This is not a Christmas Blog...

Slash, my vicious editor and erstwhile business associate frequently accuses me of aiming my ire at obvious targets – like bankers. With this in mind I will be ignoring the most obvious target you could think of at this time of year: Christmas. This blog is a Christmas free zone.

I am most certainly not going to rattle on about foul smelling sprouts and even more putrid aunties who litter sitting rooms across the country following their temporary release from care homes where they usually pass away the afternoons testing manufacturers claims that the upholstery is urine resistant.

It’s why I’m not going to mention the strain put on the national grid by attack dog owning, tattooed, never had a job in their lives but its not their fault, chain smoking skinheads called Jake, who decide that the best way to teach little Jaketta about the nativity is to plonk a herd of illuminated reindeer in the front gardens of their council houses and hammer a Father Christmas with a flashing nose under every window.

I won’t bother to mention the false bonhomie that is cringingly offered by anyone reliant on tips to supplement their income and I most certainly won’t be getting on my high horse about being fed a diet of American films that are awash with ‘meaning of life’ metaphors and always end with some washed up American loner, who was an alcoholic divorcee for the first 20 minutes of the film, sobering up sufficiently long enough to save humanity and re-marry his wife.

I won’t mention this country’s obsession with a white Christmas or the fact that if it does snow all of our TV news bulletins will come from a gritting shed in Chelmsford, flooded with councillors all proclaiming their readiness to deal with a prolonged and sustained deluge, only to discover, after the first dusting, that it’s the wrong kind of snow for the grit they ordered.

And, finally, I will utter nothing at all about the many myriad of religious factions who pile out of the woodwork at this time of year to remind us how bad we are, despite most of them touching up young boys for the last 100 years.

Nope, no more soft targets for me, I definitely won’t be talking about Christmas…

How very inconvenient

Larson, the cartoonist, was a genius and an American – a very rare combination indeed. He was able to encapsulate frustration into a one liner and a sketch. My particular favourite was a picture of a shop interior in which all of the shelves had been placed just below the ceiling. The caption read: ‘Inconvenience Store.’

You might think that this is simply the whimsy of a fertile imagination but his cartoons are borne out of real life. I come across this sort of stuff all the time. For example, on Saturday I encountered an ‘Inconvenient Convenience’ at Farnborough Football Club.

The urinals under the main stand are high enough up the wall to trouble Meadowlark Lemon. For anyone under 7 feet the only feasible way to avoid a puddle and an embarrassing tie die stain around the crutch is to stand a yard away and ‘arc.’ This option requires a steady hand, stomach muscles and a well-timed sprint towards the urinal prior to the shake. Inevitably this set of skills are only in the domain of the under 40s. Anyone beyond that age is acutely aware that nothing dribbles uphill.

Last Friday, whilst travelling to Bristol, I also encountered the most ‘Inconvenient Parking Meter.’ I was planning to meet a colleague at Chievely Services leave my car there and drive down with him. The new thing in parking is buying your ticket by telephone. The sign informed me it was for my convenience, as I would no longer need to rout around for change – a dubious benefit as the cost for parking was a crispy tenner.

To take advantage of this convenience I had to register as a customer. The sign informed me of the benefits – if I ever parked in one of the management’s parking spaces again I wouldn’t have to do much. Obviously, to enjoy such a worthy benefit I’d need to register my car too – that way if I ever parked the same car in one of their parking spaces ever again I’d save loads of time. Clearly, taking my debit card details was a pre-requisite, as it would also save me considerable time should I ever park the same car in the one of their parking spaces ever again.

As the other option to giving them my debit card details, car registration number and registering was parking on the hard shoulder of the M4 I opted for the convenience.

I then set about the registration process – a system based on hitting the right key, in the right order and listening to a voice recorded over the top of a 7 year old practising the violin regurgitating my selection back to me. Not too difficult for numbers but quite a task when you combine numbers and letters. Take a look at your telephone keypad. Under most of the numbers are 3 or 4 letter clusters. So to simply input the letter V of my registration number for example, I had to input the number 8 – the violin voice then asked me to confirm I had selected the number 8. 1 for yes, 2 for no, 3 for repeat the options. I selected 1. It then suggested I might like to pick 1 for T 2 for U 3 for V or 4 to repeat the options. I selected 3 for V. The violin asked me to confirm my selection - 1 for yes, 2 for no, 3 for repeat the options. I selected 1.

