Rich's Wanderful: Underwater Cycling

Bloging from Miami Beach, B.O.A.C,

The United Kingdom, Atlantis, Ho Chi Minh City and Robert Maxwell... what do they all have in common? Currently all of the above are lurking below a considerable amount of precipitation with no hint of an end in sight.

So while the UK version might be the cuddly-wuddly, roll it into a ball and stick a carrot in it, sliding down hilltops, pensioner murdering, chillier than Mr. Frostie's handle, frozen kind; here in HCMC we are still labouring under the literal and figurative cloud of a never ending rainy season.

There's real problems with the rains here, most of which are linked to the ZX Spectrum powered, city electricity structure collapsing like a foppish uncle with the vapours every time the sky 'looks a bit Lancashire'. The other problems are to do with the aftermath, as the immediate flooding of the major city streets prevents you getting anywhere (which, if you're somewhere with a cocktail hour, isn't too bad) and even when the streets do clear, walking on them becomes a process about as pleasant as cleaning your toilet with your bare feet while a cackling Ferne Cotton plucks your eyelashes out with her grimy fingers.

In Saigon's constant mission to always be counter intuitive, rain doesn't clear the streets of filth and grime, rather it brings up the cess and cack and detritus to the surface like blood to a beaming child's ruddy cheeks on a cold day. In this way, the personality of Saigon will always remain intrinsically linked to the stench.

My flatmate recently made a diary of the aroma's around Saigon, which basically boiled down to:

Monday: Toilet, rotting flesh, over ripe fruit, beer, poo

Tuesday: Toilets, rotting flesh, fruit, beer, sick and poo.

Wednesday: Toilets, flesh, fruit, beer, sick, poo and just a hint of lavender.

It's quite a thing to autosave a list of disgusting things to your hard drive so you can reproduce them in your blog (just ask Leslie Grantham) but it is absolutely true that Saigon smells like nothing, nor anywhere else that I've been, read smell biographies about, or had some street grime sent to me from.

If, perchance you disagree and wish to send me some filth from your city or town, then please do so. Perhaps we could have a low budget X - Factor where some piles of shite are paraded as entertainment. We can call it "Britain's Got Talent" ('parp').

Wakemeupbeforeyougogocusimnotplanninongoinsolo.

xxx

Rich's Wanderful: Pho Kit

GOOOOOOOOOOOD MORNING VIET..... oh, sod it.

Through time, the great philosophers (Socrates, Nietzsche, Kyle) have all mused on the life of a man through reasoned consideration of the human experience and lie detector tests. Great literature is constantly preoccupied with the cyclical nature of the human experience. In the mater bothering, eye gouging, orgy of Oedipus Rex, the Sphinx posed the riddle of the three ages of man; In Twelfth Night, Feste the clown muses that 'What's to come is still unsure', and the Very Hungry Caterpillar had to eat his way through 1 red apple, 2 green pairs, 3 purple plums, 4 red strawberries, 5 whole oranges, a cake, a salami, a swiss cheese, ice-cream, cherry pie a whole watermelon and a single leaf before he could realise his full flutterby potential. It's a fable which is either a nuanced rhetoric on the importance of experience to formulation of the psyche, or Kerry Katona's daily 'to do' list.

So it is with these musings in mind that once again my feet have itched like Usain Bolt's slippers and I have relocated the blog to the streets of Ho Chi Minh city, better known as Saigon. Like the US army, various stoned pack-packers and a very successful Vespa sales rep before me, I now find myself pitched up in this often filmed but little visited city in the South of Vietnam.

The tedium and tiredness of a 16 hour journey (highlight = the peanuts) quickly gave way to befuddled anxiety when I reached the Vietnamese boarder control and realised that the local immigration processes were probably sketched on the back of a fag packet and hidden in a safe that everyone was looking for the key to. Scrawny, clueless looking officials in ill fitting olive green shirts stood around attempting to adjust their frowns just enough to convince their superiors that they were taking it all very seriously and not standing around idly while a gazillion new arrivals jostle pointlessly for some indication of what the bloody hell was going on.

In front of me in the queue were two Chinese Monks apparently failing miserably to be allowed to go about their business. The argument which followed regarding the legitimacy of their papers took approximately 14 hours and so many officials that it appeared that they were recruiting, training and dispatching new officers to add to the futile squabble. After a while they were led off to another room, presumably to be frowned at in new and exciting ways, leaving me free to approach the counter, cough up my $50 and be waved instantly through. Money definitely speaks louder than mixed metaphors in this part of the woods.

