Home in Zone 1

“Enjoy sitting on that train every day?” the huge sign draped all over the new apartment complex asks us. Said apartment complex is right next to a wide band of railroad tracks.

To tell the truth, the train isn’t that bad. It might not work often, but it’s spacious and your mobile phone works. In fact I spend a lot more time changing to the (aptly nickamed) Tube and continuing my journey once in zone 1. If there was a poster at the platform advertising a new apartment complex with the tagline “As if working for ‘the Man’ isn’t bad enough, why do you do this to yourself and become a fucking sardine twice a day” that may have affected me enough to hunt high and low for a mortgage.

In fact, it’s not our commute those adverts should be focusing on. Commuting to work is only a byproduct of the bigger picture which is that we still have to work. However, I somehow think that “Enjoy hitting numbers on that PC 10 hours a day?” wouldn’t be an incitement to buy a flat near the financial district, but rather seems like a question a bookie with balls could ask us.

Greek food

So said a guy with whom I was out for dinner in a Greek restaurant on Sunday:

“Greek food is motherfucking weird. I’d think that being the cradle of civilization and all you would have perfected at least food but evidently fuck-all progress has been made on that department.”

While in other departments we are a beacon of excellence that is.

My question to you is this: Is Greek food weird?

1. Yes, but Tandoori is giving it a run for its money.

2. No but I could do without the live music I must endure in some of their restaurants.

Deadline is in 10 years. Pretty much the type of deadline I would want at work.

Got Talent?

It has come to my attention that a cousin of mine has appeared on Greece’s Got Talent and there’s a relevant clip on YouTube to attest to that.

They say you should be able to choose your friends but not your relatives. To protect his privacy, no, scrap that, to protect MY privacy rather, I won’t publish a link to the YouTube video. I can see his point though; he’s a productive age yet lives on the dole and has too much free time to piss about and obviously he got paid to appear on the episode he did. When I was shown the vid with his act, I just knew; I can think up a hundred ways to waste my time but to see a clip of my cousin on Greece’s got Talent will actually make me want to invent time travel and reclaim 2 minutes of my life.

The “judges” there are cut from the same cloth as Simon Cowell et al. Talentless yet lucky enough to ascend to showbiz, on the brains department they’re no different than the general population and obviously they took a couple of risks in order to get money and fame which turned out to their advantage. Their replacement is standing on the stage before them, longing for their approval.

I won’t go on on how talents got discovered before the talent show era. That goes without saying. What I don’t understand is why one would make a complete motherfucking cunt out of oneself to prove a point or, for that matter to pass one’s time. It’s one thing to be judged by examiners on how well you have studied a profession, in which case you can appreciate their judgement and perhaps take no for an answer. On top of that, the examiners will not take the piss on you like Simon Cowell does.

“Quit fucking watching it then”, I hear you say. Fair enough. Might I mention that I haven’t, in fact, seen one single episode of any of that. That doesn’t mean you’ve just escaped it, no. A member of your family or a friend or an acquintance will be obsessed with it and talk about it. I’ve had two guys in their mid-30s telling me how gracious Susan Boyle was and that how everybody who judged her by her looks should be ashamed of themselves and oh I was one of those too and I’m so full of regrets now. In short, a type of conversation one would expect only from our girlfriends when they were away from us in a shopping mall while we were focused on the important business at hand, i.e. getting pissed up at the pub at 2pm.

In the recent years we men have been politically corrected like nobody’s business. In a sane world, Billy Elliot would have gone to his dad begging him to register him for boxing classes. Britain’s Got Talent would be aired on a 4th class cable channel. There would be a variant of Sex And The City with men. See where I’m going with this?

Posted by Wordmobi

Pre-plane crash behaviour

I truly wish for no more plane crashes although we all know they will happen. Every time I’m on a plane and especially at the time the plane takes off, I have that notion of what I must do in case I’m up there and something bad happens. We’ll hear the captain’s voice on the speaker and he’ll say something along the following lines:

“Ladies and gentlemen, I must inform you with regret that the luggage compartment has been decompressed and we are losing oxygen. Also, debris from inside the luggage compartment have been sucked into both of the aircraft engines and we cannot keep up the aircraft. There is still a chance we can get out of this alive as long as you remain seated with your seatbelt fastened and brace when you are told to do so by the cabin or the cockpit crew. I will not lie to you; the chances of our survival are very slim but we will do everything humanly possible to land you safely. Thank you for your understanding and wait for further instructions.”

