dope

The biggest ongoing news story in Oz at the moment is that of Schapelle Corby, a 27 year old Australian woman who was found in possession of 4.5 Kg of marijuana going in to Bali.

To put this in context Bali is to Australia as Ibiza is to the UK, more or less. Bali falls under the governence of Indonesia, a state with some of the strictest - read draconian - drug laws anywhere in the world. Indonesia is also not noted for its' commitment to human rights, particularly with reference to its' judicial system. Corby got 20 years, the prosecution asked for life and drugs campaigners in Indonesia were asking for the death penalty.

Part of the intricacies of Indonesia's drug laws, which are designed to intimidate potential smugglers by achieving convictions with the minimum of effort, the burden of proof is shifted to the defense on a technicality. The defense that someone has tampered with your baggage is no defense at all. All the prosecution has to do is prove that the bag containing contraband is yours, not that you had knowledge of its' contents at the time you were arrested. The concept of reasonable doubt is dispensed with; if the bag is yours the contents are your responsibility.

Whilst initially this sounds unnecessarily harsh but if I attempted to walk through customs at Heathrow with a few kilos of grass I would have more than a few serious questions to answer. I would almost certainly be detained for trial. However, as with any incident like this there are complications. Australian customs have been sitting on a report that indicates that baggage handlers at Sydney's Kingston Smith Airport have been involved in drug smuggling and stealing from passengers, forcibly reinserting reasonable doubt into Corby's trial. Something the court didn't consider as the story was late to arrive on the scene and was broken by an Australian newspaper.

To further complicate matters prior to Corby's 9 young Australians were caught attempting to smuggle serious amounts of heroin out of Indonesia strapped to their bodies. They are the Bali 9. There have been real indications that the 9 mules have been coerced into this. They face death by firing squad should they be found guilty of drug smuggling. I hate to be a pessimist but without some really serious evidence of coercion they've had it.

Australia has naturally got behind Corby as an apparently blameless victim of circuses. This is despite the fact that her defence case is not particularly strong, and wouldn't be even if she were tried elsewhere. Much of the money given to her defence team by the Australian government thus far seems to have been targeted at Australian public opinion. The fact that Corby's parents have now taken on the Australian equivalent of Max Clifford to manage the media has done very little to persuade me that they are in no small part to blame for the inefectual nature of her defence. They so convinced that her innocence was self-evident that they barely seem to have tried to use the resources at their disposal. Allegations of bribery and corruption have seen Corby sack her entire legal team over the weekend and re-hire 3 of them. It's a right bloody mess.

In fact the entire event has been characterised by semi-constitutional and extremely partisan behaviour behaviour by everyone concerned. Jury trials do not happen in Indonesia, three judges were allocated to hear the case. At the head of this panel was a man who, in over 500 drugs cases, has acquited exactly no-one. He also, other than just stating that there would be no special treatment for a high profile case, started dropping hints that Corby probably was guilty and the trial would be swift.

The Australian government has so far put about $250,000 of legal aid the way of the Corby family, critically without stipulating that the 2 QCs, both with substantial training and experience of trials abroad, offering their services on a pro bono basis, were used. Only now that Schapelle is a convict has this been done. More legal aid has been put her way to try and strengthen her case, with negligible evidence, but at least a chance of getting the original conviction thrown out on an accusation of bias. In turn Indonesia's strong popular anti-drugs lobby has been campaigning for tougher sentancing with particular refference to Corby. Some of the ugliest scenes at court have been the clashes between Corby's family and campaigners.

Both prosecution and defence have appealed against the verdict. The defence against the verdict and an apparently biased judiciary, and the prosecution against an apparently over lenient sentance.

Whatever you think about the proceedings it is utterly impossible to talk it through with any degree of clarity over here, so you will pardon my rambling. All Aussies - 90% according to The Australian - think she's innocent and this is self-evident and none of the ex-pat's I know will touch such an emotive issue with a ten foot Polish national. The resolution of this is not even close. It's going to be long ugly and unpleasant and I will be thoroughly sick of the name Schapelle Corby at the end of it, which is a terrible thing to say about something that will decide someone's future. My own opinion is that she probably is innocent, but everyone involved has made it exponentially more difficult for her to prove this with every intervention.

