Yum!

The song isn't half bad either.

The Dutch have arrived

There are around twenty aryan-looking people squashed around our dining room table, all yabbering at each other.

My mother woke me at the ungodly hour of 9:30 this morning, telling me she was off to the airport to meet the relatives. "There are 18 bread rolls out in the kitchen", she declared. "I want them all buttered and ready to be served when I get back. Be sure to heat up the two huge saucepans of soup as well. That'll take at least half an hour". "Haven't you realised by now," I returned, "that anytime before 1pm is not good for me".

"Tough titty. See you in an hour, and don't you dare go back to sleep".

God above, the things I have to deal with.

So things (and my mother along with them) are only going to get more frantic between now and Sunday.

As an aside, my father's broadband provider is really starting to do my head in. The most harmless of sites are blocked, being categorized as sex sites or occult sites (never heard of the latter rating in content filters before) and they can only be temporarily unblocked for upto 8 hours. It's not that big a deal, as since it was me that set up the connection, I know all the passwords for changing the settings, but it's more than a little irritating. The provider is gaelic.ie, set up in connection with the GAA of Ireland, and it's more than a little reflective of the values of its parent organisation. Newsflash, boys: youtube is not what anyone with half a brain would consider a sex site.

Ho ho ho

It's been a bit of a mixed bag.

Most of my family have come down with some illness or other in the last few days. We had Christmas dinner at my sister's this 25th, and in a particularly cruel irony, she herself was unable to taste it, having completely lost her sense of smell. I myself still had a bit of an earache on the day, but it's gone now. Yesterday was pretty good though, as I had rather a lot to drink last night and met loads of people who I hadn't seen since last Christmas and probably won't see until this time next year. I ended up at a house party, and got home at around 5am or something like that.

Some of the people I know don't have much of a sense of ceremony about going out at Christmas though, which is a bit annoying as when I come home, I'm generally raring to go. Or maybe it's the fact that every pub was packed to the rafters last night. Oh well...

My brother's wedding is on Sunday, and the dutch side of the family are all arriving at the airport tomorrow. My mother is catastrophising left, right and centre as she's still feeling a bit sick, and is worrying more than usual about getting better in time for the wedding. I can understand, but anytime I tell her to GO TO BED AND TAKE IT EASY she dismisses it, saying she has too much to do, and ignores any offers we make to do things for her. There's nothing like a couple of obstacles being thrown in my mother's path to send her into a full-blown panic, and she is not one to suffer in silence.

Because of the wedding, Christmas has taken a bit of a back seat this year for us. None of us bothered to try and surprise each other with regard to presents. I got my brother a CD and kept the receipt so he can change it if he wants. I asked for Armistead Maupin's Tales From the City, which I've heard good things about. My father has just given it to me. All three of the titles.

So roll on Sunday. Thanks be to God I don't have to do any speeches. Thank God.

At home again

I'm at home, since last Saturday, the 16th.

Little did I know that as I began my descent into Cork, events were taking place in my left eardrum that would lay the foundation for a very unpleasant couple of days ahead.

At the start of this week, a pain had appeared in my left ear. Attempts to disinfect with olive-oil-soaked cotton wool balls failed miserably, and a couple of days later, I was unable to sleep, such was my agony. I also found it very difficult to have conversations with people who were anywhere in the vicinity of my left side, or watch films on TV at night, such was the deafness that had taken hold in my left ear. I hauled myself off to the doctor, and he prescribed a five-day course of amoxycillin. He also recommended an over-the-counter lotion with a dropper that you use to put the liquid into your ear. I used this once, and shortly afterwards, the entire left side of my head felt like it was going to explode, so I'm not continuing with that one.

So that's it. Antibiotics over Christmas. Which means very little alcohol (I don't think alcohol is advised against when taking amoxycillin but there's NO WAY I'm running the risk of that pain making a reappearance. I'm only just about back to normal now).

