could all have been so different.

The philosophers, poets and playwrights have had much to say about love...

Calvin: What's it like to fall in love?
Hobbes: Well... say the object of your affection walks by...
Calvin: Yeah?
Hobbes: First, your heart falls into your stomach and splashes your innards. All the moisture makes you sweat profusely. This condensation shorts the circuits to your brain and you get all woozy. When your brain burns out altogether, your mouth disengages and you babble like a cretin until she leaves.
Calvin: THAT'S LOVE?!?
Hobbes: Medically speaking.
Calvin: Heck, that happened to me once, but I figured it was cooties!!

or as Elizabeth Barret Browning said.....

How do I love thee? Let me count the ways.

I love thee to the depth and breadth and height

My soul can reach, when feeling out of sight

For the ends of Being and ideal Grace.

I love thee to the level of everyday's

Most quiet need, by sun and candle-light.

I love thee freely, as men strive for Right;

I love thee purely, as they turn from Praise.

I love thee with a passion put to use

In my old griefs, and with my childhood's faith.

I love thee with a love I seemed to lose

With my lost saints, I love thee with the breath,

Smiles, tears, of all my life! and, if God choose,

I shall but love thee better after death.

2006-02-14T05:20:00.000Z

Work, work, work...
Work seems to completely dominate my life at the moment. However I wasn't going to let that interfere with the rugby this Saturday. Rugby on TV is one of the few things I really miss about the UK, I'm not really an avid fan but I like to watch all the international matches. I have now subscribed to Setanta's internet sports service so I'll never have to miss a game again. The Italian's played valiantly on Saturday but with superior strength and an awful lot of luck, England prevailed (31-16) and are odds on to win the Six Nations.

Rod, my colleague from Costa Rica and I decided to head downtown on Sunday. I wanted to build a new PC and there's no better place to buy the bits than China Town. Prior to buying the components we caught some lunch at the Sky Dragon, it's a Dim Sum place, nothing fancy but it has a style all it's own. This may be normal in China but not having eaten there I don't know. A constant stream of waitresses walk the aisles between the tables with saucers and steamers of all manner of dim sum, you indicate which plates you are interested in and they are dropped on your table with a ramikin of the appropriate sauce. Within 5 minutes of sitting down we had half a dozen plates of asian delicacies spread before us. Rod, who is a black belt at eating, quickly got the hang of the new ordering technique, we ran out of room on a table for four and within half an hour were completely stuffed. Rod remarked that the Americans had a lot to learn about the fast in fast food. The table cloths are polythene and when it is time to clear a table, a waitress picks up the table cloth by the corners, encapsulating the plates, cups, glasses and bottles and carries them off; another waitress lays out crockery and a fresh pot of green tea on the fresh table that was under the previous one. The food is good, there is an amazing variety and it is cheap too. We both balked at the steamed chicken feet but everything else was great.

Walking outside we found ourselves in what seemed like the last vestige of the Chinese New Year celebrations, with people in dragon costumes dancing to the beat of drums.

I managed to get the PC parts from a store in the same area and it has all gone together without a hitch. It's nice not having to use a laptop at home.

For those of you that are interested, I have updated my gallery site with photos of New York, you can see them here.

2006-02-11T07:38:00.000Z

Feet semi-firmly plated in Ontario...
A week back at work and in just the one country, has not quite given me enough time to relax and my project at work is pressing so the weekend will be a short one (again). Time in Costa Rica, whether a working day or a weekend is like being on vacation. Time back in Toronto feels like day after day of Mondays. Still, another two weeks and I'll be back home again.

Nothing eventful has occurred, all barring a series of angry phone calls to my mobile phone service provider, who are the most unimaginably inefficient and incompetent bunch of semi-numerate and proffesionally useless cretins I have ever had the misfortune to deal with. During one conversation with them, they put me on hold, their phone system plays music while you wait and the track that was playing was by Thievery Corporation. There has never been a more appropriate listen while your life ebbs away number ever.

It's not big and it's not clever! Do these people walk around thinking to themselves "Too many people are taking me seriously, my life would be so much better if the public at large regarded me as an idiot instead of just the people that know me personally."

2006-02-11T03:18:00.000Z

Last Sunday
So I have finally seen The Statue of Liberty, she is beautiful, but then I have always loved French girls. The words of Emma Lazarus have struck a chord with me for many years and I have always used them as a yardstick by which to gauge the current morality of U.S. immigration and foreign policy.

Give me your tired, your poor,
Your huddled masses yearning to breathe free,
The wretched refuse of your teeming shore.
Send these, the homeless, tempest-tossed, to me:
I lift my lamp beside the golden door.

Many of the buildings on Ellis Island have been allowed to deteriorate and are currently under restoration. The museum celebrating the immigration of bygone centuries is filled with exhibits of the large scale self-indulgent backslapping variety and although it is possible to spend several hours there, best to get in take a quick look about then step outside and admire the views of Manhattan.

The site of the World Trade Centre is now a pit several stories deep, the concrete sides studded with the cut and rusted I-bars that supported the lower floors. the base is now covered by air conditioning units for the subway station below. Without access to a nearby building it may only be viewed through layers of galvanised steel fencing. If it were not for the street vendors dotted about it, selling cheap souvenirs you would hardly know you were standing at the site of such tragedy. Somehow I expected it to be accorded more reverence.

It needs to be said that there is probably no better day to go site seeing in the U.S. that Superbowl day, so nothing was really that busy. Back in Costa Rica, it was election day and the busiest day of the year at the office.

It may have just been coincidence but 50% of the bars in New York seem to be Irish places.

Mental Note "I must remember to stay in a classier hotel next time"

Stay tuned for the next exciting episode "Back in Canada"

2006-02-09T03:27:00.000Z

....there's more
NYC as I said before is a place of extremes and nothing is more extreme than the prices for car parking and kamikaze driving of the taxi drivers. Come to think of it, London is the only place I have been where I feel comfortable in a cab. Although I'd curse them when I lived there for not 'gahn sowrf of the warter' (crossing the Thames to South London) after midnight and other such transgressions, they are in fact Gods amongst taxistas. They don't take you to drive in robberies like they do in Colombia (don't take one alone Joe!), you can wear a seatbelt unlike Costa Rica where they remove them, they know where they're going unlike Costa Rica, they speak a recognized language, unlike Canada and they don't rip you off unlike Costa Rica, Spain, the Czech Republic and most of the rest of the world. Gibraltarian taxis are also good, but only having about 7 small roads to drive on, they have little excuse.

I managed to get to see the England (47) v. Wales (13) game of the 2006 Six Nations Rugby Tournament in a Irish pub called Baker Street which inexplicably has a Sherlock Holmes motif. A man known for his love of coke but not of craic and not Irish in the slightest. Still, they sell an Irish breakfast (the same as an English breakfast) and I needed to eat some real bacon after going into withdrawal about two months ago.

The Museum of Modern Art is a wondrous place and I was overjoyed to reaquaint myself with Magritte, Seurat, Gauguin, Klimt and Miro. As with many such places, it is really too big to walk around in one visit. If you are nearby, you really must go.

Depressingly, both the Flatiron Building and the Guggenheim were covered in scaffolding, I am passionate about architecture and would love to have seen them naked. I did however manage to catch the Empire State Building and the Chrysler Building which are deservedly famous icons. An unexpected joy was Time Square at night, it reminded me very much of the movie Blade Runner, such over the top consumerist decadence, beautiful yet somehow sordid and distasteful.

2006-02-07T06:56:00.000Z

New York, New York...
It's been a busy day, I only got back this morning, so I'll have to tell you all about it later, but for the moment I'll let you know that I have never been to New York before.

It has held a magic for me ever since watching Mouse in Manhattan as a small boy. An episode of the old Hanna Barbera Tom and Jerry cartoon produced in 1945. The Gershwinesque score by Scott Bradley, originally based on Louis Alter's 1928 Manhattan Serenade still haunts me today.

Having now trod a little sidewalk there, I have to say that many years on I think I now understand why Jerry was so excited to get there and also why he was glad to get back home.

It is a place of extremes and of which much hyperbole is fully justified.

2006-01-31T05:08:00.000Z

I've been a little busy...
So a quick post to catch up..... Last Wednesday I flew home from Toronto to San Jose, Costa Rica. When I got home there was a dead scorpion in my lounge, luckily I haven't found a live one while putting on my trousers. I had a quiet night in Santa Ana and checked out a couple of bars I've been meaning to go to.

Thursday I went to the Teatro Torres, dropped off all The Body Shop products that the cast had requested and followed it up with drinks in a salsa bar in Heredia. People just seem to bring their own instruments and jam, it's too packed to dance really, which saves much embarassment.

Friday night saw drinks and great conversation in a bar near work, then on Saturday after three hours sleep, I got up, took a taxi to the airport and flew to Managua, Nicaragua via El Salvador and spent a fantastic weekend in Granada (the Nicaraguan one) and Managua. Granada is an unspoilt colonial wonder and I stayed in a hotel built in a restored mansion house and was only awoken once by the sound of gunfire and sirens. I found a new friend and the time spent there was sublime. Sunday lunch was taken in a restaurant on the shore of a lagoon that fills the crater of an inactive Volcano.

I was shocked by the brief glimpses of poverty in Nicaragua. I have resolved to visit a lot more of Central and South America. I'll take that trip to Panama in three weeks time, then see if I can work my way through the continent a weekend at a time. Companies with a North American ethos don't seem to understand the whole vacation concept. Work life balance indeed, how is five or six days work then one or occasionally two days off a balance?

This morning I flew back to San Jose in a twin turboprop ATR 42 and after a rough landing, took a taxi to work. Tonight, I had dinner with my friend Nicky which was long overdue and we chatted about everything and nothing. About an hour ago I jumped in a cab home.

I am looking forward to spending more time in this end of the continent.

2006-01-21T16:28:00.000Z

Chinese horoscopes
A recent radio programme prompted me to check out my chinese horoscope. Apparently I am a fire horse, which unfortunately gives away my age. So now I'm going to have to update my lunar sign so that it is in tune with my date of birth which I switched to 1972 a little while ago. It is not a failure to own up to the years I've spent here, it is more a realignment of my chronological age with my youthful good looks!

So the stories go, fire horses are often killed at birth due to the shame and trouble that they will bring their families. I know that both my parents contemplated this on numerous occasions when I was a small boy, when they caught me painting their eiderdown to match their brass bed, when I was kicking the lower cans from the pyramids at the local supermarket (Newtonian Law needed verification) and any one of the many of my youthful crimes. I never really practiced arson and gave up the violin and wasn't a nerdy boy with dreams of world domination, which accounts for my failure to achieve the giddy heights of Thomas Edison, Albert Einstein and Bill Gates.

I don't believe in the whole horoscope thing as I don't see that 1/12 of the worlds population will have a similar day tomorrow nor that everyone born on March 19th will have a great Monday next week because the paranormal hack in the paper says it will be great for Pisces. Chinese horoscopes have a little higher granularity, it taking 60 years for one cycle of the combined element and animal signs, still tosh though I'm sure. I was so fed up with people telling me what virgos were like that I changed my star sign to Chevrolet. Apparently I am a typical virgo, you know intelligent, good looking, virile so I might change back. Anyway, for the purposes of the next paragraph I am going to suspend disbelief.

My predictions for 2006 are:

My project will go live with much fanfare, anxiety and raised voices in March
A minority Conservative government will be elected in Canada next week
They'll realise it was a mistake in 2007
I will meet a wonderful woman and fall in love
Someone you know will listen to an ELO number
General motors fresh new strategy will be to put a marginally larger engine in the same crappy cars.
Eric Clapton and Joe Cocker will each release a new compilation album of hits they had years ago in much the same way as they do every year.
The American public will realise that Laura Bush is actually more of an idiot than her husband, he was born simple and can't help it, she married into idiocy or was it money?
I will fritter away a lot of cash on rubbish I don't need.

