travelogue 2

January 25, 2006

back though the underworld tunnel and out into the swirling mass that’s terminal 4 concourse on a rainy sunday lunchtime where I’m already on the wrong floor so I’m pressing all the buttons on the elevator again to see where I come out which is thankfully right next to WHSmiths where I need to buy 17 litres of spring water just to make sure I don’t get a flaky nose by the time I’ve coated my face with everyone else’s breath passed through a chlorine filter that has probably come from the swimming pool in greenwich and makes me look like pete burns by the time I’ve landed in Denver and all the indians start wailing at me as I pass them over the walkway that connects BA to CO via TSA and FBI.

so I’ve checked in online and I’m 2 hours early which is a contradiction that BA can’t really deal with, so I proceed to the bag drop to be told that I’m checked in alright but I’ll actually have to drop my bag somewhere completely different like off a cliff or something so follow me and I’ll get that taken care of for you except you don’t know where you’re going do you? still, the bag passed onto the conveyor at the back of the check in area and my confidence in ever seeing it again dropped to somewhere below zero which was rather worrying as I’d packed the tadpole and so all the work I needed to do was in there and never mind you’ve had a wasted trip sir – couldn’t you just do your presentations without the pictures you drew in them? without the pictures? are you mad? they are the presentation. you’re not in marketing are you? anyway, if I never see my bag again, I’m remembering your name, er, steve, and I’ll hold you personally responsible for its safe return. ok, calm down and zip up everything that moves to progress through the security screening and then on to wander aimlessly around the rubbish terminal 4 shopping and almost buy a shirt from pinks for no reason probably. I might just get a ridiculous sandwch from starbucks that takes me about 30 mintues to undo the packaging.

wait up. that’s surely not the queue to get through security. I’m surely not going to have to stand next to this annoying wailing family for half an hour listening to that insidious little twerp rattling on about the computers. excuse me! full body scan! me! me! oh, right, they’re doing the full body scan. I expect it will show up that alien growing inside you. shuffle. nice shoes. shuffle. nice hair. shuffle. you don’t really need a carry on bag that size mate. shuffle. ooh, you’re nice, I hope I sit next to you. shuffle. aah. not you. shuffle. etc. in the end its pretty painless and after putting all my clothes back on and applying some of the cream they kindly gave me, I’m sauntering into the safe haven of a stateless environment, only cluttered up by the loons on their way to paris, oman, brussels, new york, wherever.

godammit, get me on that plane. I’ve been to the bathroom and so I’m ready for my window seat. I hope 29H and 29J had some kind of passport problem and won’t be boarding today so that I can have these 3 seats to myself and move my leg at least 15 degrees off-centre to get some movement in them. oh, hang on. hello enormous russian lady who will be sitting next to me for 9 and a half hours. is that your friend? oh, no, just some unrelated wiry looking black jumpered snippy little man who probably will get his laptop out in a minute. right, so everything set now. perfect. let’s get the sony walkman out and start with maximo park to see me through the first tedious stretch…

as we are a few hours into the flight, we go north just far enough to dip out of the daylight and into the twilight to the point were they meet in the middle and everything goes purple. I was expecting this to happen which is why I had planted myself by a window, but I didn’t really know that everything would look quite so other-wordly as we passed over Iceland in a kind of drug-fuelled luminarium, which is how I like to think of the whole Iceland experience anyway so it was appropriate. as my forehead stuck to the window, I just kind of fazed out for a moment – like I do on conference calls about portal architectures and globalization business models requiring platform enhancements that I hadn’t included in the original brd in 2003 – until everything went blank with my camera whirring in the background and mrs seatanahalfakov dribbling over some story about a tractor factory in the newspaper while mr beaky played poker online via satallite with a young woman called brandy from ohio who was really big dave from east ham but it didn’t really matter becasue we were all playing with complimentary lemon fresh tissues

travelogue 1

January 24, 2006

right mate, terminal 4? right, get off this one and get on that one over there. he’s going to terminal 4 but I’m knockin’ off and I can’t be bothered and as you’re the only one then I don’t really care, right? yeah, this your bag? right, there you go mate. <crash> dave’ll sort you out. dave! terminal 4! I ain’t going, can you take this one! he’s only one! alright, I’ll go, here’s my suitcase, careful with that. <crash> anywhere mate, be about 5 minutes. thanks. hang on. this bus has got leather seats. and it’s got a huge telly at the front that shows you where we’re going. and the aircon works. dammit. I get to sit 4 hours on a sharabang from 1989 with flock wallpaper on the seats and the heating up to 11 with sticky patches on the carpet, which are, incidentally, on the back of the seat and footrests that take the skin off your shins, just because I travel from East Anglia? what’s with that then? this is a nice bus. I want to be on this one all the way, not just the last leg after being ejected by a truculent dolt of a provincial driver who wants to get home for sausages and arsenal.