Would many people remain in their seats if that announcement were to be made? I know that in very few occasions people have survived plane crashes and I would probably do as the pilot said. Part of me, though, wants to find the strength to defy the crew’s instructions, quickly look around the cabin to find a pretty female and approach her with the ultimate chat up line a-la Airplane: The Movie.

“Hi there. You know, it’s quite likely that these are our last moments. I’ve noticed you from a few rows behind and I find you quite cute. Mind if I sit next to you for a while? Though we’d better be quick. By the way, and i’m talking to you, you old whore sitting next to her, you are ousted to the fucking aisle”.

I wish I, and everyone else on the planet, will never find ourselves in that situation. Just in case, though, if you’ve spotted a single person you fancy in the boarding gate try and see where he/she is going to sit in the cockpit and sit next to him/her. Failing that, once you get into the aircraft scan the already seated passengers. That’ll save you a trip to his/her seat, thus inconvenience nearby passengers in their last moments.

You can always ask a steward/stewardess, of course. That applies mostly to us men as there is always at least one tasty stewardess on the plane.

Posted by Wordmobi

Tweedledum and Tweedledee

In case you don’t know, and I will fully understand if you don’t as it’s not any more important than reading that Amy Winehouse snorted blow last night, it’s general election day in Greece on Sunday October 4. In the UK, they have an expression called LibLabCon, short for Liberal Democrats/New Labour/Conservatives, a rather disparaging term for the three major parties claiming British vote, meaning that their policies are not really different, rendering the UK effectively a one-party state.

In Greece, I don’t know if there’s an equivalent term. I think people here still think that the policies of the two major parties are essentially different or they simply keep hush-hush as they kiss some MP’s toes in order to get into a long-term work placement program with no insurance and benefits. This is the fate that awaited me had I stayed here to find work. “Everything is going to be alright”, they said. “You must learn to kiss arse in the right way and at the end of the day it doesn’t matter what you know but whom you know”, they said. Thankfully I’ve rarely been a good listener and got the fuck away sooner rather than postponed my departure until I became too jaded by the daily grind in Greece to emigrate later on.

From what I hear most presidential candidates had had a few broadcasted debates. If they and we wanted to be completely honest, there would be only one debate and it would go somehow like this:

“Opposition Leader, I’ve got this to ask you; The country is in the shit, people have grown desperate and lost all hope in leadership and also generally. What’s to stop 80% of the population to emigrate and deprive you of their tax money?”
“Go on, then, off you go. Fuck off. We’ll import cheap workers from Eastern Europe and Asia to fill in the gap. We’ll also make them citizens and give them the vote.”

And it would all end there as they’re not worth the time of day. Instead, the media give them too much air time putting more important news to the background. As the leaders of the two major parties tour the country, they are on one edge of the country one day, then on the diametrically opposite edge the next day, fresh looking, clean shaven, in well pressed suits. And why wouldn’t they. They never have to do their washing-up, iron their shirts, cook lunch and dinner, or spend two hours a day commuting to and from work squeezed like a sardine on the bus or train. That’s left for the people who vote for them. They have all the time in the world to study their speeches, sleep an adequate number of hours a day in their homes or on their jets.They only have to do essential work, which is to please their sponsors continually, and their voters once every four years (or as we said, sometimes every other year).

Now that I mentioned public transport, wasn’t there a certain individual named Cherie Booth who boasted on using the Tube to go to work instead or being chauffeured in? I mean, who in their right mind would concede in enduring traveling in such harsh conditions while they can afford a private limo? Obviously she did it to come across as “one of us” but anybody with half a brain could see through a silly stunt like that. In the end she both had to suffer being squeezed on the Tube and came across as a hypocrite. Besides, I’m pretty sure all she did was to walk from Downing Street to as far as Westminster or Charing Cross tube and travel a couple of stations away. Her protection detail which I’m assuming consisted of at least 2 men, would also take up valuable commuter space inside the confined tube carrier during rush hour, but wasting commuter time is not a crime and if it were to become one, her husband would only vote to make it one only after his Cherie got sick and tired of a whole week of using public transport.

