Mootpoint

Is it actually ironic that if I moved to the States I’d have to give up cola? Hmm, possibly, although the word has been abused so much I just don’t know anymore. Not that I ever did, not even in the halcyon, Reality Bites days of youth and China. I guess if fate did lead me there, I could import it from a country that understands that high fructose corn syrup is in fact the spawn of the Devil? A product that renders anything it’s put in completely unfit for human consumption? 

So last Sunday we took a trip to a market (the Sunday Up market, for those who are interested – guess when it’s open, go on…) where I bought a can of coke. So far, so usual, you all might say. But I had failed to (cos, er, why would I need to?) check where the can had been manufactured, and it was only after that first, long anticipated draught that I realised that I held the abomination of American Cola in my hand. Disappointing coke is very, very disappointing. If I’d been MC Hammer, I would’ve had something more to say about it all, I’m sure.*

Luckily the Szechuan chicken I also bought was passable, and as the sun’s finally decided to come out in London, it’s nice to just wander aimlessly around the town, perch on sidewalks listening to buskers, and watch the strangely dressed life go by. The daffodils and crocuses (Crocusi? Crocii?) are up in the parks, the weather is decidely warmer, and the days are getting longer at an incredible rate. I suspect you could almost say that spring has sprung, and life is much, much better because of it. And much, much better just in general, thanks for asking. Excepting the fact I might be made jobless any day now, of course.

But what’s new? And do I really care? Not particularly.

Happy birthday, Juliet! One day I might even buy you a present, but not today.

* Speaking of which, does anyone else remember James T doing a piss take of that ad in 4th Form English with Bonita and Chiquita bananas? No? Well, he did. And now you know.

When people keep sending me cool stuff that makes me happy? 

Take these random acts of awesomeness for example… http://www.facebook.com/group.php?gid=68643364337 

Good work that man. (And thanks Lucy!)

I’ve got a blog half written sitting somewhere. It’s about how I’ve been doing stuff. It’s shaping up quite nicely, maybe one day it’ll get posted. But I’ve just been sent (hi Lis!) quite an amazing video that’s worth posting and not waiting and considering. Enjoy.

(Seriously, it’s worth the click. Your socks will be rocked.)

London

If this lift
Breaks down
Keep calm
Press Alarm
Button for
3 seconds
This will activate the
Automatic telephone
Do not attempt
To leave the lift
Until told to do so
Trained personnel
Will release you

(I need to get me some of those trained personnel…)

(This post brought to you by my IT “Help”desk, who declared it would probably take 24 hours for someone to call me about the fact I can’t use printers or email at the moment. Which means I do what exactly? Blog!)

So. 2009. Forget 2008, I swear 2007 only began about a month ago… I was still in a relationship (just), finishing off a particularly annoying summer school course or two (including Korean, which has proven to be *oh* so useful (see above)), had almost moved into the Rainbow Love Mansion (thanks again for that, Simon), an MBA loomed (damn, did it loom), and plans for 2008 weren’t even a twinkle in my mind’s eye. At this time two years ago I was on the cusp of finally busting out of that comfortable Christchurch existence I’d so carefully constructed since leaving school.

Which I guess you could say, looking back over the last twenty four months, I managed to do. And then some.

So where does the beginning of 2009 find me?

Well, I’m living in London. Or to be more precise, I’m living with Dan and Alex out in sunny Lee, which is in the London Borough of Lewisham found to the south east (SE12 0AL, for those who care… also, who knew that postcodes could be so, er, specific?) I’ve been there for a month and a half, and would love to move closer to the centre of the city if I could only get an employment contract confirmed for longer than a couple of months at a time.

On the work front I find myself in that wonderful space of being over-educated but under-experienced (especially in UK terms), and consequently find myself somewhat under-employed working for Westminster City Council in Parking Services (so much for grand plans…) Then again, I may complain, but it’s not that bad – the people are cool, the pay’s pretty good, the experience is valuable, and the work, when I have some, can be quite interesting in a problem solving kind of way.

I have to say though, coming to a new country on a temporary work visa while trying to change professional direction just as the biggest recession since the Great Depression hits with bugger all money in the bank… well, let’s just say I could have perhaps done it differently. I don’t think I would have, but I definitely could have. And based on my experience I highly recommend that others do so when they come over (looks meaningfully in Tim’s direction).

So what, you ask, does London have to offer apart from the slow death of the dream of a challenging, relevant, highly paid position in a forward thinking, globe spanning organisation based in the heart of the business universe situated in one of the biggest cities in the world? For me so far this would fall into two categories: new friends and music.

New friends is pretty self-explanatory, except to say that there are a number, and they’re all damn cool people. (One of whom I convinced to buy Game of Thrones the other day. And there was much rejoicing. And then I lost.) You should come meet them, if you’re not already here to do so.