On another note I am leaving Toronto on Wednesday to go home to Costa Rica for a week. Then after I get back here I have some flights booked for a weekend in New York City (fortuitously during the Chinese New Year celebrations) and some time next month I really need to go to Panama.

This weekend has been far too short!

2006-01-20T13:51:00.000Z

Whaling
I was very disturbed when the other day I heard a Norwegian official defending whaling on the grounds of it being a tradition and ecological ocean management. When in fact it is merely the barbaric torture and slaughter of an intelligent creature that we know so little about for commercial reasons. I could buy the tradition argument in Iceland or Norway's case if they went out in rowing boats and hand threw harpoons at any that they happened to see while not grafting at the oars. Other than a few coastal villages, the Japanese have only been eating whale since the Second World War, so there is no cultural excuse.

There's nothing traditional or humane about chasing down whales using sonar in diesel powered death cruisers and firing a harpoon tipped with a hand grenade then hauling it back to ship, shooting at it with rifles and hanging it upside down with blowhole subsurface so it drowns to death before craning it into a factory ship for processing into Minke burgers for the rich consumers of this food. There is no humane way to slaughter an animal this size. It should be stopped.

Japan and Norway are expected to slaughter around 2000 whales this year, for "Scientific Research" as there has been an IWC moratorium on commercial whaling since 1985/6. Although exactly why you need to kill 2000 whales a year for research and how putting the meat on supermarket shelves constitutes scientific research is a bloody mystery. Every year many whales become stranded in shallow waters for reasons we do not understand, if scientific research is necessary, these could be used. If you wanted to study what is man would it be easier to do with 2000 corpses ? This wednesday Greenpeace Germany parked the 20 tonne carcass of a fin whale that had become stranded on the Baltic coast and died, outside the Japanese embassy in Berlin to demonstrate this point.

Every year, the Japanese bribe poor nations with no interest in whaling to join the IWC in order to help them tip the balance at the next vote in the hope that they can gain some quasi-official sanction for their continuance and increase of this dirty trade.

A Japanese whaling ship rammed the Greenpeace vessel harrying them in the southern ocean earlier this month, if you can afford to do something to help them or are just interested, go here.

Bastards!

Meanwhile, today in London, a 7 tonne bottlenose whale has found itself swimming up the Thames past The Houses of Parliament and everyone concerned is trying to gently persuade it to swim back out to sea. Now isn't that a better approach?

2006-01-18T03:21:00.000Z

First real motorcycle, first real friend...
Motorcycles have been a part of my life for more than 20 years. I first road a a motorised two wheel vehicle on the road when I was fifteen. My dad had a little 50cc Honda and late at night I grabbed the keys and snuck out on it. I was a rainy night, so I had what I now call a "get-off" which is when friction fails you and your bike dumps you on the road. Youthful zeal and inexperience were my downfall here. That and my dad the next day when he noticed the scratches. Although I very briefly had a little moped myself at 16 my first bike was 1981 Honda CB125T I bought when I was 17. It was beautiful and I rode everywhere on it.

I had just started my apprenticeship at a diesel generator manufacturer in Havant near Portsmouth and needed my own transport to get there. I wasn't interested in cars. My grandfather loaned me the 300 pound sterling it cost to buy and he wouldn't take the payments. He just asked me to give up smoking, I didn't, but he still wouldn't take the cash.

He was eighty something years old and visiting my mother at her house when I turned up on the bike he hadn't seen yet. He had ridden motorcycles all his life but had stopped riding his last a couple of years earlier. He missed them. He wanted to have a look at the bike I'd been lusting for and left the house to see it. After a few seconds a broad grin and a devious look overtook him. "Let's have a go then!" proffering his hand for the keys. My mum came running out the house, but by then it was too late, he was off. "What are you doing Jake?, he's eighty years old, he's not wearing a crash helmet !" Mum was having kittens. My reply was drowned out by the howl of the engine and we watched as the grinning red blurr blasted past. After about ten minutes he'd run out of road laws to break and returned probably the happiest I'd ever seen him.

A rear footpeg fell off it one day and I only noticed when I got home. There was an old CB125T parked around the corner from where my mum lived. A matt silver one with rusty spoked wheels that always seemed to have a plastic bag over the cylinders. I often wondered what the bag was for. One afternoon there was a lad working on the bike and I rode over to ask about it. He had a northern accent, which I now recognise to be from Lancashire. We introduced ourselves and he informed me that the sparkplug threads had been helicoiled but it had been done poorly and when it rained water got into the cylinders. I took this to be a tall story, it all seeming faintly ridiculous and I jestingly asked him if I could have a rear footpeg off of his bike to replace the one I had lost. Much to my surprise he agreed and handed me a wrench to take it off. His footpeg in hand I figured I owed him a few pints of beer to return the favour. The young lad has been for many years, possibly since that day, the closest of friends and the brother I didn't have growing up. I have now known Dave, more years than I have not known him and he is one of the rocks in my life, picked me up when I've fallen down more times than I choose to count. Perhaps one day I'll let you know about some of the glory days we had, before realising that we were mortal, which Dave only discovered about a few months ago when his son and my nephew Thomas was born.

I used to race everywhere, not a roundabout that didn't see sparks flying off the footpegs and hardly a month that there weren't blue lights reigning in my exuberance. I was racking up a thousand miles per month after work and setting the points with an impact driver to stop them vibrating out at the fourteen thousand RPM redline. Every road was a racetrack, every other bike, a challenge and if it would cut seconds off the course and see me in front of a bigger bike that had got the better of me, I'd dash the wrong way across a roundabout. I think I survived because I was the Wile E Coyote that never looked down. He could run off a cliff and all the time he didn't look down, he didn't fall. I've looked down since.

The little red Honda died after a year due to the heavy mileage and a car shunt. I borrowed a bike to take my test on. I sometimes think fondly of my CB125T and how much fun I used to have and it's long enough ago now for me to think fondly of that young tear-away I used to be.

2006-01-15T18:11:00.000Z

Harry Pothead

I can't stand this effeminate, smug mummy's boy! I'd like to see him try it on with Artemis Fowl!

Ahh..... the Nimbus 2000 broomstick, how many have watched the movie and wished they too could own one and now a toy that mum can enjoy too. Only another few sequels and Hermione Granger will be on one of these babies.....

Fortunately they are still available on ebay for the eighteen to fifty eight year old lady that has everything.

2006-01-14T23:56:00.000Z

Work, work, work.....
Well the project I'm running is approaching the deadline. Two months from today it will be live or we will have failed, the deadline can't be moved for business reasons. So the whole team are busting their butts.

I wanted to pick something up from the Hudson Bay Company in North York and a colleague, Rodrigo from Costa Rica who is also working in Toronto and I strolled in. There weren't any customers, but it is a very cold day with a nasty wind blowing so I figured they must all be at home. There weren't any people at the checkouts, curiouser and curiouser. We seemed to be the only people there. But the flat screens were showing commercials for this and that, and the escalators were running, so we hopped on the escalator. My Costa Rican buddy remarked "Mae, this is crazy, these Canadians are so trusting, in Costa Rica this shop would have been cleaned out by now." There were no checkout assistants upstairs either, Rodrigo repeatedly enquired "Hello?" in a loud voice, but there was no answer. I said "Rod, I think it might be closed, all the lights at the end of the room are off." We went downstairs. Still no-one, I walked to the end of the store that adjoins the mall and has floor to ceiling reinforced glass doors that are open and rolled into the wall during opening hours. "Rod, the shop is closed, let's leave." We walked back out the entrance we had come in and I looked at the opening hours on a sign, Saturday they close at 6:00pm, I looked at my watch which read 6:30pm. There was a police car near the entrance we had gone in, I walked over to it, but there was no policeman inside. My natural paranoia cut in and I immediately assumed that CCTV had picked up two handsome, rugged, beasts of men (Rodrigo and myself) strolling around a locked shop and the cops had come to investigate. We got in the car and I drove to one side of the mall looking for someone in a uniform to talk to but no luck. I drove to the other entrance of the store and as I passed the unlocked entrance, a large white van with two ugly and hairy characters inside that had slowed sped off. At the other entrance the last of the store workers were leaving, so I went up to a man who seemed to be in charge and told him about the unlocked doors. He said they had been locked earlier and someone must have unlocked them, then he ran off to sort things out.

We drove away, joking that about all the unguarded plasma screens and how my boss probably wouldn't cover bail money on expenses anyway with the final thought that just perhaps we had spoiled the shopping trip for the two ugly guys in the white van. Seeing two young(ish) guys with cropped hair in a new Buick Allure (called a Lacrosse in the US) and thinking to themselves, "No regular guy under 50 buys a Buick, they must be cops!"

As I write this, I'm sipping at a cup of ginseng tea sweetened with maple syrup. Very healthy! It's amazing the rubbish you'll drink when there's no whisky in the house!

2006-01-12T12:49:00.000Z

Shock Motoring News: General Motors make crap cars no-one wants to buy!
A long, long time ago in a place far, far away.......*
The first car I owned was a 1971 Chevrolet Impala. It was a two door, in a lime green that was matt after years of polishing by previous owners. I loved it so much I made a recording of the engine rumble and mailed it back to friends in the UK. I had bought it for a girlfriend, I was only interested in motorcycles but I worked night shift, she worked day shift and taking her to and from work on my Honda was only leaving me 3 hours sleep in the afternoon. To cut a long story short, she left me and the car for a job in San Francisco (mad I know), so I took my Californian driving test and my first steps into the land of 4 wheels. It was handy really, a short time later a woman driving a pick-up without paying attention and without paying her insurance, pulled out in front of me. My femur shattered and I watched my right thigh form a ninety degree bend about halfway between my hip and my knee as I flew over the hood of her truck and tumbled into the on-coming traffic lane. My bike didn't survive the accident so for the first time a car replaced a motorcycle as my primary mode of transport, although they haven't always been that way since.

The North American motor industry, at one time the engine of the US economy is in meltdown. General Motors have announced huge redundancy plans and the closure of plants in response to a profits warning that has seen the share price fall to the lowest point in 20 years. My job as most of you know sees me splitting my time between Costa Rica and Canada. While up here in the North I rent whatever bloatmobile is available from Budget. So far the score is 3-1 to abject failure with the only goal for interest being a Chrysler 300C. My current ride is a Buick Allure. To drive it is much like sitting on a blancmange strapped to a supermarket trolley with one wheel missing. The interior is an ocean of cheap, hard, grey, plastic with plastic wood veneer printed highlights. The first L in ALLURE of the chromed plastic lettering stuck on the trunk so that passers by know what car not to buy next, has fallen off as the 2c piece of sticky tape gave up trying to hold on to it. So I am now driving A LURE, a lure for what is in question. Chevrolet engineers appear to have dispensed with damping in the suspension design and one could almost get seasick driving it. Unsurprisingly the new GM cars are being sold at 10-20% below the sticker price, with the Impala being an inexplicable exception. A leaf through their 'exciting new models' reveals all that needs to be said.

A few years ago, the US motor companies demanded that if the Japanese wanted access to US markets then they ought to build their cars their. The result: Honda Civic Motortrend 2006 Car of the Year, Honda Ridgeline Motortrend 2006 Truck of the Year, Nissan XTerra Motortrend 2006 SUV of the Year and nowadays these are North American cars built with North American labour, so no-one can say that buying a Honda is costing American jobs.