In other news, my parents are starting to embrace the 21st century. I came home to see a widescreen LCD tv in the sitting room. There was also a broadband router AND DVD/VCR combi waiting to be setup. My parents can be quite clever about these things. They buy them just before Christmas, when they know I'm coming home, and then don't touch them until I'm in the door, knowing they can count on me to do it all.

But thank GOD. Mallow may still suck compared to Brighton, but it's a bit more bearable now.

That bear I was supposed to meet on Friday before I left Brighton texted and cancelled at the last minute, so an opportunity for hot gratuitous sex was lost to me. Perhaps in the new year...

The preparations for the wedding grind on. Like a lot of women in such a position, the bride-to-be has turned into a bit of a psychopath, and has already fallen out with, and subsequently replaced, the two bridesmaids that she had lined up. They had been friends for almost 20 years. That's enough of a catastrophe. Hopefully there won't be any more.

In other news, I've been helping my mother type up a list of dutch recipes given to us by our relatives across the pond. The relatives had tried translating the recipes using an online translation tool, but had come up with some truly hilarious results. Pigs Head stuffed with cheese had come up as (fnar fnar) Head Cheese, and my favourite, Water-based Gruel had come up as 'Water Horror'. An interesting name for a horror film, that one would be. Anyway, it's done now, so my brother the chef will be getting a bound book of traditional dutch recipes as one of his wedding presents. He'd better apprecitate it.

Now I have to go and help my mother polish silver.

(P.S. I know I've been getting really bad at regular updates. I promise I'll try and keep you all scintillated over Christmas. Ta ra)

The Cock

I haven't written about any trysts with men for some time now, mostly because at the time I couldn't be bothered. But then I thought, well, half the reason I started this blog was to record them. So. An update.

It's either feast or famine when it has come to the men in my life lately, but I appear to be in the middle of a feast at the moment. It's about time.

Daffy hasn't been on the scene for a while now. It's a shame. As much as I know he's not boyfriend material, having one of his own already, he's still fun to be around. Oh well, maybe I'll see him around.

There was that time recently where I went out with Dan and June to celebrate the anniversary of their first date. Once that finished, I headed into the Bulldog and netted myself a man. As we headed back to his, he announced that he had a boyfriend. "Where is he?" asketh I. "In prison" replied the object of my desires. "Cripes" said I, "what for?". "I don't really want to talk about it", respondeth he.

We had much fun, but I hope it wasn't GBH or murder his boyfriend was in for, otherwise I may have to flee the country when he gets out.

On sunday night, I arranged to rendez-vous with a smouldering polar bear in the Star Inn. I thought we'd have time to go back to his after our drink, but he had to move on and meet other friends, though I might be able to pencil him in before I head back to Ireland on Saturday.

After he'd left, reinforcements were summoned, and I ended up staying for a few more. The Star has now set up its own playroom. As most of the crowd there weren't taking advantage of the opportunity, I waited until a burly person I've had my eye on went in there, and I followed him in. Some fun was had.

After that, I went to the Bulldog, and after a while, I made eye contact (and then mouth contact very quickly after that) with a hot skin bear. Locked in a passionate embrace, we took turns to pin each other against the wall. We're meeting at mine on Friday after lectures at about 3pm. I'm looking forward to it, and he's well-endowed, apart from anything else. Of course, as luck would have it, he's in a relationship, albeit an open one. Oh well...

Then there's Nuclear Physics Bear, who I'm still in touch with. We've been sending each other filthy texts lately, and now that I've got a camera phone, saucy pictures as well. One of them is currently being used as wallpaper on my phone. He hasn't been back to Brighton since Pride this summer, but there might be some potential there. He's single, at least.

Dying

I went out to an event organised by one of my classmates last night. It was for the kickboxing club, but the way it worked out, half my class was there.

A special arrangement had been made with the bar that they would only charge £1 for certain drinks (bottles of Fosters and vodka/cokes). By the end of the night we were all hammered (especially me. Surprise!) and cutting a serious rug on the dancefloor.

Unfortunately what goes up must come down, and now I am sitting at work with my head in my hands.

Please kill me...

Nnnnnggghhh!