Once I was able to leave the airport, I was feeling sweatier than Satan's jock strap, so to get into the icy, air conditioned cab was exquisite. The heat is almost terrifying, because it seems to suck all the air out of the room, leaving you with only a kind of moist stew which occasionally allows oxygen to enter your lungs. Sweat beads gather on glasses, on shirts, around your wrist watch and if you wear tight pants, you might as well cut out the middle man and simply boil your gonads in warm marmalade.

In this type of oppression, the last thing you want is to be swapping barely understandable platitudes with a hotel owner in the middle of the back-packer district of Saigon whilst wondering if the ten thousand or so locust-like scooters which swam the city streets are actually participating in a kind of live action Grand Theft Auto where the mission is to attempt to fracture your spine with a wing-mirror.

Still, as a hotelier, Mr. Binh is friendly enough. The only real draw back is his increasingly hostile attempts to sell you whatever shite he was able to pick up off ebay the previous week. Sim cards, chocolate, water, fags, T-shirts, tactical nuclear weapons. He's so excited to have a captive audience of bewildered teachers to flog his wares to he actually leaps from buttock to buttock in his chair with excitement if anyone so much as shows a passing interest. His reaction to a knock back is more disappointment than anger, but don't feel sorry for him. The mark up is at least 50% and the quality is at least -40%. Who said business was difficult? - think of a number, double it, sell it. If you can't do that, you're fired.

So over the next week I'll actually start teaching English to the little darlings of Vietnam, which should provide ample distraction from the fifty cent beers, trying to count money in the millions and blocking up the holes in the walls from the gathering armies of furious looking ants.

More updates to follow - probably in their thousands. In the meantime, remember, this is the country where 'five dollar' can get you some things, but it still can't get you through customs.

Saigoneroaming xx

Return

No Mr. Bond, I expect you to blog...

Blinking, red eyed, white skinned and looking leaner than a butchers dog after a weekend at a swanky health spa, eating hummus sausages and playing mixed doubles with Cheryl Cole and Lassie, I finally emerge from the dark cavern of my blog-exile and launch into the second phase of the life and times of the reservation.

This is indeed the second phase of my project to bring whimsy, foolhardy rhetoric and misleading opinion to the masses. Actually, when I say masses, I'm referring to you, the tens of people who actually take the time out to read this grim nonsense.

You make me very happy and sad in almost equal measures mainly because I worry that to some people I must be at least as entertaining as stalking ex-girlfriends on Facebin, losing to the computer at chess in 9 seconds and looking for ways to avoid the NSFW tag and avoid detection from the morality police (i.e. your boss at work). I feel the weight of responsibility to match the entertainment value in these wholesome pursuits and spend my nights shivering and wailing that I can't live up to the expectations.

Luckily for me, since my last blog, quite a bit of excitement has been taking place in the wacky world. Oh boy, hasn't it been fun? There's plenty to enjoy out there, like 6 month Chilean potholing expeditions, the George Michael driving school, BP vs. the World and the Pope-aid concert tour. Eventually, I fear that the spending cuts imposed by the gay pin up couple (Cleggover and Camoron) may lead to some actual news being deposited on the telly box, and Natasha Kaplinsky will have to switch her robt face to the matronly 'stern face' setting to report on the 3 day week and public sector walk outs. While it's still the silly season, we can keep ugly things like 'facts', 'debate' and 'information' out of the news, and look at Katy Perry's magnificent swirrling ass instead. Mmmm. Twirrly.

I'm guessing that to some people the visit of the Pope to these shores is significantly newsworthy. In fact, so much time and reverence is being dedicated to Benedictators trip, that the Daily Mail hasn't even mentioned another foreigner on these shores driving down house prices. The BBC has even wheeled out a special 'Pope 2010' graphic to accompany their reports.

You know the BBC are getting serious when they enlist the work experience kid with an A-Level in Fonts, to make some curly graphic appear behind the newsreader, but ultimately making News at 10 look like a low budget PowerPoint presentation by a biscuit company salesman on the quality of Bourbon sales in Scunthorpe. Thus is the power of the Pope. Look upon his wonders and despair.