The only cars that the US car manufacturers seem to do well are muscle cars, the Dodge Charger and Ford Mustang being prime examples and trucks, Chevy are behind the others here as well. So if the US motor industry wants to start making cars people want to buy it should. Sort out build quality, realise that if BMW can make a serious car with a 3L diesel engine, then a 4L, 5L or 6L petrol engine isn't necessary, spend more than $10 on the interior, learn about suspension, you shouldn't have to spend $70K to get a car that doesn't roll like a rowing boat in a Tsunami, learn that biggest isn't always best.

European cars are for the most part too expensive for the North American market, but the Japanese have cracked it, the Koreans are doing well and the first Chinese cars should be hitting the US in a few months. It seems a shame that after all these years, the US motor industry is going to die, killed off by the consumers' understandable desire for quality and value when all it would take is a little common sense.

Jase recommendations for US marque car purchase:

Family man or pimp - Chrysler 300C
Exceedingly rich car nut - Ford GT
Rap star or drug dealer - Hummer H2 (what else)
Survivalist - Hummer H1
Self obsessed body builder, worried about hair loss or genitalia - Dodge Viper
Recently divorced 40s (Man) - Dodge Charger or Ford Mustang
Recently divorced 40s (Man or Woman) - Ford Thunderbird
Hairdresser - Chrysler PT Cruiser
Hairdresser with family or blind person - Chevy HHR
Teenager with acne and rich dad - Chevy SSR
Construction worker - Ford F150 or Dodge RAM
Overweight, fat or obese - bicycle

*Historical note: I moved to San Diego from London when I was 20 years old and returned to London some 3 years later.

2006-01-10T01:54:00.000Z

A reflective day
Yesterday I took a stroll downtown with a colleague from Costa Rica. After a curry on Queen Street and a coffee downtown we walked up Yonge Street and outside a branch of Footlocker was a pile of cuddly toys, letters of condolence and candles. I asked a bystander what had happened and was told of the shooting of Jane Creba on Boxing Day. A fifteen year old girl that was out shopping with her sister and caught in the crossfire of two young gang members exacting the defence of their delicate and juvenile egos with guns on a crowded city street. Six others were injured and her brief, bright, light was extinguished outside a shoe shop, the day after Xmas. Being outside the country for twelve days, I hadn't heard.

I'm going to get controversial here: I look forward to the day that registered drug users can walk into Shoppers Drug Mart and pick up their cocaine or heroine or anything else prescription for a nominal sum made on a corporate farm, refined in a corporate factory; So they won't have to buy their vice from villains, with money stolen from innocent people; So there will be no villains defending territory for the sale of their detergent cut white powders; So there will be no drug wars and no wars on drugs; So that the users only suffer from their using and they are the only people that suffer, unlike today when the cold dead corpse of a fifteen year old girl, lies in the cold wet ground. The only time her smile will be seen again, is in the tearful mind's eye of the people that knew her. And for what........?

We got a cab to a place a little further up Yonge and were pleasantly surprised to find ourselved in the middle of an Irish folk music night. The pub was packed with people of all ages, the musicians had talent and the beer flowed. Normaly they also have two or three real ales (from a hand pump) on tap as well, which is enough to put any pub outside England on my map. The music was full of energy, as were the girls dancing on boards strewn on the floor, heals and toes clattering an ad hoc Riverdance. The atmosphere was about as good as I've ever experienced in a pub anywhere. I met and chatted with a few friendly people and have decided to make it a regular haunt. There was a girl laughing and joking in the corner of the room with a group of her friends, she appeared to be a Thalidomide victim, although there aren't many left now, so maybe it was something else. I remember them from when I was a small boy, sitting on a bus with my mum and feeling both sad and for some reason embarrassed, perhaps almost guilty. The girl had a big pretty smile, slim, shapely legs and long hair. Her left arm tapered out where her elbow should be, without a hand, her right, the same length but with a wrist, thumb and forefinger. She drank her pint through her straw, clasping the glass between forefinger and thumb. She laughed and joked and chatted away with her pals without a care in the world. I went outside for a breath of fresh air. And a cigarette. When I came back in, the whole pub was holding hands and swaying to some frollicksome Irish air. The girl with the big smile and the big physical compromises, saw me, saw that I couldn't get past and wasn't involved, then pulled me into the human chain. She introduced herself, grabbed me with her hand and I swayed and jigged along in time with the rest of them. What a marvelous tribute to the very best of human spirit she is.

I had a nightcap in my local. I was the only customer, I didn't know the barmaid, but we got talking. She is from the Ukraine, a pretty, charming and enigmatic woman, in her early twenties and busy studying for her degree. Her family brought her to Canada because she had contracted bone cancer due to Chernobyl and escaping the radiation was an imperitive. We laughed and talked and I walked home a little while later, a little more reflective, a little happier and a little humbler for my day out.

Maybe Sunday was trying to tell me something.

2006-01-08T14:03:00.000Z

A quiet and wild Xmas in Costa Rica. (Part 2)
I went to the theatre with a few friends as another pal Natalia was in it. I haven't enjoyed a show so much in years, more cabaret than anything else and a marvelous melange of comedic skits and dance. The Torres theatre, named after Maria Torres the star of the show by her friend Johanna the owner of the venue, is an intimate place with a small and cozy bar open to the street in downtown San Jose. After the show, we had dinner with the cast. I managed for the first time not to upset the creative and completely gorgeous Natalia, the booze flowed freely and Maria Torres insisted we hugged for a photo in the restaurant. I put my arm around her for the shot and she insisted I clasp her (covered) boobs for the camera. Although boob clasping is not something I am averse to, I am not accustomed to being instructed on the clasping technique for a new and famous pair for the sake of the camera. But that's theatre I suppose. There was much laughter and new friendships were formed. I went to bed late and happy with a smile and some memories for my collection.

Christmas Eve was quiet, a few drinks with a colleague in the evening and a lay in for Christmas day. The Spanish give gifts on January 6th, Epiphany or Kings' Day as the story goes that this is the day that the three kings delivered the presents to baby Jesus, which is why there are twelve days to this holiday. It is only a theory, but it is probable that the three kings were from Costa Rica. On arrival at the stable: "Que mae! Sorry, we're late with the presents, but there was a party you know, otherwise we'd have got here for Christmas." In Costa Rica they celebrate Christmas on the 25th as people do in North America and the UK.

After coffee, I opened the present from my mum, that she gave me in October with the strict instruction, not to open before Christmas. In the afternoon I went over to a friend Matt's for dinner. Matt had 40lb of turkey in the oven and his small pet dog was looking eager and ambitious. I normally end up cooking at these affairs and missing most of the party itself. Matt, very kindly told me to stay out of the kitchen, which I did, except for whipping up a quick white brandy sauce and brandy butter for the Christmas pudding.

The rest of the week in Costa Rica was quiet other than a mixed New Year's Eve. I worked every day. The Sunday before leaving I popped in to Rancho Macho for a beer with a book. I ended up chatting until midnight about cabbages and kings to Monica, a very interesting Uruguayan lady living in the US and vacationing in San Jose with her lovely daughter Kaisa, who was being very brave about a horse riding accident she had had earlier in the day.

Now that the Christmas season is over, alcohol consumption must return to sensible levels, there is a lot to do at work and hangovers don't help. Harold Wilson British Priminister in the 1970's once recounted that his Foreign Secretary George Brown, was brilliant, until four in the afternoon. Once at an embassy reception in Peru, he had asked someone to dance, the recipient of the invitation replied: " You are drunk. That is not the cha cha, that is the Peruvian national anthem and I am not a delectable young thing in red, I am the Cardinal Archbishop of Lima."

2006-01-07T15:19:00.000Z

A quiet and wild Xmas in Costa Rica. (Part 1)
I'll now commence to cover my recent time on the rich coast, as I said I would in my previous post. I got back to Costa Rica on the Wednesday before Xmas. Arriving at my apartment I set down my bags and the gatekeeper gave me the now spare set of keys to the place. Chocolate dust seemed to be embedded in every pore of my dwelling as my ex-bruja had decided to use it as her kitchen prior to swanning off on the rollercoaster of her own ego.

I called my pal Nicky and was told of a mission to the cinema that evening to see King Kong. This movie would be better entitled "Running with Dinosaurs" and the near perfection of special effects cannot mask the fact that it amounts to not much more than three hours of rancid cheese and directorial self-indulgence. The 187 minutes of catatonia that is this digital cellulose coma was capped in the last moments by Jack Black who managed to utter "It was beauty that killed the beast!" for any amoeba watching that might not have been able to work it out for themselves. Peter Jackson should have saved the countless millions in production costs by filming the whole thing on a camcorder with handpuppets using the cash he saved to pay Anthony Hopkins and Renee Zellweger for the voice-overs. It would have been just as believable.

The trip to the cinema was an event in itself. While stopped at a light in a taxi on my way to the cinema a car pulled up alongside, driving was a buddy of mine, Esteban whom I work with in Canada and had left the office two days before me. It's a small country! It's a pity that the taxi driver didn't follow Esteban, as he shot across a roundabout and then drove down the on ramp to a freeway the wrong way. Realising what he had done, he smiled, carried on driving and told me that we would cross over a space in the centre reservation when there was one. He had a change of heart and a change of pants when the headlights of another vehicle came hurtling towards us from the blind bend we were approaching. Luckily, the taxista was just as without regard for speed restraint in reverse as he was in forward motion. It was almost with relief that he swerved backwards out on to the busy roundabout we had been on only a couple of minutes previously.

Stay tuned for the next less than exciting episode of my life.

2006-01-01T01:03:00.000Z

Happy New Year
It's been a quiet and wild few days, but I'll save telling you for when I'm back in Toronto, hiding from the cold in my apartment. It's New Year's Eve, my friends and family across the ocean will soon be putting head to pillow, if they haven't already. Faces and thoughts are flashing through my mind and I am missing home. I am not sure where home is. Where the heart is? Mine is spread out so far, I no longer know. To an inveterate nest builder, such as myself, this is particularly galling. I am ever hopeful, but sometimes I think that this has been my undoing. My greatest fear at this very moment is that my sentiments will be the same another year on and I will be another year older.

Sometimes I smile and think of the lyrics to A Wanderin' Star, reflecting that rather than a curse, if that is what life has in store for me, then I should get to enjoy it. But I have felt the need to settle down for many years and not managed it successfully yet and explore too, but exploring is less fun on your own, although I have learnt to enjoy it.

However, the night is young and I can fake it! At least for a little while! So I'm going to shower, get my glad rags on, go out and be gorgeous. Apparently I look even better after a few drinks.
So, ever the optimist and fully able to ply myself with enough compliments that a half-cut me will believe me. I'm going go out and see if I can find someone to share my self delusion.

I would like to wish, you all, my family, friends, colleagues, associates and strangers a very Happy New Year. I hope with all my heart it brings you, peace, health, prosperity and serenity.

Jase

2005-12-24T18:09:00.000Z

Merry Christmas one and all!
I was planning on a different post without Xmas on my mind. A dear friend of mine Ken, wrote to me and I thought I would share my reply to him with all of you.

Remember always there are people in the world that love you and people in the world that need your love too. Some of them you already know, some you have lost contact with but still think about and they think about you, some you have yet to meet. As someone that believes in these things I know that you will realize that friendship and love ignore distance and time and that those whom you think of are always with you.

Xmas is important because it is a period of hope. A million years ago our ancestors shivered in the cold and knew without knowing; that the days had started to get longer; that although the worst may be yet to come, that it was the beginning of the end for winter and spring would follow with all the bounty that it brings. Xmas by another name was celebrated before Christianity and it will be celebrated after Christianity is forgotten, because of the seasons and the reason why they exist, it is a connection we share with the planet we live on and the path it follows through space. So for all the commercialization and hollow felicitations, there is still in all of us, that little golden thread of hope connecting us to the earth and to the people that we share it with, so with that thought present I would like to wish you, my dear friend, a very Happy Christmas.