That's the news in Oz...

good 'n' bad in Oz

Bad

• Advert jingles - alive and well and living down-under


• TV generally - not great but some stunningly awful individual examples.
  
  'Blue Heelers' - think the bill in small town Australia.
  
  'Hi 5' imagine Steps (remember them? A sort of pseudo Abba but with boy band types in place of comedy scandiwegian beard wearers) made a kids TV programme. They sing athe theme tune at the end, each presenter has their own dance move. Awful isn't it?



• Australian sports - Iron man contest? Why not just have a triathlon? Rugby league; 'tis a silly game but not compared to Aussie rules football. This is football?? I can't see a trace of any rules in the game Aussie or otherwise. They call their soccer team 'The Socceroos' which makes me cringe whenever I hear it

Good

• Food - cheap plentiful and fantastic. Lots of Thai and other Asian flavours.


• Wildlife - Loads of it. Whales swim past on their migration. Bloody amazing!


• Weather - The locals are wandering around shivering in long coats. I wear a jumper and laugh at them.


• Insults - Aussies are good at these. Calling someone a 'slack-arsed tart' works no matter what their gender or sexual orientation.


• Shop names - I went into a cafe called 'Wok on Inn', I was hoping the food would be crap so I could tell people to wok on by, but it wasn't. I also have to try 'Holy Crepe', I nearly walked in to 'Bush Outfitters' to see what they were about but something stopped me...

More later, run out of credit...

temping

I have just got a temporary assignment working for the Supreme Court of New South Wales. This may seem like a rash decision by our antipodean cousins as the phrase "The law is an arse!" - ass being too weak a word, and seemingly some kind of American donkey - has been heard to escape my lips on more than one occasion (probably more frequently than I'm letting on, particularly if beer is invloved).

Just consider, if the pattern of my work history continues as it has for the last few assignments I will be taken on full-time, promoted and end up running half the day-to-day operations of the place. I can almost feel Sydney, Canberra and the rest of the state shivering at the prospect.

Un-PC thought: Just how do you have a justice system for a country that was colonised by criminals (allbeit people that were branded criminal for stealing things like bread to feed their starving families)? Drumhead trials? Some kind of code of conduct a la pirates? Or just a damn good thrashing behind the courthouse?

nosh vs knowledge

We ate out at the thai place down the road a few nights ago. The total bill came to $21. Both of the books I wanted to buy earlier that day were $25. I have come to a country where knowledge costs more than luxury and I'm not quite sure how I feel about that.

To be fair this is probably more a reflection of Sydney's low-cost and super competitive restaurant industry than it is a cultural indicator; made for a good quick blog post though didn't it?

Starwalker

Walks into Mont Blanc shop, looks at expensive fountain pen. Sales assistant approaches...

"You want StarWalker?"
"No me want Light Saber!" Makes appropriate whosshing noizes

Receives utterly bamboozled look from sales assistant.

"This is not the sci-fi fan you are looking for...." Makes appropriate Jedi gesture. Still nothing. Backs slowly out of shop.

Good to see that the 13 hour flight hasn't dented my twisted sense of humour.

Changi

At Changi Airport in Singapore. I'd forgotten how bloody big this place is and how little time the computer terminals give you.

Only 30 mins left to wander aimlessly through acres of overpriced luxury goods that I don't want and couldn't afford anyway. How will I cope?

panic

AAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaarrrghh!!

Have I got it all done? Christ alone knows. Moving to the other side of the world is giving me stress attacks. I got good and pissed last night & I still couldn't get to sleep before it started getting light outside.

Too much to do....run out of time....

tiger

I know that truth is supposed to be stranger than fiction but honestly who would make this up?

If Ms Htay sticks to her offer of only breastfeeding until the cubs grow teeth, she won't be at it long. Tiger cubs grow teeth within weeks of being born, says Taina Strike, a vet at the Zoological Society of London (ZSL). "I still feel sorry for the woman though. Their sharp claws will be pummelling her."

As to why Ms Htay has offered her services, when bottled milk could do just as well? "I don't even want to go there," says Strike.

