April 28th, 2006
Conclusions I’ve reached this week:
- The music of Johnny Cash will always sound fantastic
- Sunshine is the best medicine there is
- Nothing actually happened in Lost series 1, it’s only characterisation that stopped people switching off
- Cheese is the finest food on Earth
- Goldfish have a longer concentration span than I do
And my quote of the week:
To fear love is to fear life, and those who fear life are already three parts dead.
Bertrand Russell
Where’s the week gone.. again. It feels like I got nothing done this week, but I’ve managed to tick off several to-do items, and added as many again, so things must have happened. I’m actually strongly of the belief that keeping lists is the sign of an unhappy and unclear mind – happy people don’t keep to-do lists, they just do stuff, and in the past, the more unhappy I’ve been, the longer and more detailed are the lists I’ve kept. The only positive list is a list of aspirations that reminds you what you really want to achieve with your life if you look beyond next week and the next credit card payment – so I’m putting one of them at the end of this post.
I’ve been interrupted while typing to be told that a cat has vomited somewhere. I’m apparently not required to clear it up, but it’s good to keep your finger on the pulse of events in the house. I’ve started thinking recently that cats are an unnecessary extravagance – they do nothing but pester you for milk or food which they leave after sniffing it once, covering everything with fluff, getting run over and incurring crippling vets bills, and vomiting in hard-to-reach places. Why do we keep cats? The smug little so-and-so’s always make out like they can take care of themselves and they don’t need us, so let’s see how they cope if we turf them all out.
I’m still providing the benefits people with evidence for my Jobseekers’ Allowance claim, nearly two months after I claimed. They’re doing their job, it’s fair enough that they ask the questions they have to, but the whole experience serves to remind me of a simple Definitive Rule For Anyone Who Takes A Major Career Break – make sure you have enough saved up to look after yourself for at least three months after you get back, and don’t go claiming JSA just because someone said “you’re entitled to the help, you know”, particularly if you’ve left the country and/or been self employed for several years.
I published a new website this week, for Earthwalkers Fund, a charity I got to know about last year when I was in Cambodia. EWF support underprivileged Cambodians through health, education and welfare work, and is run by a group of Norwegians, with me their newest team member as Marketing Coordinator. I’m seeing if I can become an honourary Norwegian, which should easily be accomplished by adding -sen to the end of my name. It’s the next best thing I can do to going back there and helping out, which is what I hope to do in the near future.
Last week already seems ages away – a short canal boating break with Dan, Charlotte and Nick already feels like a distant memory, especially as my bones have now fully dried out, there is now more blood in my bloodstream than bacon fat, and I’m not rocking back and forth when I stand still.
Canal boating is a wonderful thing in modern British society. When everywhere you look, paving slabs have been filed flat by councils terrified of legal action from the first person that trips and cracks their head open, hand rails prevent stupid people from throwing themselves from bridges onto motorways, and employees can’t pick up anything heavier than a stapler without three million pounds worth of public liability insurance, it is however quite straightforward to injure or kill yourself while canal boating. Locks are open, with deep, murky water laden with muck and who knows what diseases. You can easily crush your hand or foot between two boats or against a wall. You can lose a finger winding up a sluice gate quicker than you can say “shouldn’t have put that there”. They should send more stupid people canal boating, it might speed up natural selection.
It’s quite a trick when your group is in their late twenties and early thirties, at least half of you are married and respectable, you’re not shouting profanities and throwing food, and you’re not all wearing hoodies and making the ‘wanker’ sign at all passers-by that you still manage to get such an utterly frosty reception from other boaters, but we somehow managed it. It’s almost as if the very worst of British standoffishness was encapsulated in one week for us last week. The old saying about it taking less muscles to smile than it does to frown was lost on at least seventy percent of the people I saw – people actually looked like they were labouring at being miserable. It might have been raining most of the time, but that’s just no excuse – for the first time (whether I hadn’t been sensitive to it before I don’t know, but this was my fourth canal boating trip), I got the impression that four young people in a hired boat were as welcome on the waterways as a formation team of naked jet-skiing wrestlers with firecrackers shooting out of their arses.
That said, Staffordshire was occasionally beautiful, in a rather understated and sombre British fashion. Herons, ducks, swans and moorhens lined the riverbanks, lots of beaten-up old lock-keeper’s cottages, odd buildings and out of the way places hid in the countryside, and the canal was quiet, with little more than another boat passing us from hour to hour, and only one or two bearded miseries to make remarks about how we were going too fast from the riverbank. There were also, to be fair, some great people along the way – the chap who took his own boat through the locks and had a beard you could lose a badger in, and the lady in the ramshackle lock keeper’s cottage whose house smelt of cats but who was very sweet.
Evenings were spent playing many, many games of Shithead, some Sevens, and one or two rounds of Cheat, which Charlotte didn’t like. I have come to realise that Cheat is in fact the perfect card game to play when you are slightly drunk on ale. After we finished in the pub, it was a stumble back to the boat in the darkness, along treacherous canal paths with puddles big enough to swallow a man.
One problem with canal boats is that, as sturdy as they are on the outside, thick metal hulls designed to withstand being scraped along the floor of the canal by boaters as they try and avoid colliding with each other, inside the walls may as well be made of paper. When someone’s in the toilet, the boat can hear every noise going, necessitating coughs or ‘courtesy flushes’ on the part of the person going. I provided Nick with earplugs as the poor sod had to share a cabin with me, but my snoring still kept him awake.
So, a list of good to-do’s to finish… . I want to:
- start an interesting podcast
- become fluent in a second language
- set up a website on sustainable tourism
- study again, in a topic related to environment, policy, society and international development
- spend a minimum of one year in South East Asia and other developing countries, working towards my qualification
- make a film
- enjoy London more if I live there again
- see more live music
- see Mongolia, Africa, Sri Lanka, Europe, Laos, Japan, Cuba, Mexico, and more of China, India, Vietnam, Cambodia, Argentina, Bolivia
- learn to play an instrument
- write a book (and I’ve started it, but I’m just missing a synopsis, precis, plot, characters, ending, and middle)
That’ll do for the moment. Can’t do it all at once.
Quite Random is the blog of Nathan Nelson, a human male who lives in the UK and is not entirely sure what he's going to do when he grows up but is interested in international development, photography, secularism, technology, music and movies and other things anyone of his age would be.