Bored yet?

Imagine the fun I had with the debit card details. Then disaster. I pressed the wrong key but confirmed it was the right key. I put this down to repetitive the strain injury that to this day has left me with an index finger set to permanent point mode. I had to ring off and start the whole process over again.

By now I was drawing a crowd. People get so inquisitive when they see someone circling a car like a punch-drunk boxer and repeatedly calling the phone cupped in their hand a bastard.

30 minutes and two text message confirmations later, feeling light-headed and now 30 minutes late for my meeting I set off.

The moral of this story is: never trust anything or anyone that promises you convenience because it invariably mean theirs, not your...

What a load of bankers...

Forgive me blogees for I have sinned. It has been nearly a month since my last blog-fessional.

I can’t point to a particular excuse, only that life keeps getting in the way. Or to be more accurate, my new business venture www.wedothewords.com (please go visit – lovely website). By some strange quirk of fate it has been attracting customers. The business isn’t just me, there is an old chum from a previous career involved and Slash the editor. My old chum brings savoir-faire to the adventure and Slash brings brevity. I bring the biscuits (Rich Tea obviously – the SAS of dunking biscuits).

New business ventures are predictably unpredictable. But there are two things you can always be sure of: expenditure (of time, effort and money) confidently strides out over the horizon whilst income rolls around behind you kicking and screaming like a truculent child.

I’ve been involved in quite a few new ventures over the years some successful, some not so. But, the common denominator in all of them is that I always played with other people’s money. This is something I have in common with the banks.

When I was young and looking for my first bank loan to buy an Opel Manta the first stop after the application was the bank manager. He wanted to size me up and try to understand why a 19 year old would need a ‘sports car’. He offered me the loan, but only on the proviso that I buy a Ford Fiesta or Escort. Those were the conditions of the advance.

These days, of course, things are different. I wouldn’t get to see the bank manager, because there isn’t one. But, the Indian call centre disguised as my personal banker would, until recently, have suggested a Ferrari.

They wouldn’t need to worry about my defaulting because at the end of the day banks can’t go bust – because you and I guarantee all their loans. It’s our money the Government are using to prop them up.

This is an interesting concept. Lets think about it for a minute. Everything I earn I put in a bank. The bank uses my money to lend to people and businesses. It also borrows against my money so it can lend even more money. It then sells the future interest repayments of my money to other banks or takes out a mortgage on my money to lend even more money.

Anyone still with me?

My money is now so far away from where it started that I have lost interest and the bank have lost track. But no matter because should someone in the long chain of lending not pay up the Government will step in and make good the loans. With my money. Genius.

But banks are even cleverer than that. They have taken all of my money and refused to lend it to anyone. In this way they can keep my money to pay bonuses.

Yesterday I read in the paper that the man the Government put in charge of the Quango responsible for looking after my money in the banking system stated, and I’m quoting almost verbatim here, ‘… if we take away bankers bonuses or defer them as shares to be vested over some years we are in danger of losing all the talent in the banking sector as they move elsewhere to achieve their remuneration expectations…’

Two things: Who are these talented bankers? Are they the ones who purchased securitised loans riddled with toxic debt? Is it the bankers who thought lending money to the long term unemployed in the Mississippi Delta represented a good lending risk? Or is it the ones that apologised for their mismanagement of banks to the Treasury Select Committee last year before walking off into the sunset with multi-million pound pension pots?

One thing's for sure - it's not the man who told me to buy a sensible Fiesta...

And anyway, where would all this talent move to – I imagine banks are crying out for bankers who don't understand what they are selling?

Naturally I have a solution. It involves snipers. I can’t go into too much detail here, blogs have ears and all that…

Bugger, I'm ranting again...

Punchlines

I’ve long believed life is one long joke punctuated with punchlines. Yesterday they hit me like the machine gun delivery of Max Millar. Punchline number 1: British Rail (or whatever they call themselves these days) suggested I might like to relieve myself of ½ of £100 if I wanted to get to Stevenage by 11am, thus snaring the last train of the rush hour from Farnborough (which, incidentally leaves 1 minute before the end of rush hour).

Punchline number 2: the train was so crowded I had to sit in the corridor and look longingly at a row of luxuriant, unoccupied seats, in First Class.