Imagine the psychological trauma this is going to cause to both Tiger and Toddler. The tiger will grow up believing it is okay to try and take milk from humans, which is probably going to prove a trifle hard to deal with for any future female keepers. My overactive imagination is already picturing the headlines should the unfortunate creature ever escape; "Titty Kitty on the Rampage" or "Faster Titty Cat, Kill Kill" (Russ Meyer gags must be made at every opportunity)....

Ferocious Feline Savages Sister Theresa's Ti...er...Dignity

Nuns on the Run from Confused Cat

A small superfluity of sisters from St Agnes' Home for Enervated Ecclesiasticals( Enfield) were enjoying a day out at London Zoo when disaster struck. "Titty" the Tiger, so named as she was breastfed as a cub, leapt from her enclosure and lunged at the group, pinning elderly nun Sister Theresa to the floor and ripping off her habit.

"I thought I'd had it," Sister Theresa said later, clearly traumatised by the ordeal, "I was praying that the tiger would finish me off quick and not start toying with me. Goes to show how wrong you can be."

Far from going for the kill the tiger, apparently thirsty, began trying to suckle from the octegenarian.

"Its' tongue was ever so rough," continued Sister T. "I haven't felt anything like it since my youth, but he's gone now..."

Clearly unsatisisfied after some five minutes Titty jumped back into her pen of her own accord, much to the releif of her keeper.

"At first I thought that Titty'd mistaken her for a penguin or a zebra or somthing, what with the black 'n' white get-up 'n' all," said keeper Joe Harris, "but then I saw what she was trying to do. All I can say is thank God it wasn't Titty's brother. He was suckled for much longer than Titty and has developed a real fixation. He could've gotten really confused, I dread to think what could've happened."

Several such attacks on female keepers in the past have resulted in Titty having an all-male keeping staff. Despite these obvious warnings the big cat enclosure carries no warning notice for women and is set into the ground causing people to lean over the edge, giving the lions and tigers an exagerated view of their chests.

When asked to quote on the event RSPCA spokesman, Tim Holt, gave us he following statement:

"London Zoo have known about this problem for some time and have singularly failed to take action. Similar such incidents will continue to happen whilst ZSL refuse to address the core of this issue: namely Jovani the leopard's 'Show us yer tits!' tee shirt. Until this is taken from the animal female Zoo attendees will be at risk."

Truth stranger than fiction, he says, instantly proving himself wrong.

coffee

I love coffee. On an average day I will drink about 8 cups of the stuff. My favourite comic book hero is the excellent Too Much Coffee Man. It doesn't matter how much coffee I've had to drink if I can smell it I want a cup. Coffee is great.

However, coffee is far from being an ideal drug of choice as it can make you hyperactive and dehydrated give you a frenetic lifestyle flitting between cups, getting headaches, being knackered by 3pm and introspection (please God no, not introspection, anything but that!!). What can I say, I'm an addict. The boom-bust cycle of caffeine dependancy is all part of the fun, until you OD and get the shakes.

Today I have clearly been suffering from withdrawal symptoms. The caffetiere at work has been broken for a couple of days and I decided that this might be a suitable point to try and cut down my intake. Instead of cutting down I seem to have gone cold turkey. My flatmate who is used to being woken by the sound of the coffee grinder and being constantly surrounded by the smell of coffee must be wondering what has been going on. I have been sluggish and grumpy for 2 days and I decided that I had had enough of it (this has nothing to do with the last post I made on here, *sarcastic cough*, nothing at all). I resolve to pinch the coffee pot from upstairs:

Ninja-like I creep into the lift unseen by the ever-watchful Raj in security. Stealthily I slide up the third floor corridor, insinuate my way into the sparsely furnished corridor that serves as tea room. Making full use of the available cover and carefully keeping to the shadows I make my approach. Then with the speed of lightning and the subtlety of a stealthy moth, I strike! A double forward somersault lands me tantalisingly close to my target. A few combat rolls and a swift grab and it is mine! Concealing it in my clothing I drop neatly to the floor and go to make an unobserved escape when disaster, the door opens and I am seen! I fell the first of my oponents with a hail of shuriken, the second falls to a dart from my blowpipe and the third to a hail of kicks and punches as I somersault over his head. Disuading persuers with a scattering of caltrops I make good my getaway, slipping away more smoothly than an oiled otter.

