FFS
1:03 am Saturday, 3 May, 2008
Well done London! Good voting one and all!
Archive for the 'London' Category
Let’s see how far we can amble
11:34 pm Sunday, 10 February, 2008
Note: From Wednesday February 6th.
I’m sat in the departure lounge in Heathrow waiting for my flight to Dublin to board. I have at least another 30 minutes to wait. I’m not really sure why I ended up at the airport so early but it had to be done, or at least I thought it did.
For the first time BMI are checking bag weights. Now in fairness to them I was 25% over but they just pointed out that now I can carry two pieces of hand luggage and there is no weight limit on them so why don’t I just do some repacking. So I did and it all worked out fine though I could do without having to carry so much shit. That’s going to come back to haunt me but more on that later.
So Dublin. I’ve been staying at my sisters a bit recently. It’s not been ideal (air mattress in a one bedroom studio) but it’s worked out much better than I expected it to. This last weekend though I was down in County Kerry for some music, drinking and of course some photos. It didn’t help that it lashed rain for most of the weekend but it wasn’t too bad and I ended up with a few shots I liked.
Now I’m not sure what I really wrote about Egypt, I’m not even sure I wrote anything. So lets go for a very quick recap on that. There isn’t really very much that I can add to the hundreds of thousands of people who have written or commented about seeing the temples at Karnak, Luxor, Philae, the jaw-dropping Abu Sembel or walking in the tombs in the Valley of the Kings or seeing the collection in the Cairo museum from Tutankhamun’s tomb. If you really want to know anything about these all I can actually tell you is that they are beyond amazing, the colours deserve to be seen and they look a thousand times better than any photo or video you have ever seen (yes even mine!).
Two things which I will single out, one because I don’t care how many people have talked about it, I did it and it was instantly one of the highlights of my life to date and I suspect will be one for the rest of my life too. I am, of course, talking about going into one of the Pyramids of Giza. Now as it happens, I have typed something out about this so I’m just going to paste that in here.
***
There is nothing inside but a simple stone sarcophagus and blank walls. There is no oxygen, it’s stupidly hot and the only way for someone of my size to get in and back out is to get down on hand and knee and crawl, sometimes in close to pitch black. It’s sore, I left several pieces of skin along the corridor (though thankfully I did not crack my head at any stage). The walls are blank save for a simple name and date from the early 1800’s in French. It is in fact nothing compared to the sights of the temples of Luxor or Kom-Ombo or Abu Simbel, just blank walls. It doesn’t matter, nothing at all matters but for the fact that you are standing inside one of the Pyramids of Giza. Nothing else matters. It’s beyond words how amazing an experience it is, how profound the feeling is as you scramble through the dark in a monument built (we don’t even know how it was built) over 4000 years ago. I was crawling from the very first metre of the passage way but way more importantly I was smiling (if not grinning like a loon) from the same point. Just amazing.
***
Now the second was a little more mundane but it was absolutely nothing like what I had expected and is now something I’m very keen to do again. I went on a hot air balloon ride over Luxor and the Nile (not the valleys of the Kings or Queens unfortunately) but still it was awesome. I didn’t take that many photos because I was simply there enjoying the ride. Great fun and I’m totally going to do one again the next time I get a chance.
Alright so that’s pretty much that on Egypt, you can take a look through the photos for more of the story.
So Dublin. Few reasons for heading there. The main one being the lack of a flat in London. I’m not doing anything until the second week of March and I’m not crashing around at people’s places for that long when I can just stay in my old room at my parents in a real bed. So that’s the big one. That really leads up to the second one which is that I’m going travelling in March for a while and I don’t really need to be paying rent into a flat and so my stuff is in storage.
While I was in Egypt I had some quiet time for thinking and I believe the correct term is self-reflection. I came to a few conclusions and I decided that while I didn’t know what I was going to do next but I was certain it wasn’t going to be a job (sorry mom, dad).
Most of the thoughts and conclusions and indeed realisations were about me and I’m going to take some time and work with them. I decided that I have a once in a lifetime chance to get out into the world and take a good look. I’m not going to have the money or the time off again so I need to do it now.
So in a fit of something that I’m not really sure is like me, or at least wasn’t like me but is now, I am going off around the world. I leave from London on March 10th and I’ll be back at some stage early next year. It’s all booked and paid for (my bank account isn’t looking as good as it was a couple of days ago!) and will take me through around 20 countries spread over 5 continents. I’ll put some more details up on that over the coming weeks and will probably switch over to some sort of travel blog assuming that I have time (read am bothered) to set something up and it’s of course based on the assumption that I’ll get online a bit while I’m away. One thing I have to be careful about is that some countries seem to have a nasty habit of canceling place tickets if they find out you have been to come places that they don’t like.
