Compare and contrast exam results

The Irish Leaving Cert:

Minister backs bonus points system for maths and science

Poor marks in maths, science in Leaving cert results

English A-levels:

Record passes revive calls for review of exam system

Maths fuels rise in top grades at A-level


"Learning isn't cool"
A comment from a educational officer, on how the basic skills of reading, writing, and numeracy are absent in some young british school-leavers, after spending 11 years in school. It was part of a documentary focusing on how the labour of Polish immigrants is now often favoured over that of workers native to the UK.

Firstly, to deal with the irish conundrum on poor performance in the technical areas.

I don't know if it was always the way with Irish students - I don't think it was, to be honest - but lately, I've seen people over here on my course from my home country who have refined the skill of rote learning down to a fine art. It's something I've never been able to do for as long as I've been in a classroom. My thing has always been solving, re-ordering, analysing, and processing. It's the reason I steered clear of subjects like Business Studies, Home Economics, Biology, and Geography in school. It is, however, the way that a lot of students now seem to get through second-level (and in particular, points factory grind schools), and I can see it on my course. I can't fault it, because it requires no small work ethic, and can net someone a pass in a subject even when they don't fully understand what it is they're studying, but it can't be applied to technical subjects. If grades in maths and the sciences are lousy (and I think a lot of that really is only hype), then that is because students are choosing to just try and bulldoze their way through it with memorization rather than actually getting to grips with it properly.

I remember in first year in school, I had what was a definite contender for worst teacher of the year instructing us in maths. I failed that subject in the end-of-year tests, along with most of the other students, and the teacher was promptly juggled out of our classroom and into another of poor unfortunates waiting to be bored to tears. If you had said to me then that I would end up netting a good B in honours maths in the leaving cert, I would have laughed, but the following year, I was fortunate enough to get a good teacher in the subject, and after that, I never struggled with it again. What I think the problem is, is that a lot of people aren't pushed beyond this initial hurdle. Once you get over the initial incomprehension with the subject, it's like riding a bike. You never forget. Once it does click with you, you will also find that all other technical subjects like the sciences will come much more easily to you as well. This is where the experts need to start, because I've noticed that amongst students who are of enough ability to regard all subjects as equal, the science and maths subjects are always chosen, because scoring highly in them can be a more straighforward matter in a lot of ways. It beats sweating blood and tears over an Irish essay, only to get a C afterwards, that's for sure.

So, good maths teachers are needed to get to the root of the problem, but then that raises the whole issue of how the HDip for secondary school is a convenient qualification to fall into for unemployed and indifferent college graduates, and that's for another day.

Failing the above, you could always get the artistically minded students to watch Darren Aronofsky's Pi and hope for the best. Or get the girls to watch A Beautiful Mind, on the pretext that it's got Russell Crowe in it.

Now, onto where these subjects can lead you.

Mary Harney, the minister referred to in the second link, has been sharing a bed with industrial interests for quite some time now. It is no surprise to hear her encouraging Irish students to sharpen up their technical skills, for then they become viable candidates for employment with the companies she so desperately wants to keep happy and whose investment in this country she works so hard to secure.

It has been said that in order for companies to invest in Ireland, an adequate 'knowledge base' must be present. For this, you can almost read 'worker drones who are prepared to accept minimal rewards for maximum technical endeavour'. It is often pointed out that there are still lots of jobs to be had in the technical and scientific sector. What the media conveniently forget to mention most of the time, is what the nature of these jobs really are. Working in what can be a intellectually very challenging area, designing or refining a product that will generate the company a great deal of revenue, and then having to negotiate a measly 3-4% pay increase in your yearly performance review. Thank you, but no.

That's not to say that the aforementioned academic areas aren't important. You'd have to be an idiot to think that, but they aren't rewarded all that much in the marketplace. For example, chemists (people who have studied chemistry, as opposed to pharmacy, in case you misunderstand), a group of people who have engaged in the study of a subject that is the amongst the most challenging you may care to mention, and who have at their fingertips knowledge that is fundamental to the life sciences, are not amongst the most well-paid in industry in general, and are amongst the least well-paid in the pharmaceutical industry in particular. Fact. I'd feel a little cheated if I'd struggled with that area for a minimum of four years in higher education, and then found out I'd have to take weekend shifts where I worked to make ends meet. That's the situation that one of the mature students in my class found himself in before he went back to college.

I remember roughly 10 years ago, quite a few courses were introduced in the irish universities that were 'close' to industry. By this I mean the courses were tailored towards the passing on of a body of knowledge specific to various kinds of industry. Materials science was one. Marine science was another. Industrial engineering another. Year after year, those courses were only partly filled, with most of those accepting the offer doing so because they hadn't got anything else, or didn't know any better. By not knowing better, I mean that while the courses were being tailored towards certain kinds of jobs in industry, anyone taking them seemed unaware that they would find themselves in a serious bind if that particular industry dried up years later and those workers found themselves at the mercy of their company, unable to leave. That's what happened in IT (and may well still be happening now, for all I know) when the recession hit there. Wage freezes were brought in by the truckload, and there was sod-all the employees could do about it.

Around about this time, a lot of academics in the developing areas moaned that the candidates with the best grades in science subjects were hightailing it into medicine and the like, and ignoring their areas. At this time of going to press, this is still the case. Applications for science and engineering courses are still falling. There is a reason for this. Healthcare courses, having been around the longest of all, have a proven track record in generating rewards for people once they enter the market. Working for a company as an authority in a particular area generates a lot of money for that company, of which you will only see a fraction.

The fact is, if you choose to work in the corporate technical sector, you need to be aware that it can backfire on you, and this is something that people advocating the study of technical subjects don't really tell you. In a particular area, once the number of employees exceeds the number of jobs out there, you're fucked, and this is precisely why I chose for my career something that is not usually perceived as a hotbed of scintillation: There are almost always more jobs than pharmacists to fill them.

And lastly, but most certainly not least, you can lead a horse to water, but you cannot make them drink, and if Irish students are displaying ineptitude in this area, promising them bonus points if they do well isn't really going to achieve much. Ten years ago, it was appreciated that our syllabus in maths was amongst the most rigorous in the world, next to Japan, and then it was overhauled and made a bit easier. We need to leave the course itself alone now, and go after the students themselves.

And now, onto our over-achieving neighbours.

First a hypothetical question for our audience. If you are allowed to pick three subjects to study at any level in school, hands up those of you who are going to pick subjects that they don't really like, or pick subjects they're not really good at.

Are you getting this, everyone? People are doing well at A-levels because they are studying subjects that they are free to opt for!

The A-level system is somewhat unique in that it allows academic specialisation at a stage in education where most other systems would still have a student studying a number of mandatory subjects. In Ireland, you have to do seven subjects at leaving cert level, of which only 3 (in some schools 4) are chosen by the student. In Scotland, you do five subjects for the higher exams. The French/International baccalaureat, while allowing the flexibility of studying a number of subjects to more depth than others, still requires the reading of a broad range of subjects. In Canada, Australia, and America, the situation is roughly the same. Which is better, allowing someone to specialise early in their academic careers, or instil in them some knowledge of a variety of subjects before they leave school, is a moot point. Allowing a technically minded person to ditch the humanities early on can prevent them from achieving a fully rounded education, but requiring them to study them when they don't want to isn't going to develop in them a great appreciation for the subject either.

Then there are the succes stories of the sciences and maths. This is simply because no-one in their right mind is going to opt for these subjects at A-level unless they are at least halfway good at them. These are simply not doss subjects, not by any stretch of the imagination, and only students with their eye on science, engineering or healthcare courses (again, not exactly a cakewalk at third level) will opt for them. It's not that they're easy, it's that the students doing them are prepared to work hard.

It has to be said, though, 3 A-levels is not the most taxing workload. While the level a subject is studied at probably is ahead of the level the same subject would be studied at under a different secondary school system, it is only winning that race by a nose. This is already reflected in the fact that some students are now opting for a fourth A-level, and some even for five. Yet snot-nosed british universites seem to have a problem with recognising any qualification outside of their own. I was required to get an A in leaving cert honours chemistry in Ireland for the course I'm in now, but my English classmates would have got in with a C in A-level chemistry, and I can tell you now, there is not much difference between the two courses.

Having said that, the whole concept of education has changed since the naysayers in their 60s got their degrees. It's next to essential to get some award of higher education under your belt now before entering the jobs market, and a lot of courses, and places on those courses, are springing up to meet this demand. Students leaving school are much more mercenary about education, and have much higher expectations about it now, and are not just accepting it as a privilege. Then there are the grind schools, whose job it is to squeeze every last drop of attainment out of even the most mediocre of students. Is it any wonder people are opting to extend the best days of their life into their twenties?

Anyway, to sum up this part, if British universities are finding it harder to pick out the 'brightest of the bright' then a broader system like the one I've already discussed should be put in place. It should be pointed out that studies correlating performance in universities between bac results and between A-level results showed that graduates with a mediocre bac still tended to do well at third level, whereas graduates with mediocre A-levels didn't. So there it is.

And now, onto the thickos.

I saw a documentary on TV a while back. I can't remember on what channel, but it was about the influx of Polish immigrants into Britain, and how they are addressing the skills shortage being suffered by this country at the moment. The general point being made was that Polish workers were much more reliable, skilled, knowledgeable and hardworking than their indigenous counterparts. Someone should have introduced the presenter to that stupid pharmacist I had to work with, as I since found out that she is Polish as well, but I digress.

It was pointed out some companies loved the Poles because they were willing to work hard for half-nothing. Dissenting opinions were that the companies should pay more in general, the presenter pointed out, but it was time to get realistic: If certain british based companies found they had to raise the wages of their workers too much, they would simply go elsewhere. Of course, it was easy for the presenter to say that, settled cosily in a nice comfortable job with a national television station. I wonder how he'd feel if he had to hoist around cargos of fish all day for £5.10 an hour.

Anyway, the point was made that british students leaving school after their GCSEs were turning out to be getting thicker by the year. A post-secondary technical college was finding that a lot of them lacked the basic skills of literacy and numeracy, and as quoted above, one expert in education said that it seemed that learning wasn't quite the thing to be into in school any more, if you were concerned with your trendiness quotient. The reasons for this are sure to be many and varied, although if I were to point at something and complain like an old-age pensioner, I would say that the veneration of the most inconsequential of celebritys (Preston, Chantelle, Kerry, Paris, fucking premiership footballers) in the popular media does rather send out the message that though you may be as thick as shit and have nothing to say, if you look halfway good (though not with too much character, mind), and are willing to prostitute yourself for a bit of exposure on celluloid, you don't really have to worry about having to string a sentence together as you'll succeed anyway. But maybe that's just me.