I think the only solution for this country is for us to import a detail from the “LibLabCon” crowd and boot out our own candidates. The British can keep the good ones and send us their useless shits if they like. They can put this house in order.

Departing

I’m out of the country for two weeks for some long awaited holidays. It’s a bit sad that we have come to a point that we need time away from work to feel alive again, but this is the state of affairs we’re in. You’re confined in an office at least 10 hours a day, sometimes you work from home when you get back. You spend the weekend to do washing-up, grocery shopping, cooking, go to the council swimming pool (I don’t count physical exercise as leisure) spend an hour going out for drinks and dinner and an hour to go home, do other things that take turns once every month or every other month and this leaves you maybe with 5-6 hours to yourself on Saturday and the same for Sunday. Repeat the above steps until you’re 68.

Away from the grind, then, and here I am at the airport. Upon entering the terminal, I exchanged glances with a police officer with a bulletproof vest on, holding what I think is a submachine gun. I was quite surprised that he hadn’t had a partner. If gunfire erupts, which I assume the authorities deem possible otherwise this man would be holding a baton, how far is the backup? Anyhow, I will assume that they’re know what they’re doing.

Past the Easyjet kiosks I walk. Now, I might mention that every time I think Easyjet, I think the geezer who owns it, one Stelios Hatjiioannou. Wikipedia describes him as a “British entrepreneur” but his accent is worse than mine. My dad saw him on a tennis court in Greece once, with his entourage which consisted of a few bodyguards with handguns. I felt I could have done with something like that when I lived in the more dodgy areas of London. But I’m digressing now again, as I always do, so I’ll leave it at that.

The lady at the kiosk checks your passport and then asks you some “security questions”. Now I realize that this is very serious and you’re not allowed to make a joke when you reply. There was in fact the case of that Greek male glamour model whose name now escapes me, who, after a series of photo shoots in London, when he was checking in for his return flight he said that he was carrying a bomb on his hand luggage. He had been banned from the country for many years after that trip of his.

Which is a bit bad, really, ‘cos there’s some good fun you can have at that point. “Did anyone gave you anything to carry in your luggage on their behalf?” “Yep, that dark-skinned bearded man gave me a metallic cylinder which had a ‘nuclear hazard’ sign on it but it’s just a small cylinder so I didn’t give it much thought and took it with me.” Instead, I try to keep a straight face and go no, no and no to anything they ask me.

Before you enter security, you have to rummage your hand luggage and part with any liquid container that had capacity of 100ml or more. I don’t know why they chose that limit instead of, say, 75 or 89. Is it because it’s a good-looking round number? I’ve had a spectacle cleaning spray confiscated before, as well as shampoo when I was only travelling with hand luggage. At that area you can see some humongous plastic bags all containing confiscated cosmetic liquids, shampoos and the like. Items which, as we’re told from the airport megaphones, will be later on destroyed. Yet we all suspect what will happen to them a few hours later: Items that until now had been treated as potential bomb ingredients will go next to the vanity mirrors in the houses of the 16-year-olds who confiscated them in the first place, after they have shared the booty.

The next step is the x-rays of your hand luggage and possibly your frisking. Nothing new there. What is, new, however is the additional x-ray scanners that has been installed just at the entrance of the duty-free shopping mall. That is for examining shoes. And so, my friends, you see the merits of multi-fucking-culturalism in Europe. Richard Reid paved the road by attempting to blow up the plane he was on by detonating a “shoe bomb”. Then those other bastards attempted to blow up some other transatlantic flights and they’re the reason why we now drink overpriced bottled water in the airport terminal. If in any of my future flights I encounter a dark-skinned man with a big hooked nose inside the aircraft, I wonder if I can muster up enough courage to walk up to him and say “Hola señor, como está?” and if he doesn’t answer demand that he is removed from the motherfucking plane immediately.

