The flat by the sea...

I had a 6 month changing moment last night. Psyc had another row with H-Bomb in the week which I overheard the end of as he shouted ‘well I think you probably should as well’ down the phone as I went for my shower at 7.45 am. Far too early to be talking, yet alone shouting. On the back of that he got motivated to flat hunt, with the plan being that he, one of his course mates and me will get a 3 bed flat/house and live without the wrath of the Bomb. He found one that sounded really good- three
double bedrooms, furnished, and was ready to move into as soon as- which was no small achievement in the Plym. Me and Psyc viewed it yesterday, with Helen, the Lettings person, at about 5.15.
The best thing about it is was its literally a stones through from the sea- the views are of gardens and the sea, and I stood on the seafront, as the sun was setting and marvelled at the possibilities of early morning swims, fishing, and balmy summer evening barbeques. Then we went in the flat and it got even better- the living area was 3 times the size of where I am now, and there will be half as many people. There was a decked terrace where my Brazil hammock would make afternoon chill out sessions a dream, and it had 2 power showers, a dishwasher, and a separate dining room with a roof beam to do pull ups on. There was also a single bedroom that I imagined we could either use as a study, or rent out cash-in-hand to some of the visiting PhDs we get at work for a few months a year- this would make it slightly cheaper than H-Bombs abode, with an order of magnitude more advantages. The only problem I could envisage would be deciding who got what rooms; there were two were large but normal doubles, and one that had its own floor, ensuite and separate mini roof terrace. I couldn’t stop smiling as thoughts of summer evening parties, making a herb garden, and renting a huge TV swirled in my head.

Psyc was just as keen. We are very different people, but get on well and have an understanding that I lack with the rest of my current housemates. He was sure that Aro, his Portuguese course mate would be equally thrilled, and set off to give her a lift to show her the area.

This morning Psyc comes down and shows me a text from Aro saying that after sleeping on it she’s not sure about the place, and whether we would like to go and look at a house in a different suburb.

So annoyed!

Shes not even been in there yet! My summer house dreams may be in tatters. Psyc has said he will try to convince her today, or else we could try and get a third person in. I’ve never done that before but it must be fairly easy? I’m so sure I want to live there I would happily pay the extra rent for a month or two until we found someone else.

On the drive home from our viewing I said to Psyc that it feels like something has to go wrong- we surely can’t be this lucky?

Well maybe it has. Aro, who are you and what are you doing?

Bomb Fallout V's Metal Fatigue

So the H-Bomb, that bitch of a so-called landlady, has disconnected the house's Broadband and TV supply from Virgin. This partially explains my lack of posts over the last few weeks and fully explains my lack of watching Dave- the freeview channel that was excellent. You don’t miss these things until they’re gone.

I went to a gig in Liskard last night. A friend is an engineer, and he works with a load of old guys who have a band doing classic rock - occasionally bordering into metal - covers. Their name, Metal Fatigue, is quite simply brilliant on at least three levels. We got a minivan over to the next county and felt like minor celebrities as we talked with the band at the bar while the locals looked on at us whispering 'that’s the lot who've come over from Plymouth, that is'

I've always been one for trying to appreciate new music and bands, and dont own a lot of music that wasn’t released in my era. It’s not because I don’t like AC/DC, Pink Floyd, Led Zeppelin etc, but just because I don’t relate to the people singing it as well as I do to the more up to date bands. With all that said, there was a moment last night when I was stood in the bar, 5 pints of Tribute down and I was struck by what an absolutely brilliant song Wish You Were Here is by The Floyd. Maybe it was the beer, the setting, my emotions or soomething else, but I thought it was purely fantastic. I’ve listened to it about 6 times this morning already and although I've now got the hangover, rather than the enhancement, of fresh alcohol to interpret the words, it makes me think deeply about what they mean to the guy who wrote them, and especially what they mean to me.

The test of time is the hardest of all to overcome.

...which Metal Fatigue's valentine song (to the tune of Slade's 'So here it is Merry Christmas') probably won’t:



Good fun though.

The H-Bomb went off

Looking back now, it feels like the argument was inevitable, but I’m still surprised at its severity. I don’t enjoy conflict with people - I try not to get wound up about anything - but sometimes you have to make a stand. Sometimes you’re forced into a corner by a cold hard bitch and you have to engage just to avoid being bullied.



