Travel math

I have 227 stamps in my passport.

My passport is three years old.

Three years is 795 days.

That is one trip across an international boarder every 3.5 days.

According to Carbon Footprint Checker my travels have put 60,000 lbs of CO2 into the atmosphere.

To neutralize my carbon footprint and appease my conscience it would cost me $357.00

$.33 per day, every day for three years.

Of course this doesn't include energy use at home, in hotels, taxis and the few times I hired a car.

Let's call it an even $1 per day.

$1 per day to erase my stain from the earth. $1 per day allows me to maintain a lifestyle of comfort, travel and westernized prosperity with no further thought for the repercussions of my energy intensive actions.

Such a deal.

Praha

I'm in the second half of a long stretch in Prague. One migration and one internal procedures audit which is even less exciting than it sounds. Truth be told I wouldn't mind doing these audits full-time. I would get the requisite travel I require to maintain a healthy appreciation for London and the demands are very low: show up, ask to see some paperwork, tell them everything they are doing is wrong, leave. I have the evenings to myself and I never have to work until 2AM re-permissioning every folder on a file server by hand (as I was doing last night).

It's the height of the summer travel season and Prague is filled with tourists. My hotel, the Intercontinental, seems to be the favourate of visiting Americans. They are hard to miss: trying to squeeze their immense girth into the lifts, tucking in their t-shirts and wearing white socks. They are also the only ones eating at restaurants before 8:30 at night.

To tell the truth, I'm with them on that one. The European habit of eating dinner very late doesn't suit my metabolism. Tucking into a pork-pie (or in my case a tofu-pie) at 10, an hour or so before bedtime, guarantees I will spend the best part of the wee hours clutching my stomach in torturous agony.

In Spain there is a federal statute which prevents restaurants from searving anything but hard rolls before midnight and dance clubs don't even start shoveling out last-nights cigarettes until 3AM. Yet these people manage to show up to work at 9:00- still drunk and wearing the clothes they left in the day before but at their desks they will be.

To be fair, that last sentience applies to the English. I've never met a drunk Spaniard during the morning commute but I encounter them with staggering regularity on those few days I manage to Tube to my office in London.

Right. Prague. They have a mini version of the Eiffel Tower here. It's up on the top of what, from a distance, looks like a small hill but which is in fact a daunting, wooded, Matterhorn. I didn't set out this morning with the intent of scaling that particular mountain but I kept wandering further and further afield and ended up at its base. They have a funicular which runs to the top but the queue to get on snaked back to Italy so I decided to hoof it.

I come from San Francisco so I'm used to a good bit of urban mountain climbing however I grossly underestimated the scale of the task facing me. My timing, as always, was well off and I started my accent at high noon. By the time I reached the summit, a good 45 minutes later, I was feeling distinctly old and out of shape. Never mind that the route to the top is a well maintained car-free road with gradated switchbacks. Bah! I found a disused goat path that looked much more direct and considerably more interesting. There certainly wasn't a shortage of shirtless, tattooed homeless guys using my path as a public urinal; this provided all the motivation I needed to scamper up those last 200 meters.

I have to say that the view from the top was stunning in its absence: you simply can't see Prague for the trees. I considered for a moment trudging up the spiral staircase to the viewing platform of the mock Eiffel Tower but I was again thwarted by the queue. All of this worked to my advantage.

Through a break in a wall I discovered a large park and rose garden. Massive trees provided the perfect mix of sun and shade and I settled in for a nice bit of daydreaming, napping and note-taking. For almost two hours I stayed under my tree; thinking about the nature of things and watching people being happy. Eventually I explored the rose garden and took a keen interest in the bees as they toiled away collecting for the betterment of their hives. Nearly our entire agricultural system, not to mention ecosystem, is dependent on an insect whose lot in life is to be born, work for six months and die. Unless they're the queen they don't even get to have sex and their working conditions make a Laotian sweat shop seem like a wide-open prairie. They must have some pretty impressive motivational posters tacked to the walls of the hive.

Taking a different goat-path I made my way back down; passing through orchards which had long ago returned to a feral state. Much to the delight of a Japanese couple the trees were loaded with fruit. I watched for a while as the man, somewhat inexpertly, climbed a tree and dropped a dozen pears into his lady friend's outstretched hands. I picked some cherries and sat in a grove of apple trees feeling lucky and happy.

If you ever get to Prague, and I highly recommend a visit, after you have done the cathedral, the castle, the astronomical clock and a river cruise, do yourself a favour and spend a day walking to the Eiffel Tower on the hill. Every city needs a green lung to expel the traffic and crowds; for London it's Regent's Park and for Prague it's Petrin Hill.

Foolish

I miss you so much my teeth hurt. I miss you even though I know you are the devil in a woman suit. I miss how your long, thick, chestnut hair fell on the pillowcase. I miss the way you wiggled your nose when you were thinking and how you would wrap yourself around a project until you achieved perfection.

I miss listening to you talk in your sleep.

My family and friends didn’t like you much. They thought, still think, that you were aloof, cold and pretty much an uncaring, selfish bitch. Back then I defended you, as good boyfriends do. I was stupid in love with you and there wasn’t a damn thing anyone could say that would break the spell.