Disaster, and shoddy landlords, seem to follow me at every turn.

It has been about two months now since we moved into our house in Staplefield Drive, near the university. After ironing out a few discrepancies, everything between me and the others in the house is now going fine. The house itself is not.

We found out not long after moving in that the previous tenants had left quite the trail of destruction after them. One of them was a drug dealer, and once the special branch of the police had gotten wind of this, they raided the house, SWAT team style. Everyone who had happened to be there at that time found themselves being forced face-down onto the floor and their hands cuffed behind their backs. It appears that none of the others in the house knew about their rogue housemate's activities and by the time the team descended, he was gone.

One thing we noticed in the aftermath of all of this was that there was a raft of unpaid bills left behind these people. One would expect a decent landlord worth his salt to have all that sorted before we moved in, but no. That was left to us. Sorting out the £300 gas bill wasn't too much of a problem, relatively speaking, although it still took a while. The landlord gave a meter reading to one of the housemates, and I (eventually, as I didn't know he had it) got it off him. So now that's done. The electricity has turned out to be a different kettle of fish entirely.

The electricity is managed by a pre-payment meter, which basically means you top it up in advance of using it, like using a pay-as-you-go mobile phone. We found, when we moved in, that once we topped up the meter, it was counting down our credit a lot quicker than it should have been. The landlord and his lackey fobbed us off, telling us that we must have been using high-drain appliances a lot, but we knew this was bullshit. A lot of phonecalls later, and I found out that the meter was incorrectly programmed (to recover debt from the last tenants, I think) and it was indeed deducting too much from us. More phonecalls to the suppliers later, and I was given a list of instructions on how to correct this. Basically, I've been sent a new electronic key in the post. I have to use this key in the same shop the next three times I top up the meter. A bit convoluted, I think you'll agree, but I went along with it.

This afternoon, I went along to the grocery store to put money on the key, and then went home and stuck this key into the meter to transfer credit to it. The meter responded by displaying a single message.

'No'.

I put in the old key we had been using all along. 'No'.

There is only 44p left in the meter, which should see us into the small hours of the morning, before our electricity is cut off, and I currently have no way of increasing it. I'm going to ring the supplier's emergency helpline in a minute...

Part 2: I've just got off the phone, and the monuments of incompetence at British Gas Electric kept me on the phone for twenty minutes (bang went £2 of airtime credit) and couldn't even find the computer records for our address. I'm going home now. Two of the others in our house have contract phones, so I'm going to use them in an effort to try and iron this out. Stay tuned for the sorry saga...

Part 3: I've come back from the house and am now in the library. I've made I don't know HOW MANY phone calls, and finally found out that I have to buy ANOTHER key (£8) at a participating outlet. I was told this at about 8pm. All participating outlets had by then closed. I told the moron on the phone that we had only 17p left on the meter. She assured me that as a a safety measure, meters don't cut out the power supply at night. They wait until 9am the following morning. The gibbering fool was mistaken. About half an hour later, the meter clocked down to zero, and the entire house was promptly plunged into darkness. I have to wait until I can go to a 'participating outlet' in the morning (6am) before I can (hopefully) restore the power supply.

My phone credit is down from £7 this afternoon to the £1.50 it is now.

I have a report to hand in tomorrow.

Oh, and the university messed up my wages transfer, and I have not been paid for the work I did last month. I have £10 to my name.

I hate the world...

I have formed the definitive criterion for finding out what I call the 'monkey rating' of a landlord. I've dealt with quite a few in my time, and have thought about the differences in personality and competence of a lot of them.

Put bluntly, if your landlord's career comes under the heading of 'unskilled labour' or 'semi-skilled labour', hang on tight, boys, you're in for a bumpy ride. Prime examples of this class of people (oh, contradiction in terms) are bricklayers, plumbers, electricians, or any other kind of people involved in the building trade. Having worked in construction for some time, they've cottoned onto the fact that property can make for a good investment and, gathering their similarly inclined handymen around them so they can have a go at doing it themselves on the cheap, they decide to give it a shot. Unfortunately, once they start renting it out to their victims, the lack of skills required to organise a piss-up in a brewery become apparent.

