Protest

Being in close proximity to Whitehall, work here is often interrupted by the sound of a protest. Standard procedure in these circumstances is to crowd around the window trying to sound intellectual. Rather tricky for me, as you might expect, but I muddle on.

This morning there was quite a big one. My project manager saw a banner saying "PEACE FOR DR CONGO" and asked me "Who's Doctor Congo?".

[awkward pause]

Well, I mean, how are you supposed to answer a question like that?

I may have to stage a mutiny.

Office Gossip

Firstly: No more trafalgar square. We're bailing out of Regus and into our own home. So farewell Nelson, hello Mayfair. And we all know what happens to companies with offices in Mayfair, don't we? The CEOs end up decamping to the Groucho to dream about personalised number plates and the scruffy unwashed office monkeys spend 2 years scratching their nuts in the provinces to emerge as members of the emergency services.

In other news I joked about being told to go to Murmansk on these very pages last week. This week it emerges that we actually *do* have a project coming up in Russia - just as yours truly is about to come off the project I'm currently on. However, I reckon I'll just be sent somewhere pedestrian instead. Edinburgh probably. I never get the exciting trips.

Have moved off code-busting now and am on to something else. Lunch.

Code Cracking

I have been tasked with working out the utilisation of a department of about 500 people. Utilisation is a semi-polite way of saying "you lot don't do much work, do you?". To this end, I have been given a year's worth of schedules.

Imagine a spreadsheet. Each row is a person or a meeting room. Each column represents half a day. Each sheet represents a three month period. The colour and sometimes the value of a cell represents its status during that 3.5 hour period. All well and good so far? Excellent.

The problem is, that for a 26-week period we're talking 15 time intervals (they don't work Saturday afternoon or Sunday) for 500 people and about 150 meeting rooms. This is 9750 separate pieces of utilisation information. But that's not the whole picture. You see, control of these spreadsheets has been split (for reasons based on total insanity) amongst 6 unco-ordinated individuals nationwide. For this reason we not only have to deal with the information I'm after being split up across 24 worksheets in 6 workbooks, but also 6 different sets of hieroglyphics that indicate utilisation. Hence the colour red may denote bank holidays for glasgow and a team meeting for Brentwood. It is my job to unpick this merry little mess - not helped by being assigned distractions like maths problems and, most bizarrely, co-ordinating a laptop's journey with DHL and a colleagues travels by Virgin Trains so that the two coincided.

I spend yesterday writing a fiendishly clever algorithm to consolidate the schedule information and today I'll most be doing the analysis on in and one or two other things.

Last night I met up with Hoyan and we went to dinner in Islington. My two central purposes in life are currently to get people to try eating bloodier meat and to tell them how excellent Dr Who is. So she was persuaded to go for medium rare rather than medium and we discussed David Tennant / Russell T Davies in terms of Cassanova. Good enough for me. Hoyan has recently returned from her semi-native Hong Kong where she has re-fallen in love with a fireman named Ben. I saw lots of pictures of Thailand as well but am unconvinced that I wish to visit. If all goes to plan then this time next year she'll be moving back there to live happily ever after or something which is good news all round. I may visit for Chinese New Year in 2007.

Long term planning? Not a bit of it.

Still no word from home as to the arrival or otherwise of my earth shattering stereo.

Back to the codeface.

BOOM pow BANG ratatATATAT BOOOOOM

i live - as the crow flies - five miles from Portsmouth.

this is bad news for when the ice caps melt but also means that the sounds from today's fleet review - especially the cannon - travel over the hills and into my aural canal, where they start to annoy me.

don't get me wrong - there is every need to commemorate the 200th anniversary of giving Johnny Foreigner a good whigging. 23 ships they lost, but (with the notable exception of Nelson) our casualty figures were eight rats, a week's supply of parrot-crackers and the whore-dingy from HMS Neural Syphilis.

however, we aren't commemorating it quite as we should. the Royal Navy farmed the organisation of the event out to contractors, who then focus-grouped everything to shit, hence the Red vs. Blue furore - they are re-enacting the battle, see, but instead of Us vs. Them (or, as it should have been, Plucky Brits vs. Cheese Eating Surrender Monkeys & their Swarthy Bear-Dancing Henchmen) they've opted for Red vs. Blue.

so we don't offend any of our "allies".


what an economy-sized bag of fucksticks.

anyway, at the risk of coming over Jeremy Clarkson (fnar fnar), i think this is quite shite. it was 200 years ago, (and besides, they fucking started it. it's not like we're hamstrung by Imperial Guilt this time round). why is Britain the only country that does this to herself? i don't think America will be re-naming the war of independence the Unnecessarily Violent Disagreement of Sovereign Rights With Heroes On Both Sides. i don't think that Russia will start apologising to Germany for Stalingrad. i can see it now:


German Ambassador: "Hello, Mr. President. You summoned me?"

V. Putin: "Da. It's about the Siege of Stalingrad"

Ambassador: "Ah. Er...Well, it was all a very long time ago..."

Putin: "Yes. We'd like to say sorry"

Ambassador: "?!"

Putin: "The behaviour of the Russian people at the time was totally unacceptable. I don't know what we must have been thinking"

Ambassador: "Are we talking about the same siege here? 1941? Panzers carving great chunks out of your country? Twenty million Russians killed by bombs, guns & famine as Hitler doodles big red arrows all over the atlas?"

Putin: "Yup. That's the one. Can we give you lots of money in reparations for all those poor, cold Stormtroopers we murdered and maimed? It's just that it's about time we made amends. We should have really tried for some sort of peaceful solution. Reasoned discourse. Getting round a table and working it all out. I just feel we could have put more effort into finding a peaceful compromise. When two elephants fight, it's only the grass that gets hurt, that sort of thing".

Ambassador: "But the Wehrmacht was trying to gut your entire country! Russia had already been divided up into enormous chunks of land to be given as presents to favoured Nazis after we'd won!"

Putin: "Well, look - an eye for an eye will make the whole world blind, that's they way I see it. Better a nation of slaves than a nation of murderers. I'm sure those invading soldiers had wives and children too. Like I said, we're awfully, terribly, enormously sorry. Takes two to tango, after all!"


Bollocks. What bollocks. I really don't think, had France won the battle of Trafalgar, they would be calling the fleets Red and Blue. Bollocksssssssssssssssss. The entire population of Britain would be marched at garlic-point to London, down Rue Charing Crux to Le Place du Trafalgar to kiss the base of Villeneurve's Column...

anyway. i digress.

i am not normally this europhobic. i think that europe is by far and away the superior continent on this planet, and think the variety of its peoples and cultures to be its strength and its pride. it's just that i am just getting slightly irked by the non-stop and oh-so-fucking-noisy helicopter-flights over my head; we are in a direct line between the Portsmouth naval bases and Middle Wallop airfield. so i get a lot of whirly-boppers thrumming through my personal airspace. and because this isn't exactly a highly populated area, and because it has lovely & predictably undulating hills (combined with a lack of high-voltage power-lines), that means that the pilots go all Top Gun and fly rather lower than normal. so the urge is upon me to go outside and start lobbing bricks at rotor-blades.

...i mean, it worked on that pheasant..

anyway! they are rounding today off with a firework display that has been touted as the most opulent & impressive ever seen in the UK. so i may just get in the car and toodle off to watch that. and perhaps take a quick paddle out to the French aircraft-carrier Foch and let it feel the wrath of my cork-screw...


have at thee, you Rainbow-Warrior sinking sausage-suckers!

U2

Tickets left for a show in Vegas in November.

Dangerously tempted.

Anatomy of a Purchase

Woke up this morning, showered and got dressed. Was waiting around for the taxi and bought a stereo. How did this happen? Well, let's consider:

About a month ago, I was out for a walk down one of the lanes around the house just getting some air and was considering buying a house. Perhaps the genesis of *that* idea lay in seeing a "For Sale" board or something. I honestly can't remember. This set me off thinking "Moving house is an expensive business, but at least I have most of the things I need".

This much is true. The spare room is currently floor to ceiling with my extraneous crap. I have a whole kitchen packed up in there. One of the hazards of renting your accommodation is that you eventually wake up and realise you don't own anything. Fortunately the last place I lived in was pretty much unfurnished. I reckon when I move out I'll need some dining room chairs, a bed, a sofa, a wardrobe and that's it.