Punchline number 3: I found myself apologising to a young French girl on the Northern line for forcing my rear end onto her open palm and not removing it for 3 stops. The only alternative to her unwanted feel up would have been to thrust my crutch into the hips of a large black man who was muttering to himself and sweaty profusely onto my suit. He carried the look of a man with a freshly prodded wasps nest behind his eyes.

All these punchlines but I wasn’t laughing - ½ of 100 quid? My first wage packet was for less than half of that and it had to last me all week.

Stevenage is an interesting place if you’re the sort of person who likes collecting and cataloguing toenail clippings. It doesn’t help that the railway journey to it starts at Kings Cross, and believe me if a King visited he would be cross. What a shit hole. It’s easily the worst mainline station in London. No wait, why stop at London. This time last year I was travelling across Europe & Asia on my way to Saigon. Kings Cross makes the Vietnamese/Chinese border-crossing look like Westminster Abbey.

All this talk of trains reminds me why I started this Blog in the first place – my book. We’ll you’ll be pleased to know I still haven’t found a publisher stupid enough to print it. No matter, as it’s the anniversary of the trip I’m offering you another excerpt. I am travelling from Beijing to Hanoi, heading south on a Chinese train. The Vietnamese border is most of the day away and I have found a new best friend called Tie and his sister Twee, who are both lucky enough to be sharing my cabin.

Day 15

… I am woken by a tinny electronic voice wishing me a lovely journey. It’s the automated announcer at Changsha train station. This disemboweled Chinese lady, with an American twang that would pass mustard in Mississippi, goes on to say how nice it would be to see me again. Its six o'clock, an hour normally filled with surreal dreams involving cats with zipped pockets and giant orchids pulling planes out of the sky. Nevertheless I'm keen to rise and see what the world is like outside. Careful not to disturb my slumbering sharers I grab my wash bag and step out into the corridor. It’s my first real look at the train interior and I discover it’s rather shabby. The clean contours of the train that took me to Beijing have been replaced with British Rail rolling stock circa 1970. The red carpet running along the centre of the corridor bares testament to an army of shuffling passengers’ eager to find the bathroom. In places it curls up like stale bread. Any self respecting Health and Safety Officer would declare the whole corridor a trip hazard. The cream walls are grubby and the light outside show more than a few imprints of outstretched palms on the windows. Outside rice has replaced the corn of the north, taking up every available inch of land. Paddies buttress the track, steam rising as the warming sun melts condensation trickling down the fronds of heavily leafed trees. It’s hard to tell whether the rice paddies have followed the contours of the land or shaped them. Even at this early hour I see farmers hunched over, up to their knees in paddy water, or leading reluctant water buffalo, tugging aggressively at ropes attached to the beasts nostrils. Snorts of breath are expelled with force and forms small clouds floating upwards to an evaporating death.

The bathroom door is locked so I stand a while and take it all in. The vista is much less wealthier than the north. The villages and towns we pass are well established, the buildings older, and there is an absence of suburbs. All the activity is in the center. English signage is practically non-existent. Gigantic spring onions and leaks compete for space with washing flapping gently on balconies. I notice that most have a birdcage hanging from a hook and I can just make out small finch like birds hopping from perch to perch. When we leave the towns the water buffalo count is significantly higher than cars. What is the delay in the bathroom: don't they know there's a queue out here?

While I wait, I consider this part of my journey. Beijing to Hanoi is about 1700 miles as the crow flies, but I know little about the regions I'll be passing through. And I'm on my own from here. No travel agent assisted itinerary and no being met at the station. When I booked my Hanoi accommodation from the UK I asked them about meeting me at the station. They would be pleased to, they said, for more than the cost of the room. I decided I'd get my own taxi. How hard can it be? Thinking about it, all I really know about this part of my train journey is that I am scheduled to arrive in Hanoi tomorrow morning.

I notice a five star general, who an Asian would recognize as a carriage attendant, walking towards me and I take the opportunity to ask about the bathroom. He looks at me confused: maybe he’s struggling with my English. I up the volume, that should help. ‘BATHROOM…’ he holds up his hand to stop me and opens the door next to the bathroom. It’s the bathroom. I've been standing outside the toilet. This bathroom is palatial in comparison to the Russian offering. Three shining aluminum sinks in a row and plenty of running water. I have a choice of cold or instant frostbite. Selecting cold I make short work of stripping down to my under-crackers and set to work. Two minutes later the door flies open and a woman so old she may have been the original Eve shuffles in. She is stooped like an upturned hockey stick, but not quite as broad. She clocks me and her eyes widen in the same way they might if she’d walked off a cliff unexpectedly. She retreats in what I suspect is, the fasted backwards shuffle ever recorded. I hope I haven't offended her because you just don't know what you’re dealing with in this part of the world. Don't forget people like her fought off the mighty Americans armed with only a hairpin, three boiled sweets and inscrutable guile.

