Freakspotting

Choose Life. Choose a job. Choose a career. Choose a family. Choose a fucking big television, choose washing machines, cars, compact disc players and electrical tin openers. Choose good health, low cholesterol, and dental insurance. Choose fixed interest mortgage repayments. Choose a starter home. Choose your friends. Choose leisurewear and matching luggage. Choose a three-piece suit on hire purchase in a range of fucking fabrics. Choose DIY and wondering who the fuck you are on Sunday morning. Choose sitting on that couch watching mind-numbing, spirit-crushing game shows, stuffing fucking junk food into your mouth. Choose rotting away at the end of it all, pissing your last in a miserable home, nothing more than an embarrassment to the selfish, fucked up brats you spawned to replace yourselves. Choose your future. Choose life... But why would they want to do a thing like that? They chose not to choose life. They chose somethin' else. And the reasons? There are no reasons. Who needs reasons when you've got Cosplay?

Yes, Cosplay, the biggest threat to the country since Hitler and his sharply dressed army. But, unlike the Nazis, this lot know nothing of discipline. In fact a good dose of National Service would sort them out. If you have no idea what I am talking about, let me explain. Cosplay is the attempt by people with nothing to wake up for in the morning to dress up as their favourite characters out of comics or TV series. It probably all began with Trekkies dressing up like General Kirk or Doctor Spock, but has gotten all out of control with people dressing up as minor characters in the Legend of Zilda or E.T. The Extra Testicle. It gives them a sense of being, a belonging in a world that hates them. They gather together and perform strange little rituals, usually at comic conventions. Which is where I gazed into the face of madness. I was attending Thought Bubble, 'an annual celebration of sequential art in all its forms' (LOL. Just call them comics!) Ninjasaurus Rex had brought it to my attention and he was desperate to get to a Japanese restaurant in Leeds again, so this seemed like a perfect opportunity to kill two birds with one stone. If only we'd killed one hundred Cosplayers with the same stone we would have come home happy men.

I arrived at the plaza between the Royal Armouries and the new Savile Building and gazed on what looked like a scene from the Fourth Circle of Hell. The avaricious with their cossetted material possessions danced about to the tuneless horns of Mars. Dressed as Manga characters. I panicked and telephoned Ninjasaurus who had been struck immobile by the scene of human degradation. Seeking comfort in numbers we banded together quickly and watched one anothers backs like hawks. Our fear was soon dissipated by the sight of the very chair SIR JIMMY SAVILE sat in:

Not only his Chair, but his car as well!! This was a man who was living the dream!

This was without doubt the best thing we saw all day and was well worth the ten pounds admission fee alone, but was nothing to do with the Comic Con. Which, frankly, was just loads and loads and loads of comics for sale. But then, what else did I expect it to be? Ninjasaurus saw some of his friends from the dark world of comic publishing and I bumped into the Big O, who rather kindly gave us a free comic each!

Cheers big man!!

Outside, the swirling mass of madness was gathering it's momentum and here are a few pictures to illustrate just what we saw. I beg you, gentle reader, do not allow your eyes to linger too long on these images...

Aren't you a little shit to be a Stormtrooper?

I wanted a photo, not a pose...

Electra's arse and Mario and Luigi. The mind boggles...

Is that a lightsaber or a lipstick?

Wrap up warm, love...

Interviewer: So what is missing in your life?

We retreated into the Armouries to look at real weapons, rather than over sized foam hammers and realised that we had a vantage point over the assembled freaks. After a few minutes of playing 'spot the tard' we both said in unison 'I wish I had a rifle.'

Sargent, three rounds rapid!

I was going to run up to him shouting 'Help! Help! Judge, I've just been raped in the Armouries toilets!' to see if he'd help, but I bottled it at the last minute. 

We finished the afternoon off by a visit to this authentic U-Boat which had surfaced in the docks.

