You'll find me about 11,000 miles away.

Intro About 7 weeks ago, I got made redundant. 29 years old and facing redundancy. I guess it could be much worse. I could be twice as old, have little savings, kids and wife and these feelings of desolation and sadness would be compounded, and I guess that's why lots of people decide that only an extreme, fanatical immersion in religion or alcohol or even suicide is the answer. I like to think I would take a very positive attitude towards it, and hopefully have a lot of helpful friends and relatives to turn to. I decided that instead of weeping into my semi-naked lap and enhancing the ambidextrous skills of moving the mouse and typing one handed (with my left hand), not washing, alcoholism and eating instant noodles, I would do something productive enough like writing a diary. Take Anne Frank; she managed living in an attic for the most part of World War 2, I bet keeping a diary helped her deal with the pain. If someone could get through the suffering and emotional torture of

Mr Shouty One Saturday evening on the train home, we saw this guy. Absolutely crazy. Attention seekingly crazy I think. It was like he had the mental age of a 10 year old, apart from the vulgar vocabulary of an MS-13 gang member. Many times I was in stitches and all I had was my phone to write these gems down. My shaking fingers couldn't use Swype fast enough. One of his first jeers to the whole train was "Do you like Hungarians?" He had sat down in a seat momentrily before by pushing his way up to the top floor of the train carriage and then hauling a middle aged Asian lady out of a window seat she was about to sit down in. Below is a list of his random proclamations. If it's May 1st, I want my fuckin money Do you believe in Jesus Christ? I got the cross in my pocket Where do you think the dead go...they're like Michael Jackson [ asks me ] mate, why is this train so slow?  [He looks around the train, then looks my girlfriend. She is Asian] 

A few weeks ago I watched a documentary about the London Underground and there was this comment about one of the passengers losing a shoe underneath a train. Apparently, this is a common occurrence, as when people run for the train, their shoes fall off. This struck me as quite a strange thing to happen - in nearly 5 years of catching the tube everyday for work, I never saw someone lose a shoe. It's probably possible though. Once at Farringdon station, a train station in London, I did see some guy get his head stuck between two closing doors of a Metropolitan line train, literally 1/2 a metre in front of me. What made it really amusing was the fact that he was dressed in a suit, slightly balding, wearing glasses and heavily laden down with an engorged laptop bag, a bag of shopping and a newspaper. He was standing in front of me on the platform and as the train pulled in, nothing untoward looked like it was going to happen. The train came to a standstill, the doors opened, he got

Everytime I go to China I am always amazed or in awe of something or just reminded of how different another country is. I was in China a few weeks ago and saw more characteristically intriguing things. The next few are nothing surprising. The hoodie on the left proclaiming "You look happy when Friday is here". Yep, that's right, Fridays are the best of the 5 days of the working week. Comforting to have it on a tshirt and that on a global scale Fridays are appreciated. The tshirt combo on the right with writing taken from lyrics of a Cardigan's song "Do You Believe" ( notably covered by Deftones.. .). Nice to see SMS style abbreviations being used on mainstream clothes too. And nice to see that languages that don't use Roman characters can pick out beautiful, important words (like HAPPY, FRIDAY, LOVE, SAVE, SOUL), not know/understand/care about the meaning and not really care about how these words are displayed. I hope Asian countries like the

I'm not alone in having a justified hatred for noisy animals at certain times of the day. Most birds,mating calls of frogs, in fact any shrill, irrhytmical mating calls, cicadas, dogs...do you see where this is going? During the days they're fine. Well, between the hours of 9am and 10pm on weekdays, 11am til 11pm on weekends. And that's being lenient and generous. If it were down to me, there'd be a unwelcome-noise curfew from 9pm onwards. Til 1pm the next day. And this noise curfew encompasses too many things. Way too many. Frogs - mating or otherwise, even just mating calls/sounds can be excused. They're a fact of life. Who am I to deny a frog a bit of a noisy prelude to spreading his seeds, or to impose on a cicada the humiliating fate of spending the lonely few hours before his scheduled death watching increasingly depraved insect porn (maybe culminating in interspecies  -  a spider mating with a fly, or a snuff movie like 2 stick insects mating then the fem

Washing dirty dishes is a pretty tedious task, it causes arguments between couples, family disharmony about whose turn it is (to my younger sister who had an S in her name: if your name has an S in it then you only do washing up with an S in the days), friction among friends sharing a flat and one of them using 5 pans to cook bacon and egg, the point is escaping me....pretty much everyone would like to not do it. Pretty much everyone needs an excuse. This is a good excuse. A big, hairy, fuck-off spider in the corner of your kitchen. You can even see what looks like a black and white little face that looks like Papa Lazarou from The League of Gentlemen.  "Oh my....fuck me dead...what the fffffuuu..." was my reaction. Pretty colourful lanaguage looking back on it, but I was arse-clenchingly surprised. I'm not even that scared of spiders. But for those not used to seeing massive spiders (me included) this is probably one of the biggest, hairest, fuck-off spiders I have

There is probably a statistic available somewhere (in this situation though, I have just made it up...); maybe 1 out of every 12 people that has been to Thailand has had some sort of bad experience. I am one of that 8%. I have mixed feelings about Thailand. It's probably best, and more comprehensible if I categorise each bit of "culture". It's worth taking into account that we (Jo, Steph, Steve and Nick) visited Thailand during the peak of the peak season...Christmas and New Year. I have a lot of time for Thai people. As I mention in another post they are so friendly and helpful, and it lives up to the name of "the Land of Smiles". If you make eye contact with many Thai people, they would smile at you. I enjoyed this. But then this leads me to one of the major bad points. The tourists. The sheer amount of foriegners. I hate the word "tourist" too. It has such bad connotations to me. Everywhere we went there were just incredible volumes of foreign