excess bloggage

Sunday, July 23rd, 6.13 pm, Beijing Went to a party last night. First one I've been to in a while. A good honest-to-god party the way parties are supposed to be - Drink, random pairings, rock and roll, kitchen action. It's an inalienable fact of any party, large or small, that sooner or later one group of people will set off like the Hebrews from Egypt towards the headier climes of the kitchen and form their own splinter soiree. Why? I have no idea - Copernicus described the skies, Martin Luther nailed [literally] the Catholic Church, and Van Morrison managed to be the funkiest white, fat, bald Ulsterman in history - but could any of the aforementioned sages figure out why everyone kept buggering off to the kitchen when they had parties? Nope. In fact Luther only ever had one party, when he was twenty two - so pissed off was he to find half his guests rooting through his freezer, that his personality changed from mild mannered theology student with slight personality issues into a frothing at the mouth religious and political paranoiac with slight personality problems. Well, it looks like someone is actually reading this - god knows why, but still... Kagler tells me that Excess Baggage is [possibly was by the time this gets posted] getting around 500 hits a day. I am filled with mild trepidation by this fact. To be honest, I'm more comfortable with an imaginary, erm… audience than an actual one. This new state of affairs implies expectations... which, as those few of you who’ve been reading for the last couple of months can attest, are not always fulfilled. When I didn’t know that any of you actually existed I didn’t really give a shit what you wanted... hence all the longwinded gag- and music- free crap about obscure Roman enclaves on the Black Sea. Don’t get me wrong, that ain’t stopping any time soon, but now I guess I have to leaven it with more, y’know, interesting shit that might actually belong on a record label website. Fuck knows what that is, though. If you want actual Tag Team Records news there’s already the cunningly named ‘News’ section, and since a largish part of that section is also written by me, it be pretty foolish and dull to repeat the same gags about Joewi’s pinup status and Deng Pei's almost obsessive love for his laptop here [seriously, the way he gazes at that screen, it’s almost embarrassing, get a room, already!]. Basically, Hi. Good to know you exist, now if you don’t mind I’d like you to cease to exist... finally an indie rock reference. Not sure if I should do this, but what the hell. I sent the Tag Team Newsletter out to my Dad the other day, and here’s his response. Bear in my mind that my dad is a much more useful member of society than me and has a sense of humour that veers towards the Saharan side of dry; -Thanks ... I guess. So this sort of, ah, chatter sells your music, does it? -Keep it up, then. I'll tell all my friends to log on. Obviously a lot of you probably share his views on the ‘chatter’, but I think it’s still an excellent response and one of many reasons why my dad is cooler than yours [and could probably take him in a fight as well]. By the way, welcome to any friends of my Dad reading this. Be sure to make us your homepage and be warned, I find typing profanity therapeutic. Not the actual word ‘profanity’, but… well, you get the fucking idea. Actually, truly the most therapeutic, comfortable, relaxing word to type is ‘reference’. Go on, give it a try - if you’re reading this you’ve obviously already got far too much ‘down’ time and can afford to spend a couple of seconds typing the word ‘reference’. Oooo Yeah! That felt good, didn’t it. Do it again, treat yourself! [in the trade, I believe this sort of blathering nonsense is referred to as ‘filler’ copy - not a fun word to type] Monday, July 24th 2006, 11.15am, Beijing Re-reading ‘About a boy’ by Nick Hornby at the moment. In principle I hate Nick Hornby. At least I hate the covers of his books and the back cover blurbs from various ‘Media’ types. Existential angst, 90s/naughties man inscribed blah blah blah. It’s like Roddy Doyle. Now I’ve never read a word that Roddy Doyle has written, but everyone says how wonderful he is and the film adaptations of his books are alright, but it’s the presentation of the books - specifically the cover photos. Kind of like the monochrome photos that adorned the covers of old Smiths albums and singles. Even if I liked the tune, which I admit in the case of the Smiths was always going to be unlikely, no way was I going to be buying something with a ‘meaningful’ photo of an obscure fifties pugilist on the cover. Same with Nick Hornby. I’ve read ‘Fever Pitch’ and I’ve read ‘High Fidelity?[which at the time seemed to be almost eerily relevant to my life], and I loved them both. I mean I really really loved them both. Fine, liking Nick Hornby is a bit of a cliché but the pretentious blurb on the back is always right. He’s always a joy to read, the prose is not at all difficult but flows easily and evenly. But the covers! Every time, I have a Nick Hornby book lying around, it takes me forever to pluck up the courage to read it. I forget how much I usually enjoy his stuff. The cover and the blurb override my liking for him. The moody monochrome washed out photos on the covers belong on some turgid Booker Prize nominee, not these great book. This leads me on to another thought I had [oh joy]. I was moaning on about my fear of being unable to communicate with someone on a one to one basis, regardless of my actual eloquence last night.. It occurred to me that this might be a good subject for a novel. Your protagonist could be someone who is in fact a veritable G.B. Shaw of conversation, someone completely eloquent, endlessly fascinating with perfect timing and a light touch. But he is completely unaware of this, and hence is in practice a complete bore, as he never says anything for fear that people will find out that [as he believes] he is a complete bore. I don’t know how you would end it. Maybe he commits suicide in an ironic way. You could call it something like ‘The man who didn’t talk’ a title that is completely unimaginative but appears to be very profound, which would encourage people like Salman Rushdie and Germaine Greer to spout euphorically on the inside flaps and back covers. Slap a moody abstract photo on the cover [possibly of an Edwardian circus performer or off-duty Nazis playing contract bridge] and - bingo - reviews in the meatier kind of publications and Spectator literary lunches, here you come! Of course, the fact that this idea came to me while I was reading a book by Nick Hornby, is the first flaw in this idea. This is very much Hornby territory. Could Salman be encouraged to wax lyrical for both you and Hornby? I doubt it. Also, it would be difficult to write such a book without coming off as ineffably smug, since your reader would come to the natural conclusion that you were writing about yourself. Mind you, Hornby seems to get away with it. Maybe, I should send the idea to him. This is a true story. Honestly. Perhaps not quite what you’re here to read about [refer to previous comments about what the hell to write here], but true nonetheless. At the moment my bedtime music of choice is by B. Fleischmann, a German who makes excellent low key electronica [‘Pop Loops For Breakfast’ - highly recommended]. The last track on his album ‘a choir of empty beds’ is called, fittingly, ‘goodbye’. This track is some 16 minutes long - consisting of 8 minutes actual tune and 8 minutes of gently modulated noise that sounds rather like an overexcited swarm of crickets. It’s much better that it sounds on paper, trust me. So there I was last night, in bed, slowly fading away into sleep, while Fleischmann’s crickets grazed [or whatever it is that crickets do] in my speakers. Satan, my cat, was sleeping next to me, as is customary [unless someone else is occupying her space in the bed - in which case she retreats to the top of a nearby chest of drawers, from where she glares and scowls and generally looks pissed off]. Anyway, all of a sudden Satan went fucking berserk [not a sentence one gets to type all that often], flinging herself at the barely open window. She’s a cat, she has weird mood swings and the occasional spazz attack, so once the initial jolt back to full consciousness has settled a bit, I ignored her and started dozing off again. Satan, however, kept leaping around the place, constantly scrabbling at something then jumping back. My resistance level to the strange things my cat does is high, and the cricket noises were soothing - so kept dozing off. I guess about three minutes passed and then with a huge primal yowl Satan leapt onto my chest and started hissing at something. ‘Right, fuck this’, thinks I, switching on my lamp. Holy Mother Of Shit! There’s a huge - and I mean FUCKING HUGE - angry looking [so far as one can tell these things] grasshopper crawling down my stomach crotchwards. Have I already said ‘Holy Mother Of Shit’? Well, trust me, it was worth saying twice. This thing, an ugly menacing dark brown, was the size of a fucking cow! Ok, a pretty small cow, but you get the idea - I swear it was fully four inches long. Obviously, I shot out of bed pretty damn quickly. My cat and I cowered around the corner - out of the room - having a panicky strategy conference. This mostly consisted of my exhorting the cat to earn her fucking keep for a change and deal with this home invasion, while the cat looked at me quizzically, as if she didn’t understand a word I was saying to her - the big coward. Occasionally, I’d duck my head round the corner to check on Evil Jiminy. Still there, hadn’t miraculously dropped dead or disappeared - crawling around on the bed, buzzing its wings faster than is surely natural - but failing to fly. The cat must have damaged its wings somehow, but stupidly hadn’t finished the Job. Make a mental note to myself to discuss where tennis racket strings come from with the cat, supposing we ever make it out alive from ‘Attack of the Evil Hellspawned Bugs’. Meanwhile, the task at hand... Got to get it off the bed, onto the floor and under something heavy. Looking at the beast, it doesn’t seem like a foot’s gonna do the job, some sort of breezeblock would be better, or possibly a small nuclear device. I feel dizzy with terror at the task ahead - to complicated, too many steps, too many parts to go wrong - much better to simply bash the shit out of the beast where it is - still on the bed. Arming myself with a new testament, I lunge into the fray. It’s a wily fucker, no question - maybe it’s got some sort of mind-reading abilities to go with its mutant size. Of course, the fact that I’m trying to hit it while keeping as much of the rest of my body as far away as possible from its undoubtedly venomous fangs [Yes! Dammit! It had fangs… probably] doesn’t really help much. Cat’s being less useful than an erection in a retirement home. Finally, however, I get the brown bomber in a position where I can give it a couple of whacks of Good News. Even if my cat is shirking its duty as pest control, surely Jesus won’t forsake me. Well, it must have been Jesus’ night off, ‘cos the fucker refused to die. Wilfully, perhaps even tauntingly, the grasshopper from hell continued to make himself comfortable on my bed. Having exhausted my meagre supply of courage in this titanic battle with evil, I retreated back around