2005-12-21T01:16:00.000Z

Here comes the sun.....
Tomorrow I am renouncing the heinous frozen wastelands of Canada to spend Xmas and the New Year in Costa Rica. Those of you whom are regular air travelers will know that the reduced cabin pressure in a plane leads to expansion of abdominal gases which may lead to some discomfort. This will be especially true for the people sharing my flight tomorrow, as I am just about to tuck into a giant pot of of extra spicy Vesuvius flavour noodles. It's these little pleasures that make it all worthwhile.

I have been driving around here in a vanilla and snow white Chrysler 300C which makes me feel like a pimp or a rap star, or perhaps a poorly dressed wedding chauffeur. It is an ocean liner of a car, I'm actually quite sad to have taken it back to the rental agency. My marvelous yet thrifty boss would prefer me to be driving around in a rent-a-wreck special that had previously been rejected by a junk yard for lowering the tone of the lot. I told him I needed a Bentley, so I think we have met half way on this one. Besides, when you are driving on snow as I have had to do in the last week it just feels a little more secure if you are in the automotive equivalent of the Queen Mary.

The ladies of my office in Toronto have been forewarned of my departure and they know that they only need mourn my absence until the New Year, when they may recommence humouring my mock ego.

I picked up some green cardamom pods for my friend Olga, so hopefully she'll make me some baklava, pastries are a weakness of mine. I can't make them, but like eating them. In theory I am cooking Xmas dinner for some amigos, as Marie will be spending it with her family and I didn't get an invite, even before the recent events that seem to have drawn us further apart. Still, the lucky buggers have an excellent meal in front of them. This is almost a routine started off by my friend Nicky, who for a while was collecting dinner guests that were happy to cook for all on arrival. I believe I still have the Guest Chef high score but there is no use resting on your laurels. It is worth noting that as a bloke I am allowed to do junk food every so often, but even so, if I am just on my own, I'll still cook something serious once per week.

I have decided I want to make babies. I have practiced making them so much that I should do an excellent job when the opportunity arises. This is not a recent revelation, I have just been getting broody recently.

2005-12-18T19:25:00.000Z

Many of my colleagues in the office in Toronto are Rumanian and prior to working with them, I knew nothing of their homeland. Now, I know almost nothing. What I do know is that it is made up of three countries that joined together in 1600: Transylvania; Wallachia; Moldavia. It is very poor and Vlad the Impaler AKA Count Dracula was born there of a Wallachian family.
I believe that Transylvania needs to achieve independence from the rest of Rumania for the sake of economic regeneration and to reverse the tide of emigration that is denuding the country of the educated middle classes. The passport alone would make it worth moving to.

Transylvanian dentists would be sought the world over, cape and hair oil manufacturers would have to double production just to keep the souvenir shops in stock. That part of the region at least would be back on its way to some of the wealth enjoyed by some of the other post war countries of the old Austro-Hungarian Empire.

My plans to learn Italian by watching all four series of the Sopranos on DVD back to back seem to have faltered. I am falling slowly in lust with the simple, caring approach of the mature, experienced and beautiful Carmela. I am struck evermore with the innocent sophistication and stunning looks of Meadow. Yet I feel that the intelligence and the irresistible simmering sensuality of the gorgeous Dr. Jennifer Melfi will win my heart in the end. However, I know that even thinking about taking one of these babes for my next goomah is gonna get me clipped so I'm gonna go on the lamb.

I think I need to get out more.

2005-12-17T06:05:00.000Z

Odds and Ends
I am reading an excellent book at the moment called "Tuesdays with Morrie". It is wonderfully life affirming and has affected me somewhat. It recounts the final conversations between an old dieing man and an ex-pupil. I think reading this book has changed me or at least brought to the fore some of those thoughts that have been hanging around for a while. The things that have hit me the most are; the lingering reminders that it has given me to really pay attention to those around me because my time and thoughts are the most precious things I have and not giving them is not caring; to actively show the people I love that I do because one day I'll be out of time; to care a lot more about even those I don't know, because really under the skin, we are all so very similar.

I have done all my Christmas shopping this year over the internet. Except the presents for Marie back in Costa Rica, who has lost her mobile phone and quite possibly her interest as she never calls and is never in to answer mine. The geographical and emotional distance make me feel quite alone up here and single yet somehow bound.

Two weeks back or so I was in Bar Volo on Yonge Street with three developers I have up here from Central America. The waitress was extremely surly, she stated that she could not bring me another glass of wine and a pint of beer at the same time (I was thirsty OK!) together with the rest of the round as it was against the law. Apparently because you can't serve someone two drinks simultaneously and also apparently rubbish from those I have spoken with. I asked her to come back and say it again wearing a police woman's uniform. She was not impressed and launched into a loud and lengthy monologue on her distress and umbrage in the packed restaurant. So I said, "That's fine but can you come back and say that again wearing a police woman's uniform?" The food was pleasant. When it was time for the desert she described the special, "it's made of sponge, it's a chocolate hollow filled with mousse and cream". I said "I'd like to eat your chocolate hollow". She launched into a loud fit of magnanimous trite hubris that seemed to designed to create embarrassment in a crowded restaurant. When she finished I said, "That's fine, but I'd still like to eat your chocolate hollow". She returned with the bill rather than the desert so I wrote ZERO in the tips section and booked my table for ten the following week somewhere else.

It has been snowing here quite a bit recently and the thirty minute drive back to the apartment took two hours yesterday. The snow blanket is very inconvenient but so very beautiful. I think I'm getting used to the cold. I left the office for a cigarette with a colleague on Wednesday, I didn't bother putting my coat on and remarked that it was a quite a nice day as the sun was out and it was only -10C. Roll on January, the winter and the cold weather.

2005-12-05T03:56:00.000Z

Back in the frozen wastelands of the North...
About two and a half weeks ago I left Canada via the tortuous freeway system of Toronto in the rental car to get to the airport and thence to Costa Rica. The signage on the freeways in Toronto is designed to comfort the nuerotics that already know their route perfectly. For anyone that does not they are useless. The freeway splits and only after you are on the new route are you rewarded with a sign that tells you that you made the right or wrong decision. Signage for minor roads is designed so that you have to swerve across five lanes of heavily trafficked highway within a hundred meters, at 120kph or be forced to drive on safely, missing your exit, to the reach the following one and drive around aimlessly for an extra hour. Did Ontario employ Spanish road designers?

Prior to leaving I went downtown and happened upon the Toronto Santa Claus Parade, it takes about two hours to see the whole thing and takes place over a 6km route. This was the 101st year, which apparently makes it the oldest running Xmas parade in the world. Along the whole route there are children playing and families under blankets sitting on camp chairs and some of the floats are truly impressive.

I went to the Toronto Motorcycle Show today where I became convinced that life would not be complete unless I owned a new KTM 950 Adventure in Costa Rica. I'm not normally drawn to this type of bike, but as I live on unmade roads halfway up a mountain and work in a city paved like the Himalayas, they are just practical. I got depressed later in the day after finding out that Costa Rican Import Duty is 100%. Which turns a bike that in the US costs $13,900 into the price of a small farm three hours drive from San Jose. This I am sure means that the people that rent them out and organise motorcycle tours on them are bribing the customs officers.

2005-11-20T03:53:00.000Z

The wages of sin....
Last week I was robbed. A very polite lady working at a cash register in a shop called LCBO beat the crap out of my debit card and all because I wanted a bottle of wine or so. LCBO, the Liquor Control Board of Ontario is the only place in Ontario that sells wine and spirits to take home. The shops are very impressive, often being in large old municipal buildings and in prime locations, and so they might be, the prices are extortionate. In Spain, where I lived for three and a half years, you could by a bodega for the price of a good bottle of plonk in Canada.
Officially my job is based in Costa Rica, but due to my project I am spending most of my time in Toronto and I'm thinking of asking my boss for a booze supplement to my wages. The only saving grace for Toronto booze-wise is that it is home of the Granite Brewery that make some very fine real ales. So it may be freezing cold (actually a lot below freezing) over the winter but at least I can get a warm beer! So the wages of sin might not be death but it costs a bloody lot to support ones vices.
On the subject of sinning, I was christened much against my wishes into the Church of England. I voiced my opinion loud and strong, but as I couldn't form words at that age, no-one paid much head to my objections. I don't remember rightly, but I feel sure that the young and very rebellious me may have tried to urinate in the font as an act of protest.
Growing up in the South of England where religion is something you do at births, deaths and marriages and only for the sake of tradition, unless you are a complete nutcase, I never really understood the whole my branch of Christianity is better than your branch of Christianity thing. I still don't and as an agnostic, I probably never will. For those that are unsure of what an agnostic is, it is probably best described as a sort of spineless, chicken shit, indecisive, sit-on-the-fence atheist. I may admit to a supreme being, but I'm not going to describe it's nature. However, I am thinking of becoming a Catholic, not because I have any new found religious inclination. I just like the idea of confession. Don't get me wrong, it's not a recently developed affectation for religions that have free weekly psychoanalysis sessions, I just like the idea of an attentive ear to listen the edited highlights of my colourful life......

Forgive me Father for I have sinned, it has been 39 years since my last confession, or it would have been if I'd had a priest present at my birth. (I exaggerate my age here for gravitas and although I was really born in 1966, I am still only twenty nine and a bit). For research purposes I have just cross referenced the seven deadly sins, with the ten commandments and any connection between them, is at best tenuous, in fact depending upon interpretation, the ten commandments are actually sinful!

For those of you that don't remember or wish to become experts, here they are:

The Seven Deadly:

Pride
Envy
Gluttony
Lust
Anger
Greed
Sloth

The Ten Commandments:

"Thou shalt have no other gods before me." Exemplifying Greed (for adulation), Pride (in the position), Lust (for power) and all the others with the sole exception of Sloth, God seems to be a bit of a sinner here and not a right-on role model.
"Thou shalt not make unto thee any graven image, or any likeness of any thing that is in heaven above, or that is in the earth beneath, or that is in the water under the earth. Thou shalt not bow down thyself to them, nor serve them: for I the LORD thy God am a jealous God, visiting the iniquity of the fathers upon the children unto the third and fourth generation of them that hate me. And showing mercy unto thousands of them that love me, and keep my commandments." Pride, Envy and Anger for sure, the others following with Sloth taking up last place, much as you would expect I suppose.
"Thou shalt not take the name of the Lord thy God in vain; for the Lord will not hold him guiltless that taketh his name in vain." Getting repetitive here isn't it? Pride in at number one, the others following. Sloth as yet hasn't smelled the coffee. But the case for the prosecution remains sound, God is guilty of a lot of this sinful stuff.
"Remember the Sabbath day, to keep it holy. Six days shalt thou labour, and do all thy work: But the seventh day is the Sabbath of the Lord thy God: in it thou shalt not do any work, thou, nor thy son, nor thy daughter, thy manservant, nor thy maidservant, nor thy cattle, nor thy stranger that is within thy gates: For in six days the Lord made heaven and earth, the sea, and all that in them is, and rested the seventh day: wherefore the Lord blessed the Sabbath day, and hallowed it." Finally, at last, Sloth wakes up and tells the others to give it a break, the others sins being too bone idle to wake up on Sunday (or err... is it Saturday if you are Jewish?). God condoning Sloth however is a bit of a worry. This however is a commandment I can get behind, If only this could have been a Friday through Monday long weekend type commandment.
"Honour thy father and thy mother: that thy days may be long upon the land which the Lord thy God giveth thee." Nice he's stopped talking about himself for a bit (or herself). Definitely a veiled threat here though, Anger is in there for sure. Greed in there as a distant second place as well in the hope of a bit of getting the farm. The demand for adulation though is a bit sickening.
"Thou shalt not kill." At last a moral commandment! However, this has been countered by justifications for capital punishment in Exodus, Leviticus, Numbers and Deuteronomy. As you can see, God love a bit of killin'. Have a bit of a look if you can be bothered, here and even more so, here. As you can see, there's nothing like a little homicide to keep the creator happy. Unfortunately hypocrisy isn't listed as a sin so he/she gets away on a technicality! This small stuff aside, check out God's opinion on the Midianites. Bastard!
"Thou shalt not commit adultery." I didn't even realise that was a sin until researching this article, I just thought some people got lucky! Anyway, in terms of sinfulness, this is a tricky one, if you aren't collecting notches on the bedpost which rules out Greed, the question is really dependent on whether Lust is involved. If it is a love thing with a woman that is not your wife then Lust is out, so this might be a pure act and technically not sinful.
"Thou shalt not steal." Well I'm cool with this, but check out the Old Testament. God is telling his chosen ones that there is no better way to spend the weekend, than bloodily rushing the the opposition. See the big Midianite land grab.
"Thou shalt not bear false witness against thy neighbour." A commandment that is not a self (God) centred demand for worship can never be a completely bad thing, this one is probably the only one that the big 'G' can keep to, so not a bad one to remember. Because of it's importance I shall paraphrase it "Don't Lie!".
"Thou shalt not covet thy neighbour's house, thou shalt not covet thy neighbour's wife, nor his manservant, nor his maidservant, nor his ox, nor his ass, nor any thing that is thy neighbour's." Condemnation of jealousy for the common mortal here, a great thing, if only it wasn't one of those one rules for God one for everyone else type things...... see the earlier commandments. For the record I have never coveted nor covered my neighbour's ass, nor his manservant's. His maidservant's and wife's are another matter completely.

