RIP Mizz 'Flee

Andy Howarth, sometime commentator here under the handle of 'Flee, and contributor to the blog BN2 Beeyatches, passed away early this morning. He was 37.

Below is the most recent photo I have of him (left), taken last July at his civil partnership, with James.



Farewell, honey. It was fun propping up the bar in the Bully with you all those times.

OH MY FUCKING GOD!

Yesterday turned out to be an uninspiring day. I toddled along to the sixth floor results noticeboard to find out the result of an assignment I handed in ages ago. I passed, but the result was less than stellar. I was furious, partly because the guidelines for what was required for the finished work were unclear, and I know that's at least part of the reason why I didn't do so well. I went home, resolving to e-mail the course co-ordinator and at least get to the bottom of why I hadn't done well. I had yet to hear from the hospital I interviewed at last week, and felt in my heart that I hadn't done well enough to get a place.

Today I came into uni to work on a presentation that I have to give tomorrow, and to do my laundry in preparation for the Bear Bash at Manchester for the weekend. I was still smarting from the mark I got the day before, and was moaning about it to anyone who would listen. Specifically, Denise and Karina, with whom I was having coffee when I first came in.

Suddenly my phone rang, with a blocked number. Sensing that it was the hospital, I excused myself from the girls, and went into a quiet corner.

"Hello?"

"Hello, Denis, this is Fiona here from [London Hospital]. You had an interview with us last week."

My heart sank. It wasn't the chief pharmacist, but his deputy. He had probably delegated to her the task of telling me I was unsuccessful.

"OK"

"We've had a chance to review your exam and interview, and you've done very well..."

"OK..." My heart sank some more. I anticipated she was about to begin her next sentence with 'but'.

"...and we'd like to offer you the position".

OhMyGodDidSheJustSayWhatIThinkSheSaid?

To say that my heart skipped a beat would be an understatement. The woman asked me if I needed time to think about it. "No" I managed to squawk, "I'd like to accept."

After that, it was just small talk about how they'd formally notify me by post.

So, to my absolute disbelief, I have managed to snag a hospital in London for the next year. And not only that, but one of the premier teaching hospitals in the UK.

It would be understatement to say that in the last while, my faith in myself to make a success of myself has waned substantially, and the future was looking uncertain. To say that the phone call I received today goes someway towards helping would also be downplaying things.

So. Operation Soho.

Status: Success!

HOT!

One of the kissers is gay porn star Eric York, apparently.

I turned 33 yesterday.

It passed with little fanfare but large hangover, thanks to the party I went to on Saturday night (and like, where did that massive bruise on my arm come from? And how did I get food all down the front of my pants?)

A special mention to Luke Brooks, who also had his birthday yesterday. He is 2.

The continuing saga of college

Well, it's not like I have anything else to write about (except for that time on Tuesday night where I went out for a friend's 30th birthday party and we stayed out until 6am and my 30-year old friend got hilariously drunk and in the grand old student tradition robbed a traffic cone and one of the girls we were with decided she wouldn't be outdone and robbed a sandbag from the same roadworks site but anyway I digress where was I?).

I still haven't scored a job for after graduation. I have accepted that I most likely will be working in a community pharmacy for a year. This is fine by me in some respects, as it would be a gentler introduction to working in the field. The only thing is that because I'm going to be working in a relatively confined space for a year, I have to make sure the supervising pharmacist who takes me under his wing isn't the kind to soar high into the sky and then drop me, i.e. relatively sane and decent with people who sometimes need things explained to them more than once.

Having said that, I'm still keeping an eye on the hospital sector. I recently applied to a hospital near Birmingham. The location certainly wouldn't be anything approaching my personal preference, but I figured I might as well try. It turned out that I didn't even get shortlisted for an interview. I was a bit annoyed with that, but figured that at least it saved me a long train journey, and I sent them a mail asking them for feedback on my application.

They said my application was strong, as usual, but that while I listed my pharmacy experience, I didn't specifically mention what I gained from it. I took this on board, and also the advice of one of the tutors at university who said that I should emphasize the hospital experience I gained from within my course (I previously tended not to think of this as an asset, as every pharmacy student does it throughout their course). I redid my CV, and sent it off on Thursday for another vacancy that has arisen in a well-known London teaching hospital. I wasn't very optimistic, as the Birmingham hospital had about 60 applicants for one position, and as the London one is a popular hospital, it was bound to have even more.

I must have done something right, as I got a phone call the next afternoon, asking me if I would like to attend for interview this coming Wednesday. They asked for my e-mail address and said that they would send on the details. I haven't got them yet, however, so I'm ringing them on Monday morning.

It's all a bit of a juggling act at the moment, as I have a presentation to give in 10 days, a draft of my thesis to hand in at some point this coming week, and now I have to prepare for this interview as well, which by all accounts is supposed to be a fairly gruelling process, according to the people who have done it already.