Being with you was like playing tennis with someone better- I had to up my game. You were smarter, I was more clever, you were a hopeless optimist and I was a calculating realist, I was the better photographer but you were the better artist. Our biggest failing was that we were never a team. We were never able to lash together a constructive working arrangement. There was respect, I guess, but it was only shown grudgingly. You were too concerned with never admitting you were wrong about anything at all and I was too busy resenting how fucking brilliant and beautiful you were.

When you left me you said it was because I wasn’t the one for you. We both know that, at the time, it was just a bullshit excuse because what you really wanted was the freedom to fuck all the pretty little college boys you found. In the long run however you were spot on. We weren’t right for each other; the few times I have seen you since have confirmed that fact. After ten minutes in your company I realize that I don’t find you in the least bit fun to be around. You never make me laugh, your pop-n-fresh optimism is unnerving and your new-found social and environmental conscience, not to mention your British accent, are thin affectations.

Of course I still want to fuck you. Call me shallow if you will but you’re still a slammin’ hottie and I don’t hate you enough not to want to rub soap all over those perfect breasts.

So here I am, 36,000’ over Germany listening to sad songs and thinking about you. Pathetic I know but that’s how it is. Since you left I’ve been with women smarter, better in bed, almost as beautiful and certainly easier to live with but I have never found a replacement. Occasionally you say you want to be my friend but I’ll have none of it. I don’t know how to be friends with you- I don’t want you in my airspace at all. Not, as an impartial observer might think, because you are like concentrated evil to me. Rather it’s because we had so much potential for greatness, not necessarily as a couple but in a partnership, that it pains me to know that we will never be able to work together for ridiculously lofty goals. You have a million ideas but they lack substance; I have the substance but not the drive. Truth be told I guess I need you more than you will ever need me and that’s something I simply can not accept.

Be that as it may I want you to remember one thing: for the record, on that gloriously sunny San Francisco day, on that hillside, you in that sweater and me in my cowboy boots and hat, your hair brown streamers in the wind, on that hillside, on that day, you leaned back into me.

Think of all the trouble it would have saved if you’d have just stayed where you were.

40 years ago this very second

"Houston, Tranquility Base here, the Eagle has landed."

A few hours and one grooved boot print later, Neil Armstrong creates a record that will be in the books forever.

Never has 160kb or memory taken us so far.

Nowhere man

Bakerloo line. 9:15AM and already the tube is brutally hot. I'm sitting in the last seat of the last car. Across from me is a pretty rough looking dude sprawled over two seats. I have my earplugs in and am doing my best to ignore the existence of the universe.

The doors open, people get on, the doors close. Our carriage fills up rapidly with each passing stop; there are only two seats remaining- one next to me and one next to the transient guy. A fairly hot blond gets on, looks at the empty seat next to me; looks at the empty seat next to my friend across the way, looks at us both and sits down next to him.

More people crowd on and still no one sits next to me. I squeeze up against the bulkhead and try and look friendly- no one even glances at my seat. At one point I have people standing in front of me but no one will sit down.

At this point I would like to say something like, "and then I noticed that there was a huge mound of melting ice cream on the seat next to me" but that wasn't the case. The seat was fine, padded and inviting.

It made me think of Neil Gaiman's book Neverwhere in which the characters who have dropped out and fallen through the cracks of society live in a shadow world which runs alongside the real. They were there, just outside the edge of our vision, standing behind us in the Post Office queue, next to us as we walk home from the pub, late, cold under the yellow streetlight.

There I was, one of them, the forgotten, the misplaced, the ignored. Somebody else's problem- taking up space, two spaces in fact, but not a presence in any tangible sense. Only a vague perception behind the eyes of "no, not there, that seat is not vacant but I can't really tell why."

Edgeware Road. Baker Street. Oxford Circus. On and off go the businessmen, the shop assistants, the lads in their football colours; I sit in my private state of mind and watch from a very great distance.

Charing Cross, my stop, I stand and knock a woman with my bag. "Sorry" I say. She looks up at me and says, "no problem" and goes back to reading her book. I step off the train feeling much relieved.

This makes me happy

This has been a really crappy day

Which has capped a really crappy week.

I need to lift my spirits but all I can seem to do is sit at work and hit "Stumble."

What's my motivation? Oh yeah, I don't have any.

That's sorted then.

Fuck Virgin Trains

Yesterday I spent an infuriating hour on the phone with two different Virgin Train customer "service" representatives trying to change a ticket.

Yes, it was an Indian call centre. Yes, I could barely understand them. Yes, they were rude, unhelpful and could only follow their script and yes, I was hung up on when I asked to speak to a supervisor.

All I wanted the fuckers to do was abide by their own terms and conditions and change my fucking ticket for the stated £10 fee. Simple. I wasn't asking them for anything difficult, like a pleasant attitude or a blow job before I boarded. I wanted them to put me on a train which left one day later than the one I was booked on.

If anyone who works for Virgin is reading this let me first say, "I'm fucking sorry you work for such a festering pustule of a company." I'd also like to add that if you work in one of Virgin's sweatshop call centres and you were one of the two assholes who spoke to me yesterday- I hope you spend eternity having to make cold-calls to people who can shock you in the nuts every time you ring them.

This is how it played out as I went through each page of Virgin Train website with the faceless drone:

Me: "Click on Terms and Conditions and tell me what it says"

Drone: "It says you can change your ticket for £10. But no matter, because you chose an e-ticket option you can not change your ticket."

Me: "Why?"

Drone: "Because it is an e-ticket."