My childish fantasies aside coffee is bloody interesting as one of the world's first internationally traded leisuretime commodities.

Most people think that tea is the British traditional drink but it was far less popular than coffee until about 1750 onward and tea's popularity exploded when the East India Company made tea fashionable and capitalised on it. Tea wasn't as popular early on because of it's outrageously high price and the fact that it was often adulterated with non-food things, like rat droppings, a flavour retained for the sake of tradition in many of today's most popular brands.

The first recorded coffee house was "Angel" in Oxford in 1650, but it was London's coffee houses that were really famous. The first of these was opened in 1652 by a Greek named Pasqua Rosee. By about 1670 London coffee houses became meeting places where political and literary ideas were discussed, something of a rarity in Britain which was run by puritain thought police at the time. Coffee houses were seen as a breeding ground of subversive dissent, both French and American revolutions were plotted in coffee houses. Something which makes me wonder whether the social order, not to mention the democratic process in Britain, would be vastly different had tea not been so popular. Ultimately British coffee houses slowly died out as tea, which they initially served, became more popular but had bizarre taxes and licensing restrictions put on it making it's open purchase in private houses problematic.

London women didn't agree with coffee at all; launching The women's petition against coffee, a fantastic historical oddity which basically calls for the serving of coffee to stop. The reason? Since their men stopped going to the pub to drink ale and took up coffee the women weren't getting enough sex. With the beer goggles removed and quivering from too much caffeine their men had become "as Impotent, as Age, and as unfruitful as those Desarts whence that unhappy Berry is said to be brought".

Coffee became more popular in America as a result of a little-known event called The Boston Tea Party where uppity yanks revolted against perfectly legitimate British tea taxes and ruined vast quanitities of tea, the mutinous caffeine-addled colonials (points awarded for the best revolting yanks joke).

Instant coffee was invented when Brazil developed a coffee surplus equivalent to a world supply for 6 years. The Brazilian government approached Nestlé in 1930 to see if coffee's popularity could be boosted with the introduction of a new product. Amazingly it took 7 years of development to produce this thin bitter and virtually flavourless travesty of a drink that they had the nerve to call coffee. Imagine what they could have done with another 7. On 1 April 1938, NESCAFÉ was launched in Switzerland; worst April fools gag ever.

Without the Second World War I doubt that instant coffee would have got very far. I mean, just how instant does a drink have to be? Take ground coffee, apply hot water, lo and behold coffee. Instant is clearly lighter, easier to carry and makes more sense during war time. Nestlé had timed it perfectly (check out Nestlé's history of instant coffee as a point of information you should also check out baby milk action to find out why people refuse to drink NESCAFÉ).

Coffee factoid attack:

• The ingestion of coffee provides the equivalent amount of antioxidants as three glasses of orange juice


• Coffee originated in central Ethiopia and then was transplanted to Yemen, where it was cultivated as far back as the sixth century


• October 1st is the official Coffee Day in Japan


• Currently there are approximately 2,200 ships involved in transporting coffee beans each year


• Over 53 countries grow coffee worldwide, but all of them lie along the equator between the tropic of Cancer and Capricorn


• Coffee stimulates the apocrine glands and makes you sweat more. Which is why I sweat when I eat - bugger.


• It takes 42 coffee beans to make an espresso


• 80% of the world's coffee farmers are smallholders working on less than 3 hectares. The rest comes from plantations which are run more as agri-businesses.


• To make a roasted pound of coffee it takes around 2,000 Arabica coffee cherries. With 2 beans per cherry - this means around 4,000 beans are in a single pound of coffee.


• In December 2001 Brazil produced a scented postage stamp to promote its coffee - the smell should last between 3 and 5 years.


• The USA is the world's largest consumer of coffee, importing 16 to 20 million bags annually (2.5 million pounds), representing 1/3 of all coffee exported. More than half of the United States population consumes coffee typically drinking 3.4 cups of coffee a day


• Coffee is the most popular drink worldwide with almost 2 billion cups consumed every day


• The world's most expensive coffee is made from beans cycled through an Indonesian marsupial's digestive system. It is called Kopi Luwak and no I haven't tried it.