My mind was wandering. What else would I need? Well, my flatmate owned the iron, the ironing board and the microwave. So I'd need some of that action. "What about a DVD player?" asked my subconscious. Now, strictly speaking I don't need a DVD player. I have an Xbox and that'll play DVDs nicely, thank you very much. And you could argue that I don't need a stereo. Between my computer, my ipod, a kick-ass pair of headphones, a large guitar amplifier and the not-insubstantial speakers on the TV I'm sure we could do pretty nicely if pressed.

However, the thought continued to nag. Could I really live without a sub woofer? Would I really enjoy films with being able to hear the occasional sound behind me?

Of course, the answer to both these questions is 'Yes'. However, I have a number of frailties. One is for technology. Another is for things that make noise. Another is for really good design. So, telling myself it was only speculative I started researching on the web. Then I bought a couple of magazines and read them cover to cover. Then I persuaded Benny to join me on a jaunt into a nearby town to have a look - speculatively - at some stereos. We got there too late and the shops had shut, but a decision was already forming in my mind.

The magazine reviewed a Denon all in one system. I worked a little with Denon when I was doing backstage stuff in theatre. Their kit is good. I told myself I needed to hear it and this last weekend Benny and I went into Southampton and had a look around a few shops. We couldn't find it anywhere, but I did buy a nice pair of trainers. Still, the stereo nagged me when we got home.

As I was trying to get to sleep last night I realised that I didn't really need to hear it at all. Imagining what it would be like to find it in a shop, it surprised me to twig that it would have to be chronically awful in order to prevent me from buying it. The decision to purchase must have been made shortly after reading a review of it. I realised I was effectively unable to stop myself. So instead I decided to sleep on it.

This morning at 0625 or thereabouts I looked it up on froogle and found it for £250 less than the list price. 2 minutes later it was bought and should arrive during the week in order for me to enjoy it next weekend. I imagine a trip to town for some ancillary cables may be in order but the job's done. Since buying it, I've felt considerably relieved - rather like the relief I used to feel when smoking a cigarette after a relatively long period of enforced non-smoking (after flying or seeing a film for instance). So maybe I'm a secret shopaholic or something.

[Wom]

This train I'm on right now has plastic windows or something. Every time we go through a tunnel, the air pressure flexes the windows which distorts the reflection of the inside carriage that you can see in them. The effect is not dissimilar to the bit at the end of the matrix where the background fisheyes behind Neo as he rises from the dead and does nasty things to Agent Smith.

The first time I saw it (the bending windows, not the film) it felt like I was on drugs or something. Most disconcerting.

i'm going to be a dad!!

i am pregnant

in a purely technical sense. as in, i have been fertilized with the eggs of another creature.

a horsefly.

got bitten yesterday at cricket practice. although instead of normal insect spit being pushed into me it's looking rather more like it was, actually, a river of hot baby-gravy. my left calf has swollen to the size, texture and tactile-pressure of a rugby-ball, has risen a few degrees in temperature and is pustulent in the extreme. "weeping" is, i believe, the correct medical term. infected! so the inconsiderate bastard gave me an STD too.

men!

this would be a good time to digress into an idle philosophy i once had about the human race and the negative effects that medicine has on it. this started with a swift analysis regarding antibiotics - if you have an infection, i think your body should cope with it, as a learning-experience if nothing else, simply to get the antibodies for next time. this will remove the dependency on chemicals and increase the adaptability, longevity & quality of the individual body.

(however, this is a whole can of worms because it quickly shuffles into a poor-man's eugenics, as it is impossible to not apply the same attitude towards diabetes, asthma, hay-fever, broken-legs, appendicitis, cancer, hangovers, road-traffic accidents, wisdom-teeth, chlamydia* and any other incident that needs treating. remember, kids - what fails to kill you only maims & disables you horribly! thus).

anyway, so, personally, i'm just in it for the antibodies. and the child-$upport.


today, of course, marks the start of the weekend, which for me will be blissfully uneventful. i need this time off just to let my bonce tick-over, since the last five days have been - understatement of the year - a bit of a rollercoaster, and i have to put my hands up and admit that this blog constitutes some attempt to get it all straight in my head, if nothing else.

monday was a riot of maths revision and nerves, to prepare for tuesday, which in turn was just plain odd; assessment day for the hampshire ambulance service, see. so i turn up at 8:30 at their HQ in Winchester. this leads to some facts - for this student paramedic course, 1000 people asked for an application pack. roughly 450 returned them. of those, 2/3rds were binned, leaving 150 to come in over two days and be put through the mill - we'd been told to prepare for the following events:

• literacy & logic testing
• numeracy testing
• teamworking assessment
• manual handling assessment
• fitness test (bleep! bleep! BLEEP BLEEP BLEEP BLEEP BLEEP!)

so i turn up at 8:20 with a degree of precision that would put the Global Atomic Clock to shame, get ushered into an antechamber with ten or so others. and nooobody talks. nooooooooobody. smiles, and hellos, but lots of looking-at-feet etc. normally i feel like i've wasted an opportunity(?) if i do not fill such a gap, but i have deliberately put myself into the Grey Man mental-mode today, i.e., not acting like a spakker, not leaving myself open for the least, smallest, tiniest bit of embarrassment or negative connotationalalism. so i too shut up and say nothing, and attempt not to stare at the contents of the sports-bras that surround me. ahem.

i learn from inference that many of the people at this assessment day are internal applicants, aka, serving ambulance technicians. this un-nerves me slightly.

after some bending around with room-changes, etc., we kick off with literacy & logic, basically where you get one big multiple-choice answer sheet that's like a lottery-ticket on steroids & a large booklet full of the situations that Harry and Sarah find themselves in when they join a new company (the hardest part of this exam is trying to find fucking room for all this shit on your pissy-little folding-out-writing-table-chair-gibbons). previous to this test we learn that none of the 75 bods on the previous day manage to complete it because there are too many devious questions and not enough time. needless to say, i polish it off in its entirety in short order. ho ho ho - game on, Harvey. having carved my way through the preliminary challenges, like Bruce Lee dispatching nameless minions on his way to the Big Boss, i am presented with my nemesis:

MATHS

a little background - i have a C grade in GCSE mathematics. i dropped out of university because i could not handle the calculus or the statistics. I DESPISE MATHEMATICS. i have a lot of mental baggage when it comes to this sort of stuff. so i am not looking forwards to the numeracy business. again, big lottery-ticket to fill in, again question sheet. i still have my rough-paper. it has so many angry crossings-out, zeros, lines and scrawled numerals on it that looks like someone tried to doodle a pearl-necklace that's being attacked by an army of break-dancing guinea-worms, failed, was upset by his artistic efforts and then fed the result through a seismograph placed on Michelle McManus's staircase as she trots down it upon hearing the pizza-delivery transporter crunch up the drive.

or something.

anyway. no smugness after that one. but what's done is done. let the teamworking begin! divided into groups of five. watched over by two serving paramedics with clipboards and serious expressions. we're given A4 sheets of paper with the names of nine people and a background paragraph on each of them. and these nine people were out potholing but have become trapped in a deep pit. WHICH IS FILLING UP WITH WATER! IN WHAT ORDER DO YOU RESCUE THEM?! now, within approximately half a picosecond of getting my grubby mits on the sheet i twig that this isn't about the result, it's how we reach the result. this is not an intellectual leap since it is, obviously, a teamworking exercise. i instantly see the road to personal success in this endeavour, which is to facilitate the contributions of others. now, my group contains two males and three females. my fellow chap instantly jumps in and tries to organise everybody. TACTICAL ERROR, my similarly-be-genital'ed friend! lots of angry note-writing from the observers at this point. adopting the tones of a wise patrician, i simply bide my time, speak when i have something to add to the discussion, try to prevent my fellow - now visibly struggling - male from shoving things to a hasty conclusion and make perfectly sure that i poll ALL opinions, ESPECIALLY from the shyer girls. this is not rocket-science; i just make sure i am always the 2nd most-vocal participant, and that when i am vocal it's always just to put new ideas in, and to see what everyone else thinks, instead of uttering concrete proclamations. admittedly, this does verge on grandstanding, and adopting the chairmanic-highground does earn me a bitchy look from one of the girls, but, sorry love, fuck you up the arse with a metal brush.