I picked up my graduation pack earlier in the week, which felt a little weird. It had all the arrangements for the ceremony in it, along with a brochure for gown hire. I've bought the tickets, and reserved my place at the ceremony. It feels a little strange that the whole degree will be over and done with in just over a month (not to mention scary: all I can think about is how much I still don't know, and how I'll eventually be responsible for the drugs that loads of people will be taking). At this stage, I'm fairly confident of passing (the introduction for my thesis was well received: my tutor told me that as long as I keep writing as I am, I'll be fine), but I can't yet put a finger on what kind of degree I'm going to get.

In the middle of all this, I've almost forgotten that I'll be 33 next Sunday. I've plans to celebrate with the venerable Luke Brooks, who'll be 2 this year on the same day. Other than that the Bear Bash in Manchester will be the following Friday, so that should suffice. Fingers crossed there'll be some hot furry action, though I am NOT looking forward to the 7 hours on the bus (all the cheap rail tickets were gone. Aaarrrggghh!)

Now back I go to that wretched dissertation...

A random conversation from the Pharmacy Ball

Me: "My ass has really come on in leaps and bounds since I started going to Kung Fu."
Claire: "Yeah, me too! Check out my Kung Fu ass. Yeah!"
Me: "Yeah, check out my Kung Fu ass! Yeeaaaahhh!"

Enter Denise, another Kung Fu student.

Denise: "Hey Guys, whatchya at? Kung Fu asses?"
Claire & Denis: "Yeah, check out our Kung Fu asses."
Denise (not to be outdone): "Well, check out MY Kung Fu ass. Yeeahhh!"
Claire, Denise, and Denis: "We got the best asses! Kung Fu, yeeahh!"

Enter Sinéad, a non-Kung Fu student.

Sinéad: "Wow guys, your asses look really great. I think I might take up Kung Fu."


I blame the four free glasses of red wine before dinner.

Reactionary old gits?

I've just been out to get my free copy of GScene in the Bully, and after leafing through some of it in RedRoaster coffee shop (who happened to have a good album by someone called Loop Foundation playing over the speakers), I found out that a conviction against former Tory Brighton councillor Peter Willows has been overturned in an appeal.

For those of you who don't know this story, it goes something like this.

At a civic ceremony for the then new mayor of Brighton a while back (August 2006), Peter Willows, a member of the Brighton Conservative Party, made a comment that 'all gay men are paedophiles'. He made this comment to Paul Elgood, a Lib Dem councillor and himself a gay man. At the end of the ceremony, Willows was re-approached by the councillor and James Ledward (the editor of GScene) and taken to task on it. When asked by Ledward if he thought that Elgood too was a paedophile, he said no, but that 'all other gays are'. It was an isolated and somewhat pathetic incident, and Willows really should have known better, but he refused to recant or apologise. Matters were complicated some more by the fact that Willows sat on the Brighton Community Safety committee, which had pledged to make LGBT safety its top concern at that time. He really should have kept his mouth shut.

The conservative party refused to take action, so Ledward went to the police. He made a complaint on the grounds that Willows committed a public order offence. Willows went to trial in December 2006 (after not bothering to turn up for the first hearing) and after a fairly pathetic defence by anyone's standards, he was convicted and subsequently resigned as tory councillor for the region he represented.

It was the aftermath that held my interest the most. One man, a friend of Peter willows, was interviewed in The Argus and said that the conviction was unjust, that too much of the law had been brought to bear on the Councillor and (if I remember rightly) that he had merely exercised his right to free speech. That friend of his was gay. The opinion underpinning the editorial in the newspaper at that time was that poor old Willows, being a 75 year old war veteran, should have been left alone. I came away from all this with a few things.

The standard defence that is trotted out on behalf of an older person who comes out with racist or homophobic comments is their advanced age. Why? Is it because they grew up in a time where the mainstream was less tolerant than it is now? The assumption behind all of this is that they have absorbed the values of the time when they were younger, and have since reached the point where they can no longer take on board newer ones, or adjust to what is going on around them. As lines of reasoning go, it's bollox, but when you think about it, it is the pernicious undercurrent that informs a lot of the ageism that you see around today: Older people are physically more frail, therefore they must be frailer in mind and intellect as well. They're not as resilient or adaptive as their younger counterparts, and therefore are not as useful as members of society in general. Blah blah blah. It is the logic that sees the elderly experience great difficulty in securing gainful employment, to name one of the many problems that are thrown their way.

The flip side of the coin is that Willows has been around for a long time. He's been living in Brighton and Hove for quite some time now, so will have had some exposure to the gay community. He's had a great deal of time to amass the wisdom that is the preserve of those who have been around for longer than the rest of us. He's seen more of the world and has seen more of the suffering wrought by wars than the average bloke, so by now he really should, at the very least, have some bit of wisdom and humility in his current dealings with people. His age is no defence. None at all.

Also, you have to wonder about that friend of his, a gay man friends with a man who obviously has issues with gay men. What does that say about the self-respect of the former? The way it worked out in court *could* be likened to the killing of a fly with a sledgehammer, but no-one else was prepared to do anything else.