There is also the fact that a culture exists over here that where, if it turns out that you're not too intellectually gifted, the GCSEs can be a convenient drop-off point for some now, whereas in other countries, you're generally regarded as more than a bit of a loser if you leave before you final secondary school exams. So if anyone wants to start complaining about people 'coming over and taking our jobs', they would do well to do a little inward examination first.

But lastly, to return to my first point, when are people going to get that university is not about acquiring a set of skills that don't require Einstein's IQ to master? It's about education. Let the fucking corporations train up new employees in the skills they need. They can certainly afford it, and if their habit is to underpay the people that are most important to their success, they may soon find that they have no choice.

FED UP!

The landlord has changed his tune quite a bit, and has basically said that the first large group of people who comes along will get the house. I'm still there, but on borrowed time, and if I want to stay on I have to assemble a group of people to take on the lease in double quick time. There are lots of postgrads looking for rooms at the moment, but they're as sloppy as fuck about replying to messages and noticeboard announcements that I've put up. This is moving too slowly for my liking, and I've started to look elsewhere again.

Of course the racketeer himself told me this the day before my Immunology exam, so that really put me in the frame of mind for success.

Then, there is an estate agent involved in the business of the house who really doesn't need to be part of the process at all. But then, that's their job description all round, isn't it? I am definitely going to look into property as an investment when I have money. If that landlord can manage it, and he currently owns 30 properties all over Brighton, then there should be a way of breaking into that sort of thing.

Of course during the move-out of everyone else, a bickering match erupted between me and another housemate over some of my stuff 'finding' its way into the bin. What is it about some people not being able to handle these kind of things without doing something unjustifiably stupid?

Once I was finished there, I went on an unmerciful batter, and engaged in a number of trysts in the Bulldog. At one point, I was serviced on one of the side-streets off St. James. I thought about this while it was going on, and eventually came to the decision that it wasn't my style, so I put a stop to it. Then I told the gentleman in question to wait while I visited the toilet in the Bulldog, after which I would go home with him. When I came back he had gone. I went back to the Bulldog, where some more men were descended upon, and of course no night out would be complete without me coming onto the bouncer. Then I met Daffy. After that I went home, and spent the following day in the throes of a lingering hangover.

I don't know how to feel about my exams. I was struck by how many students that I would consider conscientious have actually had to return to resit at least one exam. It is quite possible that I won't progress to third year without having to wait a year to retake those modules.

Going home on Monday the 11th for my mother's birthday. Please God the next two weeks go well.

Yippeeee!

I've managed to take over the lease on my current house. Which means I don't have to move. Which means I have somewhere to stay for the next twelve months. Yippeee!

Shit. I still have lots of study to do. Exams this coming Thursday and Friday.

Again, a bit late...

Drug classification rethink urged

Where basically the shit A/B/C system is trashed and something a bit smarter is put forward. Of course, this probably won't appeal to the binary-minded, but nothing new there...

I was a bit surprised to see GHB so far down the list, though. When taken with alcohol, that makes for russian roulette as much as any of the narcotics. The same for solvents. Then again, I suppose they don't inspire gang warfare as much as the top two offenders.

A rather sobering yet enlightening essay about homelessness. It's long, but worth the read.

The search for a new house and the study for exams grind on slowly, but I'm on top of things at the moment. I'm liking unemployment, though my sleeping pattern is starting to slip. Have to nip that one in the bud.

Anger!

Well, the peak of the year has just been followed by the trough.

I went to work this morning. I arrived in Haywards Heath too late (by 2 minutes) to catch the complimentary work taxi because my miserable (ex) boss insists on getting the taxi at 8:35, not 8:40. I then, by a hairs breadth, missed the bus to work by 1 minute and had to wait until 9:05 to get the next one. I arrived 20 minutes late.

It went downhill from there.

After suffering a morning of her snapping at me over the slightest of things, and refusing to allow me to take documentation out of the shop so I could compile an induction handbook - something badly needed in the place and highly beneficial to everyone there - I cracked after lunch.

I was moved from the counter to the dispensary, and after trying to use the computer without having been given any proper training, I made a labelling mistake. As in, the computer printed out a series of 10 labels in rapid fire. It was the last straw, and I lost it.

The pharmacist was dutifully informed (if that's the word) that it would be my last day today, so to speak. She persuaded me to stay half an hour, and I ended up staying until the end of the shift. Then, as we waited for a taxi outside, she casually said 'Oh, you'll be on Saturday, won't you?'

Hello!

I reminded her of our conversation earlier. She moaned, tried to make me feel guilty, and tried to get me to change my mind. It didn't work, and now, with a bit of luck, I will never see her again.

I'm sick of this though. This academic year so far:

1. I move three times, two of those times just after completing a set of exams.
2. I have no money for the most of the year.
3. When I do finally get a job, it sucks, and I don't see my first paycheque for six weeks.
4. My national insurance number gets messed up, thus ensuring I have to suffer a prolonged (and still ongoing, at this time) period of emergency tax.
5. I fail two exams.
6. When I land what I think is a dream student job, it turns out to be a nightmare.
7. Sundry other shit from sundry other people.

And now I have to be out of my current place in three weeks. Wonderful!

Oh, and Nuclear Physics Bear was supposed to be coming down to see me this evening, but after considering everything, I had to ring and cancel.

Kill me now...

Pride!

Well, as you'd expect, it's been a rather mental weekend, and it turned out, for better and for worse, not quite what I expected.

I got myself out of bed on Saturday morning, bought some booze in Sainsbury and headed for the seafront. There I met up with the Brighton Uni GaySoc and their float. Out of the five fucking spangly fucking beaded curtains that we worked on last night, only three were hanging up. One of the girls assured me that amongst the three was the one I had worked so hard on the night before. Or maybe she was being nice.

As I stood there, texting and trying to get people to meet me (it was only 10:30 that morning), one of the float participants came upto me and said that they needed 'Wheelwalkers', people who walk alongside the float and make sure that no little shits try to run under the wheels. The float couldn't proceed without them, so I 'volunteered'. I was provided with a fetching county council-esque dayglo orange vest to denote my newly elevated status, and off we went.

In due course I was also provided with a bagful of biros, bearing the sponsors logo, to hand out to the spectators as I passed them buy. Most of the children were eager to have one, although I suspect it was because the biros looked like sweets from a distance.

As we proceeded up West Street and turned onto North Street, I saw a crowd of bible bashers, sectioned off by the police, most likely for their own safety. One old man, the shape of his mouth making it highly likely that he was completely toothless, stood motionless, holding a placard in each hand. I can't remember what one of them said, but the other was that old faithful, Leviticus 20 Verse 13. I was genuinely startled. After living in a place like Brighton for any length of time, you tend to think of these people as only living elsewhere.

As we passed the Grand Pavilion, I saw Phil in the crowd with a camera, and the work that I didn't see myself doing when I got up that morning was recorded for posterity.

Once we got out of the city centre, and passed through Preston Circus, I spied two hot leatherbears and cruised them ruthlessly. In fact that was one of the upsides of the job: I got to see quite a lot of talent (the guy who was wheelwalking in front of me wasn't half bad either), and I let them know my opinion of them in no uncertain terms.

Once we got to Preston Park, where the main festival was, there were more morons with placards. One of the guys I live with made the all-too-familiar but no less flawed point, that in a democratic society these people should be allowed a voice too, which is horseshit: They use their freedom to impinge on other people's freedom. The only thing they achieved was to affirm the need for a yearly festival like this.

At this point, I made the ill-advised move of going back into town to meet Dan, and things got quite messy for while, so I didn't get to see as much of the Preston Park part as I would have liked. Alcohol, once again, is to blame for this, and I'm attempting a boycott for a while.

Later that evening, I cruised the streets of Kemptown, and bumped into a rather hot biker bear who told me he worked in Nuclear Physics, for the government. I didn't quite remember his name, so I've christened him Nuclear Physics Bear. We swapped e-mail addresses and have already been in contact since. Who knows where this might lead?

After that, I met up with MizzFlee and Slagella, before chatting up a bear from Bognor Regis and inviting him back to my place. It was then that things went tits up. Once I got home, I was way too tired to do anything, but invited him to stay on anyway, seeing the morning as another opportunity. He took great exception to this and left in a huff. Moral of the story: If your body says you are too tired, don't let your brain tell you otherwise.

The one bit of comic relief was that, on our way home, we passed two girls, one of whom was on the phone. She loudly complained of boredom, saying that all the men in Brighton that weekend were gay.

Duh!

Sunday, I woke up dying, but headed out to catch some more eye candy anyway, along with some open air jazz in the New steine Park. The street party, the sunday night climax of the event, was cancelled this year for legal reasons, and the police re-opened the roads around the town centre at around 8pm. That pretty much put an end to the atmosphere of the street, and along with the fact that I was tired from the night before, I headed home at around 10:30 that night.

This was my first Pride, and I had built it up to be a huge thing beforehand. That kind of thing inevitably leads to disappointment, but I still enjoyed myself, and have learned from the mistakes I made at this one. Next year's will be planned with military precision. A massive beach party took place on Saturday night/Sunday morning, but I was oblivious to it, and was too tired to go anyway. Oh well, I'll know next year...

This morning I was watching a history of Brighton on a video cassette left lying around the kitchen. In it, the commentator siad that there was no other city quite like Brighton in Europe. It's nearest equivalent, he said, was San Francisco. That, along with the whole weekend, brought home to me how right I was to move here, how much I was missing out on before: I never went to a single Pride when I was living in Dublin, and it's only now, since I moved here, that that whole aspect of my life has come to the fore.

Roll on next year...

Fucking Spangly curtains

With only one day to the main Brighton Pride carnival, I rang up the Brighton Uni GaySoc president and asked if there were any pre-Pride drinks happening. She said no, but that they were in the latter stages of assembling the float and I was welcome to help. So I volunteered, turning up at Falmer campus to help with the proceedings.

I spent two hours trying to untangle a spangly beaded curtain. Here is a word of advice, dear reader, if you ever want to use a spangly curtain without any undue hassle.

Don't fucking roll them up beforehand.

So that was that. On the plus side, the guy who volunteered to help me with mine was a cute med student, studying in Manchester, but originally from Gibraltar. His accent was something I've never heard the like of before, but as skins go, he was rather eye-catching.

