Où allons-nous mettre la fosse aux ours?

After yesterday's day off Clay and I turned at site this morning, drove in through the gateway and was confronted with the addition to the site car park of a Gypsy camp. Not just your common-or-garden type Gypsies either, oh no, but French Gypsies. Most likely of Algerian extraction. I assumed it was Karma coming round to slap me on the ass. The site is situated right next to the Park and Ride into York, there being a bus slip way running part way down the duel carriage way to allow buses access to the station. Commoners in cars have to go to the end of the road, do a full revolution on the round-about and then enter site. The bus slip road shaves off having to go around the round-about (and in Clay's case missing the exit and driving half way to Leeds...) On the approach to said bus route, Clay had been goading me about going up the slip road, saying Ali had said it was OK, that I was any kind of man then I'd go up it as well. He said that it was a test of masculinity to have such flagrant disregard for law and order. How could I look myself in the mirror each morning knowing that I'd wimped out of such a simple test of manhood? With this burning in my ears I took the exit up the slip road onto site. The only day I break the law in such a manner and the site is populated by Algerian (presumably) Gypsies, coincidence? I think not... Karma, I tells thee. Not only have they invaded our car park but they appear to have been using the grassy area in front of the site hut as a toilet, Cath and Daryl having to spade human faeces off the floor before anyone else got there. Apparently they'll only be there for three days so that's three days of spading shit up ahead of us...

'You're only here for three days? No Problem...'

Speaking of cars, I managed to get mine through its MOT today. It had failed previously on the parking brake, which for a 17 year old car is pretty good going. But this is the last day of a long tale of anguish. I had been looking forward to this job as it was just down the road and would only take about fifteen minutes to get to site (ten by using the bus slip road...), this meant that I would be able to lie in until about eight o'clock. The usual time I am on site for any other job. Relative bliss... But fate has turned against me it would seem. Clay and I have been having MOTs and mechanics looking at our respective cars most mornings and always at unreasonable times. In fact we have both been back and forth to the MOT place so many times in these past two weeks that the guys there probably think we work there. Mind you they still get uppity when I asked if I could leave my car there for the day while I was at work, well how else would I be able to pay for the MOT? They chuntered and muttered about not having parking spaces, but the ten parking spaces in front of the place were as empty at five o'clock as they were when I dropped the car off in the morning...

'Sorry, we're really pushed for space today, you'll have to park on the road...'

LULZ at work today, I was talking to Abi about The Plato Papers and how a future society decimated by an unknown tragedy had begun to base their knowledge of the past on fragments of Charles Dickens books. She asked if they had electricity in Charles Dickens' time, then quickly corrected herself, they had gas lamps. Yes I said they had gas lamps. Oh no, says she, No hair straighteners!

 Getting Charles' hair sorted in the morning was a full time job...

Not much else to tell you, expect last night was the last night of my Teacher Training course and I had to give a class. I taught the rest of the class how to lay out a grid square. The other micro-teaches that were being given were how to pot herbs properly, how to spot signs of abuse and the best one, how to make gloop. Gloop consists of corn flour and water and is the maddest thing I've ever seen. It basically stays solid in the tray you mix it in, until you pick it up when something reacts and it turns liquid again. It was literally blowing my fucking mind and it kept the five of us who stayed behind entertained for ages.

Gloop, kids and adults love it so!

Paranormal Bollocks

On Monday Lauren and I watched Derren Brown's program about exposing Spiritual Mediums. I'm not a big fan of Brown, but it was a good to see an examination of the techniques employed by the 'psychics' to manipulate and exploit the vulnerable and grief stricken. This led onto a discussion about Lauren's friend's mum who was also claimed to be a  'medium'. Apparently her spirit guide had channelled through her to tell Lauren that there was something wrong with her car wheel and when Lauren checked the tyre was flat. HOW FUCKING FREAKY IS THAT? Now, why the spirits would make a point of telling Lauren something that she would have noticed as soon as she went to get into her car, I don't know. But that's what makes me a skeptic.

And we all know, cats are always right... 