Well, actually I have despaired a little bit. The trip has been largely a mask of mass public mass delivered with all the mediocrity that attending an open air gig starring Carol Vorderman, Susan Boyle and an old man in a hat could possibly provide. All they needed to do was to add Daniel Bedingfield and Sooty to the bill to make it so boring that members of the congregation start melting each others faces with pilgrim candles just for something to do.

There's a typically British feeling to the way the visit has been staged, lacking the pizazz and balls out, dick swinging largess of an American event, or the class, tradition and reverence of religious events in Europe. We always seem to find a way of giving a large scale event a touch of middle management, patting each other on the back for 'staging this scale of event so very bloody well' whilst the whole thing looks like it's taking place on the main stage of a minor peace festival in the Cotswold's, attended by badminton enthusiasts and sponsored by Muller Rice.

However, underneath all of this, the whole even is stalked by the spectre of the systematic cover up of paedophilia in the church, making the pale white plastic staging look all the more desperate. The mire that the Catholic church has become central to in its role covering up the mess it's responsible for resolving, shows how reluctant mass organisations are to confronting and dealing with their own failures. The head of the Church is seen as God's representative so can't exactly resign, however great the pressure becomes. The scandal is one thing, the cover up quite another. It is always in the cover-up that the true evil becomes exposed, as the people who know but do nothing become as culpable as the monsters perpetrating the crime.

Whatever your views on the church in general, the central idea of faith (be good, treat others as yourself, take responsibility, help the weak) are good values to live by in a socially responsible world. If you want to add having a finger wagged at you by a mythical man in the sky to the mix, then who the devil am I to argue the why's and wherefores. I don't care if you think Noel Edmond's is is judging you from the back of a tortoise made of ham or that we all live inside the anus of Anneka Rice, if you live by the principles of being quite nice to people and not stealing my crisps, then as far as I'm concerned, you're A-OK.

Religion, however, is a very different horse to 'faith'. Religion is hierarchy, corporate responsibility and fund raising. Religion is political, personal, furious and moralistic. It decrees war, outlaws contraception, builds monasteries, desecrates monasteries, chases people down the street, forgets to flush the toilet, gets newsprint in the carpet and hides in places you wouldn't expect then jumps out at you giving you quite the fright. Religion causes as many problems as it solves and as such, like dairylea dunkers and The Pussycat Dolls, the Pope isn't necessarily a good idea.

But, he's here now whatever I think about it, so it's time for him to offer support and offer an ear to the victims of hideous crimes committed by servants to his church. If change comes as a result then this Pope could be seen as a great man, who faced up to and conquered a culture of protection and obstruction. I fear though that all that will come to pass is tedious distraction, pretty fonts and a selection of Pope related merchandise intended to bore us into distraction.

So all that's left to say is a big welcome back to the reservation. Follow me. The alternative isn't too good.

Solongandthanksforallthefish xx

Soon to be....

Be not proud...

The spirit of the Reservation lives within the souls of all mankind.
Soon everybody will witness the rebirth of the legend. The four line sentences. The swearing. The insults. The ridiculous metaphors. The use of the word 'bum' without a hint of irony.

Get ready for the level up...

Soon.

So what became of the monkey, monkey, monkey, monkey, monkey

Currently the reservation is dillying and, indeed, dallying around in Oxford. No doubt, I'll be seen loading saddlebags with the complete works of Edith Bowman, wearing a neckerchief and pooh-poohing theories as you read this, whilst swinging from side to side on my ancient bicycle as a result of a rather 'topside' sherry.

The reality is that I'm up to my glands in lesson planning, teaching and the like so the blog has had to go into hibernation for now. Please feel free to check back occasionally to re-read some old posts or leave comments.

Put down the razor blades and shotguns. It'll only be for a couple of weeks while I get used to all this mish mash. We'll meet again. Very. Very. Soon.

Toodlepipmylittlemonkeys. xx

Orb chasing and skirt slobbering

Some people are on the pitch, they’re reading a blog...

It's a curious thing, that once every 4 years, I find that it's completely appropriate to become a gurgling neanderthal, shedding millions of years of natural selection in the process. It leaves me scouring round the flat, scuttling after pigeons that land on the windowsill, hoping to lure them inside so I can bash them to death with an IKEA bedside lamp and grill the meat over the toaster. I got LOVE and HATE tattooed onto my eyelids. I started clapping with my elbows. I enjoyed yelling jingoistic slogans in the direction of the magic picture box in the corner of the pub and imploring some of the fittest men in the world to 'work harder' while I recline in my seat and suck warm beer through a straw like an alcoholic stroke victim.