As soon as we began talking the loose comments piggybacked their way on to the end of an otherwise civilised sentence. The replies contained their own munitions, sometimes hidden in a pause, sometimes on full display, but they all hit their target. Once you’ve set off on this path it’s a slippery slope. Your momentum carries you forward to places you don’t especially want to go. Voices get raised, people are talking over others and neither wants to back down. The noise conveys no meaning but defiance. Any fragment of reserve that was in place at the start has been washed away by the rushing blood and all that remains in its place is instinct. Instinct from ancestors that lived in a wild time, when they had to fight to survive. Soon the insults weren’t camouflaged. They were clear. Rude. Excessive.

A very slippery slope.

My housemate, Psyc, was involved to. He remained calmer than me, despite receiving some heavier flak. I was amazed at how annoying the H-Bomb, my landlady, could be when she went off but I’m still a bit surprised and disappointed in myself for getting so wound up. That said I don’t regret anything I said and think that she deserved it. Some things need to be said.

After 15 minutes, with no progress made, the H-Bomb said,

“Im terminating this meeting, and will be serving eviction notices on you two”

Her fingers were pointing at Psyc and me.

Evicted.

Bring back Norris McWhirter

I went to Exeter on Saturday. I saw the Twin for a few hours then in the evening, in a different type of way, saw David Ford. I very much enjoyed the afternoon and evening. David Ford was/is a brilliant musician with a powerful, distinctive voice and a huge songwriting talent. He walked on and without a word began his song 'State of the Union' by playing and recording an instrument onto a loop which then continued playing as he sang and added in more and more instruments. It built up and up and up before he suddenly stopped the music and sang the last line unaccompanied. It was an amazing thing to witness live (not for the first time, YouTube has come to the rescue of my description).

Thinking about it afterwards I was in awe of his confidence at not mucking it up- it would really would have thrown a spanner in the works if he did as it would keep on playing over and over, and quickly become a whole set of spanners. This could easily have happened- during the gig he broke a string, the drum fell over, and his guitar strap came off - all of which would have caused a major problem with the recording bit.

Anyway, the gig was really good, but he is so intense, and the songs are so intensely downbeat that I found it quite draining. I'm not saying I think he shouldn't be intense, negative, and a bit miserable, but it really was an effort to get involved with each and every song as it consumed so much attention. After three or four songs I needed a few minutes relax and tell myself everything was going to be alright. In a 'normal' gig you can do this as you're stood up watching, dancing, or whatever and then you can go to the bar, have a joke with a friend or just throw some eye yarns round the room. In the venue he played, The Phoenix, everyone is sat down facing the stage and you're about 2 metres away from his guitar. It feels like it would be really rude to look away. You just have to sit there while he gives you both barrels and hope you dont black out.

Checking him out on YouTube I have seen a few really lighthearted, almost comedy covers ('My Heart Will Go On' and 'Stan' have lingered in my memory) either, or any other of which would have made some really good breaks in the intensity. He did cover Leonard Cohen, however, and he has a cover of The Smiths 'There Is A Light' on his myspace, so I guess he likes to cover dark songs as well as 'pop' ones, depending on his mood.

The support was Ruarri Joseph who was also highly enjoyable, and somewhat more optimistic in his words. I'm not sure if it was the lack of intensity, or something in the music, but I wasn't nearly as moved by his performance as David Ford's one. I'd quite like to be Ruarri Joseph's friend- but I didn't feel compelled to buy (Well, illegally download) his CD.

I also visited the narrowest street in the world (well nearly- see later)- which is only 64 cm wide at one end.

The wide (1.2m) end of the 2nd narrowest street in the world

However, after the narrowest street glory days of the 80's and 90's, the success was shook to its core in 2007 when a street in Germany successfully challenged Parliament and took its place in the Guinness Book of Records.



Have a look at the photo though. That's not a street! Its a gap between a building and a house- and a wooden house at that. Surely there must be some mistake. The standards of the Guinness World Records seem to have gone right off since Mcwhirter carked it. Theres no way he would have stood for this. Im seriously considering getting in there and sorting the world records team out before their own stock starts laughing at them.

I did wonder what criteria 'a street' actually has to have, but the Exeter one has at least got some doors to flats on it, so people live there. If the German ones allowed I may as well buy a bit of land, build two houses close together and then write to the council and say the 5 cm gap between them is a street. The Germans have missed the whole spirit of the narrowest street competition.

I think Exeter council should get some cement and reduce the gap slightly, just enough to get some of Mcwhirter's paduwans down with their ruler. I want to see Parliament Street back where it belongs as top of the narrow street pile.