the corner. Then I have a thought I should have had ten minutes earlier. For Christmas, my folks had sent me a racket-shaped bug zapper. Like all the best gifts, this had provided a lot of satisfying mosquito zapping fun for a couple of weeks and then had been retired to the shelf - unthought-of, forgotten. Until now. Time to send enough voltage through the evil brown fucker to send it back to hell. Couple of minutes spent finding the racket of death, couple more corralling whatever shreds of courage were still lying around. ‘Time to meet your maker, my nasty friend’, I think to myself [by this stage I was a veritable Errol Flynn engaged in a life and death duel with George Sanders - it’s a pity there weren’t any chandeliers for me to swing from]. Back into the pit I went, high on adrenaline and fear. There it was - looking smug, comfortable, arrogant, evil. ‘Stick this in your mandibles and smoke it!’, I would have said, had there been anyone around to hear me. ‘Snap’, went the racket of death as it made contact with the bug’s exoskeleton, ‘snap snap snap snap snap’ - just to make sure. I would like to report that there was smoke, the smoke cleared, and then all there was was the fried and very dead body of the monster on it’s back - one leg raised in vanquished supplication. Unfortunately, I can’t, because still the FUCKER WOULD NOT DIE! Perhaps slightly charred, but very much alive and jumping around the place. Shit, this really was ‘THE ZOMBIE GRASSHOPPER FROM OUTER SPACE’! I’ll remind you we’re talking about four inches of demonic evil here. Damn! I’m crazed now - with frustration, with desperation and with a rather urgent need to pee. So, its back to hand to testament fighting. I get a couple of good hits in while it’s in mid-air, batting it against the wall. This seems to stun the beast a little and finally gets it off the bad. It’s on the floor now, trying to regain its composure. It’s all or nothing time, so I throw my bible at the little shit. Obiviously, I totally miss - the bible flying open in mid-air - but the draught its downward flight creates blows the bug towards the cat, whose spent most of this time around the corner cleaning herself nonchalantly. Finally however, she decides to get involved, grabbing the bug in her mouth before it has a chance to right itself. Like the useless idiot cat she is, she doesn’t chomp down and kill it right then and there - oh no! Obviously realising she has lost serious face by absenting herself from most of the fray, she lays the grasshopper gently down on the open bible on the floor. Good thing she’s cute, that’s all I’m going to say about that. I snapped that bible closed so quickly, the popes probably going to excommunicate me. The last thing hellbug saw before it died was Saint Paul’s Letter to the Corinthians, up real close-like. So the moral of the story - erm… don’t listen to cricket music and get a useful cat who understands its responsibilities. Oh, and always have a bible handy. Lately, I’ve been having problems with women. Well, I guess I should rephrase that… not really problems, more like ‘issues’. Weird, unexpected issues. At least, unexpected for me. Traditionally, my problems with women involve their absence from my life. I have tended in the past to imagine myself as a loser in love. I’m not and wasn’t - not really, not any more than anyone else. But this self-image of the romantic loser who nobody loved was comforting, constant - a nice veil to wrap myself up in. A universal excuse for all my own failings. DON”T WORRY, I’m prefer to sprinkle nauseating self-pity over all the text, not deliver it in huge dollops, so I’m going to spare you any ‘woe is me, I’m so lonely’ bollocks. The simple truth is that, lately, I’m not at all lonely. Quite the contrary. I seem to have women crawling out of every orifice [yummy simile], not usually concurrently but definitely consecutively. My current problems with women involve a surplus not a deficit. This year has been like a sexual dream come true. Here, I am unable to resist the cliché and say that one should be careful what one wishes for. Sadly for anyone wanting all the salacious details [unlikely as that may seem], you ain’t getting them. Most of the females involved are still floating around over here in the ‘jing and I'm far too much of a coward, erm… gentleman to name any names. Suffice it to say, it used to be that I knew what I wanted, but didn’t think I could get it. Now, when the full spectrum of womanhood is arrayed in from of me - from casual fuck buddies to potential long-term girlfriends - it seems as if I don’t really know what I want. Or I do know what I want - love, relationship, blah blah blah - it just turns out that I'm irritatingly picky. At the end of the day, however, it’s still totally their fault. Bitches! Anyway, since I can’t bore you with any of the women-related crap that’s going down now, I’ll take the opportunity to bore you with women-related shit that was going down a year and a half ago. Don’t worry, its funny - its ‘Sherman Scale of Sexual Failure’ type stuff. And its far too self-revelatory for the likes of you, strangers mostly. Yeah - it’s long. Fuck you! Make it to the end, and I might talk about some gigs or music or something. [The following was an email written to friends back home, 18 months ago.Apologies to the Greek -still very much floating around - in advance for basically, well, everything. Also apologies to ‘Nigel’, who is pseudonymous but will probably recognize himself nonetheless. Nigel is actually nothing like the description of himself below - first impressions, eh? Never trust ‘em] [AN EXPLANATORY INTERLUDE] JANUARY 2005 So I’ve lately come to the conclusion that I’ve reached the age where from here on in all I am fated to do is go on dates. Date after date, recycling the same old handful of anecdotes, all of which have layers of meaning, none of which are important. There’s the anecdote designed to display my constancy; the amusing one about my failure to pull repeatedly [designed to make it easier to excuse my cack-handedness]; the one about how fucking cool I was ten years ago; the one, depending upon audience, that makes clear that either a] I abhor going out and getting drunk and like nothing better than to stay in with a good volume of Josephus, or b] I’m a recidivist party animal who’s on cheek-kissing terms with all the fabulous people and coke-sniffing* terms with all the hippest nightclub toilets in town, etc, etc. That’s all I seem to do lately, trot out stories/parables that made my mother cry ten years ago but now [in my mind at least] serve as romantic lubricant. [*Horrible stuff. The great leveller in that it makes arseholes of us all. But if my date has a permanently running nose and a hyperinflated sense of self, then buy me a conversational ticket to Columbia] The problem is that sex in itself is no longer the goal. In the good old neo-traditional manner you’d go out, get pissed, find someone equally inebriated, spend five minutes checking each other out, another five testing each others’ breath close up and then you’d go home together. Or you’d go out, get pissed, find someone equally inebriated, spend five minutes checking each other out, and NOT PULL. But at least the process was short. But now, sadly, drunken, frantic, squishy, impersonal sex is not the object. Apparently, different rules apply here. The last time I did the proper ‘dinner and a movie’ style courting thing was twelve years ago with a girl called Remeny [now anecdotally famous as ‘the one that shows how shy and sensitive I am’]. It’s a long time ago and largely irrelevant, so I’ll summarise; Dinner, movie, dinner, dinner, sweat, um, ah, er…, dinner, movie, movie, movie for months. She gets bored waiting for me to make a move and finds a nice Italian to go home with. Apparently my dating MO hasn’t changed all that much. All of which was actually a preface. A preface to my rather complicated dating existence at the moment. Lets go back a couple of weeks... First; Dramatis Personae: The Greek: Bête Noire. The German: Hand-holder, trainee bunny-boiler The Italian: Flirtatious friend The Gaul: Cute as a button, Psychological Clue THE GERMAN Day One The Italian’s Birthday party. The Greek and I parted ways a couple of months previously. Usual Sherman post-breakup behaviour patterns kick in; moping, self-imposed isolation, total disappearance of self-confidence, lethargy and facial hair growth. But this was the week when I was going to emerge. This was designated liberation week. Was avoiding being in the same place as The Greek, was going out, was meeting new people, was working it. The Italian, a pretty good friend of mine, had been, embarrassingly, dragging women over meet me. Had a word with her and she stopped. Also not a little flirting going on with The Italian herself, but more of that anon. Towards the end of the evening, having drunk enough self-confidence to make speaking to women easy but walking difficult, I went over and introduced myself to someone; The German. The German, was talking to a friend of mine, so I subtly eased myself into the conversation. Jan, my friend, disappeared, and then it was just me and The German. The German is one of these unattractive-and-yet-strangely-attractive women that Germany seems to produce in abundance. We chatted for about half an hour, of what I have absolutely no memory – which is probably a good thing. Then it became time for everyone to leave and go on to the club. I just unthinkingly grabbed her hand, pulling her up out of her chair and then let go. It didn’t really mean anything significant to me. I don’t usually grab women’s hands, but alcohol had released the beast inside. However, it obviously meant something to her for as we were milling about by the entrance, she grabbed mine and basically didn’t let go for the next four hours. This should have warned me. Four hours later after lots of hand holding, occasional lap sitting and some minor bottom-stroking incidents and we leave… together… in the same taxi. Notwithstanding all the crap at the top about sex not being the point any more, sex is still nice, and by this stage, frankly and unapologetically, I thought I was about to get laid and LO! I WAS PLEASED. Sadly, ‘twas not to be, after some more taxi shenanigans, I was dumped on my doorstep and she sped off into the night. Not the end of the world. We live to fight another day, etc etc. Although, I have to say that I was a bit confused by her signals – but then when have I ever not been confused by a woman’s signals. I drunkenly text her, insisting that she have dinner with me the next night and wishing her a good night. The next seven days It turned out that The German was possibly about to return to Germany for good, certainly she was returning for a short period. So at the beginning it seemed like it had all the makings of some short week-long fling, or something like that. She was faced with a choice, she told me the first night I met her; She had been offered a Job, quite a good one, back in Germany – beginning in January. She was returning now [in December] to attend a job interview with a German company right here in China. She seemed rather ambivalent about it. No – not ambivalent, just very undecided. She didn’t really seem to know which option she preferred, not when I first spoke to her. The decision was obviously causing her serious stress on top of the stress of the