as an irish flatmate of mine used to delight me by saying, either take a shit or get off the pot...

decisions are made by those that turn up ;)

tick.

thus. then we do manual handling. this is not a problem for me as i have been pumping lots of iron recently, and my upper-body strength is good. in pairs, we have to move a blonde plastic dummy up and down a flight of stairs whilst he - Keith - is strapped to a chair. Keith weights 13 stone + chair. easy. or it would be, had i not been teamed up with a partner so weak that pushing her own eyelids up must have been a severe strain. walking backwards down the stairs, me first, with Keith staring me out with his big baby-blues, edging down, backwards, she starts to lose it. thus i am presented with the prospect of her falling forwards, thus pushing me arse-over tit down a long flight of hard stairs, to be landed on by a plastic pal and then her own bingo-wing'ed self.

i nearly laugh as the thought strikes me that there are worse places to have an accident than a lavishly-equipped paramedic training school. it would be like being ship-wrecked on a desert island - with Ray Mears.

anyway, lots of re-assurance and concern and co-ordination from me = more approving ticks. job done. and then time to suck down some water - on this extremely hot day - in preparation for the bleep-test. a bleep test, for those of you who do not know, is a fitness test. you run to one cone 20 meters away. then you run back. you keep doing this until you cannot do it anymore. the barb is that you do this to a soundtrack of bleeping, played through a portable stereo. you have to be at the other cone before the next bleep. and, of course, the time between bleeps decreases, meaning that you have to accelerate all the time. now, although i do a lot of middle-distance running, and a lot of cycling, i hardly ever sprint. get me into a good rhythm and i can plod along for miles, but my thighs are too powerful and heavy for this sort of nimblism. i still pass it easily, of course - ha - but am quite saddened by the expressions of the less-fit girls who do not, and fail the whole course instantly. like me and maths, these are obviously people who hate something - exercise - and have been dogged by their lack of aptitude in this area for their whole lives, and to have their dream snatched away by their oldest béte noir is palpably devastating. i truly felt for them.

and that was the end of the day. wrapped up at about 1pm, goodbye and well-done-for-getting-this-far talk, chow. see ya. back to the car park. i decide - since i am now in sports kit - to run to it. also, i am now buzzing with excess energy, both mentally and physically, and i know that if i do not burn something off now i shall drive like a twat on the way home and bury myself in the side of a tree/a bus-shelter full of orphans/the car of one of today's assessors. so off i go running, helped inordinately by the music piped in through my only birthday present so far, an iPod Shuffle - thank you, brother, very much (having my 25th birthday on today of all days is a head-fuck of the most inordinate magnitude. i shall elaborate on this when i am capable of such thoughts) - and so i set off at speed. it is broilingly hot. i get into a good, fast stride and carve my way through winchester and blow through the milling crowds in the pedestrianised high-street like a cruise-missile through a flock of geese. normally, of course, i would not run through such densities of people because that would be the behaviour of an arsehole. however, sometimes, like a certain mr. gump, i just run and keep going. and i do keep going, i divert away from the car park and ascend St. Gile's Hill, which looms over & inspects central Winchester like an officious call-center supervisor. i get to the top. i bask in the pure sun. i look around me at the haze, and the quasi-florescent green of the world. i feel myself take in, more feeling than looking, my surroundings of hallowed and holy stones, and of motorways and people flowing, and of this all, mid-day on the highest point of high summer, when nature is at its most alive. and i sing along to the turin brakes because no-one else is within half a mile of me (yet double that to a mile and there are a couple of hundred thousand). i feel like the lord of all creation. and then i piss in a bush and go home.

so that was tuesday.

time for a quick run. i don't need to go, i'm just curious to see how much jizm will come out of my leg.

one hour later, the answer is = rather a lot...

anyway. pub lunch. help put the beer festival away. back home. sleep. wake. prep for Chris and Sergeant Mark to come down on their way to Glastonbury - this would be a perfect excuse to get stinko-blotto but, alas, on our way out of the assessment day they said a., we'll phone you tonight, to say whether you've passed/failed and b., if you HAVE passed today then we'll invite you in for an interview. tomorrow.

so no drinkies for me. as the barber said to me when i called in on him on the way back from the pub, in his & his customers' experience (as info-node for the entire population of the South of the UK he is a physical incarnation & repository of fact comparable in volume & amount to the Bodleian library, the British Library & Museum, Lt. Commander Data and Mr. Toad combined) they apparently phone all the negatives first and then phone the positives, upshot being - the longer i was waiting the better.

"like an author waiting for the phone to ring" springs to mind.

anyway. got the thumbs-up. more relief than satisfaction. barbequed (gingerly, camply keeping my eyes clear of bloodshot-inducing smoke) and worried.

Woke, had a waterfight; the gurglingly-easy childishness of the behaviour after such an uncontrollable & unpredictable few days was like hitting EJECT out of a burning fighter-bomber. and then straight back into shoe-shining, suit-checking, interview-practicing concentration. at this point i need to say a big thanks to two people - Ewan, who was an enormous help when i was putting my application form together, getting me over a nasty patch of writer's block at 2am, and to Tom, who helped me enormously by sitting down with me Wednesday lunchtime and hammering through interview questions, technique, practice answers and such, putting his management-consultancy skills to help someone gain employment, instead of his normal talent of sawing entire divisions off of feckless corporations - he is constantly watched by two private eyes on the Job Centre payrole to see where they'll be needing to set-up shop next. so for him to help you get a job is like Stalin coming up to you in the street and wondering if you need help carrying your shopping.

And so we begin. interview kicks off at 4pm. I get there at 3:40 thanks to a canny taxi-driver. I sit. I wait. I sit. I wait. I sit. I smile pleasantly yet confidently at strangers as they round corners in corridors because they might just be a member of the interview panel come to get me. In the end I have to give up smiling because my facial muscles start to wibble with the stress of it all and I want a little energy left in them for the interview, lest the panel think they're talking to a manically-depressed & recently-botox'ed Boris Karloff, or, even worse, my cheeks go into spasm and they think i've undergone electro-shock I JUST GET THESE HEADACHES!!!!!! etc.

i wait.

my mind begins to play tricks on me. it's a swelteringly hot day and i am in a black (inordinately tastefully) pinstriped suit - there is a window to my right but it is closed. are they testing me??? should i open the window...? move my chair further into the breeze? tell meee!

"another lamb to the slaughter, eh?" grins a passer-by.

"baaaaaaaaaaaaa!" say i. in my mind, at least. my only actual response to him was a quick dose of the old electro-shock.

pure horror-show, brother.

i get fetched, i get sat-down. i get introduced.

there is tim, to my left. he is a green-clad paramedic division-leader. he is short and stocky and quite obviously not to be fucked with or bullshitted to. he is exactly the sort of fellow male i have always had difficulties with, in terms of talking to - so totally solid and dependable, so utterly capable and rock-steady that they must view me with the most profound and utterly demonstrable belief that i am a little tit. oh well.

there is maria, straight in front of me. she is the course leader at the University of Portsmouth.

there is kate, to my right, head of HR for the entirety of hampshire ambulance.

forty minutes later i say thanks for your time, and for this opportunity, and stroll out of there. what happened, i cannot say with any great deal of accuracy as fact and supposition and retrospect have muddied the neural waters and playback functions have suffered. these are the unshakable facts of the interview:

• they asked me five or six questions each, taking turns
• i asked them a couple
• they made notes

these are the pretty-certain facts of the interview:

• i didn't twitch or spasm all that badly
• the body-language i got back was good from maria, not bad from kate and on the shaky-side from tim
• i drank all the water they'd given me

these are the suppositions made at the time during the interview:

• i displayed an excellent understanding of the structure and development of this course and of the role of the hampshire ambulance service
• i also displayed a quite phenomenal & textbook comprehension of the fundamental need for a paramedic to be tactful & understanding & aware of every diversity-issue under the sun, from keeping certain personal information from family members "sorry mrs. smith, but your son has an autoerotically-asphyxiated alsatian wedged up him" to the religious sensitivities "oi, you superstitious knob-jockey, i'm going to give you this blood-transfusion whether you fucking like it or not. if you die you'll gay-up my quota for the month!" etc.
• i don't think i gave a good enough answer to the oh-so-very important "so, why exactly do you want to be a paramedic?" question. i gave a fucking good answer on my initial application form (see Appendix 1) and think i got confused over whether or not they would all have already seen this, and sub-whetherly if i should repeat all/the good bits of it or not.
• they're looking for people with first-aid experience. i am unpossessing of this.
• practicing questions with tom was a godsend. one question asked by me from maria was - word for fucking word - exactly what tom asked two hours previous and i had practiced for. "are there any aspects of the degree course that you think you will have problems with?" hit for fucking six. over the boundary and far a-fucking way. there has never been a perfecter answer in the history of job interviews. she grinned. game on.

these are the suppositions made after the interview:

• tim has a problem with this entire course, and is worried about paramedics straight out of university muscling street-savvy technicians around. this i infer from sub-suppositions (that he himself worked up from the bottom) and from a horrible, evil, vastly ghastly question he asked me. "if you arrived at the scene of an incident and saw a colleague applying first aid to a patient that you believed to be wrong, what would you do?" ...was the first part. i tore into this gladly as an opportunity to show off my knowledge of emergency care, babbling away happily about the chain of knowledge & experience ranging from trainee technicians to technicians to paramedics to BASICs doctors, the need for specialism at the scene, the need to take charge if you know that something could be done better, to not let personal concerns get in the way of patient care etc. etc. then he held up his hands - fairly impatiently, i think - and then bowled me this googly: "what if you were both paramedics of the same rank? what if you were recently university-qualified but your colleague had no university education, but more street-experience?" i mean, come on, fuck-a-doodle-do. i think i got out of that one by the skin of the skin of the skin of my teeth by swerving into a logical but improbable answer about training-schedules and the problems of applying state-of-the-art techniques & methods to a vast and complicated service, and me as a recent graduate would be possessing of more-bleeding-edge tricks. but to be fair, it wasn't the most logical or probable of scenarios, so, for wont of a more sophisticated QED, yar-boo sucks to you.

...ask a fucking stupid question and you'll get a fucking stupid answer...

my conclusions about the course in general:

• they interviewed "40 or 50" people for "20 or 25" places on this course. thus my odds are - numerically - at worst, 50/50. throw in a few no-shows or facial-tick-sufferers for interview and they get better. throw in the internal-applicant factor and they get worse. i would calculate how much by, but, you know, crap at maths...
• as to interview, excellent + ok + bad = mediocre overall. so it really is just totally inscrutable...unless tim vetoes me for being a little tit...



anyway. i go home. i get home. i go hay-baling. it's not so much baling (taking cut hay and making it into large, holdall-sized bales) as opposed to taking machine-made bales off the tractor-trailer and stacking them in the barn, like the biggest lego-set you've ever seen. this is why i'd be a terrible farmer - i would spend all my time making castles and space-stations out of hay and forget to feed the cows...but it's fucking hard. throwing bale after bale above my head to waiting farmers, flinging them around the place like a robot, standing - no shit - ten meters above the barn floor on top of a pile of wobbling straw, the cracks between which will swallow your leg up to bollock-level with even the slightest of misjudgements. i go into this wearing crappy old trainers, blue-jeans and gardening gloves. i come out of it wearing about eight kilos of hay and straw-pollen stuck to my sweating torso like some outlandish & primitive cavemanic papier-mâché. i should have waited until it dried and peeled it off to make some fibrous sculpture instead of being hosed-down in squeal-inducingly cold water...

anyway...my shoulders still hurt...

and then i cycled down the pub and got fucking wasted. which, in my defence, i think i rather needed. cycling home through narrow, brooding, perfectly-empty and darkdarkdark country lanes, moonlight guiding me in, i savoured the heat of the summer air. i realised that i'd done my level-best, and that only time will see where it all takes me. the clarity of brandy-calmed, monochrome country glory that expanded in every direction around me allowed me to think - at least for a few short, perfect moments - that wherever i go, it doesn't much matter.

sometimes you're ahead. sometimes you're behind. the race is long, but in the end, it's only with yourself.

calm.



at least, calm until i woke up the next morning and pulled several straw-stalks from betwixt my tear-ducts, like a magician yanking a never-ending chain of coloured handkerchiefs from the arsehole of a rabbit. that's enough to weird-out anyone's day.

...easy-come, easy go...






...any way the wind blows...











*a wonderful name for a girl, i always thought






---------------------------------------------------
Appendix 1
---------------------------------------------------
Finally, please tell us why you feel that you should be selected and what you can offer Hampshire Ambulance Service.

I feel that I should be selected because I have an enormous and unshakeable drive to succeed in this role. I don’t see being a paramedic as being a glamorous or a thrilling job – just a way that I can make a difference to people’s lives when they really, really need it. I’m going into this with no expectations of being a highly-praised hero – quite the reverse, actually, as all my expectations are “bad”; being shouted and screamed at, being bled or vomited on, never seeing people at their best. I know that the three year’s training will be monumentally and perpetually difficult. I know that shift-work plays havoc with your social-life. I know that there’s a very real risk of being extremely upset or even seriously traumatised by some of the things I’ll see if I am selected. I know the other risks (vehicle accidents, infectious disease, assault, etc.) are higher than for the average person. But I’m still passionately, ardently convinced that I want to do this. I think this course and subsequent employment with the Hampshire Ambulance Service to be a real opportunity to do amazing, fulfilling and beneficial things every single day and as such, if selected, I will make this role the highest priority in my life and put all my efforts into becoming the best and most able paramedic that I can possibly be.

All I can offer the Hampshire Ambulance Service is absolutely everything that I’ve got to give.

Insecticide

As has been covered, I presently live on a farm. This is largely a tranquil and hassle free existence. The only usual downside is that if you want anything: food, a haircut, a conversation for instance then you have to go for a short drive or a long walk.

However, farm = cows = cow shit.

Not usually a problem as they typically have the decency to defecate outside the area set aside for us humans. However, in summer cow shit + heat = flies. Lots of flies. So many flies, in fact, that sometimes I can barely hear myself think. So much buzzing, in fact, that one or two colleagues have asked me during phone conversations if I have a nice sideline going in dildo testing. Well, that's obviously entirely ficticious but you get my point.

I'm not bothered about the flies per se. Dealing with english flies having lived with their Australian cousins for a while is rather like playing a game of pool after a game of snooker - you can't see what all the fuss is about - but the buzzing is getting seriously distracting. So I have escalated the arms race against our multi-eyed foe and have purchased an electic fly killer. I look forward to testing it shortly.

christ christ christ

i'm typing this with my eyes closed. my burning orbs need to be caressed by silken smooth and liquid lids lest they crack and pop like that girl in the wimbledon coverage trailers.

or something.

fucking hellfire. i am drained. wasted. exhausted. i have never before been this comprehensively depleted - brain is ticking over and running on autopilot. body is just a mess. a mess! extreme and brutal levels of physical activity in the last few days have cracked and torn my musculature at the cellular level and i am just a human-shaped bag of hurt. chief culprit was the hay-baling. i must still be a soft city bastard at heart. life on the farm is worse than any fucking circuit-training.

i cannot walk because my legs are crocked through cycling. i cannot breathe deeply because my shoulders are aching from cricket practice. i cannot turn easily because my back is shot. my thighs are still burning from the bleep-test on tuesday.

in fact, the only parts of my body that are currently functioning within normal parameters are my genitals, my hair follicles and my pain receptors. so i am not looking foward to my legwax-whore-sadism conference tomorrow. full house!!

anyway

the last few days have been packed with all sorts of shit that would make for prime, A1-grade blog-material. however, as is often the case, i was too busy doing all of this shit to make notes about it for the consumption of others, big blogger heretic that i am. life has been a series of flashes for me, encrypted onto my mind's eye:

watching a vast moon rise through barbeque smoke

feeling warm night air slide across my naked chest as i bike home

smelling brandy mix with pollen

trying to measure my infinitely-long shadow over the perfect, endless plane of a cricket pitch as the sun starts to set

seeing people dance all around me

watching air currents move as they are thick with hay-dust, looking like rivers of boiling syrup, and then dying almost instantly as a towering trailer reverses in and fills the barn door-frame exactly. like a pharoh's servant's last sight as the builders ram the last block of the pyramid home.

being stared at by an aryan dummy

running through a crowd, music blaring.

not being able to remember any more

Pizza Time

Work done. Pizza in oven. Of the five DVDs currently awaiting viewing (Sideways, Master and Commander, 21 Grams, Run Lola Run and Bad Boys) I have selected Bad Boys for mindless levity purposes.