So , in short, after a little self analysis, I have discovered that I am right up there with God in terms of sin level although he(she) tends to go for the sins of the ego; anger, pride etc while I am more into coveting my neighbour's wife's ass.

It's a funny old thing this religious lark, you can bust most of the ten commandments without being a sinner and be a resolute follower of the ten commandments and a sinner of the worst sort.

But going back to this confession business ......

"Forgive me Father for I have sinned, it has been 39 years since my last confession, I have committed adultery am guilty of lust, constantly, I have had sex outside marriage with over xxxxxx women. Gluttony and Sloth I am an expert at! I am good at Pride and I envy anyone that has any of the following: a latina girlfriend/wife even though I have one already; nice kids; an Aston Martin; that is a better cook than me (this doesn't happen often); has a beer in front of them; has more beer in their glass than I do. I am also guilty of unnatural acts with any number of hot babes (isn't oral sex in contravention of some rule or other under Catholicism) err blasphemy and many other terrible things. And that was just last week..."

a little later......

"Forgive me Father for I have sinned, It has been 5 minutes since my last confession, but I just like talking about this stuff......"

2005-11-19T21:14:00.000Z

Language
I have always been fascinated by languages, the way they travel across the world evolving, morphing and adapting to their new environments, merging with new languages, sometimes dieing. They leave audible tracks of the migrations of people, tell us where individuals are from, their education, upbringing and attitudes. They are living history. Some are relatively pure and untouched where the native speakers have been isolated, some like English are a mix of many others displaying many roots.

Traveling through Europe you start to notice that the languages we think of as national are really just the dominant languages imposed by the victors of earlier wars. The language that most people call Spanish is actually Castillian. There are five major languages in the geographical area known as Spain, the others are Catalan, Galician, Asturian and Basque, each of which has dialects. Italy has among others, Italian (Tuscan), Sardinian, Sicilian, Ligurian, Neapolitan, Lombard, Piedmontese, Emiliano-Romagnolo.
The Breton of France speak a language that is most closely related to Cornish and Welsh. Cornish although it has been revived, is to all intents and purposes extinct, with only about 400 people speaking it fluently. Breton shares about 80% of words with Cornish and about 70% with Welsh.

We have the soldiers of the Roman Empire to thank for the commonality of the European languages, speaking Vulgar Latin and changing forever the linguistic history of everywhere they conquered. Many of the similarities are still there today.

The Spanish word for address is dirección. I thought nothing of this when I started to learn the language. Then I arrived in Costa Rica, where outside the centre of major cities there are no street names, house numbers or post codes (zip numbers). Here are some examples of addresses in San Jose (in English): 700m South and 100m North of supermarket Saretto, Escazu; Apartment 3, 200M below Rancho Macho, Santa Ana.
Addresses really are directions which is why the Spanish word for address and the word for direction is the same. There are still addresses in San Jose given as directions from El Higueron, a famous fig tree which has long since gone. So as you can imagine newcomers to the area might find things a little confusing.
The last time I left Toronto for San Jose, my colleague from Costa Rica, Ricardo was mostinsistentt that I wrote down the address of the office here so he could find it on his own or get there by Taxi. I said "look Ricardo, it's easy, its number XXXX Jane Street." Ricardo told me that Canadian addresses were confusing for him because they didn't tell you where the trees were or the closest ranch or river or anything.
I think he was worried that without landmarks the taxi drivers would never find the place. Having experienced Toronto Taxi drivers I quite agree with him and can see the advantages of the Costa Rican address style.

Spanish is a very confusing language for the English speaking native, there are fourteen tenses, a different verb form for each person, masculine and feminine nouns, some of which change gender between singular and plural e.g. el agua, las aguas . In fact there aren't really many Spanish that fully understand Spanish grammar. It has has to be difficult really, Vulgar Latin mixed with Arabic, what a combination! The history of Moorish occupation is still betrayed by the language in pronunciation and some of the words. The Spanish exclamation Ojalá (Portuguese Oxalá) meaning 'I wish' or 'I hope' is derived from "law šá lláh" or as Muslims today say Insha'Allah meaning "If Allah wills it".

Much like the application of all rules and regulations in Latin countries, the language rules are also mostly guidelines and you can never really rely on any to be solid. Most nouns ending in an 'e' or an 'o' are masculine, most nouns ending in an 'a' are feminine. Sometimes the ending indicates the gender e.g. el chico - 'the boy', la chica - 'the girl', el gato - 'the tom cat', la gata - 'the she cat'. But this doesn't always hold true.

A friend of mine, Nuala rides horses, the Spanish word for horse is caballo. Nuala was at the stables and was going to take a mare out for a ride. She didn't say Voy a montar mi caballo, 'I am going to ride my horse' because it was a mare and thinking it might be better she applied the language rule swapped the 'o' for an 'a' and announced to peels of laughter from those present Voy a montar mi caballa which means 'I am going to ride my mackerel'.

Someone else I know went in to a butchers when they first arrived in Spain. It was full of happy Spanish women out doing their morning shopping. He wanted to buy a chicken. The Spanish word for chicken is pollo. So he waited for is turn and announced to the lady working behind the counter Quiero una polla grande! the women in the shop started laughing and the woman working behind the counter asked Que grande? or 'How large?' He hadn't realised that the slip of the tongue which is the difference between pollo and polla made the difference between asking for a large chicken and stating that he would like a big penis.

On another note, my cousin Mark lives on the Welsh island Anglesey home to the town with the longest Railway Station name and possibly URL in Britain: Llanfairpwllgwyngyllgogerychwyrndrobwllllantysiliogogogoch which is Welsh for 'St Mary's church in the hollow of the white hazel near a rapid whirlpool and the church of St Tysilio of the red cave'. This name is of course so long that it is surprising that the Germans have not reappropriated it for themselves.

The Germans are well known for the mercilessness of their almost limitless compound nouns, the longest official ones being: Rinderkennzeichnungs- und Rindfleischetikettierungsüberwachungsaufgabenübertragungsgesetz which means Law on delegation of supervision duties for marking of cattle and labeling of beef and Donaudampfschiffahrtselektrizitätenhauptbetriebswerkbauunterbeamtengesellschaft which means the association for subordinate officials of the head office management of the Danube steamboat electrical services.

Bastards!

English is constantly evolving and unlike the French or the wannabe French Québécoise , the English seem happy with the adoption of new words such as punani (which is a fantastic word) from immigrant populations and the evolution of the meaning of existing words.

Booyakasha!

Punani is the name of a village in Sri Lanka (as well).

2005-11-15T05:38:00.000Z

Radio 4
When Today Programme presenter Brian Redhead's death was announced on January 23rd 1994 it was, although unannounced as such, a day of national mourning for the British middle classes. The media were full of tributes and people I knew told me that his death hit them personally. Although I listened to Radio 4 at this time and had heard Today now and again, it wasn't really a part of my life. Brian's death prompted me to tune in, perhaps for no other reason than to catch the zeitgeist. I have now been listening more or less every day for the last eleven years. The Today Programme is my cerebral caffeine, without it I'm not sure I mentally wake up. Every couple of years I go on vacation and am without it for a fortnight. Much more than this and I feel that my connection with what is happening in the world will fade and I will dumb down. So the Today programme is now as much a part of my daily regime, as it is of my father's, Margaret Thatcher's and millions of other Britons.

The British nuclear deterrent (nucular for US Republicans), the Royal Navy's Trident equipped Vanguard submarines that quietly cruise the depths of the North Atlantic have a series tests to perform should they lose contact with their command structure that would indicate that the UK has suffered from a devastating nuclear attack and that it is time to open the sealed envelope. It has been reported on numerous occasions that one of these tests is the absence of the Today Programme for 3 consecutive days. So I guess I'm not the only one that feels a bit out of sorts if I haven't heard it for a while.

When I first moved to Gibraltar and then Andalucia, I listened to Today via the British Forces Broadcasting Service on BFBS2 transmitted from the Rock. Somewhat later I started listening via the internet as good reception was guaranteed. Then I discovered the absolutely marvelous Listen Again service, through which I can keep listening to some of the other Radio 4 institutions I'm Sorry I Haven't a Clue, Any Questions and so many others. Comedies, plays, short stories and programs that have kept me company since I first started listening to Radio 4 at 12 years old. Whoever championed the implementation of this fantastic feature on what is an already brilliant internet portal needs to be, knighted, canonised, awarded a Nobel prize and given a small island, Guernsey perhaps, in recognition of his services to mankind.

No-one who has ever heard one of his broadcasts could forget the quiet measured tones and comforting wisdom of Alistair Cooke and for me as I suspect for many others, he became the wise grandfather I always regret not spending enough time with.

So via the magic of the Listen Again feature and the Today programme, wherever I am in the world, I always wake up in Britain.

Never a truer word was spoken than in 2003 when Today Programme presenter John Humphrys received a lifetime achievement award together with a national radio station award for Radio 4 and said in his acceptance speech....

"Radio 4 is the civilising influence in this country - I think it is the most important institution that we have"

2005-11-12T07:47:00.000Z

Moving Pictures.....
Films and Television are becoming the way we define ourselves. A common international point of reference. People will often describe colleagues as looking like a character from a movie or TV, she looks like Julia Roberts in Erin Brockavich, he looks like Gene Hackman in the French Connection. We describe items, posessions, people and experiences as being like those seen in a film.
Harmless datums and comparators mostly, simply serving as descriptors we all understand. But it is going too far. People on the street view themselves in comparison with the unattainable standards set by airbrushed stars, believing that if only they could harness the same trappings of wealth or the same digitally corrected beauty that they would be happy. The narcissists in the gym that believe that inner happiness and contentment can be achieved by re-sculpting their torsos so they might emulate the youthful Schwarzenegger; the girls that believe they are fat grotesques because they do not share the Gwyneth Paltrow wispy figure; the black guys that find self definition in their pimped rap star Mercedes and the lonely Joe on the street that thinks that if he had the Ferrari and the Hollywood bank account, he would find love and contentment. Television and movies gear us to relate to superficialities and material wealth, encouraging us to compare ourselves with the bland characters of the big and small screen and the actors that play them. Shallow is now an aspirational character asset with men anxious to be judgmental and tough instead of compassionate and fair. The ideal woman has been reduced to a wisecracking sex kitten right into her sixties, rather than your mum or your grandmother. Anyone failing to meet these standards is seen as too fat, too skinny, too pale, too poor or without that movie quality.