impending interview, so I decided to take a step back from that. To begin with, I didn’t want to be part of any decision she made. I believed for the first few days that I would be happy if she did come back and we could pick up where we left off, but I didn’t want that to be a reason for her choice. Anyway, in a pattern that seems to have become something of a motif for me this festive period, it turned out that I was only going to have seven days to ‘prove myself’ to the fair German. So we did the dinner and the movies and the walking in the park thing. I didn’t get to see much of her, given that she had various farewell functions every single night, so we’d have weird meetings at very un-date-appropriate times like 10.30 am or 4.45pm. At some stage, as we got to know each other a little better, say after three or four days, I discovered that I actually wasn’t all that interested in pursuing anything with her. I feel/felt totally honourable in this epiphany. We didn’t have sex, we didn’t even sleep together. So this realisation was based entirely on the fact that we had nothing in common and I found her stupefyingly dull. She liked sports, I don’t. She didn’t like going out, didn’t like to drink, didn’t smoke [you think this stuff is unimportant? Trust me it is]. She liked going for walks in the parks on a daily basis. She didn’t get my sense of humour and I didn’t get hers. She had no interest at all in music – causing me a minor heart attack when she half-heartedly told me that she sort of liked Phil Collins. I could go on ad nauseam about the total lack of common ground between us, but I won’t. I don’t think I would usually even go into as much detail as I have here, unless there was a good reason. The above are all reasonable grounds for cessation of courtship, I believe, and they were all arrived at in time to spare anyone any pain. Or so I believed. The problem was that as my romantic interest in her was disappearing, her interest in me increased. Come day five, when I’d been sitting with her for 45 minutes, every one of which was a titanic struggle to dredge up something to talk with her about [inevitably either the weather or her impending job interview], I was just biding my time. Why bother getting all messy and shouty when she’s about to leave for Germany, possibly for good. Just let it play itself out, avoid any meaningful romantic statements and, above all, sexual activity, and let it die of its own accord. The German, however, seemed to be having a completely different experience than me. It was if she wasn’t sitting through the same turgid conversations as me. Her pronouncements on the subject of ‘us’ got stronger and stronger. I was starting to get a very clingy vibe from this woman, and all after five or six days. The final day arrived. She came over late at night. And we sat. I stared at the wall while she enjoyed our blissful courtship. She’d reached a decision. If she got offered the job, she definitely wanted to come back to Beijing. Fuck! As far as I could tell the only new factor in her life in the previous week had been me, and here she was announcing that she wanted to come back to Beijing. Bollocks. I did not want this responsibility for a woman I barely knew – and yet knew well enough to know that I didn’t want to go out with her. But what was I supposed to do? Was I supposed to tell her then and there that I had no interest in further joint adventures? It would have, alarmingly enough, led to tears, recriminations and heartbreak. Found my self painted into a horrible corner. One the one hand there was the guilt and on the other there was the resentment of the guilt. Why the hell should I feel guilty? After seven fucking days – seven days in which I haven’t told her I loved her, haven’t called her girlfriend, haven’t had sex with her, have barely seen her, haven’t told her that she should come back, haven’t really said much of anything. It was seven days, for fuck’s sake! Usually, after seven days I’m still plucking up the courage to kiss a woman without a litre and a half of gin in me and yet here’s this one madly in love with me. So I did what any steadfast man of honour and decency would do under these circumstances. I buttoned my lip and secretly hoped that she would fluff the interview and stay in Germany, where the men are presumably more used to this kind of fast track bunny boiler stuff. So she left. I breathed a sigh of relief. I knew that if she did come back I would have to have a “chat” with her and that there would be blood in the streets or, at the very least, a lot of salt on cheeks. But on the other hand, now I had some breathing space. Not so. The German took to calling me, on my mobile [which costs me a fortune] every single night after she left. First she called me from the airport – so dire was our social connection that we ended up talking about the weather at the airport. Then she called me when she arrived in Germany – where it was cold, apparently. She called me the next night at around ten o’clock to wish me good night. The following night she called at the same time for the same purpose. As it happened, I had cooked and had some friends round for dinner. When I told her this she actually ‘tutted’ down the phone at me. The woman called me all the way from Germany just to vent dissatisfaction that I wasn’t safely tucked up in bed pining for her. She called about 11 the following evening. Now, I’m not going to go into details in a family orientated email like this, but let’s just say that she called at entirely the wrong time and it’s a good thing she couldn’t see what was going on as I attempted to maintain a conversation about jobs with her. It’s possible that certain acts were being performed upon my person which she wouldn’t necessarily have approved of. But then again, who can say? When you’re middle aged like me the mind does begin to play tricks, don’t you know? She took the opportunity, once again, to express irritation at my refusal to be in bed when she called. She called, for what turned out to be the last time, about 11 the next night, a Friday. As it happened, I was at home and had no plans to go out and in fact was contemplating bed. But because I didn’t want her to call me on my home phone, which is cheaper and therefore available for longer conversations about German weather, I told her I was out. I also, in an unconscious, pathetic act of defiance, told her that I wouldn’t be home for several hours. Lots of tutting and disapproving tones followed. But no matter. It seemed tonight she had further items on her agenda than a mere ‘guten nacht’. Much further. It appeared that she was at loose end between then and ten days later when she had to go with her parents to France. She’d had a marvelous idea, which she shared with me. She thought maybe she’d like to come back to Beijing for those days. I swear I spilled my drink at that point. It was quite obvious, blithely arrogant as this sounds, that the only reason she would spend all that money flying back here for ten day was… gulp… me. Alarm bells, sirens, claxons all went off at once in my head. Shit shit shit shit. Err… yeah… that would be an… um… interesting idea. Have you… gulp… considered the financial ramifications? Oh jah, I think in the future I will have all this money from my work and no time to spend it. So maybe, I should spend it now. Jah? Yeah… that’s one way of… erm… one way of looking at it… erm… if you came… if you came, when would you arrive? Och… I have already looked into flights [shit!] and I am sad because I would not be able to arrive until Monday. [More drink spillage] Oh… oh… that’s, erm……[sweat beginning to bead]... a shame Jah, I am zo excited! There’s one other idea I had… maybe when [Bugger, a couple of seconds ago we were talking in terms of “if” now it’s “when”]... maybe when I come, jah, I was thinking that I could live with you. Would that be good? I’ll spare you the various facial ticks and body spasms that took place at this stage. Obviously it would not at all be “good”, but the problem was saying it in such a way that wouldn’t conclude with her parents finding her hanging from the rafters the following morning. It wasn’t like I’d been given a lot of prep time here, so I went into a long sweaty frantic speech about how in theory it would be great but… but… but… err… do you really think it’s a good idea, I mean, you know how small my apartment is, I’m not a good person to live with, maybe its not such a great idea at this beginning stage, we’d end up hating each other, you understand don’t you, but in theory a wonderful idea, one of the best ever, you Germans – full of genius ideas, Albert and the exhibition, Porsche and the people’s car, and now you and the cohabitation after eight days, a great idea, but maybe we should… err… consider it more caref- At this point she interrupted and said that she had “got the message”. This was sort of a bonus, since I didn’t actually have a coherent message that I was trying to send, I was merely trying to avoid living with a woman I had no interest in who would have come thousands of miles to see just me. But never look a gift horse in the mouth, as they say [especially if it’s German]. Some sort of accidental message had been sent and received. Tokenistically, I protested weakly that there was no message etc, etc. But all of a sudden she said that she had other calls to make and rung off. And that, my friends, was the last I heard of her. I still sleep with one eye open just in case, and I make sure I know where all the knives and pets are at all times. A very near miss. Which is a rare thing for me to say. The moral: Be careful whose hand you drunkenly grab, they may turn out to be German. THE FRENCH Day One The very day after the alarming call from the German. I got dragged along by the Greek to a leaving do at the Kai Club. Coincidentally I also know the guy who DJs there and was also meeting other friends. The Greek went off to hang with the leaving party whilst I sat and listened to an exceedingly dull conversation about telecommunications standards in China with one ear. The other ear and the rest of my senses slipped easily into that old dread familiar behaviour pattern of watching The Greek like a hawk, seeing who she was flirting with, which men were talking to her, just generally fixating. This was such a horrible backslide that I was about to leave and go somewhere else where she wouldn’t be dominating my consciousness when I noticed that she was talking to a very cute woman. So instead of running away I decided to go a join the Greek at her table. Cute girl turned out to be French, who I shall call ‘The Gaul’, working in the embassy and very cute [it’s worth mentioning twice]. A rather bizarre scene developed whereby the Greek seemed to be pimping me, not that I kicked and screamed. The Gaul seemed friendly, actually far too friendly, given that she’d just met both of us, and she did seem to spend rather a large amount of time making eye-contact with me. So out came the conversational anecdotes carefully designed and honed over time to make me sparkle, only this time The Greek was the one telling them. Weird and bizarre. The Greek then proceeded, in a spectacularly obvious way, to discover whether The Gaul was single or not. She was/is [with qualifications, more of which later]. The night ended. We all wended our ways home. The Greek and I, obviously, ending up in bed together. Where