Anyway I’m pretty conflicted over the trip. I am extremely nervous about what it will all involve and what it all could bring (and how much it’ll cost when it’s done!!) and I’m so excited about heading out to see what there is to see and experience a little, or a lot more. As one close friend said to me when I told him the news “Man, that’ll change you!”.
Now I guess I should back up a little and spill some other news. Not the ideal way but I guess it’s now slowly doing the rounds but I’m back to the world of singledom. The travel plans above kinda become plans after that athough the travel was certainly a factor. Before anyone rushes to jump on that one, it wasn’t the only one and wasn’t really the important one. It brought some conversations forward and well those conversations went different ways. So that’s that and indeed probably more than I had intended to say. Oh well.
So yes around the world. Hurrah! I have two things to work through now (aside from mountains of preparation of course). The first being I need a laptop for travel. I think that my Macbook is too heavy. I am loving the idea of a Macbook Air but I need to get one into my hands for a good look first and I need to have a think about the cost. Several sorts of handhelds (Sony have a couple of nice Vaio’s) look like they might do the job for half the price. The next and this is the one that I’m more worried about is camera kit. I currently have 3 lenses that I would use for this covering 10-200mm between them for a total cost of about $2000. Now to get a single lens of better quality which would replace all three of them and do me 28-200 would cost me about $3000….hmmm
And that’s where they called my flight and I stopped typing.
I’m your dream, mind astray
3:30 pm Tuesday, 11 September, 2007
Alright, do I want to pay over £50 for a single theatre ticket to see Patrick Stewart play Macbeth? I’m fairly sure the answer is yes…. Tickets have only just gone on sale and there are some good tickets left, I’m looking at one in the fourth row at the moment (which would be nice).
I’m thinking about just putting one on the credit card now and going for my birthday in a few weeks. I haven’t been to the theatre in a long long time and I’ve seen some really good stuff over the years. In fact I saw him in A Life In The Theatre some years ago and he was excellent, as was the play.
Hmm.
As an aside, I really need to gather all my old blog entries into a one searchable (and perhaps postable) format.
12:41 am Tuesday, 4 September, 2007
“But the problem for all of us remains that Metronet and its administrator are the employer and the qualified assurances they have given cover only the period of administration.”
RMT general secretary Bob Crow
FOR FUCK SAKE. He really expects that anyone will be able to give more assurances than that for a company in administration. I say again, FOR FUCK SAKE!
Now that you’re awake everything seems different
12:39 pm Friday, 10 August, 2007
This morning I got to read a newspaper, The Guardian, from start to finish. This is quite unusual for me. My usual commute isn’t quite long enough and I prefer to take a book. I’m going out tonight so I didn’t want to be carrying my book around all day and well I didn’t have my usual commute. The Jubilee line went from severe delays to suspended in the 10 minutes I stood on the platform waiting for a train.
So I ended up on a bus and deciding there was no way I was going to make it through fortyfive minutes to an hour on the bus with nothing to read, I bought a paper. It was nice to just sit down and take a read. I read a lot of news, general stuff on the BBC and lots of tech/web specific stuff on various other places. So it’s rare to actually get any news from a paper, I just get more detail on things I already knew about, which is fine.
So that was the start to my day.
It will get much better though. I’m very much looking forward to this evening. I’m still having a tough time getting worked up about seeing Prince. I understand it’s a great show, there are some rave reviews floating around and anyone I know who has seen it so far loved it but I’m still really just going cause everyone else was going and because he’s one of the people that should be seen for the sake of seeing. But ya know, other considerations too :)
Anyway, it’s Friday, coming up on lunchtime and no-one is really around to have lunch with which is boring. I have one meeting this afternoon, I’m waiting on some info so I can plough ahead with some work but everyone seems to be on a different page which does not help. Although sometimes that does feel like BAU.
Oh the filters, well claims of error still abound and they are now gone but we shall see. There was some jest in the pub last night wondering if it was a test to see if we could just get some people to quit. So glad I didn’t stay in the pub last night. There are some messy people this morning. 2 drinks to say goodbye and then a quick goodbye from myself and home. Aside from having bags of shopping to carry home, I had no food in the house due to a fridge accident and needed to stock the new fridge with essentials (milk, eggs, sausages, bacon, several kinds of cheese).
My sister flies back to Dublin today after finishing in Japan. I suppose I should get back over for a weekend at some stage while she’s around but so much going on at the moment. I have no idea, nor does she, how long she’ll be there for. So I guess I have a little time now.