• The French philosopher, Voltaire, reportedly drank fifty cups of coffee a day.


• Regular coffee drinkers have about 1/3 less asthma symptoms than those of non-coffee drinkers according to a Harvard researcher who studied 20,000 people.


• Turkish law makes it legal for a woman to divorce her husband if he fails to provide her with her daily quota of coffee.

I could hardly sign off this post without mentioning that as a traded commodity which grows best in some of the world's poorest areas coffee has become a worldwide economic conundrum as farmers in the developing world are ruthlessly exploited by large corporations. This happens with a lot more than just coffee but is probably most pronounced with coffee given that, as stated above, 80% of the farmers involved in coffee production are smallholders with no leverage at all. Buying fair trade coffee can help but I have heard rumors that not all coffee labelled as fair trade are really that fair. Have a look at Make Trade Fair for information on this. I have found that the fairtade coffees are far more likely to be organic and generally taste a lot better, even the instant.

If you are a real tree hugger you can actually buy fairly traded bird-friendly coffee, I am happy to report that it is delicious.

hangover

How is it that a few drinks in the park ends up with me walking halfway home in the middle of the night?

Complaining as I am it did give me the opportunity to practise my new favourite hobby of falling asleep standing up at a bus stop. Sounds like an invitation to robbery? Remarkably I have never lost anything more than my sense of direction doing this.

Outdoor drinks are clearly a case of soft drugs leading to hard drugs. If you have a can of Red Stripe in the sunshine you will end up doing Tequila slammers at one in the morning (*gags slightly* I can still taste it).

Thank Christ I didn't get really carried away and decide to go for a kebab. There are limits to even my hard drug use.

sweets

Can anyone explain to me who the audience for this website is?

It describes itself as "a traditional , old-fashioned sweetshop, online" which strikes me as a bit of a misnomer. Whilst I do occasionally get a hankering for humbugs or a craving for coconut mushrooms I have never had trouble finding them in a sweetshop, ever. There may be somewhere in Britain where you are more than 5 miles from a pick 'n' mix, but I've never been there. In fact most village shops have a better selection of traditional sweets than city shops.

Perhaps a quarter of is aimed at housebound pensioners that can't shift themselves away from Trisha to get their weekly supply of aniseed balls in a noisy and toothless nightmare of pink froth. This doesn't quite tally with the fact that the older generation seems to have taken to the internet like a fish to space travel. Perhaps because they find it unbearably patronising to be called silver surfer (link goes to an over-fifties portal. No really).

Who the bloody hell wants sweets through the post anyway? Differed gratification and confectionary are almost mutually exclusive. If you live in a dodgy part of the world where postmen are less scrupulous than they should be not only are you going to lose your sweets but the rest of your post is going to be sticky and covered in popping candy.

I think it may be the name of the site. If you asked me to finish a sentance that started with; "A quarter of..." you would almost inevitably elicit a facetious reply such as; "...your finest marijuana my good man", or "...an hour with your daughter costs how much?! A tad overpriced for used goods I'd say.".

Perhaps I shouldn't be so quick to laugh, it is probably for expats. As a website this clearly has a global audience and whilst I may take the piss a bit now after 6 months in Australia I will probably start to get a bit misty eyed at the idea of a bag of sherbert flying saucers in all their stale papery foulness, but I doubt it ( I hereby reserve the right to send the occasional email pleading for Marmite).

click on related link for a sick giggle (internet granny related)

toads

Cheers to Phil for putting me on to this one: exploding toads in Hamburg.

What I particularly like about this story is the suggestion that the toad's dramatic self destruct could be:

"...a defence mechanism against aggressive crows" - Werner Smolnik, animal protection worker

Toad thinks: "Oh shit, that crow's looking a bit tetchy. It's wearing a Burberry cap, it's coming this way..." Toad goes BANG!!

Somehow it just doesn't wash as a defence mechanism.

If only I could persuade the damn turtles to part company in such style. Anyone fancy a trip to Hamburg to see if it works on turtles?

celebrity tongue

You can tell I'm having a slow day at work can't you.

Click on pic for a collection of pictures of celebrities with thier tongues out. The awful example below is in fact Celine Dionandonandonandon.



