16 June 2009
There is currently rather more action at the Rickbot Memory Project.
16 May 2007
Sigh.
08 August 2006
Life note: Welcome to the Doll's House - 5 April 2005
My bank statements read like the index of Zagat's. I really must bring my spending under control.
In other news, Bots all made the mammoth trip down to the South London Theatre in order to see the play what Darien directed [not that he would - in just 16 months time - return the favour by attending my Film Festival, far more conveniently located in Angel (although of course, I do not currently know this, such is the nature of a daily diary)]. The play was quite serious and slow, and not a great deal of fun, but I believe that was all in the writing: Darien did the best that could be done of it, and that - surely - must be considered a success. Because we were in the dead end of South London none of us could really hang around too long in the bar for drinks, so I went home to bed.
Oh, and Maria was there, and it turns out she was Darien's stage manager. Cool.
4 April 2005 - Dinner with M
Last night I bought a new digital camera, five and a half weeks after I bought my last one. Nothing makes you appreciate the speed, quality, weight, size, optical zoom, capacity, exposure features, focus, flash, white balance, battery pack and giant LCD display of a £200 digicamera than previously owning a £70 digicamera.
I now have about 300 photos of my living room, plus a movie of my coffee table. Perhaps once I'm in Rio I'll find more interesting subjects to document.
I also went to Brasserie Roux, in the Sofitel on Pall Mall, and ate black pudding for the first time. I've always assumed I would hate black pudding, since it looks black and burned, and I've been a little put off by my grandfather's tales of making it as a child (essentially, he was paid to stir a giant cauldron of boiling blood and fat). Still, when I was tried some last night I found it to be utterly delicious, comparable to some of the finest foie gras. I now regret always scraping it off my plate for my pa to eat instead. Man, I gotta get me some more of that. Dinner was deliciously preceded by the best gin martini ever at Albanach in Trafalgar Square, which is rather improbably a stylish and Scottish-themed cocktail bar.
My bank statements read like the index of Zagat's. I really must bring my spending under control.
In other news, Bots all made the mammoth trip down to the South London Theatre in order to see the play what Darien directed [not that he would - in just 16 months time - return the favour by attending my Film Festival, far more conveniently located in Angel (although of course, I do not currently know this, such is the nature of a daily diary)]. The play was quite serious and slow, and not a great deal of fun, but I believe that was all in the writing: Darien did the best that could be done of it, and that - surely - must be considered a success. Because we were in the dead end of South London none of us could really hang around too long in the bar for drinks, so I went home to bed.
Oh, and Maria was there, and it turns out she was Darien's stage manager. Cool.
4 April 2005 - Dinner with M
Last night I bought a new digital camera, five and a half weeks after I bought my last one. Nothing makes you appreciate the speed, quality, weight, size, optical zoom, capacity, exposure features, focus, flash, white balance, battery pack and giant LCD display of a £200 digicamera than previously owning a £70 digicamera.
I now have about 300 photos of my living room, plus a movie of my coffee table. Perhaps once I'm in Rio I'll find more interesting subjects to document.
I also went to Brasserie Roux, in the Sofitel on Pall Mall, and ate black pudding for the first time. I've always assumed I would hate black pudding, since it looks black and burned, and I've been a little put off by my grandfather's tales of making it as a child (essentially, he was paid to stir a giant cauldron of boiling blood and fat). Still, when I was tried some last night I found it to be utterly delicious, comparable to some of the finest foie gras. I now regret always scraping it off my plate for my pa to eat instead. Man, I gotta get me some more of that. Dinner was deliciously preceded by the best gin martini ever at Albanach in Trafalgar Square, which is rather improbably a stylish and Scottish-themed cocktail bar.
Weekend Report: 1-3 April 2005
On Friday I met with Brock, Olivia, Terrie and Jacqui for a "few drinks" after work. This shortly became "missing the last train home", as my endless pursuit for the finest caipirhinia in London was foiled at every stroke – you know something is wrong when Arkansas and I can make better caipirhinias with a saucepan and an ash tray than a central London cocktail bar can with its extensive tools and resources. Even efforts by Stranded on the Strand and Smollensky's - previously both touted as reliable cachaca stomping grounds - proved both watery and foul.
On Saturday I woke up so impossibly hungover I couldn't bear the thought of leaving bed, but I managed to drag myself into the kitchen for a Red Bull, and then to the sofa to watch the DVD of Memento. I clicked on the 'Extras' section in order to see the trailer first, but there was no trailer and - eek - no way to get back to the main menu either. After about one minute of clicking on every option, I somehow 'unlocked' the 'hidden' chronological feature, and so had to settle for watching the movie forwards. It has an absurd story arc read this way round, and the character development is completely fucked (all the dark revelations come right at the start, and then the characters get nicer and less deceptive the more you watch).
In the afternoon I went to Tesco and bought a whole new wardrobe for my beach holiday, for just £25. Olivia and I then spent the afternoon making the Rio 2003 Glitter Book (or rather, we drank pink wine and glued bits of paper to other bits of paper, only to realise it was the wrong way round, took another slug of pink wine, and peeled it off to try again). We also made lots of salsa and guacamole, which was totally demolished by Olivia's party guests. Arkansas and I made a saucepan full of capirihinia, but it soon got drunk (I blame Seth) so we had to make another. Yum. We also played the Matt Barnes' Penis is Shaped Like a Teapot game and the Ainsley Harriot Game. I fell into Olivia's spare bed and slipped off into sweet dreams of an EasyJet crashing into my parents' house.
The Pope died too.
On Sunday I woke up fresh as a daisy, and skipped down the stairs to do the washing up. I then climbed into my smartest clothes (...that I possessed at the time...) and rushed off to wTim and Bobbie's daughter's christening. I associate churches with authoritatian maniacs who use mysticism and ancient artefacts to abuse and control the congregation's minds, and was not disappointed. A solid hour of Greek orthodox incantations is not as fun as it sounds. I sat with wDorothy right at the back, where we whispered plans to have a picnic later this summer, with cider and pie. There was then a christening reception where I made polite conversation with lots of people I remembered from the wedding, and was rewarded with some splendid Greek food.
I snuck out early in the evening to visit spim in his new flat in Farringdon. We drank some tea, some gin, made and ate some Famous Spimcoot Chilli, drank some port, and then went out to the pub for a quick drink.
By now shattered and desperate for bed, I staggered home, climbed into bed, drifted off into sleep, and then was immeditately woken by a text message from Zack wondering if I have time to make three t-shirts declaring "In Loving Memory of Matthew C. Barnes".
I texted "No" and drifted into dark, unforgiving sleep.
On Friday I met with Brock, Olivia, Terrie and Jacqui for a "few drinks" after work. This shortly became "missing the last train home", as my endless pursuit for the finest caipirhinia in London was foiled at every stroke – you know something is wrong when Arkansas and I can make better caipirhinias with a saucepan and an ash tray than a central London cocktail bar can with its extensive tools and resources. Even efforts by Stranded on the Strand and Smollensky's - previously both touted as reliable cachaca stomping grounds - proved both watery and foul.
On Saturday I woke up so impossibly hungover I couldn't bear the thought of leaving bed, but I managed to drag myself into the kitchen for a Red Bull, and then to the sofa to watch the DVD of Memento. I clicked on the 'Extras' section in order to see the trailer first, but there was no trailer and - eek - no way to get back to the main menu either. After about one minute of clicking on every option, I somehow 'unlocked' the 'hidden' chronological feature, and so had to settle for watching the movie forwards. It has an absurd story arc read this way round, and the character development is completely fucked (all the dark revelations come right at the start, and then the characters get nicer and less deceptive the more you watch).
In the afternoon I went to Tesco and bought a whole new wardrobe for my beach holiday, for just £25. Olivia and I then spent the afternoon making the Rio 2003 Glitter Book (or rather, we drank pink wine and glued bits of paper to other bits of paper, only to realise it was the wrong way round, took another slug of pink wine, and peeled it off to try again). We also made lots of salsa and guacamole, which was totally demolished by Olivia's party guests. Arkansas and I made a saucepan full of capirihinia, but it soon got drunk (I blame Seth) so we had to make another. Yum. We also played the Matt Barnes' Penis is Shaped Like a Teapot game and the Ainsley Harriot Game. I fell into Olivia's spare bed and slipped off into sweet dreams of an EasyJet crashing into my parents' house.
The Pope died too.
On Sunday I woke up fresh as a daisy, and skipped down the stairs to do the washing up. I then climbed into my smartest clothes (...that I possessed at the time...) and rushed off to wTim and Bobbie's daughter's christening. I associate churches with authoritatian maniacs who use mysticism and ancient artefacts to abuse and control the congregation's minds, and was not disappointed. A solid hour of Greek orthodox incantations is not as fun as it sounds. I sat with wDorothy right at the back, where we whispered plans to have a picnic later this summer, with cider and pie. There was then a christening reception where I made polite conversation with lots of people I remembered from the wedding, and was rewarded with some splendid Greek food.
I snuck out early in the evening to visit spim in his new flat in Farringdon. We drank some tea, some gin, made and ate some Famous Spimcoot Chilli, drank some port, and then went out to the pub for a quick drink.
By now shattered and desperate for bed, I staggered home, climbed into bed, drifted off into sleep, and then was immeditately woken by a text message from Zack wondering if I have time to make three t-shirts declaring "In Loving Memory of Matthew C. Barnes".
I texted "No" and drifted into dark, unforgiving sleep.
Life note: The Oxbridge Boat Race - 27 March 2005
Cambridge lost the boat race this year, but it seems only Terrie cared. She's still new to London, and so has some residual loyalty to her old university that long evaporated from us. For some reason, she also persuaded her mother she was in a brothel. After the boat race, all the Bots but Terrie and I vanished, so we spent a pleasant afternoon drinking wine in Hammersmith and then searching London for caipirhinias and met a charming and soft-handed tramp from Liverpool
We also at some point went to see Melinda and Melinda, which was much worse than Miss Congeniality 2, if you can imagine such a thing. We then made plans to move into a central London flat together, and then went to a backstreet pub near Picadilly Terrie met Fergal and Deepa for the first time, and we drank too much beer and ate a burger.
Cambridge lost the boat race this year, but it seems only Terrie cared. She's still new to London, and so has some residual loyalty to her old university that long evaporated from us. For some reason, she also persuaded her mother she was in a brothel. After the boat race, all the Bots but Terrie and I vanished, so we spent a pleasant afternoon drinking wine in Hammersmith and then searching London for caipirhinias and met a charming and soft-handed tramp from Liverpool
We also at some point went to see Melinda and Melinda, which was much worse than Miss Congeniality 2, if you can imagine such a thing. We then made plans to move into a central London flat together, and then went to a backstreet pub near Picadilly Terrie met Fergal and Deepa for the first time, and we drank too much beer and ate a burger.
Book review: The Crimson Petal and the White, by Michael Faber – 28 March 2005
This 850 page novel looks horribly daunting at first, but by the end of it all you're longing for another 850. The story immerses you in the wonderfully detailed world of early Victorian England, without it ever feeling like an awkward history lesson. A long and winding plotline introduces scores of detailed characters, from the cheapest whores of St Giles to the greatest industrialists of Notting Hill - and more entertainingly explores the interactions and dependence between the two. With so many characters, Faber is able to play fast and loose with our allegiances: we warm to the foppish William Rackham at the start, pity him by halfway through, and at the end we're cheering his misfortune. A fabulous book to immerse yourself in for a fortnight or so. I am already missing the characters. I wonder what Miss Sugar is doing now?
In other news, I sent my niece a copy of Lilo & Stitch for her birthday... It made her cry. What a wonderful gift the knowledge of a parent's mortality is.
This 850 page novel looks horribly daunting at first, but by the end of it all you're longing for another 850. The story immerses you in the wonderfully detailed world of early Victorian England, without it ever feeling like an awkward history lesson. A long and winding plotline introduces scores of detailed characters, from the cheapest whores of St Giles to the greatest industrialists of Notting Hill - and more entertainingly explores the interactions and dependence between the two. With so many characters, Faber is able to play fast and loose with our allegiances: we warm to the foppish William Rackham at the start, pity him by halfway through, and at the end we're cheering his misfortune. A fabulous book to immerse yourself in for a fortnight or so. I am already missing the characters. I wonder what Miss Sugar is doing now?
In other news, I sent my niece a copy of Lilo & Stitch for her birthday... It made her cry. What a wonderful gift the knowledge of a parent's mortality is.
Holiday diary: SNOWBOARDING 2005: APOCALYPSE PARK, AND WHAT CAME BEFORE – 20-26 March 2006
Snowboarding in 2005 was pretty much the same as snowboarding in 2004, except I was much better at it. I won't therefore bore you with a day-by-day account of the experience (see last year for that). Here then are some randomly thematic memories...
Getting there: fully forewarned from last year's horrific twelve hour coach journey, we were prepared for delay this time round and took plenty of food and water with us. This preparation should have seen us through, however as the promised three hours inevitably stretched out to fill eight hours of barely moving traffic, I began to regret being so prepared with fresh water, and my bladder grew fuller and fuller. Of course, no one had forewarned me that, just like last year, the coach toilet would be broken again. As the coach driver spoke very little English, I was obliged to simply abandon the bus and wee on the side of the road. This was bad enough in front of a coachful of cool snowboarder dudes, but even worse once the traffic edged forwards and I was a roadside display for a French school bus - a gaggle of polite little school children, their faces frozen in horror. (In the end, it turned out we were delayed because of farmers protesting against foxes. I'm sure the foxes heard their protests and heeded the placards.)
My boarding: My boarding skill developed really well: I went much faster down the slopes, turned quicker and with much more confidence. I'd like to say this was because of my natural drive to stretch my skills and develop, but I have no such natural drive. No, Fergal is completely to blame as he'd regularly take me off on 'an adventure' across the mountains, which would inevitably involve going up what looked like a very benign ski lift and then – at the top – discovering an icey, 85 degree slope was the only way home, thus giving me the choice of starting a new home up the mountain or risking life and limb in the hope that – at some point – I might actually get down without dying. Still, by Wednesday I was so confident with my boarding that I decided I'd best send postcards before I started being too brave and ended up breaking both my wrists. On the Thursday we tested ourselves to the limits and made a visit to Apocalypse Park. This was a collection of ramps, jumps and hoops to go through. Bizarrely, I found the idea of going down a steep, icey red run far more terrifying than this playground.
The company: MnkiFrki came, as they did last year, but we were also with Nugget and JP, who I don't much know. They turned out to be good fun, and JP's boarding went really well. Well, that is, after the first day. On day one, Fergal took us all to the top of a 75 degree slope which was frozen solid with ice, and then zipped off down it on his own. Even Mnki, Nugget and I were uncertain of the slope, but JP had never done anything outside of the Tamworth Snowdome before. He gave it a brave stab - hurting himself in the process - before deciding to take off his board and walk down: Error. These are not slopes you can walk down without a huge board strapped to your legs as a break. JP got to the bottom of the hill on his bottom.
Food and drink: The Les Arcs resort was clearly very aware that it was our exclusive supplier of all goods and services. The food was expensive wherever we went: ten euro for a burger, and five for fries on the side. It was even expensive to get drunk - e.g. beer was about 4 euro a half pint, whilst coke was over a quid. These rules did not apply to wine, however, where a carafe of vin chaud worked out far cheaper than a single coke, and a bottle of crisp and delicious white wine was just one euro fifty. This made rehydrating ourselves whilst up the mountain very pleasurable. We tried eating in our apartment to save money, but this was tough as the six of us were sharing just one tiny room, and the stench of sweaty boarding gear drying on the radiator did little to boost our appetites. Still, Mnki made one of her magnificent curries whilst JP invented a series of remarkable salads (this does not sound remarkable until you realise that the supermarket sold only salami and wine).
On drinking and exercise: It's amazing what happens to the metabolism when you're doing a huge amount of exercise every day. I was able to drink pretty much as much as I liked every evening (and often far more than I liked) and wake up fresh as a daisy in the morning. I suppose, to invoke the arkanerror, so long as you do enough exercise, you can drink as much as I like with no effect.
The resort: Despite this being a purpose-built winter resort, the radiators didn't work at all. When I asked the receptionist about this, she very cheerfully explained that this was normal, and then blanked me. So it was cold.
The pressing sense of ennui: Throughout the holiday I suffered from constant anxiety because I was expected to do just one thing all week long (snowboarding), and despite the fact that I love snowboarding – absolutely adore it – the whole time I was rueing my captivity and longing to be somewhere else. After a week, I was allowed to go home and then - of course - I desperately missed snowboarding.
Snowboarding in 2005 was pretty much the same as snowboarding in 2004, except I was much better at it. I won't therefore bore you with a day-by-day account of the experience (see last year for that). Here then are some randomly thematic memories...
Getting there: fully forewarned from last year's horrific twelve hour coach journey, we were prepared for delay this time round and took plenty of food and water with us. This preparation should have seen us through, however as the promised three hours inevitably stretched out to fill eight hours of barely moving traffic, I began to regret being so prepared with fresh water, and my bladder grew fuller and fuller. Of course, no one had forewarned me that, just like last year, the coach toilet would be broken again. As the coach driver spoke very little English, I was obliged to simply abandon the bus and wee on the side of the road. This was bad enough in front of a coachful of cool snowboarder dudes, but even worse once the traffic edged forwards and I was a roadside display for a French school bus - a gaggle of polite little school children, their faces frozen in horror. (In the end, it turned out we were delayed because of farmers protesting against foxes. I'm sure the foxes heard their protests and heeded the placards.)
My boarding: My boarding skill developed really well: I went much faster down the slopes, turned quicker and with much more confidence. I'd like to say this was because of my natural drive to stretch my skills and develop, but I have no such natural drive. No, Fergal is completely to blame as he'd regularly take me off on 'an adventure' across the mountains, which would inevitably involve going up what looked like a very benign ski lift and then – at the top – discovering an icey, 85 degree slope was the only way home, thus giving me the choice of starting a new home up the mountain or risking life and limb in the hope that – at some point – I might actually get down without dying. Still, by Wednesday I was so confident with my boarding that I decided I'd best send postcards before I started being too brave and ended up breaking both my wrists. On the Thursday we tested ourselves to the limits and made a visit to Apocalypse Park. This was a collection of ramps, jumps and hoops to go through. Bizarrely, I found the idea of going down a steep, icey red run far more terrifying than this playground.
The company: MnkiFrki came, as they did last year, but we were also with Nugget and JP, who I don't much know. They turned out to be good fun, and JP's boarding went really well. Well, that is, after the first day. On day one, Fergal took us all to the top of a 75 degree slope which was frozen solid with ice, and then zipped off down it on his own. Even Mnki, Nugget and I were uncertain of the slope, but JP had never done anything outside of the Tamworth Snowdome before. He gave it a brave stab - hurting himself in the process - before deciding to take off his board and walk down: Error. These are not slopes you can walk down without a huge board strapped to your legs as a break. JP got to the bottom of the hill on his bottom.
Food and drink: The Les Arcs resort was clearly very aware that it was our exclusive supplier of all goods and services. The food was expensive wherever we went: ten euro for a burger, and five for fries on the side. It was even expensive to get drunk - e.g. beer was about 4 euro a half pint, whilst coke was over a quid. These rules did not apply to wine, however, where a carafe of vin chaud worked out far cheaper than a single coke, and a bottle of crisp and delicious white wine was just one euro fifty. This made rehydrating ourselves whilst up the mountain very pleasurable. We tried eating in our apartment to save money, but this was tough as the six of us were sharing just one tiny room, and the stench of sweaty boarding gear drying on the radiator did little to boost our appetites. Still, Mnki made one of her magnificent curries whilst JP invented a series of remarkable salads (this does not sound remarkable until you realise that the supermarket sold only salami and wine).
