Quite Random

It isn’t all dragonfruit and sunsets

Friday morning and my usual train’s cancelled. The platform is swelling with people. The guy to my right is smoking, so the smoke, as well as tiny flecks of ash, blow across me. That pushy blonde woman and her fella, the one who looks like a model from a Grecian 2000 advert, show up. Naturally, she pushes in to the front of the platform. Finally a late train rolls up, and everyone shoves in. A woman behind me appears to have developed limbs like Mr Fantastic, and pushes her arm round an unfeasible distance in front of me, blocking me though I’m in front of her, to grab a handrail and yank herself on to the train. Once in, we all stand in silence, and I think even sardines would bitch about being in such close proximity to others, especially when the air is polluted by morning breath, the tinny tempo of iPods, and stupid, stupid ringtones.

Ah, the London commute. Only one of the things I won’t miss while I’m away.

The thing is, the grass is not always greener on the other side. I may be going away, and it may be fantastic fun, but I’m thinking about all the crap stuff about travelling today, particularly in Cambodia. It’s good. It’s called managing expectations. Some of the things I’m thinking about include sweaty waits at border crossings, smarmy Italians, insanely dangerous roads, pushy rickshaw drivers, not wanting to get really ill because the hospital costs $750 a night, karaoke turned up full-blast on buses, being pursued round markets by pathetic children with eyes the size of saucers, rolling around a sweat-drenched bed being kept awake by cicadas with 120–decibel songs, a complete absence of decent baked beans, rude Israelis, ruder English people… did I mention the smarmy Italians?

None of this matters anyway. If this is the worst I have to worry about, I don’t have anything to worry about at all.

Tick tock

College work is all done now, at least until next year. I managed to get my final assessment posted off in time, after staying awake until 5am last Sunday night. While the topic of the assignment was recycling as part of the waste management hierarchy, I think I may have ended up writing about the best way to get a tutu on a pink elephant, but maybe they’ll give me marks for thinking outside the box. Going to work on two hours sleep proved to be an interesting experience – it felt just like normal, except I couldn’t walk in a straight line and my brain arrived in rooms two minutes after my body.

Now the course is done, I have two weeks left at work and it’s time to brain dump and tidy things up. I must empty my drawers, clear my inbox of the seventy things I procrastinated recently, write some documents, and work out where to go for my leaving drinks.

Things I should be worrying about now: sorting out my accounts, finding somewhere to store my stuff while I’m away, and checking my vaccinations. What am I worrying about instead? What to call the blog for the trip. Trivialities rock. Possibilities:

• Apocalypse Cow
• Carry on up the Mekong
• Barang, Barang, Who’s There?
• O Brother, Khmer Art Thou?

Getting nowhere with college work?

Swear a lot. I feel better now.

Old man grumbles

I am currently overweight, unkempt, a bit of a wreck, generally a haggard old bastard. I blame too much on London and not enough on me being an idle swine, but it is unhealthy to live here. Lunchtime is hard work. A never-ending quest to discover interesting lunches, eat well, and not pay out a fortune in food shops with stupid names that serve Edamame with pomegranite and Sushi rolls wrapped in impenetratable plastic. Time once more to practice the Pret a Manger Shuffle, where you stealthily enter sideways and snatch your no bread sandwich from beneath the noses of the fifteen gormless people standing in front of the fridge trying to figure out if they want cheesecake today or not.

Sushi. One pound fifty for two slivers of fish on lumps of cold cooked rice… and they didn’t even have to cook the fish. The person who designed the logo for the olympics is sitting somewhere at a bar on the beach with the person who thought up selling pre-packaged Sushi in plastic trays with fake grass. And they are laughing their arses off.

I feel tired – escape from London is approaching, and I need it. I don’t know if I can come back here again, I don’t think living here is natural. When Samuel Johnson said “when a man is tired of London, he is tired of life”, he was talking out of his arse. Some people actually exist solely within London and regard the rest of the UK as another country. Suffolk is ‘up North’ according to these people, when everyone knows the North-South divide sits where dry stone walls start appearing in fields.

I still feel like a kid inside, it’s just the shell that doesn’t look right. I’m dealing with hairy nostrils and an involuntary grunt when I sit down, but when people refer to me as a man, I still think they’re talking about someone else.

1 month and 24 days until I fly to Bangkok.

It’s not a logo!

“It’s not a logo…”
Seb Coe

That clears that up, then. What’s everyone moaning about?

BBC SPORT | Other Sport… | Olympics 2012 | London 2012 team defend new logo.

Apocalypse Cow!

I’ve bought the plane tickets, sorted the insurance, got my earplugs already, now I’m looking for those trousers with the zip-off legs, trying to figure out what jabs I need, and sort of asking myself in the back of my head what on Earth I’m doing. 31 July I head to Cambodia. Again.

This time round, I’m going to work with Earthwalkers Fund on a variety of projects, some admin and fundraising, teaching, maybe sustainable development work. I’m taking someone with me this time, a damn fool girl who is getting on a plane with me even though she hardly knows me and I annoy the hell out of her. She’s a vet, so hopes to form a close relationship with some of Cambodia’s many overworked and undernourished cows.

I have modest expectations. Only that this could be even better than last time, I’ll engineer a career change out of the experience, not have any more accidents with tuk-tuks, and lose three stone without the aid of an unpleasant stomach condition.

New blog on the way.