Me: "And that's different because?"

Drone: "Because it is an e-ticket."

Me: "That doesn't answer the question."

Drone: "..."

Me: "OK, let's go on to the next page."

Drone: "Now select the e-ticket option and click continue, see how it now says that you can not change your ticket?"

Me: "Yes. Fair enough but go to the next page where I pay for the ticket. What does it say under Terms and Conditions?"

Drone: "That you can change the ticket for £10."

Me: "And you don't see a contradiction or a problem here?"

Drone: "You can not change an e-ticket.:

Me: "Right. Let me speak with a supervisor."

Drone: "Of course."

Click.

Silence.

The really fucked up thing is that since every train line in this goddamn country has a monopoly on their routes, if I wanted to get back to London (and, unbelievably, I did) I had to use Virgin Trains. I ended up having to buy another full-fare ticket because Virgin made it impossible for me play by their rules.

It took me fifteen minutes to dig up their customer service contact details on their website and I sent them off a sternly worded complaint. Have I heard back from them? Of course not. Will I ever hear back from them? No. Never. They want me to simply give up, accept the ass fuck and move on. Well they can suck my balls. I'm filing complaints with anyone who will listen. I'm going to the press. I'll start a boycott. I'll write Richard Branson. I'll make sure every single person I meet at any business or social event knows what gutter dwelling leaches Virgin Trains are. I will not be made to look the fool.

However, in the meantime, I'll sit in the 1st class compartment, drink their drinks, eat their food and steal their little packs of biscuits. That'll show 'em.

Honestly

I'm not an atheist- not quite anyway. But I do happen to believe that most religions, with the possible exception of Buddhism (which is more of a philosophy anyway) are pure evil.

This pretty much sums it up:

http://www.irreligion.org/wp-content/uploads/2007/12/321.gif

Language difficulties

I've been in Manchester for the past week (Macclesfield actually) and I'm having a hard time understanding what the hell anyone is saying. I don't suffer alone: two French guys sitting at the table next to me just spent the better part of five minutes struggling to understand the waitress when she asked them what type of bread they would like.

Waitress: "Wheeeet ur bruuun bred?"

French guys: "Pardon?"

Waitress (slower and louder): "Wheeeet ur bruuun bred?"

French guys: "Wit or bruin brad?"

Waitress: "Brad. Whut type o brad do ya want?"

Me: "She wants to know if you would like white or brown bread."

French guys: "Ahh! We would like rolls."

To be fair, I had to listen pretty hard to catch her drift so it's not surprising that my French friends were struggling.

They really need to dim the lights in this place. I feel like I am sitting in pizza parlor.

I've spent the last five nights at an ancient old manner house which was converted to a hotel and golf club about two-hundred years ago which, coincidentally, was the last time the carpet was changed or indeed cleaned.

I rolled up to the place on the hottest day of the year so far (30 C) and they stuck me in an attic room at the top of five flights of stairs (no lift). Even before I opened the door I could feel the heat radiating from the door. Stepping in I was slapped back by stale, furnace like, air.

I searched the walls for a thermostat, switch or leaver- anything that would activate whatever passed for air conditioning at the time of the pile's construction. Nothing. I called the front desk, "Help! How do you turn on the AC? My shoes have melted into the carpet."

"I'm sorry sir, none of our rooms have air conditioning." Came the reply.

"You must be joking! I'm in a pottery kiln up here and the damn windows don't open more than three inches!"

"That's a security feature."

"A burglar would have to be suicidally insane to try and scale the side of this building to get to my room! You have got to get me into something cooler."

Needless to say I was told that they were full up, "But there is a fan in the closet." I was helpfully informed.

That night I slept naked on top of the bed- spread out like a starfish, fan osculating a steady stream of hot air up and down my body.

I'm going to cut this short because my lack of sleep is pushing me over the edge of exhaustion.

• The next day it started raining and hasn't stopped since
• My room temperature never dropped below the boiling point of lead
• I am now in a different, modern and altogether better hotel only a few miles down the road
• I am freezing my ass off because even though there has been no sunshine for days they've turned the heat off for the "summer"

Thank you and goodnight.

The history of the universe (abridged)

http://www.savageresearch.com/humor/historyOfTheUniverse.html

Along the not so straight and narrow

Just rolled in the door after spending a few days in Devon attending a wedding and getting in some practice at being terrified while driving through the narrow country lanes.

We hired a car that, by American standards, would be considered a compact but in the UK is classed as a guided missile cruiser with wheels.

I always make it a point to warn my English friends who are traveling to the States not to underestimate the distances between things. A guy in the office recently asked me if I thought that, given a week, he could see The Grand Canyon, Vegas, Death Valley, Yosemite, San Francisco, Big Sur, Santa Barbara and LA. I said, "Sure, if you're only going to look at them in a book."

Quite the opposite is true in Europe and especially Britain, which is small enough to fit inside Oregon with room left over for all that remains of the Empire. There is a great line in a Fawlty Towers where a visiting American said he couldn't find the main road and instead had to use the “little back street called the M5." A joke which was completely lost on anyone living outside of England.

The English countryside is a baffling maze of hedgerows and single-track lanes. Street signs were banished around the time of the Norman conquest and houses are named, not numbered. First time visitors often find themselves in the dead of night and pounding rain looking for "Broken Coxswain House, near the Thee-headed King's Vicar pub five bridges past Potten End on the left."

