Ooh La La

I thought Ooh La La was something said by French stereotypes. Whilst watching Gail Monfils yesterday at Wimbledon, i was pleased to discover it is a phrase used in real life by French people. After miscuing a shot off the frame of his racket he let out an exasperated "Ooh La La."

Apart from that, it was a good day out. No rain, a pleasant amount of beer, some good tennis and no work...

Badadada da da da da da da da da daaa

That, of course, is the BBC theme tune to their Wimbledon coverage. I use that because I am going along tomorrow to try and get some tickets along with all the other twatriots. Come on Tiger Tim!

Shunt

I was in a car crash in Malta. Their roads and driving abilities leave something to be desired. After driving up a dead end because of road works, we were almost hit by a car and trailer reversing the other way to turn around. We turned around and went back to turn on the the road we were previously on. As we were waiting, stationary at the t - junction, the car with the trailer that had almost reversed in to us decided using breaks wasn't the way he liked to slow down. Driving in to the back of us was his preferred method. It buggered his bumper but left surprisingly little damage on the bumper of my little brother's car.

Malta

Malta was good. I had an potentially embarrassing moment on the Heathrow express on the way to the airport though. I was chewing gum. I sneezed. I no longer had chewing gum in my mouth. The gum was no where to be seen. There were a few people sitting in front of me but nobody got angry. I had a good look around before I got off but could find no evidence of the gum. So if anyone did find a piece of chewed gum about their person or on their baggage after travelling on the 5.55 heathrow express I apologise to them.

I had never even heard of Mdina. It is a beautiful medieval city, with well preserved (/restored?) honey coloured buildings providing the narrow streets with plenty of shade, with the odd palace or two, impressive open squares and a cathedral to finish things off nicely. It is set on a hill with great views over the thick city walls, next to the more modern town of Rabat. My little brother took us there for a wander around before sunset and a really good meal. It is an amazing place, yet, bizarrely there were almost no one there. It was good getting the view of the city with the setting sun before the food and seeing it tastefully lit up after dinner. It is brilliant and would have been worth the flight just to see that... We also relaxed on a beach, ate well and had a look around Valetta. Valetta is not as good as Mdina, but still has a lot of charm. The beheading of St. John by Caravaggio in the baroque Co Cathedral (i never found out why it is a co catherdral and not a straight cathedral) is impressive and the old buildings all around the city, despite being pretty run down are still impressively grand.

I had a great time and would happily go again. Getting up at 5.15 in the morning on Sunday was a little hard after a night on the town though. I might not do that again...

Maltese Cross? poke him in the eye...

Hooray. 3 days off. And sunny Malta to look forward to. Instead of packing and getting everything ready last night (and making various calls i needed to make), i somehow managed to fall asleep from about 7.30 until 10 to 1 in the morning. I was all confused and sleepy and unable to pack when i woke up. I did make sure i found my passport before bed as it can take some time to find things in my bedroom, but did the rest of the packing this morning. Not getting any washing done last night has meant i had fewer clothes available than i would like. I am lacking underpants and swimming trunks but I intend to buy those at the airport...

Rant

I dislike Father's Day and Mothers Day and Valentines Day. They are all invented to make people spend money. Surely you should be nice to your parents all year round, not just for one day. And a spontaneous romantic gesture is far better than the forced romance of Valentine's Day. They are all rubbish and should be scrapped...

Just Odd

After luckily stumbling across Full Metal Alchemist, I have been trying to find other anime of similar quality. I have watched some of Basilisk, which I have found a little confusing so far and it certainly lacks the depth of FMA and I was pointed in the direction of Gilgamesh and Cowboy Bebop, but have not started those yet. Another recommendation I got was Club to Death Angel. Not recommended for its quality but for sheer weirdness. I watched a bit of it last night and it certainly is odd. It is about a an angel living with a boy. She is an angel from the future and has the power to turn back time and keeps killing him with her magic club in gruesome ways when she gets angry and then bringing him back to life. Another angel has come back as well to properly kill him (rather than the playful killing of his angel) because in the future he will create an anti aging device, which is against God and will be a paedophile(??). His angel only wants to stop him learning so he can not invent the anti aging device. He spends his time letching over the selection of buxom young girls in the cartoon and getting killed... It is as odd as it sounds. It is amusing but also a little disturbing.