On drinking and exercise: It's amazing what happens to the metabolism when you're doing a huge amount of exercise every day. I was able to drink pretty much as much as I liked every evening (and often far more than I liked) and wake up fresh as a daisy in the morning. I suppose, to invoke the arkanerror, so long as you do enough exercise, you can drink as much as I like with no effect.
The resort: Despite this being a purpose-built winter resort, the radiators didn't work at all. When I asked the receptionist about this, she very cheerfully explained that this was normal, and then blanked me. So it was cold.
The pressing sense of ennui: Throughout the holiday I suffered from constant anxiety because I was expected to do just one thing all week long (snowboarding), and despite the fact that I love snowboarding – absolutely adore it – the whole time I was rueing my captivity and longing to be somewhere else. After a week, I was allowed to go home and then - of course - I desperately missed snowboarding.
18 July 2005
MARCH 2005 UPDATE
So snowboarding rocked. Some most splendid fun. I will write it up in my diary soon!
Also, Miss Congeniality 2: Armed and Fabulous is a far more entertaning movie than Woody Allen's latest, Miranda and Miranda, which pretty much sucks. Beers and a burger beats both.
Finally, some people I never met won the boat race, and some other people I never met lost it. We cheered for one set of the people, on account of the fact the academic institution that taught me archaeology also granted these people scholarships because of their athletic prowess. Anyway, this all comes after snowboarding. Here is the news up until the start of the holiday:
Week report: Sushi and a Tong Reunion - 11-17 March 2005
On Friday I left work early for a very pleasant run on the north bank of the Thames, albeit on a treadmill in a gym on the north bank of the Thames. Any good the exercise did me was instantly ruined when I met up with Terrie for a pisco sour and some of those broad bean chip things. Pisco is amazing, like an alco-slush puppy, and I could drink it all night if it wasn't so incredibly expensive; this is probably just as well, as instead we got to go to Dan's house and feast on seemingly unlimited quantities of delicious sushi, the three highlights of which were: spinach with sesame goo; large pieces of tuna sashimi; and watching Terrie's face as she tried to swallow a piece of dead octopus. We drank absolutely everything containing alcohol we could find in Dan's house - apple brandy, muscat, truffle schnapps, drain cleaner - and once the flat was drained dry we bid a fond farewell without even offering to wash up.
Saturday was spent lazing in bed, playing Pitfall, eating poached eggs on toast and drinking coffee. The sunbeam in the living room was back, so the afternoon passed most pleasantly. In the evening I headed up to Farringdon for Michelle's leaving party. It started in a noodle bar with five complete strangers, who I was able to entertain by passing off Terrie's thoughts on Neighbours as my own. I was briefly rumbled when I made the mistake of thinking Sky was still an ugly, spitting baby, not a 16-year old lesbian, but I weathered it by revealing Terrie's gossip that Doc Kennedy soon dies, and then effecting a yawn.
We then went to Bar & Grill, the new name for The Living Room. It was expensive and the alcohol was watered down. After meeting and greeting lots of people I'll probably never see again I headed home to fuck up an aubergine dip.
On Sunday some bots came round to eat pizza, drink wine, watch Mannequin and play EyeGroove, my new Playstation2 dancing game. Unlike many of the classic movies of the 1980s - Ferris Bueller, Baby Boom or Big Business - Mannequin has actually improved with age, and was a true pleasure to watch. Somehow Andrew McCarthy had switched from being an older man I look up to, to a much younger boy one feels protective towards. I must have missed some in-between stage in the intervening decades.
On Monday I had a swift drink with Darien before hometime. We must have had fun as Darien snuck a pewter tankard into my bag.
On Tuesday I summoned bots en masse to the Porterhouse, and about five of them bothered to turn up. We drank fine beers and wines, then stuffed our faces at the Mongolian Barbecue, a wonderful land where you make the food yourself, and so can choose just how awful it tastes. My salmon and tofu with pineapple, five spice, lemon juice and teriyaki was a clear winner.
On Wednesday, I finally got round to swinging along the roof and up into the temple at the top of the Hall of Seasons, where I faced down an evil spirit. I got the mystical icon on my third try, and boy was the evil spirit pissed off about that. Still, I died about three times when the room flooded with water - I mistook it for an evil, viscous fluid that I couldn't swim in; instead, it transpired I had simply forgotten which button made Lara Croft kick. If it had been Pitfall Harry he'd have been off like a torpedo.
On Thursday I went to the London Drinker Beer and Cider Festival at the Camden Centre at Kings Cross to be reunited with Mnki and Fergal. It was as good a way as any to avoid the St Patrick's day idioms (the sooner the mayor clamps down on these amateur, seasonal drinkers the better). The reunion was very emotional, and I felt rather like the dog in Who Gets the Dog?, since I didn't know which Tong to hug first. The emotion quickly passed when it transpired nothing had much changed and there was beer to be had
The beer hall was extremely full, and the room was permeated with the unmistakably sour aroma of real ale fans. At every turn beer bellies pushed up against beer bellies, lank beards pushed up against leather braces and pewter tankards rubbed against bulging bottoms. We enjoyed our beer, and then some more beer, some cider, some wine and chinese food, and then to the pub for a rest and some gin.
Movie review: Harold and Kumar go to White Castle - 10 March 2005
Despite Dude, Where's My Car being one of the Three Official Bot Movies (the other two being Office Space and Legally Blonde), when we all met last night to see the new White Castle sequel we ultimately decided we simply couldn't be bothered and should just drink instead. This was all very well, until we wanted dinner.
The hunt for food should have been easy, as we were walking along an endless parade of restaurants, and yet we simply could not agree on where to eat. Eventually, after I'd gotten humpy with Seamus for turning down Thai and humpy with Arkansas for turning down Japanese, I didn't feel justified in making everyone humpy by turning down TGI Friday when that turned eventually turned up.
My shitting gods, what a mistake.
My main course - described as pasta in a rich tomato sauce with slices of juicy chicken breast - was over-cooked spaghetti mixed with a tin of tomatoes, with what appeared to be four pieces of burned rubber on top. It was utterly vile, and mindlessly bland. Darien had "chicken finger dippers", which tasted like burned rubber rolled in corn-fed chicken's vomit.
We also ordered the 'downtown Manhattan cocktail selection': five small glasses each with a different classic cocktail. Quite beside the fact a TVR (tequila, vodka and red bull) is neither classic or cocktail, nor indeed especially 'downtown Manhattan', they couldn't even make a Bellini (traditionally 1 part peach schnapps diluted with three parts of good Champagne): it tasted of sherbert and lemonade. If that drink had even seen a drop of alcohol I'd be astonished.
One promising alteration to the menu since I was last there six years ago was a product placement deal with Jack Daniels. Virtually everything on the menu came 'with Jack Daniels'. Alas, the promise was deceptive: it wasn't a shot of fine rye whiskey, but a sticky syrup sauce poured over everything on the plate; presumably intended as lubrication to ease the dessicated husks of chicken down our craws.
And don't even get me started on the fucking waiter and his fucking flair.
Next time, just say no.
Life note: Fate - 8 March 2005
We went to the pub. Sara had her handbag stolen, whilst I had an awful club sandwich at Auberge. Why is fate sometimes so cruel to so many?
Life note: Afternoon off - 3 March 2005
Thanks to a generous boss, I had Thursday afternoon off for free, which I spent with Arkansas. First we ate a great deal of Thai food without brown rice at the Thai Pot (where I get a 10% discount, I only later realised), then we got drunk in the National Portrait Gallery Bar (where I get a 10% discount, I only later realised) overlooking Trafalgar Square, and then we went to see the dreadful movie Old Boy. I say 'dreadful', but it was actually quite brilliant most of the way through: the problem was that the "mystery" running throughout every event transpired at the end to be so weak that - like a delicate silk woven on rotten weft - the whole film was swiftly ripped asunder. Also, right at the end, a man cut his own tongue off with scissors for no apparent reason whatsoever. What a twist!
Arkansas and I celebrated with a pint of beer each.
It was then time to go see Romeo and Juliet with Olivia, but Olivia had other ideas and repeatedly asked me "Are you sure you want to come?" until I finally gave up and answered that, well then, perhaps I wouldn't. This seemed to make her happier.
Friends then rushed off to play games, so I went off home in the snow, found I had a new fence, watched Groundhog Day, and then slipped into bed with the Good Book (in this case, McSweeney's Issue 15, which is half brilliant and then half modern stories from Iceland; sadly, it transpires that the Icelandic are obsessed with snow, nature and death. I, by contrast, am not.)
Dream Diary: Dan meets Spencer Brown - 2 March 2005
Dan famously never has exciting dreams himself, but I rather resent him compensating by totally taking over one of my dreams, and sidelining me during all the action.
We were up in Edinburgh during the festival, and Dan was very excited about going to see Spencer Brown's new comedy show, about clairvoyants. Dan was going to go see the show whilst we distributed fliers on the Royal Mile. Well, let me tell you (it's probably best I do the talking, since this is a non-interactive journal entry), I don't think he liked the show very much. He came back white as a ghost and shaking. He refused to talk about what had happened, and we were all amused at first. Then we gradually began to realise something utterly monstrous had happened whilst Spencer Brown tried to contact the dead - something so horrible Dan would get extremely angry and then upset when we tried to prise it out of him. Helen had to give him a special hug to stop the crying, and then we took him home and Helen tucked him in to bed. Dan quit his job, and by the end of the dream he still hadn't left his bed, and slept with the lights on.
In my next dream, I was the youngest of the Rug Rats. We went to a fair and ate candyfloss, then I discovered I could fly. I soared through the sky without a care in the world, until the authorities kidnapped me. I spent the remainder of the dream as the subject of invasive surgical procedures aimed at discovering the source of my flying ability.
So snowboarding rocked. Some most splendid fun. I will write it up in my diary soon!
Also, Miss Congeniality 2: Armed and Fabulous is a far more entertaning movie than Woody Allen's latest, Miranda and Miranda, which pretty much sucks. Beers and a burger beats both.
Finally, some people I never met won the boat race, and some other people I never met lost it. We cheered for one set of the people, on account of the fact the academic institution that taught me archaeology also granted these people scholarships because of their athletic prowess. Anyway, this all comes after snowboarding. Here is the news up until the start of the holiday:
Week report: Sushi and a Tong Reunion - 11-17 March 2005
On Friday I left work early for a very pleasant run on the north bank of the Thames, albeit on a treadmill in a gym on the north bank of the Thames. Any good the exercise did me was instantly ruined when I met up with Terrie for a pisco sour and some of those broad bean chip things. Pisco is amazing, like an alco-slush puppy, and I could drink it all night if it wasn't so incredibly expensive; this is probably just as well, as instead we got to go to Dan's house and feast on seemingly unlimited quantities of delicious sushi, the three highlights of which were: spinach with sesame goo; large pieces of tuna sashimi; and watching Terrie's face as she tried to swallow a piece of dead octopus. We drank absolutely everything containing alcohol we could find in Dan's house - apple brandy, muscat, truffle schnapps, drain cleaner - and once the flat was drained dry we bid a fond farewell without even offering to wash up.
Saturday was spent lazing in bed, playing Pitfall, eating poached eggs on toast and drinking coffee. The sunbeam in the living room was back, so the afternoon passed most pleasantly. In the evening I headed up to Farringdon for Michelle's leaving party. It started in a noodle bar with five complete strangers, who I was able to entertain by passing off Terrie's thoughts on Neighbours as my own. I was briefly rumbled when I made the mistake of thinking Sky was still an ugly, spitting baby, not a 16-year old lesbian, but I weathered it by revealing Terrie's gossip that Doc Kennedy soon dies, and then effecting a yawn.
We then went to Bar & Grill, the new name for The Living Room. It was expensive and the alcohol was watered down. After meeting and greeting lots of people I'll probably never see again I headed home to fuck up an aubergine dip.
On Sunday some bots came round to eat pizza, drink wine, watch Mannequin and play EyeGroove, my new Playstation2 dancing game. Unlike many of the classic movies of the 1980s - Ferris Bueller, Baby Boom or Big Business - Mannequin has actually improved with age, and was a true pleasure to watch. Somehow Andrew McCarthy had switched from being an older man I look up to, to a much younger boy one feels protective towards. I must have missed some in-between stage in the intervening decades.
On Monday I had a swift drink with Darien before hometime. We must have had fun as Darien snuck a pewter tankard into my bag.
On Tuesday I summoned bots en masse to the Porterhouse, and about five of them bothered to turn up. We drank fine beers and wines, then stuffed our faces at the Mongolian Barbecue, a wonderful land where you make the food yourself, and so can choose just how awful it tastes. My salmon and tofu with pineapple, five spice, lemon juice and teriyaki was a clear winner.
On Wednesday, I finally got round to swinging along the roof and up into the temple at the top of the Hall of Seasons, where I faced down an evil spirit. I got the mystical icon on my third try, and boy was the evil spirit pissed off about that. Still, I died about three times when the room flooded with water - I mistook it for an evil, viscous fluid that I couldn't swim in; instead, it transpired I had simply forgotten which button made Lara Croft kick. If it had been Pitfall Harry he'd have been off like a torpedo.
On Thursday I went to the London Drinker Beer and Cider Festival at the Camden Centre at Kings Cross to be reunited with Mnki and Fergal. It was as good a way as any to avoid the St Patrick's day idioms (the sooner the mayor clamps down on these amateur, seasonal drinkers the better). The reunion was very emotional, and I felt rather like the dog in Who Gets the Dog?, since I didn't know which Tong to hug first. The emotion quickly passed when it transpired nothing had much changed and there was beer to be had
The beer hall was extremely full, and the room was permeated with the unmistakably sour aroma of real ale fans. At every turn beer bellies pushed up against beer bellies, lank beards pushed up against leather braces and pewter tankards rubbed against bulging bottoms. We enjoyed our beer, and then some more beer, some cider, some wine and chinese food, and then to the pub for a rest and some gin.
Movie review: Harold and Kumar go to White Castle - 10 March 2005
Despite Dude, Where's My Car being one of the Three Official Bot Movies (the other two being Office Space and Legally Blonde), when we all met last night to see the new White Castle sequel we ultimately decided we simply couldn't be bothered and should just drink instead. This was all very well, until we wanted dinner.
The hunt for food should have been easy, as we were walking along an endless parade of restaurants, and yet we simply could not agree on where to eat. Eventually, after I'd gotten humpy with Seamus for turning down Thai and humpy with Arkansas for turning down Japanese, I didn't feel justified in making everyone humpy by turning down TGI Friday when that turned eventually turned up.
My shitting gods, what a mistake.
My main course - described as pasta in a rich tomato sauce with slices of juicy chicken breast - was over-cooked spaghetti mixed with a tin of tomatoes, with what appeared to be four pieces of burned rubber on top. It was utterly vile, and mindlessly bland. Darien had "chicken finger dippers", which tasted like burned rubber rolled in corn-fed chicken's vomit.
We also ordered the 'downtown Manhattan cocktail selection': five small glasses each with a different classic cocktail. Quite beside the fact a TVR (tequila, vodka and red bull) is neither classic or cocktail, nor indeed especially 'downtown Manhattan', they couldn't even make a Bellini (traditionally 1 part peach schnapps diluted with three parts of good Champagne): it tasted of sherbert and lemonade. If that drink had even seen a drop of alcohol I'd be astonished.
One promising alteration to the menu since I was last there six years ago was a product placement deal with Jack Daniels. Virtually everything on the menu came 'with Jack Daniels'. Alas, the promise was deceptive: it wasn't a shot of fine rye whiskey, but a sticky syrup sauce poured over everything on the plate; presumably intended as lubrication to ease the dessicated husks of chicken down our craws.
And don't even get me started on the fucking waiter and his fucking flair.
Next time, just say no.
Life note: Fate - 8 March 2005
We went to the pub. Sara had her handbag stolen, whilst I had an awful club sandwich at Auberge. Why is fate sometimes so cruel to so many?
Life note: Afternoon off - 3 March 2005
Thanks to a generous boss, I had Thursday afternoon off for free, which I spent with Arkansas. First we ate a great deal of Thai food without brown rice at the Thai Pot (where I get a 10% discount, I only later realised), then we got drunk in the National Portrait Gallery Bar (where I get a 10% discount, I only later realised) overlooking Trafalgar Square, and then we went to see the dreadful movie Old Boy. I say 'dreadful', but it was actually quite brilliant most of the way through: the problem was that the "mystery" running throughout every event transpired at the end to be so weak that - like a delicate silk woven on rotten weft - the whole film was swiftly ripped asunder. Also, right at the end, a man cut his own tongue off with scissors for no apparent reason whatsoever. What a twist!
Arkansas and I celebrated with a pint of beer each.
It was then time to go see Romeo and Juliet with Olivia, but Olivia had other ideas and repeatedly asked me "Are you sure you want to come?" until I finally gave up and answered that, well then, perhaps I wouldn't. This seemed to make her happier.
Friends then rushed off to play games, so I went off home in the snow, found I had a new fence, watched Groundhog Day, and then slipped into bed with the Good Book (in this case, McSweeney's Issue 15, which is half brilliant and then half modern stories from Iceland; sadly, it transpires that the Icelandic are obsessed with snow, nature and death. I, by contrast, am not.)
Dream Diary: Dan meets Spencer Brown - 2 March 2005
Dan famously never has exciting dreams himself, but I rather resent him compensating by totally taking over one of my dreams, and sidelining me during all the action.
We were up in Edinburgh during the festival, and Dan was very excited about going to see Spencer Brown's new comedy show, about clairvoyants. Dan was going to go see the show whilst we distributed fliers on the Royal Mile. Well, let me tell you (it's probably best I do the talking, since this is a non-interactive journal entry), I don't think he liked the show very much. He came back white as a ghost and shaking. He refused to talk about what had happened, and we were all amused at first. Then we gradually began to realise something utterly monstrous had happened whilst Spencer Brown tried to contact the dead - something so horrible Dan would get extremely angry and then upset when we tried to prise it out of him. Helen had to give him a special hug to stop the crying, and then we took him home and Helen tucked him in to bed. Dan quit his job, and by the end of the dream he still hadn't left his bed, and slept with the lights on.
In my next dream, I was the youngest of the Rug Rats. We went to a fair and ate candyfloss, then I discovered I could fly. I soared through the sky without a care in the world, until the authorities kidnapped me. I spent the remainder of the dream as the subject of invasive surgical procedures aimed at discovering the source of my flying ability.
FEBRUARY 2005 UPDATE
Weekend report: South London Road Trip - 26-27 February 2005
Last weekend was splendid fun. On the Friday night I had to work quite late, and so just went straight home and ate whatever I found in the fridge for dinner: in the fridge was most of a roast chicken. It tasted good.
On Saturday morning Darien and I embarked on the road trip to end all road trips. London to Bangor was old news, Manhattan to Niagra Falls a picnic in the park by comparison. We drove from Thornton Heath in South London to Forest Hill in South London, and then to Thornton Heath again, and then to the Purley Way in Croydon, and then back to Thornton Heath.
South London is so beautiful in the wintertime: the grey clouds make a magnificent backdrop for both the grey buildings and the dark grey yet muddy ground, on which Darien insisted on draping his coat - Francis Drake style - to protect my shoes. It took little time at all to move all the wood in the world from my house to the car park at the dump, and then up some rather improbable stairs to the dump itself. I have no idea why they built stairs up to the dump.