The Pizza Packaging promises me "Restaurant Quality Pizza". I don't doubt this. However, the specific restaurant whose pizzas are of comparable quality is not cited.

When I lived in Borough there was a Pizza GoGo down the road. They varied between edible and shite. Like a bitch, I always went back for more.

When I lived in Melbourne I favoured a place on Sturt Street. It was a revelation. The ingredients were fantastic - gigantic prawns, fresh avocado - great stuff.

I suspect this evening's offering from Goodfellas will be rather more like the stuff from Borough.

jik cvf w2q `

My cat has just walked across my keyboard. I guess this is her way of letting me know that it's her dinner time too :)

TTFN

Possibly the Best Private Eye Cover Ever?

HRH recently acquired an iPod. Here's Hislop's take:

http://www.private-eye.co.uk/covers/1135/1135pe.jpg

Self-Deception Update

Benny has now departed for work, oblivious to the productivity killing cargo in his glove box!

I have completely outfoxed myself!

Genius!

Pirate Harvey

Because of various shennanigans over the last few months I've missed out on some of the episodes of Dr Who. Yesterday, however, I got Bit Torrent working on my mac and am now downloading one of the episodes I missed.

Question: Although currently illegal to do so, I paid for the episode via my TV licence and surely the fact that I 'missed' it is just a quirk of an outdated delivery model. Surely my right to watch it is independent of when it was initially made available to me? Or have I effectively broken the law by forgetting to record it?

Getting skyplus is now almost my main motivation for buying my own house.

Monopoly Live

The makers of the board game have kitted out 12 london taxis with GPS and set up an online version. You get £15m to buy properties around london, build hotels etc. and then get rent every time your chosen driver hits a location that you own.

Working from home again today. In an effort to be more productive I have stashed my Grand Theft Auto game disc in Benny's glove box. I simply cannot be trusted sometimes. So far I have conducted an interview, submitted a holiday request and will now move on to do some number crunching. "Woooosh" as Macleod would say.

Benny himself is stumbling around the house after helping the farmer shift some hay and then heading off down the pub last night for too much brandy. Looks like my plan to divert myself from the xbox may be jeapordised if he skives off work.

Signalling Fun / What not to wear

Once again, the return of the sun appears to have taken the country by surprise. Sunburn for the weekend and transport chaos for the working week. The train I'm writing to you from is 46 minutes late (not that I care - I turned up at Waterloo 2 minutes before it left). The train I caught into London this morning was 30 minutes late, which meant that rather than being early into the office I was late. What is it about the UK and the summer? We know it's coming, yet do nothing discernible to mitigate its effects. It's annual, for christ's sake! It's like being surprised when Christmas happens in the middle of December. My marvellous new train from Hampshire was lovely and air conditioned and stepping into my office was like opening a fridge (bless you, Regus), but god knows what it was like on the tube today. Hell on/under earth, I suspect.

I was ambushed a couple of times today. I was supposed to be doing a few interviews and setting up the rest of the week, but all bets are suddenly off. I'm now going to be doing wall to wall process stuff which is good because it helps out a nice chap called Gary who's crazy busy but bad because there's lots and lots to do. I also had my half-yearly appraisal re-scheduled for today at 3 hours notice. Bearing in mind the shit of the last few months it went surprisingly well. Embarrassingly, I'd forgotten about the bonus that comes with it - and it's not like I'm rolling in cash so this is about being unfocussed rather than any lack of significance.

There's a school of thought that says one should invest windfalls. There's another school that says men cannot function without a kickass six speaker / 1 sub woofer home cinema system. I suspect that in this instance the second school will triumph. It has, when all's said and done, been a crap year for TEH [plc] so far and a large capital purchase may just be the necessary watershed between shite and unshite.

Also, our CEO dropped into the office from Ireland for some training along with the other co-owner and the head of my group. My project manager was there, as was my line manager. Normally lovely to see them - they're fantastic people, these guys in charge of my consulting destiny. However, I'd critically misjudged the dress code.

The first time I went to our head office in Ireland I wore a suit. Everyone else was in jeans, chinos or sportswear. Felt like a proper knob. Ever since then, I have consistently misjudged the sartorial requirements of every corporate occasion, bar none. Today was no different, I bowled up in some jeansandgapwear (tm) and everyone else was in their Saville Row finest. Felt like an idiot for most of the day until right at the end when our chief exec and I spent some time comparing our Powerbooks and talking about the new operating system (we're both mac heads, much to the unmasked but jovial contempt of my friend the IT dude). What is it about some people who make you feel instantly better about yourself? Bottle that and you'd be minted.

Back to London tomorrow for some process action. If I go in wearing jeans I'll look like an idiot but if I wear a suit I guarantee they'll all be in there in shorts and hawaiian shirts or something similarly humiliating. I suspect that I'll go for some kind of khaki / formal shirt combo, but I have no fucking idea what colour goes with what. My designated fashion consultant is currently in Thailand. Bugger. This is one area of my life where a girlfriend would prove especially useful. I would apologise for the stereotype but it's true. Women can normally dress men much better than men can dress themselves. Or certainly me, at least.

Upstairs / Downstairs

Exiting the office I bumped into one of my sales colleagues and a person senior to me in the organisation who's someone I really look up to. You know how you get a few people who, in character at least, sum up why you want to be part of your company? This is one of my guys. Today he was travelling from Waterloo as well.

"Are you going to Waterloo as well, Tom?" asked the sales dude "We can all get a cab together"
"Bollocks we will!" said my guy "It's quicker to walk".

And without question, we all set off across the new(ish) Hungerford Bridge. Despite the fact he's about 15 years older than me and is more generously proportioned I had trouble keeping pace with him. It was about as fast as you could walk without breaking into a jog - and today was *hot*.

The guy plays a very canny game - he's an unreconstructed snob, but is fun with it - makes you feel like you're on his team. It's a very effective mix of bemused, engaging, oblivious and flattery. I exaggerate in order to make my point, but as we sped across the bridge towards Waterloo, the somewhat breathless conversation ran something like this:

"Where are you living at the moment Tom?"
"Near Winchester"
"Oh really, where abouts?"
"Just in the middle really of Southampton, Winchester and-"
"I bought some paintings from a guy who lives down in Southampton"
"Oh really?"
"Yes - fucking good and great value. Have you been in Morrsions recently?"
"No, I can't say I-"
"Full of prams. Terrible place. Tried it once, had to go back to Waitrose."
"Oh right, er, hold on - prams?"
"Yes - loads of them. Single mothers. Baseball caps. These paintings: fucking great. Bought an umbrella this morning"
"Um, right?"
"Yes - had to queue for 10 minutes in the rain, then, when I'd got one, it stopped raining."
"Who are the paintings by?"
"Chap called Greg. Great chap. Does landscapes of the Solent from his yacht. Have you got a boat?"
"Have you seen my salary lately?"
"I don't know what to do with this umbrella now the sun's come out. You don't wear baseball caps do you?"
"No I can't say-"
"And you don't fancy buying a landscape of Cowes?"
"No, I really can't say-"
"How about an umbrella? Well, look, can't talk all day. Anyway - spot of bother in Russia. Can you pop over to Murmansk tomorrow and do a time and motion in this power station we've just taken on?"
"-er-"
"Knew you were my man! Here are the tickets - TTFN"

This Commuting Lark

Wake up at 0550 for a 0630 Cab and 0700 Train to get to the office for 0900. Full day, then 1820 Train for 1940 cab for 2015 home time. Total elapsed time: 14hrs, 25 mins for 9 hrs work. Some people do this every fucking day. Tossers. When I was up with my Dad recently he reminded me several times of something Macmillan said: "The chief aim of work is leisure". But that's easy to say if you're retired and your main daily concern is sourcing breakfast, lunch and tea.