Why do people collect this kind of shite?

horse's head

For the film nut who has everything a horse head pillow.

I mean honestly what is the point, but I still want one...

australia

I think I have now told everyone who would be shocked or surprised now, so I can announce it on here too. I am moving to Australia to live and work for at least a year. I leave the UK on 20 May and Christ alone knows how I am going to get everything done before then.

If you are still shocked and/or surprised by this announcement try reading your email you may have been told and just not picked up your messages in a while. If you still feel aggrieved because I haven't got your email address, or your computer is broken, or you just haven't called me in a while, then tough. Harsh I know but I can't be held responsible for your lack of dilligence.

I have been offered a working visa and a plane ticket to Australia with the help of @www, the web agency the beloved Mrs, works for and I am at a point in my life where I would be stupid to turn it down. Huge thanks to @www. Things might otherwise be very different.

Thanks too to The Place2Be (P2B), the excellent but little known children's charity for whom I have worked for the past 2 and a half years. P2B took me on from being a temp, gave me training and continually took risks on me that have benefitted me enourmously. I will genuinely miss everyone I have worked with there.

One of the main reasons for the recent flurry of activity on this site is because I am trying to get into the habit of posting as often as possible so that this page can be a journal of where I am and what I am doing(and my slow descent into Aussie slang). I will eventually be posting pictures as well and have discovered a thing called a moblog which allows you to post pictures from a mobile phone camera. Updates as they happen.

hubble telescope

The hubble space telescope has been operating for 15 years this week and has taken over 700,000 images most of which are awesomely beautiful and make you feel suitably small and insignificant. They have also advanced the cause of astronomy and cosmology by leaps and bounds, greatly increasing our understanding of the universe (click on pic for more).



Something so good couldn't be allowed to go on indefinitely. Ultimately George W. Bush holds the purse strings for NASA and naturally feels threatened by anything that increases knowledge and understanding. He is running down the maintainence schedule, read cancelling, on Hubble to pay for more ambitious projects (as if you needed another reason to hate him). Namely a return to the moon and a manned flight to Mars, neither of which will tell us anything new about space. It's just being done so that the US can say "We did it first!". It's the national equivalent of "look Mum, no hands!".

The telescope's orbit will soon start to decay and given the amount of valuable kit on board and the size of the thing it will have to be brought down safely. Couldn't they just do some repairs and nudge it back into a stable orbit?

Let us leave aside for the moment the fact that the British contribution to the project was the mirror, which rendered the telescope short sighted for the first year or so of its operational life, and that the European Space Agency has a record of innadequacy and hopelessness bourne of not having even a third of the budget of NASA couldn't we buy or lease Hubble from the yanks just to keep it in service? ESA could use it for practise missions. We could let the Americans do the dangerous exploring bit and we can have the knowledge and understanding bit.

Let's have a whip-round. I'll start us off with a fiver...

elephants

So these two elephants walk into a restaurant...

In a strangely accurate allegory for contemporary life six elephants escaped from their daily grind in an amusement park and tore through Seoul. Two of them took the opportunity to act like a pair of drunken louts, breaking into a restaurant and engaging in the treasured drunken tradition of garden hopping.

To my mind there are two ways of looking at this:

1. Don't try and use a creature which is probably as intelligent as you, and which is 70 times more massive, solely for entertainment. It is a foul and inhumane thing to do and eventually it will rebel.


2. The anthropomorphic (as at the beginning of this post): The elephants as a metaphor for workers service-based economy.
   

   "It seems one of them panicked, causing the others to also panic and flee the grounds," one official said.

Which presents the intriguing possibility that if one of us freaks out at work our colleagues will charge out of the building with us and cause havoc. Something I have long suspected.

Perhaps it is worth trying to provoke erratic behaviour in our colleagues so that we can get wrecked, destroy restaurants and go garden hopping. Something to think about as May Day/Labour Day approaches...

(related link requires realplayer)

Pope Benedict XVI

Bugger. I suppose it was too much to hope for really. They had the chance to elect the first african pope but instead I find the words:

"For more that 20 years he was head of the congregation of the Doctrine of the Faith in the Vatican - the Vatican's guardian of orthodoxy."