As you then make your way to the aircraft via the tube that takes you there, you will no doubt see the famous HSBC posters with a series of photos and large one-word captions on them that alternate between the photos on the wall. The message they want to get across is that there is variety in life because people have different points of view. Which is great, but not always. For example, since this all takes place in an airport, will we see a future ad campaign that portrays a man wired with explosives inside a passenger aircraft just moments before he hits the detonator, then another one next to it with a Middle Eastern village being carpet bombed and the words “terrorist” and “liberator” taking turns in the two photos? They say that a man’s terrorist is another man’s freedom fighter so an ad like this would make a lot of sense. For me, in many cases, like this one for instance, there should be only one point of view. Multiple points of view are great but up to a point. I guess where I’m driving at is that if most people were like me I would get out of my house a lot more often.

Inside the aircraft we are told to switch off all electronic devices during takeoff and landing including mobile phones with flight mode on. So you’re confined in a space that can barely take in your volume, only sitting upright for three hours will enable you ti fit in there nicely and to add insult to injury you cannot use your phone’s mp3 player to pass the time. I still don’t believe that a technologically advanced aircraft that can carry 300 people with their baggage up to 35000 feet, equipped with one of the the most complex circuitry and navigation system man has created can be “confused” and plummet to the ground taking us all to our deaths just because your parents call you to check how you are getting on on the plane. Yeah. Right. Yet you think that you don’t really want to find yourself with a court date so you just comply. Now, come to think about it, I wrote a couple of things on this entry that could land me in court. Upon my return to the UK, could I face capital punishment or a large fine or have my reputation destroyed by the media just for saying that we let people in from far away lands into Europe, bringing their disputes here, some of them going as far to realizing their disputes as blowing up aircraft or Tube trains.

On the plus side, the flights to and from Greece have gone quieter. It used to be the case that i always happened to sit next to some first-year Greek student who for some reason thought I like some chit-chat to pass the time. These days seem to be gone and that’s good.

Another good thing is that farts don’t smell on the plane.

Attack of the infested shower head

I haven’t yet found the nerve to tell my mates in Greece to fuck off next time they send me a chain mail of what is perceived as a joke. At the moment I am just content with just deleting the gits without looking inside. Yesterday, however, I received an e-mail with a URL starting with ‘http://news.bbc…’ on the subject line.

It must be important, I thought. Perhaps Anthony is watching what’s going on in this country as the “politicians” are wrecking it and he wanted to bring my attention to something I may have already seen but sometimes you just don’t know.

“Taking showers can make you ill”, the title read, and the article body went on explaining that your shower head contains “dangerous bacteria” and they make their way to your skin when you take a shower.

That’s right. The Bacterial Shower Head is coming to sit next to the Bacterial Keyboard in the Bacterial Hall Of Fame. You remember that one? Yes, it’s the keyboard that is n times dirtier than a public unflushed shitter (where n > 2). What was your reaction when you first heard that? Very few people would, I presume, rush off to shed alcohol on their keyboard. Most likely, the reaction of the rest would have been “Fuck them scaremongers”.

There is no denying that keyboards accumulate germs, but so does a mobile phone’s keypad, a train/bus support railing, a steering wheel, money, keys, especially if you drop them on the ground or the floor. Everybody can deduct that simple truth. And what do we do about it. Jack shit, of course. Me, I can’t be arsed. And in any case none of the people I know will ever take off their shower head and immerse it in bleach dissolved in water on a monthly basis.

Posted by Wordmobi

Contact Lenses

If you are an adult your short sightedness is not likely to increase within the course of two years. Yet the opticians won’t sell you new contact lenses unless you have a “valid” prescription, that is pay £20 every year to have your eyes checked and be issued a new contact lens prescription.

The idea is that within the course of one year, your health may change or you may be taking medication you hadn’t taken the year before and that could have an impact on your comfortability with the foreign objects that are the contact lenses. That’s a valid argument but I’d like to learn of one single case where one’s health circumstances have changed so that one got irritated or even went blind after a year had elapsed and did not consult an optician. Besides why does a prescription have to be renewed on yearly intervals since the odds are perfectly legitimate that one may develop a problem 3 months after a consultation?

Then they said they can sell me a pack of three pairs because my prescription is expiring next month. Because they don’t sell packs of one pair, which makes it ok to break the law and sell me products that will expire at the end of November, I suppose. 