4:43 pm Thursday, 12 July, 2007
I’m back in London almost three months now. I did my time in the US and I have been set free.
But the paperwork never ends. I’m in the midst of trying to fill in tax forms for both the US and the UK and some of it just doesn’t make sense. I suspect I’m going to have to spend some time, quite an amount of time, on the phone with my accountants next week.
Tax equalisation is a good thing, I think… but fuck if it doesn’t get complicated especially when you dive into state taxes. I have the added complications of trying to figure out how the hell I account for all of the medical bills and the associated tax. It makes my head hurt. I believe I can claim several thousand dollars back (that’s about two pounds at the moment) and so I really need to take my time and understand what I’m filling in.
Paperwork of course never being my strong point…
The King stay the King
3:46 pm Sunday, 8 July, 2007
I’m reading a book called The Raw Shark Texts at the moment. I started it yesterday evening after I sped through Harlan Coben’s latest; The Woods. It was okay, another quick and easy read which rewards you exactly as much as you would expect for the work put into reading it. Anyway I’m only a few pages into The Raw Shark Texts and it’s a bit odd and I’m not quite grabbed yet but I hope to be soon. I read a few pages this morning and I came to a couple of lines which go;
Every single cell in the human body replaces itself over a period of seven years. That means there’s not even the smallest part of you now that was part of you seven years ago.
I kinda stopped reading after that. It had me thinking, not in any really serious way but it resonated a little bit. I mean it’s one of those pieces of science/biology that you come across every now and again. I don’t know if it’s actually true or not but it’s sticking with me a bit at the moment. I guess that come October I’ll be reaching Dave 5.0.
Anyway on the subject of books, I finished We Need To Talk About Kevin. The last couple of chapters pushed a book that I was enjoying into the ranks of my favourite books. I didn’t see the ending coming, I probably should have but I didn’t and even as I read it, I’m not quite sure I accepted it. Horrible ending in a way but at the same time absolutely beautiful. I don’t know how it will re-read, I suspect it could change the book in quite a serious way but I’m sure in a few years it’ll come around to my pile again and I’ll find out.
Yesterday I went out with Rich and Doug to the Tour De France Prologue. It was a gorgeous day, for the first time in weeks the sun came out and shone. I think I’m sunburnt from it! London was packed of course. We were well positioned for the Caravan beforehand but that was pure and gross commercialism. Not very impressed with that. We made the mistake, in as much as it can be, of going to the pub for lunch and when the actual time trial started didn’t have such an easy job of finding a spot to see nevermind to be able to take photos. Got a few decent shots, but of course after a while it just blurs together and while some are up, with a few more to follow, I’m not sure that tens of different cyclists coming around the same corner is very interesting. We headed off around 5ish and found a nice pub to have a much needed sit down and a couple of pints in and then it was an early night.
My flatmate, Alex is filming her latest music video in the flat at the moment. This isn’t so bad but it does mean the front rooms are all taken up. So I’m sat on my bed with my Macbook. I have broken after so many mentions recently and I am about halfway through the first season of The Wire…again. That’s the second time in a year and possibly my fifth time going all the way through it and it’s still miles above anything else ever produced.
Tomorrow, for the first time in about six weeks I will have a proper iPod. I decided that when I was coming back from the US that it did not matter how much cheaper they were, I had no need for one and would not spend the cash. Of course less than two weeks later I broke mine. I have been surviving on my Shuffle and 2Gb in my phone but it’s not been very good. Tomorrow though, when a couple of the lads get back from the US, I’ll have a nice new 80Gb version to fill up. I’m looking forward to it. It’ll be nice to have a selection back with me again. It’ll certainly make work more bearable. I have had more than once moment where I just needed to have Master Of Puppets going loud. Long time readers will recall this is my “go away and leave me alone I’m working” music.
And now another little gem from the Wisdom Of Dave file. Years and years ago, I was given some advice on girls in a random Saturday evening conversation from a girl that, well lets just say we often didn’t see eye to eye. Which in hindsight is somewhat odd as we became good friends and even hooked up once or twice in more recent times but anyway she said, and I have no idea if it’s true that shoes were important and it was something that girls often looked out. I don’t know why this came into my mind during the week, I don’t think it’s ever ever crossed my mind in the ten years or so since she said it but it did this week. And so one day I wore a new pair of shoes…which as it turns out weren’t broken in at all and I was getting close to limping by the end of the day. Still though, taking us full circle; “All in the game yo, all in the game”