passing south african airways on the right, a 777 passes overhead at about 50 feet before skidding onto runway 2 and I’m wondering whether booking the hotel closest to terminal 4 is the best idea in the world as we pull up at departures and get hoofed on the concourse, our suitcases cascading out the back of the National Express like it’s a waste collection. the hilton heathrow is supposed to be connected to terminal 4 by a covered walkway which sounds like something out of dr. no, but I’ve a sneaking suspicion it might end up being an experience more like dr crippen judging by the way the day has gone so far. through the terminal building I spy a helpful yellow sign that says ‘hotel’ and realize I’m on the wrong floor and in the wrong elevator and so I press all the buttons at once to see what happens and I get ejected onto level 2 where there’s a tatty looking weatherspoons called ‘the departure gate’ or something ridiculous and just to the left there’s a barely noticable black hole in the wall where the journey to narnia begins through the back of a photo booth where you can get your head superimposed onto michael jackson. again. so this must be it. the otherworld that is the heathrow hilton covered walkway. it’s a tin tube with the occasional window and unsettling fire escape and signs which say that you’re ‘5 minutes from the comfort and luxury of the hilton heathrow’ or something like that, which doesn’t give me a great feling for how long it’s actually gonna take to get me to a bed tonight. the walkway is also suspended over the inner roadway for the airport so the odd rumble of delivery lorries underneath and business class overhead make for a sublime underworld experience. with ‘1 minute to go before the plainly further than that away entrance lobby of the luxurious and splendid hilton heathrow’ I’m beginning to lose confidence and the will to live, but as I round the next corner, I see the portal to the otherworld and I pass through into an ecstatic reception from the queen sized gods of bedroomland. well, I get to the car park anyway, and it’s raining, but hey, there’s the lobby, and what a fine lobby it is…

checking in is painless and dutch and I’m soon off to room 217 to unload, unwind and work out where dinner is. get in the room, dump the stuff, take off a couple of layers of day-old clothes and hey, let’s check out the view. hang on. this is looking into the hotel, not out. I can see the restaurant, the bar and the huge atruim in the middle of the huge square hotel. there’s loads of people down there. and they’re all looking up here. at a fat guy with no shirt on picking fluff out of his navel and doing a huge belly-out yawn. this is a mirror right? I mean, a one-way mirror. I can see them, but they can’t see me. I mean, it would be stupid to have hotel rooms on the 2nd floor looking out onto the atrium and everything where everybody out there can see back in while you’re getting undressed and checking out the tv. don’t panic. no sudden movements. just gently sliiide to the back of the room and take a moment. right. so. there’s a cleaner next door, I saw her, so let’s ask her about the windows onto the world

excuse me. sorrie? excuse me. yissss? these windows, they’re just one way, right? I mean, I can see out, but they can’t see in, is that right? I’m sorree, I’mno to understand the windoors? never mind. so I crawl back acorss the floor of my room, peel my shirt of the bed and get dressed again before casually striding up to the window and pulling those curtains across like it’s something I do every day. it turns out, when I’m down in the bar, that you can see directly in to the rooms, which is why the business rooms are on the fifth floor, so you can look down on everybody with just your boxers on and nobody ever needs to know. I spent some time talking to a student on his way back to the Netherlands who wanted to be an IT journalist when he leaves home and travel around the world like I do. except I’m only going to Colorado, I told him and he’d already spent half his life in africa helping staving children with his parent’s charity work, so I wasn’t really much of a role model, but the fact that he was even talking to me was a novelty, so I milked it as much as I could and got him to pay for my drinks with the british airways payout he’d been given for them not having a connecting flight for him. genius.

tomorrow it’s 9 and a half hours to denver, so I’m going to watch match of the day now with the curtains open and write messages on the window backwards with melted chocolate.

a medley of sausage

January 18, 2006

go on, its got a raspberry jus and a sugar snap pretzel heart-shaped toothrot stuck in it. what? what do you mean its too loose? what does that mean? right then, I’m off to play liminous indoor golf on my own in an empty movie theatre while rachel sorts me out with lightly kilned golden and a couple of chap sticks. after that we can pile in the space shuttle and watch the series premiere of Flatiron housewives left on 36 while I get heated from underneath and press all the buttons at the same time so chris gets ejected out the tailgate and into the path of the hummer, which is careening around the cark park, looking for a kerb to mount except all the kerbs here are tiny like those steps they make you climb to get to the lobby which are there just to get me out of breath again.