On the way back to my cabin I'm nearly trampled by a platoon of five star generals. In perfect formation, eyes ahead, backs straight, they march past at the double, in metronymic unison. I only just manage to stop myself saluting, and dip back into the cabin before I’m trampled. Still no sign of the Chinaman, dirty little stop out, but my new friends seem to be stirring, albeit, slowly.

Soon I hear the sales call of the trolley girl. I discovered this little gem last night. Basically the buffet car doesn't function like the one traveling down to Beijing. On this train they package up whatever they're cooking and bring it around on trolleys. I have no idea what's in her sales spiel, or indeed what's in her trolley but I stop her anyway. The trolley is essentially an oven on wheels, with a storage area on top that houses the condiments, soy sauce, chilli powder, sugar and so on. The front of the trolley displays the content and price. So I know it’s going to cost me five Yuan (about 40p), I just don't know what it is. The trolley lady looks about fifteen and her hair is rolled into a bun, which is partially covered with a small white hat. She's wearing a green tabard and tries, without success, to avoid eye contact with me. I point to the sort of plastic box you get burgers in. She opens it to avoid any translation issues and I'm relieved to find its full of noodles nestled in like a pit of blanched vipers. I stick a thumb up and she smiles a little pointing to the chili sauce. I offer my thumb again and her eyebrows knit together. Obviously she was expecting thumbs down. Nevertheless she ladles on a healthy dollop. I grin, trying to look like I always have half a pint of chili on my breakfast. Finally she spoons on a steamy beef broth with tofu and spring onion. Et voila - breakfast.

My sharers linger in their beds as I work my way through it, the boy eyeing me carefully. Which is how he comes to notice I've spilled some on my bed, and offers me some tissues to mop it up. I do my best but it leaves a brown stain on the sheets and now looks like I've shit the bed. I put my flannel over it so as not to upset his sister.

'What food is this?' he asks.

'Fang,' I reply, offering the only word the waitress had said. For all I know she could have been calling me a shit and I’ve told Tie I’m eating shit.

'Chinese food?'

I give this due consideration. Let me think, I'm on a Chinese train, in China, being served by a Chinese waitress.

'I think it might be,' I say.

'Oh, Chinese food no good, ' he says waking his sister. They tuck into a couple of cold McDonald's apples pies.

Punchline number 4: why can’t our trains be like this?

Cordonski Bleuski

My first encounter with the restaurant car on the Trans-Manchurian Express... By way of explanation (and you might need it) when I refer to the toilet situation, you should know that all of it empties directly onto the track...

... I don’t have far to travel, as the restaurant car is the next carriage down from ours. First impressions are that it has promise. To my right there is a small bar area, then on either side of the aisle, four cubicles that can seat four diners each. Pink curtains are draped at each window, tied back with lace ties, turning the rectangular picture windows into triangles. There is a large no smoking sign under which two Russians are smoking like steam trains. I miss the entrance to the galley on the way in but I catch its smell. It’s a sort of musty cabbage, not unlike an old peoples’ home at dinnertime.

The waiter pops up from behind the bar. He looks like Charles Bronson from the Death Wish films, except his features aren’t symmetrical. Someone jogged God’s elbow in the design phase. The left side is out of kilter with the right. He’s wearing a black suit, black shirt buttoned to the collar, and a pair of blue furry slippers. It’s the sort of garb I imagine Johnny Cash’s mother might have worn. When he smiles it makes him look ill and me feel ill.

‘Menu An - glee skee?’ I say with a phrase learned this very morning from the back of my guidebook.

‘Da - breakfast?’ he says. I detect mild incredulity.

‘OK.’

‘Eggs, cheese, butter?’

This seems an odd combination, and I’m not sure if he’s offering me breakfast or a recipe.

‘No cheese, please.’

‘No cheese?’ He says this like I’ve just informed him Putin is a lesbian, but nevertheless shuffles off, presumably to meter out some vigilante justice on the chef.