I left at about 11pm. I left my leather briefcase behind. Please God the caretaker has got it.

I'm back!

It's been a busy two weeks, which explains the entry pattern of this blog at the moment. As MizzFlee says, they're like buses, for ages there are none, and then about three at once.

Wednesday 19th saw me head back to Ireland for my cousin's wedding, on the Thursday. It was fine, though most of the crowd were in the older age category and I didn't know that many. It was the first one where I went to bed early, leaving before most of the others, and - shock! - before the bar had closed. Still, I got to catch up with my cousin - though I hardly saw any of him over the weekend.

The wedding was held in Foxford, a western Ireland town. For convenience, I flew into Knock airport, as it was nearest to the airport. For those of you who don't know, Knock became famous some time back for allegedly being host to what could be called manifestations of the presence of Our Heavenly Creator. Or maybe it was The Virgin Mary who crashed the party, I can't remember. Anyway, there was either an apparition or a moving statue (actually I think the latter may have been Ballinspittle, but who cares?), and now Knock, nothing if not opportunistic, has capitalised on it. There are crucifixes everywhere, and lots of souvenir shops selling hordes of miscellaneous tat line the main street. The atmosphere, after coming from Brighton, was oppressive in some way. I forgot how religion can play such a huge role in some people's lives. I could have done without remembering.

As it happens, before I flew to Knock, I was singled out at Gatwick to participate in a survey about perceptions of airport security. My reward? £25 of vouchers to spend in the airport, which netted me a new CD player.

On Friday, I decided to go to Dublin. I got the train from Foxford to Dublin, noting that while a monthly return was forty euro, I was only going one way, and that was twenty-nine euro. Or so I thought. On the train I got, and when the conductor came around I asked for a single to Dublin. He quietly charged me the same as a monthly return, pointing out that friday was peak time, and in order to get people to stop travelling at those times, Iarnróid Éireann have taken to fucking the customer up the ass. I didn't accept this with the same degree of quietness, and he told me to complain to them when I got into Dublin. I did. They shrugged, and gave me the address of their customer relations department.

I laugh maniacally when people complain about the rail system in the UK over here. They don't know how lucky they are to not have to deal with the fucks that run the Irish service. Bastards, all.

One thing I noticed about Dublin in comparison to Brighton, is how there is so much mingling of the social classes in the former, whereas the latter is for the most part a very middle class city. I was unsettled, walking around for a while, but soon adapted. In one sense, having so many types of people living cheek and jowl next to each other adds character to a city, and once I got over my initial disdain, I kind of liked it. Unfortunately, the presence of some of these people results in Dublin turning into the sewer we all know and loathe at the weekend. Pity one aspect goes hand in hand with the other. While Brighton is diverse, those of lesser means usually stick to their own estates and don't come into the city in the same way. Well, at least that's how I perceive it. It's probably what makes the centre of this town a better place to be, all snobbery completely unapologised for.

Saturday night I went home, met my friends and got trashed. Then I met my brother and his fiancée, who were even more trashed, and things got a little hairy. Unfortunately, alcohol can bring out the unholy toxicity in some people, and this couple are testimony to that. I was disappointed in them, but the man Dan's advice was to forget them. I still wish they would GROW THE FUCK UP, but oh well...

Monday 24th I came back.

The following tuesday I worked my last day in the supermarket. Yes folks, I have finally found another job. As a counter-come-dispensing assistant in a pharmacy. Unfortunately, it feels like a case of jumping out of the frying pan and landing arse-first into the fire. The experience is good, but the duty pharmacist is about as far away from nomination for manager of the year as you can get. She has already told me 'to relax', that I am too 'eager', and that I ask too many questions. I'm still flailing about in there, and the other guy who works in there - incidentally a guy in my year on the course - isn't the best at passing on information either. Today, as the woman snapped at me twice before 11am, I slowly curled up into a ball of rage, and nearly stormed out of there for good at lunchtime. We have spoken a little about it, and when I come back (next Tuesday, as I have the weekend off for Pride. Yay!) we are going to fill in the blanks that I have. The potential for me to learn from this work exists, and it would be a shame to let that pass. I need to know how to do things better than her, if nothing else.

Frustration

(noun) Having to suffer a fuckwit in a mixed group when you had previously decided that his permanent absence from your life could only be a good thing.

The results are out...

...and I have to resit two papers.

It's not the worst case scenario that I had envisioned. It was quite possible that I could have failed three, and that would have effectively put the end to a summer of fun. As it stands, the workload I have to get through before the repeats is manageable.

I found out at Dan's on Wednesday night. After arriving at his, I found out that in some cases, people who had failed three were being told to repeat the year without even getting an attempt to resit in the autumn (Quite how this decision was reached is unclear, and the university kept that one very quiet, bastards). I hadn't yet found out what my results were at that point, so I went into deep shock. After composing myself with a beer and a smoke, I went online on Dan's computer and found out.

After I had recovered and composed myself, June and the little feller went to bed, and me and Brooksie went out onto the balcony for some very enjoyable drinks and weed. Then I walked home. At 3 in the morning. Again.

Earlier that day, I had a job interview with a pharmacy out in Cuckfield. It was difficult to tell if I'm in there, but I hope so, I'm sick and tired of that supermarket job, and I really really need to get out of it.

Thursday, I went back to Dan's again to collect my glasses and play with Pukey Lukey (what we've christened baby Luke) long enough for him to drool, and yes, puke all over me. But he's adorable.

I go home for a few days next Wednesday. My cousin is getting married, and I'm a groomsman so I have to make an appearance. I managed to get my student loan topped-up, so I'm of the financial woods for the moment, thank GOD.

Trailers of note.

Sofia Coppola's Marie Antoinette.

And....

Another Gay Movie.

The trailer for Marie Antoinette opens with the opening track on Aphex Twin's Drukqs, 'Jynweythek', which is interesting because when working on my masterpiece, I was going to use 'Meltphace 6' from the same album.

Anyway.

The second one looks like a spoof on American Pie, and should be good ol' dumb fun.

The weekend was its usual.

The Bitches of BN2 came back Saturday evening, from their holiday in Spain. It turns out that MizzFlee's piercings set off the metal detector while she was passing through customs, and she was led away by a burly Spanish security guard for what turned out to be something approaching a full cavity search. After she had recovered, she decided that she quite liked it! Some bitches have all the luck. Click here for an eye-witness account.

I suffered my usual weekend at the supermarket. I ID'd what turned out to be a 29-year old woman when she tried to buy alcohol, and she stomped off. Later, her husband came in to bitch at me. I just politely told him it was shop policy, but he accused me of just being awkward. I should have advised him that seeing as his wife was an Asian dwarf of five-foot-nothing, she should wear heels, or else carry her driver's licence around with her. I felt like cutting him up into little pieces and putting him a box in the basement for storage. My supervisor, of course, just stood there and said nothing. Luckily, in the queue right behind the husband, was a woman who worked in another branch of the same supermarket, and she waded in on my behalf.

I have sent CVs to pharmacies, but they're all too disorganised to get back to me. I'm mounting the search with renewed vigour.

Of course after a day like that, I ended up in the Bulldog with La 'Flee. At one point in the night, I greeted the bouncer with his gaydar profile name (bigtop), and he looked at me as if I had asked him if I could spend the night with his mother!

I also met Daffy, looking as hot as ever.

I got home at 5am, and of course the Sunday shift at the market was delightful as a result. On my way home, there were loads of people shouting and honking horns, and draping themselves in what looked like the Irish tricolour. Upon closer inspection, I realised it was a flag of a different country, and when I got home, I found out that Italy had won the world cup. Big fucking deal. Well, at least the stinking tournament is over now.

The exam results are out this week. I find out on Wednesday how many I'll be repeating. I'm being honest. That's the most pertinent question with regard to the outcome right now.

The wind that shakes the barley

I went to see this on Monday night at the Duke of York, the first time I'd been to that cinema since I saw The Corporation last year. It's after winning the Palme D'Or at Cannes, something that was somewhat filtered out by the insufferable vanity of the critics the night I saw the coverage of the festival.

The first time I saw a Ken Loach film (Sweet Sixteen), I was struck by how realistic the dialogue was, how much it was stripped of theatre and drama, and how it reflected, pretty much more than anything else I'd seen at the time, how conversation between people flows in real life, complete with hiccups, pauses, and misdeclarations. There was also the fact that, in order to stay true to the working-class Glaswegian accents, it was necessary to subtitle parts of the film.

This was interesting in a different way. Set in a part of Cork not a million miles from where I live (the county council of Mallow, amongst others, was thanked in the closing credits), it follows the story of a group of young Irishmen who set up the first resistance movements in response to the oppression of the Black and Tans. The Cork accents were spot on. Thick, but not staged, if you get my drift, like. It then followed the split that happened in their ranks in the aftermath of the acceptance of the Treaty. It followed almost exactly the same timeline as Neil Jordan's Michael Collins, but in many ways it couldn't have been more different.

Loach's credentials as socialist are on quite the display here - watch out for the scene where Cillian Murphy and Liam Cunningham's characters meet for the first time - but it's the right context in which to show them. I have to wonder at how he gets the nuances of speech, character, and stage set right when so many other directors can get it wrong, or at the very least be hamfisted about it. A non-Irish director making one of the most authentic Irish films out there is quite an achievement.

So. Go see.

All this reminds me of a screenplay I started work on a while back, back in the summer of 2003. As is often the case with many things in my life, it ended up being put on the backburner, but ideas for it still come and go in my mind, and about a month ago, I re-read it. I expected to cringe, but it wasn't half as bad as I thought it may have been. Then again, I had only written the opening scene.

The greek chap I met recently told me that I should write a screenplay as a book first, and then, after going on a crash course on scriptwriting, adapt it for the screen. I'm not sure about this, and I'm even less sure if I should embark on something like this without at least reading in general a bit more first, but maybe I might just throw caution to the wind, do a Kerouac on it and stay up for days pounding on the keyboard non-stop.