Having achieved something so productive, we needed to reward ourselves with self destruction. Alas, we were unable to drink alcohol because of the whole "driving a car" thing, so we settled for a slap up meal at the Wing Yip Chinese centre. This giant temple to Chinese capitalism squats just off the Purley Way (next door to the HSS Hire Centre, if you need a point of reference). The queue for Chinese food was equal in size to the entire population of China, but we snuck up some back stairs and discovered a whole other restaurant that had evaded discovery by previous adventurers. For just £10 we had unlimited access to the All You Can Cram in Your Gob Malaysian Buffet; this was an extraordinary price, as the food was of previously unperceived quality: chicken that melted in the mouth, spring rolls that were both nourishing and succulent, shrimp chips that actually tasted of shrimp. As we exclaimed later to the waitress: Mama mia! Ola grub squisito.
With the road trip over, in the evening we headed into town for Seamus and Lani's birthday party. We arrived far too early and so settled down to drink a couple of pints of beer and then some wine with Colin. Somehow I instantly slipped from being so tired I was verging on falling sleep to being hyperactively wide awake and bellowing random anecdotes out at Colin. My health kick - that is, to drink no more than two drinks in any one night - died with the first glass of wine, which I tentatively half filled and then, after a single sip, topped to the brim.
Guests finally started to file in, and the remainder of the evening was spent drinking and chattering with friends. Among other things, I made the unpleasant discovery that Sam Smith's pubs no longer do bottles of wine for £6 (a suprise which I understand spim also experienced, and to greater effect). We also proved at great length that Vampire is not a game that works in the pub.
Everyone stumbled into the street at closing time, made a firm pact to go to a late bar (spuriously Fuel), and then immediately disbanded to go home. On the late train my hiccupping was so loud it repeatedly alarmed the woman opposite. For dinner spim and I ate chicken.
On Sunday morning I woke at 7am to do some more work on my report, then went to wake up spim in the living room and eat toasted bagels, special eggs and coffee. With utter disregard for the state of the weather outside we made a plan to walk along the Thames path from London Bridge to Canary Wharf, where we would have a lovely Sunday lunch in a chain pub they have there. This sounded all well and good in theory, but in practice we found walking by the river somewhat akin to standing in an arctic wind tunnel, so we retreated into a labyrinthine network of underground tunnels and took the Jubillee line to North Greenwich instead.
The walk from North Greenwich to Canary Wharf is a most distinguished route. You begin at the touchingly optimistic millennium dome tube station, a grand construction seemingly designed to allow thousands of passengers an hour to visit a tatty (and closed) tourist attraction and around three thousand acres of scrubland and rubble. It took us just three minutes to stray off the neat pavings and find ourselves in a post-industrial wasteland: vast piles of trash heaped against mountains of overgrown rubble, all backdropped by the gleaming metallic towers of Canary Wharf. Stark but beautiful. As we stumbled through the filth we saw some pretty incongruous sights too: a farmhouse marooned in a moonscape and dwarfed by the millennium dome; a young woman in the window of a rotting mobile home reading the Sunday papers; a neon-lit tudor pub sharing a lot with a rusting gasometer; a long row of terraced houses where every other one was condemned as a dangerous structure - the remainder inhabited by families, and the penultimate one recently sold.
Fortunately, as we kept walking, all of this miserable wasteland was gradually replaced by the majesty of Greenwich: huge Victorian factories with intricate architecture; vast limestone buildings with neatly manicured lawns; and lots and lots of lovely little welcoming pubs. We headed through the Brunel foot tunnel, under the Thames, to the Isle of Dogs. Spim had never been through the tunnel before so he was very excited, although he hid it well.
Once on the other side of the river we strolled up through the Isle of Dogs to Canary Wharf and I was astonished by how much development there had been since my last visit: Island Gardens DLR has now been moved underground; five new skycrapers have appeared; my favourite bridge has been cut in half; and vast swathes of dock have been reclaimed for building on. Although the shapes of the docks are still familiar, the low-rise housing that had first helped to repopulate the area is gradually being swallowed up by thirty storey apartment blocks for a new breed of middle class who want to live the suburban life vertically.
We then went to a lovely little pub with dancing lamps and ate a hearty meal with some lovely soothing ales. Then the sport came on - some nonesense about kicking a ball around a field - so we packed up our shit and got out of that hole.
Arriving home at 4pm, I had plenty of time for a five hour nap before going to bed.
I bought a digitial camera too, so all of the above is documented. Perhaps I'll post the photos here. [Editor's note: I will not and did not]
Life note: Benares, Chip and Pin - 25 February 2005
Matt claimed that last night was "Just like Terminator 4: The Rise of the Pin and Chip Machines".
He could not have been further from the truth.
Dream Diary: Scissor Cult - 18 February 2005
I dreamt I had been entrusted with looking after a young boy, a sort of Haley Joel Osment type. Of course, it wasn't long before a cult of Satanists was on our trail. This cult operated a method of mind control which involved physically mutilating their victims. We did the usual business of hiding in places and running around lots, and ended up in a motel room. Exactly as I was thinking that we were all secure, I discovered a small bag of red rose petals in the room. As I went to pick one up, I realised they were not rose petals at all, but elegantly cut pieces of human skin, drenched red with blood.
Realising all was not good, I looked up to see the boy had been attacked: he stood beside the fireplace with his t-shirt torn off, revealing huge paper-snowflake like patterns cut deep into his skin of his chest with scissors. So that's where the rose petals came from, I thought to myself, not much happier for the enlightenment.
The boy was now under the cult's control, and came at me with a sharp pair of long-bladed steel scissors. The dream ended with us fighting on the floor, then him sitting on my stomach and snipping neat patterns into the flesh on my chest.
Life note: Darien birthday: Karaoke Part 2 - 17 February 2005
My brain is sore from alcohol abuse, my limbs are sore from kickboxing and my throat is sore from shouting over the music. What a great night! Of course, poor Darien is now over thirty, which sounds even older than thirty. Poor egg.
In other news, I spent 2am through 6am listening to the news on the radio, and then by 6:30am was fast asleep - just in time to catch the alarm clock at 7am. Hooray!
Life note: Karaoke Part 1 - 15 February 2005
After sensible Bots had got good and drunk and slipped off home, Darien and I slipped off to Belushi's on Borough High Street for open mic night. 'Open mic night' seemed to mean sitting in an empty basement in which a man was frolicking in one corner in just his underwear. We wouldn't have stayed, but wine was £5 a bottle and perfectly drinkable.
Curse this hangover.
Life Note: The Science Museum - 11-13 February 2005
On Friday night I went to La Perla in preparation for seeing Meet the Fockers, but then opted to drink lots of beer and not see Meet the Fockers instead, which turned out to be the correct decision. I downed a bottle of Corona in 10.01 seconds, which beat Conrad by five whole seconds, and his ladymate by about 15. We also had some tequila.
On the Saturday, then, I woke up with a raging hangover, and plans of redecorating my house and doubling its value were rationalised into lazing on the sofa and watching Josie and the Pussycats. Alan Cumming was over-the-top as always, indicating a downward career spiral which is only cemented by his presence in Son of the Mask (seen on bus sides only). Still, the girl what done played Josie was very sexy, so that balanced things out.
Deciding it would be good to get out of the house, in the afternoon I met up with Terrie to go to the science museum. This first involved around half an hour of running through Kensington and Sloane Square, demanding directions from French tourists and dodging into shoe shops to avoid the rain, and then involved a long, lazy afternoon lunch at The Jam, one of my favourite restaurants in London. We stuffed our faces with Italian food, banoffee pie and water.
Running through Kensington and Sloane Square and then having long, lazy lunches takes up some time, and so when we finally got to the Science Museum we had only half an hour before it closed. This turned out to be okay, since the majority of exhibits were simply giant hoardings announcing that the museum was undergoing refurbishment, and this way to the toilets please.
We raced around looking for the 'Launch Pad' - where all the buttons, levers and hornicators are - but all we found were more and more lavatories. There was even a big yellow sign saying "Yet more loos this way ->". The irony hung heavy on our shoulders, then, when we finally found Launch Pad was now closed, and the squat woman guarding the door suggested we try flushing the replica turd down the toilet in the History of the Home exhibit (which apparently "always goes down a bundle"). Terrie and I were now convinced that the Science Museum is really just the largest lavatory block in the world.
The only fun the Science museum can offer is pressing buttons, and although the History of the Home section had lots and lots of buttons to press none of them were buttons I didn't already have at home: "Press the button to make the microwave work!" the sign announced in bold font; "Make the blender blade spin!" Woo. Still, we both got so excited by an exhibit on the evolution of open fire-effect gas fires that we almost missed a fridge door flap open - only once, and at random - to reveal a bear was trapped inside.
So then I went to the DIY store and spent £60 on DIY materials, which were together sufficient to finish my flat completely, and then sat on the sofa and watched Dawson's Creek for three hours, instead of finishing my house completely.
On Sunday I finished the plastering in my bathroom and rewired the bedroom a little, then went to SeamusLaniHaus, where we and the Pixies played Puerto Rico. I rather wished I'd bothered to read all the tactical advice people have been posting to Live Journal over the past week, as the only tactic I could recall was that I'd once come close to winning by buying lots of tobacco. This didn't work a second time, and I came last.
And then, I went home and ate some chicken in bed.
Life note: Health Plan - 10 February 2005
The new plan: do some exercise, don't drink any alcohol, go home, eat well, get an early night.
Unaccounted for factors: (i) three drunks shrieking in the night, and then giving the police abuse as they were arrested; (ii) neighbour playing the drums; (iii) horrible muscle strain.
Result of implementing plan: after scarcely any sleep, wake up feeling worse than hungover. Head pounding, drowsy, limbs aching, irritable.
Conclusion: Return to tried and tested method of getting drunk each night. At least it's more fun the night before.
Life note: ArkanMic party: Back to the Future - 6 February 2005
After much hype and anticipation, a coterie of bots met up at the Arkanhaus to re-record the voice track to 'Back to the Future'. Unfortunately, this MicFly party quickly deteriorated into the non-amusing kind of nonsense. By the end, we swore upon our lives that details of this terrible evening would never be revealed to those outside the coven.
Life note: Rick and Daxter - 2 February 2005
I think Baron Praxis would have greater success in killing me if he spent more time focussing on his aim, and less time bellowing "YOU CAN NEVER DEFEAT ME! YOU ARE POWERLESS TO RESIST!" whilst flying around in a giant squid costume and firing his laser canons in a preprogrammed sequence, which I can effortlessly step around. Also, what's with him dropping fresh ammunition for me to collect every time he goes to re-energise? Does he want me to blow his fucking head off?!
I totally blew his fucking head off.
This morning I had a rest from Jak & Daxter II and played a bit of Price of Persia III instead. This game so totally sucks. Play.com inform me they cannot exchange if for something else as "we were lucky to offload the sodding thing on you in the first place" (my words, not theirs).
Weekend report: South London Road Trip - 26-27 February 2005
Last weekend was splendid fun. On the Friday night I had to work quite late, and so just went straight home and ate whatever I found in the fridge for dinner: in the fridge was most of a roast chicken. It tasted good.
On Saturday morning Darien and I embarked on the road trip to end all road trips. London to Bangor was old news, Manhattan to Niagra Falls a picnic in the park by comparison. We drove from Thornton Heath in South London to Forest Hill in South London, and then to Thornton Heath again, and then to the Purley Way in Croydon, and then back to Thornton Heath.
South London is so beautiful in the wintertime: the grey clouds make a magnificent backdrop for both the grey buildings and the dark grey yet muddy ground, on which Darien insisted on draping his coat - Francis Drake style - to protect my shoes. It took little time at all to move all the wood in the world from my house to the car park at the dump, and then up some rather improbable stairs to the dump itself. I have no idea why they built stairs up to the dump.
Having achieved something so productive, we needed to reward ourselves with self destruction. Alas, we were unable to drink alcohol because of the whole "driving a car" thing, so we settled for a slap up meal at the Wing Yip Chinese centre. This giant temple to Chinese capitalism squats just off the Purley Way (next door to the HSS Hire Centre, if you need a point of reference). The queue for Chinese food was equal in size to the entire population of China, but we snuck up some back stairs and discovered a whole other restaurant that had evaded discovery by previous adventurers. For just £10 we had unlimited access to the All You Can Cram in Your Gob Malaysian Buffet; this was an extraordinary price, as the food was of previously unperceived quality: chicken that melted in the mouth, spring rolls that were both nourishing and succulent, shrimp chips that actually tasted of shrimp. As we exclaimed later to the waitress: Mama mia! Ola grub squisito.
With the road trip over, in the evening we headed into town for Seamus and Lani's birthday party. We arrived far too early and so settled down to drink a couple of pints of beer and then some wine with Colin. Somehow I instantly slipped from being so tired I was verging on falling sleep to being hyperactively wide awake and bellowing random anecdotes out at Colin. My health kick - that is, to drink no more than two drinks in any one night - died with the first glass of wine, which I tentatively half filled and then, after a single sip, topped to the brim.
Guests finally started to file in, and the remainder of the evening was spent drinking and chattering with friends. Among other things, I made the unpleasant discovery that Sam Smith's pubs no longer do bottles of wine for £6 (a suprise which I understand spim also experienced, and to greater effect). We also proved at great length that Vampire is not a game that works in the pub.
Everyone stumbled into the street at closing time, made a firm pact to go to a late bar (spuriously Fuel), and then immediately disbanded to go home. On the late train my hiccupping was so loud it repeatedly alarmed the woman opposite. For dinner spim and I ate chicken.
On Sunday morning I woke at 7am to do some more work on my report, then went to wake up spim in the living room and eat toasted bagels, special eggs and coffee. With utter disregard for the state of the weather outside we made a plan to walk along the Thames path from London Bridge to Canary Wharf, where we would have a lovely Sunday lunch in a chain pub they have there. This sounded all well and good in theory, but in practice we found walking by the river somewhat akin to standing in an arctic wind tunnel, so we retreated into a labyrinthine network of underground tunnels and took the Jubillee line to North Greenwich instead.
The walk from North Greenwich to Canary Wharf is a most distinguished route. You begin at the touchingly optimistic millennium dome tube station, a grand construction seemingly designed to allow thousands of passengers an hour to visit a tatty (and closed) tourist attraction and around three thousand acres of scrubland and rubble. It took us just three minutes to stray off the neat pavings and find ourselves in a post-industrial wasteland: vast piles of trash heaped against mountains of overgrown rubble, all backdropped by the gleaming metallic towers of Canary Wharf. Stark but beautiful. As we stumbled through the filth we saw some pretty incongruous sights too: a farmhouse marooned in a moonscape and dwarfed by the millennium dome; a young woman in the window of a rotting mobile home reading the Sunday papers; a neon-lit tudor pub sharing a lot with a rusting gasometer; a long row of terraced houses where every other one was condemned as a dangerous structure - the remainder inhabited by families, and the penultimate one recently sold.
Fortunately, as we kept walking, all of this miserable wasteland was gradually replaced by the majesty of Greenwich: huge Victorian factories with intricate architecture; vast limestone buildings with neatly manicured lawns; and lots and lots of lovely little welcoming pubs. We headed through the Brunel foot tunnel, under the Thames, to the Isle of Dogs. Spim had never been through the tunnel before so he was very excited, although he hid it well.
Once on the other side of the river we strolled up through the Isle of Dogs to Canary Wharf and I was astonished by how much development there had been since my last visit: Island Gardens DLR has now been moved underground; five new skycrapers have appeared; my favourite bridge has been cut in half; and vast swathes of dock have been reclaimed for building on. Although the shapes of the docks are still familiar, the low-rise housing that had first helped to repopulate the area is gradually being swallowed up by thirty storey apartment blocks for a new breed of middle class who want to live the suburban life vertically.
We then went to a lovely little pub with dancing lamps and ate a hearty meal with some lovely soothing ales. Then the sport came on - some nonesense about kicking a ball around a field - so we packed up our shit and got out of that hole.
Arriving home at 4pm, I had plenty of time for a five hour nap before going to bed.
I bought a digitial camera too, so all of the above is documented. Perhaps I'll post the photos here. [Editor's note: I will not and did not]
Life note: Benares, Chip and Pin - 25 February 2005
Matt claimed that last night was "Just like Terminator 4: The Rise of the Pin and Chip Machines".
He could not have been further from the truth.
Dream Diary: Scissor Cult - 18 February 2005
I dreamt I had been entrusted with looking after a young boy, a sort of Haley Joel Osment type. Of course, it wasn't long before a cult of Satanists was on our trail. This cult operated a method of mind control which involved physically mutilating their victims. We did the usual business of hiding in places and running around lots, and ended up in a motel room. Exactly as I was thinking that we were all secure, I discovered a small bag of red rose petals in the room. As I went to pick one up, I realised they were not rose petals at all, but elegantly cut pieces of human skin, drenched red with blood.
Realising all was not good, I looked up to see the boy had been attacked: he stood beside the fireplace with his t-shirt torn off, revealing huge paper-snowflake like patterns cut deep into his skin of his chest with scissors. So that's where the rose petals came from, I thought to myself, not much happier for the enlightenment.
The boy was now under the cult's control, and came at me with a sharp pair of long-bladed steel scissors. The dream ended with us fighting on the floor, then him sitting on my stomach and snipping neat patterns into the flesh on my chest.
Life note: Darien birthday: Karaoke Part 2 - 17 February 2005
My brain is sore from alcohol abuse, my limbs are sore from kickboxing and my throat is sore from shouting over the music. What a great night! Of course, poor Darien is now over thirty, which sounds even older than thirty. Poor egg.
In other news, I spent 2am through 6am listening to the news on the radio, and then by 6:30am was fast asleep - just in time to catch the alarm clock at 7am. Hooray!
Life note: Karaoke Part 1 - 15 February 2005
After sensible Bots had got good and drunk and slipped off home, Darien and I slipped off to Belushi's on Borough High Street for open mic night. 'Open mic night' seemed to mean sitting in an empty basement in which a man was frolicking in one corner in just his underwear. We wouldn't have stayed, but wine was £5 a bottle and perfectly drinkable.
Curse this hangover.
Life Note: The Science Museum - 11-13 February 2005
On Friday night I went to La Perla in preparation for seeing Meet the Fockers, but then opted to drink lots of beer and not see Meet the Fockers instead, which turned out to be the correct decision. I downed a bottle of Corona in 10.01 seconds, which beat Conrad by five whole seconds, and his ladymate by about 15. We also had some tequila.
On the Saturday, then, I woke up with a raging hangover, and plans of redecorating my house and doubling its value were rationalised into lazing on the sofa and watching Josie and the Pussycats. Alan Cumming was over-the-top as always, indicating a downward career spiral which is only cemented by his presence in Son of the Mask (seen on bus sides only). Still, the girl what done played Josie was very sexy, so that balanced things out.
Deciding it would be good to get out of the house, in the afternoon I met up with Terrie to go to the science museum. This first involved around half an hour of running through Kensington and Sloane Square, demanding directions from French tourists and dodging into shoe shops to avoid the rain, and then involved a long, lazy afternoon lunch at The Jam, one of my favourite restaurants in London. We stuffed our faces with Italian food, banoffee pie and water.
Running through Kensington and Sloane Square and then having long, lazy lunches takes up some time, and so when we finally got to the Science Museum we had only half an hour before it closed. This turned out to be okay, since the majority of exhibits were simply giant hoardings announcing that the museum was undergoing refurbishment, and this way to the toilets please.
We raced around looking for the 'Launch Pad' - where all the buttons, levers and hornicators are - but all we found were more and more lavatories. There was even a big yellow sign saying "Yet more loos this way ->". The irony hung heavy on our shoulders, then, when we finally found Launch Pad was now closed, and the squat woman guarding the door suggested we try flushing the replica turd down the toilet in the History of the Home exhibit (which apparently "always goes down a bundle"). Terrie and I were now convinced that the Science Museum is really just the largest lavatory block in the world.