Also not very encouraging are those who have inherited their property, or who have come by it in a way that they normally would not. Guards or other civil servants can also be a bit troublesome.

I think the quality one needs to look for in a landlord is whether he has the means to come by the money to buy the property without borrowing heavily and banking on the tenants covering the repayments. The best landlords I had were ones who had good careers anyway, and didn't need to invest in property to start bumping up their assets. They were also organised enough to get things sorted when it was necessary, without us having to harass them for weeks to get them to do it.

I've thought about property as an investment when I graduate. If some of these idiots I've rented from can do it, anyone can.

Casino Royale

Well, I came, I saw, I enjoyed.

Trying hard to forget that I had just paid £3 for a carton of popcorn that would have cost me 50p if I had been organised enough to buy it in a shop, I headed into screen 4 of Brighton CineWorld on Wednesday night.

Spoilers follow.

As I've previously said, I've never really been a fan of this franchise, and have only ever seen them when I've nothing better to do. Still, the amount of people who take seriously what is ultimately a load of fluff... oh well. One thing I've come across in some people so far is the conviction that Seán Connery was the original Bond. It speaks volumes for Connery's acting ability that he got famous off the back of what was essentially a bit of escapist bubblegum. Mediocre actor, mediocre films, match made in heaven, and yet he gets to be the benchmark by which all other subsequent Bonds are judged. Whatever.

Cheese has always been a problem with the Bond films in the past. Chat up lines, martinis, introductions, female leads, eyes rolling skyward inside of five minutes of the start of the film, you get the picture. This was different. Straight from the opening, it was obvious that the director was not going down the route tried and tried again. The flashback to the fight scene in the toilet was interestingly rendered, and when the theme song kicked off, I noticed a familiar timbre in the singer's voice. My hunch was right, ex-Soundgarden singer/songwriter/instrumentalist Chris Cornell was listed as singer and co-songwriter on the opening credits. My only trouble was working out if this shows that the Bond franchise was moving up in the world, or if Chris was moving down.

Other things that jumped out at me during the film was the opening sequence, which was more kinetic, and yet still more realistic than what I've seen in other Bonds, M's wit ("If an agent did something that embarassing before, he usually had the good sense to defect. God, I miss the cold war!"), and the scene with the camera effects where he's in the hotel bathroom, desperately trying to hold it together after being drugged. Also, the usual outlandishly far-fetched slew of gadgets was mercifully absent, save for a bucketload of product placement for Sony.

Then there's Daniel Craig.

It has been debated by everyone from Jonathan 'Woss' to 007 anoraks as to whether Craig is good enough to step into the shoes of the character. Well, if the ability to ham your way through an entire feature and take yourself seriously to a ludicrous extent in the process is a prerequisite, then Craig fails. If getting himself across as a hard-nosed hitman with a presence all of his own is the thing, then hats off, because he's pulled it off. Oh, and he looks great doing it. Much better than the other lot. That body. Mmmmmmm....

Otherwise the film is more or less the usual. An innocous subtext about a baddie trying to gamble his way out of debt to underworld crime lords is introduced, and I forgot it almost as soon as it was presented. As is often the case, the less than worthy one is afflicted with some physical malady to highlight further Bond's rugged manliness. There is also a near Road-To-Damascus experience where Bond falls in love and (almost) resigns from her majesty's secret service. However, the producers toward the end seem to adopt the philosophy of my flatmate - "No gadgets and he falls in love? Then it's not James Bond" - and all of that goes tits up. There are also a couple of knowing references to the original style, which grate more than anything else, and the last line does indeed cause me to, yes, roll my eyes towards heaven, but at least it was at the end.

So that's pretty much it. It's different, and there are worse ways to spend your time than watch it, even if it ultimately ends up paying tribute to the very style it helps revamp.

Now all they have to do is bring out a Daniel Craig blow-up doll in time for Christmas.