HTML heavy; The Amazon

We head out into the night. I think to myself that my view would make a fantastic Imax cinematic experience, but I tell myself to stop thinking too much about what would be good and just take it in what is great, amazing, Amazonian, right now. The Rio Negro is 3 or 4 miles wide at this point, and stretches to the horizon out in front. I’m in a long motorised canoe with my fisherman, Sentana, zooming along in triangle formation with Big J and fisherman BigHat to my right and Calveson, alone, on point. Huge lines of lighting in the distance give an erie sense of scale of the river and the occasional flash closer to us lights up the boats, showing us for a split second exactly where the others are. The perspective from the front of the boat, with the warm wind in my face and lightening show maxing out the amount of info my eyes can process, really is fantastic. I feel more like a special forces soldier on a secret Amazonian mission than the description of ‘semi-nerdy scientist on a jolly’ which a friend had recently made with uncomfortable accuracy. My favourite moments are the 2 or 3 minutes where there is no electrical light at all and I can let my mind drift and try to consolidate the memory of the journey to the first discus fishing trip.

Sentana and BigHat: smoking during a refuel!

We were lucky to get here. We hired our boat and crew yesterday lunch time, loaded up the boat with supplies and equipment and arranged to set off that evening. We could see the local river beach situated on an island a short ferry trip away, so headed off there to while away the afternoon. We checked out the Fio Dental on display, swam in the river, and A German guy who had tagged along with us took some cool photos of us chilling in the shallows. Check out the bearded scientist (right)

On our return to the mainland we discovered our boat had sank. It had filled up with fuel, driven off the pontoon and something caused one of the hull planks to give way. We’re still not sure if it was some sort of explosion, or if drive had just hit something in the water. Either way, the boat keeled over, the three people on board jumped off, and the boat sank to the bottom. Luckily for capitano the bottom was only a few metres away, so he was able to get a tow to the shore and the next day pump out most of the water and save his livelihood. The photo shows the hole that caused the floating issue (photographed the day after during repairs).

To say the least, our bags were somewhat damp. My rucksack, that I had so meticulously packed had weighed 22Kg a the airport. Now I could barely move it, yet alone pick it up. All our sterile equipment; sponges, tubes, syringes, pipettes, and, for that matter, all our other equipment had taken a really good dunking. We nervously laughed as we checked whether or not we could save anything. We spread it all out to dry- it looked a bit like a pile of recovered things from an aeroplane disaster.

A day later we had salvaged what we could, borrowed some items from others and set off in boat number two. A few hours up river and the absolute wilderness made us rediscover the jokes we had had the evening before, most following the ‘what the fuck would we have done if the hull had given way here’ line of reasoning.

'Drown' seemed the most likely answer.

Boat #2 at camp 2


Calveson setting fishing nets - he was a lot better at it than me


A rainstorm at camp 1 (ill be amased if this works...)

The trip was a wonderful adventure, and while extremely tiring at times, it lived up to all of my expectations. We fished at night- an hour of so driving from our various beach camps and then paddling around the small tributaries until the day began to break. We returned to the hammocks and slept like dead men for 5 or 6 hours but then woke as the heat became too much. The days were relaxed in the extreme. We swam, set nets for piranha, watch the river dolphins cruise around the main channel. Later on we eat piranha, chilled out in our hammocks, took pictures and read. I tried a different Amazonian fruit every day for two weeks, including cashew fruit (as in the nut - you can see it in the picture), which i didn't even know existed. My favourite thing of the whole trip was the routines of doing the same things every day, things that ill probably never do again. I didn’t miss the city life at all- telephones, computers, tv, prepared food, rushing to do things- all of these were forgotten in an instant. I adored the time spent on the river, it was a simple existence, but one that my mind and body cheered for every day.

The Girls of the SMARTBuddy Mansion

Diary: I recently read some of my old posts and enjoyed remembering how I was thinking at the time, how perspectives have changed and so on, so I’m going to do another post for my own benefit in 6 months time...

The current crop from the mansion are:

Carrie from Christmas eve had, as she does, slipped from my mind until I just read my list of posts on my Blogger Dashboard. The day after I posted about her I was pointed in the direction of her FaceBook account by the C-Unit and messaged her, but have received nothing back. I wish I hadn’t been so clever in my message now. I can’t possibly send another. It’s probably for the best. She's called Carrie from Christmas Eve for a reason.

Girl A has moved to Australia. Oh well.

LEA is somewhat missing in action. We text a bit, but I think she’s more lonely than interested, but I’m not sure. She’s great, and we have ‘potential’, but I don’t think I’ll even see her until the spring or summer, by which time she will probably be married.