else should I end up after an evening of [what passes for] flirting with another woman whilst the Greek talked me up? Did the usual bed-type stuff interspersed with editorial comments from the Greek about how much she thought The Gaul liked me. Myself, I certainly intended to give her a call but not with any great hopes. I closed my eyes to the lingering feeling that The Gaul must have suspected that The Greek and I were a couple of swingers trying to get her involved in a threesome. Day Two Sunday I woke up to instant thoughts of The Gaul and a firm resolution to take the situation in hand and call her. Went home, then had to suffer hours of agonizing and tension, waiting for The Greek’s customary 2pm wake up time so I could get the phone number from her. However, before I even had a chance to ask for it, the Greek texted it to me. The whole situation was beginning to assume a Twilight Zone-ish feel. I called her up and asked why she’d sent me The Gaul’s number. Apparently, The Gaul had called and invited The Greek and me to watch a film at the French Cultural Centre that evening. The Greek had declined, but told The Gaul that she should call me. Hung up on The Greek, and immediately got a call from The Gaul. Did I want to go to see this new film with blah blah blah about blah blah blah, the address is blah blah blah. I was so pathetically excited that I really didn’t hear any of the details. Did I wanna go? Fuck Yeah! It could have been a three hour black and white documentary about Mongolian yak milking, and I still would have been there. Sad? Oh yes. Due to the fact that I really didn’t listen to anything else she said after the invitation, I was late for the film, but not too late. Film was ok-ish. Some Sino-French co-production called ‘Clean’ with Maggie Cheung, who herself is really rather good. Went to Alfa for drinks afterwards. A mistake. Alfa is a nice enough bar, but one of those places where they play bland café del mar chill out music at maximum volume. Still, it all seemed to go adequately enough. Bucket loads of personal information were exchanged in that frantic yet unacknowledged search for frames of reference and common ground that people do in these kinds of situations. Thankfully, after this provisional scan, some were found. Now my problem is this: I can be quite personable, charming and possibly even witty. But not on a date. Dates just scare the shit out of me. I keep going on them lately, but I dread and abhor the entire process. I get nervous, I get sweaty, I get twitchy, I get anxious, I panic. Power of conversation seems to evaporate, leaving just a bland dull residue of interrogational ability. Question after question seems to be the only way I can communicate on a date, and this surely can be intimidating, Hell, this wasn’t even an official ‘date’, and I was practically having a nervous breakdown every five seconds. To make matters worse, The Gaul seemed very shy herself, and barely spoke at an audible level. The one thing I cling to on a date, is the unconfirmable [at that stage] hope that she is just as nervous and as terrified as me, and therefore is so wrapped up in her own anxieties that she doesn’t notice the small lake of sweat that is slowly forming on the table-top in front of me. So what did I learn? Well, she’s 26, likes the Pixies and Noir Desire [if there’s one form of communication that doesn’t fail me on dates it’s the ability to relentlessly drone on about music, even if I’m bluffing out of my arse]. She also likes French Jazz [whatever the hell that is – sounds like something to steer clear of] and Bach’s cantatas [which, luckily, I’ve just started listening to]. Now, Bach had a real thing for Choral music and consequently composed about 23,000 Cantatas - all identically named, so it was sort of hard to pin down exactly which ones we had in common, but c’mon, what are the odds of two young-ish people who even know that Bach wrote cantatas ending up on a ‘date’ together? So this I took as promising sign. She’s going back to France for Christmas but will be back in the new year, her parents live in Tokyo, she smokes – but not as much as me, her sister has a Moroccan boyfriend and hates being French, and SHE DOESN”T SEEM TOTALLY REPULSED TO BE SITTING ACROSS A TABLE FROM ME ON SOMETHING THAT”S ALMOST-BUT-NOT-QUITE A DATE! This seemed like the most important nugget of information mined from the evening. And since she had invited me to the flick, as I understand things this left the ball in my side of the court. Thinking that another evening of one on one with sweaty, nervous, twitchy Ian would drive her to the hills, I decided that she needed to see me in my milieu, surrounded by friends - pre-briefed wingmen all - witty, intelligent, sophisticated – a social lion, sparkling like the bloody Hope diamond. So I invited her to a pub quiz. Of course, she had no idea what a pub quiz is, so explanations ensued, during which the whole thing began to sound less and less like a good idea. She certainly didn’t look enraptured with the idea, but said she’d see The night ended. We shared a taxi. Total absence of mad passion in the back seat. Dropped her off. She said she’d call about the quiz. Shit. Pessimism kicks in. Not a good vibe. Ah well, back to the salt mines. Day three Monday Monday was spent in consultation. General chorus of groans greeted my announcement that I’d invited her to the pub. ‘Ian, you are rude, obnoxious, and totally anal at a pub quiz. Not a good environment for your first/second date’. Generally, I would refute the ‘rude, obnoxious, anal at the quiz’ slight to my good name. However, since practically everyone I discussed this with came up with variations on the theme, I’m prepared to accept that there may be some slight slither of truth to it. Began to get a sinking feeling. The day wore on. The pub quiz is on Tuesday, therefore had no reason to contact her on Monday, and, y’know, keep myself on her radar. Assembling a war cabinet of feckless wastrels and other people I know, we began formulating emergency contingency plans for when, as expected, she declined the joys of the quiz. It was resolved that, in a last ditch push, I would invite her out for dinner on Wednesday. And that I would make this invitation some time late afternoon Tuesday [you’d be amazed how long it took to agree to the exact timing of this invitation]. Then miraculously, around 9 that evening I had a text from her, not only that, but the text was blatantly ABOUT NOTHING AT ALL – some nothing about how was your day or something. Aha! Thinks I. Still don’t know if you’re coming to the quiz tomorrow, but who’s trying to keep who on whose radar now?! Day Three Whole long day of ignorance. Not good for the hairline. However some time in the afternoon she texted me for the address and time of the quiz. Whooo hoo! Swiftly followed by: Oh Shit! What the hell am I going to wear, and sundry other teenage-isms. Now, when I made the invitation to the quiz, I didn’t think it was as necessarily meat and potatoes humdrum as it sounds. It just so happens that we have a pretty damn good pub quiz team going at the moment. It’s been months since we were out of the top three, and for the preceding three weeks we’d come out winners. Winning, as a bonus, means free bottles of booze, and hence midweek drunkenness, which never hurts on a date. So I get there full of hopes of victory, followed by vodka, followed by taxi back seat passion action, followed by deep and meaningful blah blah blah. First we have to win though, and I have to guard the seat next to me against all comers, including the Italian, who looks a little peeved throughout the evening. sigh... Anyway, mere moments before the quiz kicks off we’re informed of a format change. This week the entire quiz is sponsored by local listings mag “That’s Beijing” and consequently all the questions are about China. Oh shit! 8 people sitting around the table, between us there must be 25 years of cumulative living in china, but a quick frantic straw-poll reveals that none of us actually know anything about the bloody place. A quick, pointless round of recriminations and rueful ruminations along the lines of ‘Shit! I always meant to watch more Chinese telly’, and then the quiz begins. The Gaul isn’t there for the beginning. She shows up about half an hour in. Happily, it turns out that everyone had been being modest about their sino-ignorance, and by the time she showed up we were in a respectable mid-table position. Unhappily, it turns out that the only person who hadn’t been modest about his ignorance was me [well, insofar as I have no idea when the first foreign restaurant opened in Beijing, etc]. I, very conspicuously, failed to answer a single question the entire evening. Awareness of this made me embarrassed and irritable, never attractive qualities in a date. A new member of the team, a guy called Nigel, caught the screechy end of my irritability. Nigel, who went to Cambridge and writes for some fancy educational supplement or other and never wants you to forget it, is one of these irritating people who knows he’s right and doesn’t want anyone else to be right before he’s had a chance to be right – even if he’s actually wrong. What this mean’s in real terms is that he’ll listen to the first few words of the question, decide he knows both it and the answer, will announce the answer complete with supporting data [spurious or otherwise], drowning out the rest of the question for the rest of us. We’ll shoot him some irritated looks and ask for the question again. Question master will get a couple of words in, before Nigel starts talking loudly about how easy and obvious the question is, thus drowning the question out for the rest of us – again. Normally, this is mildly irritating, but on this night, what with all my ignorance and irritability, and the fact that we have a non-native speaker trying to hear and understand the question, it drives me up the fucking wall, so I have real hissy fit at him, undoubtedly making myself look even more attractive to the adoring eyes of The Gaul. The evening ended with us in a fairly respectable fourth position. I managed to regain some intellectual credit by the simple expedient of commandeering the answer paper and writing the answers down, thus creating opportunities for me to pretend that I already knew the answers. The Gaul remained fairly quiet throughout the evening, but on repeated and overanxious grilling from me, stated that she had enjoyed the evening and was interested in coming back in the new year. Which seemed like a good end. Also produced a comedy moment when I asked her if there was any sort of French equivalent quiz in Beijing. She said that there had been, but that after a while the organizers had called it off due to the fact that most French people were incapable of working in a team. Got home, flushed with relative success, sent her a text inviting her to dinner the following evening. Day Four Didn’t hear from The Gaul all day. Slightly irritating. If this goes anywhere, this failure to immediately respond to texts is seriously going to shred my nerves/get on my tits. Heard there’s a sort of mini-festival of local bands playing in commemoration of John Lennon’s death. Seems like a weak excuse for a gig, but a potential after-dinner-entertainment opportunity for me. Anyway, finally, The Gaul calls me up about 5, saying that I should meet her at such and such a