The music front is in relation to both music to go and see, of which there is much, some of which I even manage to get to, and the playing of it. So far I’ve made it along to Death Cab For Cutie, Sigur Ros, Lisa Hannigan and Ben Ottewell, next week I’ll add Don McGlashan to the list, and the goal is to make that expand considerably in the near future. Chuck in the festivals over the summer and it should be a fun year. On the playing front, I’ve started some guitar lessons to try and sort out some kind of technique or some such, and hope to get more into this as the year goes by. Watch this space. (He says, but you all know it’ll take another three months for any kind of update…)

As for other 2009 plans, I’m working on them. Seems like they’ll be many and varied, but I have no idea where I’m going to be in six months, let alone twelve, so I’m not making any promises.

Except that I’m going to write some thoughts about this article.

Probably.

London at this time of year is decidedly grey.*

This might not normally be such an issue for me, but as daylight savings has just finished, suddenly it’s getting dark before 4 pm and the days never really seem to get out of first gear. They brighten up a little in the mornings, remain dim, grey, low and overcast during the day, then slide back into blackness very early on in the piece. In some ways this means the nights are far more enjoyable than the days – the city is properly lit up then, people are out having fun, and while the day seems to suck the life out of the place, the night seems to give it back. 

Which is fortunate, as there inevitably turns out to be a lot to do at night…

I forgot to write in my last blog about Clinton and my trip to Wembley to watch the NFL game between the Chargers and the Saints. (The Saints? My own NFL team? At last I have one to support for appropriately spurious reasons…) I believe it was considered a home game for the Saints, and we all got little Saints flags to wave when they did anything good. Which they did, quite a bit, eventually winning a very cool game 37-32. I have to say that while I’ve hassled NFL for being kind of silly in the past, (a one hour game played in 3 hours 45 minutes, seriously?), watching it live it becomes a much more fluid and enjoyable spectacle. Especially when you’ve got someone who knows what’s actually going on sitting next to you (thanks Clinton).

And it really was a spectacle, complete with (extremely cold, I assume) cheerleaders, mascots running about the place, marching bands, giant floating banners, the totally excellent aerial camera thing they have, what appears to be approximately 300 players per team, and 82,000 people packed into Wembley. Which is quite a lot of people, especially after the game when all of them want to go back to the station and catch a train back. Quite the sea of humanity on the boulevard that runs between stadium and station.

I’ve got to say, in my two or three experiences of it, British police are past masters at effective crowd control. Wembley was a good example of this. On the boulevard at about three points there were five or so mounted police with their horses spaced evenly across the way. In order to control the flow, and prevent crushes in the station, every now and then one would yell out “Full cordon!”, and the horses would all pivot 90 degrees and become a fence that people couldn’t pass through. Was really interesting to watch, although did necessitate the need to avoid manure on the boulevard.

That was a couple of weekends ago, and while last weekend led to a couple of random, drinking to the wee small hours of the night, nights, watching the US elections in a bar full of Obama supporters until 7 in the morning was probably the next thing of true awesomeness to occur.

(NFL, US Elections… some might suggest I’ve ended up in the wrong country perhaps?)

The night produced some interesting conversations with Americans, Canadians, Sri Lankans, other Kiwis, Brits… really a multinational basement bar, all barracking for Barack. (An aside here, the definition for barrack. Australian vs British usage, totally opposite to each other. Odd.) (I was using it in the Australian sense, obviously.) It also led to a handshake and conversation outside the bar with John Bird, the guy who set up The Big Issue. He seemed pretty cool. Random.

The night also produced some excellent emotions. Hanging with a room full of people who were all so incredibly excited to see the victory, having followed the race closely for well over a year myself, tired, somewhat drunk… great way of really getting into the spirit of the thing. I highly recommend it.

And the victory itself? Especially the speech? Stunning. Amazing.

Afterwards, when I finally left the pub and was walking to the tube station through a misty Kensington Park, the fact that the day was once again grey and lifeless didn’t seem to matter quite so much.

* Most of the year actually, I’ve been reliably informed, but I’m really noticing it just now.

Back home when I didn’t blog for a while, it probably meant I wasn’t doing much that was interesting enough to blog about. Not so much the case here.

Highlights of the last month include…

• Get along to a Jack the Ripper tour, which was a very cool tour of late 19th Century London, only slightly marred by the gruesome late 19th Century photographs of dead prostitutes with their noses cut off and their livers placed on the bedside table. Ok, more than slightly.
• Listen to a public lecture by KAL (the Economist editorial cartoonist) and Henry Naylor (creator of Headcases and one of the writers of Spitting Image back in the day) about political satire, how it’s evolved over the past few decades, and how to draw a George Bush cartoon.
• Take a train to Cambridge for a couple of days for a training and team building course for work. Which was going well, until I stayed out too late, failed to wake up, and slept through the morning training session. Bad temp, bad.
• Head up to Leeds to go on a whirlwind tour of the Yorkshire countryside. Damn it’s beautiful up there. Highlights included various ruined abbeys (thanks, Henry VIII) and the Captain Cook museum at Whitby (he sailed to many, many places).
• Fly over to Barcelona to catch up with Mum, Don and Angel, and explore a city that everyone raves about. And with good cause, it is rather super, and I am now similarly raving.
• Move into my cousin’s place on Buckingham Palace Road. (And yes, we can see Buckingham Palace from our place. Neat.)
• Go to many pubs and restaurants, and perhaps a party or two.