I've been driving in the Devon lanes fairly regularly for the past seven years and I have yet to get comfortable with the experience. After frequent encounters with locals barreling down on me from around blind corners I've gotten a bit jittery. On Saturday I was trundling along in second gear when I rounded a bend and came face to face with the grill of a delivery truck. I managed to stop without becoming a hood ornament but was then confronted with the prospect of backing uphill around a corner because Lord knows locals don't reverse for the punters.

I managed to pull it off but in so doing I put a nasty gouge in the left-hand fender . The rental company was more than happy to charge me £151 to fix the damage. Of course by "fix" they mean "wash and send it out again." By that point I was in no mood to argue. I was happy to pay whatever it took to get that miserable beast off my hands. Truth be told, I would have abandoned the goddamn thing in the middle of the motorway if I thought I could have gotten away with it. The longer I spend driving in London traffic, the more I learn to love the London underground.

Cash in hand

The US is, nominally, a secular nation but has "In God We Trust" emblazoned on their banknotes.

The UK which has a state religion (Church of England) has on their banknotes:

• £5 Elizabeth Fry (prison reformer)
• £10 Charles Darwin
• £20 Adam Smith
• £50 John Houblon (Governor of the Bank of England)

Other fun tidbits:

• 92% of Americans believe that God exists or that God "probably" exists
• 26% of Americans think Evolution is true
• 38% of English believe in God
• 48% of English think Evolution is true
  

If atheists really wanted to gain some traction in the US, they should push for a state religion.

George Carlin: Sun Worshiper

When I was a kid my friend Mark Duncan and I would wear out diamond needles listing to George Carlin albums. We were in Catholic school at the time and it was pure rapture (pun intended) to listen to him mock the authority of our overlords.

His shtik was more gentle back then; he seemed to still posses some fondness for Holy Mother Church. Later, perhaps as his own beliefs changed, his routines took on a decisively more aggressive tone.

In an interview with Reuters in 2001 he said, "I don't have any beliefs or allegiances. I don't believe in this country, I don't believe in religion, or a god, and I don't believe in all these man-made institutional ideas."

The one thing he did believe in was the sun:

Without them, we would never know

5:45 in the afternoon. CineWorld in Haymarket; a nearly empty theater, watching State of Play as it attempts to be the All the President's Men of the Bush era. It fails in that attempt mainly because it over plays the "conspiracy theory come true" angle and spends the last 40 minutes trying to pull all the pieces together into a final, muddled, twist.

This isn't to say the movie isn't enjoyable, it is and there is some fine acting all around. Russell Crowe is particularly believable as an overweight, ex-hippie investigative reporter attempting to balance protecting a friend (even after screwing his wife) and Getting The Story.

When I came out of the movie I couldn't help but wonder how many people believe that die-hard muck-rakers still toil away in grubby newsrooms, knocking back Jack Daniels and committing small-scale felonies in pursuit of a scoop.

Back in the pre-CNN age when I was a cub reporter with delusions of grandeur, a well-founded cynicism and mistrust of all politicians, I actually worked with guys not dissimilar to the Russell Crowe character. They kept whiskey in their desks and knew the phone numbers of cops, bookies, gang informants and the mayor's barber. Information was their commodity; they acquired it and traded it with the deft precision of cold-war spies. They knew that discretion was the key to staying in the game and sources were never, ever, burned.

I don't know how things work now- I haven't set foot inside a newsroom in 15 years. I do know that with the advent of 24/7 network news the stature of journalists and the profession of journalism began a steep and steady decline. CNN lowered the bar and Fox News dug a hole and buried it.

To someone like me who grew up idolizing photojournalist, humbled by the steel-will of Edward R. Murrow and believing that Woodward and Bernstein were tobacco stained superheros, the sight of overpaid, vile-spewing pundits shrieking at each other during the news-hour is nothing short of criminally repulsive.

Gone is the dignity and depth that Walter Cronkite would bring to every story he presented. Replaced by an endless stream of government issued sound-bites and talking points. US news programs have descended to the level of Jerry Springer-like farce. Likewise the slanderous rags which pass as "news" papers here in the UK can do nothing to instill confidence in the profession.

One would think that this sorry state of affairs would be the root of the mistrust the general public feels towards journalists. To some extent and within some quarters this is true, however it doesn't explain why a significant number of people will trust Fox News over the BBC and bloggers rather than the New York Times.

I think that part of the reason stems from a frightening trend to blame problems not on the perpetrators but on the messengers. A conversation I had recently illustrates this point nicely:

Random woman at a party (RWAAP): "We need to get the reporters out of Iraq and Afghanistan so that our troops can do their jobs!"

Me: "Don't you think we need to know what's going on in war-zones?"

RWAAP: "No. The military sometimes has to do things...certain things...to win the war and they can't do them if there are reporters around."

Me: "OK. So we should pull reporters out of ALL war-zones, like Rwanda, Georgia and Palestine so those soldiers can get on with the job?"

RWAAP: "Yes. I mean, NO! We need to protect our troops."

Me: "Right. Because our guys never commit atrocities?"

I didn't get an answer to that because my partner pulled me into the garden and chastised me for "not being friendly."