The only fun the Science museum can offer is pressing buttons, and although the History of the Home section had lots and lots of buttons to press none of them were buttons I didn't already have at home: "Press the button to make the microwave work!" the sign announced in bold font; "Make the blender blade spin!" Woo. Still, we both got so excited by an exhibit on the evolution of open fire-effect gas fires that we almost missed a fridge door flap open - only once, and at random - to reveal a bear was trapped inside.
So then I went to the DIY store and spent £60 on DIY materials, which were together sufficient to finish my flat completely, and then sat on the sofa and watched Dawson's Creek for three hours, instead of finishing my house completely.
On Sunday I finished the plastering in my bathroom and rewired the bedroom a little, then went to SeamusLaniHaus, where we and the Pixies played Puerto Rico. I rather wished I'd bothered to read all the tactical advice people have been posting to Live Journal over the past week, as the only tactic I could recall was that I'd once come close to winning by buying lots of tobacco. This didn't work a second time, and I came last.
And then, I went home and ate some chicken in bed.
Life note: Health Plan - 10 February 2005
The new plan: do some exercise, don't drink any alcohol, go home, eat well, get an early night.
Unaccounted for factors: (i) three drunks shrieking in the night, and then giving the police abuse as they were arrested; (ii) neighbour playing the drums; (iii) horrible muscle strain.
Result of implementing plan: after scarcely any sleep, wake up feeling worse than hungover. Head pounding, drowsy, limbs aching, irritable.
Conclusion: Return to tried and tested method of getting drunk each night. At least it's more fun the night before.
Life note: ArkanMic party: Back to the Future - 6 February 2005
After much hype and anticipation, a coterie of bots met up at the Arkanhaus to re-record the voice track to 'Back to the Future'. Unfortunately, this MicFly party quickly deteriorated into the non-amusing kind of nonsense. By the end, we swore upon our lives that details of this terrible evening would never be revealed to those outside the coven.
Life note: Rick and Daxter - 2 February 2005
I think Baron Praxis would have greater success in killing me if he spent more time focussing on his aim, and less time bellowing "YOU CAN NEVER DEFEAT ME! YOU ARE POWERLESS TO RESIST!" whilst flying around in a giant squid costume and firing his laser canons in a preprogrammed sequence, which I can effortlessly step around. Also, what's with him dropping fresh ammunition for me to collect every time he goes to re-energise? Does he want me to blow his fucking head off?!
I totally blew his fucking head off.
This morning I had a rest from Jak & Daxter II and played a bit of Price of Persia III instead. This game so totally sucks. Play.com inform me they cannot exchange if for something else as "we were lucky to offload the sodding thing on you in the first place" (my words, not theirs).
15 July 2005
JANUARY 2005 UPDATE
Life note: Evening with Darien, and sugar rush - 27 January 2005
My favourite joke from last night:
BOY: Darling, as a symbol of my love I've bought you this ring set with a diamond.
GIRL: Your grammar is appalling! That's a ring set with Anne Diamond.
[Camera pulls back]
Second favourite joke from last night:
Dear Jim'll Fix It,
Please can you fix it for me to go up in a hot air balloon. Thank you.
Yours sincerely,
Billy, aged 5 and a half
P.S. Please do not send me up in a hot air balloon.
Life note: Most Depressing Day of the Year - 24 January 2005
A Cardiff University academic has pinpointed this Monday - 24 January - as the most depressing day of the year. Well, if going to the pub with your friends, doing a spot of exercise and then having some pizza and salad with a cheap bottle of merely decent Merlot is as depressing as this year is going to get, I guess that can only be a good thing.
Life note: Road Trip to Bristol - 21-23 January 2005
Spimcoot and I made short work of a Friday night road trip from Addlestone to Bristol, and once reunited with Simon we fell into a lazy weekend of pubs, restaurants and cafes. Contact was made with the latest Tong - Jon Pike - and contact was reestablished with an old favourite, Nugget Tongs. Si also pulled a tendon in his leg, and so kept us well entertained by limping around all weekend like a broken baboon. Realising we couldn't spend the entire weekend drunk, we also briefly went to see Team America - World Police. I don't think I've laughed so many times during a single movie before. It wasn't much good, but it is very very funny.
On the way home we finally completed some unfinished business from last year's Saving Private Spimcoot: retrieving a box of forgotten possessions from a mysterious bearded man in a penthouse apartment in Salisbury. Then it was zip-bang to Weybridge for an unforgettable train journey:
Weybridge: with no staff on duty at all, I spent fifteen minutes wandering in the cold, confused about which train to take, until an old woman took me under her wing and told me about the Railway Replacement Bus. No method was provided for buying tickets. There was no provision of food, or even a vending machine. We stood outside in the wind and rain awaiting the fabled bus.
Surbiton: after a 45 minute bus journey, which seemed to visit all the train stations in Hampshire, Surrey and Kent, we arrived at Surbiton, a slightly bigger station than Weybridge. Although there were several places to buy food, I was too intent on making sure I caught the next train to waste time there. Despite sprinting from the bus to the correct platform, I turned up to watch my train pulling out of the platform. What sort of imbecile doesn't hold the trains up until the passengers arrive? Waited in the cold for fifteen minutes. Having passed through the ticket barriers, no food was available.
Waterloo: at old favourite, Waterloo has been the start of many adventures across the continent. On this occasion it was the end of an adventure. All trains from Waterloo to Forest Hill were cancelled. I bought a chicken salad baguette at the bargain price of just over one third of a kilopence, and wandered down to the tube.
Jubilee Line, east: being underground was a luxury, if only because the tube is kept marginally warm and - being underground - is out of the howling arctic wind. Waited for five minutes for the train. Random black tube-dust speckled my baguette like freshly ground Italian pepper.
London Bridge: usually such a welcoming station, late on Sundays everything is closed. Waited on a freezing cold platform for my delayed train.
Forest Hill: so close to home, I stand in a puddle.
Life note: Things done seen - 13-15 January 2005
Item! Garden State - This splendid film is a very early contender for best movie of 2005. The plot is great, the characters are great, the soundtrack is great, and the whole thing is done rather well indeed. Natalie Portman was completely against type, in that she actually did some acting. Zach Braff - the writer, producer, director and star - is definitely one to watch.
Item!! That Mitchell and Webb Sound - Dan drummed up a gang of us to go see this radio show being recorded at the Drill Hall. The comedy was quite patchy, but fast paced enough that you didn't notice. I doubt I will ever hear it on the radio, as they tend to play these things on dumb days at obscure times on Radio 4.
Item!!! Without a Paddle - Terrie, Arkansas and I braved North London (okay so, the other two actually live there) to see this appalling American comedy in an extremely empty cinema. How could they go wrong with Seth Green? Badly. They could go wrong very, very badly. We spent the rest of the day drinking just to recover, and soon everything was right with the world. I turned up to meet Seamus and other assorted bots in the evening and found I was so drunk I could barely stand, and it turned out they hadn't even started.
Life note: London fun - 8 January 2005
Terrie and I spent the day by being in London. We wandered around lots, and then watched The Incredibles and National Treasure - both of which I also saw last month - and then ate infinite quantities of sushi. National Treasure was somewhat improved by a woman seeking to flee the cinema five minutes before the end, and then falling down the steps with what sounded like a sackful of cutlery. My initial sympathy was completely replaced when a man sitting behind me started cackling, and shortly the whole cinema was in hysterics, obliterating much of the mawkish ending of the movie.
Movie Review: Twelve Angry Men - 7 January 2005
This film should really be called 'One or two angry men, and a bunch of others', as not many of them are very angry at all, least of all Henry Fonda, the mild mannered anti-hero. The basic premise is that a boy murders his father, and he gets off because some bored architect on the jury decides to demonstrate to the other jurors that no information can be 'beyond resonable doubt' unless witnessed first hand. Post-structuralism at its very worst. The witness testimonies are disposed of one by one on the weak premise that we can't absolutely trust that the witnesses saw what they said they saw, and we cannot absolutely be sure that what appears to be firm evidence is not merely a series of highly improbable coincidences. At best, this film might be considered an interesting diversion, whose plot moves more speedily than might be expected given the static setting.
Life note: 29th Birthday - 5 January 2005
Seven years ago on this very day I was unemployed and living in what was effectively a filthy squat in Vauxhall. I spent my birthday depressed, and was turned down by every employment agency I contacted looking for work. In the evening, Zack, Arkansas, Olivia and I got drunk on cheap red wine, and had dinner at McDonalds in County Hall.
This year I'm having lunch at the Ritz, followed by cocktails at the Lanesborough Hotel, and then all my friends are coming to the pub in Angel for fun. Perhaps I'll even eat dinner. This is a good development trajectory - where will I be in 2011?
Update: If the power of my hangover is anything to go by, my birthday was a splendid success. Lani, Seamus, Olivia and I had a splendid meal at the Ritz, feasted on a pretty spectacular pancreas salad and then encountered a magnificent wheeled cheese dome that at first made me think Davros had taken a job as waiter. Spim and Arkansas then joined us for a trek over to the Lanesborough for a couple of rounds of cocktails - martinis, caipirhinias and mojitos, largely. Thus utterly spacked, the remainder of the day (when all my other friends came to see me in Angel) is a blur.
Movie Review: Night of the Living Dead - 3 January 2005
Night of the Living Dead is a surprisingly gentle movie in which a number of 'ghouls' wander around aimlessly, and the cast are gradually whittled away one by one until there is no-one left, and the director decides he'd best call it a day.
And also... a book review:
The Restraint of Beasts: a splendid book, provided under the Graveney Book Gift Scheme, which either ends very abruptly or else has a twist I simply failed to understand. The characters are very endearing. No ghouls in this one.
Life note: Evening with Darien, and sugar rush - 27 January 2005
My favourite joke from last night:
BOY: Darling, as a symbol of my love I've bought you this ring set with a diamond.
GIRL: Your grammar is appalling! That's a ring set with Anne Diamond.
[Camera pulls back]
Second favourite joke from last night:
Dear Jim'll Fix It,
Please can you fix it for me to go up in a hot air balloon. Thank you.
Yours sincerely,
Billy, aged 5 and a half
P.S. Please do not send me up in a hot air balloon.
Life note: Most Depressing Day of the Year - 24 January 2005
A Cardiff University academic has pinpointed this Monday - 24 January - as the most depressing day of the year. Well, if going to the pub with your friends, doing a spot of exercise and then having some pizza and salad with a cheap bottle of merely decent Merlot is as depressing as this year is going to get, I guess that can only be a good thing.
Life note: Road Trip to Bristol - 21-23 January 2005
Spimcoot and I made short work of a Friday night road trip from Addlestone to Bristol, and once reunited with Simon we fell into a lazy weekend of pubs, restaurants and cafes. Contact was made with the latest Tong - Jon Pike - and contact was reestablished with an old favourite, Nugget Tongs. Si also pulled a tendon in his leg, and so kept us well entertained by limping around all weekend like a broken baboon. Realising we couldn't spend the entire weekend drunk, we also briefly went to see Team America - World Police. I don't think I've laughed so many times during a single movie before. It wasn't much good, but it is very very funny.
On the way home we finally completed some unfinished business from last year's Saving Private Spimcoot: retrieving a box of forgotten possessions from a mysterious bearded man in a penthouse apartment in Salisbury. Then it was zip-bang to Weybridge for an unforgettable train journey:
Weybridge: with no staff on duty at all, I spent fifteen minutes wandering in the cold, confused about which train to take, until an old woman took me under her wing and told me about the Railway Replacement Bus. No method was provided for buying tickets. There was no provision of food, or even a vending machine. We stood outside in the wind and rain awaiting the fabled bus.
Surbiton: after a 45 minute bus journey, which seemed to visit all the train stations in Hampshire, Surrey and Kent, we arrived at Surbiton, a slightly bigger station than Weybridge. Although there were several places to buy food, I was too intent on making sure I caught the next train to waste time there. Despite sprinting from the bus to the correct platform, I turned up to watch my train pulling out of the platform. What sort of imbecile doesn't hold the trains up until the passengers arrive? Waited in the cold for fifteen minutes. Having passed through the ticket barriers, no food was available.
Waterloo: at old favourite, Waterloo has been the start of many adventures across the continent. On this occasion it was the end of an adventure. All trains from Waterloo to Forest Hill were cancelled. I bought a chicken salad baguette at the bargain price of just over one third of a kilopence, and wandered down to the tube.
Jubilee Line, east: being underground was a luxury, if only because the tube is kept marginally warm and - being underground - is out of the howling arctic wind. Waited for five minutes for the train. Random black tube-dust speckled my baguette like freshly ground Italian pepper.
London Bridge: usually such a welcoming station, late on Sundays everything is closed. Waited on a freezing cold platform for my delayed train.
Forest Hill: so close to home, I stand in a puddle.
Life note: Things done seen - 13-15 January 2005
Item! Garden State - This splendid film is a very early contender for best movie of 2005. The plot is great, the characters are great, the soundtrack is great, and the whole thing is done rather well indeed. Natalie Portman was completely against type, in that she actually did some acting. Zach Braff - the writer, producer, director and star - is definitely one to watch.
Item!! That Mitchell and Webb Sound - Dan drummed up a gang of us to go see this radio show being recorded at the Drill Hall. The comedy was quite patchy, but fast paced enough that you didn't notice. I doubt I will ever hear it on the radio, as they tend to play these things on dumb days at obscure times on Radio 4.
Item!!! Without a Paddle - Terrie, Arkansas and I braved North London (okay so, the other two actually live there) to see this appalling American comedy in an extremely empty cinema. How could they go wrong with Seth Green? Badly. They could go wrong very, very badly. We spent the rest of the day drinking just to recover, and soon everything was right with the world. I turned up to meet Seamus and other assorted bots in the evening and found I was so drunk I could barely stand, and it turned out they hadn't even started.
Life note: London fun - 8 January 2005
Terrie and I spent the day by being in London. We wandered around lots, and then watched The Incredibles and National Treasure - both of which I also saw last month - and then ate infinite quantities of sushi. National Treasure was somewhat improved by a woman seeking to flee the cinema five minutes before the end, and then falling down the steps with what sounded like a sackful of cutlery. My initial sympathy was completely replaced when a man sitting behind me started cackling, and shortly the whole cinema was in hysterics, obliterating much of the mawkish ending of the movie.
Movie Review: Twelve Angry Men - 7 January 2005
This film should really be called 'One or two angry men, and a bunch of others', as not many of them are very angry at all, least of all Henry Fonda, the mild mannered anti-hero. The basic premise is that a boy murders his father, and he gets off because some bored architect on the jury decides to demonstrate to the other jurors that no information can be 'beyond resonable doubt' unless witnessed first hand. Post-structuralism at its very worst. The witness testimonies are disposed of one by one on the weak premise that we can't absolutely trust that the witnesses saw what they said they saw, and we cannot absolutely be sure that what appears to be firm evidence is not merely a series of highly improbable coincidences. At best, this film might be considered an interesting diversion, whose plot moves more speedily than might be expected given the static setting.
Life note: 29th Birthday - 5 January 2005
Seven years ago on this very day I was unemployed and living in what was effectively a filthy squat in Vauxhall. I spent my birthday depressed, and was turned down by every employment agency I contacted looking for work. In the evening, Zack, Arkansas, Olivia and I got drunk on cheap red wine, and had dinner at McDonalds in County Hall.
This year I'm having lunch at the Ritz, followed by cocktails at the Lanesborough Hotel, and then all my friends are coming to the pub in Angel for fun. Perhaps I'll even eat dinner. This is a good development trajectory - where will I be in 2011?
Update: If the power of my hangover is anything to go by, my birthday was a splendid success. Lani, Seamus, Olivia and I had a splendid meal at the Ritz, feasted on a pretty spectacular pancreas salad and then encountered a magnificent wheeled cheese dome that at first made me think Davros had taken a job as waiter. Spim and Arkansas then joined us for a trek over to the Lanesborough for a couple of rounds of cocktails - martinis, caipirhinias and mojitos, largely. Thus utterly spacked, the remainder of the day (when all my other friends came to see me in Angel) is a blur.
Movie Review: Night of the Living Dead - 3 January 2005
Night of the Living Dead is a surprisingly gentle movie in which a number of 'ghouls' wander around aimlessly, and the cast are gradually whittled away one by one until there is no-one left, and the director decides he'd best call it a day.
And also... a book review:
The Restraint of Beasts: a splendid book, provided under the Graveney Book Gift Scheme, which either ends very abruptly or else has a twist I simply failed to understand. The characters are very endearing. No ghouls in this one.
Late December 2004 update
Life note: Christmas and New Year 2004
A splendid Christmas was had with my family in Edinburgh, drinking gin to excess, politely avoiding screaming matches between children and wondering in idle minutes whether any of Deepa, Fergal, Kirsty or Luke was dead. According to virtually everyone, dying in a tsunami in Asia during her own wedding was 'just the type of thing' Kirsty would do. What curious habits one develops.
My relatives had badgered me for a Christmas gift list several months before the start of the season, and so I dutifully provided them with a detailed list of all the books I wanted, including full title, author's name, publisher and ISBN; as ever, some confusion must have occurred down at Waterstone's as I received a t-shirt, a clock, a shower radio and a pair of socks. After 29 Christmases just like this one, I have learned to guard myself against the disappointment of unwanted presents, and to throw myself back into the gin.
With a head befuddled with booze and overeating, I went on to attend the now traditional New Year's Eve Eve party, followed by a more standard New Years Eve, at Olivia's house in Hawkhurst. We drank pop with the Wrattons, downed champagne in a bus shelter during the Bread Game, and remade The Sound of Music, only with more Nazis. I played the helicopter.
Life note: Botmas - 23 December 2004
I guess we must have had fun last night, as my head feels like it has hamsters warring in it. I also guess we must have been playing sophisticated Victorian parlour games, as I just found a piece of paper in my pocket on which some wag has written "Matt Barnes is dumb and licks ... penis". I love the dramatic pause. You can almost hear the author struggling for inspiration, and then just giving in to the inevitable.
Too hungover to have a shower and go to work, I lazed on the sofa eating toast, drinking red bull and watching The High Life. This is what life will be like when I'm rich.
Life note: Christmas and New Year 2004
A splendid Christmas was had with my family in Edinburgh, drinking gin to excess, politely avoiding screaming matches between children and wondering in idle minutes whether any of Deepa, Fergal, Kirsty or Luke was dead. According to virtually everyone, dying in a tsunami in Asia during her own wedding was 'just the type of thing' Kirsty would do. What curious habits one develops.
My relatives had badgered me for a Christmas gift list several months before the start of the season, and so I dutifully provided them with a detailed list of all the books I wanted, including full title, author's name, publisher and ISBN; as ever, some confusion must have occurred down at Waterstone's as I received a t-shirt, a clock, a shower radio and a pair of socks. After 29 Christmases just like this one, I have learned to guard myself against the disappointment of unwanted presents, and to throw myself back into the gin.
With a head befuddled with booze and overeating, I went on to attend the now traditional New Year's Eve Eve party, followed by a more standard New Years Eve, at Olivia's house in Hawkhurst. We drank pop with the Wrattons, downed champagne in a bus shelter during the Bread Game, and remade The Sound of Music, only with more Nazis. I played the helicopter.
Life note: Botmas - 23 December 2004
I guess we must have had fun last night, as my head feels like it has hamsters warring in it. I also guess we must have been playing sophisticated Victorian parlour games, as I just found a piece of paper in my pocket on which some wag has written "Matt Barnes is dumb and licks ... penis". I love the dramatic pause. You can almost hear the author struggling for inspiration, and then just giving in to the inevitable.