The Saturday night twin: The radio silence was unexpectedly broken soon after the last post and over the next week we sent the occasional flurry of texts which eventually set up a 'lunch date' for the coming Sunday. She had been to visit her mum in Cornwall and got off her train at Plym Station on her way home. Unfortunately for me that was the only getting off that the day was to see. I met her just outside the station. It was a little awkward. I drove us to the Barbican and since it was too early for lunch I suggested we go to the aquarium. This was probably a little selfish, but I saw it and immediately thought it would be a good place to walk around, have a chat, relax, and have something to look at during times when we had nothing to say. After thinking about it for another 20-30 seconds I thought it was a genius idea, but probably shouldn’t have told her so.

It was really good and I was enjoying it. They had a huge tank of UK fish like I saw snorkeling last year, and a tropical tank with loads of fish I saw in Sumatra. I think my favourite thing was a very large (football sized) octopus that I’ve never seen close up before, but who could probably have done with a bigger tank. The twin was easy to talk to, seemed quite relaxed and we had (well, I had) a good time. It was good to have her there without the other twin knocking about as unlike at New Year it was always really easy to tell who she was and who she wasn’t.

Then we went for lunch, which I was struggling with a bit on two fronts. I was mildly hungover and exceptionally full. I had been out the night before for 6 pints of Guinness, which is dinner in itself, but also had two normal dinners (I had dinner at home then got invited out by El Capitano with whom, after a few beers, I went for a curry with). Even after skipping brekkie in the morning I still felt like I’d just eaten my own liver, and a pub lunch with a pint didn’t really have its usual appeal. The food, thankfully, was good, and I managed to eat most of it in between feeling the early onset of obesity. The talk was fine. It was nice. It wasn’t amazingly good or bad, and continued over a cup of tea at my house and a lift back to the train station. I gave her a brief hug and a kiss on the cheek goodbye. I even broke out a wave as she walked off and looked back. That was it.

I guess my main thoughts are that it was fun, but not as much fun as meeting while drunk and kissing. I was being so measured and precise in everything I said- I’m sure she was as well. Pretty much everything I said got proof read before it came out to make sure there was nothing too strange in it. This, coupled with the fact that we didn’t really know each other led to lots of candy conversation about what we both did, what family we had, what we both did and what family we had. There was no blurting out of anything that would have given some real information about who we were, or who we were pretending to be (which would have been something at least). My sober brain was busy analysing what was being said, the behaviours we were displaying, the silences, the eye contact, but I didn’t really learn anything of note. Bring back getting ruined and drunk conversations any day. My previous few relationships have all evolved out of seeing someone out a few times, having a kiss or more over a series of drunken nights, from which we have, or have not, emerged a few months later as a couple.

I agree that that probably says more about me than her, but I’m not really thrilled or giddy, or whatever else I feel I should be about the prospect of two or three months of getting to know someone. It’s really not her- I wouldn’t want two or three months of sober conversations with Jessica Alba. I'm serious*. I want an instant hit. I want results. I just want to know. Maybe the Saturday night twin and I would be good together, but it’s going to take forever to even find out at this rate.
The main problem is that she lives in a different city. This means we’re trying to get to know each other without the benefit of being able to pop out for lunch, or a beer, or ten beers. This is no small thing. If it was the summer we could go camping or something. If one of us was really keen we could see each other on weeknights. If she lived up the street, we’d know in a few days if it’s going to be worth a go. They say long distance relationships are a struggle, but at least there is a relationship; this a long distance non relationship. I don’t know if it’s worth carrying on. So dont carry on, right?

The only other fact that has some bearing on the above is a holiday. Last week Barbie emails me to see if I want to go on a camping / surfing holiday to Biarittz at the end of May. I bite his electronic hand off as this sounds totally excellent. He buys flights, books the campsite and says, quite casually the next day,

‘Oh you know the Saturday night twin is going, don’t you?’

‘What? No. What?’

‘Yeah, shes going. Oh and LEA as well’

‘What? Nooo. Really?’

So now I'm going on holiday with the Saturday night twin in May. How awkward is that?! Ive got to explain to her how this happened without me knowing. How it really happened without me knowing, and not that I made it happen, which is how it looks. Plus now I’ve got this holiday hanging over my non-relationship like a smell that I can’t quite tell is good or bad. It could be good. Great even. It could be shit. It could be one of the smells that we keep in the fume cupboard that if you smell too much you die. It depends on what happens over the next few months. And LEA will be there to witness it all going off.

Good stuff Barbie.

*Well nearly.

January is rubbish

I heard on the news yesterday that it was officially the most depressing day of the year.

It says, "GPs say exercise and reading up on depression are ways to beat the blues".

WTF? Its dark and cold outside, you've got no money and you're feeling a bit depressed. Whats the one thing thats not going to help that situation? - Going out to buy, then sitting down and reading a book on depression. That really is depressing.

Thank fuck its out of the way!