What they don’t get is that this is London and there are many Italians, Greeks, Spaniards, all within 3.5 hours away from somewhere we go twice a year to stock up on packs of contact lenses among other things.

Glossy gossip magazines

As I was doing my grocery shopping, those strategically placed colourful magazines caught my eye. Although, honestly, even if they weren’t so strategically placed, they could still be spotted from anywhere in the shop being so bright that in the event of a blackout they could easily light up the place.

Imagine being a grocery store clerk and you are restocking the place: “Hey Ngozi, we need to put the latest version of “Heat” next to the till queue area. These old hags who shop here have a memory that fails with age, so let put those mags there to be sure to sell them.”

Anyway, there was a big caption in one of them that read something in the lines of “Pete speaks his mind and tells all”. First of all, they assume we all know who “Pete” is. I wouldn’t know, if it weren’t for his wife (is she still his wife?) whose cleavage stars frequently in the covers of said magazines. I didn’t even know that he’s a singer. Before I found out, he had only earned the attribute of “the famous guy who has married the glamour model with the big tits”. Basically defining him through his famous wife. Pretty much in the same manner as how we came to identify Sharon Osbourne’s husband ever since he stopped recording anything of essence.

Basically, it’s not a bad thing, having the world know that you shag a glamour model with big tits. Yes, she may be a total airhead. She may be an avowed chav. Yet, it’s not a bad thing for one single reason alone.

As the late Don LaFontaine would say, in a world where you’re judged by how handsome you are, how much you earn and how pretty is the chick you bonk, you could be the scourge of humanity, an untalented bastard. That means jack shit. Yet you get the big-titted glamour model and become the envy of the male population? All these millions of peasants settle for what they can get while the hottest of the hottest will only look at the likes of pop singers. That’s why they have their faces in the magazines. To remind you where you stand in the social chain and where they do. The personality and how decent the character of their partners are, are not important. They have money and fame and 70% of the world population is looking up to them.

You would think that I’m jealous. For one thing, I know i would never become a pop singer or a model or a footballer. I do the job I think I can do better than any other. Singing is something I’d like to do as a hobby but I don’t think it’s exactly a rational career to be a pop star or a glamour model so, I’ve left these two out. What bothers me is exactly the fact that i work just as hard as a performer on european tour, yet I earn 6 times less than he/she does. Of course, I’m not as expendable as they are nor do I have to deal with the circuit of their industries, but still.

The other thing is the wife. How many non-famous men out there can honestly claim that if they could be with virtually any woman that they desire, they would choose to stay with their existing partner? Do we conciously choose the best woman while turning down far better looking women while they would fall hell over heels for us or do we settle for what we can get?

Anyway, those magazines follow the lives of people we don’t know and care and who will never get to know what we do in our lives. Yet I suppose they sell a lot of copies. There are two cases at play here. Both apply to those who settle for whatever they can get. 1)They see famous people and their beutiful wives/handsome husbands and live the life they’re not living by following what they do. 2) They read their breakup stories nodding their head thinking ‘tsk tsk, he got married to a chav glamour model with big tits and silicone lips, what did he expect, did he really think he would keep her or what? At least I’m with my below-average-looking wife who is down to earth, but come to think about it I’d like to do Katie at least once’.

Twitter

I had given Twitter a whirl some 7 months ago. I frankly don’t know what had gotten into me. You can only type in 160 characters at a time and if you aren’t someone whose day-to-day activities genuinely interest a lot of people, it’s only bollocks that clutter up the internet. You only need a blog to bloom your ideas and opinions.

Twitter is good for specific people i.e. someone somewhat known who travels a lot and sees something new every day. For the rest of us, who go from home-work-home or home-work-pub-home every day, I fail to see the importance.

Or do I? Perhaps it is an opportunity for a bitchin, grumblin’ grump to express himself in a new way. As I find myself with not much time for blogging these days, as is evident by the sparsity of my updates, I can now mitigate that somehow using twitter. Now, equipped with a Nokia E71, I can make a quick note of anything preposterous I see on the train, the street, or anywhere else, many times during the day, as it happens.

Until I realize that I fail to see any meaning in Twitter after all, that is.