I look out of the window: it’s my first proper look at Siberia. While I slept I missed about 300 miles of it, but I’m not worried, there is still another 4400 miles to go before I reach its eastern border with China, and yet another 900 miles before I jump off in Beijing. This thought catches my imagination.

As I mentioned before, Moscow to Beijing covers 5623 miles of track. Not that I believe it. Who decides where to start measuring in Moscow, and where to stop in Beijing? Have you ever seen, in any city in the world, a marker post heralding it as the centre of the city? The mileage signs showing distance to London used to be marked out from Charing Cross. So Charing Cross was consider the central measurement point for London. Then they moved it to nearer Whitehall, but I bet they never changed all the signs.

I start to think of more reliable ways to measure my progress. What about books? I have four books with me so Moscow to Beijing could be measured as four books long. The benefit of this measuring system is that I can adjust my reading to meet my estimated arrival time. For example, I’ve already started a Bill Bryson book that I know I will read slower than a fast-paced thriller. A little bit of careful planning in this respect and reckon I’m onto a winner. I like this idea and decide it’s the only form of measurement flexible enough, and I decide to adopt it throughout my trip.

However I’m not sure it adequately solves the time issue. I’ll be passing through 7 time zones. Keeping track of this is made more complex by the train insisting on retaining Moscow time throughout the journey. This means just before I get off the train at Beijing it’ll be 2am in the corridor. Immediately I step onto the platform it’ll be 9am. That’s one small step for me, and one giant leap for confusion.

But a solution comes to me. What if I wear seven watches? Set at hourly differences I could use the watch nearest my elbow from today and as I get nearer to Beijing I can progressively work down my arm, until I am using the watch on my wrist. All I need to put this plan into action is another six watches…

We passed Nizhny Novgorad, better known as Gorky very early this morning and the next town of any significance is Vyata, which, not that long ago its citizens called Kirov. Despite my internal machinations I’m becoming quite blasé about the distances which might be why my mind turns back to ablutions. The regimented forest decked out in its early autumnal uniform marches past me at pace outside my window, but fails to deflect me from this thought.

What’s vexing me is this. There are eighteen people staying in my carriage, two Provodniks and one Provodnitsa. That adds up to twenty one arses. Times that by the eighteen carriages and you get 378 rear-ends when the train is full. And that doesn’t include the train drivers, who supply a pair of buttocks each on strict rotation. Stick with me here. Assume, on average, people do their business four times on this journey, a fair average for a week I think. That adds up to an almighty 1512 dumps. OK, the toilets are shut just before, and just after stations, but that still leaves an awful lot of shit on the tracks. From the air it must look like someone’s trailed a thick brown felt tip from the back of the train.

I’m driven from my diversion by the untimely arrival of breakfast. Bronson coughs over it as he places it in front of me. He also places down some black bread that he doesn’t cough over.

‘Beer?’

It’s early but I look at the meal and think it might be a good idea.

‘Da.’ I say in fluent Russian.

The breakfast has been delivered in a sort of miniature frying pan without a handle. Its not immediately clear whether this is because the chef couldn’t transfer it to a plate, or if it’s his take on a breakfast classic. I rather think it’s the former. The contents looks like a large fried egg with a big knob of butter melting in the yellow yolk. The whole is specked with light brown droppings, which I think is ham. I dig in. I can’t tell you what the bottom half tastes like because it is impossible to peel away from it’s casing, but the top half tastes OK.

Despite Bronson handing me the bill as he collects the remains of my breakfast, I linger in the restaurant car drinking coffee, which is awful but improves with my clever remedy of sprinkling pepper in it. The Russian smokers left some time ago and nobody has replaced them. No one has even walked through. The chef came out of the kitchen once, which did nothing for my appetite. He looks like the reflection Don Estelle from it Ain’t Half Hot Mum might see in a Hall of Mirrors. He’s wearing baggy shorts and his legs, like the ends of his fingers, are the color of nicotine.

I’m expecting to see Janet up and about by the time I get back to my cabin but he’s in bed, asleep. Encouragingly, there are signs he may have had some breakfast as a large tin mug the size of a potty has appeared on the table together with some packets of plain brown biscuits. This can only mean one thing. He does wake up from time to time...

Parking

Regular blog-ees will know that I am occasionally prone to the odd rant.

Some consider ranting a futile exercise given that nothing ever really gets changed as the result of one. But, I would argue that these poor unenlightened souls are missing the point. Rants are the release valve on the steam engine that is everyday life. Letting fly at the iniquitous shit that’s thrown at us is remarkably cathartic. Ranting should be available on the NHS. And we all know the NHS needs a purpose.