Too hungover to have a shower and go to work, I lazed on the sofa eating toast, drinking red bull and watching The High Life. This is what life will be like when I'm rich.
Holiday report: Kenya: the Reader's Digest version - 3-18 December 2004
Hey - it turns out Kenya really rocks. Within a week it felt like we'd been there a month. Among the funs:
1. I found a warthog in the bar, and a monkey in the restaurant
2. A crocodile ate a goat's head during the soup course
3. Years of doing the jumping dance finally paid off when I defeated all five masai warriors in their own competition
4. We saw a cow day-dreaming
5. Ellie kissed a giraffe
6. Debbie's nipples were stripped of skin when she swam in the soda lake
7. We ate a full English Sunday lunch under armed guard - the masai with bows and arrows, looking out for leopards
8. Spim and I found a camel 800 miles too far south
9. Our van got stuck in the mud next to a pride of angry lions.
10. I got drunk. Constantly and without hesitation.
Gin was £2.50 a litre. Beer around a pound. I cannot understand why we ever left.
The full cast at the Uhuru monument, from left to right:
Holiday report: Kenya - on-the-road diary - 3-18 December 2004
3 December 2004: Friday
The holiday started in the worst possible way: after slogging away at work until 8:30pm, I took the wrong train to spimcoot’s house and found myself standing in the freezing cold, late at night, outside a closed petrol station in a town I still don’t know the name of.
I doubt there has been a moment in my life I’ve been more in need of a holiday, so I suppose it worked out well in that sense. Also, Nietzsche really knew his onions: doing bad stuff really does make you appreciate the good. Within half an hour I was ensconced in spim’s house, tucking into lasagne and a bottle and a half of red wine, and never before had lasagne tasted so good. I was immediately refreshed, and ready to lie futilely in bed for four hours until it was time to catch an early morning cab to Heathrow.
As I write this, I am wearing shorts and listening to the hippos calling out their territories, so we know the story has a happy ending. Bear with me here.
4 December 2004: Saturday
Our flight to Kenya seemed to last forever, and involved an impromptu stop in Kigali. Knowing nothing about Kigali this did not concern me much, until FrkiMummi explained that it’s in Rwanda, and Lucy launched into a lecture on the forthcoming civil war. Some comfort was found in the huge amounts of food being served, although the highlight of the flight – a particular scene in Spider-Man 2 – was wholly missed thanks to the cruel intervention of a flight steward.
SN Brussels Air were generous enough to lose our luggage so we wasted no time waiting by the carousel in Nairobi. Instead, we wasted our time queuing for an hour to register our loss. Unencumbered by silly bags we ran to meet MnkiFrki and parents, and were swiflty whisked off in the monkey bus to our new home at the Progressive Park Hotel (opposite the Ukay Centre in Westlands, if you need a point of reference).
The rooms at Progressive Park rooms are barren, with no hot water. A single butter knife comprised the entire set of cutlery. But still, it was refreshingly nice to sleep horizontal.
5 December 2004: Sunday
I woke early and headed to the Ukay Centre to buy some clean clothes to wear. Sadly, Kenyan shopping malls are not as well stocked as the Next on High Holborn and so I ended up having to wear an absurd orange t-shirt and see-through blue shorts. Deepa (flatteringly) confused me with SiBear all day.
We all piled into the bus with Mnki's extended family and headed off on a field trip. Nairobi is a very impoverished city, possibly the poorest I have ever seen. Shanty shops cling to the sides of the streets, amid a flood of sprawling rubbish, offering for sale broken pots, recycled plastic and pieces of dead animal. Meanwhile, the wealthy live in large compounds protected by electrified razor wire, dogs and armed guards. The wealthy do not venture into the street, rather they move from guarded compound to guarded shopping mall to guarded restaurant only by car. Foruntately for us we very distinctly fell into the wealthy category.
Mnki's dad, Ramesh, provided us with a splendid bus tour during our journey: clearly not knowing the route, he bellowed out whatever street signs he saw. Thus our guided tour comprised large international hotels and a couple of department stores.
We stopped briefly to see the Uhuru Monument: a giant structure built to mark Kenya’s independence. The significance of this event was lost on us as we all scrambled to climb up it, and Fergal discovered a cool rounded bit we could use as a slide. It was a great deal of fun. Sadly, being on a tight schedule, we didn't have time to slide down the Freedom, Peace and Unity Monument on the other side of the car park.
Next on the tour was the Nairobi giraffe sanctuary, where you hand feed giraffes tiny little pellets of compressed grass. We all had a great deal of fun stuffing the things into the giraffes’ mouths and being licked in return by their huge, blue tongues. Ele put some of the pellets in her own mouth to make a giraffe called Daisy kiss her. This was not wholly pleasant: giraffe salvia is rivalled only by spider silk in terms of stickiness and strength.
We were then taken on a nature trail, the details of which elude me since nothing of consequence occurred.
For lunch, we went to the Diamond Plaza, another guarded compound in Nairobi. The very moment we sat down in the food court a thousand waiters flocked around us, waving their menus and demanding that their chips were the best. Ramesh dealt with it all in style: after bellowing at them to go away, he confiscated their menus and sat on them until the waiters agree to play nicely. We ended up eating a splendid meal of coconuts, chips, curry and dosas.
After lunch came a traditional siesta – a vital time of the day in which one must rest and seek relief from the sun. For us, it is just yet another opportunity to get drunk. To turn a mammoth drinking session into a cultural event, we called it the Kenyan Beer Festival and set about trying one of each of the beers available from the Ukay centre.
After so much beer, a neat little plan to go to the drive-in cinema and watch some traditional Bollywood somehow evolved into Ele, Debbie and I heading to the next shopping mall but one and watching The Incredibles. This was, in itself, an African cultural experience: we sat at the front so we could surreptitiously drink beer and chatter whilst we waited for the main feature. Some irritatingly loud music came on and so Debbie had to raise her voice to tell me a sordid tale of spiced rum. Unfortunately, it turned out we were ignoring the national anthem, and everyone else in the cinema was standing to attention, glowering at us furiously.
We drank more beer, then went to bed.
6 December 2004: Monday
We woke up early and headed out to stock up on beer, having already drunk all the booze we were planning to take on safari with us.
The journey into the Maasai Mara lasted for hours, and the scenes of deprivation we watched through the windows degraded further and further: the tumbledown buildings of Nairobi turned into the shanty towns of the suburbs, turned into stalls fashioned from sticks and corrugated iron, turned into makeshift shelters of straw and bin liners.
Children waved as we drove by, and adults stopped to watch. After many many hours of dust tracks and broken tarmac one of our tyres exploded and our van went careering off onto the side of the road. We found ourselves stranded in the middle of a Maasai village, where children and adults alike gathered to watch us struggle with a new wheel. Their houses were simple thatched huts, their clothing robes and sticks. They resembled the Bronze Age people I studied at university, and I wondered what on earth they think of us.
To seal the moment, Debbie performed a handstand – or rather, her attempt failed when she hurt her hands on the gravel, and she did a sort of low, crouched, modern interpretive dance instead. Still, the Maasai seemed amused by it. Our driver tossed them our burst tyre - which they will apparently scavenge for shoe soles - and we headed off on our way.
45 minutes down an isolated dirt track, a second tyre exploded. Given we’d already used our spare, this meant the driver was in some deep shit. All day long he’d been merrily telling us that his philosophy is ‘Hakuna Matata’ – the trite Swahili phrase for 'No worries', made popular by the Lion King - but something in his manner implied that things weren’t so Hakuna Fucking Matata now. We left him to walk the five miles to the nearest settlement and joined the parents in the Old Folks’ truck, and were safely installed in the David Livingstones lodge within the hour.
En route we saw warthogs, giraffes, impala, about a billion goats and – somewhere in the distance – elephants. The lodge itself curves around a bend in the river, which is home to four separate families of hippo and three very hungry crocodiles. At lunch we drank our soup two metres from a crocodile on the bank, although my appetite faded when the croc devoured first a goat's head and then the rest of the carcass, although it got tired halfway through and sat with the legs sticking out either side of his mouth before sucking them up like noodles.
Most of the gang went out on an evening safari, but I stayed behind - I was far too tired of being in the van, and figured I'd already seen plenty of animals. Yet within just half an hour of being in the lodge I'd already seen monkey babies in the restaurant, a warthog in the bar, hippos on parade, and gazelle and zebras frolicking across the creek. I sat on the veranda and watched the hippos wallow as the sun set. Who needs safari?
The Monday evening is now a blur of gin, Tusker beer and another long, four course meal. As the meal drew to an end, five Maasai warriors entered the room singing and dancing. Ele, FrkiMummi and I leaped up to join in. All my life I have done the jumping dance in nightclubs, and that training finally paid off as I defeated all five warriors in turn at their own competition.
We ended the evening by drinking beer by the swimming pool, shouting and making up new constellations. The electricity cut out at 12:30am, and so it was time for Fergal to go skinny dipping, and then bed.
7 December 2004: Tuesday
I woke up so hung-over I could barely stand up, and felt I would vomit at any moment. This was possibly the worst time to attempt a dawn safari, however I had a splendid time once we got doing:
ITEM! We followed a couple of cheetahs as they stalked an impala. They failed, of course, since although cheetahs are cunningly camouflaged and agile, the impala could scarcely fail to notice the three huge safari trucks trailing their predators.
ITEM!! We watched a hyena kill and consume a dikdik. The rich tang of blood in the air, and the sight of the hyena gorging itself, made me very very hungry.
ITEM!!! We met an elderly exiled bull elephant which despondently fed itself with trunks full of grass, not much caring whether it lived or died.
… as well as countless ungulates, ostriches, vervets, baboons, giraffes and jackals. Not to mention the splendid fun of attempting to chart the unpaved savannah in what amounted to nothing more than an old ice cream van: the Olds’ van got stuck in the mud repeatedly, whilst our own almost toppled over whilst trying to crawl through a dried river bed.
We returned to the lodge for an immense breakfast of sausage, pancakes and beans, then I headed out again to tour a Maasai village with Fergal and the Olds. This was a bizarre field trip, and I was never very certain of who was exploiting who. On the one hand, we poked around their homes, took countless photos of them and and chased after their hens; on the other hand, we paid them 2,000 shillings, were constantly bothered by salesmen with the usual niknak tat and were given no more than a rudimentary worldwind tour, about three minutes behind the one ahead of us.
First, FrkiMummi, Chris and Penny joined the Maasai women for a welcome dance, then the Maasai revealed the tightly-guarded secrets of how to make fire, then after a quick jumping dance they dragged us over to see the kids sing the alphabet. We were then taken into a chief’s house, which was small but cozy, and smelled rich of woodsmoke. Still, the best bit was once the tour was over and Fergal and I fell into conversation with one of the women, who was the same age as us. We tried to explain what we did for a living (although neither artificial life nor business intelligence have close analogues in the Mara), and discussed our lives briefly. She could not believe I was 28 and without a wife. I could not believe she planned on having seven children.
After another huge meal by the river, watching the crocodile and hoping against hope if might attack a baby hippo, we headed off on the final safari of the day. This time we trekked for an hour or so to the foothills where a small family of white rhinos lived. The macho image of the rhino was somewhat compromised by the fact they need three armed Maasai warriors as bodyguards.
As we headed home the sun began to set, and the giraffes wandered silhouetted on the horizon, and a rainbow streaked across the sky. We were all rather struck by just how unnecessarily perfect everything was. We pressed on briefly and got stuck in the mud again. Despite the lions prowling in the bushes around us we all baled out to give the minibus a push. At the time it seemed like an awfully fun adventure, but I later discovered that the safari guide was extremely anxious about the whole affair. Apparently it's bad karma to lose tourists to the lions.
After a brief beer back at the lodge, we headed out into the bush yet again for some dinner. We were taken to a bonfire in a clearing, where tables have been set up complete with table cloths, cutlery and napkins. There was yet more Maasai dancing, some splendid food, and when it all finished we got to drive back through the bush in the dark, leaning out of the roof to inspect the Milky Way, lit up by shooting stars and sheet lightening. Already it felt like we’d been there for months.
Before turning in, Ele, FrkiMummi and I went to watch an enormous number of baboons on the river bank opposite the bar. I made monkey calls, and the baboons called back, and so it went on until I was no longer certain who was mimicking who.
I returned to my hut and collapsed contently into bed.
8 December 2004: Wednesday
Writing the date out now I laugh out loud: not only does it not seem as early as Wednesday, it sure doesn’t feel like it’s December. I am writing this now on the verandah over looking Crater Lake... that is, I was until I heard a very large animal growling in the undergrowth, and hotfooted back indoors.
The morning started with another safari from the David Livingstones lodge, although since there had been a great deal of rain in the night many of the animals had retreated deeper into the Mara and so we "only" saw some giraffes, baboons and hippos – along with the infinite range of identikit horned ungulates, of course: impala, gazelle, dikdiks, etc.
Our luggage also finally arrived – flown out to the Mara by the boffins at Nairobi airport – and so I finally had my video camera ready to catch any animal action. Alas, whilst yesterday the animals wouldn’t keep still for photos, today they all had stage fright and refused to perform for the camera at all.
A lot of the day was spent travelling back to the Rift Valley and then along to Lake Naivasha, beneath Mount Longonot. The journey was very successful: we had just one blown tyre, and otherwise broke down only whenever the engine overheated on the savannah. At one stage our progress was so slow that we were matched in pace by a young Maasai couple, who were walking with their suitcases.
En route through the Rift Valley we stopped off at a tourist niknak shop we had visited on the way out to the lodge a few days before. I really needed to use their toilet, but remembered how the last time I had been conned out of 2,000 shillings for some dumb giraffe mask (presumably made for the giraffe equivalent of the phantom of the opera). This time I was not so gullible. I stormed straight through the showroom to the toilet, did my business, and then returned commando style, moving fast and keeping close to the ground. Alas, I bumped into a salesman who demanded to know what I was doing. I simply smiled, waited until he was distracted, and then broke into a sprint. Thank god for Red Bull.
As I raced back to the van, I saw that more salesmen were gathering around the van, like the zombies in Day of the Dead. Fergal and I invented the Doctor David Starkey Game, and then the shoe-rock game, and eventually the salesmen lost interest and went away.
After another hour or so we ended up at Crater Lake on the edge of Hell’s Gate National Park, above Lake Naivasha. The location is utterly spectacular. We parked on the lip of a volcanic crater and took a long chain of steps down into the volcano, where we found a sparkling green lake surrounded on all sides by the forested crater walls. Everywhere were exotic birds, genet, gin and something that sounded like a lion, which roared and stalked around the tent late at night. The whole area is a nature reserve, and at night the guards dressed in black and stood between our tents, armed with bows and arrows against whatever nature might throw at us.
After a quick beer and some lunch everyone entertained themselves with swimming, boating and walking. I satisfied myself with chasing after the flamingos and then sitting out on the veranda with spim, watching the sun set and drinking gin. Although we're technically staying in tents it isn't exactly like Wales: our tent has a verandah, an en suite bathroom and two four poster beds.
It seems we were well advised to avoid swimming, as it is a soda lake. The manager, an Old Etonian with an impeccable English accent, sold this as a good thing: nothing can live in the water, so there’s nothing in there to harm you. He conveniently forgot to mention that its high alkalinity effectively strips the skin from your body. Poor Debbie’s nipples were apparently never the same again.
At dinner we have the first truly fantastic meal of the holiday: a completely incongruous but impeccably cooked roast pork dinner, with all the trimmings and syrup sponge and custard to follow. This is the most colonial the holiday has been so far, but I can forgive a bit of ethnic cleansing for this sort of treatment.
At the bar, I saw a news headline about there being a monster in the lake. To make conversation, whilst I wait for the gin to pour, I asked the barman “So, you have a monster in the lake?”
“No,” the bar man said. “Ice and lemon?”
The volcano is such an amazing location it seems absurd to leave it immediately the next morning just to see another bit of nature somewhere else. Spim and I decide to avoid going to Hell's Gate National Park, and plan to spend the next day exploring the crater instead.
9 December 2004 – Thursday
I slept well during the night, but found it impossible to lie-in the next morning as every bird, frog and monkey seemed determined to define their territory, call for their young and seek out a mate through the disruptive medium of song. Have these creatures not heard of instant messenger?
There was some confusion over whether spim and I could stay behind for the day, so we all met up extra early to sort it out. Unfortunately, the drivers didn’t turn up until midday, so the options were conveniently narrowed down.
Spim and I spent the time until midday exploring something called a 'crater cone'. Halfway up the volcano we stumbled across a camel: a fully grown, moth-eaten camel some thousand miles further south than I had expected. Still, the camel seemed to be content eating a shrub nonchalantly and so I figured it knew what it was doing.
The crater cone was disappointing: as it is defined geographically as the lowest point in the area, the view was not splendid. We pledged to press on to the great Flat Rock which was marked on our maps, figuring it would be an impressive natural monument. Alas no, it was just a rock which was marginally more flat than any of the others in the immediate vicinity. Now dusty and sweaty, we figured we had little to lose and so ascended to the top of the rim. We were immediately rewarded with a spectacular view: below us stretched the entire volcano, a vast round rim of greenery with our little green lake at the heart. Hell’s Gate national park lurked behind the volcano wall, and the rest of the Rift Valley stretched out to the horizon behind that. Nice. We stumbled back to the camp for a bottle of coke.
All but Debbie, Wally, Chris, spim and I headed off to Hell’s Gate – effectively, all of the non-Huttons were left behind. We rowed a boat around the lake, spending a happy hour chasing the flamingos and lazing in the sun, burning our skin both with the sun and with splashes of soda water.
Afterwards we chatted with Chris and Wally; it’s amazing that these two were complete strangers five days earlier, and yet already we were swapping details of our bowel movements. By this stage at least half the group had come down with some major bowel error, and it looked like the other half were not far behind [editor’s note: I thankfully avoided diarrhea, but not stomach cramps, retching and constipation. Now read on…]
Eventually it was time to drive to Elementaita Lake in the Rift Valley, where we stayed in a friendly little apartment block in a 1950s holiday park. The view from the terrace bar was amazing: a vast plain housing a lake full of flamingos, flanked by mountains, with a forest in the distance and gazelle frolicking in the foreground. We spent a lot of time on the terrace, nursing a gin or Tusker, as the sun went down.
Dinner was vast as always, and after a quick night cap we were all tucked up safely in bed.
10 December 2004 – Friday
This was a sad day – my first blister pack of anti-malarial tablets ran out, signifying the passing of a whole week since we arrived. Still, despite this it seems like we've been on holiday pretty much forever. As I write this, we're back in the Progressive Park executive apartments in Nairobi, and these spartan rooms already feel like an old home, rather than somewhere we once spent a couple of nights a week ago.
The morning started late at Lake Elementaita. Everyone decided to lie in and catch the latest possible breakfast, which confused the waiters who were just packing everything up. I guess we lay in mostly because there wasn't a great deal to do in the area. We had all been looking forward to horse riding, but the horses were busy having their injections and so that was off. This was all part of the "can't-do" atmosphere of the place: "Of course we have the internet, sir. This is a hotel. Although of course, it's broken". Likewise the ready supply of stamps in the gift shop which – it soon transpired – were only for sale to those willing to subject themselves to the trials and red tape of a Kafkaesque bureaucracy.