One pet peeve of mine is that point about free speech. It's somehow seen as a violation of someone's personal rights when they are taken to task over making homophobic comments, and that casual homophobia is still acceptable, nay expected, in everyday circles.

Whenever I hear this, I think, if you replaced the homophobia with racism, would people still find it acceptable, if slightly unpalatable? Not at all, and like I've said before, homophobia can almost be put into this category at this stage. The fact remains though, if Willows had been racist instead of homophobic that day, his feet wouldn't have touched the ground and the door wouldn't have hit his ass on his way out. But because he was being homophobic, a case wasn't automatically made, and when it eventually was, it was done so in an awkward and haphazard way.

It's like this: Willows is a politician, and in a public position. There is a certain responsibility that goes with this position that he wasn't willing to live by. He tried to have his cake and eat it. He was fed an enema and...oh you get the picture.

Willows was a serial homophobe. When LGBT police liaison officers went on a fact-finding mission and training course to San Francisco previous to that time, he attacked them in the press, and the result was a tabloid feeding frenzy which resulted in the officers being followed and photographed in San Francisco nightclubs. It was more than a little invasive for the officers in question, but Willows was never cautioned by his own party, and again refused to apologise for it.

Ledward said his fundamental motivation for going to court was:

"...for every young LGBT teenager who is taunted and bullied at school for being different because bigots in public office have for years been able to spout this type of hate without being challenged."

He was running for office himself later that year, but denied that this was also a factor in his pursuit of this case. The first reason is honestly good enough, and I don't give a shit if he was looking to bolster his public profile or not. He did the right thing.

Alas, it looks like the right thing has been undone. Surprisingly, the editorial in The Argus seems to have executed something of a U-turn, and has now summed up the result of the appeal quite well:

"This is not a case of common sense triumphing over political correctness. It is a vindication of a narrow-minded minority's urge to slap crass labels on those who exercise their freedom to live their lives the way they choose."

Indeed.

Did I mention...

that I passed that Psychopharmacology exam? Yay me!

Perhaps there's something to be said for the divine power of prayer. Or the journal article on depression I managed to cram into my brain the night before.

Graduation ceremony arranged for 30th July. My own attendance at it might not be such an outlandish possibility after all.

Just glad it's over

I have not had the best of weeks this week.

Monday saw me go into the lab to test my drugs as usual. For the most part, I've moved onto testing their influence on animal behaviour. I arrived on Monday morning with as much preparation done as I could do for an procedure I had never done before in my life. In other words, I was expecting a little bit of support.

Unfortunately, my project supervisor doesn't really seem to believe in... erm... supervising my project at this stage of it. The students who had already done it were nowhere to be seen, and when I arrived at the animal lab for testing, the technician was of the opinion that as it was my experiment, he could just leave me alone to get on with it. So there it was. I spent about 15 minutes looking at the mice in their cages, psyching myself up to deal with the task at hand. Oh, and struggling not to pass out from the smell of the place, which is really rather rank.

Basically what is involved is that you have to 'expose' 12 mice to a 'unfamiliar environment'. The environment in this scenario is an open-topped tub with gridlines traced on the inside of the bottom of it, and two coffe cups turned upside down and placed on the base as well. Behold my carefully constructed plan below.

The idea is that you place two identical coffee cups in the positions marked on the plan, and then let each of the 12 mice explore their new environment for 3 minutes. Once the 12 3-minute sessions have elapsed, you begin the cycle again, allowing each mouse another 3 minutes to explore the same environment (for 'explore', you can read: Run up and down the box like a blue-arsed fly, shitting all over it).

Because there is more than one mouse per cage, and they all look the bloody same, you have to give each one of them an identifying mark on their tail so you know which one has been in the tub, and which one gets which drug by way of injection later. Let me tell you, dear reader, the marking of the tails is really quite a pain in the arse. By Christ, those little shits will wriggle, and given any opportunity at all, they will bite. Before I began the experiment, the technician informed me that he had been in the business for twenty years and had only been bitten twice, so that side of things wasn't really anything to be worried about. I must have been on a run of bad luck, because I was on my fifth mouse, during the first exposure cycle, when the little bollox managed to sink his teeth through latex gloves into my hand, drawing blood. I had been gentle with them and considerate of their plight up until then, but that was the watershed. After that, I was brisk and business-like.

It's at the end of the second cycle that each mouse gets injected. Mercifully, by the technician. Four will receive injections of saline (placebo) and the other eight will get injections of supposedly memory-enhancing drugs. Then they go back into their cages and chill out for the night. The next day you come along, change one of the coffee cups to a different one (the 'novel' stimulus marked above) and videotape each of them as they do their 3-minute thing in the tub again.

I was left on my own again, to work out the video camera.