I was going to wax lyrical about many of things in individual posts (you should see the drafts), but right now I don’t think it’s in me. So I’m gong to leave the list as is, which is somewhat lame I agree, and make a better attempt at writing about London life at some stage in the near future.

Oh, and Tim, they’re opening an Oporto restaurant at the food court in Victoria Station. See? I am sorting out the place for your “imminent” arrival.

(Although Bishy reckons he looked like Tim. But I don’t ever recall a carved-into-white-marble, ten foot high depiction of Tim as the Roman god Mars though, so I stand by the title of this blog.) (Although Tim does still have a few decades left, so I may live to be corrected on this score…)

The British museum is feckin’ enormous. Seriously, it’s a vast place. Until this evening, I’d only been in the immense Egypt/Greece/Rome/Assyrian section. Tonight I headed into the main central bit (the Reading Room) where the Hadrian: Empire and Conflict exhibition is currently housed. This is an amazing space, both the courtyard outside and the domed reading room that stands in the middle of it. And now, even after spending several hours wandering through these two huge areas, I think I’ve still got a good third to half of the place to go. Good work having an empire and using it to steal a lot of cool shit from all over the place, that’s what I reckon.

So yeah, Hadrian was cool, the end. You should go, if you’re in London. If not, watch the videos on the website, they also rock quite hard.

I was rereading a couple of posts back, and wondered whether it came across as me dissing London public transport. If it did, that wasn’t the intention – the range, and regularity, of options for getting about the place here is stunning. Whether it be buses, the tube, trains, the DLR, or the Thames Clippers that ply the river, there is almost always something going towards where you want when you want. And while it feels like a lot of money each week when you shell out for a weekly pass, I’d be willing to bet it’s far less than if you were maintaining a car around these parts. And probably equally as useful.

Of course, the system does break down sometimes. And don’t try to get to Si’s place on the weekends, that way lies madness. And occasionally (tonight) certain lines are closed due to a “person under a train” event. (They broadcast this over the intercomms in the stations. It’s kind of weird to hear it when you’re sitting there, waiting for your own tube… turns out to be a relatively regular thing.) And the Clippers, they have those big tvs endlessly playing ads. I hate these things at the best of times, but they only have like ten ads playing over and over, and the trips can be upwards of fourty minutes… I no longer care that Stevie Wonder and Leonard Cohen are playing at the O2, seriously. More annoyingly they never seem to change. I haven’t travelled on one for weeks, but last weekend I took a boat ride, and the same ten ads were cycling through. Ack.

But otherwise, public transport here is one more thing that’s super cool.

On the actual things that happen in my life front, work is ok, in an inoffensive, please give me something to do, please, kind of way, (turns out it’s not only the tie I don’t have to wear – tshirt and jeans works fine as far as they’re all concerned, unless meeting with external stakeholder types); I’m applying for real jobs, had an interview for one today (cross some fingers, people); I’m increasingly annoyed at being a transient, dragging my suitcase about the place; and, I’m really looking forward to starting again.

I’m also looking forward to doing sething fun so I can write a blog that contains no reference to public transport in this city.

Speaking of which, we’re having a party at Mog’s on Saturday. You’re all invited. Go on, you know you want to, Mog’s old now and everything.

“Back home, friends don’t let friends drink at Starbucks. But here, well, it’s often not the worst choice there is.” Random Kiwi co-worker, earlier today.

It’s not the first time the first thing I’ve talked about with someone else from home is coffee. Why? Wanna bond with a Kiwi or Australian you’ve just met in London? Then start a conversation about just how overwhelmingly shit you’ve found the coffee to be here.

It seriously seems to be a better bet than talking about the rugby, or which city you’re from, or politics, or the weather (less depressing than talking about the weather, anyway), or which school you went to… The love of good coffee seems to transcend a lot of the other usual divisions within and between the two countries, and the fact that you are a person who places a high level of importance on finding a place (of which there seem to be about three in the city, two of which are owned by the same people, all of which are owned by New Zealanders) that makes good coffee, almost instantly marks you out as a fellow Australasian.

What’s even more amusing is the look of surprise on many people from this hemisphere’s faces when you profess to caring that much about this particular caffeinated beverage. Some have even expressed surprise that I (being from New Zealand) have even experienced espresso style coffee before.

I set them straight.