Respectable defeat and binocular camera

The glider competition was good fun. We were fortunate to have bright sunshine for the event. Having said our glider looked good after seeing a picture of it, I realise I was mistaken. Amongst the carefully sculpted planes belonging to the other entries, our glider looked distinctly half assed. Not even the shark sticker on the side or our name on the wings made it look any better. Nobody else was using 5p pieces to weight down the nose either. We were allowed 15 minutes to do any final tweaking we needed to do, which in our case was making sure our wings weren't going to fall off. In the end we basically tied them on with elastic bands. As the competition started I wasn't confident of our chances. Although one plane had broken a wing during practice, so we stood a chance against them. The rules of the competition were every plane got 3 flights and the longest time in the air of any of those 3 was what counted. After a couple of solid efforts of over 20 seconds of flight and good looking gliding form it was our go. The planes were being launched using a fishing rod with a ring on the end of the line to pull the planes in to the air. We got some good height on our first pull, the ring released and then the plane plummeted in to the ground, smashing the end of the wing off and ripping the wing covering in a couple of places. It was in the air after release for 2 seconds. Things weren't looking good. We repaired it with surgical tape, and were able to get it looking like a glider again, adjusted the wing somewhat and got it ready for the 2nd run. By now the best time was 47 seconds. Again, we got good height on the launch and the release was OK. It was a beautiful, perfectly balanced run... And we managed 19 seconds of flight. Very satisfying. The third run got up to a good height but didn't release properly and after some brief aerobatics, managed about 6 seconds. Our 19 second best time was good for 6th (out of 8) place. After the competition, the kids started playing with the gliders and got some much better performances than the adults had managed. We tried to fly our for a 4th time, but the hook ripped out, causing the plane to crash and breaking the wing irreparably this time. The day continued with lunch at my Uncle's house and a good time was had by all.

My brother and his girlfriend had forgotten to pack their camera and so asked her Dad if they could borrow a camera from him. Luckily he had just picked up a camera from a car boot sale. It was a pair of binoculars combined with a digital camera. The box art was funny. It was the binoculars zoomed in on a woman lying on a beach in a bikini. It is good to see the aspiring pervert market being catered for so well nowadays...

Pants

Our internet has been down at work for the last couple of days. It has meant that I have had to work from home in the mornings checking my e-mails there and then coming in to work. Starting the working day lying in my bed in just my pants is the best kind of work there is. It really is a much more civilised way of doing things. I was quite impressed that i did actually manage to do some work rather than just lying there procrastinating (Is that the word I mean?). The guilt made me do it. Given enough time working from home I think I would lapse in to very poor working habits, but for a couple of days I was able to do it...

2 days til the glider competetion... I have seen a picture of our glider and it looks good.

Red

I saw one of the reddest men I have ever seen last night as I went to catch the tube. His face was the colour of rhubarb. The sort of red you can only achieve by years of dedicated alcoholism. Unbelievably red. So red I couldn’t help but stare as he stumbled around mumbling to himself showing off his big red face. I wonder if when he looks at himself in the mirror every day he is surprised by just how red he is, or if, like the smell of shit in the countryside, it is something you get used to over time?

Also, I ate an unbelievably good cake over the weekend, bought from a farmers market. A sponge style cake (but the sponge was almost shortbready in flavour) with blackberries and some sort of syrupy covering. It was delicious. It was a big cake but only lasted 2 days. I wish I could cook cakes like that. Although, if I could cook like that I would be enormous… mmmm cake.

let down

I managed to screw up another intended visit to home. I was supposed to go back to give my cousins their birthday cards and presents on Saturday. After last week's train experience, I decided to hire a car. My intention was to get up early, pick up the car and then head on home. I went out for a few beers on Friday night. I found it very hard to get up on Saturday morning. The two may have been related, maybe not though. I could have just been really tired... I managed to head over to the car hire place for just before 3.00pm. Surely people still want to rent cars at that time of day on Saturday, but apparently not enough to warrant staying open. I had to make an embarrassed call to my Aunt to say I would not in fact be coming home for the delicious barbeque, which various family memebers were attending.

I did manage to fulfil my Sunday obligations though, and made it to my brother's house in Leicester to help finish off a glider for next weeks family glider competition. For my Uncle's 70th members of the family have to build identical kit gliders and the longest flying glider is the winner. It sounds like it should be a lot of fun. I am doing a joint effort with my brother. It was looking a bit shonky when i left last night, but my unemployed brother should have sufficient time to work it in to shape before next weekend.

Speaking of my unemployed brother... He is 30, I am 29 and my little brother is 25. Yet somehow we have never all been employed at the same time. A pretty impressive fact, if you ask me.

alone

Both of my flatmates are away so I am on my own in the flat for a couple of weeks. The flat is a little dishevelled at the best of times, but having nobody around has relaxed my already lax standards of cleanliness. My clothes are strewn across the living room, amongst the banana skins and lolly wrappers, I have no clean dishes to use and the fridge shouldn't be opened for longer than necessary if I don't want to stink up the place. The two week gap is not inspiring me to clean as i have ages before anyone else will be around...