The theory is that the mice injected with the memory-enhancing drugs will have better recollection of the environment that they have been put into previously. They should have greater recognition of the new coffee cup as an unfamiliar object, and spend more time exploring it. So far, this has been the case for all the mice, even the ones that got placebo. You also have to count the number of gridlines each mouse crosses during the 3 minute session, to determine if the drug has a stimulant or sedative effect, compared to placebo. I have yet to do the statistics on the results to show if the ones injected with the memory enhancers display a significant difference. I do know one thing though: This part of the experiment blows, and I have to do it two more times before I'm finished. The only thing that motivates me now is the sooner I get it done, the sooner I can get on my write up and work on getting as good a mark as possible.

I came in yesterday, to try and work on some animal tissue. That didn't even get off the ground. Still, there's always next week.

This morning I woke up (well, this afternoon, but I digress) and found a letter from a debt collection agency addressed to me. When I left the old house 6 months ago, there was some loose ends with regards to bills. The landlord took the gas bill and told us he would take care of it, and deduct the appropriate amount from our deposits. He didn't take care of it, hasn't returned my deposit to me at all, and he's not returning my calls (I left him a message on his voicemail today threatening to pay him a personal visit at his address in London). Somehow the fuckers at the gas company have found out where I live now and are pursuing me over it to the tune of £120. I'm getting well sick of this, and am going to try and take the buy-to-let monkey to court. What bugs me is why the gas company are coming after me rather than him. I'm tempted to go to court and argue my case, but it's hassle I don't need. And the bitch who left the house before the end of the tenancy seems to have gotten off scot-free. It really makes my blood boil. So now I'm assembling paperwork for an application for an emergency grant top-up when I really could be doing something else. Gah!

On the plus side, the pharmacy ball is next Friday, and I've managed to organise a tuxedo. Should be a laugh. The facebook pictures should be something to behold anyway.

This says how I feel...

(Nicked from BN2Beeyatches)

I had my first experience with Vista back in October, when I started back in my part-time tech-support job at the university. The influx of first years had begun, and with them their laptops, needing to be configured to connect to the university network. I just about had the patience to do it on XP (just), but on Vista? Bloody hell. Negotiating the 'innovative' interface gave enough cause to tear my hair out (if I had any), and why, when you try to launch an app or open a file, does it ask you if you are sure that this is what you want to do?

When I worked in software testing, part of the pleasure of my daily grind for the first half of my tenure - about 2 years - was testing various desktop applications on various different versions of Windows. Most of the applications were themselves written by Microsoft, who dictated that they had to be tested on every version of Windows going. As a result, I built up my experience with - and subsequently formed an opinion of - everything ranging from Windows 95 to Windows XP. You want the definitive guide? Of course you do.

Windows 95: Superceding all versions of the Windows GUI before it, it was supposed to feature universal Plug n' Play. It didn't. Although lacking in features compared to what came after it, it was reasonably stable, although I'm sure you'll agree that when it comes to Windows in general, that's not saying a whole lot.

Windows 98: More unstable than a nuclear bomb primed for detonation. Microsoft quickly realised their mistake, and released...

Windows 98SE: A slight improvement on it's predecessor, and as far back as Microsoft were willing to go when testing their applications in 2000. Bought a PC with Windows 95 on it and didn't feel like upgrading a mere 5 years later? Too bad. I have fond memories of frantically trying to locate various device drivers at work because this one came with f**kall as standard.

Windows NT Workstation and Server: A widely distributed (in market terms) business OS, it still wasn't what you'd call the first choice for setting up a stable network. One of guys I worked with who generally tended to work on distributed applications described its day-to-day status as 'up and down like a whoor's knickers'. Other than that, the interface was about the same as Windows 98SE.

Windows Millennium: The follow-up to 98 SE it was universally derided as one of the most bug-ridden unstable version of Windows out there (PC World called it the fourth worst product of all time). I ran this on my own PC for a while, however, and it did generally tend to behave itself, though I never really used it for much, and it wasn't what you'd describe as overflowing with features.

Windows 2000 Professional and Server: In my opinion, the first time Microsoft started to get it right. As a client OS, whether you were a business or home user, Win 2000 did the job adequately, and as far a I can see, is the most stable of all the client operating systems Microsoft have released to date. The Server edition didn't have too bad a track record in most of the places I used to work. Also the last of the operating systems that didn't require online activation, thus making the installation of pirate copies a breeze. Mystifyingly, it holds only something like 2% of the current Microsoft market share.

Windows XP: Never one to operate by the adage 'If it ain't broke, don't fix it', Microsoft ploughed on. This followed shortly after 2000, and has most of its features (with a few extra unnecessary bells and whistles), but not a whole lot of its predecessor's stability. Oh, and it's ugly. It's seemingly shorter boot-up time compared to Win 2000 comes at the inconvenience of waiting around for over a minute while it hourglasses post-login. Sneaky little trick, that one. I tried to get away from XP when I came over here, but a computer I was given for free 2 years ago had XP installed, and most of the computers in the college did too, so I was forced to get used to it. Not the worst, as long as you don't try and work quickly with it: that confuses it, and it promptly hangs.