place at 7.30. A little abrupt, but good nonetheless – glad to see someone is taking command of the situation. So there I was at 7.30 pm and so was she, looking ever so cute and gallic. I took her off to Elephant, which is a rather nice Russian Restaurant. She had never been to a Russian restaurant before, so I was able to play the experienced gourmet and guide her. I, obviously, already knew that I would be having the Chicken Kiev. In fact, I’d known that since I’d first thought of taking her to Elephant, since Chicken Kiev is the only thing I ever eat in Russian Restaurants. But she didn’t know that, so I spent five minutes mulling the relative merits of various dishes [all seemingly variations on the theme of stewed cabbage] and consulting with the waiter before resolving aloud that maybe I’d try the chicken kiev… just for a change. She, weirdly, had no idea what Chicken Kiev was and looked at me with total admiration when I explained what it was to her [or possibly that was just my fag smoke getting in her eyes]. Ahh... the joys of being a fake gastronome. Dinner went well. Conversation seemed a little – just a little – easier and I made sustained eye-contact with her at least twice. The brilliant moment came when I noticed that she wasn’t eating her vegetables. I, who had only been eating mine to impress her with my general healthiness and value as a potential donor of genetic material, was consequently able to make lofty and mum-like comments about the importance of balanced nutrition and generally embarrass her. Successful dates are made of such petty victories, I'm told. Towards the end of the dinner she invited me to a crepe party she was having the next night at her place, at the same time explaining that it would be very small, since it caused diplomatic difficulties within the French community to invite one person without inviting another. I should feel special, she said. I did indeed. I’d been considering the pros and cons of taking her to a gig after dinner. I was thinking maybe that would be a step back at this stage; to go from cosy conversational exclusivity into loud garish noise, where communication would be reduced to screaming in each others’ ears. On the other hand, screaming into each others’ ears would bring us physically closer together and, given my date-induced verbal somnolence, it might be of benefit to be in a situation where I wouldn’t be expected [and more importantly, wouldn’t force myself] to make ‘witty’ conversation all the time. So I decided that I’d mention it as a possibility, but in a very low key not-my-first-choice kind of way. However, it turned out that the Greek had already told The Gaul about it and encouraged her to come, which I found irritating. How dare she interfere like that? So the choice was taken out of my hands by my increasingly irrational ex-Greek. We got to the gig. Here’s where the date started to go pear-shaped, at least to my overanxious eyes. The Greek was there as were a whole bunch of other people I knew. But I was on a date; maybe I’m just an old fashioned kind of guy, but I figure being on a date means that you devote most if not all your attention to the woman you’re with. So I said hello and introduced The Gaul to the people I knew, then basically left them alone, hoping that they’d get the message and reciprocate. Most did. Except The Greek. My god, what a nightmare. The Greek spent the entire evening flirting with me in the most gratuitous way. And when she wasn’t flirting with me she was fucking flirting with The Gaul. The woman did not leave us alone the entire evening. Let me paint a picture here. We are talking about The Greek. If flirting was an Olympic sport [and she undoubtedly believes it should be], she would be the pride of Greece, they’d put a statue up to her on the Acropolis. There must’ve been five or six hundred people in the room. Even when we were an item, she’d flirt with every other man in the room, never with me. And yet, here am I, on a date, with my date, here at her fucking suggestion, and all of a sudden she won’t leave me alone. It’s not enough for her to talk into my ear, she has to put her arm around my neck, pinch my arse, thrust her chest into my face, all of it for the visual benefit of The Gaul. I stood next to The Gaul most of the evening – I start talking to The Gaul, only for The Greek to get between us – physically and metaphorically – at every available fucking moment. A week later, and I sit here typing this and it still makes me furious. At two o’clock, I’d had enough of that shit and suggested to The Gaul that we leave. At that stage I didn’t even care whether the back seat windows were gonna get steamed up or not, I just wanted to get myself and The Gaul away from the poisonous bitch. The Gaul agreed. We’re making for the door, and up zips The Greek insisting, while looking at The Gaul, that we stay for the next band. She literally would not let us leave. So we did. For the next two bloody hours. The Greek finally found someone else to flirt with or fuck or whatever and we were able to go. No hand holding, no back seat blah blah blah, no nothing. A kiss of each cheek. She did, however, hold on to me a fraction longer than was strictly necessary after disconnecting from the cheek kissing process, which in my usual pathetic/desperate way I considered a step forward. Unlike at the quiz, the previous day, I had managed to keep a tight lid on my anger at The Greek. The Gaul hadn’t been made aware of the The Greek/Ian situation, and I didn’t need her contemplating it in any depth, especially since the Greek had essentially pimped me to her. So I hadn’t taken The Greek aside and beaten her to a bloody pulp [verbally, of course], which would have been my preferred course of action, and restrained myself to the occasional glower at her, to no noticeable effect. I mention this because I think as far as The Gaul was concerned the date had been OK. I won’t go any more optimistic than that, because as discussed elsewhere ad nauseam, ON A DATE, WHO THE FUCK KNOWS IF IT’S GOING WELL OR NOT? [right, enough cursing – now we’ve got this date out of the way] Day Five Woke up in a dreadful mood. Absolutely appalling. A mixture of dread and resignation. Took some time identifying the causes. Dismissed last nights Greek shenanigans as one. I intended to deal with that forthwith, but it wasn’t the cause. Finally realised that after all the big deal The Gaul had made about it the previous evening, the idea that The Greek had also been invited to the crepe party had slunk into my brain sometime during the night and was still there, making a general nuisance of itself. I’d find out soon enough I figured, so pushed it to one side and concentrated the worst Greek-related incidents of the previous evening so I would be fully prepped for shouting “J’accuse” at The Greek. Was getting a very nice head of steam indeed going when the phone rang. It was The Greek. With a slightly victorious tone about her voice: ‘So what time are you going to The Gaul’s party tonight?’ Shit. Was half way through some burning martyr [“you go. I’m not sure if I’m going”, etc.] routine with her, when I thought fuck it! I’m sick and tired of this shit. So I told The Greek, I’d come round. Which I did, and much shouting ensued. The Greek’s line, as per usual, was total denial. I’ve learned that there’s not much you can do against this. So I shouted some more, calmed down a little, told her that I would really really really appreciate it if she didn’t come to The Gaul’s that evening, and left. Felt a little better. Rest of the day was spent in nervous anticipation/worry/excitement/fear/fashion-stress. Evening rolled around. Dinner starts at 9. But she’s French, her guests are all French – everyone’s gonna be late. Don’t want to appear too anal and anglo, so I shoot for half nine. Big mistake. Now… we’re going to take a little trip back in time, 15 years or so... When I was seventeen, my life sucked or at least I thought it did. All my own fault. I was a little shit on so many levels. I was a horrible little turdy insecure teenager who collected teenage clichés the way other people collect stamps. Kicked out of school, because nobody understood me because I was a lazy little bastard [hey, I didn’t say that I had resolved all of these issues], ended up living at home with the [still] ridiculously forbearing parents, doing absolutely fuck all. By which I mean every day I would wake up, go to work, come home, watch some telly, go to bed, wake up, go to work, et cetera. Now, don’t worry this isn’t going to be some long dirge for my wasted teenage years, there is a point and an embarrassingly relevant one at that. So it’s 88/89 and Ian is lonely, pointlessly surly, teenage cliché embodied. I didn’t know anyone, didn’t have any friends, certainly didn’t know any women – well, except for those that my mother would produce in very unsubtle ways, mostly [I’m sure] to test if I was gay or not. My friends were the people I worked with/for, whether they wanted or not. Now on the other hand, my older brother was like Cary Grant and Cassanova to me. In retrospect, of course, he wasn’t, he was just as much the teenager as me, just on a slightly less industrial scale. But he had friends, he had women [or said he did], its possible he smoked the occasional joint. So you’ll understand when I say that his arrival back from the states [where he was at school] caused some resentful excitement in me, ‘cause, if nothing else, it meant that I could ride with his social life for a while. I could go out to the pub, which happened occasionally on my own, but this time I’d actually know someone else there. There were two pubs in particular that all the young, beautiful and posh would go to, the Shuckburgh being pre-eminent. To be in the Shuck was to be in the same room as the future great and powerful. Or it felt like that anyway. It is possible that I’m over romanticising the hell out of this, but then that’s just the kind of teenager I was. Actually the Shuck was a tiny smoky pub, filled with current and former private school boys. Precisely the kind of people I wanted to hang out with, or at least felt I should. In some way that I can’t remember right now, it always seemed to work out that my brother would be in the pub hours before me. I always seemed to have to stay home and have dinner with the ‘rents. So I would walk down after dinner. Unfortunately, what would usually happen would be that I would arrive at the pub and be so full of fear and trepidation that I would basically have to walk around the block for hour an hour smoking fags and generally trying to pluck up the courage to step into this fearful lion’s den of sophistication and gregarious teenagers. Sometimes, I would just walk around for hours and then go home, never once plucking up the requisite nerve. For me this pub was like hell. Somewhere where all the best and nastiest depravities are taking place but at the same time a place that is scary as, well… hell. To sum up, as perhaps I should have done from the beginning of this little detour, I was almost catatonically shy and insecure. So here we are 15 years later and a lot of water under the bridge. I’ve learnt the art of making and keeping friends, I’ve become fairly secure in myself I think [if it serves no other purpose, the size of this email should prove that]. I’ve come to realise that the stupid shit that I occasionally still do