Enough is enough. The fiction is OK, but that is all it is. Let us not compare each other with anyone, just try to be a little more understanding and a little more caring, of the people we don't know as much as of the people we do.

For the record I have the roguish charm of Han Solo, the time tempered intellect of Obi Wan Kenobi and am hung like a wookie. *

*All Star Wars characters referenced here are from the superb first three movies produced rather than the last three crap ones.

Apologies to the readership for the dearth of articles in the last week, I have been traveling and quite ill.

2005-10-29T03:03:00.000+01:00

Home at last.....
Having lived in and out of suitcases for the last seven weeks I have been looking forward to settling down for a little while. The desperate feelings of expensed vagrancy have grown, I am now actually homeless, a man of no fixed abode, which is not actually the same as not having a roof over my head, but is discomfiting. By late last week I resolved to find a new home. Marie has been a great help, searching out places as have a couple of others. Yesterday I had resolved to rent a modern three bedroom apartment near the office, it doesn't feel hugely latin American but it has the advantage of being walking distance to work. Not necessarily walking distance from work, as the gun toting robbers are normally working the five to midnight shift in the more affluent areas. I'm going to try and move in before leaving for Canada on Wednesday where Mary Kiss has found me an apartment in Toronto should it be authorised by the boss. So I will have gone from a man without a home to a man with two in the space of a week.

From the time I arrived in Costa Rica until about Friday last week, I had been amazed at just how awful the coffee in Costa Rica was, bitter and largely flavour free. Which is surprising given the awesome reputation. I had of course been buying my coffees from the ubiquitous mall coffee bars that use Britt Expresso. I bought a 10 dollar coffee machine from the cheap stuff shop in the mall that specialises in all the highest quality merchandise available from Asian sweatshop distributors. Leaving it a little late I then went out for the coffee. The pulperia (general store) had closed. I went to my regular coffee bar in the mall, where my temporary apartment is also located and asked for some coffee. The owner happily ground a cup of beans for me and I left with blissful thoughts of caffeinated beverages to come. I made a coffee. Awful! I thought it may have been the flavour of the new machine, but no a second brew revealed the coffee to have all the subtlety and delicacy of flavour that one normally associates with old engine oil. Time for an upgrade. The next day I bought a random bag of ground coffee from the general store for the princely sum of 950 Colones which is about 2 US Dollars. Absolutely magnificent, subsequent random purchase of other coffees have revealed to me that it is almost impossible to get coffee that is anything less than sublime unless you go to a coffee bar. I am now convinced that Expresso is actually Latin American for "That shit we sweep up off the factory floor and sell to Gringos in shopping malls".

My coffee machine overfills the permanent plastic filter and disgorges half the reservoir contents over the floor of the apartment unless I watch it. This doesn't seem to have upset the maid, who takes care of everything washing included. Earlier in the week she placed a laundered pair of Marie's panties on my beside table with a condom on them. I checked and as I suspected, this was maid humour rather than matronly rebuke. Speaking of Marie's panties, they encase what is one of the most perfect bottoms in Christendom. She can't keep her arse off my hands though, which can be a little embarrassing in the supermarket. I tell her to stop it, but she is forever catching one of my paws down the back of her jeans. It must be the latin blood! She is very pretty and looked great in her birthday present, perfume. However, a relationship cannot be purely physical, based on animal lust and base thoughts of unnatural acts no matter how much she'd like it that way. We'll see how things go, there are cultural differences but we have a lot in common.

As is the case whenever I'm here in Costa Rica, the blog postings are further apart as they make way for my life. Of course this can't go on. I'm back in Toronto from Wednesday for 10 days or so.

2005-10-22T20:33:00.000+01:00

Don't eat the Staff!
I finally arrived at the company apartment in Costa Rica some twenty seven and a half hours after getting in a cab to Gatwick airport in the UK. My sleep patterns are so wrecked that I have not slept more than four or five consecutive hours any day in the last two weeks. Yesterday at 9:30PM the Airbus A330 lowered it's undercarriage on approach to the runway at San Jose, the pilot thought better of it and I was drinking coffee in Panama airport until reboarding at midnight for another attempt at the rain soaked, fog smothered airport in Costa Rica. I finally went to bed at 3:30am, woke at 7:30am and was in the office after half an hour or so.

Due to jet lag induced sleep deprivation the day had a slightly padded feel to it. Shapes slightly less distinct, voices less clear, my thought processes had slowed. I decided to quit the office about 3pm and try to sleep. I moved the last of my six suitcases up to the apartment in the same building and unpacked. I feel distressed about being homeless. I have no fixed base, no address as such, I have a job, but no contract. Together with the absence of any fixed timezone, currency, country or altitude. In short everything in my life is a little unstable, me included. I haven't spent more than 5 consecutive nights in the same place for nearly two months and I always seem to be packing or unpacking, I am not happy about it. I went back to the office to fetch a network cable for my laptop and was met by a young lad from the facilities management team, who informed me that there had been a mistake in the apartment booking system, they had double booked and that I would have to move to a hotel on Monday. There was a loud click as my incisors snapped shut between his 6th and 7th vertebrae.

After the red mist lifted and I realised that this was probably a mistake. I regurgitated his head and tried to pat the red soggy bits of his torso and neck together. I met my boss later who asked me to refrain from bighting other members of staff although he understood that my mental state was somewhat fractured.

Last Wednesday
Manda had very nicely let me use apartment while I was in the UK. I woke had a coffee and got in the shower. The streaming hot water reaching into my skull started to massage my brain into acceptance of the new day. I thrust an arm out and grabbed the only non-girly shampoo within reach. I always get confused when buying shampoo, because I am a man. This means that I do not know whether I have dry, normal, greasy, thick, thin, delicate or any combination of these types of hair. I just know that if I take my head to a special type of shop every two or three weeks, a nice lady massages my scalp with hot water and then leans over me a lot with her boobs at eye level while doing stuff with clippers and scissors. This makes me even more handsome, if you can imagine such a thing. I read the label on the bottle it said "SHAMPOO FOR MEN, FOR BODY BUILDING AND THICKENING". I used it anyway, but I was careless about rinsing, spilled some on my belly and when I got out the shower I was fat.

I needed to get a copy of the criminal record I haven't got from the police to help me apply for residency in Costa Rica. The police told me that I couldn't get a copy unless I had a proof of address, such as a bank statement or phone bill and that it would take forty days to arrive. I learnt several things here. My passport and birth certificate are no longer useful for verifying my identity and I should resort to carrying bank statements; people that do not have utility bills do not commit crimes; it takes forty days to find out if you have a criminal record, so policemen locking people up for anything less than that are just doing it out of spite.

I tripped into London via bankside, visited Thomas James, had a pint with Dave and then got back on the train to Waterloo, where something strange happened. The carriage I was on filled up with drunk people all wearing the same ties. They were very amiable and all started singing this song about some fellow called Father Abraham and taking their clothes off. I twigged, this was obviously a rugby club. Within 5 minutes there were a dozen stark naked rugby players dancing and singing on the train. I thought about joining in but as I didn't know the words and didn't want them getting jealous of my tackle, I wisely kept quiet. By the time the train arrived at Waterloo they were fully dressed again and on enquiry I discovered that they were Guys Hospital RFC which is actually the oldest rugby club in existence.

I met up with Manda and her bloke Rodge in Richmond and we went for a pint. After a quart of London Pride I stood at the bar panicking over whether last orders had been called, franticly gesturing to the barmaid that I was in medical need of more beer when a face from the past appeared in front of me:

bloke: Jason?
me: Yes
bloke: Jason Ellis?
me: Yes
bloke: Jason Ellis, Mile Low Club?
me: Yes

The face belonged to a chap Chris James, whom last saw about 10 years ago when we worked for a planning tools division of a major UK IT consultancy. The Mile Low Club thing he referred to was an incident in which The Sun newspaper ran a front page story recognisng me and my girlfriend of the time as the first people to have had sex in the Channel Tunnel.

After finishing my beer Manda dropped me off home and I caught a few hours shuteye in readiness for the marathon journey back to Costa Rica.

Last week at the airport I saw a metallic burgundy 1990s 3 series BMW with a 8 inch high, 6 inch wide spoiler on the boot (trunk). I have never felt the urge to urinate on a car as much as I did at that moment.

2005-10-19T20:42:00.000+01:00

Not another baby post!
Although I have always wanted children, I have not actually made any. Not that I haven't practiced making babies, which I like very much, I just haven't actually made babies.
Most non-parents find the constant wittering of new parents about about how clever, active, fun, good looking, blah blah blah their new cabbage patch baby is, to be as much fun as bathing in warm vomit. Having to look at the photos equally tedious. Most of these photos are snaps, in that they serve as an aide memoire to someone present when they were shot. They are not art! If you are a bit of a photographer, which I am, you either have to shut down your visual cortex and grunt approving noises or you actually have to look at them. If you look at them you will get bummed about how the table is in focus but the kid isn't; how half it's head is out of frame or has a plant growing out of it and any number of other issues. You can't mention the errors in photography in case the parents think you find photography more interesting than their baby. Basically, other peoples babies are not interesting unless you are feeling very broody, even if you are a girl, who have higher interest levels in such things. Sorry but for the rest of us, they all look the same and especially so if you are a guy.

However, this brings me to the point of this post.
Please let me introduce my new friend, Thomas James Maximus McSpirit whom I had the great pleasure to meet yesterday. He is the eleven week old son of my longest standing friend Dave, whom I have known since I was only one motorcycle old and his girlfriend Jenny. This makes him virtually my nephew and Dave introduced me to him as his uncle so that's cool. I now have uncle responsibilities. Which I think means that it will be my job to introduce Tom to vices and all the other stuff that Dave, is prohibited by Jenny from doing due to his dadness. We'll have a lot of important ground to cover, beer, girls, motorcycles, cigars etc. Maybe we can discuss the arts, cooking, philosophy and culture as well if we have time.

After his dinner, TJMax settled down for a nap in my arms. We had a bit of a chat as he drifted off to sleep and we already have a few things in common. We both like women. Tom is a boob man. Mostly he sees women as a source for food and comfort, so not much different from most men in that respect. When the time comes I'll teach him how to cook the fish he catches when us three men are out fishing. He was a bit tired after eating and a couple of burps finished him off. He slept happily for an hour or so, wriggling in his sleep every so often and then woke up ready for a bit more supper, so I handed him back to Jenny. It was nice spending an hour with the new little man.

Dave is very proud of having made Tom and hugely grateful to Jenny for all her help with the production. So much in fact that Dave says they are going to keep him and don't need to get a pet after all. Of course my moral support in the whole project is also worthy of note.

Dave and I went down the pub for a couple of beers to talk bloke stuff. We had a chat about the little fellow while I waited for my train. Anyway, I stand by what I said before, I saw this baby in a car the other day that could have been drawn by Gary Larson. They all look the same they all act the same, that's it. Except for Thomas my nephew, who is different, more interesting, better looking, smarter and all that other stuff that you lot not related to him would never understand!

2005-10-18T10:22:00.000+01:00

Chance and Offialdom
Well, this was the day that every previous day in my life was leading up to. The same of course could be said on every day. This one was a little special though. I left Spain today. I came back to tidy things up and vacate my apartment and that is now done. My friend Manda flew over and helped me pack my things as she did when I left the UK in 2002. Today I woke from a troubled sleep around 8am. The only thing left to pack was my desktop PC, all my other chattels being boxed and awaiting the removal men.