For further evidence of this overwhelming desire to blame the press for reporting on government malfeasance rather than the government for committing it, take a look a the comments from this article from yesterday's San Francisco Chronicle about a New York Times reporter who escaped from the Taliban:

http://www.sfgate.com/cgi-bin/article/comments/view?f=/n/a/2009/06/20/international/i085949D20.DTL

The reporter, David S. Rohde, clearly has balls of steel to go along with his Pulitzer, yet he and his newspaper are slammed both for his being in Afghanistan and reporting on the war. Do yourself a favour and search the New York Times website for Rohde's articles: they are insightful, well researched and yes, address uncomfortable subjects like prisoner abuse. The irony is that Rohde wasn't even working for The Times when he was taken captive- he was doing research for a book on the conflict.

Without news organizations like The New York Times, The Washington Post, The Los Angeles Times, Associated Press and the BBC the public at large would be nearly blind to the workings of both world and local governments. If it weren't for men and women with cameras, notebooks and tape recorders the atrocities of Tienanmen Square would have gone unreported.

From the Khmer Rouge to My Lai, Watergate to Blackwater; Katrina, Chernobyl, the 2004 Indian Ocean Tsunami, WMDs, Parliamentary expenses and Iranian elections- if you have heard about it, read about it or watched it on TV, reporters delivered the content.

The shift in readership from traditional news outlets to blogs is one I find particularly disquieting. I will never argue against the right of any idiot with an opinion, myself included, to post whatever mindless drivel he or she wants on the web. What I find alarming is that so many people are substituting raw, unsubstantiated, gossip for hard news gathering. There seems to be a feeling that bloggers, unencumbered by the need to verify their stories, somehow are privy to information and sources unavailable to people with press credentials.

Don't get me wrong. Blogs have their place and the immediacy of the Internet is a useful tool for providing a first look at breaking news. The ongoing election crisis in Iran is the most recent example of this. However, as the BBC was quick to point out, running video clips without first being able to ascertain their legitimacy jeopardizes the authenticity and accuracy of the coverage.

In my mind it is that question of accuracy which divides the world of on-line and real-world reporting. The New York Times doesn't always get things right but unlike the blogsphere, they can suffer serious repercussions for getting it wrong. The Jayson Blair scandal in 2003 is a prime example.

Jayson Blair wrote for the New York Times for four years and filed hundreds of stories, a large number of which contained fabrications. He was hauled before his editors, confronted with his unacceptable behavior and took a "personal leave of absence" from the paper. After he came back he seemed to have turned his life around but it wasn't too long before inaccuracies started creeping back into his pieces. He was sacked in May of 2003 for what the paper called "a profound betrayal of trust and a low point in the 152-year history of the newspaper."

A career destroyed, public humiliation and embarrassment. The price paid when legitimate news organizations fail in their duty to convey accurate and truthful information. What then are the penalties for a web site like The Drudge Report when they convey blatant falsehoods? According to the BBC they would be, millions of dollars in advertising revenue and a place in Time magazine's 100 Most Influential People In The World list.

(Take a look at an excellent article by Andrew Shapiro on this subject: http://www.mediachannel.org/originals/shapiro-drudge.shtml)

Who then are we going to trust? A newspaper who's very existence depends on its reputation for accuracy and in-depth investigative reporting or an anonymous blogger sitting alone in his apartment churning out whatever pops into his caffeine soaked brain? For many, the answer is the latter. It's easier to believe a comfortable lie which agrees with your own point of view than inconvenient facts which oppose it.

I fully expect The New York Times to publish articles that run counter to my world view and to reveal that institutions or individuals I hold in high regard are flawed- sometimes fatally so. That is the nature of a free press and I wouldn't want to live in a society where such journalistic freedoms, along with inherent checks and balances, were absent.

The rapid decline of the standard bearers of professional journalism and the rise of unmoderated, unaccountable, opinion blogs, on both sides of the political spectrum, bodes well for any politician who wants to cut a shady deal or any multi-national who decides that cleaning up toxic sludge from a little place called Love Canal is just too much of a financial burden.

Knowing that we are being watched is supposed to keep us honest. That's why here in the UK we now live in a nation-wide Big Brother House of interlaced listening posts and CCTV cameras. While the effectiveness of this surveillance for deterring crime is debatable, what is unquestionable is the impact a camera and a pen in professional hands has on governments and large corporations. If no one is watching, they can, and will, get away with murder.

Where does it come from and where does it go to?

I have decided that I am going to will myself to write something here every bloody day just to keep my fingers accustomed to striking keys. I have become so apathetic and lazy with my writing that each time I open my computer and launch Word, I stare at the white wasteland of a new document window until drops of blood form on my forehead.

Inspiration is not something that comes easily to me. Normally I must wait for outside influences, typically in the form of soul-destroying heartache, to force my hand. Considering that I am in a fairly stable relationship I must therefore either sow seeds of discontent (a process in which I am nothing short of an enlightened master) or look elsewhere for my angst fuelled creative impulses.

Last-minute panic is also a recognised deep well of motivation and one which I sampled liberally from during my years before the higher mind. Unfortunately the repercussions for failing to update scantly read blog entries do not compare to the seemingly life threatening consequences inherent in missing a term paper deadline in grad school.

Which leaves me with only one fallback: inner motivation. My capacity for which could fit inside a matchbox without having to remove the matches. Without a clear goal I just don't see the point in doing anything at all. Indeed it is only the fear of a deathbed review of a wasted life which prevents me from forgoing gym memberships, tennis, photography, all forms of social interaction, travel and shaving for beer, a wife-beater shirt and daytime TV.