Anyway, I have so far come up with the following:

a) It'll be set in the gay community of a major american coastal city. Surprise!

b) There will be bears.

c) There will be sex between the bears.

d) To balance things out, there will be lesbians, and sex between them. I've already thought about casting Kristanna Loken, Leelee Sobieski, and Chiaki Kuriyama in this regard.

e) The main character will be a dashing bearish writer-in-waiting in the throes of an existential 30-something crisis (he doesn't want to work, or at least not for a living, in the way that everyone else does). In an attempt to arrive at some resolution, he will sleep with lots of other bears. This will be in the film. A bit like the portrayal of Charles Bukowski in Barfly, except instead of hard liquor, the drug of choice will be hard...Oh, you get the picture.

f) As a counterpoint to this modern-day rendition of Jean-Paul Sartre's Nausea, the other main character will be a renegade lesbian pharmacist who supplies the Bear Who Is Not Of This World with drugs, an Albert Hoffman to his Aldous Huxley, if you will. I decided a long time ago that the only actress who could possibly play this role would be Jennifer Connelly. I will accept no substitutes. It also provides me with motivation to stay on my degree course, so that I can ...erm.. research certain things a little more.

f) Aphex Twin and/or Philip Glass are amongst those under consideration for soundtrack duties.

Are you getting this, Harvey Weinstein? Cash or cheque acceptable.

Anyway, now I must go to bed as I have a headache.

Thank God!

Settled into the new place now (thanks to YellerKat and MizzFlee for helping with the move) and everything is now unpacked and internet access organised. It's been a hellish week of being tossed from pillar to post, but now I can put roots down for the next two months. The new bunch are cool: They laid on a barbeque this evening, and yesterday offered me some pasta bake, so I haven't had to cook anything since I moved in.

Also, for some reason, the presumed fault on my PC monitor (shades of red weren't rendered properly) has corrected itself. A mystery...

Close to four hours on the nudie beach today, and a colour is now starting to materialise (Red. Again!). I left at six, just as two of the police force were coming into my section over some matter or other. Just as well I was off, that could have gotten awkward.

I met Daffy again recently, as I had to give him his socks and cock ring. We met for drinks, and had a bit of a chat, but he reaffirmed in a way I didn't like about how he was in a closed relationship with someone else. I had been dimly aware of this on the night I met him first, but had chosen to psychologically brush it under the carpet. I left after the second drink, not really wanting to talk to him after that.

It's a shame, as I kind of like this guy, and he's the first suitor I've met who I wouldn't mind getting to know a bit more, but there's no point. He's investing in someone else, and being a third party like that isn't my style. He offered to help me with my move, but I was too proud to accept.

*Sniff*

Oh well...

Pride is about 5-6 weeks away, and in order to facilitate my attempt to give up the smokes, I think I'll be staying away from the pubs, and alcohol in general until then. Will I succeed? Oh, why do I even bother asking?

Mind you, 'Flee and Bear have taken off to Spain, so that's one temptation out of the way.

I'm moving again! Oh fun...

I have found somewhere new to live. Thank fucking Christ.

The only problem is that it's for two months, so I have to start looking for somewhere else to live towards the end of August. The other is that while I have to move out of my current place on Sunday 25th of June, I can't move into my new place until the following Wednesday, so I have to move into temporary university accommodation on Sunday, and then move from there to the new place on Wednesday. The stuff of envy, I'm sure you'll agree.

I met the new flatmates last night and somehow got talked into going to see the England vs. Sweden game in a pub. The flatmates seemed fine anway, which is just as well, as I was utterly disengaged from the game. A goal? Oh is that what happened? I was looking at the floor. Who was it that scored? More beer, anyone?

I went to London on Monday to visit J. We went to see an exhibition, 'Bodies', in the Earls Court museum. Made up of real human bodies and their parts, preserved using some new polymer whatever process, it has attracted some controversy owing to use in parts of the bodies of the victims of murder under the current and previous Chinese regimes, apparently without the consent of their relatives. One of the press releases on this urges people to question not the use of the bodies in the exhibition, but the circumstances under which they were killed. Meh, I suppose they're right, but if that was someone I knew and loved up there, I'd be pretty pissed, to say the least.

The preservation process gave the bodies a somewhat plastic appearance, making them look like mannequins at times. Yet it was pretty much to the forefront of my mind that I was still looking at real dead people. Three things stood out in my mind. The first was the section of the anal canal, and how diminutive it looked. It must be pretty stretchy if it can take a ... oh, you get the picture.

The second was the two pairs of lungs. One pair, that of a healthy person, the other, that of a smoker. 'Leave your cigarettes behind here' urged the sign over a glass box with an opening on top. The box was full of cigarettes cartons, lighters and matches dumped by those who had been affected by what they had seen. I'd found the £17.50 entrance fee rather extortionate, but Joanne pointed out if I did give up, it would be money well spent, which is true.

The third was the unborn child section. Foetuses that had perished before birth were on display. The museum was considerate in that you were warned before you entered this section, and were given an alternative route if you wanted to keep viewing the exhibition, but bypass that section. It was really weird seeing the foetuses at weeks 1-8 of a pregnancy. Halfway through this early stage, you could make out the mouth on the face of the potential baby, curled up into what looked like a smile. At week 9, a dramatic increase in size was observed. I imagine it would be pretty hard for anyone involved in a miscarriage or abortion to look at something like this.

Then there was the placenta, which brought Tom Cruise, unbidden, to mind. We left.

So it's onward ho over the next few days. Tomorrow the packing and cleaning up begin. Joy!

CJ Haughey, 1925-2006

One of the advantages of living in where I am right now is that while I may have to suffer other people's fever for England in the world cup, I'm pretty much saved from hearing anything about Ireland's progress in the same event (Did we even qualify? Do I even care? Actually not and definitely not, respectively).

The flipside of this is that events of no small consequence can come to pass in Ireland, and only by chance do you find out about them via a third party. Such as it was with the passing of former Taoiseach (Prime Minister, if you're not Irish) Charles Haughey, announced on Tuesday 13th. His funeral, complete with state honours, was the following thursday.

If ever there is one politician who should form a central part of a college course in political psychology, it would have to be him. Course PS203: How to screw a country out of a substantial part of its collective wage packet, yet still command the unwavering loyalty of its majority and get re-elected into power again and again. Independent reading: How to claw your way back into public favour after suffering a disgrace that would see other politicians retire in ignonimy (cf. arms trial in 1970).

It's the brass-necked hypocrisy, more than anything, that has me open-mouthed in wonder. The 1980 speech where he urged the naton to tighten its belts while he was living his lifestyle on money he had basically grabbed from the hands of the Irish, the speech he gave about family values just after returning from Paris, having entertained his mistress there, oh, this goes on and on. But most striking is the manner in which people have been prepared to overlook his misdemeanours, write them off as not as significant as they actually are. Not as significant, I suspect, as they would be if committed by someone else.

This, of course is it. To get down to brass tacks, what did CJ have, something no-one else had, that allowed him to carry it off?

In one of Nuala O Faoláin's articles in the Irish times entitled 'Spirit of the Nation', she wrote:

The first of the Irelands Mr Haughey commands is the Northside, which is not just Dublin's northside but everywhere people live in streets and kids go to big, tough schools. He knows all that from the inside - playing football, robbing orchards, taking the bike out to Portmarnock for a swim. He was something of an exception in being very clever - first in Dublin for a scholarship - and very bookish. He haunted Marino Library. But not that much of an exception. His personal friends - still Northsiders - a motor trade businessman, a supreme court judge, an auctioneer - would all have been the same kind of boy, reared in modest circumstances, but with the brains to transform them.

There is also the fact that at 15, elsewhere wrote about in the same article, he joined the local defence force.

Could this be it? The fact that he was a bit of a bruiser gained him the respect of the man on the street, to the point where that same man might overlook his waywardness as a consequence of someone with a strong personality, an unfortunate side-effect of the achievements in his lifetime. Most other politicians, having come from privileged backgrounds, don't have this quality, and this is probably what set CJ apart.

What struck me in the tributes left on the ireland.com page was the extent to which his supporters were willing to overlook the flaws in his character, write them off as minor, and focus on the 'great things' he did for his country. Any naysayers are dismissed by these people as begrudgers, symptomatic of the Irish tendency to build people up and then tear them down, as if that was a mindset specific to Ireland alone.

There are a two important flaws in this reasoning, though: His achievements, upon examination, weren't that great, and his misdemeanours were many and substantial.

He screwed Ireland for money in the 70's and 80's in a way that no-one else did before or since. upper band tax rates, a 'reward' for people who had managed to maneouvre themselves into a position where they were high earners, were just totally fucking insane, yet he siphoned off his money to the Cayman Islands so that he himself could escape the financial net he had created for everyone else. More than anything else, this demonstrates complete contempt for the country he had under his watch at this time.

He was involved in gun smuggling in the 1970s, at a time that saw the emergence of the IRA in its present form - an important point, considering that the organisation had deteriorated to little more than a collection of thugs at that point - a form that would prevail until it was disbanded. He had the phones of his opposition bugged so that he could anticipate their next move. Physical intimidation was used in the Dáil to quell dissent. His restriction on the sale of condoms, his opposition to divorce and the Anglo-Irish agreement.

Money that was collected with the intent of paying for important surgery for his friend Brian Lenihan, he used on himself. His friend.

Yet I have never seen denial like that which I have seen in his supporters when confronted with all of this.

And now onto the bloody Celtic Tiger. It has been put forward that he laid the foundations for the prosperity that Ireland enjoys today. I have yet to see an expert in economics conclusively prove that this is the truth. Fintan O' Toole put it best once, when he said that just because sunrise follows someone having an early breakfast, it doesn't mean that the person eating that bowl of cereal has caused the sun to rise. It happened independently of the breakfast. The same logic is applicable to Ireland's economic boom.

It may be closer to the truth that he saw it coming, and made preparations for it. Such as the building of the IFSC, for example. Of course the tax incentives used to attract multinational investment over here could well turn out to be a band aid solution: Of the corporations whose incentives have expired, some have withdrawn from the country. It remains to be seen if the rest will do the same.

Of course all of this deflects from the basic unassailable fact that while he was in power, Ireland was in recession, and after he left, Ireland boomed. It always annoys me when politicians try to claim credit for fiscal successes like these, as if a substantial part of it was under their control, when really, it is not.

Then again, if we are to apply the skewed logic, he is therefore responsible for the current mess in Irish hospitals. We got rich, but our healthcare system got shit. Nice trade-off, CJ.

Free travel for the elderly? A free TV license? The cost of these was borne by CIE and RTE, respectively. The reaffirmation of the artist within Gaelic Ireland? The action of someone with thought processes.

Under his leadership, a guy getting hot n' heavy with another guy? Illegal.