After a coffee I cycled across the frontier and entered the Orwellian tax office in Gibraltar. Here I queued for 20 minutes to see an orangutan behind a door marked 'Information'. I told the tax simian that I had ceased to work in Gibraltar as of August. After retrieving a particularly stubborn termite from his chair and putting it in his mouth, he told me that I would need a form. I proffered a form and asked if it was the required item. He looked at me ponderously, swallowed the termite he had been chewing, defecated behind a waste basket and told me that I would have to queue again and go into one of the two doors marked 'Enquiries'.
In the waiting room ten people were decaying and ruminating over the sheer life sapping experience which is a visit to any government department anywhere in the world. Governments actually seem to seek out, not so much under achievers, but people that although they may have evolved physically along with everyone else, retain the cerebral capability of sea sponges. After another hour it was my turn and I entered a door marked 'Enquiries'. The chimp in attendance looked at the form I had shown the orangutan in the booth next door, asked me to sign it and I left for my next brush with officiousness.

I went to my bank, which is actually Norwich and Peterborough Building Society and saw a mortgage advisor about switching from an endowment policy to a repayment policy. All was very interesting and it well until I asked about redemption values for the endowments. At which point the mortgage advisor Janet told me that as I had only held these policies for about 3 years, there would probably be no redemption value as "they cost a lot to set up and are long term savings vehicles". At this point I felt I had slipped though a worm hole and Janet was confusing me with an innumerate labourer circa 1950, that didn't realise that it doesn't cost 20,000 pounds sterling to establish a savings vehicle and that thought that bankers were respectable people rather than liars, cheats and thieves conducting their fraud through legal channels. I left and will be speaking to one of their representatives in the near future.

I enjoyed a relaxing late breakfast at Da Paulos in Marina Bay with a copy of the Daily Telegraph. The UK Conservative party leadership elections are amusing in the extreme. I have always hoped that the Tories will ultimately bury themselves up their own collective arses, pulling up their pants on their way in and we will all be left wondering where all the spiteful, out-of-touch people have got to. It looks like I will get my wish as the only leadership contender recognised as human by the electorate at large is Ken Clarke and the rest of the Tory MPs are rejecting him for not having pointy enough teeth, not being able to prove his Transylvanian heritage etc.

I went home and had a nap. On waking around 5pm I did some important thinking lovely thoughts about Marie and packed away my PC. The removal guys turned up and emptied the flat, Kay came by to pick up keys and paperwork, Anas and Lourdes arrived to take me to the airport and Ken, who was already at the airport to send me off, called to inform me that the flight had been delayed and not to rush.

Ken waited with me until the delayed plane had arrived. He's been having a rough time of late what with his girlfriend dieing. He has been very morbid and speaking of giving up, which I don't like, as it's terrible to hear someone you care for chewing themselves up. I offered a couple of suggestions as to new direction, but with little success and then a mini-flash of inspiration. In my carry-on luggage I had a copy of the Messiah's Handbook. I handed it to Ken and asked him to open it and see what it said. He opened , the book, turned to it and read..

Here's a test to find whether your mission on earth is finished:

If you're alive, it isn't.

So that was cool I had providence on my side and that seemed to cheer Ken enormously.

After arriving at Heathrow I queued for a taxi to take me to Manda's. The black cab driver informed me that as I wanted to got to Ashford, which is approximately 5 minutes away and that it was outside the metropolitan area, it would cost 48 pound. Sorry but black cab drivers are mostly tossers. They won't take you south of the water (The Thames) after midnight and only apply taxi rules as they see fit. "Sorry mate I can't turn around, I'm in a rush, on my way to a dental appointment, I only stopped 'cos I thought you might also have, one or maybe need to get some flowers from the shop next door." I called Manda to come get me.

It was late, I updated the blog, called Marie and fell asleep.

I would like to apologise to all of the great apes for comparing them to people who work for government offices.

2005-10-15T14:40:00.000+01:00

The Unjust Persecution of Smokers
I haven't had a cigarette since last Saturday. It was about time I quit again. I was off the smokes for two or three months earlier in the year but stress and apathy conspired to start me again. In the last two weeks the toll of constant change combined with the Marlboro Lights has given me a cough, which is proving hard to shake off.

Cigarettes in Canada are punitively taxed, much as they are in the UK so I'll be a little better off financially too. I really resent the tax on tobacco. I have probably already paid for about four heart bypass operations and with a bit of luck I shouldn't survive more than two or three. Ideally of course I'll bypass the whole bypass thing by quitting now. Obviously in the UK, Canada and other enlightened places the state pays for healthcare, but it seems a little harsh only punishing smokers for their cost to the system. So for today's arbitrary attack on the innocent I am going to pick on lovers of winter sports.

Skiers pay no serious tax on their hobby and they're injured so much that in the US they get their plaster casts on 3 for the price of 2 deals. Snowboarders have selected more or less the only pastime actually guaranteed to cause wrists and elbow trauma. Both of these groups are also prone to liver damage caused by drinking far too much mulled wine while bullshitting themselves about how cool they are on the black runs. Not to mention syphilis and other social diseases acquired during the apres ski sex. How much tax are they paying in to the system for all the treatment they get? Nothing over and above the sales tax on their equipment. Skiers and snowboarders cost the National Health Service considerably more than stamp collectors and anglers yet they pay no more in to the government pot!

It's getting more and more difficult to find a place to smoke now. In Ontario you pretty much have to go outside for a cigarette, much as you do in Ireland and a lot of other places. Why? Because the government says non-smokers should not be forced to inhale smoke passively due to their choice of jobs or their choice of whether to go into a bar or not. I think they should stop people from driving cars because non-drivers have to suffer from exhaust emissions and people that work in gas stations are inhaling all that benzene. You have to smoke a lot of cigarettes to beat a Cadillac on toxic emissions!

Smoking is a more or less environmentally neutral hobby, the tobacco plant absorbs CO2 from the air which we release again by smoking it. But every government now seems anti-smoker while leaving other more harmful pursuits alone. Take hot air ballooning. Now this is a seriously environmentally damaging hobby. The balloonist drives off to the countryside in a gas guzzling 4x4 towing an enormous trailer. He gets to where he's going and burns huge quantities of propane to blow up his balloon. It takes off in a random, wind blown direction followed by the ground crew in the Land Cruiser so it can be packed up again after landing. All this for a couple of hours flying in a desperate attempt to persuade the girl he's taken along that he is an at one with nature sky master and that she should shag him in the basket. There are more honest ways to get laid. Fact: Ballooning is more environmentally damaging than either prostitution or masturbation.

Smokers as a rule die younger and are therefore less of a burden on the state, pension and insurance companies. They are actually helping to reduce population density issues and by virtually ensuring that their bodies die before their brains do ensuring that they do not contract Alzheimers or any of those other unpleasant old age brain malfunctions.

In Canada about half the surface area of the cigarette packet is devoted to the health warning, each pack has a photo of something highly unpleasant on it, a heart after a heart attack, a lung operation, some vile looking teeth after mouth cancer. I wondered if the picture was related to the tar levels of the cigarettes; ever so slightly yellowed teeth for extra lights; a gangrenous amputated leg for the full tar smokes; a smiling lady-boy prostitute for menthols. Apparently the warning is random which is a wasted opportunity. Not knowing one Canadian cigarette from another, I only bought smokes that lungs on them regardless of brand. If someone else offered me a cigarette I always checked the packet first, as I wouldn't smoke anything from a packet with an erectile dysfunction warning in case there was something especially dangerous about them.

Anyway, I don't have to worry about cigarette issues now, the cough is starting to go and the new woman in my life wants to smooch with me a lot more.

Winter Sports can seriously damage your health!

2005-10-14T02:35:00.000+01:00

Queuing at the bank...
You know you are back in Spain when you go into a bar and the barmaid hands you a cold beer out of the fridge and a hot glass straight out of the dishwasher to put it in. Franco replaced modernism and thinking for yourself with suspicion and inefficient bureaucracy. Thirty years after his death, his legacy lives on. I went to the bank today. The Spanish Olympic queuing team are practicing at my branch for Beijing 2008. I queued up in line to make a deposit and in only enough to to shave, read Martin Chuzzlewit, finish The Times crossword and shave again, I had arrived at the counter. I slammed a wad of notes down on to the counter loud enough to break the peaceful slumber of the bank clerk and while waiting for her computer to crash, reboot and crash I pondered the difference in attitudes to waiting.

In the UK and the US making you wait for a service that costs you money is considered equivalent to stealing life.

"Excuse me but the usable bit of my existence has been reduced by 30 minutes since I arrived at this bank, if you added up all the time I've wasted here since I opened my account I have probably lost 6 or 7 days of my life you vampirical bastards!"

Spanish people think of queuing with a nostalgic romance, viewing it as an opportunity to chat with the other people in line, make friends and perhaps get invited around to dinner. Which it possibly is in the rural branches. However there are old men queued up in Spanish banks that hadn't reached puberty when they walked in and I don't like it!

To pay a bill at a bank here you must go in on a Tuesday or a Thursday, between 8:30 and 9:30, between the 10th and 20th of the month. Although I am prone to exaggeration for comic effect, this is in fact unadorned truth. The adorned truth requires much sobbing, a decease in the family and a flashing neon Santa Maria statuette.

The deposit complete, I asked the clerk to change my address. The clerk told me I needed to go and join the line of people waiting in front of a desk on the other side of the building where a three toed sloth ponders Rene' Descartes and occasionally deals with customer issues.

Please may I take the opportunity to apologise to those offended by my gratuitous defamation of a religious icon, it was thoughtless and quite possibly blasphemous. But I rather like it.

2005-10-10T14:11:00.000+01:00

Wish I was here (Part 2)

Well the Dutch couple introduce themselves, Steyne (incorrect spelling) is a surgeon and his beautiful girlfriend Sanne a product manager for a watch company. Sick of admiration, adoration and sympathy from Americans, Steyne now answers enquiries about what he does for a living by telling people he is a pet hair stylist. A conversation along these lines ensued and by the end of the night we were running a successful pet cosmetic surgery and holistic healthcare centre. Steyne was doing nose jobs on bulldogs that thought they were labradors born in the wrong body. I was offering counseling for cocker spaniels depressed about their weight and the weight of their owners, while my partner was offering lyposuction for fat dogs and boob jobs for cats. As you can imagine the alcohol flowed freely and all three of us had a riotous time. As the night drew to a close the sad realisation hit us that somewhere, they probably already have these things.

After a quick breakfast and a little shopping I drove to the volcano. Unfortunately it was still cloudy, so for the most part the top of the volcano was obscured. The trail meanders through seas of 3m tall pampas and tropical grasses that are split by dried river beds of volcanic ash; under the jungle canopy crammed with mangrove like trees growing from squelchy earth and filled with loud bird calls and the barking of monkeys; over great igneous rock flows borne down the fire mountain by rivers of magma in 1992.
Unlike the Barbary Apes of Gibraltar, the monkeys here make the ooh-ooh-ooh noises you hear in Tarzan movies as well as a variety of barks and grunts. They do not attempt to rob you of anything that sounds like a packet of crisps. But the noise in darkness of the jungle can be disconcerting (Scared, not me oh no!)

Unfortunately I didn't have the time to see everything as I wanted to get back before nightfall. Driving across mountains on foggy wet unlit roads at night concerns me somewhat. Before arriving in Costa Rica I had been playing a computer game, which I do about once every year or so. The game was called Boiling Point and is set in a Centro American country. One of the most frustrating things about the game is the car driving. The other drivers in the game seem to operate their vehicles randomly, completely oblivious to other cars and pedestrians, leading to constant repair bills and injuries. Frustrating and ridiculous! Or so I thought. Now I realise it is a faithful recreation of the Centro American driving experience. Only having had roads and cars a few short years, they seem to pilot motor vehicles as if they are donkey carts. The realisation that a vehicle to vehicle interface feels different with a combined speed of 50-150kmh,to what it does when your burro nudges the cart in front seems to have passed people by completely.

