Deliver Us From Swedish Furniture

and, according to this article, it was only tied as Earth’s second warmest year….very dissappointing really! In the UK, we had no summer to speak of and my brother got married in Australia and the weather in Melbourne was, to be frank, awful! My Mum has some photos of myself and another friend trying to take photos at the 12 Apostles on the Great Ocean Road while we could barely stand in the winds that were blowing. To give you some idea of how *&^%ing cold it was, remember these winds were straight up from the Antarctic and hitting us fill on as we stood on top of the cliffs by the ocean’s edge…..so here’s to summer 2008

Well I am back from my little jaunt to NYC and I think Karma is really having a go at teaching me a lesson for turning up and inviting myself along to everyone’s holiday parties - after getting myself out of bed and into a cab at 4am to catch the plane, we were delayed taking off, then had 2 hours of horrific turbulance. Once the turbulance had died down, we were left with the joyful experience of the remaining few hours of the flight with the lingering air of vomit before finally touching down. I staggered off the plane, utterly exhausted from no sleep/huge stress levels only to be told the cargo doors had frozen shut and it took them over an hour to get them open so we could get our luggage and escape the joys of Heathrow, with no finger nails and only a few splatters of vomit on my clothes…maybe I need a list!!

Well I have managed to find myself on foreign shores again, this time I’m in New York to catch up with some friends and do a bit of Xmas shopping. For a change there were no mad panics on the way to the airport and, even more suprisingly, no power-mad immigration oficers that seem to think that everybody that comes to the USA is only doing it because they are planning to blow the place up or, far more importantly, intending to overstay their visa. So I made it through pretty easily, hopped in a cab with my luggage to go and meet a friend at a bar called Pravda just off Houston. ⇥ Continue reading

Well I am back in the dark and cold world of the UK in the middle of November, having cleverly left Australia just as it was getting nice and warm and toasty…. Anyway to cheer myself up I went on a bit of random web-surfing (which has been hard to do lately as those nice people at Orange have screwed up my connection and then failed to actually do anything about fixing it for a week despite being on the phone to them every day….) and discovered a like minded soul in the shape of Pappa Jake….yes I know it’s nicked from Amelie and half a dozen other places, but it’s still a loverleee idea

While I was off and about down-under, I spent an awfully long time in my car…well actually my brother’s, but he was not around to make use of it so I thought I would make sure it was kept warm….anyway, where was I? Oh yeah, radio in Australia, is it any good? Well if you like Avril Lavigne, Snow Patrol and the Foo Fighters, then it’s pretty good as these seem to be on continual rotation. To start with I wasn’t too bothered, I mean they could have picked worse people out there and besides you can always turn over. However after a while I tried to turn over, but I couldn’t. ⇥ Continue reading

Sorry for a lack of posts. I’ve actually been running around a lot and not had a chance to post anything about the fun and games that I got up to down in Victoria….and it’s not going to change yet as I’m feeling all Humed out.

I drove the near 900km of the Hume Highway in my brother’s car, which he kindly donated to me while he’s away on his honeymoon….well I thought it was the kindness of his heart, but it turns out that while working for Holden (that’s GM in these parts) he gets a new car every 10 000kms, so my driving this will mean he gets back and can order himself a new one…. ⇥ Continue reading

G’Day….always good to start with a cliche I find! Anyway my brother, the most English person you will ever meet, has become a barbeque fiend since moving over to Australia. No more of this frozen beefburgers burnt to within an inch of ecoli poisoning for them, no, it’s a well oiled machine of surgical quality tongs, made to measure barbeque luggage, monsterous prawns, various exotic veges (no, the full word is not used under any circumstances here) all cooked up on these incredible, gas fired barbeque things that are sat around in the various national parks….oh yeah they are free too!

The parks are also pretty amazing, the vgetation always looks so ghostly as all the trees have a wizened, etherial quality and the paths wend their way through to, well, where ever really! In this case it was along old aboriginal tracks alongside a dried up creek, along a ridge watching the kangaroos watching us, then up a hill ⇥ Continue reading

Well I am jetlagged, it’s official. There is no other way of explaining why it is that I keep getting up at times that begin with a single digit….and they aren’t even the afternoon! It is also bloody cold here around Melbourne, but this has provided one of the highlights after I saw several folk arriving at the airport when we went to pick up Mum, all dressed in board shorts and flip flops, emerge into the cold damp Melbourne night….I know, I am very childish!

Anyway, things that have changed about Melbourne since I was last here two years ago. Well Spencer Street Station is now Southern Cross station and is fully accompanied by lots of wavey roof type architecture and a bloody huge outlet mall on stilts next door. There has also been a continuing property boom, but unlike London where almost all the blocks being put up are pretty bland and uniform, they do like they funky details here (basically they paint them some weird and wonderful colours). Beyond that, I have had the energy to consume coffee and that has been about it….it is hell getting up at a ‘reasonable’ hour, I don’t know how people do it!! ⇥ Continue reading

Well after much running around like a loon and generally being my usual dis-organised self I finally got around to booking my flight to Oz for my brother’s wedding. In keeping with the preparations for the trip, the journey to Heathrow was equally as chaotic - in the pouring rain overnight a lorry turned over on the M25 and spilled it’s load of golf balls everywhere! One 12 miles or so tailback later nothing was moving on the M25 so we decided to go the other way round the M25, got through the Dartford tunnel to be confronted with another big jam due to a 4 car pile up…Oh joy! Amazingly I had managed to set off really early and after much cursing and swearing and calling the travel agent, the airport, BAA and Quantas nobody seemed to know whether I would actually be able to change my ticket if I missed the flight. Luckily the huge queue for the M4 (another accident) cleared and we managed to pull up outside Terminal 4 just in time for me to run around trying to find the right check-in desk, barge my way through security gates (not something to be recommended with lots of paranoid guys with guns standing around!) and running through the duty free bit I made it just before they were due to close the gates….where we then got to sit for nearly 45 minutes until they actually got pushed back off the gate!  ⇥ Continue reading

I have very fond memories of Playa Del Carmen, it’s where I learned to dive under the supervision of some very strict, but amiable, Swiss instructors. I didn’t realise how much of a rarety amongst dive instructors this was, but since then the majority of the instructors and dive-masters have been so slack or obnoxious. When I went over to Cozumel I was presented by one that was obnoxious, slack and impatient, I wonder if people like that ever think they might be in the wrong job? Anyway I digress, when I was last there, about 5 years ago, we arrived there just after they had been hit by a big one then. This time Playa Del Carmen escaped the worst of it ⇥ Continue reading