Elsewhere in the aforementioned 'Spirit of the Nation' article, O'Faoláin writes that his background makes him seem "an outsider, an anti-establishment figure, permanently challenging, even when he is in power". Bollocks. He bought into something bigger than himself and became corrupted in the process. For a woman of O'Faoláin's insight, I'm surprised at her short-sightedness. She's just like the rest of his supporters in this regard.

Ultimately his position was made available to him by democracy, so it could be argued that he represented all aspects of the nation, that he represented the best and worst of the Irish people. That someone like him can flourish says something about the people who allowed him to flourish, who elected him into power.

Like many a man with talent in no small amounts, he had his moments, but they were too few, relative to what he was capable of, and capability was his middle name. I have no doubt he could have been a great leader, simply, he wasn't. But we got the government we deserved because we voted him back in again and again. We accepted his many warts, when we should have been demanding higher standards of him. This is what exasperates the most.

He's gone now, and it's over to others to do away with the climate he created in politics, if they see fit. Hopefully it'll happen. Indirectly it'll reflect damningly on the the population of Ireland if it doesn't disappear, because it means they'll have sanctioned it, directly or otherwise.

The Da Vinci Code

Two things about it that were good.

1. Jean Reno's hotness (not his acting, as he was an autopilot all the way through).
2. The scenery/locations.

Two things that weren't so good.

1. It stuck rigidly to the book, with one or two exceptions of artistic license. Because of this, I knew exactly what was going to happen at almost any given moment.
2. The flashbacks sucked.

I remember reading this ages ago, and thinking that while the writing wasn't great, it might adapt well to a screenplay. The constant cliffhangers in the book didn't transfer well to the screen, though, and the character development was pretty ropey, to say the least. All in all, I'd be inclined to blame the source material and just leave it at that. Tom Hanks wasn't as miscast as some would have you believe, and Audrey Tatou was as valid a choice as anyone. As I'd said before, the lifting of the lid on the history of Catholicism was interesting in the book, and would have been interesting to see on film if you had not come across it before.

One thing I've noticed about this phenomenon is that more and more people are coming out of the woodwork and criticising it, and recent coverage of the Cannes film festival featured a selection of critics turning their noses up at the whole thing. If ever there an example was needed of a frustrated bridesmaid, it has to be a film critic, and it does nothing except increase my resolve to see the film even more. Have a go at making your own films boys, and try not to speak out on others. The sound of jealousy getting caught in your throat can be heard by all.

Incidentally, Sofia Ford Coppola's new film, Marie Antoinette, is coming out next year, and she's done the same with it as she's done with The Virgin Suicides and Lost in Translation in terms of the soundtrack. This time, it's the New Romantics that are spicing up the background a bit. Should be interesting. Incidentally, a selection of critics showed their appreciation for that one by booing. Very mature, ye of little consequence.

Must Have More!

Need sound.

Likes cuddles. And Daffy.

The last few days have been interesting.

On Friday night I was bored. I stayed in, foregoing my usual rendez-vous with the Bitches of BN2, only to get itchy feet at about 12:30am Saturday morning. Where in Brighton, I hear you ask, can you get drink in a bar at this time, without having to pay an entrance fee? The Bulldog, we cry!

So down I went,on my own. Got a drink and surveyed the eye candy. 'Anvil', a sort of kink-themed night, was just finishing up in another club, so soon the Bully was enjoying (well, I was enjoying, but I digress) an influx of men big n'beefy. After talking to a few of them, including two ex-entanglements of mine, I settled on a big burly cuddly dude. It led nowhere. Then I spotted another tanned and rugged specimen and swooped. That led to my place.

The journey home was a bit fun, in a smartarsery kind of way. He moaned constantly, but kind of jokingly, about the walk, and said that if we had gone to his, we'd be there by now. I hotly denied this and told him to shut up and keep moving. He then wanted to know what I intended to do when we got back to mine. I told him I was expecting to get into his knickers. He shrugged, not explicitly ruling it out as a possibility, but declared that when we got there, he would expect a nice cup of tea.

He got a nice strong cup of tea. The rest followed in due course.

In the course of the night, or should I say early morning, I learned two things about him that still make me smile. 'I love cuddles', he proclaimed at one stage (We cuddled at this point). I asked him about the tattoo of a bear paw on his ass. He told me that when he was younger, about 15 years old, he got a tattoo of Daffy Duck on his ass. In due course, he thought the best thing to do would be to cover it up. So step forward, paw of the bear.

This made me laugh to myself at work later that day, while on the checkout, serving customers. I now have him stored in my phone as Daffy. It's just as well: He left his cock-ring and his socks behind him, under my bed.

I suspect, though, that there is something about him that marks him out as someone who is not really suitable for anything other than a bit of fun. His insistence that I 'be discreet', for one. I think I might have to investigate that a little if I meet him again.

On Sunday evening after work, I met an interesting Greek man. His blog can be found here.

Yes, I'm a believer in keeping more than one iron in the fire.

Moving out

I have just over two weeks left to find somewhere else to live.

Over the last few days, the others in my flat are moving out one by one. I've noticed that certain things of mine seem to be departing with them. A blue mug of mine vanished round about the time of the departure of one of the lads, and I came home from work tonight to find that the (admittedly free) TV guide that I donated to the communal area, had the tv times for tomorrow and monday ripped out. Errmm.....

At least the ones that are left until last are amongst the nicer of the lot.

In any case, I think I'll be stashing my kitchen utensils in my room between now and my departure.

Thank FUCK!

The exams are over now. It's been a car-crash week and I'm relishing being able to breath again.

It looks like I'll be staying here for the summer, at this moment in time. House hunting starts tomorrow. Or maybe the day after. And then the job hunting. I still have the supermarket job, but after 8 hours behind a cash register today, I was reminded of how boring it was.

Like I had forgotten! Bah!

This blog as a graph

Unlike BN2 Beeyatches, which seems to have a somewhat nuclear structure, mine is an entity more diffuse, with arms outstretched. I'm so original.

Do your own, and add it to the Flickr group here.

Announcement

As and from today, The Friday Thing, weekly satirical e-newsletter par excellence, is free to those who may wish to subscribe to it.

If you have a brain, you owe it to yourself to get on it.

And we're off...

... to the worst start ever.

Immunology this morning, and I can say with 100% certainty that I will be back in early autumn doing that again.

As an aside, it is rather strange for a module as comprehensive as this one to only barely feature HIV in lectures, and have not even one question (not even an MCQ) on the exam paper on the subject. Yes, ladies and gentlemen, you don't have to be a genius to work out what area I put most of my work into there.

Now I return to the books, and make sure this doesn't recur. On it's own, this damage is controllable. If it makes friends, I'm screwed.

Later...

A declaration

I hate this time of the academic year.

Here we go AGAIN!

I found this on BuffTuff, the blog of a hot n' hairy Canadian biker. It's from a recent CBS edition of "60 Minutes" conducted by correspondent Lesley Stall. It's long, but worth the effort, upto a point:

Psychologists used to believe homosexuality was caused by nurture — namely overbearing mothers and distant fathers — but that theory has been disproved. Today, scientists are looking at genes, environment, brain structure and hormones. There is one area of consensus: that homosexuality involves more than just sexual behavior; it's physiological.

Dr. Bailey , a noted sex researcher, and his colleagues set up a series of experiments in his lab at Northwestern University. In one study, researcher Gerulf Rieger videotaped gay and straight people sitting in a chair, talking. He then reduced them visually to silent black and white outlined figures and asked volunteers to see if they could tell gay from straight. The idea was to find out if certain stereotypes were real and observable. Based on physical movement and gestures of the figures, more often than not, the volunteers in the study could tell a difference. "So, is the conclusion that gay people do in fact move differently?" Stahl asked Rieger. "Yeah, absolutely," he replied. It's not true 100 percent of the time; it is true on average. The researchers also studied the way gay and straight people talk, and they found differences on average there too. This research is controversial. Some say it is reinforcing stereotypes. But to Bailey, the stereotypes suggest there's a feminizing of the brain in gay men, and masculinizing in lesbians. Ironically though, when it comes to their sex lives, he says gay and straight men actually have a lot in common. "Straight men tend to be shallow in terms of focusing on looks. Gay men are shallow, too. Straight men are more interested than straight women in having casual, uncommitted sex. Gay men are like that, too," says Bailey.

"One has the impression that gay men are much more inclined toward casual sex than straight men," Stahl said. "They're just more successful at it, because the people they're trying to have sex with are also interested in it," Bailey explained. "But don't you find this interesting that the one big area where gay men are more like straight men is in sex? I mean, that is…both amusing and odd," Stahl said. "It suggests that whatever causes a man to be gay doesn't make him feminine in every respect. There must be different parts of the brain that can be feminized independently from each other," Bailey replied.

But how and when does this feminizing occur? If the differences were already apparent in childhood, that would point to an early, perhaps even genetic origin — and that's what Bailey and Rieger are testing in a new study using childhood home movies. In the study, volunteers were asked to rate each child's femininity or masculinity. Stahl took the test and rated two girls highly feminine. When shown video of a toddler girl running a truck off of a table, Stahl observed, "She's really not girly. Isn't that interesting? She's not girly." She also observed differences in two boys, one of whom would grow up to be straight, while the other is now gay. If you can spot a child's future sexual orientation before the child even knows he or she has one, doesn't that prove it's genetic? Studies have shown that homosexuality runs in families. So genes must be the answer. But then the researchers tell you identical twins can have different sexual orientations.

60 Minutes found identical twins Steve and Greg Lofts in New York. They had the same upbringing, have the same DNA — and yet Greg is gay and Steve is straight. When people meet the twins and find out one of them is gay, Greg says people have asked if he's sure, and how it can be. "Everyone is curious about that," he says. There were signs, even when they were little kids. Their mother told Stahl that Steve loved sports and the outdoors while Greg liked helping out in the kitchen. But it wasn't until high school that Steve became convinced Greg was gay. Asked if he said anything to his brother, Steve says, "I did actually. And I think the way I worded it was something like, 'You know, Greg, if you're gay, it's OK with me. And I'll still love you the same.' And he gave a very philosophical answer. He said something like, 'Well, I love the soul of a person and not the physical being.' And in my mind, I was like, 'Yep, he's gay.'" "I wasn't ready just yet," Greg added. "

Does this prove that it's not genetic? "What it proves is it's not completely genetic. They have the same genes," says Bailey. Asked if that brings us back to the mother and the father, Bailey says no. "But that's environment," Stahl said. "That's environment. But that's not the only environment. There's also the environment that happens to us while we're in the womb. And scientists are realizing that environment is much more important than we ever thought it was," Bailey explained.