If I had to do this every day it would destroy me. I can handle working for 12 hours a day, beyond this I start to lose effectiveness. It's the travel that'd do my head it. It's dead time - such a waste. All these twats around me doing soo-doo-coo. If you want stimulation, get a job that doesn't require you to spend 10 hours a week in a train carriage doing kid's puzzles. If you want a little challenge, build a spreadsheet to solve it automatically for you then move on. Now, I can occasionally get some work done on trains but by and large I find it very difficult to concentrate. When working, I normally have to refer to emails, written notes and word and/or excel files. There's never enough room to do this on trains - and that's without thinking about the noise, the interruptions and the inability to have a conversation without being cut off by going into a tun-

-nel. Dead time = dead lives. Looking forward to 0550 tomorrow already :(

speaking of rather fine human beings...

i have a new index of beauty, the benchmark against which all other human beauty is measured.

she is available here, from about fifty-five seconds on. how anyone can look good whilst wearing such a costume is quite unbelievable...

ho hum.

in other news, i have just gotten back from the beer festival, where i was since friday evening, working - worked friday pm, saturday lunch, saturday pm and sunday lunch. factor in the sleeping-in-the-beer-tent-to-dissaude-theiving-pikeys and i have spent 36 of the 44 hours since leaving work at 5pm Friday down the pub. a personal best.

since i spent 22 of those hours running around like a bastard, balls-to-the-wall busybusybusy, i must admit to being rather tired. i hope my legs recover for Tuesday, as i have to take a bleep-test FOR THE HAMPSHIRE AMBULANCE SERVICE!

have ittttttttttttt. i thought they'd binned me, they'd left it so long. but in a wonderful display of just-in-time delivery, they sent the notification letters for the two-half-day selection process out on Friday, thus giving everybody one working day's notice. ho ho ho. eeeeep! eeeeeeeeep! thus the rest of my weekend is going to be spent brushing up on maths so i do not flunk my psychometrics entirely.

such a relief to get that letter. rose off me like steam. i know i shouldn't, but i'm looking at it like the one last role of the dice to actually steer life somewhere i want to go instead of just getting swept along in a torrent of mediocre fuckstickery. so. time to get some food, stop biting my nails and get out the maths textbooks...

what a fun evening...

David Tennant

Rather fine, no?

stripper/poker

hmmmn

i have just returned from poker night down at Southampton University.

i thought perhaps i might be remarking most about the concrete campus wilderness, or maybe how i'd forgotten just how much sneering that a middle-class 18 year-old is capable of in a five-minute period, or possibly even a critiqué of current student fashion (i.e., dipped in glue, thrown bodily into River Island).


but no. i think the most remarkable thing was just how similar it all was to how i once paid some cash to a girl named anna to strip naked and wiggle her breasts & genitals in my general direction.


i am talking about getting The Trembles. this has happened to me only twice in my life. the first time was about four years ago when - for reasons lost in the mists of time - a lunchtime drink led into the grotto of the Griffin on the Clerkenwell Road, which is a strip-pub; just imagine a boozer with blacked-out windows and a dias/pole arrangement in the corner*. anyway, in between the oil-covered past-their-prime glamour-models & the botched-boob-job barbie-dolls (honestly. looked like Terry Thomas had carved his initials on her chest with a soldering-iron) there was a just awesome girl, south american i think, cute, pretty, graceful, smiling, quite stunning in a girl-next-door manner. anyway, i couldn't take my bloody eyes off her. this transfixation-by-porn ("hypnojism", if you will) was noticed by my partners in crime who egged me on to go and have a private dance, which i got, for all of a tenner.

anyway, apart from getting a grin and a peck on the cheek (she'd obviously copped me as the 19 year-old virgin i was [i was actually sitting on my hands throughout]) she also sent my entire endocrine system into overload - adrenaline & testosterone levels just went sky-high, the strangest sort of semi-demented energy swept through me and my whole body seemed to fizz.

and exactly the same thing happened this evening when i sat down and started playing with strangers for plastic discs. fuckin' weird. has got me wondering how exactly my brain is wired. why, exactly, should these events and only these events produce such extreme hormonal reactions? what is the trigger? and like Dr. David Banner, can i control it to use on demand & thus become a wandering, misunderstood super-hero...?

anywayyyy. i did quite well. apart from getting sneered at. the buzz is only just wearing off now; i shall do more reps this evening with the dumbbells just to take the edge off and thus ensure sleep - i shall need plenty of kip to prepare for the weekend, since i shall be on sentry duty in the beer-tent friday & saturday night, with only my little truncheon for company <- long story...






*i just wrote "diaz/pole". freidian slip...**





**that's when you say one thing but mean a mother.

job satisfaction

my job is so awful that sometimes, i piss when i don't actually need to, just to escape the fuckwittage for a few precious seconds.


occasionally i'll even bother to walk to the toilets.






in all seriousness though, that first sentance sounds rather Fight-Clubish. time to start worrying...

Slowly Downward

Monday Night: Radisson SAS Limerick. Gorgeous food, huge rooms, professional staff.
Tuesday Night: Malmaison Birmigham. Slightly faded around the edges, but still rather nice. Staff rather too cool for school.
Wednesday Night: Hilton NEC. Rooms too small, overpriced, long queues for checkin. Fellow guests = jumped up salespeople. Ick! Don't touch me!
Thursday Night: Camden Lock Holiday Inn. Jury still out.

We shall see if the trend continues.

Human Contact

I've been working by myself for so long that working with my colleagues face to face has been a real gift on the few days it has happened over the last couple of weeks. Great banter and pisstaking on trains, in airports and workshops, most of which appears to centre around how long my hair has grown since I've been neglecting it.

This is all relative of course - most of my colleagues have shaved heads or very short hair.

Martin was letting rip at me at every opportunity during our activity day on Monday. When we were karting he made a few unfavourable comparisons between myself and James May (a long-haired presenter on 'Top Gear'). When we were doing archery he said it was remarkable that I could see the target 'through my barnet', let alone hit it. I was in the process of storming the enemy base during the laser shooting game when I heard a cry of "I didn't know they let long haired people in the army" from the edge of the battleground which made me laugh so much that I gave away my position and got grenaded. Very funny. Martin is a little vertically challenged, so I give as good as I get. However, it's definitely time for a haircut.

HOWZAAAAT!

oh god, we're in trouble.

none of us can bowl. none of us can bat. i am the only member of the team who can run bewtween stumps and not have to stop for a breather halfway. between the eight of us, we worked out that the combined time since we last picked up a bat was approximately sixty-two years.

i fear a little context may be in order. i am a founder-member of the pub cricket team! my reasons for signing up are three:

a. it's an excuse to drink beer and barbeque. as if i needed one...

b. it's playing a nice, fun game with nice, fun people. ("fun" and "nice" are, of course, infant-teacher-type words, and fluffy, and meaning of a thousand things, but hey. i'm retyping all this after Blogspot went 404 on me last night so i cannot be cunted to reach for the thesaurus)

c. it is respectable and wholesome and English in the extreme. For Harry! And St. George!!

but i digress. me and seven others moseyed on down to a place called Hursley Park, south of Winchester, which is where IBM/HAL had their Everywhere-Else-That's-Not-America HQ for thirty-five years until last week when they sacked everyone.

anyway, presiding over our sorry parade of unco-quadraspaz window-lickers was a very nice gentleman named Pete, who, although rather advanced in years, was posessive of more poise & purpose of body than i am/will are/ever be capable of. think of a willow-wieldng Mr. Miagyie and you are along the right lines...

admittedly, on first seeing our pitiful efforts of catching like girls & throwing balls as if they were hand-grenades he had to visibly restrain himself from chlorinating the gene-pool by bludgeoining us all to death on the spot - the effort of halting his bat-holding hand from a quick spot of eugenics was palpable. but, dare i say it, his gentle tutoring in the darkest, most arcane & secret cricketing lore (i.e., how to hold a bat, where to stand...) had quite a profound effect on our little group and, by the end of our session, we had mastered such advanced techniques as bowling the ball at the correct player and not de-front-toothing the wicket-keeper.

also, my batting improved several quantum orders of magnitude by my embracing of the Dark Side - focusing my hatred and anger on the little red leather bastard as it flew benwards enabled me to smack the fecker rather hard instead of gaining zero satisfaction by just punting it around...

...just call me Darth Botham...