Windows Vista: As far as I've seen, a complete rip-off of OS X. All major features have been regrouped (like, what's with the bloody Network Connections section? It was fine as it was) and God forbid you try and install any of the leading anti-virus applications, that way lies tears. Prone to spontaneously shutting down on Dell laptops, which is a bit of a bummer when you're working on that essay that is due in the next day and you forgot to save your work as you went along (this happened to my flatmate). The update patches are already out in force. How embarassing...

So there you have it, folks. Burn yourself a copy of Windows 2000 Professional (in the next two years, before they stop supporting it) and off you go.

At last...

I am now officially in the firmament of Brighton's gay social scene, and move and shake with the best of them. What am I talking about? After four years, my picture has finally appeared in that coveted monthly glossy, Brighton GScene.

Spotted! On a night out, sir Denis Ryan esq.

Coincidentally, the picture of a man whose knickers I would very much like to get into is featured later on in the same edition.

This bloke has seriously got the broad-shouldered, inverted-pyramid, barrel-chested thing nailed. Alas, whenever I pass him in the local fleshpots, I am lucky if he even acknowledges me. Well, he'll have to revise his opinion of me now!

So there you have it folks. If you ever want me to deign to attend one of your social functions, I shall need at least one months notice, and even then I'm not promising anything.

Now back I go to my pedicure...

College

The exam is done and dusted and I really don't give a shit about when the result is out. As long into the future as possible, with a bit of luck.

I'd have liked a bit of a break this week, but last Friday I emailed my project supervisor to ask him if he wanted me to come in on Monday and pick up my work from where I left it before Christmas. Personally, I'd sooner have stuck pins in my eyes than go back into it, such was my frame of mind at that point, but I felt that I should at least pretend to give a shit. So I got in touch, asking him if I should come in this week. Secretly I was hoping that he - like most of the other supervisors - was taking a break for the next two weeks. "Why yes", he said, "Come in on Monday, but I'll be teaching for most of that time, so I won't really be around to help." Bollox, I thought.

Yesterday wasn't too bad, though I was stuck in there until 5:30, as per bloody usual.

Today is looking rather different. Have you ever worked with animal tissue, dear reader? No? You should be profoundly grateful...

Basically, a big part of my project involves working with parts of dead animals. It's not particularly nice, but the work we're doing could result in the development of drugs to slow down the mental decline associated with Alzheimer's disease, so I suppose it's for the common good. Well, for the common good of the human population. Less good for the playfully cute mice that end up donating their brains and internal organs to us.

This morning, another one shuffled off this mortal coil and we...erm...honoured her by taking out her uterus and suspending it in a solution, where each end of it was attached to terminals designed to measure muscle contraction. The idea is that you inject novel drugs into the solution, and from the response of the tissue, you get an idea of whether or not the drug will have a noteworthy effect if used as a psychiatric drug later. Unfortunately, the reliability of the tissue as this kind of indicator relies on its uniformity of behaviour, i.e. it should stay still in the absence of external stimulii and contract in presence of drugs with an established mechanism of action.

Right now, it's not staying still on its own at all. The ghost of its pissed off host must still live on in its uterus, because it's spontaneously contracting of its own accord, which shits up any chance I have of using it. Which means that I won't have obtained anything in the line of useful results today, and let me tell you, it was not an easy exit from my bed this morning, dear reader.

(Later)

I'm at home. The treacherous uterus yielded nothing. I decided to call it a day. I'll be back in there on Thursday afternoon to try again. The one catch is that I'll be teamed up with two med students who've never used an organ bath before, and it'll be my job to inculcate into them the joys of using it.

But overall, it's OK. I'm making reasonable progress. Not as fast as some, but that's because I'm very exacting (bordering on obsessive) when it comes to lab work, making sure everything is done correctly and precisely. Project work is a good way for the lazy to pick up marks, as it involves doing things more than thinking or learning about them. Most of the time you're just walking around a lab making up solutions and using pipettes to deliver volumes of them, without having to think too much about it. I'm liking this project, hell I'm in the middle of it, doing it, and I still think it sounds impressive.

Basically, it's about this neurotransmitter called Angiotensin IV. In the last ten years, there has been a lot of work done in certain areas of neuroscience, memory and diseases like depression and Alzheimer's disease, and it has been discovered that if you raise levels of this neurotransmitter in the brain, you get improvements in memory and learning. This is of interest in the area of neurodegenerative diseases such as Alzheimers, where deeply embedded memories remain untouched until the latter phases of the disease, but acquisitional memory (the mechanisms involved in making new memories) suffers earlier on. Raising levels of Angiotensin IV in the brain seem to be the obvious way to combat this.