The NHS used to be cutting edge. In 1962 they performed the world’s first kidney transplant. Two years later they replaced the first hip, a few years after, a heart. In the 1980s they successfully ripped out a heart, lung and liver in the same operation and replaced them with some others they had lying about.

When the NHS was in its pomp it was a sort of leading edge organ Swap Shop.

These days it concentrates on more mundane things… like Chlamydia (see previous blog), sex change operations for confused teenagers and fertility treatment so we can keep up population growth sufficiently high for our island to sink into the English Channel by 2020.

The truth is, as it gets older, the effectiveness of the NHS, like peoples’ health, is failing.

If you don’t believe me try parking near the lifts in a shopping centre car park. You won’t get within a mile. And I’ll tell you why: the exits are surrounded with acres of disabled parking bays. Row upon row of extra wide spaces.

And why are the bays extra wide? I’ll tell you. To accommodate the fat lardy arsed lumps struggling to get out of, or squeeze into, people carriers with back seats supporting tiers of baby seats full of snotty nosed urchins wearing only 1 shoe.

If these lumps are so disabled how do they drive? How do they manage to pro-create so efficiently? In reality they should be made to park a mile away from the lifts, then they might shed a few pounds on a shopping trip, rather than get to the cake shop more quickly.

When I was young there was only 1, maybe 2 disabled parking bays near shops. They were often empty for days. And, when you did see someone parked there, they looked proper ill. They often took an hour to get out of the car because of the shrapnel lodged in the section of their brain responsible for movement and co-ordination. They had knees that had been peppered with sniper bullets whilst fighting off the Bosch in the Ardennes. They needed to park nearer to the shops because they only had minutes to live.

These days you can qualify for a blue badge if you know someone who might be disabled one day.

Naturally I have a solution. Only give disabled badges to people who need a walking aid. OK, Ok, I know what you’re thinking – anyone can get hold of a pair of walking sticks.

Which is why I suggest building in booby traps to the base of all walking aids. Sensors will pick up the reliance of said walking aids by measuring a simple ratio: weight of the stick owner Vs pressure exerted onto the stick.

If the downward pressure is not sufficient it will prove that the owner is not sufficiently disabled to need sticks. This will detonate a small explosive charge of sufficient strength to remove their shins.

By using this method of control we will at least know that the next time they trundle to a halt in a disabled parking bay they will truly qualify for one…

Simples, as they say on that irritating advert.

Next week: How to solve the problem of excessive signage…

Chinese Tucker trials...

How about another section from my book? I had been tracking down a famous food market in Beijing without much success and then, by more luck than judgement I find it...

.... An hour later I arrive, via a narrow alley that doesn't exist on my guidebook map. Donghuamen market is actually a street of about seventy stalls. Each stall is covered in a red and white striped awning. Nothing unusual in that I hear you say. Well no. The interesting stuff is the produce underneath them, because this food market specializes in ingredients that westerners would normally bludgeon with the heal of a stout shoe.

The first stall I look at is typical. In fact, its pretty much repeated all the way along the row. There are a few things that are obvious. Scorpions piled next to mountains of ants. Skewered grasshoppers, deep fried frogs, although some of these have lost their original shape due to the cooking fat partially melting them. Other items look like the contents of an autopsy bucket and are, I suspect, the internal organs of larger species. I walk up for a closer inspection.

'You try this,' the stallholder says, offering me a worm impaled on a tooth pick. He's large and fat, not unlike the worm. I pull it off its spear with my teeth and bite. It's been deep fried, and to be honest, the overwhelming taste I get is garlic and ginger. I open my mouth to show him it's gone. He laughs a very high-pitched laugh, like he's been sucking helium.

'Ha, ha, ok, where you from?'

'England.'

'You have this in England?' He produces a small handful of ants in his podgy palm.

'Ants?' I say. 'We love them.' I scoop them off his hand and munch them down - easy. I notice, as does the stallholder that I'm starting to draw a crowd of extremely interested Chinese. It’s like having five million people to dinner but on the upside I'm getting fed for free.

My new best friend says something to the crowd and they all burst out laughing. He then offers me a water cockroach. I'm struck by the silence as I push it in. The texture is disgusting and the wings give way almost immediately. I then bite down into the body. If you want to know what it tastes like ask a teenager if you can chew on the cluster of whiteheads on his chin. However, I am conscious of the fact I am representing the UK now and manage to turn my gag into a gentle cough, which I follow up with a smile.