I was home shortly after sundown and went for dinner with Marie at Cerruti. Her company was, as ever, invigorating and fun, I hope that she misses me while I'm away.

2005-10-10T02:15:00.000+01:00

Wish I was here! (Part 1)
You will note that my posts are less frequent during my time in Costa Rica. This is because I have more of a life here. Some good pals, some nice haunts and nowhere near enough days free to see all the stuff I want to.

As I have to be back in Spain next week and London the weekend after that, I thought I'd have to go and do something other than hang out in San Jose. All of my girly friends are doing other stuff. Emms and Nicki have been to the beach and have no doubt been boozing and man-ising something terrible after endless hours of exposing their semi-naked forms to the sun. The lovely Marie was off to a ranch with her sister and her mother, something like a Centro American Macbeth I guess. Oh and Mary Kiss, whom I mention here only because I said I'd say something about her in my next post, spent the weekend in Toronto where she lives. Weekdays she organises everything and everyone in the office, weekends she is a demon shoe shopper and culture vulture.

So I rented a a little 4x4 and hit out for Arenal, which is an active volcano about 140kms from here. The journey itself is quite magical. Outside of San Jose Costa Rica turns into a patchwork of green hills, forests and jungles. There is a slightly unreal feel to the roads, which are perfectly clean due to the daily rain scrubbing and bordered by lush vegetation in greener greens than I have ever seen. My digital photo-editing experience makes me think that someone has overdone the colour saturation in the real world Costa Rica. The houses that dot the countryside are all brightly painted and each has a unique character.

I arrived in a little village called Fortuna a little way from Arenal around 6pm, by which time it was dark. Unfortunately, it was raining and the top of the volcano was hidden by clouds. You can just about hear it from Fortuna, there is a small explosion every few seconds.

The problem is basically that during the dry season the place will be overrun by tourists, so the ideal way to explore Arenal is during the occasional dry spell during the rainy season. After booking myself into a cheap hotel that smelled vaguely damp I went out to avail myself of the local rustic cuisine. Initially the vaguely damp smell of the hotel is depressing, but thinking about it, everything around Fortuna is damp. The bioactivity of the soil there must be phenomenal. It rains for six or seven hours every afternoon for six months and the mornings are hot with some great sunshine until the clouds roll over. I imagine dropped litter decomposing while you watch.

At the first place I get some reasonably priced yet very boring fare and decide to move on to a better bar. I find myself in El Rufino, sat at the bar next to a Dutch couple watching the football on the TV behind the bar. Costa Rica are playing the USA and even though I am not normally interested in the game, I watched so I could feel culturally aligned with the Ticos. Costa Rica won 3-0. Shocking that the USA can't field a decent soccer team and noteworthy that the only games the USA is really world class at, are those that are really only played by Americans ; American football, baseball, basketball. The scenes of jubilation after the victory are shot from Mall San Pedro and played out over TVs across Costa Rica. I tell my new friends that right now, I live and work 6 floors above the cameras, when I'm not in Toronto that it.

(to be continued)

2005-10-03T08:28:00.000+01:00

Toronto, still not completely crap for beer!
Yesterday, I met up again with Deidre and Bryan for another night of boozement. We hit C'est What at 67 Front Street. An intimate cellar bar with five ales on hand pumps, which are all rather pleasant indeed. Rather shockingly though, they still think it's acceptable to raise some of the beers they brew with pressurised CO2 or Nitrogen, lending an unnecessary fizz and destructive coarseness to their beers. I noticed the same sad issue at Amsterdam on King Street West, they have ruined what would otherwise be acceptable beers. Anyway after C'est What, we hit the House on Parliament pub in Cabbage Town. It's a great neighborhood place, quaint and very friendly. But they had no real beer, so somewhat depressingly, I switched to Guinness.

A return to Caffe Volo tonight allowed me to acquaint myself with Black Oak Hop Bomb. As you would expect it was very hoppy and quite dry, a little cloudy, which I don't mind, being as I am more interested in substance than looks. I like my beer like I like my women.... err tasty, err 6 per night.... err, strong, dry and ever so slightly sweet. Strike that simile! I like my beer like I like my beer. Anyway, the food there is very pleasant too and it was served up by the deliciously confident and competent Allison who had a refreshingly intimate knowledge of the menu. My visit tonight, very much confirmed my previous experience of the place, the only downer being that you can't rent a room there.

On a different note, out roaming the streets of Toronto today, I saw a street in the financial district turned into New York immediately post the collapse of the World Trade Centre. Dust, litter, NY taxis, cop cars, fire crews, the lot. There was a rather unconvincing jet engine lying around wisely just off set. Toronto is often used as an NYC body double, as it rents out cheaper.

Expect to see these guys on a TV near you sometime soon

2005-10-03T03:37:00.000+01:00

Toronto, not crap for beer!
My non-British friends and associates do not understand my deep-seated and heartfelt love for real ale. I have found the last 3&1/2 years to be a barren and soulless experience beer-wise. Although I have flirted with lager it has never been truly satisfying. An emotional dessert, I find myself waking in the middle of the night from fevered dreams of London Pride, Youngs Special, Spitfire and Hopback Summer Lightning. I often mull wistfully at the thought of hoppy, living bitters while supping distastefully at a bottle of lager, for it is not in need of the reverence of glass, the yellow, sterilised, pastuerised, filtered carbonated swill masquerading as beer, purveyed by charlatans in the bars of Spain, Gibraltar, France, Canada and Costa Rica. But these are emotionless dalliances with blondes of little worth. The brunette nitrokeg shams that are the Caffrey's and the John Smith's may look good in a glass, but they are cheap harlots dressed as ladies. I am looking for love, not a succession of one night stands.

So, romantic beer prose aside, I was in a pub the other night and drinking a fizzy, cold IPA and lamenting that there was no flat, warm beer about and the barman said they sold a drop of cask ale in the place next door. I drank my pint on the outside on the terrace, quickly and with great expectations of drinks to come. I briefly made the acquaintance of a very nice couple who are also not a little partial to a real beer or two. I finished the IPA, the attentive barman asked if I'd like another, I replied in the negative and beat a hasty path to the place next door, Caffe Volo, which strangely enough was an Italian restaurant. I asked the stunningly beautiful blonde siren working behind the bar if this tale of ale was in fact true. She replied positively and asked if I wanted a thimble full as a taster. She brought the shot glass of Granite IPA to me, I put the glass to my lips and what must have been two nanoseconds later a rapturous obsession overtook me and I was demanding a full pint. Absolutely magnificent a dry hoppy beer, raised from the keg by hand pump and served just marginally below room temperature. Perfection in a glass!

About half a pint later, or four seconds as time is measured by Canadians, the nice couple from the previous bar came in and joined me. A friendlier, more intellectual, gregarious couple you could never wish to meet. Deidre is an American Civil Engineer and her husband Bryan, a Scottish Biochemist. They were excellent company and we passed the night together chatting on the patio of the bar consuming some of the nicest ale I have had in many a year.

2005-09-29T04:15:00.000+01:00

Airport Security
I am writing this in the smoking bar at the airport. It's not just my cigarette that is fuming. Airport security really pisses me off. On getting to the check-in queue at San Joseâ a security guard asked to look at my passport and leaving tax papers. On walking a further two yards a second security guard asks to see the same. He examines my passport, first by hand, then with a jewellerâs loupe, then leafs through every page with an ultraviolet torch. Unsatisfied he rechecks every page, fingering the edges of the paper, presumably to check for pistols and WMDs embedded within the paper. The spine of the passport is subjected to internal examination, still unhappy, he asks if I have any other ID. I ask he wants to see a note from my mum, saying itâs OK for me to get on the aeroplane, but he is not amused. Finally he pisses off with my passport, my Spanish residencia card and my UK driving license to photocopy them. I obviously look like an Al Qaeda activist in disguise, you know, white skin, no turban, no AK47, an Anglo-Saxon name. Eventually El Dicko gives up trying to find something wrong and hands me back my papers.

I walk another two yards; a young and rather pretty security guard asks for my passport, and opens my suitcase either to search for contraband and smuggled Latinas or to fondle my underpants. She doesnât spend nearly enough time checking my briefs, nor does she mention how great theyâd look on her bedroom floor, so I guess she must be abnormal in some respects.
I walk another two yards and have finally made it to the check-in. I of course have to proffer my passport again. I am not in a jolly mood by this point and am not in the slightest mollified by the check-in girlâs explanation that they are only doing their job.

After obtaining my ticket I walk to the desk of the âMigration Policeâ, so that they can check my passport. Another 3 yards and we are at the only bit that makes any sense, the checking of the hand luggage and finally I am through. I shelve my plans for giving up cigarettes and head straight for the smoking lounge.

I hope not to receive a rectal examination on boarding the plane.

2005-09-28T08:02:00.000+01:00

What's Happenin'
If you are not bored by this already or writing a letter to FHM recommending me to james.carter@emap.com for a position as a staff writer you will be by the time I am finished with the Toronto and living in Costa Rica full time!

I have been back in San Jose for a little over a week now, although it seems like mere seconds have passed, unfortunately I'm back on a plane to Canada tomorrow. Not that I have anything against Canadians, I'm just wholly unsure of this winter thing of theirs. The moment the Boston Tea Party was over, England should have given everything north of The Great Lakes to the people that would later name themselves Americans and kept the juicy bits from New England down to the Mexican border for the mother country.

Anyway, I'm back in CR and have stayed half my time at the Hotel Jade and the other half in the company apartments. The company has offices in the top floors of a shopping mall. So lunch is often spent in a stroll through the laberynthine mall walkways trying not to return the glances of the beautiful latinas, their bums seem to follow my eyes all over the place! The company apartments are quite nice, tastefully appointed, with showers big enough for a safari adventure. The maids come and clean the apartments every day and routinely remove any item of clothing on the floor for washing and pressing, returning it the next day. This is all fine, but recently I have noticed other people's pants appearing in my closet. That's underpants or briefs for my American readership! I could deal with this if they were little lacey numbers that had recently encompassed the firm tight buns and moist wonderousness of a hot latina babe. Even better still if the maid had forgot to wash them, but oh no, these are mens pants. Which is always horrific and a shock unless they are your own. Or you are gay, which I am not, but I do have very normal lesbian tendencies. I only ever sleep with women. More distressing still is the fact that my pants must end up travelling through another company apartment closet, discovered by the occupant and returned to the maid or like as not thrown from the 8th floor apartment windows.

I had a marvellous meal the other day with some new friends, quite possibly the best I've had in years.
There was a great amuse bouche of smoked salmon pate' made with soured cream, horseradish and cayenne pepper served on little discs of lightly toasted french bread with olive oil.
The starter was a salad of endives, walnuts (pecans), grapes, celery and feta cheese in a balsamic dressing which arrived with a garlic bread ciabatta topped with pesto and parmesan.
The main course was a Thai Green Prawns with boiled rice and an alternative main, which was king prawns in a pico de gallo on tortilla chips.
The desert was natural greek yoghurt, with pecans, almonds and honey alongside a little sliver of dried orange.

I will of course take this opportunity to thank Emma for assisting me with the cooking and Nicky for the loan of her kitchen and gorgeous little bewooded cottage. The six present had a wonderful time and as ever I massively over did it on the portions. Apparently Nicky finished the pate' and curry today. I think she wants me over to cook again when her freezer is empty and she can load it up with gormet ready meals prepared by yours truly.