Having set myself a goal of daily postings may trick my nearly atrophied brain into believing that it has to produce some sort of reasonably coherent drivel before it can shut down and wander randomly through YouTube videos.

Whether or not this ruse will pay dividends in the long run will, of course, remain to be seen. At the moment I'm running late and analysing the finer points of this new strategy will have to wait.

Pride of Place

Having been an unwilling observer of the Great British Public for over eight years now I have come to the unmistakable conclusion that they are suffering from an intense lack of national pride.

Before I can expound on that somewhat sweeping generalization, a few points of clarification are in order. First, by “national pride” I am in no way referring to the rabid and, seemingly, inbuilt fear and mistrust of all foreigners which, over the eons, has imprinted itself on the lizard-brain components of native born inhabitants of this island. Xenophobia, as any Scott, Welshman or Pole will attest, is, for the English, both a way of life and a national treasure.

Near as I can figure, this hatred of The Other by the English toward, well, everyone really, comes not from a belief that their land of rolling hills and pebbly beaches is the finest to be found. Rather, the English fear that the great unwashed supposedly massing at the boarders are actually able to do everything, from running a metro system to fitting bathrooms and fucking, better than they do.

Thanks to the flying busses of Ryan Air and SleazyJet, the English rank and file have been able to venture outside the drab confines of their cloud-shrouded cocoon and witness first-hand that trains continue to run when it snows, that the phrase “having a drink” is indeed singular and that deep-fat-fried is not a food group.

These reluctant tourists return home and perform a uniquely English bit of rationalizing. “Sure,” they say to themselves, “the food, climate, healthcare, education, mass transit, postal system government and overall way of life is better in [fill in the country of your choice] but those damn [fill in race or nationality of your choice] want to come over here and take our jobs, and sponge off the NHS!” Nowhere else have I heard people acknowledge that the very infrastructure of the nation is rotten and then, without stopping to breathe or think, complain about all the hordes of moochers trying to get in.

When I first heard this I assumed that the immigrants were being blamed for the crumbling motorways and byzantine bureaucracy (and there certainly is an element of that) but what they were really saying, without seemingly understanding the contradiction, was that England is crap but the rest of the world still wants to live there anyway. Yeah, it’s a toilet but just look at all those poor fuckers standing outside waiting to take a dump.

The English, more than most, know how to hold a grudge. The Germans are hated for starting two world wars, the Spanish for sending two Armadas and the French for being French. In southern Spain and France the English have been exacting a type of revenge by buying all the habitable coastal property and walling themselves into gated compounds. Learning the native language is simply out of the question, jacket potato stands are easy to find and the local supermarket stocks Marmite and Walkers crisps.

The English are not looking for a home down south so that they can rub elbows with a bunch of foreigners- they want a Blackpool with better weather. New Yorkers have Florida and the English have Spain. It’s not much of an advertisement for a place if, as soon as the inhabitants have saved enough money, they flee.

I happened to glance at a British newspaper recently (a very rare occurrence indeed) and my eyes locked onto one particular sentence: “England: it’s all a bit rubbish and that’s OK.” I’m not pulling this quote out of context; the entire article paid homage to English mediocrity. Somewhere along the line it has become perfectly acceptable for this entire society to accept failure as an acceptable option. They expect Australia to beat them at cricket, the Americans to dictate their foreign policy, their children to be fat, fish and chips eating lumps, their health service to leave them for dead, their government to tax them to starvation and the Royal Mail to steal their post.

It is a telling sign of the state of the nation’s self-worth that when it came time to give a nickname to the spectator’s hill above The All England Tennis Club (home to the Wimbledon championships) they named it after Tim Henman, who never even made it to the finals.

For the English, any overt display of national pride not specificity directed toward athleticism is preceded as distasteful. Along side this is a deep despair that although they used to be the world’s biggest swinging dick, they now are lucky if Sudan returns their calls. Mix these two attitudes and you get a people locked into a gilt riddled self-abuse spiral, which can’t but fuel a seemingly genetic predisposition toward alcohol abuse and poor dental hygiene.

To be fair, the English are only a few generations removed from their salad days of Nazi stomping, wave ruling, little brown people exploiting, global dominance. Even Hitler knew he couldn’t fuck with the Royal Navy and it took someone who was for all intents and purposes the living embodiment of divine perseverance to drive the British out of India.

The good old days ended about the time the HMS Sheffield was sent to the bottom by an Argentinean fired, French made, Exocet missile. Only years later did it come to light how close a third-world banana republic came to doing what the combined might of the French and Spanish fleets could never do: rout the English navy on the high seas. Maggie and her team hunkered down in Number 10 knew they would face a public political castration if the Falklands were lost. The Tories would be driven out of Parliament like diseased animals and Nelson’s Column would collapse in shame.

The question remains: did the dissolution of old Empire lead to the utter collapse of English society and pride? Probably. Of course the people who were once ruled by the crown aren’t fairing very well either. Let’s take a little look at the ex-imperial score sheet shall we?

Zimbabwe: fucked
Somalia: fucked
Uganda: fucked
Nigeria: fucked
Palestine: fucked
Iraq: fucked
Pakistan: fucked
India: mostly fucked
Northern Ireland: only just getting unfucked
South Africa: fucked for years by white apartheid rule and now fucked by black democratic rule
China: taking over the world

Not the kind of marks you’d want to bring home to mum and dad.