'Ha, Ha, England, you Chinese man!' He translates for the growing crowd and they clap. Honestly, they clap. I contemplate a bow, but I don't have time. He moves on to a jar of bile, from which he ladles a small spoonful into a plastic bowl. A hush falls over the crowd and his employees stop serving. Its so viscous I struggle to keep it on the spoon, so in the end I just upend the bowl and let it slide down. It's like blowing my nose backwards. The taste is hard to describe but here goes. Run three hundred miles in the same pair of pants. Cut out the crutch section. Soak that in paraffin and bury it in a dung heap until flies have eaten the dung. Retrieve the cloth and boil it in the putrefied remains of a dozen skunks. Add pepper to taste. It made it as far as my tonsils before it came back with the velocity of a discharging shotgun cartridge. The cockroach and scorpion followed it, but curiously not the worm or the ants. The crowd burst into spontaneous laughter.

'Ha, ha, not Chinese man!' my fat friend shouts and then repeats for the crowd.

He hands me over half a dozen dumplings, which I eye suspiciously.

'This you can eat England.'

Its pork, and delicious. He refuses my offer to pay and waves me off. The crowd I've pulled is sufficient reward and he and his employees sets about serving them, still laughing at my pathetically weak Western stomach.

if I'd been better prepared I could got revenge by force feeding them some of those £1 meals from Iceland...

The Eurovision Football Contest

Yesterday I found myself watching the draw for the Champions League. To say it was soporific would be a remarkable example of understatement. Essentially, the draw is unimportant because the seeding ensures that all the best teams avoid each other. For example, Arsenal are drawn with three football clubs, each of which would get you over 3 million points at Scrabble. Despite the international nature of Arsenal no one at the club has a clue where AZ Alkmaar play their football - and I doubt many of you do either. Barcelona is scheduled to play Rubin Kazan prompting most of the players to ask why they would be playing the Prime Minister of Israel. Chelsea has to pit their wits against the mighty Apoel FC, who I understand are champions of an Armish one legged hopping league established in an island 60 miles north east of the Faroe Islands in 1642. Apparently a 60 foot lugger packed to the gunnels with bearded blokes married to their sisters washed up on the beach and the first thing they did was put down some jumpers and have a kick about. It’s the only football team in the world staffed entirely by one family.

The contrivance of it all bought to mind the Eurovision Song Contest. At least when we had Terry Wogan we could jointly enjoy the mirth he created by pointing out Greece constantly give Turkey ‘nil point’ and all the Baltic states vote for Russia in case they cut the oil supplies off.

The trouble with both of these competitions is we pretty much know what the outcome will be.

But I’ve come up with an idea to shake it up a bit – why not inject some Eurovision into the Champions League. Confused? Don’t be, its really very simple. In the future, instead of the boring league systems from which we already know the winners lets put in a singing round and get Europe to vote on it. I’m still working out the fine detail but this is how I envisage it:

After each game, irrespective of the result, five players from each team have to knock out a song in the centre circle. Fans from around Europe then vote on the performance. The numbers of votes are then added to score. So, a typical scoreline of say, 1-0 might become, after the singing round, 10,000,001 – 11,000,643.

This will add some much needed unpredictability. Clubs will have to adapt by recruiting singers into the squad. Substitutions will turn very tactical, in that you might see Manchester City (if they ever get into a European competition), with 10 minutes to go, replace their entire midfield with Oasis.

This idea can easily be adapted for the World Cup too, perhaps by replacing penalty shoot-outs with a ‘sing off.’ In a twist I’d insist that each team has to perform music from their country. We’d never lose a penalty shoot out again. Who is Germany going to put up against The Arctic Monkeys? Kraftwerk? Please….

France wouldn’t win a thing either because all they’ve got is Edith Piaf and she sounds like a grandmother gurgling without her teeth in. Italy would be out of the running now that Pavarotti’s gone and Nana Mouskouri isn’t going to trouble anyone outside of Kos is she? I can’t see how we’d lose, although some of the smaller nations might sneak up on us. Don’t forget, the Irish have got Daniel O’Donnell.

Now I come to think of it, why not apply it to politics? Susan Boyle could dislodge Gordon Brown and bring in a new law forcing all women to grow moustaches.