Most of the young folk opted for frolicking in the swimming pool, but the Olds, Mnki, Spim and I chose instead to take a 'nature walk' down to the lake. Having been born to more sympathetic parents, I had always understood the term 'nature walk' to mean a pleasant stroll, in this case a brisk trot down to Lake Elementaita; however, it soon transpired the Frki parents had something else entirely in mind. It took a full 15 minutes just to step away from the hotel lobby – the Olds were intrigued by a mundane specimen of sparrow – and spim and I did some quick mathematics and calculated that 409 species of bird multiplied by 15 minutes each equalled over four days of continuous nature trail. This alone was distressing enough, but things were to get worse when it transpired Pat and Jim could also spend quarter of an hour on each individual species of flower or cactus and - taking it entirely upon himself - the guide also decided to direct our attention to interesting pieces of obsidian he found on the route. It would have been a far simpler task to merely catalogue each of the atoms in the Rift Valley. Still, for all this nature loving no one seemed remotely interested in my impromptu discovery of a scorpion.
Our stay at the lodge was brief, and after a quick seven course meal of three soups and four jellies we were driven back to Nairobi, stopping only for a glorious view of the Rift Valley on the way, and for me to practice my new technique with the tat salesman. I would bellow "NO!" and then run away until they agreed to sell me whatever it was for just £2.
What with plans to go to Mnki parents' dry house for dinner, we decided to fortify our sprits against sobriety with a £2.50 bottle of Safari Gin, and as much of the previous week's beer as we could steal from Daddy Jim. Dinner at Deepa's parents' house was far more formal than we had expected: no sooner had we entered through the door than we were urged to sit down in the vast living room, in chairs which had been laid out in a circle, flush against the walls. I was able to wave to most of the people, but only spim and Granny Tongs were within conversational distance.
We didn't get to speak to many of the actual Shah family either, as they spent most of the evening either handing out food, urging us to eat more food, or doing their party pieces: Sonal's traditional Indian dancing set the bar quite high. Pu then raised the stakes with some brilliant sitar playing. Then it was the Olds' turn, and they were diplomatic enough not to attempt to gazump either of the sisters. They gracefully threw in the towel with a deeply mournful version of Mud Mud Glorious Mud. This clearly persuaded the Shah family to stop the party pieces, although I would have attempted to play the spoons if invited.
After five plates of deep-fried Chinese food I felt decidedly queasy and so an Uncle whose name I can never remember (although I know he was married to Pari) drove me home, along with Granny Tongs and Meat – the latter being some friend of Dhru's, and whose miserable countenance had been a constant source of amusement to spim and I. I felt that this anonymous Uncle and I bonded over conversation in the car, and I even received a breath mint upon alighting at the Progressive Park executive apartments.
I fell into bed, thought my stomach contents would also fall into the bed, and then fell into a deep sleep and left my stomach to get on with it.
11 December 2004 – Saturday
Although still ill, for breakfast I managed to force down the classic twin health foods of pink milkshake and a Red Bull. For the morning's entertainment we wandered over to see some sand sculptures at the Shah Community Centre. These were vast floor paintings constructed purely from different colours of loose sand. Although they were amazingly detailed, with complex patterns of shading and highlights, it seemed ultimately rather pointless. If we're to tolerate this, next they'll be making elephants out of mashed potato or the Buddha from goat dung. Is this really the way we want society to go?
Next we headed off to the National Museum, which was roughly on a par with the museum in Otley: lots of peeling paint, rotting stuffed animals and various native artefacts. Ferg and I spent some time looking at the hominid skulls, and then checked out some cool information on the early Indian settlements (including detailed engineer's diagrams recording the time a gang of coolies was attacked by a leopard, all neatly structured and hand-labelled). With sufficient culture in us to justify the entrance fee, we ditched the museum in search of masala chips and coke.
Such exertions as looking at sand and looking at dead things were clearly too much for the Olds, who went back to the Progressive Park executive apartments for a nap. The rest of us headed off to Put-o-Mania at the Village Market. We completed around half of the course, skipping those holes deemed too boring, and adopting new holes as and when balls went astray into water slides and flower beds. The Village Market is a vast, hacienda-syle shopping mall in an armed compound with a very high percentage of wealthy white people and Indians. It didn't feel like Nairobi at all, yet over the razor-wire fence we could still see slums stretching off into the distance. There is clearly a big need for somewhere safe and pleasant for the wealthier locals to come, but I couldn't help feeling the country's woes would not be alleviated if the monied classes only ever shop in Western chain stores. To underline this point, a stark symbol of the Kenyan wealth divide lay across the valley: the American Embassy residential block - a vast subdivision of three-storey, detached American homes - stood directly beside a small shack, with goats, chickens and a corrugated steel out-house. The two were seperated abruptly by a razor-wire fence.
In the evening, we enjoyed MnkiFrki's Wedding Feast. There was no alcohol, only coke or fanta, but this was more than made up by the mountains of food and endless dancing to bhangra versions of American hits. It was splendid fun, and followed up by SoHo's, an amusingly meta-retro bar of the type that only ever exists on foreign holidays, playing music you haven't heard since the 1980s. We drank gin and bid farewell to the lovely Debbie, who was going off on a 44 day camping trip to South Africa. She already felt like one of the family, or rather like one of the family of which I was also beginning to feel like one.
12 December 2004 – Sunday
For breakfast we discovered that the upstairs of the Ukay Centre bookshop contained an amazing little cafe, where I enjoyed a toasted BLT before calling my mum to wish her a happy birthday. The time delay on the line did little for comprehension. "I saw an crocodile eat a goat's head," I said. "Ooh, lovely!" she gushed.
The morning fun was a PR exercise for Ramesh to indulge his messiah complex: we fed 1,500 starving children. The poor ragged souls queued up around the block for a loaf of bread, biscuits and boiled sweets. The poor souls had to eat it all on the premises (to ensure they benefited, not their parents), but the drinks had all run out minutes after our arrival. Dry bread, biscuits and boiled sweets are not the finest meal one can have when one is thirsty and sitting in the sun.
The kids were very cute and cheerful, although I had to avoid some of the ones which stank too strongly of urine. They also became a lot less pleasant once they had their food, and the big kids would steal from the little kids, leading to fights which could only be broken up by the organisers' judicious use of sticks.
Chris was moved to tears by the poverty, and Deepa seemed a little upset, however I was generally unmoved. I don't know if this is a sign of a clean conscience and a healthy lack of self-guilt, or a latent sign of my late-teens psychopathy. Still, Aashi was even less moved, insisting he have a loaf of bread just like all of the other children.
For lunch, we headed round to Mnki Mummi's for a slap-up feast. Conducted in three shifts, we all tucked into amazing Gujarati food: chapatti, potato and chickpea curries, samosas and yoghurt. Around eight different Shah women had made it their personal mission over the past fortnight to get Fergal to eat more, and his tummy already bore witness to their success. The food was, of course, all immaculate and delicious; which is just as well, since they reportedly got up at 5am to make it.
Then, it was back to the Progressive Park executive apartments for a theoretical nap, which I spent taking a photo of a wall and summoning others to enjoy the gin. By the time the Monkey Bus had returned - as scheduled - to take us all to a service at a local temple, us young folk had drunk all the gin and cashed in the week's beer bottle deposits for more. We could only helplessly wave the olds off whilst we worshipped our own, spirit-based god. Once the new gin was finished we'd lost any lingering shyness and took a taxi to the Norfolk Hotel, a century-old colonial hotel in downtown Nairobi. Alas, in between the colonial period and the current day the hotel had been somewhat renovated into what resembled a Forte Travelodge; but still, this was as fancy as things would get, and the Tongs took it upon themselves to improve things where they could: spim and I took the barman aside to explain the technique of cocktail making – happy to help by knocking back his every effort – whilst Ele tried to lend a certain class to the joint by taking over on the piano. Later, the bar was packed as Ele and I tried out a few show tunes; alas, I fear the bar was packed in spite of rather than because of our rudimentary dance routine.
We stumbled home to drink whisky, and before I realised it it was already 5am and Fergal was banging on the door to wake us up. We had five minutes to be up and out for Mombasa.
13 December 2004 – Monday
In a miserable, gin-stinking hangover we were driven with 23 others to Nairobi airport. Tiny things like standing up and sitting down were an immense chore, and I had to avoid siting near Ele on the plane since the stench of raw alcohol dripping from her pores turned my stomach. No doubt she felt the same about me.
The barman at David Livingstones had assured spim and I that Mombasa was lovely, and that we'd be able to hire bikes and explore the town. Even in my hungover state I could see this was utter bollocks: as we left the airport, the road instantly degraded into a rough road filled with pot holes and pools of sewage, flanked by shanty huts, wandering goats, filthy children and filthier parents. All this we had seen before in Nairobi, but there was a new feature here: immense piles of random detritus and shit dumped in overflowing skips, surrounded by scavenging goats, crows and children. Okay, I could see that they're poor; but these people had lost their dignity too.
Still, none of this poverty mattered to us at all since we were swiftly driven to our secure compound, complete with razor wire and guard dogs: Club Sun n' Sand, an immense salmon pink complex of free food and drinks. Much as I found this resort tacky, badly managed and insufferably hot, it was clearly a paradise compared to the hell that most of the people had to cope with on the other side of the nine-foot high, electrified fences.
[Editor's note: Thinking fondly of my days as an archaeologist in Denmark, where hanging onto the electric fences in the sheep fields had given us our only thrills in between long hours of drudgery, I cheerfully suggested to Ferg that we grab some of these electric fences and enjoy the tickling current. "Dude," he helpfully explained, "those were for sheep, these are for people. Last week a man leaned his aluminium ladder on one and was burned in half." It was a lesson I didn't not need to learn in practice.]
We soon discovered that 'all the food you can eat' meant a buffet three times a day, and although these were splendid (Indian vegetarian food a speciality), when we ordered snack food outside of these times we were rewarded with limp greasy food: for example, Ferg's snack sandwich was processed cheese in cheap white bread, deep-fried in margarine.
The heat and humidity was so intense in Mombasa that spim and I took to our beds immediately. Alas, we were easily spoiled by the air conditioning, and so attempting to leave the room was a miserable experience, somewhat akin to entering a steaming hot bath. Still, as there was no room service, our incumbent sobriety drove us out in the end, and we spent a miserable hour drinking weak fruit 'cocktails' at a hotel induction, and eating the fingers of the fish and balls of the meat.
Realising there was no need to enjoy free fruit cocktails where there was free gin in all the bars, we quickly aborted and joined the olds for gin and tonics by the pool. During dinner my hangover, the heat and the overeating all got to me, and I retired to bed to recover.
14 December 2004 – Tuesday
It's seriously so hot here that it's impossible to go outside. Spim and I spent until 4pm today simply alternating between lying in our air conditioned beds and wandering out to find food. At four, however, the tide is in and so I hired a windsurfer with Lucy. We both immediately remembered how to get up onto the board and pull up the sail, however I also immediately remembered how to drift aimlessly along the coast, and so I had to trudge all the way back. Still, the water is as warm as a bath and so even trudging is no hardship.
Afterwards, I swam back to my room through the series of interconnecting pools which run up through the complex – Burt Lancaster style, only in reverse. I bumped into spim, and so I got to swim back down through the interconnecting pools to the poolside bar. We later joined the others under a coconut tree and enjoyed some cold beer, some tree climbing and Ferg being pooed on by crows.
After a quick shower, Ferg and I took Aashi and Dhru dancing – a dance which quickly turned into Battle Bots as the two kids unwillingly fought for superiority on our shoulders. Dinner was routine, and afterwards the young folk all sat out by the Jacuzzi playing The Bots' buzz game. I waited until I was both hot and bored and then declared it time for bed.
Mombasa is clearly not going to present as many surprises and adventures as the Masai Mara; however, deep down some small part of me realises I might as well try to enjoy myself, although the resort does not make this so easy.
15 December 2004 – Wednesday
After a huge breakfast, and half an hour to let it all settle down, Ian, Ferg, Ele and I engaged in a little tennis. Of course, it was so hot that the initial bout of fun soon became an immense slog, and we were all drenched in sweat, so we retired to the games room for pool and ping pong, regressing into childhood holiday habits.
We were soon so overheated we had to play in the pool to cool down – tough since the water was also very hot – and then swim down the slides to the bar, where chilled beer and gin were drunk amid wrestling people back into the pool. It was excellent to be able to fall off a bar stool without coming to any harm – apart from the risk of drowning, that is.
After lunch I needed to nap, rejoining Ele, spim and Fergal for beer in the afternoon. Ferg and I somehow ended up kayaking out to the reef and back. There were huge waves out by the reef, and we both had great fun bobbing up and down until Ferg met a particularly ferocious wave and was tossed out of his boat, cutting his feet on a sea anemone's spines as he tried to stand up on the reef.
At dinner, the waiters brought out Dhru's birthday cake in a long parade, chanting some bizarre birthday song. Alas, Dhru had nipped out to the loo at the time, and so the parade found itself circling the table in a holding pattern, desperately hoping he'd return soon, it's numbers swelling with every orbit as more and more diners leap up to join in with this new diversion.
Spim and I develop a cunning plan to return to the civilisation of air conditioning asap; Ele opposes the plan, and takes direct action by attempting to physically restrain us the whole way home. We shake her off and dive into our cool, cold beds. The air conditioning is so efficient that I currently lie in my bed shivering with cold, wearing my thick hooded top and wrapped up in a blanket. Although I feel a little guilty to be using a third world country's resources this way, I figure they'd only spend any money I help them save on filling more skips up with crap.
16 December 2004 – Thursday
As with the other days we have spent in Mombassa, this was a lazy day. A big breakfast, some ping pong with spim and Ferg, back to bed to chill out and watch Speed, a huge lunch, bar fun, and then some lazing around. When we were finally allowed aboard the bus to leave in the late afternoon, there was not an ounce of regret in my system.
The bus left the compound and we were instantly returned to the squalid reality of the outside world. Directly outside the hotel were thatched shanty houses, crumbling shops and gutters filled with trash.
Getting through the airport takes forever thanks to the effects of group inertia, but a little patience is all it took to be transported back to the cool, cheerful world of Nairobi. On the way we invented a splendid game: "If this party were an X, I'd be the X." Um, I'll explain it in person perhaps.
Desperate to spend our last night drinking with MnkiFrki, we somehow ended up instead in an obscure uncle's courtyard, sitting in Indian fashion up against the walls, eating pizza and garlic potatoes and washing it all down with yoghurt. A daughter then entertained us with some eclectic modern Indian dance, to a bhangra tune crossed with the Nightrider theme tune. This was truly incongruous: in a filthy, grey concrete yeard, the walls 15 feet high and topped with broken glass and razor wire, a young girl in a colourful sari danced before a crowd. It had all the hallmarks of low-budget Bollywood.
Eventually we were allowed to leave, and headed back to the Progressive Park executive apartments – by now our second home – for a last night of Tong drinking with MnkiFrki. This became a very brief event as Books First closed at 12am, and we only had cash enough for seven bottles of Tusker. Also, Ian and spim attempted to claim an early night, but were thankfully rallied into attendance by Lucy. It was worth it: despite being with them for almost a fortnight it didn't feel like we'd seen anything of MnkiFrki; this was the first time all holiday I felt like we'd been Tongs. I went to bed happy.
17 December 2004 – Friday
Spim and I ate our now traditional breakfast of BLT and Eggs Benedict at Books First. The atmosphere in the upstairs bar was somewhat compromised by the fact that two separate boy band ballads were warring for attention through the speaker system. In addition, the number of electronic Santas downstairs had multiplied to three – and bizarrely, not all of them were singing The Yellow Rose of Texas.
We took a bus ride to the Village Market – longtime home of Put-o-Mania – stopping en route to visit Pari's house on the way. Although Pari explained that we had to pop over because she needed to get Aashi ready, this 'getting ready' actually comprised merely putting on his shoes. The whole diversion turned out to be a ruse in order to feed us snacks and drinks and – yes – make us sit in a circle flush against the walls. Damn it, a ruse to host us!
After buying a Tusker t-shirt (now official Tongs dress), Aashni, Fergal, spim, Henna and I had a go at bowling. Thanks to a couple of strikes – and my insistence that neither of the children could use bounce-barriers or the rolling ramp – I managed to scrape in first. My first ever win at ten pin bowling!
I ventured into the Masai market and proved myself an old pro at the bargaining game. My method is simple: try to buy something you don't very much want, and only a really, really, really good price will persuade you.
We enjoyed a last meal in Kenya: spring rolls, bhajias and beer. Deepa got into a flap about organisation and timing and the olds seemingly needed to nap again and so we were all dragged back to the Progressive Park executive apartments, where spim and I spent over an hour simply sitting in a series of different rooms until finally being kicked out of all of them and ending up in the corridor.
Deepa was anxious about time, and so we headed off to the airport early, stopping off only at Ramesh's house to pick up Fergal and Deepa. Of course, no such plan can be so simple and so yet again we all filed into the house to sit in a circle around the edges of the room and accept water before we were permitted to leave again. Given we were supposed to be very late, this was hospitality gone mad.
Saying goodbye to MnkiFrki was quite emotional, but we soon recovered in time to get a couple of Tuskers each at the airport bar to celebrate Ele's birthday. Alas, we had to leave her behind to board the plane – although thanks to stops in Uganda and Belgium, Ele would still make it back to London at least five hours earlier than us.
Three films were showing on the plane: I Robot, The Laws of Attraction and The Manchurian Candidate. They all provided me with an excellent reason to sleep.
18 December 2004 – Saturday
The plane journey was a complete mess: we were moved twice because of broken doors and faulty seats, and then we found the new seats were either broken or soaked with water, with a broken reading light (permanently on, alas, not off). Things get worse in Brussels where we found we'd missed our connection and so had to wait three more hours for the next flight. Things weren't so bad because of the wait – we were still in holiday mode, and had crosswords and each other to keep us busy – but because of all the moaning we felt obliged to engage in first.
Finally we enjoyed a BA flight to London, by far the most comfortable and best organised flight of the holiday; next time, I swear, it's BA all the way.
I bid farewell to everyone, and Lucy and I took the Piccadilly Line into central London. After a brief stop home to drop off my things, I head out to met up with Seamus and Lani at the Bricklayers arms. Travelling around on my own feels completely wrong, and I keep peering into the crowds anticipating a glimpse of an Old or the orange rim of Ferg's hat. I make a brief stab at oAlex's birthday party, but am far too tired and abandon the whole plan at 20:30 for a long stay in bed.
Update 19 January 2005: on 10 December 2004 I wrote "This was a sad day – my first blister pack of anti-malarial tablets ran out, signifying the passing of a whole week since we arrived." Well, today the last of my blister packs of anti-malarial tablets ran out, signifying four weeks since returning from Kenya (plus days of forgetfulness), and I can say without hesitation this is not a sad thing at all. Good riddance to bitter pills!
Hey - it turns out Kenya really rocks. Within a week it felt like we'd been there a month. Among the funs:
1. I found a warthog in the bar, and a monkey in the restaurant
2. A crocodile ate a goat's head during the soup course
3. Years of doing the jumping dance finally paid off when I defeated all five masai warriors in their own competition
4. We saw a cow day-dreaming
5. Ellie kissed a giraffe
6. Debbie's nipples were stripped of skin when she swam in the soda lake
7. We ate a full English Sunday lunch under armed guard - the masai with bows and arrows, looking out for leopards
8. Spim and I found a camel 800 miles too far south
9. Our van got stuck in the mud next to a pride of angry lions.
10. I got drunk. Constantly and without hesitation.
Gin was £2.50 a litre. Beer around a pound. I cannot understand why we ever left.
The full cast at the Uhuru monument, from left to right:
Holiday report: Kenya - on-the-road diary - 3-18 December 2004
3 December 2004: Friday
The holiday started in the worst possible way: after slogging away at work until 8:30pm, I took the wrong train to spimcoot’s house and found myself standing in the freezing cold, late at night, outside a closed petrol station in a town I still don’t know the name of.