...on the bbc website. Oh well, he's 78, it won't be for long.

leaving

For reasons that will shortly become apparent on this page I am about to leave my job. This is an event that brings with it its' own set of anxieties and problems, most of them a bit embarrassing.

1. Writing and handing in of the letter of resignation, which is probably the easiest part of the whole process. It's such a formal thing to do that that it needs little or no attention other than to remember to put 'Yours faithfully,' at the bottom instead of 'Yours sincerely,' (something my last minion did on his rather unceremonious departure).

2. The bit when people start to find out before you've told most people in the office. You are from this point until you leave the building on your final day going to be asked the same questions again and again. Culminating in the inevitable 'so why are you leaving?'. This question is always asked with a slightly searching look no matter how content you have been in your job. At this juncture I intend to try bursting into tears and quickly leaving the room. That should raise a few eyebrows. At this stage in the leaving process it is wise to invest in a small tape recorder which you dictate your plans onto in detail. Whenever anyone approaches you with the 'so you're leaving' look on their face you simply press play.

3. The announcement that you have to make by email to everyone you work with. This is something I am not looking forward to at all. My natural tendency with things like this is to be a bit too...er...frivolous. The temptation to misbehave is just too great. For example what on earth do you put in the subject line of that email? My current personal favourite is 'So long suckers!' but I'm not 100% convinced that will go down particularly well with the Chief Exec. It is still better than 'I am rid of you all at last!', or 'Fuck this, I'm off', but none of them look like they will go over at all well. I have had 'The mother ship is calling me home...' suggested to me which I quite like. Any and all suggestions considered.

4. The agonising leaving gifts presentation and cakes etc. in the office. Which requires you to look pleasantly surprised at the touchingly unimaginative gifts they clubbed together to get you whilst trying desperately to find something to say that doesn't make you look insincere or hard of thinking. The temptation here to misbehave is also fairly pressing but is somewhat more intimidating prospect with everyone staring at you. Some surprisingly senior members of staff have misbehaved, or worse, spoken their mind, at this step in a 'screw you guys, I'm going home,' kind of a way.

The fifth and final step in the process is actually divided into parts 5a and 5b. This is the final release after the trauma of leaving day - the drinks after work.

5a. Everyone you have ever had any dealings with at your place of work is entitled if not pressured into coming to have at lease one drink. Which normally means you are surrounded by the people you disliked the most in the situation you disliked them the most in at a venue you hate (the one you like being deemed either too dingy, too loud or too far away). Thankfully the polite maximum number of drinks for people you didn't actually invite yourself is only 3 so you can be rid of them pretty quickly.

5b. All the people you actually liked at work accompany you to a venue that you actually like and get you shouting drunk. This is normally followed by a curry and possibly another louder drinking venue. Sometimes there is also a...
5c. Drunken, and slightly sloppy, clinch with the one you always fancied but never got close to before, but let us draw a veil over this unseemly thought.

I may try and come up with a more dignified exit strategy but will probably stick to the 5 step programme. I doubt I will get as far as 5c, but you never know...

sun guilt

Saturday morning and the sun comes out. I have nothing to do and no one to do it with. Still spaced out from Friday night I don’t feel quite up to calling people. They might want to talk to me, which I don’t think I would respond to particularly well in my current dilapidated mental state. I’m getting sunshine guilt, I have to get outside and do something, anything. Armour on, in the shape of sunglasses, I wander down the hill to pose around Crouch End with everyone else.

The place is a ghastly nightmare of three wheeled buggies and arguing couples. One of the things that unnerved me about moving here with my girlfriend is that people evidently move here to breed. We moved here and she goes to work on the other side of the world for six months, talk about mixed message. I decide to buy a notebook but then resolve not to, as can be seen from this page it is rare that I have particularly important or insightful thoughts that need recording. Spending a tenner on a notebook that I don’t need seems a little pointless. Dodging another three buggies and walking past yet another café I wander into a record shop, safe at last. Wandering around buying nothing and adopting a vacant look is accepted behaviour for record shops. Demonstrating an unusual degree of restraint in buying only two CDs I wander out aimlessly for a bit more toddler dodging.

Wandering up the hill again I still have no idea what I am going to do with the day and have to resign myself to the fact that it will be nothing. I am so bored of apathy.