The opportunities are endless. I really think I’m onto something here, but it won’t get anywhere. Why? Well, I don’t want to make a song and dance about it do I?...

Irritable or sleepy?

Obviously the most irritating thing about insomnia is that it happens at night. Although it beggars the question: can people who work night shifts get a daylight version of it?

That could be quite unsettling. How would we know they have insomnia? For all intents and purposes they will be awake in a world of people, who are, well, awake. The usual insomnia symptoms will simply be lost. Take irritability. Irritability is a constant companion of insomniacs, but then it is in most shop assistants. So, are we to assume everyone in JJB Sports is suffering from daylight insomnia?

It’s the sort of vexing question that plagues me. Especially when I can’t sleep. Not that I had any trouble dropping off to sleep. In fact you could stand me upside down in a tub of wasps and I’d still fall asleep. No, my trouble is that, occasionally, usually around 1.33am, my brain jams itself into the ‘on’ position and refuses to shut down.

Rather than lull me back to a healthy state of repose it opens up my life’s photo album and bores me to death with memories I never knew I had – like visits to my grandmother, the last of which must have been all of 40 years ago. My brain tabulates a scene that offers more questions than answers. Why is she wearing a tabard? Why can I remember her smell (musty cardigan) and not how she looked? Did she live alone or with my dad’s sister? Who is my dad’s sister, because I don’t remember him having one? And so it goes on.

When I studied creative writing my tutor suggested keeping a notebook by the bed for such occasions so that I might use the material in some of my work. I tried it a couple of times but by the time I’d clicked the pen and opened the book my thoughts had returned to more mundane things, like, what time is it? That’s the other thing about insomnia: once you stop lying there in the dark and attempt to get up the memories disappear, like smoke up a vent. It’s very irritating, which sort of brings me back to the beginning.

Lots of bustle outside my window now, the rushing hour will be in full swing soon, and I’ve just realised I’ve been awake all night.

Might go to JJB sports later for some communal grouchiness…

What's the time?

Here’s something to ponder: why do time management courses take so long? I attended one once that lasted 3 days. If they’d applied some of the techniques they were teaching me they could’ve fitted it into 2, probably 1 ½. But the bigger question is, why be trained in time management anyway?

The obsession with time is a British thing. It’s not the same in other countries. In Libya time is simply a concept: Libyans would consider the idea of managing it more fanciful than turning the Sahara into a giant egg timer. In Oman working hours are 7am until midday, 4 hours for lunch then 4pm until 6pm. In reality the 4 – 6 shift is merely used for socialising. It’s the Muslim State’s version of the cocktail hour.

They have no time, if you’ll excuse the pun, for time management in Asia either. Quite simply, if it’s daylight it’s work, if it’s dark it’s sleep. What’s the point in trying to manage that?

You might be forgiven for thinking that the laissez faire attitude towards time is a geographical thing. As soon as you step into France, and by varying degrees, it escalates the further east you travel. But, you’d be wrong. In fact, if you look in the opposite direction you’ll find a nation that think clocks are merely pieces of furniture – the Irish.

How do I know this? Well, lets look at my friend Nomis who, rather helpfully, married an Irish lady called Lynda so that I could use the event to highlight my point. After a whirlwind romance lasting 17 years they rather impetuously decided to get married last Sunday – naturally Lynda was 20 minutes late for the ceremony.

But, she was only 20 minutes late on the English side of the chapel. On the Irish side she was simply beautiful. So, while we were tutting and looking at our watches, they were smiling and clicking cameras.

In Lynda’s world, time has the same qualities as an elastic band. She famously displayed this elasticity at a dinner party I attended. On this occasion she arrived over an hour late. This story doesn’t, in itself, move the issue of her time management along much, until I tell you it was her own dinner party and she was never further than 50 metres from her seat at the head of the table.

Over the years Nomis has developed a Lynda proof time management system.

He’s taken to wearing 7 watches along his wrist, all set at different times. The one nearest his hand is set at the actual time and the one nearest his elbow runs four hours slower. The ones in between are set at various intervals that he adjusts depending on the situation. Unimportant times, such as when to meet him for lunch, for example, necessitates a wider range, than say, arrival at the wedding ceremony. As soon as she turns up he looks at the watch nearest her arrival time. In this way he is able to kid himself she is never late.

OK, this might not be an infallible system but it’s better than the time management courses I’ve been on…