I’ll let you in on a little secret: England isn’t all rubbish. In fact, once you leave the cities, step out of your car and take a look around, you’ll find that England is indeed that Green and Pleasant Land of Blake and Wordsworth.

Unlike America, England cannot be discovered from behind the tinted windows of a bus and they don’t put car parks in front of the best picture spots. England must be walked to, on and over. The forests might be gone but the grass is there, the rocks, the lakes, the 500-year-old villages, all survive as if they were sealed in a bottle. Yes, every inch has been trod on before but in a way that’s what makes the place so amazing: Angles, Saxons, Jutes, Romans, Vikings, French, all walked this way before. They all did their fair share of raping and pillaging but in the end the land shaped them, not the other way around.

Put down the pint, snuff out the fag and stand on a cliff along the edge of the Orkneys. You might see that pride of place comes from the beauty of the land and not from your local football club. Remember that empires won and lost are military and political constructions based on outmoded nationalistic ideals and that every family is from someplace else if you go back far enough. If all else fails, remember that Cary Grant was British, how cool is that?

The best present I have ever had

Saturday was my 43rd birthday and I celebrated it in a carbon-copy office block in Istanbul working on a migration project. There are, of course, worse places to be for your birthday; a lightly armed Humvee in Helman Provence comes immediately to mind.

My birthdays have always been very low-key affairs; by low-key I of course mean, “completely overlooked by everyone.” I’m not the kind of person whose birth is either remembered or celebrated and, it must be said, I have never encouraged either. The fact is that anytime my family, current girlfriend or wife attempted to plan a do for my birthday, they found it very difficult to find attendees.

When I was in my teens my parents found that the only way to get kids to show up for my birthday parties was to offer some sort of bribe. A particularly painful and humiliating experience for both my parents and myself occurred on my 15th birthday when a group of my supposed friends refused to meet me at a local skateboard park unless we paid for their yearly memberships. After this was done the lot of them proceeded to mock and ridicule my lack of skills, my attire and in general made the entire event one of the more traumatic experiences of my youth. Money can’t buy you love but it would seem it can buy you abuse and derision.

Even by my diminished standards, this year’s showing has been particularly poor: a card from my mum, a card from my current girlfriend, and three e-mails. Parental units number two have forgotten completely and while some people at work get a desk full of confetti, cards and balloons on their birthdays, I know that upon my return to the office I will have a desk empty save for piles of junk mail and, for some reason, discarded green pens.

Three years ago, on the eve of my 40th, my partner gave it a good go and tried to organize something a bit special. The best that she could manage was for me to share a celebration with her 29 year-old Niece. This would have been fine except my incusing in the festivities was obviously an after-thought to the point that when Happy Birthday was sung, it was sung to the Niece and then, after an embarrassed pause, “and Mark too” was hastily added. Can’t you just feel the love?

Contrast this with my partner’s birthdays which are expected to be celebrated for at least a month (her 40th managed to be strung out for an entire year), garner a wheelbarrow full of cards, stacks and stacks of presents, memorable nights on the town and a long-weekend getaway, preferably to someplace warm and expensive where she can flirt shamelessly with the waiters.

There is a wee bit of inequity on the presents front also. It must be said, in all humility, that I do great presents. I quite like finding cool and special gifts for people; not overwhelming but on-target. My partner on the other hand will tend to panic-buy and grab the first thing that her hands touch in a shop regardless of its suitability for the recipient. Or, barring that will slide into a pattern of repetition. Her female family members have received either scarves or earrings for the past five years running and, based on a conversation I had with her last week, the streak will continue this Christmas as well.

Allow me to share with you the birthday presents my Significant Other found for me over the past few years:
• A visit to a shop where I was fitted for an Aeron chair (the chair itself failed to materialize)
• Nothing
• A pair of shoes purchased after I took her to the shop, picked them out and said “yes please” when she asked if she should pay for them

Over the past few years my birthdays have taken a nasty turn for the sinister. Four years ago on my birthday my partner’s brother-in-law, universally loved and admired by all who met him, handsome, well-built, intelligent, 54, had a cerebral aneurism and died while he was out boating. Exactly one year later my only American friend in London died after suffering a horrible seizer.

I only just found out that this year, on my birthday naturally, my father also had a seizer and was rushed to the hospital where he proceeded to have another even worse one. Stacks of tests were run but nothing conclusive was found. The current best guess theory is that his anti-seizer medication might have caused the episodes. Hopefully this same logic does not apply to birth control pills.

Having a birthday during the first week of November means that my special day always falls on or around US elections. The last eight years have produced very little in the way of joyous surprises and in fact, if I were a drinking man, I would have greeted the dawns of my birthdays in 2000 and 2004 looking up at the world from the gutter outside whatever pub was the last one I was thrown out of.

Things were a little different this year.

I am under no illusion that Barack Obama will fulfil all my liberal dreams. He’s going to piss me off as he struggles to find the centre and reach a consensus within his own party. The death penalty won’t go away, the culture of gun ownership will continue to thrive and those genetically defective racists in the Deep South will continue to hate Obama because he has a “Muslim sounding name.”