On the plus side though, i can walk around naked a lot more (naked wii is good) and i'm getting a lot of good practice in for Japan. At this rate I'll have turned Japanese by August...

fisherman

While waiting to be collected from Bath station the other day I saw a taxi driver who looked like he would have been more at home as a fishing boat captain. A wild shock of white hair to go with his wild eyes and big white beard. It was a good look and made me smile. I look forward to the day my hair goes white so I can affect a simliar look...

Also, I finished the Full Metal Alchemist series the other night. Utterly brilliant. the best cartoon I have ever seen. I would highly recommend it of you are looking for something to watch. Subtitled, not the dubbed version (obviously).

Freedom of Association - a novel

I have been e-mailed this description of this book...

"Set in the suburbs of present-day New Jersey and also New York City, Freedom of Association traces the demise of three talented poets and their determination to continue their work despite overwhelming odds. Each of their lives converge when one of the poets, a middle-aged bard of traditional verse, is sent into the bowels of the turbulent inner city where he is ordered by his publishers to mentor a young, radical African-American slam poet and transform his poetry into verse that is more acceptable to mostly white, affluent audiences. To do this, he enlists the help of his beautiful ex-wife who reluctantly agrees to let the slam poet audit her poetry workshop at the local university. Their lives are forever changed when the young African-American slam poet falls for his mentor’s ex-wife. And when the publishers decide to pull the plug on the slam poet’s career, the three of them must confront the hard realities of living in the turbulent urban ghetto while facing uncertain futures as poets."

Who would have thought the world of poetry was so exciting? I was thinking about dabbling in a little slam poetry myself as I am somewhat bored by traditional verse...

trains

I went home on Friday night as it was my Dad's 65th birthday on the Saturday. I finished work and tubed it up to catch a train from Euston up to Birmingham. I bought myself a saver return from the automatic ticket machine and just managed to make the 5.40 train. As i sat there perspiring freely the train started to pull away and the "train manager" carried out his managerial duties by announcing that saver tickets would not be valid on that particular train as it was peak time. I thought £40 for a return to Droitwich was a little expensive and being made to pay extra was taking the piss but it couldn't be more than an extra £20 or so, could it? But no, if you buy an invalid ticket on a Virgin train, you don't get to upgrade your ticket, you get to buy a brand new one - for £60. Fuckers. £100 to get to Droitwich. It was made even more galling by the fact that my journey the next day from Droitwich to Bath, again bought just before travelling, was £13.90. I intend to write a letter and complain, but i do intend to do a lot of things that don't get done...

My Dad's birthday was enjoyable (cooked him a good lunch and went to the pub with family) and then I headed down to Bath for the evening (My Dad was going out for a swanky meal with my step-mother so I didn't abandon him on his 65th birthday in case you are wondering) to claim the winnings from a couple of bets with my friend. Firstly, a drink bet. He bought my first 3 drinks and his own first 3 drinks and I got to choose what he had for his first 3 drinks. Ginger spirit and pineapple juice, half a guiness with a shot or archers and baileys with a dash of lime... mmmmm. And he had to grow a beard, which I could then make him shave in the style of my choosing, which he had to wear on a night out and couldn't tell people it was because he lost a bet. I managed to walk the fine line of getting him to look stupid but at the same time not so stupid that he had obviously lost a bet. He got a lot of looks and comments and it was a very enjoyable evening all round, although the hangover the next day was particularly unpleasant.

And my friends found 3 4 leaf clovers. I have never seen even one before, apart from the ones I faked making as a child obviously...

Watashi wa Will desu

(I got a learn Japanese book last night)

I liked a couple
of the words I found as I
gave it a quick look

Kareraisu (I think) was indian curry

ringo is apple

and Feransu (again not sure of the spelling) is France.

coconut?

I went to an Argentinian wine tasting evening last night. I went to Argentina last year and it is an amazing place. I would recommend it to anyone. The wine is very good (and very cheap over there), so an evening of Argentinian wine seemed like a good idea. It was nice to drink the wine and to learn a bit more about it all. At the evening you are expected to bring your own glasses and are provided with a small glass of 8 different wines. And a bit of paper so you can jot down your impressions of the wine's appearance, smell, taste and any further comments. My thoughts did not show me to be much of a wine buff. For colour I was going for things like dark red, not so dark red and so on. For smell and taste I did get dark fruits right but that is what every one says about fruity red wines. I couldn't smell the coconut and pencil shavings I should have been getting from one of the wines... The evening wasn't as poncy as i have made it sound (although any wine tasting evening is going to be a bit poncy) and was enjoyable and there were some very nice wines, particularly the last one. And the couple running it clearly knew their stuff. I may be going to more wine tastings in the future.