The World Cup has a reputation for turning hoards of right thinking, modern people into flag draped, riot inciting, monotoned, shameless anti-socials or sunshine fearing, TV worshiping, offside rule explaining, entertainment vacuums. This time around though, the emperor is starting to look somewhat exposed around the edges. This World Cup is a little bit rubbish, despite infinite adverts rubbing their crotch and jocularly backslapping us into remembering how much we all really like football. No really... NO REALLY - YOU DO (eat at McDonald's) YOU DO. FOOTBALL. EURRRGH. FOOTBALL!

I’ve taken a short break to write this, after 7 days cultivating the impression of my buttocks into the couch and treating myself to herculean doses of the most soporific matches in history. I'm begining to think it's me vs. the World Cup. If this was a boxing match, they’d have called it off, mainly on account of being bludgeoned to death by rank tedium and the fearful sight of Alan Shearer seemingly aging on screen before my eyes.

As a dedicated football fan, I really look forward to enjoying my favorite sport with people who have a bi-decade, passing interest in it. I love watching everyone coming together and enjoying the games. The World Cup allows people who normally have stupid pointless things, like friends and lives, to stand in the pub with the rest of us, shouting at In-ger-land for doing a rubbish “ball kick thing” or celebrating a goal by shouting “BINGO”. Of course, there will always be a few hardened wretches, glumly forced into grumbling acceptance that TV is suspended for a month and complaining about the Eastenders start times.

This time around I have a sort of sympathy for the naysayers. My ears are hounded by the relentless muffled white noise of the Vuvuzelas (or ZuluAliens as someone at work calls them – you can tell he’s the father of young children) which make the match sound like it’s being beamed to us direct from the inside of Mosses' arse during a biblical plague of wasps. It's a din more irritating than having your temple prised open with a crowbar and teams of glass ants being pushed inside your brain cavity. At least the unique sound of the screeching little Pingu’s tootling away has caught the public imagination, while somewhere in the middle distance several overpaid athletes hoof their orb to and fro, with a lack of enthusiasm that suggests they're just killing time between Thai massages and adultery.

The action to date has been a humourless, grey display of defensive inscrutability, just begging for characters and big game players to get the flyaway pound shop ball under control and reverse the current trend of pinging it over the bar like Johnny Wilkinson and standing, hands on hips, looking heavenward with a ‘why me’ expression all over their sour puss.

Lucky then that there are a couple of wacky tales underpinning the drudgery and wing-backs. The astonishing sight of the overweight, onion headed North Korean goal hanger blubbing during the national anthem was something to savour, until you remembered that his tears were probably the endgame of a knowing acceptance that failure to cruise to glorious victory would mean suddenly going ‘missing’ and being replaced by another gaggle of interchangeable patriots in the next game as a result of the edict from the 'Dear Leader'.

There's the ludicrous story of a bevvy of Dutch beauties being thrown out of Holland's first game for wearing matching micro dresses that showed sponsorship logos from an evil non-FIFA endorsed brand. Only an organisation as myopic and slapstick as FIFA would fail to realise that banning the dresses and kicking them out of the ground would only draw attention to the brand that oh so badly offended them. Sure. There's literally no way pictures of dutch hotties wearing tiny orange dresses would ever get on TV or in the papers. Behold; Sepp Blatter, the thinking man's idiot.

The hilarity seemed to not only double, but square, when it turned out that monotone ITV summariser Robbie Earle was responsible for the ladies getting into the ground in the first place, leading to him losing his job, his dignity and becoming the unwitting subject of 'Well I would have done the same..' conversations up and down the country between gangs of slobbering teens and overweight, bear knuckled gruntholes.

The opening ceremony promised myriad delights, with a huge concert held in a cavernous corporate rock venue in a South African township called Myideaohell. It was quite a sight to see Shakipsdon'tlie, The Black EyePods and other paid up members of popville trying to whip up some atmosphere. The organisers helped by dumping a load of beach balls on the bedazzled onlookers and first rate strategic flag distribution. The camera's occasional, ill-judged, close ups of the crowd showed them looking like they’ve been bussed in from the Eurovision Song contest to wear sparkly costumes and tick the appropriate boxes of enthusiasm and retain starry eyed rapture, making whole thing resemble a Loony Tunes re-imagining of the Nuremberg rally.