I doubt there has been a moment in my life I’ve been more in need of a holiday, so I suppose it worked out well in that sense. Also, Nietzsche really knew his onions: doing bad stuff really does make you appreciate the good. Within half an hour I was ensconced in spim’s house, tucking into lasagne and a bottle and a half of red wine, and never before had lasagne tasted so good. I was immediately refreshed, and ready to lie futilely in bed for four hours until it was time to catch an early morning cab to Heathrow.
As I write this, I am wearing shorts and listening to the hippos calling out their territories, so we know the story has a happy ending. Bear with me here.
4 December 2004: Saturday
Our flight to Kenya seemed to last forever, and involved an impromptu stop in Kigali. Knowing nothing about Kigali this did not concern me much, until FrkiMummi explained that it’s in Rwanda, and Lucy launched into a lecture on the forthcoming civil war. Some comfort was found in the huge amounts of food being served, although the highlight of the flight – a particular scene in Spider-Man 2 – was wholly missed thanks to the cruel intervention of a flight steward.
SN Brussels Air were generous enough to lose our luggage so we wasted no time waiting by the carousel in Nairobi. Instead, we wasted our time queuing for an hour to register our loss. Unencumbered by silly bags we ran to meet MnkiFrki and parents, and were swiflty whisked off in the monkey bus to our new home at the Progressive Park Hotel (opposite the Ukay Centre in Westlands, if you need a point of reference).
The rooms at Progressive Park rooms are barren, with no hot water. A single butter knife comprised the entire set of cutlery. But still, it was refreshingly nice to sleep horizontal.
5 December 2004: Sunday
I woke early and headed to the Ukay Centre to buy some clean clothes to wear. Sadly, Kenyan shopping malls are not as well stocked as the Next on High Holborn and so I ended up having to wear an absurd orange t-shirt and see-through blue shorts. Deepa (flatteringly) confused me with SiBear all day.
We all piled into the bus with Mnki's extended family and headed off on a field trip. Nairobi is a very impoverished city, possibly the poorest I have ever seen. Shanty shops cling to the sides of the streets, amid a flood of sprawling rubbish, offering for sale broken pots, recycled plastic and pieces of dead animal. Meanwhile, the wealthy live in large compounds protected by electrified razor wire, dogs and armed guards. The wealthy do not venture into the street, rather they move from guarded compound to guarded shopping mall to guarded restaurant only by car. Foruntately for us we very distinctly fell into the wealthy category.
Mnki's dad, Ramesh, provided us with a splendid bus tour during our journey: clearly not knowing the route, he bellowed out whatever street signs he saw. Thus our guided tour comprised large international hotels and a couple of department stores.
We stopped briefly to see the Uhuru Monument: a giant structure built to mark Kenya’s independence. The significance of this event was lost on us as we all scrambled to climb up it, and Fergal discovered a cool rounded bit we could use as a slide. It was a great deal of fun. Sadly, being on a tight schedule, we didn't have time to slide down the Freedom, Peace and Unity Monument on the other side of the car park.
Next on the tour was the Nairobi giraffe sanctuary, where you hand feed giraffes tiny little pellets of compressed grass. We all had a great deal of fun stuffing the things into the giraffes’ mouths and being licked in return by their huge, blue tongues. Ele put some of the pellets in her own mouth to make a giraffe called Daisy kiss her. This was not wholly pleasant: giraffe salvia is rivalled only by spider silk in terms of stickiness and strength.
We were then taken on a nature trail, the details of which elude me since nothing of consequence occurred.
For lunch, we went to the Diamond Plaza, another guarded compound in Nairobi. The very moment we sat down in the food court a thousand waiters flocked around us, waving their menus and demanding that their chips were the best. Ramesh dealt with it all in style: after bellowing at them to go away, he confiscated their menus and sat on them until the waiters agree to play nicely. We ended up eating a splendid meal of coconuts, chips, curry and dosas.
After lunch came a traditional siesta – a vital time of the day in which one must rest and seek relief from the sun. For us, it is just yet another opportunity to get drunk. To turn a mammoth drinking session into a cultural event, we called it the Kenyan Beer Festival and set about trying one of each of the beers available from the Ukay centre.
After so much beer, a neat little plan to go to the drive-in cinema and watch some traditional Bollywood somehow evolved into Ele, Debbie and I heading to the next shopping mall but one and watching The Incredibles. This was, in itself, an African cultural experience: we sat at the front so we could surreptitiously drink beer and chatter whilst we waited for the main feature. Some irritatingly loud music came on and so Debbie had to raise her voice to tell me a sordid tale of spiced rum. Unfortunately, it turned out we were ignoring the national anthem, and everyone else in the cinema was standing to attention, glowering at us furiously.
We drank more beer, then went to bed.
6 December 2004: Monday
We woke up early and headed out to stock up on beer, having already drunk all the booze we were planning to take on safari with us.
The journey into the Maasai Mara lasted for hours, and the scenes of deprivation we watched through the windows degraded further and further: the tumbledown buildings of Nairobi turned into the shanty towns of the suburbs, turned into stalls fashioned from sticks and corrugated iron, turned into makeshift shelters of straw and bin liners.
Children waved as we drove by, and adults stopped to watch. After many many hours of dust tracks and broken tarmac one of our tyres exploded and our van went careering off onto the side of the road. We found ourselves stranded in the middle of a Maasai village, where children and adults alike gathered to watch us struggle with a new wheel. Their houses were simple thatched huts, their clothing robes and sticks. They resembled the Bronze Age people I studied at university, and I wondered what on earth they think of us.
To seal the moment, Debbie performed a handstand – or rather, her attempt failed when she hurt her hands on the gravel, and she did a sort of low, crouched, modern interpretive dance instead. Still, the Maasai seemed amused by it. Our driver tossed them our burst tyre - which they will apparently scavenge for shoe soles - and we headed off on our way.
45 minutes down an isolated dirt track, a second tyre exploded. Given we’d already used our spare, this meant the driver was in some deep shit. All day long he’d been merrily telling us that his philosophy is ‘Hakuna Matata’ – the trite Swahili phrase for 'No worries', made popular by the Lion King - but something in his manner implied that things weren’t so Hakuna Fucking Matata now. We left him to walk the five miles to the nearest settlement and joined the parents in the Old Folks’ truck, and were safely installed in the David Livingstones lodge within the hour.
En route we saw warthogs, giraffes, impala, about a billion goats and – somewhere in the distance – elephants. The lodge itself curves around a bend in the river, which is home to four separate families of hippo and three very hungry crocodiles. At lunch we drank our soup two metres from a crocodile on the bank, although my appetite faded when the croc devoured first a goat's head and then the rest of the carcass, although it got tired halfway through and sat with the legs sticking out either side of his mouth before sucking them up like noodles.
Most of the gang went out on an evening safari, but I stayed behind - I was far too tired of being in the van, and figured I'd already seen plenty of animals. Yet within just half an hour of being in the lodge I'd already seen monkey babies in the restaurant, a warthog in the bar, hippos on parade, and gazelle and zebras frolicking across the creek. I sat on the veranda and watched the hippos wallow as the sun set. Who needs safari?
The Monday evening is now a blur of gin, Tusker beer and another long, four course meal. As the meal drew to an end, five Maasai warriors entered the room singing and dancing. Ele, FrkiMummi and I leaped up to join in. All my life I have done the jumping dance in nightclubs, and that training finally paid off as I defeated all five warriors in turn at their own competition.
We ended the evening by drinking beer by the swimming pool, shouting and making up new constellations. The electricity cut out at 12:30am, and so it was time for Fergal to go skinny dipping, and then bed.
7 December 2004: Tuesday
I woke up so hung-over I could barely stand up, and felt I would vomit at any moment. This was possibly the worst time to attempt a dawn safari, however I had a splendid time once we got doing:
ITEM! We followed a couple of cheetahs as they stalked an impala. They failed, of course, since although cheetahs are cunningly camouflaged and agile, the impala could scarcely fail to notice the three huge safari trucks trailing their predators.
ITEM!! We watched a hyena kill and consume a dikdik. The rich tang of blood in the air, and the sight of the hyena gorging itself, made me very very hungry.
ITEM!!! We met an elderly exiled bull elephant which despondently fed itself with trunks full of grass, not much caring whether it lived or died.
… as well as countless ungulates, ostriches, vervets, baboons, giraffes and jackals. Not to mention the splendid fun of attempting to chart the unpaved savannah in what amounted to nothing more than an old ice cream van: the Olds’ van got stuck in the mud repeatedly, whilst our own almost toppled over whilst trying to crawl through a dried river bed.
We returned to the lodge for an immense breakfast of sausage, pancakes and beans, then I headed out again to tour a Maasai village with Fergal and the Olds. This was a bizarre field trip, and I was never very certain of who was exploiting who. On the one hand, we poked around their homes, took countless photos of them and and chased after their hens; on the other hand, we paid them 2,000 shillings, were constantly bothered by salesmen with the usual niknak tat and were given no more than a rudimentary worldwind tour, about three minutes behind the one ahead of us.
First, FrkiMummi, Chris and Penny joined the Maasai women for a welcome dance, then the Maasai revealed the tightly-guarded secrets of how to make fire, then after a quick jumping dance they dragged us over to see the kids sing the alphabet. We were then taken into a chief’s house, which was small but cozy, and smelled rich of woodsmoke. Still, the best bit was once the tour was over and Fergal and I fell into conversation with one of the women, who was the same age as us. We tried to explain what we did for a living (although neither artificial life nor business intelligence have close analogues in the Mara), and discussed our lives briefly. She could not believe I was 28 and without a wife. I could not believe she planned on having seven children.
After another huge meal by the river, watching the crocodile and hoping against hope if might attack a baby hippo, we headed off on the final safari of the day. This time we trekked for an hour or so to the foothills where a small family of white rhinos lived. The macho image of the rhino was somewhat compromised by the fact they need three armed Maasai warriors as bodyguards.
As we headed home the sun began to set, and the giraffes wandered silhouetted on the horizon, and a rainbow streaked across the sky. We were all rather struck by just how unnecessarily perfect everything was. We pressed on briefly and got stuck in the mud again. Despite the lions prowling in the bushes around us we all baled out to give the minibus a push. At the time it seemed like an awfully fun adventure, but I later discovered that the safari guide was extremely anxious about the whole affair. Apparently it's bad karma to lose tourists to the lions.
After a brief beer back at the lodge, we headed out into the bush yet again for some dinner. We were taken to a bonfire in a clearing, where tables have been set up complete with table cloths, cutlery and napkins. There was yet more Maasai dancing, some splendid food, and when it all finished we got to drive back through the bush in the dark, leaning out of the roof to inspect the Milky Way, lit up by shooting stars and sheet lightening. Already it felt like we’d been there for months.
Before turning in, Ele, FrkiMummi and I went to watch an enormous number of baboons on the river bank opposite the bar. I made monkey calls, and the baboons called back, and so it went on until I was no longer certain who was mimicking who.
I returned to my hut and collapsed contently into bed.
8 December 2004: Wednesday
Writing the date out now I laugh out loud: not only does it not seem as early as Wednesday, it sure doesn’t feel like it’s December. I am writing this now on the verandah over looking Crater Lake... that is, I was until I heard a very large animal growling in the undergrowth, and hotfooted back indoors.
The morning started with another safari from the David Livingstones lodge, although since there had been a great deal of rain in the night many of the animals had retreated deeper into the Mara and so we "only" saw some giraffes, baboons and hippos – along with the infinite range of identikit horned ungulates, of course: impala, gazelle, dikdiks, etc.
Our luggage also finally arrived – flown out to the Mara by the boffins at Nairobi airport – and so I finally had my video camera ready to catch any animal action. Alas, whilst yesterday the animals wouldn’t keep still for photos, today they all had stage fright and refused to perform for the camera at all.
A lot of the day was spent travelling back to the Rift Valley and then along to Lake Naivasha, beneath Mount Longonot. The journey was very successful: we had just one blown tyre, and otherwise broke down only whenever the engine overheated on the savannah. At one stage our progress was so slow that we were matched in pace by a young Maasai couple, who were walking with their suitcases.
En route through the Rift Valley we stopped off at a tourist niknak shop we had visited on the way out to the lodge a few days before. I really needed to use their toilet, but remembered how the last time I had been conned out of 2,000 shillings for some dumb giraffe mask (presumably made for the giraffe equivalent of the phantom of the opera). This time I was not so gullible. I stormed straight through the showroom to the toilet, did my business, and then returned commando style, moving fast and keeping close to the ground. Alas, I bumped into a salesman who demanded to know what I was doing. I simply smiled, waited until he was distracted, and then broke into a sprint. Thank god for Red Bull.
As I raced back to the van, I saw that more salesmen were gathering around the van, like the zombies in Day of the Dead. Fergal and I invented the Doctor David Starkey Game, and then the shoe-rock game, and eventually the salesmen lost interest and went away.
After another hour or so we ended up at Crater Lake on the edge of Hell’s Gate National Park, above Lake Naivasha. The location is utterly spectacular. We parked on the lip of a volcanic crater and took a long chain of steps down into the volcano, where we found a sparkling green lake surrounded on all sides by the forested crater walls. Everywhere were exotic birds, genet, gin and something that sounded like a lion, which roared and stalked around the tent late at night. The whole area is a nature reserve, and at night the guards dressed in black and stood between our tents, armed with bows and arrows against whatever nature might throw at us.
After a quick beer and some lunch everyone entertained themselves with swimming, boating and walking. I satisfied myself with chasing after the flamingos and then sitting out on the veranda with spim, watching the sun set and drinking gin. Although we're technically staying in tents it isn't exactly like Wales: our tent has a verandah, an en suite bathroom and two four poster beds.
It seems we were well advised to avoid swimming, as it is a soda lake. The manager, an Old Etonian with an impeccable English accent, sold this as a good thing: nothing can live in the water, so there’s nothing in there to harm you. He conveniently forgot to mention that its high alkalinity effectively strips the skin from your body. Poor Debbie’s nipples were apparently never the same again.
At dinner we have the first truly fantastic meal of the holiday: a completely incongruous but impeccably cooked roast pork dinner, with all the trimmings and syrup sponge and custard to follow. This is the most colonial the holiday has been so far, but I can forgive a bit of ethnic cleansing for this sort of treatment.
At the bar, I saw a news headline about there being a monster in the lake. To make conversation, whilst I wait for the gin to pour, I asked the barman “So, you have a monster in the lake?”
“No,” the bar man said. “Ice and lemon?”
The volcano is such an amazing location it seems absurd to leave it immediately the next morning just to see another bit of nature somewhere else. Spim and I decide to avoid going to Hell's Gate National Park, and plan to spend the next day exploring the crater instead.
9 December 2004 – Thursday
I slept well during the night, but found it impossible to lie-in the next morning as every bird, frog and monkey seemed determined to define their territory, call for their young and seek out a mate through the disruptive medium of song. Have these creatures not heard of instant messenger?
There was some confusion over whether spim and I could stay behind for the day, so we all met up extra early to sort it out. Unfortunately, the drivers didn’t turn up until midday, so the options were conveniently narrowed down.
Spim and I spent the time until midday exploring something called a 'crater cone'. Halfway up the volcano we stumbled across a camel: a fully grown, moth-eaten camel some thousand miles further south than I had expected. Still, the camel seemed to be content eating a shrub nonchalantly and so I figured it knew what it was doing.
The crater cone was disappointing: as it is defined geographically as the lowest point in the area, the view was not splendid. We pledged to press on to the great Flat Rock which was marked on our maps, figuring it would be an impressive natural monument. Alas no, it was just a rock which was marginally more flat than any of the others in the immediate vicinity. Now dusty and sweaty, we figured we had little to lose and so ascended to the top of the rim. We were immediately rewarded with a spectacular view: below us stretched the entire volcano, a vast round rim of greenery with our little green lake at the heart. Hell’s Gate national park lurked behind the volcano wall, and the rest of the Rift Valley stretched out to the horizon behind that. Nice. We stumbled back to the camp for a bottle of coke.
All but Debbie, Wally, Chris, spim and I headed off to Hell’s Gate – effectively, all of the non-Huttons were left behind. We rowed a boat around the lake, spending a happy hour chasing the flamingos and lazing in the sun, burning our skin both with the sun and with splashes of soda water.
Afterwards we chatted with Chris and Wally; it’s amazing that these two were complete strangers five days earlier, and yet already we were swapping details of our bowel movements. By this stage at least half the group had come down with some major bowel error, and it looked like the other half were not far behind [editor’s note: I thankfully avoided diarrhea, but not stomach cramps, retching and constipation. Now read on…]
Eventually it was time to drive to Elementaita Lake in the Rift Valley, where we stayed in a friendly little apartment block in a 1950s holiday park. The view from the terrace bar was amazing: a vast plain housing a lake full of flamingos, flanked by mountains, with a forest in the distance and gazelle frolicking in the foreground. We spent a lot of time on the terrace, nursing a gin or Tusker, as the sun went down.
Dinner was vast as always, and after a quick night cap we were all tucked up safely in bed.
10 December 2004 – Friday
This was a sad day – my first blister pack of anti-malarial tablets ran out, signifying the passing of a whole week since we arrived. Still, despite this it seems like we've been on holiday pretty much forever. As I write this, we're back in the Progressive Park executive apartments in Nairobi, and these spartan rooms already feel like an old home, rather than somewhere we once spent a couple of nights a week ago.
The morning started late at Lake Elementaita. Everyone decided to lie in and catch the latest possible breakfast, which confused the waiters who were just packing everything up. I guess we lay in mostly because there wasn't a great deal to do in the area. We had all been looking forward to horse riding, but the horses were busy having their injections and so that was off. This was all part of the "can't-do" atmosphere of the place: "Of course we have the internet, sir. This is a hotel. Although of course, it's broken". Likewise the ready supply of stamps in the gift shop which – it soon transpired – were only for sale to those willing to subject themselves to the trials and red tape of a Kafkaesque bureaucracy.
Most of the young folk opted for frolicking in the swimming pool, but the Olds, Mnki, Spim and I chose instead to take a 'nature walk' down to the lake. Having been born to more sympathetic parents, I had always understood the term 'nature walk' to mean a pleasant stroll, in this case a brisk trot down to Lake Elementaita; however, it soon transpired the Frki parents had something else entirely in mind. It took a full 15 minutes just to step away from the hotel lobby – the Olds were intrigued by a mundane specimen of sparrow – and spim and I did some quick mathematics and calculated that 409 species of bird multiplied by 15 minutes each equalled over four days of continuous nature trail. This alone was distressing enough, but things were to get worse when it transpired Pat and Jim could also spend quarter of an hour on each individual species of flower or cactus and - taking it entirely upon himself - the guide also decided to direct our attention to interesting pieces of obsidian he found on the route. It would have been a far simpler task to merely catalogue each of the atoms in the Rift Valley. Still, for all this nature loving no one seemed remotely interested in my impromptu discovery of a scorpion.
Our stay at the lodge was brief, and after a quick seven course meal of three soups and four jellies we were driven back to Nairobi, stopping only for a glorious view of the Rift Valley on the way, and for me to practice my new technique with the tat salesman. I would bellow "NO!" and then run away until they agreed to sell me whatever it was for just £2.
What with plans to go to Mnki parents' dry house for dinner, we decided to fortify our sprits against sobriety with a £2.50 bottle of Safari Gin, and as much of the previous week's beer as we could steal from Daddy Jim. Dinner at Deepa's parents' house was far more formal than we had expected: no sooner had we entered through the door than we were urged to sit down in the vast living room, in chairs which had been laid out in a circle, flush against the walls. I was able to wave to most of the people, but only spim and Granny Tongs were within conversational distance.