The program also led onto a discussion at work about Ghosts and the like. Again, I am highly skeptical of the existence of things that cannot be proved by the rigorous dry reasoning of SCIENTIFIC TESTING. Things like Ghosts. Ghosts and 'spiritual guides'. Why do ghosts and spiritual guides always come as stock characters? Think about it. Lauren's friend's mum apparently has two spiritual guides, a Native American and an Ancient Greek. Now, call me skeptical again, but how can she even begin to understand what these guides are even saying? Does she speak ancient Greek or Navajo or Cree or Cherokee? Most likely not, so how can she follow the spirit's advice? The reason these 'guides' have been chosen is because they are the layman's approximation of intelligence in history. Everybody has heard how wise the Greeks were, well, along with bumming, they invented maths and that Plato fella invented psychology or physiology or something clever beginning with P and ending in ology. And we've all seen Dances With Wolves, those Indian chaps must be clever with their quiet meditative ways and their wind catchers and diminishing supplies of buffalo. Well, they couldn't out smart fucking small pox or fire water could they? But it's the same with ghosts, people always see ghosts of  18th Century Gentlemen or Nuns, little Victorian Girls or Roman soldiers (as here in York). When Ghosts are reported they are always something historically recognisable. Why do people never report seeing ghosts of 6th Century Anglo-Saxon peasants tilling the fields or a 1980's Yuppie who died from a coke overdose after a particularly hard fought merger and acquisition? Why are spirit guides never ancient Phoenicians or Cuthbert the peasant from the 13th century who worked in the local dung smithy? Why? Because the general public don't know they even existed. Since the general public's view of history is tempered by Television, most particularly BBC costume dramas and Dickens adaptations, there's no wonder people make these connections when they see a 'ghost' or call up their local Spiritual Guide.

Would you trust this man with your dead Grandmother?

Further to the other day's Road Rage, Lauren and I have noticed an alarming trend that occurs on the A59 every morning between the hours of 7am and 9am and 4pm and 6pm. It's name is enough to strike terror deep into the heart of any driver, Howard Carter had his Curse of the Pharaohs, we York commuters have the Curse of the Farmer! Yes, everyday at precisely 7am and 4pm the local farmers decide it is time to start driving tractors towing trailers packed to the brim with hay or potatoes or pig shit or anthrax infected sheep carcasses up and down one of the busiest roads to York at the busiest time of the day. The farmer drives his tractor down one lane whilst his high foreheaded, web toed, idiot son drives down the other lane in the opposite direction. They reach the roundabouts at the ends of the A59, circle them and head back on themselves at precisely 14 Miles per hour. The cars are backed up to Thirsk and Huntington full of sweating, swearing commuters desperate to get to work on time or to get home for the night. If it wasn't for these bastards we'd be home in about twenty minutes.

Get out of my fucking way you backwards animal fucking cunts!

Into the Lungs of Hell

This is how the country would look if Nick Griffin's BNP gets in power:


What with the country still in the ICY GRIP OF WINTERY DEATH, I haven't been able to go very far from the house, the news has been telling people to make journeys only if they are essential. But having said that, I mentioned to Ninjasaurus Rex that I wanted to go to Meadowsmell at some point. Since Monday I've had this seed planted in my head about buying a Marks and Spencer pizza. I just fancied one and the desire has grown out of all proportion driven by the lack of ability to move far. I have woken up everyday with a feeling gnawing at my mind: Pizza, pizza, pizza. I have also been wanting to buy some parcels for the books I'm selling on EBay. Ninjasaurus told me his wife, Sarah, was wanting to get a new phone, so we reasoned that all these were legitimate reasons for essential travel in these harsh conditions. They both came to my house and I managed to get the car out of the garage with no problems, but two hundred yards up the road it came to a grinding halt on the small incline up to the main road.

'Try it in a lower gear.'

It took nearly an hour or slipping, sliding and clearing snow with a rake (standing in for a shovel) to get the car back into the garage. We decided that our journey was still essential enough to continue on the bus. It was an exciting adventure for me, journeying into the unknown on public transport. Since having a car I've been able to travel like a KING, whilst the great unwashed moved about crushed together in cattle cars.

'A Daysaver, please'

But Winter turned the tables on me and needs must as the Devil drives, whatever that means, and we took the bus into town. Sarah and Ninjasaurus were old hands at this game and helped me choose the ticket that was right for me.

'Where the fuck is this bus, these two are boring me now...'

We changed buses in Rotherham after a debate over taking the train or another bus. I don't think I would have been able to sustain the excitement had we gone on the train, so we took another bus. This involved standing in the ICY GRIP OF THE WINTER OF DEATH for a while until one arrived. God alone knows how we survived.

'I thought the X78 runs every 12 minutes?'