is nobody’s fault but my own. I’ve slept with women and chain-smoking nineteen year olds no longer fill me with fear and anxiety. I’m at one with myself, mas o menas. Except, apparently, none of this is true... So there I am, at The Gaul’s door, 9.30 on the nose. Find her door, find the door bell, ready to push and then… instant regression. I just can’t do it. I just can’t bring myself to push the bloody button. What the hell is going on? I want to go, I think things seem okish with The Gaul, but my finger no longer responds to nerve impulses, it will not push the button. OK, OK, fair enough, natural reaction – eight or ten intimate friends – none of whom you know. It’s cool – have a fag, relax, deep breaths. Try again. Nope. Index finger refuses to budge. Walk around a bit. Shit. French voices approaching. Hide round the corner. Don’t want to be spotted. Why not? No idea. Seems like the thing to do. Walk round the block. Walk round the block again. Sit down for a bit. Shout at myself for a bit. Swiftly followed by self-pity. Pull yourself together, man. Shaking. Smoke some more fags. Try again. Wishing I’d laid down a primary coat of beer before I came out. To late now. Walk around some more. Need reassurance and ego massage. Call the Greek. Ex-bird is also best friend, weird but what are you gonna do? Big mistake. She shouts at me and tells me to grow up. Not a lot of help and not anything that I haven’t already been shouting at myself. Walk and smoke some more. Oh, for a joint! Shit, why’d I have to give that up? Etc, etc. Finally, after many more aborted starts, I scraped up enough manliness to ring the dread door bell. At 10.30. The Gaul answers. Sounding so lovely. Shit. I hate this dating thing. Can’t we just get to the bit where we hold hands and have fights over my toenails. Come on up, she says. Taking my own very sweet time I ascend. She’s waiting. She’s French, this sort of thing doesn’t happen to French people. It’s a duplex. She drags me up, without a moments pause, into THE ROOM FULL OF FRENCH PEOPLE I DON'T KNOW. Various heads incline curiously in my general direction, nod a very laisse faire hello, and resume their conversation. The Gaul’s already returned to her seat on the floor, abandoning me in the doorway, feeling very English and very isolated. She’s French, this sort of thing doesn’t happen to French people, so I hold no grudges. Luckily, I’m still wearing my coat and scarf, so I make various mumbling noises about going down stairs and dumping said clothing, not that anyone seems to care – and why should they? Retreat downstairs, take off coat and scarf. Can’t go back up, just can’t. It’s not just that they’re all strangers, it’s that they’re all French strangers. As an Englishman, its fun and easy to hate them from a distance and in the abstract, but up close we’re faced with the awful truth. We’re in awe of French people. We wish we were all French, but we’re not so the next best option is to hate them and accuse them of selling the onions and riding bicycles [those most heinous of crimes]. So what do I do? Having spent an hour gathering together a decade’s worth of social courage to get this far, what do I do? Erm… I leave. Very very quietly I leave. Bugger this, I think with relief as I descend, I gonna retreat to the safety of my home and write a three thousand word email about how amusing Chinese people are. Something reassuring like that. When I get to the bottom, however, I’m struck by the ridiculousness of this situation and resolve to return. But as far as I know The Gaul doesn’t even know that I’ve left, so I concoct some story about having gone to buy cigarettes. I’m in the process of writing this in a text, when she calls. I ditch the fag story and just tell her the truth. She’s very sweet. I’m thinking maybe I can turn this chronic social ineptitude to my advantage. Maybe she’ll think its cute in a very neurotic English hugh-granty sort of way. I explain my weird attack of shyness and my general crapness. She’s understanding. The turning point was when she said plaintively ‘but thees means zat I will not see yoo until next year’. That, strangely, was all the [undoubtedly misinterpreted] encouragement I needed. Back up I went. Into the room. Everyone turned out to be very friendly and not-scary, but still undeniably French. As it happened, I was the last to leave, after I’d helped The Gaul with the cleaning up. Yes, I left. Yet again, passionate embraces were noticeable by their absence. Who knows? This may have been one of those cuspal moments. Should I have lingered and scorched her with my best bedroom eyes and come hither looks? Was this my last chance to, erm, plant my flag [in a strictly emotional sense] before she went back to paris for the holiday and the familiar entreaties of her ex-boyfriend [who, The Greek now informs me, has been making efforts to get The Gaul back]? God knows I don’t. Well, there you go. That was fun wasn’t it. In case you care, nothing ever did happen with the Gaul. I bumped into her about six months later, hanging off the arm of some unspeakably well muscled Nordic looking type. The German showed up earlier this year. I got drunk and accidentally had sex with her and then she went back to Germany. That’s pretty much all she wrote. Stick around for another year, and then I can spout crap about my women issues now. Wednesday, July 12th, 9.39 pm, Poland Another gorgeous day up here on the, erm… Amber Coast. Brilliant, crystalline blue skies all day, nary a cloud and a cool breeze coming in off the sea. Marvelous stuff. Currently staring at the most beautiful sunset this side of Kuala Lumpur [and the sunsets are beautiful there for entirely different reasons]. Had the opportunity to wander around town a bit today. A tad overdeveloped, perhaps, but bear in mind we’re talking about Poland here so Ko Samui, Thailand can rest on its ‘hideous saturation-development’ laurels for a while yet. Overdevelopment here seems to consist of a whole lot of pavement cafes and tack stores, nothing too offensive about that. However, one does wonder how much business all these tattoo parlours can do here - maybe body art is all the rage with infirm elderly krauts. Was sitting at one of these cafes when a large ferry arrived, vomiting hundreds of red faced Swedes onto the harbour front. It’s like the 1620s all over again, only this time they’ve brought sun block and sensible shoes [Thirty Years War reference. Do keep up! Wiki that puppy!] This seems to be a theme in this part of Poland - welcoming former invaders/occupiers back with open arms as long as they carry Euros and leave thecalipers in that special commemorative case on the mantelpiece back home. Tuesday, July 11th, 9.13 pm, Kolobrzeg, Poland Here I am in glamourous Kolobrzeg, a spa town up on the Baltic Coast a couple of hours from the German border. Anyone actually reading this drivel will undoubtedly be grinding their teeth with envy and, if female, repressed sexual desire. My life is so fucking Jetsetting, eh? One week, a Polish ski resort down by the Czech border, the next historical [if totally rebuilt] Gdansk, and now a health spa on the Baltic! You hate me, but you also want to be me! That bastard Sherman gets to all the polish glamour spots, you’re thinking to yourself - bet he gets driven around in a skoda and everything - what an arsehole! The weather is glorious, as well - since you ask. All sarcasm aside, this really is a beautiful spot and a charming town. Slightly overdeveloped, I guess, but this is Poland so we’re not exactly talking Thai levels of development here. I'm staying at a polish equivalent of Butlins. Okay, okay, you don’t have the faintest idea what that means. Let me try to explain. Picture a summer camp - perhaps you went to one when you were younger - the sort of place where your parents might have sent you when they were trying to get rid of you for a summer. Okay, everyone good with that idea? Butlins, a very British institution, is like a summer camp for adults. My mother confidently informs me that it was quite an in place to be in the early sixties. Be that as it may, in the succeeding 30 or 40 years, Butlins has become the last place in the world you, as an adult [one assumes], would like to go on holiday. We’re talking pie-eating competitions here, people, pie eating competitions! Pause a moment and dwell on that horror… Alright, so I haven’t actually seen any pie-eating competitions here - yet, but you’ll be used to my usual bullshit hyperbole by now, one hopes. This particular hotel- excuse me, ‘Spa Resort and Wellness Centre’ is like a codger-friendly butlins. I seem to be the only person staying at this hotel who is under 60 and not German. Very big with the Germans, this part of the world. Having said that, maybe the hotel’s top heavy demographics are because of its ‘wellness’ features [which seem to consist of a swimming pool and a masseuse]. Sitting at a pavement café in town this afternoon [working hard] there didn’t seem to be any shortage of extremely foxy German birds [not an oxymoron - although now I think of it the expression ‘foxy bird’ is] parading around in clothing that provided limited body coverage and ample ogling opportunities. Relax, people, none of them paid the slightest bit of attention to me. This hotel is situated about 100 metres from the beach which, while not in the same league as Santa Monica when it comes to fit active rollerbladers, must be heaven on earth for fans of elephantitus, varicose veins and ill-fitting hairpieces. There are hotels on either side of me and one assumes all the way down the beach. From what I can tell, every day from about 6 in the evening until 5 in the morning these hotels are involved in some sort of mammoth battle of the sound systems. No, no, cast all hopeful thoughts of the streets of Kingston in the 60’s with Coxone Reid and Leslie Kong battling it out from the back of a flatbed truck, trying to conquer with the latest dubplates, aside. Let me explain. The restaurant/terract bar of this hotel has Robbie Williams Singing Frank Sinatra Singing Berthold Brecht on a permanent loop, maybe chucking on some Shirley Bassey when perkier clientele require stimulation. The recreation room on this same hotel seems to have an Oompah band on staff and - by god! - they’re not afraid to use them. A constant stream of nostalgic german drinking/marching songs issues from this room - anything goes here, musically, as long as massed accordions and trombones are involved. All this from one hotel, mind you. The hotel to the left of me has a complete collection of Now That’s What I Call Music, circa 1989 - 1994, polluting the atmosphere. I swear, if I have to listen to ‘Theme from S’Express’ one more time, people are gonna die… badly and in some pain. And finally on my right, it’s Russian Hardcore a go go! ‘EVERYBODY IN THE HOUSE... bwurr bwurrrrr bwur!’ ‘Fuck off and die’ is my rational and well thought out response to this aural terrorism. Its been a long time since I heard seagulls. Rather soothing. I wonder how long it takes for them to get irritating. 