Tomorrow

Apparently I'm being sent to Coventry tomorrow.

Now, I'm no xenophobe...

...but give us our bloody money back, you frog-snorting cheese-eating surrender monkeys :)

From The Times:

"French farmers these days are not so much businessmen as extras at one vast heritage park stretching from Calais to Nice"

Splendid. Nothing like a little cross-channel friction to fill up the papers.

Team Building Exercise

A birthday party on Friday night put any kind of activity on Saturday out of the question. The party in question was up at Highgate Village amongst a crowd of raucous estate agents. I suppose you have to be in the mood for it :)

Saturday consisted largely of escaping from London and sleeping, interrupted only by Doctor Who. Sunday lunch was still a recent memory when it was time to head to Gatwick. The company I work for is very diffuse and as such we try to meet up as a group twice a year, supposedly to exchange wisdom but more likely to trade banter and semi-affectionate insults. The option was either to fly out Sunday night or at some godawful hour on Monday morning. I chose the former, and by the looks on some of the faces that were acquainted with Heathrow at 0530, this was the right call to make. Lovely meal in the hotel Sunday night, very relaxed Monday morning.

Tuesday was a day of presentations. Monday was an activity day. We were broken up into four days and rotated through physical puzzle solving, kart racing, archery and a paintball style game with lasers as opposed to bruising pellets.

Now, I'd like to add the caveat that as far as I'm concerned these things are always a little tacky and forced irrespective of how well executed or planned they are. However, this was quite good fun. The nature of our business tends to attract quite competitive people and this was pretty fierce stuff. No one wanted to let their team down. Everyone wanted to win. The prize was bragging rights over everyone else for the next 12 months - and no one likes to brag like a consultant.

At the end of the day we were all totally wiped out, bruised and in several cases bleeding. My team won (due in no small part to my heroics on the battlefield) and this has likely done my promotion chances no end of harm. No one is more competitive than our CEO, you see.

I'm currently en route from Shannon to Birmingham via Heathrow and Euston, to a workshop tomorrow AM in Stoke. Thence who knows. Some interviews and data grabbing apparently. Hopefully nothing that will involve too much movement as I ache almost everywhere after commando heroics.

Albarn says something sensible shock

From BBC News:

He [Albarn] also said record companies should donate a portion of the sales boost that participation in Live 8 will give them to help Africa.

"All the artists that play there will enjoy increased record sales - if they play a good gig, they will benefit from it," the singer said.

Albarn said artists should put pressure on their record labels to "genuinely show this is an altruistic act and that there is no self-gain in it".

Snowflake's chance in hell, but nice sentiment. Next.

Alan Duncan Running for Tory Leader

"The Tories need a gay leader, and I'm the man for the job," says Alan
Duncan. "Like M&S, we need both a good CEO and better frilly knickers."

Looks like the race just got interesting :)

Is it me or does it smell funny round here?

Apparently Winchester have implemented a new system for supressing polluting buses which involves the use of sheep's piss. I will remember this the next time I'm on the park and ride. Yuck!

Pret Prats

Good things about the Pret near St Martin's are that it's close to the office (thus not requiring a 8 mile round trip for lunch, like working from home) and is relatively large so features a full range of yummy food.

However, a serious downer is that it's on the ground floor of the building which houses Redwood, a PR company. It is therefore usually populated by pretty boys in cheap suits with funboy haircuts (as sported by > 50% of the males on big brother) and dizzy blondes anxiously looking around for the source of their next line. I may defect to cafe nero in protest, or start having lunch in the National Gallery.

Wolverhampton yesterday went very well. Everyone was doing very long, very dry presentations to the client's team. I went on in the graveyard slot after lunch, when people are usually dozing as they digest their food. Sensing an opportunity, I ripped into my presentation generally taking no prisoners. The effect was like a hand grenade going off. A rowdy debate ensued. A few hackneyed yet wry observations on my part ("Turkeys don't vote for Christmas" went down particularly well) added to the general ambiance. Things got agreed and moved on. Congratulated afterwards by the project manager. Jealous looks from peers.

If I had the patience or interest, I think I could play this corporate game pretty well, you know.

the witching hour

oh dear. coming up to four AM.

and on a school-night, too...

thing is, 4am is the time when you start to have treacherous thoughts about staying up all night & seeing the dawn in...

...and it is tempting...it's not as if i need any higher-brain functions at work anyway...........

application forms...

what fucking GCSEs did i take?

...how the fuck should i know...



IT WAS A DECADE AGO!!!


i am gurgling unhappily. and suffering from bullshitter's block.




ho hum. crack on.



there is a dead cow outside my front door. it appears to have pooed so hard that its insides came outsides. i am put in mind of a squeezy-ketchup bottle. i shall make it my mission to feed the cows figs and prunes in sufficient quantities so that this does not happen again.

...i am also waiting for the farm dog to go to sleep so that i may carve great glistening steaks from its plump and succulent carcass...

Dead Cow Time

smoking barbecue
Originally uploaded by tom_h.

Worked from home again today, sifting through interview transcripts and other data to present trends and findings back to the team tomorrow. Worked the morning in the kitchen, then operations transferred to the garden for the afternoon. This is the kind of thing that I find much easier to do on paper - annotating, summarising, sorting & sifting just doesn't work for me on a Laptop screen. Printed it all out and scrawled all over it on the patio. Splendid.

Work was interrupted when it emerged that there was no food left for lunch. Well, there was some food left but it was all rubbish. We had run out of bread, eggs, juice, any meaty stuff, decent wine etc. So I launched an abortive mission through the Bere forrest to a town nearby on the new bike. The town is 4 miles away (closest shop!). I was having a lot of fun going up and down hills, then the novelty wore off, then I got tired, so I turned back at half way. I had seriously understimated the grade of the hills and the time involved. Cornflakes for lunch. Not good.

Benny and I headed off to Sainsburys when he returned with the car after work and he is now barbecuing some steak. Problem solved.

Ew4n was kind enough to text me some encouraging words around hi-fi purchasing. My affections have moved on and I am now considering an all denon setup like this. The great man has also been relaying details of his trek cross country to Derby. I spent a while working in Leicester and Sheffield last year so am familiar with the route. Tomorrow morning I am bound for Wolverhampton. The meeting kicks off at 10, so I have to get the half six train. This means a cab at 6am, which means waking around 0515 or 0530. The taxi company are pretty insistent that it'll take half an hour to get to the station. I'm not so sure, but I guess you have to trust the experts. I doubt I'll post intimate details of my train trip to the blog. I intend, instead, to pass out and ignore the countryside limping past the train window until a reasonable hour.

Dinner is served. Ta ta.

Today

Today I will be mostly sifting through mountains of information and investigation results from my kitchen table whilst trying to shake off the idea that I need to purchase expensive and unnecessary toys.

Back in the heart of things

No more Amazingstoke for me for a little while. A call on Friday diverted me to London on Monday, which was quite a change. From sparsely populated island to a farm in the middle of nowhere to our offices in Trafalgar Square. Good for a change of scenery and a change of work. Good to work with some new faces as well. This new project will run for another 3-5 weeks and is all over the country, so expect more blogs from trains (like this one, in fact) and fewer fits of lotsofblogs then silence as uploading opportunities become more frequent.

Funny being back in London now that I don't live in it. This is only the third time I've returned since moving out in March (and the first time was a smash and grab visit to the NT). Things I hate: the rush, the smell, the grey, the traffic, the lack of community, the lack of space, the sirens, the background hum. Things I like: Pret.

Didn't know whether I'd be away for the week or just the day so packed a week case on the off change. As it turns out, working from home Tuesday and likely Wednesday. Just got back through the door, left at 0730 this morning so 12 hour day including just under 5 hrs travelling. Hmmm. Apparently to Wolverhampton on Thurs - not looking forward to that. Had a wander around Wolves on my way back from Telford one week last spring. Not nice. Lots of young girls pushing prams. Sense of dread. Not relishing the thought of return at all.