After battling the elements and scrubbers on the X78 (the route originates in Doncaster, the home of an altogether lower class of people than those from Rotherham...) we arrived at our destination, the Land of Shopportunity: Meadowhell. It was the quietest I'd seen it for a long time, although there were still great gangs of children roaming around. Every single school in Britain has been closed, due to lazy teachers seizing any excuse to not work (they get about 40 weeks off a year already, what more do they want? Blood?) and as a result the children have been running wild in the streets like animals. As it was so quiet I managed to get everything I needed within about ten minutes whilst Sarah signed her soul away on a new phone contract.

Just as Meadowhell should be, when I visit.

Sarah insisted on getting a cover for her new phone so we stepped into the future in the Apple Shop. It was so far into the future there were no tills and Sarah had to pay by telekinesis. With Sarah's mind probed, we needed nothing more and once more boarded a bus, homeward bound.

The future's shite, the future's Apple...

If you know of a better 'ole...then go to it pt6

Lichfield! Ah, Lichfield! Nestling in the heart of Staffordshire, quietly majestic down the centuries, like an aged Grandparent quietly watching the rest of the world evolve & mature. Great men came and went, great women came and went, moulding the planet in their image. Stone tools superseded by metal, in turn outdone by machinery. Lichfield watched it all. Feet gave way to carts and wagons, the internal combustion engine ushered in the era of the car, pioneers soared into the blue skies aboard aeroplanes. Lichfield sat and pondered the changes. Lichfield sat pondering.

Saturday night entertainment in Lichfield in the 1980's

Lichfield was still pondering the changes when Onsite got an evaluation trenching contract before development commenced on a new mall complex including a Cinema on what was the existing council carpark and the area surrounding the bus station:


This project was the biggest upheaval in Lichfield's history since Prince Rupert of the Rhine demolished the cathedral's spire during the English Civil War. It was such an upheaval, in fact, that the local newspapers were full of letters from the older generation (of which Lichfield is made up of about 80%, Lichfield being somewhere you go to die, not live...) debasing the coming cinema. The cinema would give the local 'youths' somewhere to gather. Obviously this would lead to them all hanging around in groups and smoking Ecstasy until they were ripped off their tits on LSD Acid. What the letter writers failed to note was that the local 'youths' had nowhere to go and hung around in groups smoking ecstasy anyway. At least a Cinema would give them a focal point and help release some of that tension that living in a town populated by geriatrics who get excited at the prospect of a Christmas show from Phil Cool can generate. This was the kind of attitude we were up against in Lichfield. Development and change=BAD, sitting on your arse for centuries doing nothing=GOOD. laissez le bon temps d'arrêt.

The Church says NO(to the cinema)!

It wasn't all bad, Lichfield had it's share of characters as only parochial places can. We stayed in Pauline's B&B for the most part and I have covered my adventures there in this post. I forgot to mention in that post that the dentist Daniel was mistaken for turned out be a Hungarian/Bulgarian/Romanian (I was never quite clear which) man with quite a dour demeanor and a hatred of 'the Muslim'. He was never seen in daylight hours and I'm fairly positive that 'Vlad the Extractor' slept in a coffin lined with soil from his homeland...

'Please be to opening ze mouth and saying ze Arrrghhhh'

There was Sven the bartender in one of the pubs, a Margret Thatcher supporting Wiccan Wizard. He spotted my Tenhornedbeast t-shirt and asked if it was a Star of David I was wearing. A Star of David with ten points? I thought you were an authority on Magic Symbols Sven? He also bored me for a while with his stories of laylines instead of allowing me to try my lay lines on the attractive barmaid he was working with.

'One for the road, Lads?'

Vlad and Sven were not the only weirdos that we met within the city walls of Lichfield and I'm sure Duck L'Orange can wax lyrical about them for hours, but that is not the purpose of this piece. Lichfield marked the last job I would work for Onsite for nearly two years. This probably had something to do with what happened on the day before I left the company. We had been erecting fences around the holes we were digging in the carpark, Nick had come down from York to oversee Lauren and myself, as Barry was off eating pies or something. Lauren had been tasked with watching the machine as it cut it's way into the ground. I was, single handedly mind you, building the fences around the holes. In a brief pause I placed a spare fence panel absentmindedly against the half built fence. The wind took the panel and it fell into the carpark. It fell into an empty bay, unfortunately the next bay was occupied by a vehicle (I don't remember the particular make, it's all a bit of a blur after this..). The fence panel was exactly the right size to fall on the car's left side and scratch about twenty identically spaced lines down each panel of the vehicle.

How the car looked to me in those pregnant seconds after dropping the fence panel...

