China is here, Mr Burton

Since being back from France I regained my pre-Gallic state of unemployment, despite begging Nick down the phone for a job even just sweeping his office, my pleas have fallen on deaf ears. I really should have gone and signed on again last week, but shoulda, coulda, woulda and hindsight is always 20/20 vision. What ever that means. So I've been filling my time by doing very little in an effort not to spend too much money until I work for York Uni again in a week. I went out on Friday afternoon and met up with Moogdroog for a pub lunch and a film. She's been given time off from her PhD cos she'd written a chapter or something. Actually I have no idea what she'd done as when anyone starts telling me about their PhD my eyes glaze over and I start thinking about Tiger Tanks or the Battle of the Somme. The film we went to see was the new Woody Allen film: Whatever Works. It's hilarious and has Larry David in it, which alone is good enough reason to see it. It's like an extended episode of Curb Your Enthusiasm, which, you don't need to be told, is the best comedy show ever written (well most of it is improvised, so it's not so much written as ad libbed, but that's all just semantics, you pedantic wankers). The film is a repackaged 1970's script and it does show in a couple of it's dated situations (the bohemian three way relationship and the Southern gun nut turning out gay), but Larry is in fine form, especially when calling the kids to whom he teaches chess 'Inch worms and Cretins'.

That evening was also spent in the company of Moogdroog along with Claire, Helen and a bunch of others I didn't know for Alia's leaving do. About the third of several such leaving dos. Good God, that girl just doesn't know how to say goodbye. She still hasn't left York, either... Town was pretty quiet what with the upcoming England versus Germany game, all the knuckle draggers are saving their money for when we get knocked out of the World Cup finally (Despite not caring about football or the World Cup one little bit, Fidor insists on telling me the scores whenever England play. I'm not sure what part 'I don't care' or 'I'm just not interested mate' he doesn't understand but his steadfastness in keeping me up to date in the latest scores would be quite endearing if it were nothing to do with football...). It was a rather sedate affair, all be told, and I sloped off to bed a little after midnight. I was awoken before the sparrows fart on Saturday morning by the butchers having a rather loud and protracted conversations in Russian outside my window.

So long, farewell, would you ever fuck off?

On Saturday afternoon I met up with Logan Josh and his paddle chums. He was also back from France and bursting with stories of crazy Algerian campsite owners. We spent the afternoon talking about films, music and aeroplanes. Logan was his usual boorish self and he left me after braying and bragging about a Barbecue at his house that was NOT invited to. It seems like the rest of York was going, with only my house having missed out on getting an invitation through the door. Well, I hope he choked on his fucking burger. I already had other plans, I went to meet Vinny down in the Basement, which is not as predatory as it sounds, and I took my leave before calling in at Yummy Chicken, the most inappropriately named take away in York, The food is not 'yummy' by any stretch of the imagination and can hardly be described as chicken either... In the Basement there were three bands on, with a sixties/seventies themed disco afterwards. The first band Russell and the Wolves were by far the best on the bill. Any band that features a girl in a tiger suit playing solos with her high heels and a Elvis lookalike on the other guitar gets my vote. The second band, The Silver Factory were an incredibly lame jangly-shit-pop-Jam-Paul-Weller-wanna-be bunch of pricks. It seemed the only way to get into the band was to have the same haircut as the rest of them. They were the lamest band I've seen for a long time. The guitarist just strummed three chords on his £500 guitar the whole time. He should have saved himself some money and bought the cheapest shit guitar if that's all he was going to do with it. But I guess image was far more important to them than actual music. I don't remember much about the last band except they had come from London. It was probably something to do with the fact I had been drinking for about eight hours solid at that stage and so decided to call it a night. I ended up outside Oki's Mobile Kebab shop eating a chicken burger and listening to some racist cunt telling the guy behind the counter 'you no spit on burgers'. I certainly don't envy those lads having to listen to that shite every Friday and Saturday night, but I still think it would beat having to listen to The Silver Factory again...

Oh, just fuck off!

Goodbye Area 2

The students finished on Tuesday, after a day of hard work, we finally got to point where the area was pretty much finished, except for a few things I had to finish today. My team bought me present of three bottles of beer and made a card with a Pop-Up-Cock with my face on the head of the penis. Awwww, bless 'em, it really touched me. They've all worked hard and I'd like to thank them all, Rob the Workhorse, Kate the Flirt, Merel the German, Lauren the Mexican, Lawrence the Gobshite, Liz the Sunburnt, Richard the sick boy, Alicia the Disney cartoon, Adam the part timer and Bryn the Archaeological expert and I will miss them. Mind you, I will see them again before I leave York, so it ain't too bad. One final thing to add, I never really shaved my pubes to make my cock look bigger, that was just a joke.

Short and sweet, so suck it up.

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.