We didn't get to speak to many of the actual Shah family either, as they spent most of the evening either handing out food, urging us to eat more food, or doing their party pieces: Sonal's traditional Indian dancing set the bar quite high. Pu then raised the stakes with some brilliant sitar playing. Then it was the Olds' turn, and they were diplomatic enough not to attempt to gazump either of the sisters. They gracefully threw in the towel with a deeply mournful version of Mud Mud Glorious Mud. This clearly persuaded the Shah family to stop the party pieces, although I would have attempted to play the spoons if invited.
After five plates of deep-fried Chinese food I felt decidedly queasy and so an Uncle whose name I can never remember (although I know he was married to Pari) drove me home, along with Granny Tongs and Meat – the latter being some friend of Dhru's, and whose miserable countenance had been a constant source of amusement to spim and I. I felt that this anonymous Uncle and I bonded over conversation in the car, and I even received a breath mint upon alighting at the Progressive Park executive apartments.
I fell into bed, thought my stomach contents would also fall into the bed, and then fell into a deep sleep and left my stomach to get on with it.
11 December 2004 – Saturday
Although still ill, for breakfast I managed to force down the classic twin health foods of pink milkshake and a Red Bull. For the morning's entertainment we wandered over to see some sand sculptures at the Shah Community Centre. These were vast floor paintings constructed purely from different colours of loose sand. Although they were amazingly detailed, with complex patterns of shading and highlights, it seemed ultimately rather pointless. If we're to tolerate this, next they'll be making elephants out of mashed potato or the Buddha from goat dung. Is this really the way we want society to go?
Next we headed off to the National Museum, which was roughly on a par with the museum in Otley: lots of peeling paint, rotting stuffed animals and various native artefacts. Ferg and I spent some time looking at the hominid skulls, and then checked out some cool information on the early Indian settlements (including detailed engineer's diagrams recording the time a gang of coolies was attacked by a leopard, all neatly structured and hand-labelled). With sufficient culture in us to justify the entrance fee, we ditched the museum in search of masala chips and coke.
Such exertions as looking at sand and looking at dead things were clearly too much for the Olds, who went back to the Progressive Park executive apartments for a nap. The rest of us headed off to Put-o-Mania at the Village Market. We completed around half of the course, skipping those holes deemed too boring, and adopting new holes as and when balls went astray into water slides and flower beds. The Village Market is a vast, hacienda-syle shopping mall in an armed compound with a very high percentage of wealthy white people and Indians. It didn't feel like Nairobi at all, yet over the razor-wire fence we could still see slums stretching off into the distance. There is clearly a big need for somewhere safe and pleasant for the wealthier locals to come, but I couldn't help feeling the country's woes would not be alleviated if the monied classes only ever shop in Western chain stores. To underline this point, a stark symbol of the Kenyan wealth divide lay across the valley: the American Embassy residential block - a vast subdivision of three-storey, detached American homes - stood directly beside a small shack, with goats, chickens and a corrugated steel out-house. The two were seperated abruptly by a razor-wire fence.
In the evening, we enjoyed MnkiFrki's Wedding Feast. There was no alcohol, only coke or fanta, but this was more than made up by the mountains of food and endless dancing to bhangra versions of American hits. It was splendid fun, and followed up by SoHo's, an amusingly meta-retro bar of the type that only ever exists on foreign holidays, playing music you haven't heard since the 1980s. We drank gin and bid farewell to the lovely Debbie, who was going off on a 44 day camping trip to South Africa. She already felt like one of the family, or rather like one of the family of which I was also beginning to feel like one.
12 December 2004 – Sunday
For breakfast we discovered that the upstairs of the Ukay Centre bookshop contained an amazing little cafe, where I enjoyed a toasted BLT before calling my mum to wish her a happy birthday. The time delay on the line did little for comprehension. "I saw an crocodile eat a goat's head," I said. "Ooh, lovely!" she gushed.
The morning fun was a PR exercise for Ramesh to indulge his messiah complex: we fed 1,500 starving children. The poor ragged souls queued up around the block for a loaf of bread, biscuits and boiled sweets. The poor souls had to eat it all on the premises (to ensure they benefited, not their parents), but the drinks had all run out minutes after our arrival. Dry bread, biscuits and boiled sweets are not the finest meal one can have when one is thirsty and sitting in the sun.
The kids were very cute and cheerful, although I had to avoid some of the ones which stank too strongly of urine. They also became a lot less pleasant once they had their food, and the big kids would steal from the little kids, leading to fights which could only be broken up by the organisers' judicious use of sticks.
Chris was moved to tears by the poverty, and Deepa seemed a little upset, however I was generally unmoved. I don't know if this is a sign of a clean conscience and a healthy lack of self-guilt, or a latent sign of my late-teens psychopathy. Still, Aashi was even less moved, insisting he have a loaf of bread just like all of the other children.
For lunch, we headed round to Mnki Mummi's for a slap-up feast. Conducted in three shifts, we all tucked into amazing Gujarati food: chapatti, potato and chickpea curries, samosas and yoghurt. Around eight different Shah women had made it their personal mission over the past fortnight to get Fergal to eat more, and his tummy already bore witness to their success. The food was, of course, all immaculate and delicious; which is just as well, since they reportedly got up at 5am to make it.
Then, it was back to the Progressive Park executive apartments for a theoretical nap, which I spent taking a photo of a wall and summoning others to enjoy the gin. By the time the Monkey Bus had returned - as scheduled - to take us all to a service at a local temple, us young folk had drunk all the gin and cashed in the week's beer bottle deposits for more. We could only helplessly wave the olds off whilst we worshipped our own, spirit-based god. Once the new gin was finished we'd lost any lingering shyness and took a taxi to the Norfolk Hotel, a century-old colonial hotel in downtown Nairobi. Alas, in between the colonial period and the current day the hotel had been somewhat renovated into what resembled a Forte Travelodge; but still, this was as fancy as things would get, and the Tongs took it upon themselves to improve things where they could: spim and I took the barman aside to explain the technique of cocktail making – happy to help by knocking back his every effort – whilst Ele tried to lend a certain class to the joint by taking over on the piano. Later, the bar was packed as Ele and I tried out a few show tunes; alas, I fear the bar was packed in spite of rather than because of our rudimentary dance routine.
We stumbled home to drink whisky, and before I realised it it was already 5am and Fergal was banging on the door to wake us up. We had five minutes to be up and out for Mombasa.
13 December 2004 – Monday
In a miserable, gin-stinking hangover we were driven with 23 others to Nairobi airport. Tiny things like standing up and sitting down were an immense chore, and I had to avoid siting near Ele on the plane since the stench of raw alcohol dripping from her pores turned my stomach. No doubt she felt the same about me.
The barman at David Livingstones had assured spim and I that Mombasa was lovely, and that we'd be able to hire bikes and explore the town. Even in my hungover state I could see this was utter bollocks: as we left the airport, the road instantly degraded into a rough road filled with pot holes and pools of sewage, flanked by shanty huts, wandering goats, filthy children and filthier parents. All this we had seen before in Nairobi, but there was a new feature here: immense piles of random detritus and shit dumped in overflowing skips, surrounded by scavenging goats, crows and children. Okay, I could see that they're poor; but these people had lost their dignity too.
Still, none of this poverty mattered to us at all since we were swiftly driven to our secure compound, complete with razor wire and guard dogs: Club Sun n' Sand, an immense salmon pink complex of free food and drinks. Much as I found this resort tacky, badly managed and insufferably hot, it was clearly a paradise compared to the hell that most of the people had to cope with on the other side of the nine-foot high, electrified fences.
[Editor's note: Thinking fondly of my days as an archaeologist in Denmark, where hanging onto the electric fences in the sheep fields had given us our only thrills in between long hours of drudgery, I cheerfully suggested to Ferg that we grab some of these electric fences and enjoy the tickling current. "Dude," he helpfully explained, "those were for sheep, these are for people. Last week a man leaned his aluminium ladder on one and was burned in half." It was a lesson I didn't not need to learn in practice.]
We soon discovered that 'all the food you can eat' meant a buffet three times a day, and although these were splendid (Indian vegetarian food a speciality), when we ordered snack food outside of these times we were rewarded with limp greasy food: for example, Ferg's snack sandwich was processed cheese in cheap white bread, deep-fried in margarine.
The heat and humidity was so intense in Mombasa that spim and I took to our beds immediately. Alas, we were easily spoiled by the air conditioning, and so attempting to leave the room was a miserable experience, somewhat akin to entering a steaming hot bath. Still, as there was no room service, our incumbent sobriety drove us out in the end, and we spent a miserable hour drinking weak fruit 'cocktails' at a hotel induction, and eating the fingers of the fish and balls of the meat.
Realising there was no need to enjoy free fruit cocktails where there was free gin in all the bars, we quickly aborted and joined the olds for gin and tonics by the pool. During dinner my hangover, the heat and the overeating all got to me, and I retired to bed to recover.
14 December 2004 – Tuesday
It's seriously so hot here that it's impossible to go outside. Spim and I spent until 4pm today simply alternating between lying in our air conditioned beds and wandering out to find food. At four, however, the tide is in and so I hired a windsurfer with Lucy. We both immediately remembered how to get up onto the board and pull up the sail, however I also immediately remembered how to drift aimlessly along the coast, and so I had to trudge all the way back. Still, the water is as warm as a bath and so even trudging is no hardship.
Afterwards, I swam back to my room through the series of interconnecting pools which run up through the complex – Burt Lancaster style, only in reverse. I bumped into spim, and so I got to swim back down through the interconnecting pools to the poolside bar. We later joined the others under a coconut tree and enjoyed some cold beer, some tree climbing and Ferg being pooed on by crows.
After a quick shower, Ferg and I took Aashi and Dhru dancing – a dance which quickly turned into Battle Bots as the two kids unwillingly fought for superiority on our shoulders. Dinner was routine, and afterwards the young folk all sat out by the Jacuzzi playing The Bots' buzz game. I waited until I was both hot and bored and then declared it time for bed.
Mombasa is clearly not going to present as many surprises and adventures as the Masai Mara; however, deep down some small part of me realises I might as well try to enjoy myself, although the resort does not make this so easy.
15 December 2004 – Wednesday
After a huge breakfast, and half an hour to let it all settle down, Ian, Ferg, Ele and I engaged in a little tennis. Of course, it was so hot that the initial bout of fun soon became an immense slog, and we were all drenched in sweat, so we retired to the games room for pool and ping pong, regressing into childhood holiday habits.
We were soon so overheated we had to play in the pool to cool down – tough since the water was also very hot – and then swim down the slides to the bar, where chilled beer and gin were drunk amid wrestling people back into the pool. It was excellent to be able to fall off a bar stool without coming to any harm – apart from the risk of drowning, that is.
After lunch I needed to nap, rejoining Ele, spim and Fergal for beer in the afternoon. Ferg and I somehow ended up kayaking out to the reef and back. There were huge waves out by the reef, and we both had great fun bobbing up and down until Ferg met a particularly ferocious wave and was tossed out of his boat, cutting his feet on a sea anemone's spines as he tried to stand up on the reef.
At dinner, the waiters brought out Dhru's birthday cake in a long parade, chanting some bizarre birthday song. Alas, Dhru had nipped out to the loo at the time, and so the parade found itself circling the table in a holding pattern, desperately hoping he'd return soon, it's numbers swelling with every orbit as more and more diners leap up to join in with this new diversion.
Spim and I develop a cunning plan to return to the civilisation of air conditioning asap; Ele opposes the plan, and takes direct action by attempting to physically restrain us the whole way home. We shake her off and dive into our cool, cold beds. The air conditioning is so efficient that I currently lie in my bed shivering with cold, wearing my thick hooded top and wrapped up in a blanket. Although I feel a little guilty to be using a third world country's resources this way, I figure they'd only spend any money I help them save on filling more skips up with crap.
16 December 2004 – Thursday
As with the other days we have spent in Mombassa, this was a lazy day. A big breakfast, some ping pong with spim and Ferg, back to bed to chill out and watch Speed, a huge lunch, bar fun, and then some lazing around. When we were finally allowed aboard the bus to leave in the late afternoon, there was not an ounce of regret in my system.
The bus left the compound and we were instantly returned to the squalid reality of the outside world. Directly outside the hotel were thatched shanty houses, crumbling shops and gutters filled with trash.
Getting through the airport takes forever thanks to the effects of group inertia, but a little patience is all it took to be transported back to the cool, cheerful world of Nairobi. On the way we invented a splendid game: "If this party were an X, I'd be the X." Um, I'll explain it in person perhaps.
Desperate to spend our last night drinking with MnkiFrki, we somehow ended up instead in an obscure uncle's courtyard, sitting in Indian fashion up against the walls, eating pizza and garlic potatoes and washing it all down with yoghurt. A daughter then entertained us with some eclectic modern Indian dance, to a bhangra tune crossed with the Nightrider theme tune. This was truly incongruous: in a filthy, grey concrete yeard, the walls 15 feet high and topped with broken glass and razor wire, a young girl in a colourful sari danced before a crowd. It had all the hallmarks of low-budget Bollywood.
Eventually we were allowed to leave, and headed back to the Progressive Park executive apartments – by now our second home – for a last night of Tong drinking with MnkiFrki. This became a very brief event as Books First closed at 12am, and we only had cash enough for seven bottles of Tusker. Also, Ian and spim attempted to claim an early night, but were thankfully rallied into attendance by Lucy. It was worth it: despite being with them for almost a fortnight it didn't feel like we'd seen anything of MnkiFrki; this was the first time all holiday I felt like we'd been Tongs. I went to bed happy.
17 December 2004 – Friday
Spim and I ate our now traditional breakfast of BLT and Eggs Benedict at Books First. The atmosphere in the upstairs bar was somewhat compromised by the fact that two separate boy band ballads were warring for attention through the speaker system. In addition, the number of electronic Santas downstairs had multiplied to three – and bizarrely, not all of them were singing The Yellow Rose of Texas.
We took a bus ride to the Village Market – longtime home of Put-o-Mania – stopping en route to visit Pari's house on the way. Although Pari explained that we had to pop over because she needed to get Aashi ready, this 'getting ready' actually comprised merely putting on his shoes. The whole diversion turned out to be a ruse in order to feed us snacks and drinks and – yes – make us sit in a circle flush against the walls. Damn it, a ruse to host us!
After buying a Tusker t-shirt (now official Tongs dress), Aashni, Fergal, spim, Henna and I had a go at bowling. Thanks to a couple of strikes – and my insistence that neither of the children could use bounce-barriers or the rolling ramp – I managed to scrape in first. My first ever win at ten pin bowling!
I ventured into the Masai market and proved myself an old pro at the bargaining game. My method is simple: try to buy something you don't very much want, and only a really, really, really good price will persuade you.
We enjoyed a last meal in Kenya: spring rolls, bhajias and beer. Deepa got into a flap about organisation and timing and the olds seemingly needed to nap again and so we were all dragged back to the Progressive Park executive apartments, where spim and I spent over an hour simply sitting in a series of different rooms until finally being kicked out of all of them and ending up in the corridor.
Deepa was anxious about time, and so we headed off to the airport early, stopping off only at Ramesh's house to pick up Fergal and Deepa. Of course, no such plan can be so simple and so yet again we all filed into the house to sit in a circle around the edges of the room and accept water before we were permitted to leave again. Given we were supposed to be very late, this was hospitality gone mad.
Saying goodbye to MnkiFrki was quite emotional, but we soon recovered in time to get a couple of Tuskers each at the airport bar to celebrate Ele's birthday. Alas, we had to leave her behind to board the plane – although thanks to stops in Uganda and Belgium, Ele would still make it back to London at least five hours earlier than us.
Three films were showing on the plane: I Robot, The Laws of Attraction and The Manchurian Candidate. They all provided me with an excellent reason to sleep.
18 December 2004 – Saturday
The plane journey was a complete mess: we were moved twice because of broken doors and faulty seats, and then we found the new seats were either broken or soaked with water, with a broken reading light (permanently on, alas, not off). Things get worse in Brussels where we found we'd missed our connection and so had to wait three more hours for the next flight. Things weren't so bad because of the wait – we were still in holiday mode, and had crosswords and each other to keep us busy – but because of all the moaning we felt obliged to engage in first.
Finally we enjoyed a BA flight to London, by far the most comfortable and best organised flight of the holiday; next time, I swear, it's BA all the way.
I bid farewell to everyone, and Lucy and I took the Piccadilly Line into central London. After a brief stop home to drop off my things, I head out to met up with Seamus and Lani at the Bricklayers arms. Travelling around on my own feels completely wrong, and I keep peering into the crowds anticipating a glimpse of an Old or the orange rim of Ferg's hat. I make a brief stab at oAlex's birthday party, but am far too tired and abandon the whole plan at 20:30 for a long stay in bed.
Update 19 January 2005: on 10 December 2004 I wrote "This was a sad day – my first blister pack of anti-malarial tablets ran out, signifying the passing of a whole week since we arrived." Well, today the last of my blister packs of anti-malarial tablets ran out, signifying four weeks since returning from Kenya (plus days of forgetfulness), and I can say without hesitation this is not a sad thing at all. Good riddance to bitter pills!
Early December 2004 update
Arkanqueer night - 2 December 2004
A vast crowd of us headed to Seamus' house last night to watch Arkansas's debut on the internationally acclaimed Queer Eye for the Straight Guy. It seems gayers aren't really the best dating advisers as they had to resort to recruiting our red blooded and manly friend in order to dish out decent dating advice. I forget what Arkansas said, but I'm sure it was something about being certain to turn up, and not ordering spaghetti. Thanks to the wonders of modern television we got to watch him twice, first on UK Living and then again on UK Living +1, in order to confirm he had not made an utter arse of himself.
Then, wildly drunk on pink wine, Terrie tried to teach me a few dance moves, most of which seemed to involve me dropping her onto the hardwood floor. Rather than trying to teach me better – or even giving up – she simply arranged a few cushions to break her fall, and so the drunken dropping continued late into the night.
Life note: Advent calendar - 1 December 2004
My firm provided us all with our own chocolate advent calendars today. I opened the first little window expecting a religious scene - perhaps a little robin perched on a crucifix - only to find the legend "Advisers to NTO and RIM Private Equity on secondary buy-out of Stanhaus". Corporate advent calendars suck.
Irony of the day: this morning, I stuffed an entire handful of council junkmail into the bin. They were all leaflets saying "South London Failing to meet Recycling Targets".
Arkanqueer night - 2 December 2004
A vast crowd of us headed to Seamus' house last night to watch Arkansas's debut on the internationally acclaimed Queer Eye for the Straight Guy. It seems gayers aren't really the best dating advisers as they had to resort to recruiting our red blooded and manly friend in order to dish out decent dating advice. I forget what Arkansas said, but I'm sure it was something about being certain to turn up, and not ordering spaghetti. Thanks to the wonders of modern television we got to watch him twice, first on UK Living and then again on UK Living +1, in order to confirm he had not made an utter arse of himself.
Then, wildly drunk on pink wine, Terrie tried to teach me a few dance moves, most of which seemed to involve me dropping her onto the hardwood floor. Rather than trying to teach me better – or even giving up – she simply arranged a few cushions to break her fall, and so the drunken dropping continued late into the night.
Life note: Advent calendar - 1 December 2004
My firm provided us all with our own chocolate advent calendars today. I opened the first little window expecting a religious scene - perhaps a little robin perched on a crucifix - only to find the legend "Advisers to NTO and RIM Private Equity on secondary buy-out of Stanhaus". Corporate advent calendars suck.
Irony of the day: this morning, I stuffed an entire handful of council junkmail into the bin. They were all leaflets saying "South London Failing to meet Recycling Targets".