But, for those of us who know, this is everything we've been waiting for. Only a certain type can appreciate the warm, sunny feeling of waking up each day knowing that there's going to be 3 full matches. Not only that, but they're on the telly. Then, the world seems to open it's full glory to us; no matter that it's BBQ weather outside, no matter that the kids want to be taken for a bike ride, or you need to eat, or that you've failed to move for 12 hours and the DVT is threatening to move towards your spine if you untie the bit of string holding it in your calf. For just a short time, every four years, the world comes together. And watches a goalless draw between countries you've never been to. Ah. Sweet mysteries of life.

BabywhenyoucallmeyoucancallmeAl... xx

No place like homeless

28 Blogs Later...



It's a bi-product of my nomadic lifestyle over the last couple of years, that I seem to be in a constant state of unpacked half and half. The things that I own, the books that I've read, the CDs I've borrowed and never returned (and put in box labelled "Mwahhhahhahhhaaa, it's MINE now") they all live in stasis. Little nuggets of my personality packed away in the attics of friends and family waiting to eventually be reanimated into my world. It feels like I'm trapped in a cautionary satire of my own life, written by a disturbed John Lennon obsessive, riffing on the idea of removing all my possessions and warbling a tedious, patronising song about it.

The stinging and painful sensation of homelessness comes into focus during more depressed moments, like when I stub a toenail, drop a plate or stand, weeping, in front of a mirror. Being without a base causes a worrisome split within me and gives me a feeling of something being out of joint. Although I've had some great times renting in flat shares, it's inevitable to be haunted by an impotent feeling of not being able to influence your surroundings and the acceptance that you must at all times be seen to be grateful and get your bloody feet off the sofa.

I've never actually owned my own house, mainly on account of the fact that I don't possess a magic duck that shits golden eggs, so find myself somewhere short of the 47 billion lifetimes I would need to be working for in order to afford a deposit. Instead, I've been wandering from short term lease to short term lease and sharing with live in landlords. Although I've never been anything other than welcome (in no small part on account of the pennies coughed up monthly) there will always be a sense of being the second rooster in the hen house. Especially when I was discovered burying turds and crowing outside the back door at six in the morning.

Perhaps my dislocation from my location is caused by the split from my possessions as much as the lack of the traditional notion of a home. This is a personal Hell, not because I live in a manner that is even approaching "mildly inconvenient", but because I am absent from my heaven. Everything I own is absent from me, locked away in storage and bundled into boxes. It's a continuously weird situation to be so transient and it's a situation that makes me wonder constantly about what my future holds.

When you lose something important; your wallet, an old letter, the key to a secret basement dungeon, the frustration is driven by the function or emotional significance of the item and how desperate you are to use it. Eventually it dissipates and you give up searching, so the anger, the looking down the children's throats, the threats to perform an emergency c section on the kitten, they give way to a constant migrane of irritation. This feels like a yearning, caused by the knowledge that it's out there. Somewhere. Mocking you. Entering your dreams and whispering quietly; "I'm here... why can't you find me....? I'm so aloneeeeeeeeee..... BURN THINGS"

All the things I've owned in the past and at some point given away, outgrown or sold for crack, they're all out there, somewhere. My history is in those artifacts. My old sofa is being guffed on by a flatulent, bum picking sloth in somebody else's front room. My old washing machine is being cacked on by a seagull on a rancid landfill. My first toothbrush was probably pushed inside a broken oil pipe in a dismally futile 'Top Kill' exercise.

Thinking about these things can lead to either a sad nostalgia, where your missing object is romanced, mourned or even personified, which is exactly what I was telling my hairbrush this morning. I know it's silly to attach painful emotions to mere items, but it's hard not to want to pin your experiences to things that remind you of certain times in your life. It has to be better to think of the objects you shed as discarding a past, rooting you in inactivity. I'm glad I can move on and create a vacuum which is ready to be filled with experiences rather than commodities.

I do miss a home and a solid base. It makes life more comforting to know you can always return to your own sanctuary, but for now, life is constantly about emptying baggage and doing as much as I can to refill it. Perhaps next time, I'll pitch up somewhere I'll be able to stay.

At least my old toothbrush is doing its bit to stop the apocalypse. Not a surprise really. It did have Mighty Mouse on it and there ain't nothing he can't do. Apart from blocking pipes vomiting oil into the sea, it appears, but then I might have missed that episode.



Callmeonthelinecallmecallmecallmeanytimecallme xx