A newborn rat pup in the lab of Dr. Marc Breedlove at Michigan State University, may, oddly enough, hold important clues to what happens in the womb. Dr. Breedlove says he can take a male rat and make it behave like a female for the rest of its life, and vice versa for a female, just by altering the hormones it's exposed to at birth. Because rats are born underdeveloped, that's roughly the same as altering a third-trimester human fetus in the womb. But first, he said, Stahl would need a crash course in rat sex. Dr. Breedlove explained that male rats, including one he showed Stahl called "Romeo," will mount any rat that comes their way. In the mating process, the female performs something called lordosis, where she lifts her head and rump. If Romeo goes after a male, Dr. Breedlove says the male will seem profoundly indifferent. But Breedlove says he can change all that. He gave a female rat a single shot of the male sex hormone testosterone at birth. Now grown up, she will never perform lordosis. But a male rat did. He was castrated at birth, depriving him of testosterone. "So you created a gay rat?" Stahl asked. "I wouldn't say that these are gay rats. But I will say that these are genetic male rats who are showing much more feminine behavior," he explained. So the answer may be that it's not genes but hormones. "That's exactly the question that we're all wondering. This business of testosterone having such a profound influence. Does that have some relevance to humans?" Breedlove said.

While biologists look at hormones for answers about human sexuality, other scientists are looking for patterns in statistics. And hard as this is to believe, they have found something they call "the older brother effect." "The more older brothers a man has, the greater that man's chance of being gay," says Bailey. Asked if that's true, Bailey says, "That is absolutely true." If this comes as a shock to you, you're not alone. But it turns out, it's one of the most solid findings in this field, demonstrated in study after study. And the numbers are significant: for every older brother a man has, his chances of being gay increase by one third. Older sisters make no difference, and there's no corresponding effect for lesbians. A first-born son has about a 2 percent chance of being gay, and the numbers rise from there. The theory is it happens in the womb. "Somehow, the mother's body is remembering how many boys she's carried before," says Breedlove. "The favorite hypothesis is that the mother may be making antibodies when she sees a boy the first time, and then affect subsequent boys when she carries them in utero." "You mean, like she's carrying a foreign substance?" Stahl asked. "And if you think about it, a woman who's carrying a son for the first time, she is carrying a foreign substance," Breedlove replied. "There are some proteins encoded on his Y chromosome that her body has never seen before and that her immune system would be expected to regard as 'invaders,'" he added. It's still not a proven theory and it gets even stranger. "One of the things we've only found out lately is that older brothers affect a boy only if the boy is right-handed," Breedlove said. "If the boy is left-handed, if his brain is organized in a left-handed fashion, it doesn't matter how many older brothers he has, his probability of being gay is just like the rest of the population." I'm right handed and first born, with no other brothers.

You can give yourself a headache trying to apply all the theories to real people. Greg and Steve Lofts both are right-handed, and they do have an older brother, so maybe that's why Greg is gay. But they also have several gay relatives, which suggests it could be in the genes, except where does that leave Steve? Adam and Jared, fraternal twins, have older brothers, but they're ambidextrous. Then there's the question of how something in the womb could affect one twin but not the other. There are many more questions at this point than answers, but the scientists 60 Minutes spoke to are increasingly convinced that genes, hormones, or both — that something is happening to determine sexual orientation before birth. Adam has come up with his own theory. "I was supposed to be a girl in my mom's stomach. But my mom wished for all boys. So, I turned into a boy," Adam explained. Asked if he wished he was a girl, Adam nodded. "Do you think there was anything that you could have done that would have changed Adam?" Stahl asked Adam and Jared's mom Danielle. "I could have changed Adam on the outside to where he would have showed me the macho boy that I would want as a boy. But that would not change who he is inside. And I think that would have damaged him a lot more," she said. Stahl asked both boys if they are proud of the way they are, and both boys gave her big nods. "Yup," Adam replied.

More at: www.cbs.com

There's a few things that I have to take issue with in this, and other articles like this.

From time immemorial, the scientific community, just like the psychology community, seem to hold with the idea that one of the fundamental characteristics of homosexuality is that it apes femininity. In the above article, there is a subtle allusion to masculinity (however the hell that is defined these days) being suppressed by a mother's immune system while she carries a male child in the womb. This is similar to a view, widely held for a while but since discredited, that a certain gland (I can't remember which one, but I think it was the pineal) in the brain of gay men is smaller in size than one in straight men, and surprise surprise, comparable to that of a straight woman. It would appear that the old preoccupation with size has spilled over into the realm of anatomy and physiology.

A few years ago, someone I know who was a psychology student, and very good at it, wrote a thesis postulating that rather than aping femininity, homosexuality should be regarded as an alternative masculinity. It's not hard to see why. To describe the archetypical camp queen as 'effiminate' is inaccurate. While some gay men have mannerisms that can be described as more flamboyant than those of straight men, comparisons of said mannerisms with those of straight women highlight the difference between the two. Gay men, often possessed of a certain something that allows them to be identified as such by a keen observer, have a 'style' all of their own. I'm not attacking the idea of effeminacy in men, in itself not intrinsically 'wrong', just saying that it doesn't exist to the extent everyone thinks it does. People of course will point out that gay men often prefer the company of straight women rather than straight men, not stopping to think that this says more about straight men generally than gay men in particular.

And now to the issue of sex. Who was it that said 'Women's virtue is man's greatest myth'? Anyway, there is the somewhat outdated notion that women (or more disparagingly, 'nice' women) don't like casual, unattached sex as much as men. Men may have higher sex drives on average, but to say that 'a woman only does it with the man she loves', well, some of these people need to get out more, and more specifically, go to a local pulling joint at a weekend and see what goes on there. But there's no point at all in denying that this notion still exists.

Women want lots of sex, end of story. The way current courtship rituals are set up in the straight world just means that they can get it whenever they want, so they can afford to discriminate a bit, provided they're someway attractive. Straight men, on the other hand, have to do more work to get it, so will jump at the chance when it's offered to them, thus perpetuating the notion that men are governed by....

I suppose that's one thing we have in common. Oh well. The point made in paragraph two about the success of gay men in getting laid is a good one though: Straight men would be putting it about so much more often if straight women would allow it.

I suppose what I'm advocating is the idea that gender roles no longer exist (if they ever did in the first place) at completely opposite poles. These days, a lot of us gravitate somewhere towards the middle, and occupy a ground that can be described as 'other'. This is a position that is occupied by gay men and lesbians quite a lot of the time, and should be considered instead of this rubbish of a gay man's brain being 'feminized' and a lesbian's brain being 'masculinized'. And anyone who thinks that men are inherently more competitive than women should think about why straight women have a reputation for being more bitchy towards one another than straight men.

Interesting piece though. Still, biological theories like this have been disproved before. I can't see this lasting forever. Perhaps scientists should stop looking at this through the lens of gender roles, and approach it from another angle.

Shit, I need to get back to studying.

Let the bitching begin

The new Big Brother contestants aren't even in the house a wet week, and already the bickering has started. What a bunch of twats.

At least The Sun can stop trying with their usual bollocks now. They're in headlines for most of the summer. God help us...

Plug

Readers of this blog may have noticed references to a certain newsletter called The Friday Thing throughout my time writing here. It's a weekly e-mail which gets delivered to your inbox every friday, thus guaranteeing that any other work you have to do that day goes flying out the window. Its parent company is called The Friday Project, and even though it is similar in name to the Friday Night Project, it has nothing to do with that turdpile, and even less to do with its supporters.

It's better than PopBitch, Private Eye, and any other satirical publication you may care to mention. It runs to about 25 pages of a Word document, so there's plenty to keep you entertained, and with a letters page at the end, there's plenty of opportunity for feedback. Just be prepared to have your missive cut to ribbons, which was once what almost happened to me.

I started reading this one day early in 2001 when someone I worked with sent on the link to me. In those days, it was little more than a campaign to get friday off work, and the accompanying newsletter, then free, amounted to about 8 to 10 pages in Word. Even if we couldn't get Friday off, these people reckoned, we could certainly find distractions for ourselves at that time of the week. Then an extended edition became available, but you had to pay a subscription fee (to be fair, it was only £10 a year at the time). Then the short version was discontinued, so it became subscription only, but it was still worth it.

Well, because of the success of the parent company, from the 2nd June the full weekly newsletter is now being offered for free. So, all of you who like your writing witty and bitchy, go to the Friday Thing site on that day and sign up. I'll try and remember to post a reminder on that day too.

For a taster, go here, a rather good essay on the nation's hopes for the world cup.

Hooray!

I'm an uncle. For the third time. My sister gave birth to a 8lb-odd boy this evening at about 5pm. In keeping with their obsession with Irish names, he's going to be called MacDara Seán, or something. A brother for Sadhbh and Fionn.

This level of patriotism in a couple who are firm leftists is a bit of a curiosity at times. Oh well. It's all cool. I must remember to send them a card.

"We don't have much time"

The study is, as per bloody usual, progressing at a funereal pace. I'm getting through subjects at roughly one-third of the speed required to cover the amount of material that would net me a reasonable pass this year. I've already given up on replicating last year's achievement of a 2.1. All I want is 40% in everything so I don't have to come back and do anything again.

This morning we had seminars on Medicine Design, and I don't feel quite so bad about what has to be done now, but then again, blind panic is usually the only thing that will motivate me to work, so I'm not sure if that's a good thing.

I've pretty much decided that if I don't get a decent job in Brighton for the summer, then I'll go home and see if I can get some work in IT. I can NOT see myself sticking out the supermarket job for more than a couple of weeks, and doing it for a full summer would cancel out all the positive aspects of staying in Brighton, and then some. Hopefully I'll get some office admin or data entry job instead. It'd be nice to catch up with some of the old heads in Dublin, though. It's been a while, and Pride in Brighton falls on a weekend this year (well, the best part does) so going to that is still a possibility even if I don't end up staying there.

Now I must go back to work, and stop googling Lawrence Dallaglio.*

Mmmmm. Mighty fine. I'd almost sit through an entire rugby match just to look at him. Almost.

*The secret to a good google nudity search is to make sure Google's SafeSearch facility is off.

It's the last line that cracks me up.

Thanks to Basando la vida en el Pene, or if you like, 'Basing life on the Penis', if Babelfish at Altavista is to be believed.

Pinched...

... from BN2beeyatches. Again.

My blog is worth $564.54.
How much is your blog worth?