anyway, after debating lossless compression and dlink cables for about 17 hours we all squeezed into the elevator with a short fat bloke from Texas who smelled of donkeys and had an unnerving spatula protruding from his hipsters until some of us spewed out onto the sticky 4th floor carpet and the rest of us stayed for another jager and had a party on the fire escape with an escaped baboon and a bus load of guides. after that the lid came off and I had to clean the carpet with my toothbrush and it was at that point I realized I’d forgotten to pack the adaptor for my adaptor which means by friday I’ll look like an upsidedown man with the wrong head.

you love it

just having a quick shiraz

December 21, 2005

I mean, I thought it would likely be just me and theee flapping about nepal and the 60s but in the end it was a couple of hours surrounded by great and good and miss roberts and miss wood although I never actually broke away from my diatribe about the expidiency of home improvement and whether the front room and the back room are offset and so only one on each side is actually over the back passage because the architect thinks they’re different sizes which might explain the dogs but the walls between are not the walls within and so its still an apneoa to us. I really should have made an introduction but for the haze of marlboro lights in lieu of silk cut which means I have to hang my clothes outside that I’m supposed to be wearing tomorrow from yesterday whereas today it all up in the air because alice is booked and the city is full so I’m guessing that the afternoon will be tanking and the evening will be baking but tonight will be mardling.

tomorrow its mushroom a la crondall and so I’m keeping an open neck

take those elephant ears out

December 20, 2005

its just a tidy up job really as we just don’t have time to get to it and frankly we don’t have any idea what we’re doing when we get there. that’s why we lopped off all the good stuff in a fit of pique and left behind those horrible scrawny things that we want you to sort out. right, so take that down to there, take those out completely, get rid of that, do whatever you want to there, and take those elephant ears out and stick those dead rabbits in and we’ll see if it flies. in the meantime, I’ll be drawing the blinds and listening out for falling bricks and lime mortar as you rip the creepers from our frontage and say hello to the neighbours from the roof.

as the guttering collapses and swings across the office window, small and previously thought extinct animals drop to the flagstone and splatter across the lawn, while a barrage of tits careen into the chimney stack as their portakabin flies across the wall into the path of a nissan micra. from the undergrowth, an army of lemmings appears and runs to M&Ms where they throw themselves into the freezer blades, as a bearded ecology student reaches for a ginsters and a chocolate milk. elsewhere, a tortoise from 1947 wakes up in the shrubbery just in time to be clattered by a stanley that’s taking out the stumps. having sought sanctuary in the hutch, next door’s dog is simpering away like a mule as it witnesses the carnage from between the cracks in a tarpaulin.

6 hours of this at 12 quid an hour and then its off to cambridge to tend to the folk festival. I can see your house from here.

you don’t need this disease

December 19, 2005

everything has reached critical mass in the upstairs department and the screws are lying in the trough. just one hanging on the wall and the oversized square one languishing around my feet as I try and wheelie over the double-sided christmas cards to where the telecaster is gathering dust by the city hall and the roger mcgough parcels. I expect that if we ever get to open the white one then the teeny bits inside will flagrantly implode like the bad tangerines in the fireplace, where a half-eaten pie has finally seen the light. If I had a car I’d drive over to the beer garden and gently scrape the key down the black slk while mrs horse is dumping the gravy into the orange monster.

gonna go to jeremy’s tomorrow night and then we’re off to the playhouse where andrew will laugh like a well-travelled hyena for 2 hours and the massed middle classes will trip over the contradiction of charity and chavity but ah well, it’s christmas, so we can have a sensibility day off. as long as he doesn’t do that one with the girl from yarmouth too often. after that, crondall will suffer the consequences and I might even stay overnight like some edwardian coachman in the cellar, conversing with the staff, hoping helen mirren pops out of the kitchen with an egg whisk and a stern looking brow, wiping her hands on the corner of her apron and flashing a boot.

but for now, it’s the lamb lies down on broadway and a small matter of business requirements before I get the scenic down anglian autos to be told that negative tread on the radials is actually illegal and you can’t even go to tescos without stumping up 200 big ones for 4 cross-plys or something that sound like I should actually get it from homebase and be making those shelves in the office with it. I’ll probably just nip to the city and hang about a bit.

