Boadicea's Chariot

Since Sunday was the Lantern Festival I left my house at 6pm to give myself plenty of time to get to the airport for my 8.30pm flight.  I needn’t have worried, the flight got put back until 11.30pm so I didn’t arrive in Beijing until 1am.  Then I had to queue 30minutes for a taxi and didn’t get to my hotel until 2.15.
Continue reading “Room Service”

I’m going to try to publish all the hack’s stories I have written on life at sea. Don’t panic, there’s not many You never know – it might encourage someone else to have a go – there has to be more ex sailors on here other than Alan and myself!

These are all true stories, by the way. In days when life was simpler, the craic better and the life itself? Oh aye….a great one. Better times than these…..

Coastal tugs are unimportant wee craft in the eyes of the pointed heads and Minor Gods who are Harbour Control. Invariably when you are on tugs and you enter a harbour, you get the worst berth the Harbour Master can find because – let’s face it – you are just a scruffy wee tug boat and in the great scheme of things, way down the list of really ‘important’ shipping.
Continue reading “Sea stories”

Once upon a time, I told a lie.  Not a white lie.  Not one of those little untruths we somethines use to grease the wheels of the daily round.  A big lie.  A dark lie.   A lie to try to conceal a mistake that could have had fatal consequences. read the gruesome deatails

Heard at 11.15am in the City of London.

Market trader on mobile phone in Great Winchester Street area :

“I know your business is good, but is it legit?”

Don’t you just love an oxymoron.

Following a Rolfing session in New Paltz, New York today, I stopped for a bento box at one of the few authentic Japanese restaurants around, also in New Paltz.  In their entryway were an assortment of brochures from local intrepeneurs, charities, arts orgs and schools.   One was the informational brochure of a hypnotist.

I made an appointment with him for Wednesday the 10th.

Volume two of Mesmerized will follow…

Bearsy, thank you for the blog roll. I thought I’d better post something on mine, since you have now provided a link to it.

So with that in mind I have posted a poem.

Maybe if the MyT site collapses under the weight of fighting-fool feuds, the ‘Creative Writing’ posts I have on there could find a home over on my word press blog?

Will we or our followers look back at this time and regard it as the ‘Golden Age’ of communicating with each other, a last burst of collective imagination before the shutters come down on human endeavour. ‘They’, whoever ‘they’ are cannot be far from introducing the invention that will rock the world, end war, end strife and keep the population satisfied beyond it’s imagination and imagination will be the key. The pixels that are gently glowing on your screen are the afterwash of my mind and my fingers, it is  the digital pixie dust that I have conjured up for you to read, or ignore, it makes little difference to me, the joy is in the creation and the afterglow that comes from a large number of comments is the cherry on the top.

So if we accept the fact that the electrical impulses from my brain have caused a mechanical action in my fingers to press keys which then turn the keystrokes back into electrical impulses, when ‘they’ develop a way of cutting out the mechanical part and hardwire my brain to the computer, everything I think will appear before me on a glowing screen. Now lets extrapolate that, let my mind run riot with every fantasy that I have ever wished to see before me. Now give me a total immersion suit so that every move, every caress, every explosion of lust and perversion (this is for illustrative purposes only, I’m just taking it to its logical conclusion) will be laid before you, every wish will be your command. You wont need drugs, you wont need booze, you wont need porn, just think it and it will happen. The streets will empty, travel will stop, who needs to pay to go to Las Vegas, just imagine the strip and you will always be a winner from the comfort of your own home. It will cause massive problems as no one will want to work, what good is money when you can live the lifestyle of the rich and famous from the comfort of your fifty bed mansion in your minds eye, Sounds fun eh?

My other half has warned me, time and time again, against the perils of it. But I’ve never been the suspicious type.

So when strangers come knocking at the door, be they double glazing salesmen, Jehovah’s Witnesses or gas men,I usually end up being cornered.

I don’t know if it’s just me – it usually is –but lately I’ve noticed a slight shift, in what you might call quality of cold callers.

When I was a child, in Wigan, it was Jehovah’s Witnesses. Always, every Friday night, without fail. Our estate was virtually split down the middle – Catholics one side, Proddies, as we called ’em, on t’other. Being on the Catholic side, I was bewildered enough by the Protestants. So the Jehovah’s Witnesses were aliens to my eight year old eyes.

Fast forward ten years and it was the TV licence men. They would systematically trawl the university halls of residence in Sheffield. They were merciless and even followed a friend in a cab one night as she tried to foist the incriminating evidence – her granny’s old TV – onto her boyfriend. I escaped lightly; the only telly I had ever had was the broken black and white one sitting in Wigan, complete with coat hanger aerial.

Continue reading “Cold Callers”