Let’s not forget that the Republicans, with the ferocity of a bear defending her young. will fight every one of his proposals, no matter how rational, no matter how beneficial for the country. He will yield, at times, to political expediency and his programs will be tempered by a bankrupt treasury, a crippling financial crisis and a world which views the Unites States as a vicious thug. He is about to step into the hardest job in the world; with the highest expectations stacked on his shoulders and with 47% of the country hoping he will fail so that they can say “I told you so.”

And yet…

And yet, if only 40, 30, 20% of the changes he promised on the campaign trail ever become reality we will be the better for it. If he can alter the tone in Washington from one of secrecy and deceit to openness and dialogue, he will have accomplished a great deal. If, and it’s a huge “if”, he can deftly negotiate the ruins left by his predecessor and somehow, someway, reverse the fortunes of America, stop her moral compass from spinning and rebuild her position within the eyes of a sceptical and cynical world; if he can manage to survive without falling victim to one of those slack-jawed rednecks, then maybe, just maybe, some of my birthday wishes will come true. I couldn’t ask for a better present than that.

YES WE DID!

I’ve been up most of the night. There is simply no way that I can, in my present state, write coherently about what the world has witnessed tonight. My father who, in his exuberance, forgot all about time zones and called me at five thirty this morning echoed the feelings of millions, “I never thought that I would live to see a black man become president, it brought tears to my eyes. I can’t help but think this is going to make a hell of a difference in America and around the world. The difference between his [Obama’s] reasoned, sane approach and the insanity of the past eight years.”

This victory is only the end of the beginning. Never mind the talk about Obama’s first 100 days- it could take a hundred years to reverse the damage caused by nearly a decade of Republican domination. Lest we forget that bigotry is alive and well, even in a solidly blue state, the ban on same-sex marriage is looking likely to pass in California. The struggle continues.

Setting aside my exhausted amazement and joy, I am still rational enough to know that the problems that faced the US and the world on November 3rd are still there on November 5th. Obama has taken over as captain of a ship that has already sunk and it is difficult to fathom how he and his team are going to begin patching the holes and pumping the water out.

Unquestionably he is going to make mistakes and many of his decisions will anger a good many people on both sides of the aisle: nothing is so fleeting as a President’s high approval rating. However, if anyone in American politics is capable of learning from their missteps and not repeating them it is Obama. He had the keen understanding that wining the Democratic Primary was not the same as winning the Presidency and never for one second settled into a pattern of political sloth or hubris.

I should remind my European friends that under Obama you will not see a sudden transformation of America into a gentle giant. No one gets to be President of the US without an ironclad belief in American supremacy. The tone will change, the communication will improve, some of the more oppressive foreign polices will be scrapped or modified but Obama believes that the US should be a shining light on the world stage and not merely a bit player in a global version of an off-Broadway road-show. No matter how liberal or progressive, every single American is at heart a fanatic patriot and such feelings cannot but influence the international dialogue.

It has been a long, somewhat tearful night and I am emotionally spent. In two-hours I have to be in a soul-sucking meeting and at first light tomorrow I’m due to be on a plane for somewhere. I will leave the in-depth analysis to the pros of the press and the hacks in the blogsphere but right now, I need a shave.

Bloody Americans

Let me tell you what Americans are. Americans are truly convinced that theirs is the greatest country which ever existed. They believe that everyone, from starving beggars on the streets of Mexico to the Queen of England would, if given the chance, murder a sack of puppies to get citizenship.

To the vast majority of the population that lives between the two coasts, there are only two types of people in the world, Americans and those who want to be Americans. My God, these people even drink American beer!

Americans cannot understand why anyone wouldn’t want to be just like them. It is inconceivable to them that the Italians can love Italy, the Moroccans can love Morocco or that, God forbid, the French can love France.

Millions of Americans are functionally illiterate in a language that is spoken by a huge percentage of their population. On the rare occasions they venture out of their home county you can find them in the passport queues of all the airports in Europe, clutching their blue passports and talking loudly about how things are run so much better back home.

American students, wanting to “explore other cultures” set off for a summer abroad only to spend their time eating MacDonald’s hamburgers, drinking heavily and making fools of themselves on inner-city trains.

Don’t get me started about the culture of gun ownership. These guys pack almost as much heat as the average Iraqi street gang.

They tout the fact that they have a magnificently advanced health care system without being able to see its flaws and inadequacies.

I am, of course, damned by association. My accent is similar to theirs and therefore I must from there. How can I explain to an ill-treated waiter or berated hotel clerk that I am not one of them?

By narrow majorities they keep electing governments that swing to the right so almost half of their population lives in near permanent disenfranchisement.

Perhaps the best thing I can say about Americas is that their currency is so hopelessly devalued that those of us lucky enough to be living in Europe can treat their cities like giant after-Christmas sales and plunder their stores with impunity.

Not that they are all bad. They do play baseball and I’ve heard they have trained some of their French residents to play ice hockey. They also amuse themselves by participating in some sort of football that they play with their hands and which is totally unrecognizable and incomprehensible to the rest of the world.

Despite the fact that they long ago cast out their English overlords, they still sigh and fawn over Mother England and indiscriminately import leftover British TV shows to fill their gaping cultural void.

I for one am getting pretty tired of these funny-talking, holier than thou, tuque wearing, Molson Golden swilling, moose eating, gun toting rednecks and if it were up to me we’d move that boarder fence from Mexico up to where it is really needed- along the 49th parallel. It’s time to protect the decent, hardworking folk in the United States from those ugliest of all North Americans: Canadians.