Also, I did this online survey thing, which generates a blog code for you (a bit like a bear code, but for bloggers). I am:

B6 d- t- k- s- u-- f- i- o++ x+ e l- c

Pissed OFF!

The last few days got off to a shit start last Friday. In Asda I decided I'd be a bit adventurous and try and new recipe or two, so I bought some utensils (a colander and a roasting tin, to be exact), along with a slightly bigger shop than usual. The bill came to £46. I only had £50 to work with that week. Only £4 left for an entire week, which was used to buy a carton of milk and do my laundry.

Then began work. I have noticed something.

Saturday: My shift coincides with bitchy supervisor. It sucks.

Sunday: My shift coincides with other laid back supervisor. In spite of the fact that we're flat out all day, it doesn't feel too bad, as we're left alone to get on with things.

Tuesday: My shift coincides with main manager. He's just about alright, but having to stand at a till all day - 8am to 5pm - with only one hour break, along with the attendant back ache, results in the shift being only barely tolerable. At about 3pm, the bitchy supervisor comes on, and the moaning about the insignificant begins again.

This is the problem. I'm listening to this woman whinge about how the £20 note compartment is jammed while I'm serving a queue of ten fucking people, bitch about how I have to ask for change for my till, and make a production of anything in general that has to be done. The other guy delegates, or else gets it done without any noise. Management has be the biggest area of underperformance on the planet with some people.

It might raise an eyebrow to hear my complaints about the job only this far in, but I've managed to put the finger on what the overall problem is: I'm not afraid of exertion (as long as there isn't too much of it), but the kind of work where you are constantly watching the clock, willing your shift to end, is the kind of work that has always done my head in. Sometimes this reminds me of the days when I used to work in a factory, always looking at the clock with longing. I've worked in places where there were no small amount of physical demands, but I didn't mind it, and the time seemed to fly.

There are jobs going at the pharmacy down the road from the shop. I've applied. I am praying. If it comes down to a choice between software testing in Dublin again this summer, and having to support myself in Brighton by working in the supermarket, I don't know if I could tolerate the latter.

I nearly fell over myself trying to make it in time for a lecture in malaria this morning, only to get there and find out it was cancelled. Aaaaarrggh!

At least the recipe I tried out - oven roasted vegetables with steak and peppercorn sauce - didn't turn out too badly, though I must remember for next time, peel garlic, NOT aubergines, and use less olive oil.

Delia Smith must be quaking in her boots.

Yippee!

I have discovered myTunes Redux, a file-sharing thing tailor-made for university halls of residence. I am like a baby in a sweet shop.

Current mood: Greedy

The last couple of days

It's been an interesting day or two from a college point of view, and it's been a while since that's happened.

Firstly, we had a rather interesting lectures on parasitology on Wednesday. The lecturer, who also happens to be my personal tutor, pertinently made points about how pharmaceutical industry control of drug prices in developing countries is fucking up efforts to treat patients with malaria, and how millions are dying as a result of this. Yeah, not exactly breaking news, I know, but you tend to forget these things when you get enclosed in your own little bubble after a while. One rather interesting development as a consequence of global warming, though, is that this affliction is headed right for our hemisphere, and it's already starting to show up in Italy. Watch the innoculations come out in force when it reaches us.

Secondly, I'd been pencilled in for a round on a HIV hospital ward on Thursday as part of the coursework. Although I knew squat about HIV drugs, I knew the treatment regimens were fairly complex, so I called around to a certain positive someone to get the low down on all of it (thanks again sweetie), and armed with this knowledge, toddled along to the hospital the next day.

While not being a complete eye-opener (there were no visibly-on-death's-door patients), it certainly raised an eyebrow at more than one point. Namely:

1. HIV treatment regimens are complicated enough, but if you think that's bad, trying being HIV positive and having other long-term conditions to deal with. One guy who'd also had a stroke had to wrestle with the less-than-enviable situation of being on 11 different medications a day.

2. Some patients can be difficult to deal with, to the point of hanging up on doctors when the latter are on the phone trying to tell them that it's in their best interests to admit themselves. Can you say 'idiot'? Then there's the ones who don't take their drugs, even when non-adherence in HIV+ patients can be seriously damaging, but I suppose I need to walk in their shoes when it comes to that one...

3. Some will lie about certain aspects of their lifestyle to health professionals, even when this falsehood is so blatantly obvious, hearing it raises questions about how they perceive others to see them.

4. The... er... theme of unpredictable uncontrollable diarrhoea as a side-effect of some of the HIV meds recurred constantly, even with those who were on anti-diarrhoeal drugs. Personally, I think highlighting this would go a lot further than some of the safe-sex campaigns that are always doing the rounds, but maybe that's just me. Then there's the nausea and God knows what else in individual patients.
   I feel inspiration for a prevention campaign coming on...

Then there was the bodybuilder who was taking anabolic steroids that would normally be used on horses. And the one who had come off heroin years ago, only to resume using it as a method of controlling pain.

At the end, I had an interesting chat with the pharmacy chief. Among the things we talked about was the perennial topic of how although the work in this area can be fulfilling, it - as per bloody usual - doesn't make half as much as working in a high street pharmacy, fielding questions about nappy rash and chesty coughs. Gah! When it comes to buying property on your own (something I, at the age of 33 when I graduate, am going to have to think about), these kind of economics get more consideration than they deserve, and it sucks.

I finished off the day by meeting the hot bear I had referred to previously, and bringing him back to mine. He turned out to be quite well versed, and the only problem that presented itself was the drunken giggling and shrieking of some of the girl flatmates outside my bedroom door, which is rather distracting when you're being worked on, so I had to march out there and, willing some piety into my voice, announce that 'I was studying'.

It wasn't a complete lie, if you look at it from a certain perspective...

Midweek

I should've know better than to head out again on sunday night after work, but that's never stopped me before. I had received word from Bear that 'Flee was in the Bulldog so I decided to drop in.

After a short while, I got ..er.. talking to a hot bear with a rug on his chest. His boyfriend was there too, but they are in an open relationship. He gave me his number. If anything is to happen, I need to ring him tonight or tomorrow night at the latest.

The Fleemeister can't quite recall, but he reckons that the man is a target he has previously acquired. Surprise!

Everyone in college was talking about all the essays they're currently working on this morning, and it all made me quite nervous. I distracted myself by looking at a hot barechested skin lying out on the grass on campus in the sun. Yum!

Back home from work...

... and feeling a little bit better. I circled the shop today before I was due to begin work, willing the shift that I was about to start to be better than the one I did yesterday. Thankfully it was, and I don't feeling like throwing in the towel any more. The duty manager who was on today, a chap called Lee, is more laid back and better at getting things done than the woman who was on yesterday, and he himself referred pointedly to her style of doing things as we walked home, so at least I know it's not just me.

Our takings were up by a substantial amount on last sunday as well, so that should please the powers that be.

Tomorrow I get up and make a start on endocrinology, before I forget why I came here.

Lots to do, little time...

Update

Just back at my room after work now (I've got broadband in my room now. Yay!). It was a day from hell. I didn't get enough stuff moved from the storage area to the shelves, according to my supervisor, and she didn't really seem interested in the fact that storage was crammed to the rafters and finding particular products was a nightmare. Having said that, I need to become more efficient in this area. Then again, if a minimum of stuff needs to be shifted during a shift, it should be made clear, and supervisors running around having panic attacks don't help, as don't staff shortages (I had help last week when I was doing this).

Hopefully this won't become a bigger incident, but one thing is certain: This job sucks.

Anyway, I got back to the house after my preceding entry about my birthday and found a text on my phone from the man Dan. His girlfriend June has given birth to a baby boy (9 pounds! Bloody hell...) after running almost two weeks overdue. So Luke Vernon Brooks, the baby in question, shares my birthday. It should be fun taking him out for his first legal drink in 18 years time.

I met Dan and his parents that night for a few drinks, and then came back here, and even though a certain tipsiness informed the scene, I still managed to install a network card and drivers onto my computer. Nice to see I haven't forgotten some of what I learned in IT. Incidentally, when I walked into the kitchen, some of the girls I live with had been out, and were lolling drunkenly all over the couch, giggling with uninhibited abandon, the smell of girlie farts permeating the air. They had torn a piece of white card off of something, and wrote 'Happy Birthday Dennis, from ?', with a balloon drawn next to it. It made me feel special, even though they spelled my name wrong.

Friday, I was joined by 'Flee and Phil, along with Sarah, for a meal for my birthday (thanks for treating me, people!) and then drinks were had afterwards in Dr. Brightons. The staff behind the bar were hot.

Sarah and I continued to party into the small hours, and the two of us ended up at that bastion of gay maleness, the Bulldog, where Sarah ended up what looked like being chatted up by some guy. A guy who had a boyfriend. After I had dropped her off at Phils to sleep I returned for one more, and got talking to a hot n' burly bloke name Gary,who has been texting me since.

As an aside, some people just couldn't let the fact that I was with a girl go without passing comment. Paul, an ex-stalker entanglement of mine, huffed that I 'seemed to have changed', and when I re-entered without Sarah, the moron manager of the Star Inn said "Well, that was a short shag". Grow up, ye twats!

Today, I met Sarah for breakfast, and then she got the train back, and I went into purgatory, sorry, work. So endeth the fun. With a bang.

God only knows if I'll stick this. I think the worst thing about it is that there is no-one to really pass the time with there, and for that kind of job, only a twenty minute break in an eight-hour shift is not enough.

Someone say a prayer for me.

Birthday boy

It's my birthday today. I'm 31.

In hexadecimal (base 16), that's... erm... 1F. This makes me look like I'm still a teenager. On the whole, I can't think if this makes me feel better or worse. Worse, I think.

31 years ago today, the song 'Oh Boy' by Mud was number one in the UK charts. The song 'He Don’t Love You Like I Love You' by Tony Orlando & Dawn was number one in America. No, I've never heard of these either, which is weird considering the current album I have on my discman was made in 1973 ('For Your Pleasure', by Roxy Music).

Famous people born on April 27th? I fed my name into this online history thing, and from what I can see, a great many composers were born on this day, including Sergei Sergeyevich Prokofiev, in 1891. There was also a physicist named de Broglie, whose laws I vaguely remember struggling with when I was doing physics courses in university before. Sheena Easton, in 1959. A baseball player named Chris Carpenter shares my birthday, year and all...

Oh, WHATEVER!

It's also Freedom Day in South Africa - FYI Slagella - and today is also World Day of Design.

Right, I think I'll quit while I'm ahead...