It was captained by this fellow:

 

You Cheeky Chappy

These last few days have been a pretty Japanese few days. It all began on Tuesday when I went to see 13 Assassins with Ali and Kirky. It's the new Takashi Miike film about Samurai and killings. In fact it's mainly about killings. Loads and loads of killings. But coming from the director of Audition, The Happiness of the Katakuris and Ichi the Killer this was to be expected, since all those films have loads of killings in them. It doesn't have the highest body count of all time in a movie, but it's certainly full of loads of blood and snot and piss flying about. Especially as the last forty five minutes is given over to one continual battle scene. Two hundred and eleven dead people later we walked out of the cinema all wanting to be Samurai when we grew up. On the way for an after-cinema pint I even stabbed the doorman at the House of the Trembling Madness just to make my point.

KILL!!!!!!!

In the same theme I also watched Akira Kurosawa's The Hidden Fortress. I have Kurasawa's Samurai DVD box set and have been working my way through them slowly. So far I have to find one I don't like, Yojimbo being easily the best so far and probably one of the best films I've ever seen. But The Hidden Fortress is what George Lucas based Star Wars on. So there I was with bated breath, waiting to see the similarities. Boy, was I disappointed. For a start it wasn't even set in space. The closest we got to stars was the scene by the fire in the night. There were no gay robots, no Stormtroopers, no fucking explosions even. I waited two hours for Darth Vader to show up and even that never happened. They were all fighting with normal swords and not lightsabres. To top it all it was in fucking black and white as well. Forgive me if I'm wrong but Star Wars is in COLOUR. There wasn't even a Death Star or them Jawas. I was so angry by the end that I was mad with rage that I went out and stabbed the local garage attendant as he was the closest person I could find.

'We're wanted men, I have the death sentence on twelve star... no, wait...'

I spent the day also listening to the Ancient Japanese Black Metal band Sabbat. Rhys had recorded me some of their back catalogue and I thought now was the time to give it a good listening to. Fucking Hell are they good. I actually got to see them when I worked in Singapore. They were supported by Ironfist, the singer of whom I was in touch with through Myspace. The show was being held in the afternoon in a downtown bar and the crowd went fucking wild for the entire gig. The thing is, being into the Black Metal scene as I am, the chance to see a band play live is limited because they're either in jail or dead, or both in some cases. Most bands  are only one-man acts and misanthropes to boot and they never venture out of their local cave to tour. So the chance to see a band who I've respected for many years in a live venue is a very rare treat in this scene.

Brack Fire, Brack Fire, Brack Fire!!!

It's the last day on site tomorrow, it's come around quickly. I'm back to my normal job next week and straight into a shit picnic with a watching brief that Stanners rejected, deeming it beneath him. But I've obviously made some form of impression on the kiddydinks. I was checking CR's field notebook today and came across the following sentence: 'constant verbal abuse from our supervisor (c bomb count = 13)'. I'm surprised in equal amounts that she kept count and that the count was so low... As I said, tomorrow is the last day and I'll miss their stupid little faces, so I've decided to do the only thing that is right and proper in this situation. Taking a tip from Jim Jones, I've been putting rat poison in some cookies that I will hand out to them tomorrow. Then we can all go to Heaven and work together on exposing cobbled surfaces through eternity! Let's leave this on a happy note with my favourite part from Mozart's Requiem:

If you know of a better 'ole... then go to it pt1

In lieu of anything really funny or exciting happening on site (unless you call Robot the Bruce's cruel and unusual punishments funny or exciting, like making me trowel natural bedrock for three days solid...) I was thinking about all the places I'd worked on over the years. I've already done three posts previously that was similar with some moderate success. This one will be longer as I have worked on more sites that I have lived in houses, but as before I will break it down into parts so you at the back don't get too bored. I'm going to give a brief overview of the sites and the archaeology therein, but don't worry there should be a few funny stories about some of the personalities that worked on these sites.