Muzak

Lots of new music. The new oasis album is a bit of a departure. They don't seem to have got to where they're going, but the direction they're heading off in is quite interesting. Probably the best of the last few albums. Someone appears to have taught Noel Gallagher how to sing: "The Important of Being Idle" quite a revelation to long standing monobrow watchers like me. I've listened to the new Coldplay album quite a bit today courtesy of itunes. Natasha has it spot on: Fix You is anthemic. Goosebumps. Masterful. As for the rest of them, too early to tell. To be honest, I've not really listened to the last half of the second album since the week I bought it and it doesn't sound like the new one is terribly varied either, so we'll see.

However, my favourite song was one that came on the kitchen radio yesterday morning: Heart Attack and Vine by Screaming Jay Hawkins. It's an incredible track recorded back in the early nineties - loads of attitude and swagger served with a dollop of sleaze. Yummy.

Articles and Relics

An odd thing about being at a parent's house is the old stuff they've hung on to. Your desk is now their desk. The bench you sat on as a child is now out the front of the house and used as a community interaction device. Twenty years ago you used to keep your Transformers (tm) in the wooden box that now contains the drill bits. Look: it's still got a Knight Rider sticker on it. Weirdo.

Please return your tray-tables...

To Cockpit From Seat
Originally uploaded by tom_h.

This is a picture of the plane that goes from Islay to Glasgow. It seats 30 passengers and from where I was sat at the front I could easily spit on the pilot (but usually refrain from doing so unless the bumping around becomes a pisstake). There's one stewardess and no food. On a clear day (usually during the winter) you can see some stunning views of lochs, highland ranges and Glasgow on the half hour hop. However, the plane cruises at 9000 feet which puts it right in the middle of the cloud on most days.

All in, 6.5 hours door to door. Not bad. Last thing I saw before cloud turned everything bumpy and white was the Laphroaig distillery on the coast. A message?

Hunter Gatherer

Fishing Catch
Originally uploaded by tom_h.

A paternal bonding experience and a half. Dad, his neighbour and I went out on a boat to catch our supper. I've been fishing twice before and both of these occasions involved catching no fish and attempting to affect an air of not caring. The Islay experience was slightly different. We went out in a small boat. I didn't ask where the life jackets were as there didn't appear to be any. Dad opted to not fish, but rather help me take my catches off the line. I thought this was quite optimistic of him.

We stopped at a few places, lowered our hooks and waited (I believe this is called casting, but we didn't bother flicking the rods and just allowed the weights to drag the line to the sea bed). Nothing happened. I was prepared for this from my previous experience. After 3 minutes of not catching anything, the neighbour (who owned the boat) moved us on. This was quite unlike previous fishing adventures, which involved a waiting around to doing something ratio of approx 20 to 1.

At our fourth stop, no sooner had the weights hit the sea bed than my neighbour caught something. Then I did. We pulled the fish in, bunged them in a box and repeated. Same again: my line came up with 4 fish hooked on it within about 30 seconds. Repeat, repeat repeat. We moved on occasionally for a change of scenery more than anything else, but in less than an hour we had caught over 100 fish between us.

We headed back home when the sun headed down and the neighbour gutted our catch on the harbour wall, feeding fish heads and intestines to grateful gulls. That evening I ate some of the fish fried in olive oil with a little bit of lemon juice. No exaggeration: the best I've ever had. Freshness accounts for everything. Seriously brilliant stuff.

The next day, Dad and I spent the best part of two hours de-boning about a dozen fish and preparing a fish pie. Our neighbours came round in the evening for dinner. A really fantastic experience, and if I'm honest, the best work I've done in a long time.

Harvey on Hols

Fishing and whiskey excluded, I spent a day ill and a day working. I always seem to get sick on holiday, sometimes even bank holidays. Irrespective of what the quacks think, I reckon this is because of work/stress imbalance. My body holds on, immune system firing on all cylinders, until it can relax and then it collapses. The work was necessary because I was feeling guilty about not finishing something before I went away. It was much nicer working under my own conditions than doing the same in a stuffy office in Amazingstoke.

the glass teat: the rots sets in

today i am not at work, because i have a dicey tummy. or had a dicey tummy. but the job i have is so mind-sodomisingly dull (it's not even data entry. it's data validation, because they can't figure out how to make the database do it) that i just could not be fucked.

now, this goes against every work ethic in my body.

personally, my view on the employer/employee relationship is that the employee owes every ounce of loyalty in their body to their job and to their company. too many people turn up for work and consider their monthly wage to be completely debrided from the tasks they do in that month, i.e., that the cash they get paid is "owed" them, like some cruelly small ration, and that the twenty days of 9:10am to 4:59pm they attend work is just a massive conspiracy to prevent them from having an enjoyable and carefree life.

i simply believe these days that, what with worker mobility and a stupendously diverse economy, that if you are an employee and you don't like your job, you should get a different job, because you are gluing up the system for everyone else. for example, if your job is awful and you don't think you get paid enough then the onus is most definitely on YOU to go elsewhere instead of, for example, forming a union to fuck your boss and the entrepreneurs of society.

being born in 1980, and most definitely being a child of the Bless'ed Margaret, i consider unions to be a disgusting and purely ungrateful betrayal of the opportunity and money that your employer has dished out to you. i concur that unions were a necessity in the past, when you were locked into a lifelong trade and moving around the country for work was literally impossible, but even then they are only one step up from a medieval peasant rebellion. you pinko cunts.


but i digress.


anyway, i don't get paid for being off sick, so i don't count ;)

last night i drank too much and cycled too fast, and so am having trouble concentrating or walking today. things on my to-do list are weights, form-filling for the ambulance job, haircut, shopping and dropping off a bunch of flowers to an optician. as you do.

on that note, this is how colour-blind i am - i can see the top-left one, of course, but bugger-all of anything else.

thus my taste in ties is not affected, lithe and dandyish clothes-horse i am.

ho hum. time for neighbours!




joking, joking...

oh yeah...

...and i'm completely colour-blind


...apparently...



not being funny or anything, but i think i should've noticed by now...

in the Event of my Untimely Demise

i have a playlist on my iTunes called this

it is thirteen songs long

and thus will burn easily onto a single CD that can be given out, one copy each, to all the people who bother to show up to any ben-related funeral that my departing may precipitate.

now, it's only struck me in the last ninty seconds that this playlist is useless unless somebody else knows about it, as in, i am 24 and thus any termination of my life that occurs is rather more likely to be instant. so i am listing it here. by reading this far you have now entered into an eternal and illegally-binding contact to burn these CDs for me, should i die, lest i come back and haunt you (motherfucker).

look, i've even put them in the order they should be played.

actually, it's a bit old, i think it needs a fiddle...



okay. here it is. and, the thing is, you, as a reader, has no right at all to judge it, because you don't know what any of the songs mean to me, or why. so ha haaa! take it all for daddy...

but seriously. all of them represent, to me, a phase of my life. when i cast my mind back to who i have been and where i have been i don't remember what i say, only what i hear. thus the list.

1. The Killers - All These Things That I've Done

2. Radiohead - How to Disappear Completely (and never be found)

3. David Grey - This Year's Love

4. Interpol - Take You On A Cruise

5. Doves - Break Me Gently

6. REM - Electrolite

7. Coldplay - The Scientist

8. Turin Brakes - The Door

9. Jimmy Eat World - Hear You Me

10 . Willy Mason - Oxygen

11. Radiohead - Talk Show Host

12. Stereophonics - Traffic

13. Jeff Buckley - Hallelujah

14. Coldplay - Shiver

15. Richard Ashcroft - Song for the Lovers

16. Placebo - English Summer Rain

17. REM - Be Mine

18. David Bowie - Heroes

19. Doves - The Man who sold Everything

20. Turin Brakes - Feeling Oblivion

thus

er

yeah, that is a few more than 13, isn't it...

oh well.


all of this preparation, by the way, was inspired by the fact that Angels by Robbie Williams is the most popular song to be played at funerals.



over my dead body

Who's Bad?

iTunes sez: No Michael Jackson songs played in the last 6 months.

Perhaps not playing someone's songs is the 21st century apathetic equivelent of a lynch mob...

That'll learn him. Wonder what his Clear Channel numbers are like. The precedent ain't good. When was the last time you heard Mr Glitter on the radio?

Ju-Judy JudyJudyJudy C'mon

According to itunes, over 9 months have elapsed since I last listened to "Hey Jude"

Perhaps this is what has been missing from my life.

Naaah NahNah nannaNahNah [repeat ad infinitum]

Perhaps not.