Except you can't raise them directly. Giving someone a tablet with Angiotensin IV in it accomplishes nothing because its chemical properties make it orally inactive, i.e. it won't be absorbed through the wall of the gut into the bloodstream. Injecting it directly doesn't really work either, as it doesn't cross the blood-brain barrier that well, if at all. The only solution is to modify the molecule slightly, making it more likely to cross into the brain, but still act on the same targets in the brain in the same way. So I've been handed two different variants of Angiotensin IV, and my job is to run a battery of tests on them, assessing their suitability for the aforementioned scenario, and finally test it on laboratory mice, and see if they display any improvements in memory or cognition. Compared to some of the projects my classmates are working on, it's fairly rigorous stuff, but I don't mind. I like getting my teeth into it, and because it's a joint effort with other students on the course, if the research shows promise, we can publish, and our names will be under that of our supervisor. At the moment, the two variants I'm testing don't look particularly stellar, but as we're all working under the same umbrella, so to speak, so my chances of having my name on something worthwhile aren't much affected by that. There's also the bonus that this project work is heavily weighted in the award of my degree (close to 40% of my overall mark, if I'm not mistaken).

I like that I feel good about it, because there've been times - even before I started this degree course - where I wondered if I was doing the right thing. I'm still not fully reconciled to the idea of having to work 9 to 5 like everyone else, but I had to be pragmatic in the face of my flights of fancy, and as much as I'd like living a more artistically-minded existence, I value financial security just as much. I've always managed to do consistently well in science subjects, so this course seemed like a safe bet. I can say now, though, that I've no regrets. If you have to get out of bed in the morning and work for a living, then you may as well work for yourself, and get paid well for it. With this I have a chance of managing both, and actually liking the job into the bargain. Not bad, all in all.

It feels weird now that I'm nearing the finishing line. No doubt the next four months will be rather shit, but barring some major disaster, I should graduate. I won't cover myself in glory: Old habits die hard, and I still have the odious habit of mastering crucial concepts on the syllabus of a course for the first time mere hours before an exam. This, along with the odd stressful external circumstance, has kept me from breaking any records. There'll be no first class honours for me, not even in my wildest dreams, but with a bit of luck, I should get honours of some sort, and then get on with the business of pulling in the dough after that.

Onward ho...

Hooray!

On Monday January 21st of 2008, June Brooks gave birth to a healthy baby boy, whose name it has decided will be George. 9lbs-odd. You seem to have a knack for producing big bruisers, Brooksy.

A son for Dan and a brother for Luke, Jordan and Jasmin. An opportunity for a piss-up if ever there was one.

Psychopharmacology exam at 2pm!

Our Father,
Who art in heaven,
Hallowed be thy name,
Thy kingdom come,
Thy will be done,
On Earth, as it is in Heaven.
Give us this day, our daily bread,
And forgive us our trespasses,
As we forgive those who trespass against us,
And lead us not into temptation,
But deliver us from evil,

Amen.

Hail Mary, full of grace.
The Lord is with thee.
Blessed art thou amongst women,
And blessed is the fruit of thy womb, Jesus.
Holy Mary, Mother of God,
Pray for us sinners,
Now, and at the hour of our death,

Amen.

Glory be to the father,
And to the son,
And to the holy spirit,
As it was,
Now,
And ever shall be.
A world without end,

Amen.

Drat and bother!

With an exam on Tuesday coming, I'm anticipating a lovely weekend ahead of me. Being my final year, one would expect all cavalier tendencies to go flying out the window, to be replaced by a new, previously unheard-of diligence, wouldn't one?

Well, one would, if one was talking about anyone other than me. The screams of despair remain the same. Although I must say that sitting down for a coffee with a few classmates the other day, and finding that they had done nothing either, and cared even less, was comforting. Why floundering isn't so bad when you're not the only one doing it, I'm not so sure, but hey.

In other more important news, Tom's bar, the one I frequented only recently, has closed down. It appears that this particular opportunity is lost to you, Mz. 'Flee, but do please dry your eyes. I'm sure another kamikaze businessman will come out of the woodwork to attempt another similar venture soon. It seems to happen a lot around here.

I'm also starting the organisation of a trip I hope to go on this year: The Great British Bear Bash of 2008 in Manchester, at the start of May. Ah yes, if I exercised this much forward planning with regards to my degree, I'd probably be looking at a first class honours by now.

And with that, back to the study of the psychopharmacology of cannabis I go. From a purely theoretical standpoint, of course.

A Sex Entry

... for those of you with a fragile disposition.

Schwarz, a bar in Brighton I went to a while back that opened my eyes somewhat, came a cropper when Legends hotel was refurbished. The basement was converted into a disco that turned out to be more successful than its dark, sleazy predecessor. It turns out that people prefer to dance to tunes on a trendily designed floor rather than have filthy sweaty sex with random strangers. Who knew?

It wasn't long before the gap in the market was spotted, of course, and a new bar called Tom's sprung up, with the same theme in mind. I was put off going for quite a while. Due to the current legal requirements for running a place like this, private membership is necessary, and at the start they were charging quite a bit for it. However, they recently stopped charging for it altogether, and in recognition of that section of their customer base, the New Year Financially Fucked, entry was free last night and tonight.