Nothing doing today. The party is on tomorrow night, with 'Flee, Phil, and the venerable Sarah, who is coming down from London for the day. Party time!

On the TV the other night...

Bill:	"What do you think we should do?"
Alice:	"What do I think we should do?"
Helena (in background):	"Look, Mommy!"
Alice:	"What do I think? I don't know. I mean, maybe... Maybe I think.... we should be grateful. Grateful... that we've managed to survive through all of our... adventures... whether they were real... or only a dream."
Bill:	"Are you sure of that?"
Alice:	"Am I sure? Only as sure as I am... that the reality of one night... let alone that of a whole lifetime... can ever be the whole truth. And no dream is ever... just a dream. The important thing is... we're awake now... and hopefully... for a long time to come."
Bill:	"Forever."
Alice:	"Forever?"
Bill:	"Forever."
Alice:	"Let's not use that word, you know? It frightens me. But, I do love you... and you know... there is something very important... that we need to do as soon as possible."
Bill:	"What's that?"
Alice:	"Fuck."

(Now dowload and listen to the song for the closing credits here.)

I don't care what any of the critics say. Eyes Wide Shut rocks.

Work

The weekend was a blur, spending most of it as I did working in the supermarket. On Saturday I came in, stood watching one of the till girls do her thing - a waste of time, as she did it so quickly I couldn't learn anything - and then went onto the tills myself. I was more than a little nervous, what with a queue snaking halfway down the shop and only two of us to deal with all of it. After a while I settled in. Barcode readers are a cinch, making most of your work brain dead, and you only have to think when someone asks you for something like a lottery ticket or a mobile phone top-up. My only mistakes were IDing a 21 year-old for cigarette papers and a 28 year-old for alcohol. A bit of paranoia on my part.

There's also shelf-stacking though, which can be very tedious and take quite a bit out of you with all the lifting and bending. I have to work tomorrow as well, I'm not sure if it's an eight-hour shift or a nine hour one, but it's a pain having to go in. I'm already tired after the last two days - yawning at my desk here - and I wouldn't normally take something like this on so close to my exams, but I need something to carry me through the summer, in the likely event of me not getting anything anywhere else. I'd prefer to stay in Brighton for the summer, and at the moment working at this is the only way I'll be able to do it. Having to return to Mallow and suffer unemployment would be unbearable.

Anyway, any job as a counter assistant after this will be a cinch. Roll on my next job, in something like Next or CloneZone.

First day on the job, sort of...

It went well, but then I was only there for 3 hours, watching videos as part of the induction process. There was one about the 'Philosophy of Co-op', which featured a rather inofffensive looking chap droning on about the history of the company, how it was set up with the community in mind, and about its social responsibility. There then followed a health and safety video about how spillages must be cleaned up as soon as possible after they occur (duh), and not to overreach for stuff when on the top of a tall ladder (ditto) and about how stuff shouldn't be left lying around on the shop flower in case people trip over them (unnhhhh!), along with the mandatory example about lifting stuff while keeping your back straight.

There then followed a rather scary video about restricted sale products, i.e. alcohol, solvents, and cigarettes. If a counter assistant gets caught selling booze to someone under 18, they can be held personally responsible for it and fined rather a lot of money. A lot of money if you're a penniless student anyhow. The same for the other two categories and their respective age minimums. Apparently the till reminds you of this on its screen automatically, but just to be sure, I think I'll be IDing anyone not old and grey who's buying booze, smokes, or lighter fluid for the next week or so.

I start Saturday afternoon. I've never worked in this kind of environment before, so I'm just a tad nervous. Fingers crossed...

Thank GOD!

After having another application for a pharmacy placement rejected (Lloyds) and having my interview for phone debt collector for Lloyds TSB lead nowhere as well, I was getting pretty despondent. It was one rejection after another, but today I had an interview for a job for a branch of the Co-op chain of supermarkets. The manager just rung me back to offer me the job! I'm in gainful employment again!! Yayyyyy!

I've zero counter experience with a cash register, and the work does sound back-breaking in parts, but sod it, I should be able to manage. I'll need counter experience for pharmacy work anyway, so this should be a good way of getting it. Fingers crossed it won't be a complete disaster.

This should soften the blow when I ring up my parents and ask them for help with paying the rent on my room again!

Out last night with Bear and 'Flee and Phil for Bear's belated birthday. Thursday 27th is my birthday. I think I'll have the night out on Friday night. Sarah Al is making an appearance too. That should be good.

In other news, I found the previously mislaid old CD-R of men that I had collected over the years, thankfully, so my man-gallery is complete once more! It was fun going through it the other night, taking a trip down memory lane, recalling where I got each of them...

Also, the grand opening of my brother's restaurant went really well, by all accounts. Good-oh, I'll have to bestow upon them an improptu tasting session when I next get home. Whether they like it or not.

Pictures!

Steady yourselves, ladies and gentlemen.



On the train to London on Friday morning. This was taken by Phil. I had been out the night before, and was trying to grab an hour's shut eye before hitting the smoke. This has been put on my gaydar profile for the simple reason that if you're going to sleep with someone, it's important to know what they look like asleep.



I woke up after a while. I rather like this one, and it's been put on my gaydar profile as well.





The first of the pictures taken in Expectations. Not a candidate for my gaydar profile. I really should've known better than to wear something with short sleeves. Phil said the cap was a cliché. Perhaps he's right, but they can look hot on some people, whomever they may be.






A slight improvement, with the shirt a size slightly bigger, but still not the best of the bunch. Especially with the sodding tag clearly visible on the right.





Better. No tags, long sleeves, and extra breadth in the shoulders. When I have enough money to splash out on this kind of stuff (Mid 2008+) this is the combo I shall opt for. Also put on my gaydar profile.






So there you go, ladies and gents. I wouldn't ever have thought that leather would be my thing, but in some circumstances, it appears that it can be.

Orders, contracts, rabid entreaties from men who want me in their bed, in the comments section, please...

London Bear and Leather Pride

Well, I'm back and fully recovered. Friday was more a day of fun than a day of debauchery, and that was just the way I liked it.

I rose slightly later than expected on Friday morn to the sound of BigPuppy ringing me demanding that I get up and get ready. Once I shook off the hangover from the night before, I did my thing and met him at Brighton Station at noon(-ish) and we jumped onto a train.

Hitting LondonBridge at around 3pm, we headed straight to Expectations to try on some leather gear. This store has a policy of no photography, but luckily the counter assistant disappeared off behind the scenes at one stage, and the Pupster was ready with his camera. Full advantage was taken - many outfits were tried on - and I wanted to upload these pictures here, now, but this stupid computer won't let me (in an internet café as all the college facilities are shut today). I'll have to wait until Tuesday. In the end I left the shop having bought a red jockstrap.

Once we had that done, we headed to Soho to check out the gay strip. We settled on Comptons first, where I could have stayed downstairs all day drooling over the hot bear couple across the bar from us. We went upstairs and settled into a big pair of armchairs next to a window that looked down onto the street. You can see these in the photo on the website. We eventually headed off to take in the Kings Arms. We headed upstairs to the poolroom with our drinks, and I salivated over the hot bears playing. After that, we headed off to Italian Graffiti to eat (nice!) and then back to the Kings Arms. At this point the bar had filled up with masses of hairy beasts, and the sensory overload was making my head spin, probably because of the blood rushing from it to go somewhere else. There was just so many men I didn't know where to begin! Having said that, I did manage - after much deliberation - to march upto one guy and tell him he had a great arse...

Then it was on the bus to Chunk, where they were having the friday night bear social. This was more of the same: loads of big hairy men everywhere, and we got talking to two guys I recognised from Brighton and stuffed our face with the barbeque food. We eventually got talking to one of the hot bears who I saw playing pool earlier, who turned out to be nice and chatty, though unavailable to me, *sniff*.

Later we boogied (Even Phil! Alas, no camera) and I locked lips with two or three different bears, including a hot Belgian one who was quite a vociferous kisser. At the end of the night, I hooked up with a small stocky cub, and it was decided that I would go back to his. It was only in the taxi queue that I realised that he was coked out of his head, so I jumped ship and quickly re-connected with Phil, and he walked me down to the Chariots sauna in Vauxhall.

It was at this point, regrettably, that things started to go pear-shaped. This was my first time in a sauna, and I was only there to while away some time until the trains to Brighton started running again. The customer base seemed to fall into one of two camps, twink or muscle boy. I've been a bit cynical lately about bear club's assertions that they are 'attitude-free', but the laid-back antics of Chunk were in stark contrast to the meat-market feel of this place. It was a bit of a catch-22 situation: The people who I fancied weren't into me, and equally the people who moved on me weren't my cup of tea either. You have to be pretty thick-skinned to cope with the goings on in a gay sauna, and I wasn't used to it. I got entangled, but the sparks didn't exactly fly. One thing I noticed was that one of the Brighton guys I was talking to earlier was there, and even though I'm still not sure if I like him, he is hot, and I checked him out getting hot n' heavy with some other guy for a while. After that, I tried the darkroom, and although I messed around with a couple of guys in there, I found the fact that you couldn't see your hand in front of your face, never mind the face of the others, more than a bit irritating.

After about two hours or so, I got bored and headed for the video lounge and fell asleep there for a while. I was woken by a twink groping me at about 10:30 in the morning, and after throwing him off, I showered and got dressed and got the train back to Brighton. There I grabbed a few more hours of sleep, thus righteously cocking up my sleeping pattern for last night, so that was why I was still up at 1am watching the Amityville Horror for the twentieth time...

Bear & Leather Pride is still ongoing in London right now, but that's it for me. It was a fun Friday, discounting how I ended it, and I know where I'll be going next time I'm in London.

Back to earth with a bang. College on Tuesday. Exams only seven weeks away. Only my birthday on the 27th of this month to look forward to now. Onward ho...

Woo hoooooo!

My grant cheque has cleared into my accout in time for Bear Pride this weekend! Yessssss! So I'm off to London on Friday for a night of debauchery. For too long, me and Phil have been planning a night like this, but something has always gotten in the way. Well, no more obstacles! This Friday is partytime!

My brother and his fiancé have recently moved back to Mallow to take advantage of the business opportunity of opening a restaurant that has lain dormant for a while. The grand opening is this Saturday. I wouldn't have minded being there, but the flights are too expensive to book this close to the time. Oh well...

Anyway, tomorrow I shop for army boots to complete my combat pants/t-shirt/black jacket military ensemble. Watch out London!