I looked at the fence panel, looked at the car, looked at the fence panel, wondered if I could get away without saying anything. I decided it was far too obvious and had to 'fess up to Nick. Nick looked at the fence panel, looked at me, looked at the car, looked at the fence panel, looked at me, wondered if he could get away with smashing my teeth down my throat in broad daylight. He decided it was far too obvious and left a note on the car to get in touch with him about insurance. Apparently the lady did and although I never found out exactly how much Nick paid out in insurance for the repair job he reminded me of the incident every time I talked to him on the phone for the next eighteen months. I sheepishly left Onsite for France, but I'll talk more about that in the next instalment, so while you think about that, I'll give you another bonus from the Singapore blog:

Thursday, May 31, 2007

Today is Vesak Day, we had the day off and I was going to spend it lying prostrate in front of a massive Golden Buddha, releasing a load of doves and then taking part in a candle lit procession like the good Buddhist I am. I got on the MRT and was heading down to Chinatown when B*** called me, telling me to come back to Yishun. Apparently I was needed as we were going to change our flights back to the UK. I thought they only needed my passport, which I had dropped off earlier. But, no, that wasn't good enough for Singapore Airlines. I needed to be there in person T**** had been told on the phone. So I duly arrived back at their apartment and we all set off down town. When we got there it turns out we didn't all need to go and least of all we didn't even need our passports...

Having ruined my Vesak day, which I had been looking forward to since the last one, me and B*** went in search of a Gun Shop he had read about in the Yellow Pages. God I was so angry I was gonna get a gun and just start blasting! Imagine, ruining MY BUDDHIST CELEBRATIONS!!

The shop was shut, so I went around the Arab quarter which was really nice, like Morroco, but better. Then walked back into town and bought myself a guitar for about £50. This is how nice people are here, I bought the guitar, the guys in the shop gave me a load of plectrums for free and then took a dollar off the price as they had no change. I then went up stairs to see Dean in To Megatherion, I bought the CD I am listening to now and he knocked two dollars off the price, again because he had no change. Imagine that in the UK?

And further to this, we needed some tyres for the array, the ones that were provided have copper banding in them. The instrument is looking for metal in the ground, so obviously having metal in the wheels fucks up the readings, as the machine reads the wheels and not the ground. We went to this bike shop called Cheap John's (true.), told the guy (I presumed it was John) our problem and he said "here, take this wheel, it's plastic, has no metal in the tyres." We said,"OK,How much do you want for it?" 'John' said "Don't worry, try it out and if it works then pay me, if not, then bring it back whenever." We were Gobsmacked. The upshot of the story was we couldn't be bothered to change the wheels over so we took it back to 'John' anyway. We are well on the way to finishing the second area of the site, there are quite few large anomolies that we have picked up with on the scanner but they shouldn't be a problem, unless they are 2,500lb Japanese Bombs. Mind you, we won't have any more problems if they go off...

Only B*** and I have been on the site for the past couple of days, T**** seems to have gone down with Dengue, the disease spread by mosquitos. It's like flu but takes about a month to get over. One of us had to get it. I expect we will all come down with it at some point. It's not fateful but there is nothing you can do about it. Mind you Dengue is the least of the problems if there is a Japanese bomb sitting under the ground, we'll find out tomorrow....

Communication Breakdown

On the way home tonight Lauren and I had a spot of car trouble. Nick refuses to buy good cars for his fleet so we end up with terrible bags of shit mounted on wheels to run about in. Most of these 'cars' would be of better service if they were set on fire and shoved off a cliff. The cost of keeping them running must be astronomical compared to the original layout cost (about £100 by the look of the things...). When I worked in Lichfield a year or so ago there were at least two instances of the big white Passat breaking down, once on the way to Lichfield and once on the way back home. Both times we ended up getting to the destination about seven hours after we had set off. What was particularly galling was the fact that when we were driving home we broke down only twenty minutes outside Lichfield, I was listening to a program about Kraftwerk on the radio and the breakdown also interrupted that. I then finally got home about eight o'clock in the evening after we'd set off for the two hour journey at about 1.00 pm. It seems to be a trait programmed into these vehicles that they break down on the way home from work rather on the way to work. Anyway, the arse fell out of the VW Golf that Lauren and I were travelling home in tonight. True to form. Twenty minutes away from site and forty minutes left to go on the journey the engine gave up the ghost and we pulled up on the side of a very deserted country road outside of Hooton Pagnell.