8th July 2006 Accidentally ended up at D22 last night, amid a flurry of last minute changes of plan. Hmm… D22…. Gotta be sort of careful here, I suppose, since this is the website of a record label that may need to work with D22 again in the the future - but then again, sensibilities have not been spared so far in this section of the website, so why start now. But know that I do not speak with any kind of corporate voice whatsoever here - merely the voice of a very bored man who has been deluded into believing that anyone gives a shit about this section of the website. Come on! We all know the main reason you come here is for updated photos of that dreamy Joewi Verhoeven [which you will never get, so fuck you! There is only one photo of dreamboat Verhoeven in the entirety of existence! And its that windswept one in the bands section of this site. That’s it! That’s all there is! If you’ve exhausted the masturbatory properties of that shot then you’re out of luck Chief! You should have paced yourself a little, y’know! What are you, 14?!]. Which, hand-shandy opportunities aside, makes you an idiot, those in the know really come back to this site in the vain hope of fresh pics of Du Yun . Shit… sidetracked a little there... D22 makes me want to hit people. Some places make me want to kiss people, some make me want to simply hang out, some even make me want to never ever tuck my shirt in, but D22 makes me want to hit people hard. Not sure who, really... but the impulse to violence is strong after every visit to the place. For a start, its in Wudaokou. Now that all the taxis in Beijing have raised their rates, its an extremely expensive proposition getting up to the ‘Wu. But this is really the underlying problem of D22. The place is smug. Most of the people working/owning the place are smug. I know someone who calls D22 his living room, notwithstanding the fact that is takes him half an hour to get from his bedroom to his living room. While Charlie is a sweetheart and a thoroughly entertaining drunken person, this is my beef with D22. It’s cliquey. It’s the same 10 people there all the time and that includes the bands. I don’t know maybe you could say the same of 2kolegas, but I don’t care. 2K has a nice garden/waste ground area outside, it’s relaxed, cats and dogs always running around, erm… and lots of other stuff. D22 is a little too wannabe hipster hangout for my liking - a little too over-designed, over-presented. And by all that remains holy in this largely sacrilegious world they need to train the fucking bar staff - there’s no reason why it should take ten minutes to make a gin and tonic! Ok, getting a little gauche here. Well, there goes my name from D22’s Christmas card list. I repeat, this does not represent the view of the management - The bible seems to tell us that on the seventh day God surveyed all his works, lit up a stogie, smiled a smug smile and took the rest of the day off. The management of this site believes, conversely, that the big fella in fact devoted the seventh day to the creation of D22. There - arses covered. Anyway, the bands. First up was Snapline, who I rather liked. We’re gonna do one of those imagining things again. Lets be oh-so-topical for a minute and imagine a Chinese Rock band football match. Beijing against, ooh… I don’t know - Shanghai. I don’t actually know the names of any bands from Shanghai, but that’s okay because only the Beijing lineup is important for this metaphor. Lonely China Day would be in goal - not a whole lot of movement required, but when they do move the crowd leaps up in awe. I see Hang on the Box in a midfield or defensive position, simply because they’re quite scary and you know they have no mercy when it comes to kicking shins. Arrows Made of Desire would be in a striking position, because - let’s face it - that Joewi’s a flashy bastard and a something of a pinup to boot, all perfect qualities in a striker. White would take Beckham’s position on the right wing, since, like Squeaky David himself, they only do one thing but they do it pretty damn well. How does this have anything to do with Snapline? Well, over on the left wing we have Rebuilding The Rights Of Statues [or Retros, as I suppose I'm going to have to get used to calling them]. Retros have Just made a perfectly legitimate challenge for the ball against some uppity Shanghainese Green Day acolytes. But the referee is an idiot [or worse, a French idot], the Shanghainese faux-punks are rolling around on the ground like they’re up for a Brazilian Oscar, and its yellow card time for Retros. Rather than risk them missing the next game*, Coach Sherman pulls them from the pitch and replaces them with, yes, Snapline. *[against Useless Foreign Rock Bands On Their Last Legs Back Home Who Tour China And Get Talked Up By ‘That’s Beijing’ or Black Eyed Peas, for short] Really could have found a much simpler way to say that Snapline plough the same musical furrough as Rebuilding The Rights, but then I wouldn’t have been able to use that brilliant and topical football metaphor. Yes, Snapline have eaten from the same Oy Division cake as Retros, but left a little room over for some Wire-flavoured ice cream and a Pop Group wafer or two. God, this is unmitigated crap. Sum up, Ian, and leave this sinking ship fast. Snapline, good band, good tunes, especially when the human drummer becomes a human guitarist and the drum machine takes over the beat. Nowhere near as good as Retros though. Other bands on the ‘bill’ [although that word seems slightly grandiose for what seems to be a case of whoever’s hanging around D22 on any particular night get to play if they feel like it], were Car Sick Cars, who really underscore the law of diminishing returns for me. First time I saw them I thought they were pretty good in a universally generic Velvet Underground-has-sex-with-the-Jesus-and-mary-chain kind of way. Each subsequent time I've seen them, however, they get less and less interesting. Truly dishing up the aural dog turds were a ‘band’ who’s parents had bought them instruments and by golly they were gonna wack the fuck out of them. I don’t know their name, I don’t particularly care to. I suppose this was supposed to be art. All four members seem to play totally different tunes at the same time. Add a trumpet that’s got to be a hazard for epileptics in audience, the worst drummer I've seen on a stage since the last time I tried to play - and no, I don’t give a fuck if he was playing ‘interesting’ time schemes. - 7/12, my arse! Concentrate on your banking career mate, that’s my advice. Truly terrible. They played for approximately 27 years, and worst of all, at one stage the girl I'm sort of kind of not really seeing [TGISOKONRS] got up on stage and contributed, uh - vocals. Oh well, that’s the end of that then. Actually, TGISOKONRS does make pretty good music [I may or may not add a link to it here] when she’s not being accompanied by the Spastic Boys On Bad Speed [which really should be their name]. July 5th, Haifa, Israel Hmm... feeling slightly more chipper today. Mostly, ''cos it's my last day, but also because I got out and about a little yesterday. I should tell you something of Haifa, eh? Well, that's going to be tricky... apart from the general feeling that since its part of Israel it's gonna suck. My hotel faces out onto an angry-looking Mediterranean. While this sounds appealing, it ain’t. Constant high winds blowing in off the see make it impossible to walk around upright - instead i'm forced to do the 80 degree slump. Still, it is quite interesting to be at the business end of the Mediterranean, as opposed to the pleasure end. The actual city proper is behind me up on Mount Carmel. I'm pretty sure something to do with Elijah happened up on Mount Carmel, my hosts didn't seem too sure. It is a very evocative name - as indeed most place names in Israel are - the advantages of a Low Church education, i suppose. My hosts and I drove up there yesterday afternoon. Notwithstanding the fact that it look very unprepossessing from down here on this side of the mountain, it is actually a rather beautiful town that spills down from the mountain into the bay on the other side of the peninsula. [Bugger - i really hate handwriting, this couldn't really get more turgid, could it. I love the idea of Israel. The idea of a state expressly set up as a home for one particular religious group. Sure, there are countries you could describe in terms of a particular creed - Italy, Poland; Catholic countries. Algeria, Saudi Arabia; Islamic countries. But the aforementioned countries are the product of a succession of historical accidents, like any other country. Except Israel - which is the product of powerful [almost scary] will and a single aim. Modern Italy for example is the result of the accidentally, temporarily coinciding aims of Mazzini and Garibaldi on the one hand and the House of Savoy and Cavour on the other. It exists for many reasons. Israel, seems to me, exists for only one. I hasten to add that I have no particular feelings about the legitimacy or otherwise of Israel. God knows better minds than mine have fucked that particular conundrum up. It's just the historian in me is drawn to the idea of this anomaly of the artificial country. Oh yeah, there have been plenty of artificial countries before - but those countries were the products of chinless fuckwits in London and Paris drawing straight lines on maps, blithely enclosing tribes that had been happily wearing each other's testicles as earrings within the same political entity. Welcome to Africa! Israel, on the other hand, is not a state created by generally well meaning but cack-handed outsiders. It was created from within by people who were not at all well meaning [at least not to the people they found already there] and were perfectly prepared to kick some serious shit if necessary [and sometimes when not]. Aren't you glad I wrote you with my keen eye for the geopolitical scene. July 4th, Haifa, Israel Thought for the day: The USA is the only country to have ever had their arses handed to them on a plate [militarily speaking] by a bunch of bear hugging Canadians. In the war of 1812. So think on this, my transatlantic friends, while you celebrate your Revolutionary War today [revolution! Yeah right, we let you guys go - too much whining and nowhere near enough attractive women]. Hey! There’s a comments board button right over there to the right! You think you got what it takes, try me! [Said with the combative smugness of one who lives in China and knows that you probably can’t get at me. Erm… losers!] Drunk on an Aeroplane no.4. So, thanks to the highly fucking efficient security employed by El Al, this isn't technically 'Drunk on an Aeroplane'', but rather ''slightly drunken at a hotel''. Anyway, strip searches aside, this one focuses on Martha and the Vandellas ''Heatwave'''- 2.41 seconds of the purest pop bliss. I guess we should start with one of my customary crappy random introductory rants. Where does one start in describing the pure transcendent joy that is most SOUL music from the sixties. I guess some sort of differentiation between NORTHERN AND SOUTHERN SOUL would be adequate. Bear in mind that we're talking about real soul music here, not your ersatz ''soul'' of R.Kelly or Whitney fucking Houston and their Ilk. The important thing to bear in mind about soul music is that all of its true pioneers had their roots in gospel music - Sam Cooke, Solomon Burke, Jackie Wilson. The link between Mahaila Jackson and Aretha Franklin is not at all tenuous - but obvious and important - Franklin’s early work on Columbia, before she found that southern sass, is pure gospel. The gospel roots of soul lend it its gravitas - its depth. Nortern Soul, embodied and propagated by Motown, did