I was going to start right at the very beginning but I couldn't find the location of the site at Thundercliffe Grange, where I worked for one day as a fifteen year old lad. I had a trowel and I found some 19th century pottery so it counts as archaeology in my book... I also did a bit of work on Stanton Moor and Beauchief Abbey during my GCSE Archaeology night class years, but again memory escapes me as to which field work we planned and which bit of the grounds we ran a geophysical survey over, respectively... So I'll have to start with my University excavations:


Ingleby, Derbyshire. This is Heath Wood where we excavated two Viking Cremation mounds and two Landrover wheel ruts. This was my very first excavation proper, it was Summer 1999, I was an enthusiastic young pup. An eager digger, trowel at the ready, searching for the past. Boy, how times have changed... It was on this site that I first made contact with the Evil Nazi Dr John Clay, I think it was the first human contact he'd ever had, as he had been hatched from an egg in a laboratory and kept in a cage for the better part of his life until this point. We also had on the team, the extremely weird Stuart Wilson. He had been told by his dentist that sugar was actually good for his teeth, that the crystals in the sugar filled in the gaps in his teeth. When there was a run to the local shop Stuart would request a 2kilo bag of sugar. He ate it straight out of the bag with a spoon...

The following Easter found me in Abingdon, back at school, well the back yard of Abingdon School. As one of Britain's premier boarding schools my working class roots felt a little out of sorts there. And that was even during half term where the pupils had gone home to Mater and Pater and the 500 acres they owned just outside of Epsom. I was there to learn how to use the floatation sieves, in preparation of working at Castell Henlys, more of which later... I remember very little about this excavation, I'm sorry, but here it is...


A year later I went back to Ingleby and then over to Japan for three weeks work at Toyama University's site up in the Aomori prefecture in Northern Japan. Now I can't for the life of me find a picture of the site as it was under a tree canopy and there are lot of tree canopies in the Aomori Prefecture, so instead I've found the community hall where we all stayed in the tiny village of Siura:


Rob and I were housed in this community centre, whilst Pins, Stan and Wendy were all housed with the other girls in the Cat Killer Cell. One of the first nights we were there Rob and I were drinking together whilst waiting for the girls to come over. We were saying 'Chin Chin' before each drink, Withnail and I style, and noticed some of the Japanese Students had a taken an amused interest in what we were doing... We saluted them with 'Chin Chin' rather loudly several times and they seemed to take great delight in this. We found out a couple of days later we'd been shouting 'Cock' at the top of our voices... Here are some more Japanese words that we learned in our time there...

Curimundi = Arrested
Saru ga Shinda = the monkey is dead
Unabe = Lesbian
Chikusho = Shit
Uchujin = Spaceman
Dame Da Korya = Aye Caramba

As you can tell it was a very cultural visit.

What was less of a cultural visit was six weeks spent in South Wales at Castell Henlys, where I was in charge of the afore mentioned Flotation device... I spent the first couple of weeks up to my elbows in freezing water. After a while I realised I could get the students to do the shit work and spent the remaining time laid down sorting through the floated samples. This in turn led onto what became known as 'Lazy Bastarditis' or Housemaids knee on my elbow. My elbow swelled up to three times the size of my head and I was packed off back to York, much to my own relief, mainly at getting out of Wales.


The main site is to the right of the red circled area, but it was under the circle where the floatation tank was set up, so that is where I spent six weeks of my life one summer. This was a student excavation so we had a fair run of lunatics. One of whom, Sam, was a caught on the edge of a 6ft sheer drop mattocking the ground away from under him. I had him for a day and sent him off for a 'long stand', he didn't come back for an hour or so. I believe is still working in archaeology, for Oxford North at last count. Jesus if they'll take him they'll take anyone...

OK, that wraps up part one, the next part will deal with some of the sites in Ireland that I worked on, and if you think I'd already met a few lunatics then these lads were nothing on the madness that awaited in the Green Isle...