I went last night. It was more or less the same thing as Schwarz. You have to watch your step on your way to the bar, otherwise you might trip over the guy on his knees servicing another guy, and in the darkroom, conversation as a prelude to sex is almost discouraged. One of the barmen was wearing a snug-fitting vest and had the body - especially the biceps - to pull it off. I wanted to pull it off. His vest, I mean.

After moving around a bit, getting to know different men (fnar fnar), I hooked up with a rather nice chap, and we headed back to mine. He was a bit nervous about holding hands in public, saying it wasn't worth the hassle, but I told him I knew Kung Fu, and if anyone gave us any shit, I'd collect one of their eyes. Mercifully, my misplaced faith in myself (I failed my most recent Kung Fu exam) wasn't put to the test.

It was about 4am when we got home, and I was exhausted after the long day (the earlier turbulence-ridden return flight I endured that day was not good for my nerves either) so we collapsed. We woke surprisingly early, but rather than get up and be productive, we spent most of the day in bed, getting it on.

The only problem is, now I sit here wide awake with my body clock gone to shit. What's a boy to do?

Go to the Bulldog, maybe?

Rant Inevitable

It's not like it should be any surprise to me, but this year I've really realised how there is absolutely nothing in my hometown for me any more.

I left Mallow with great hopes when I was 19, bound for Trinity College, in Dublin. For reasons that are too long to go into right now, that exit didn't go well, and rather than cut ties with the auld dump, I kind of stayed in touch. I was in limbo for my early twenties. I had left Mallow, but had never really settled anywhere else. That changed when, after a two-year break from Dublin, I returned at the beginning of this decade, and that was it. Things went well, I settled, and knew then that I would never come back to live in Mallow for any length of time. In spite of the odd spell on the dole, which saw me return home as I was broke, I stuck to that plan, though I maintained contact with a few people I had gotten to know in the area since I left secondary school.

I got a great send-off from both my Mallow friends and Dublin friends when I went to Brighton, and while I've seen the latter group consistently over the years since I left, it's been a different story with the former. I can't complain too much, I've moved on, and only see them when I'm back in Mallow. Deep down, I know that we're not an important feature of each other's lives any more and that's fine.

What's frustrating is that when I'm back in Mallow, I'm more reliant on them than they are on me, or so it seems. Most of them don't go out any more, having either got sick of the social scene down here (fair enough) or because they've found long-term partners and now seem to be preparing for a life at home (eye-roll!). Then there are people who I simply have nothing to say to anymore.

I saw all of this coming this year, but circumstances worked against me. My parents asked me to come back the day after university finished for christmas because they were celebrating their 40th wedding anniversary and wanted me there for it. That was fair enough, especially as they paid for my flight home. I was given some leeway with the flight bookings, but very stupidly chose to return on Friday 4th, rather than booking to come back before New Year's Eve. I'm regretting that in no small way now: I went online about a week ago to see how much it would cost to change them, but by then it would have been about £150.

Most of this is stuff that I'm used to, more or less, but what's sparked off this moan is that I've just rung around to see if anyone I know is going out tonight for New Year's Eve, and no-one can actually be bothered to do anything. I'm ranting because I'm in a situation I don't have much control over, and it sucks.

I was thinking about making sure that Christmas is spent abroad in future, to avoid this kind of thing happening again, but that's a bit like cutting off my nose to spite my face. Unless you're attached, your family are probably the best people to spend Christmas with. From now on, I vow simply to spend at most one week at home for Christmas itself, and make sure to spend New Year's Eve somewhere else.

Back to Brighton on Friday. Bring it on...

A reflection.

Recently, whenever I bring back to my house a man hot'n'beefy, I always feel that I have to warn them in advance about the state of my bedroom. My place of sleep is quite exasperating. No matter how often I tidy it - at least once every six months, for christ's sake - it always seems to revert back to its ground state: that of a complete and utter pigsty. A San Franciscan who I had (back) recently commented 'Ooh, this is glamorous' when I invited him into my boudoir.

This time around, the guy I had back didn't really care. I was in the Bulldog, having met Mizz 'Flee, and I was ogling as usual. We had paid £1 to go upstairs to the sex party organised by Brighton Orgies, but it was shit, what with the two of us being the only ones there.

As an aside, brighton-orgy.co.uk is the most amateurishly-run operation I have seen in a long time. The weekly e-mails are amongst the most poorly written I've ever seen ('cut hear' instead of 'cut here', when you want to detach a coupon, for example), and the London excursions that the bloke tries to organise every week end up being cancelled due to lack of interest. So far the private house parties have been titled 'Subs for top', 'Under 30s' and 'Over 40s'. What happens if you're active/versatile and in your 30s, like me? The organiser seems possessed of a bit of neck, but without the brains to match.