its best to iron out these potentially embarrassing spiritual roots, whilst southern soul - encapsulated in the output of Stax - held on to it, nourished and cultivated the essentially ecstatic elements of gospel into the gritty bass and horn driven sound that is associated with it. But in either geographical instance, religious fervour [regardless of the individual creed of the performers] is still perfectly obvious in the music. The strongest aspect of this gospel heritage is the ''call and response'' form - cf. ''Everybody needs somebody'' by Solomon Burke, ''Heatwave'' [brilliantly], even such pieces of masterfully constructed fluff like ''Mickey's Monkey'' by Smokey Robinson and the Miracles - the singer hollers the main vocal line while the chorus offers [farther down in the mix] advice and/or counterpoint. This is a direct inheritance from gospel where the lead offers praise while the chorus volunteer refinements on the praise - cf. Mahaila's Jackson's entire body of recorded work. This is key. In the first half of the sixties, after Elvis had joined the army and all the other original rock and rollers had fucked themselves up on speed - of the motorized and/or amphetamine kind, white ''pop'' music was bland, celibate, anodyne and all about the stupid surnames - tin pan alley shit [goffin and king - barely honourable exceptions] - it had no depth, no grit. A conscious attempt to ameliorate the initial pure sex of Presley, Lewis and Perkins into something ''socially acceptable'' that didn't offend white middle America. Fuck white middle America! To hear real music with real [for lack of synonym] soul one had to tune into the black side of the dial. The music they played had deep, well-nourished roots. The joy of listening to soul music now - in the naughties - it seems to me, is that you don't have to be a completist. It’s not really possible to hold your head up high and buy indie compilations - that just wouldn't wash with hipsters and rightly so. Indie music ideally should be heard in context. Brilliant music is created as part of a 50 minute whole. I would no more buy a ''Now that's what I call Indie 23'' compilation than i would lick cream of mushroom soup off Kagler's arse [‘cos no doubt you've been wondering]. But I have no problem outing myself as the owner of many soul compilations, but very few actual soul albums. Because lets face it - those Motown and Stax albums were filled with a whole lot of filler shit. But that's not a problem, 60's soul music is POP music, not art - Jackie Wilson recorded maybe 10 worthwhile songs in his entire career - but OMG how wonderful those songs are. Otis Redding? C'mon, be honest - ''Otis Blue'' is pretty good, but that's the exception - the singles are what he and pretty much every soul artist are about. This is pure honest to god ephemeral pop music. You didn't have to read anything into the lyrics, but if you wanted to you could. Wasn't it Bob Dylan who said that Smokey Robinson was the greatest American poet of the second half of the twentieth century? Bear in mind, Bob's talking about the man who wrote both 'Mickey's Monkey'' - a totally vacuous, but wonderful, variation on the ''dance fad'' tune [be sure to check out Rufus Thomas’ brilliant but dumb riposte ‘Can your monkey walk the dog’ [on stax, natch] and ''Tracks of my tears'' - possibly the greatest breakup song ever. The main thing with these guys was getting people on their feet, depth was an afterthought. ‘Heat Wave’, written by the pop hit sweatshop that was Lamont-Dozier-Lamont, was released in 1963. The song is totally at odds with its time, and totally unlike anything L-D-L wrote for anyone else for at least another 2 or 3 years. With its piano-driven propulsive rhythm, tight horn stabs and close compression this tune really would have been more temporally at home in 1965 or 1966. Anyway... This song is all about the piano, which comes in two forms - the simple machinegun 1-2-1-2-1-2 riff that introduces us to the song and is used to underlie the chorus, and the perfectly spaced slightly de-tuned, infinitesimally out of time, barrel house line [cf. 8 seconds in] that drives the ecstatic parts of the tune forward. The brilliance of the piano is that you hardly know its there. The mixing seems to be almost accidental, haphazard - and perhaps it was - the piano rises and falls in the mix almost whimsically, but it works. Slightly more reverb is applied as well, to enhance that old time boogie woogie feel. The second important factor in the tune is the horn section. The Motown in-house band at the time was called the Funk Brothers, who basically played on every tune the label put out until 67 or 68. However, notwithstanding their name, they were never actually very good at playing funk - Motown, relative to Stax at least, being more about bigger production, heavier instrumentation. ‘Heatwave’, although it sounds musically busy, is actually very stripped down, simplified. The aforementioned piano, a little rhythm guitar, drums and the horns. If one of the definitions of funk music is the use of horns as part of the rhythm section rather than lead instruments, then I would stake a claim for Heatwave being one of the earliest funk tunes. Bear in mind that James Brown, generally considered by boring people who care about this sort of shit as the [grand]father of funk, didn’t release cold sweat until 64, a full year after Heatwave. This, obviously, isn’t tight, constricted funk, but it’s pretty damn close - there’s a little horn solo underpinning the refrain section between 1’26’’ and 1’40 - but that’s essentially it. Of course Northern [or for that matter Southern] soul isn’t really a musical genre that had a lot of time for soloing of any kind. For the most part the horns here are percussive. I'm getting a little carried away here, but one could even make a connection between the horn stabs on the off-beat here and the development of ska into rocksteady into reggae a few years later. Rocksteady, certainly, was heavily influenced by American soul music. Right, I've totally run out of steam here, and I've gotta get this off to the printers, so to speak. July 3rd, On an Aeroplane somewhere over Anatolia Well, its touch and go whether this ever gets sent to you. I'm writing this by hand, you see, and I hate writing by hand. Sure, I guess I have a certain kind of florid hand and enjoy the cursiveness of it, but the act of literally 'scribbling' drags me down, I find. I think, in a strange kind of way, its the lack of control - lack of a backspace key or a cursor to move around the page - that tires and labours the text. It's the implicit requirement for a higher standard of writing from the off. Me - usually I'm just about able to hit an 'adequate' standard of writing after the sixth or seventh attempt, hence this page is now littered with the crosshatched remnants of the first five or six - like shell craters on a battle field. On a computer this accusatory trail of botched effort can be instantly removed or amended into adequacy. The frame of the mail is always pristine - an encouragement to continue, safe in the knowledge that you leave no spoor. Also, as you can plainly see, writing by hand brings out ridiculous literary pretensions in me - and that's never a good thing. The irritating satellite map at the front of this cattle-truck-like cabin is telling me that we are currently flying over Trabzon [aka Trebizond], on the northeaster coast of Asia Minor. Trebizond is a fascinating place. Or at least, under current music-less circumstances, fascinating enough for me to scrawl this in my notebook. Trabzon was the last remaining functioning bit of the Roman Empire - lasting until 1460 as an independent, albeit delusionally styled, 'Empire' - almost ten years after the remnants of the Byzantine [Eastern Roman] Empire at Constantinople had fallen to the Ottoman Turks. Trebizond, along with Epirus and Nicea was one of the Byzantine successor states that sprang up after the Fourth Crusade had been diverted to and conquered Constantinople in 1204. Nicea formed the main rump [and was responsible for the eventual eviction of the crusaders from Constantinople], but one of the younger runts of the ruling Byzantine Dynasty [Comnemus] had taken the opportunity to carve himself out a separate Empire at Trebizond - aided by various Christian Armenians and Georgians. This maintained a parallel existence with the reconstituted Byzantine Empire. Wow! It's amazing the arcana one can remember - or at least pretend to - when one is bored shitless. I imagine it, in its final years, as one of those great crossroad places - entrepots of culture, transmitters of religious currents. Greek in language and self-conception, whilst at the same time glorying in its role as 'the Roman Empire' - Rum. Their emperors may have called themselves 'Basileus', instead of 'Augustus' or Caesar [which became not just names but titles in the Western Empire], and followed a bastardized form of Orthodoxy, but they were very aware of the 'weight' of their inheritance. More than that - these combined streams of antiquity - Hellenism and Romism - were perverted, corrupted, diverted, orientalised, changed by their immediate neighbours - Ottomans, Georgians, Armenians, Persians, Seljuks, Crimean Tartars, Mongols. Fascinating. If the official end of the Western Roman Empire is 475 with the deposition of Romulus Augustulus, consider this tiny part of that same empire still maintaining [just] its existence a thousand years later. This is one of the reasons all sensible people love history - these lines of continuity. Sigh... bored. Not one single gag in that entire paragraph. I suppose I could slip in a gag or two about Greeks and goats. ... Where is my computer? Sigh... my computer is currently sitting in a box in the office of the security chief of Beijing Capital Airport. The lovely hardworking folks of El Al security [who, I suspect, all work for Mossad] refused to let me on to the aeroplane with it. They reached this conclusion based on 'security reasons'. Erm... excuse me? 'Security Reasons'. This was after they'd taken me to a rather sinister back office, five of the fuckers, strip searched me [thankfully without any actual 'probing'] and proceeded to examine every single thing in my luggage. Everything was ex-rayed, tapped, sniffed, stared at suspiciously - probably interviewed as well, for all I know. An hour and a half I was back there. Sample questions: Is this your camera? Does it have any photos on it? Where did you take the photos? [They declined my offer to simply show them the fucking pics - apparently it's much more informative to discuss them in the abstract] Why is there insulating tape wrapped around your USB hard drive? [Because I like the look of it] How many songs are there on your mp3 player? [I said I had no idea, which caused much suspicious muttering] Why is this tie this colour? [I swear on all that is holy I'm not making this up. FYI, Green and Red] Things they refused to let me carry in my hand luggage; My mp3 player, breath mints [?!?!], moisturising lotion, any pens. But most important - my laptop, in that box, in Beijing. I'm bereft without my lap top [and not just in my capacity as someone who has to write a fucking report as the culmination of his job here] - I am half a man. I can't type this, no internet, no mail, not work, no music, absolutely nothing. [back to Excessbloggage Archive]