swans are evil

December 16, 2005

ce n’est pas a trifle, but they look at you like you stood in their custard and then about 20 of them gather around your duffers and spit venomous bile at your frontage, as if you’re about as welcome as an extended license at the black horse, speaking of which, they have that look as well, which spakes of buckets of affrontary

as vvt says, its all of them

all wrapped up the same

December 14, 2005

drumming fingers on the desk like a deranged ape until I get the message back from the castle that everything is ok with the contact sheets and we can go ahead with the industrial scale printing operations and then get the scissors out and pluck out each little face in a 3:2 aspect ratio and squash them onto some 1000 gsm from the dodgy stationers on dereham road where nobody ever goes and then a few sigs later and we’re all off to the post office at earlham house, fighting through the tissues and pensions and switch cards until its all done for another year and next year we’ll start doing it earlier like we said we would last year and the year before that and the year before that and the year before that when we first had the idea but we had to do it at work where the printers never worked anyway and you had to wait until midnight and nobody else was around before you found the single colour printer in south east england with colour ink in and then even the cleaners were looking at you funny so you pretended it was a presentation with joke slides in which you used to do when clip art faces had no features and nobody cared what you said anyway like they still don’t but now you’ve got your own printer but you’re still doing it for somebody else when you should be poking through house of fraser getting everything you should have got last weekend when it was all about dancing instead but don’t worry because deborah hasn’t even started yet and the butcher has already sold out like a reverent al green andalucia red yellow red yellow etc.

I guess they’re in a meeting about storage heaters or something.

index schmindex

December 13, 2005

so that means you have a list of things that you can do something with like we can take it and then we have to put it through the rules that make it come out the other end as something else. or its actually just a catalogue of things that we can use to build other lists of things that we can use to just describe what we’ve got and then work out what we do with it. but really its a database of mutiple indexes that just describe everything that’s out there which mean we can query it in multiple ways to generate results that are relevant across different experiences. but perhaps we don’t have to do anyting with it, but we don’t know that yet because we don’t know what’s in it because we can’t build it because we don’t know what’s out there because we don’t know what the user experience is and that might be redundant because its about the content but we don’t actually need to do any localization because that’s a different kind of index. right?

well that’s the kind of question we need to be looking at and we know that there are inconsistencies and anomolies but we don’t know what they are because we don’t know where they are even though we know what they are there because I think we own the strategy on that and so of course its on our roadmap I just don’t have the roadmap right now, it’s in the index.

neat neat neat

December 8, 2005

this is more like it. this place is like a grimy warehouse that’s been converted into a grimy venue full of 40 year old ex-punks and students. that’s because its a grimy warehouse that’s been converted into a grimy venue full of 40 year old ex-punks and students. the stage is just there, the bar is just there, and the air is just, well, its no longer air, its just a carcenagenic haze of camel lights and old holborn through which you can learn to swim to the toilets, where you can actually swim around on the floor should you choose to. this is much better than the loathesome LCR where you can get about 4 times as many people crammed in but 5 times as many of you can’t even see the stage because you’re stuck in a big hair diagonal that stretches right back to the sandwich of floor and 6 foot ceiling in front of the bar.

I should have been here last week, but of course it got cancelled at the last minute like mr doherty and our friends from finland so once again the curse of me was upon me and I’d washed my hands of the whole concept of a stiff revival evening. in the end though, the weirdos just stayed at home and I walked into the back end of someone must have nailed us together which transformed via the epic local to the stiff supergroup rendition of I’d go the whole wide world, with sensible, wreckless and lovich all on the tiny stage screaming until they were blue in the face, which lene lovich was to start with anyway, but she does scream well.

I wasn’t even sure that it was that time, as I’d just slipped another stella in and was getting comfortable, scanning around in the dark to see who I could spot from 25 years ago, when all this used to be warehouses, when the lights go out and sensible stumbles back on stage saying something about being the last night of the tour and being drunk and then they launched into 3 songs that must have been from a recent album or something because I had no clue what they were and I was thinking about slipping out the fire escape and back home to catch the end of the champions league, when they decided it was about time to whack out noise noise noise at which point I decided to stay forever and they decided to plunder the hit collection, building up to a mad grin straight through what should have been an encore to a idiotic new rose and then the light came on and I hadn’t drank my stella at all.

altogether now, “we say noise is for heroes, leave the music for zeroes, noise noise noise is for heroes, oh yeah…”

Things what I writ