Eventually, my eyes settled on a rather fit beefy cub. Unfortunately, an ex-fling of mine had fixed his eyes rather unnervingly on me. I escaped outside for a smoke only to find FBC outside as well. We got entangled, I departed Mizz 'Flee (awfully sorry, Dahling) and headed home.

It was decent enough, though I found out soon enough that I wouldn't really ever be falling for his mind, and when he left the next morning, we said our goodbyes without any plans to meet up again. Still, the rough and tumble wasn't bad, though I could have done without spilling poppers all over myself while we were in bed. Yuk!

Home saturday. Sex life on hold for 3 weeks.

Operation Soho

...appears to have gone tits up.

It has not been a particulary inspiring few months on the employment front. As I mentioned previously, the application process for hospital vacancies began a while back, and neither of the two interviews I had yielded any fruit. West Middlesex Hospital told me that for the four vacances they had, I was ranked fifth amongst all the applicants. I can't decide if that makes me feel better or worse. Then began the clearing round a month ago for vacancies unfilled. It would be reasonable to assume that because I missed out by only a hair's breadth on the first round, that I would be a safe bet on the second round.

That has turned out not to be the case. I got turned down for all four without an interview. I can't work it out. The only thing I can think of that could be wrong is that one of the references I gave on my application isn't coming through for me, and once I get the contact details of the hospital pharmacists, I'm going to e-mail them and ask them for feedback on my application form.

So, no hospital in London. Most likely no hospital anywhere. Now and again, hospital vacancies pop up during the year as new posts become available, or people fail to take up ones that they originally committed to, but hoping for one of those is a gamble. If I hang on too long, and I get nothing there, then god knows what will be left on the community pharmacy front when I start applying there. It's like playing a game of chicken, in a way. I'll wait until after Christmas before deciding on a plan of action, I think.

I'm not too despondent. Everyone who graduates from pharmacy walks into gainful employment of some sort. The question is, will it be the kind I'm hoping for? In the long run, it doesn't matter. Once I'm licensed, a year after I graduate, I can pretty much get work wherever I want. The only thing that could limit me is if I only scrape my degree (shit shit shit!). It would have been nice to do my pre-reg in a hospital all the same, and seeing quite a few people in my class get one isn't exactly doing wonders for me right now.

I'll definitely be making a beeline to London at some point. My night out last weekend in a central boozer near - ahem - Soho bolstered my resolve.

Sicko.

I've had my moments in the past where I've doubted Michael Moore's methods. One sided arguments, hysterical ranting, and distortion of facts have all featured in his documentaries, but when I was watching this, an examination of healthcare in the US, I came to a realisation.

Most socially concious left-wing documentaries (can they even be described as left-wing, really?) don't have the broadest of fanbases. Naomi Klein, as much as I like what she does, can't be described as a household name. Sales of Joel Bakan's book The Corporation aren't exactly up there with the Holy Bible. It's to be expected, but that kind of notoriety is what's needed if the kind of change propounded by them is to take place. People will read these people's books -myself included - and think 'Gosh, don't we really need to do something about all of this?', try and convert a few people, change our voting habits and our shopping habits, and then leave it at that. Hardly the basis for a mass revolution.

The thing about Michael Moore is this. He is the megaphone for all this activism, and he genuinely does have an effect on how politicians and CEOs operate: Witness how the Bush administration tried to have Fahrenheit 9/11 banned just before the presidential election, and - in this film - how one insurance company decided, after exposure on this documentary, to pay for the medical treatment of a small child, having previously refused.

In this, Moore basically examines healthcare in the US - or lack thereof - and compares it to that in other countries. It all comes down to health insurance. If you don't have it, you're fucked. If you have it, but contract a fatal illness that the company can somehow weasel its way out of covering, you're fucked. The latter is what happened in more than one case here, and in the film, the presentation of footage of a person alive and well who would subsequently go on to die, because the emergency life-saving surgery he needed wasn't covered by his insurance company, isn't just sad, it's chilling. The one thing I loved was the naming and outright shaming of the companies involved, lawsuits and libel cases be damned.

After that, it's trips to Guantanamo bay for free healthcare for 9/11 workers and comparisons to Canadian and European healthcare. The NHS is portrayed as being a flawless model of socialist medicine, which was ...erm...something of a creative leap on Moore's part, but then again, it's by way of comparison. The price comparisons betweeen the cost of medicines in America and in other, supposedly lesser developed countries was something of an eye-opener though.

The one thing I was surprised by was that at one point in the documentary it looked as if there was going to be a shift in focus onto the pharmaceutical companies, but the opportunity was allowed to pass. Time constraints, maybe? Who knows...

Anyway, there you have it. Go see. I personally found it to be more stimulating than Fahrenheit 9/11 in some ways. The one thing I was surprised by was that on its opening night over here, my flatmates and I had no problems in getting tickets to see it. It seems that people weren't exactly beating the doors down to see it. Maybe I've overestimated Moore's box office appeal. I hope not...