I think it might be the clutch

This event further depressed Lauren as she had spent the entire day being told by Robot the Bruce about his 43 inch chest and 23 inch waist. (She was unable to break free of his droning because Stanners, Alice and myself were behind the spoilheap down the bottom of the hill. I think this was done to keep the three of us out of view of the public who had come for the site tour. I think it's no coincidence that we had also been sent 'down there' on Friday when there was another tour on.) I tried to cheer her up by playing MANOWAR really FUCKING LOUD. It worked for me anyway. The RAC man eventually turned up, condemned the car and dragged it back to Rotherham.Two and a half hours after I was supposed to get in.

No it's not the clutch, it could be something to do with the electronics...

Not only that, but today Sir Stanners found a fucking Roman Trumpet Brooch in the 'kiln' he was digging. I had been excavating a similar feature last week and only found crappy cooking wares. He started his kiln last Friday and immediately found Samian pottery. Decorated Samian pottery at that... Mind you, in the ditch I had been digging for the past two days I have found more pottery than I have found in the past three years combined. I think I have found more pottery than has been found in all of West Yorkshire, ever. I tried shoving it in Stanner's face but he retorted it was a question of Quality over Quantity.

My load of crappy broken olden-days shit is much better than yours!

It was the ARCUS Carcass rats-from-a-stinking-ship party on Saturday, I wasn't going to go, then I went and I'm glad I did. Although it was good to see all the old faces there was only really one person I wanted to see there and I saw her and that's all I'll say on that subject.

Back in the DHSS

I'm back in the UK now. It took me about thirteen hours from leaving my bed, on Jo, Roz and Duncan's sofa at 4.00am, to get back to Rotherham. Thirteen hours of miserable journeying with a hangover and two hours sleep as my travelling companions. We (Duncan, Roz, Lilja, Atli, Bjarki, Margrét, Hrafnkell, Iris, Jo and I) had been drinking the night before with some goodbye drinks that quickly turned messy. Several sad goodbyes later I crashed out on said sofa until my alram woke me up. At Gatwick I bid Jo a very sad goodbye. I probably won't see her again now until after I come back from South Africa in July. After getting home I dashed out and got myself a chippy tea. It looks like my car has been mistreated whilst I was away as well. The back tyre has a nail embedded in it and the thing was as flat as fuck when I got to it. Not only that it looks like my parents have been running it on empty, there was no fucking petrol in it when I went to get the chips. I give someone my car for four months and you'd think they could at least fill it up. You have to when you hire a car, so I don't see why the rules don't apply to me.

How my car looked on my return..

Lísabet added a comment asking if I had good memories about my time on that forbidding rock in the Atlantic. And frankly yes I do, it may seem as though I was massively unhappy in Iceland, but on the whole the experience was good one. I have no regrets about going and I met some brilliant people, whose generosity and pleasurable company was difficult to parallel. I was bored at work, but then I would have been bored anywhere really, having to trowel off bog deposits. Just one mattock would have been like a God Send. My arm muscles have atrophied, yet my hand muscles have grown out of all proportion. They look like two melons stuck on the end of pencils.

I was also bored in Reykjavik, but some of that was partially my own fault. I could have joined a night class or something similar, but the problems of doing this was illustrated by an earlier post I wrote. Also, the language barrier was always a difficult hurdle to cross besides anything else. I never saw the point in learning a language that 300,000 people speak in a country that I will never settle in. Call me small minded but Icelandic would be no use to me unless I planned to settle there, which was never a thought I had in mind. I actually love the language and I loved listening to it being spoken. The sound of it is very soothing, the use of 'th' sounds gives it a lovely comforting quality.

I mean, really, what the fuck does this say?

I found Reykjavik town a little too small, which is something I also covered in another earlier post, and that lack of escape was quite a problem for my mental state of being. I'm a man who likes his creature comforts and being Iceland only convinced me of this. I never really unpacked my suitcase from when I first turned up. Jo said I should have put some pictures up in my bedroom to make it a bit more personal. The only pictures I had were the ones from Terrorizer magazine. Not being fifteen anymore I didn't really relish the idea of Cannibal Corpse watching me sleep.

Would you sleep easily with these fellas watching you? No, me neither...

Like I said though, no regrets, I got to do so much stuff that I would have never done anywhere else. I played live three times, once clearing a bar and getting thrown off stage. I walked on a glacier, stood on a volcano, saw and ate Puffins, ate Whale meat and Sheep's head (albeit in jellied version...). Finally the country has to be the most unbelievable beautiful place I have ever seen. On a 7000 miles of a road trip across America not one place came close to the beauty and absolute gob smackingness of Iceland, except maybe the Grand Canyon. Outside of Reykjavik one surely can get Lost in Iceland. I will look back on my time there with fondness and good memories.