Calamari Ferrari Pt.2

August 17th 1844. Lord Roberts, being an excellent engineer, soon set the feckless Greek locals to building a pontoon bridge in order to ease our passing between points of strategic import. The Greek is a feckless worker, he is prone to bouts of inactivity which he calls 'Siesta'. These occur, in the main, between two and six bells. Being of stout English stock, I was most distressed to see these daily occurrences and bid Lord Roberts to quicken the pace of the labour. The Turk is almost equally feckless, but the fighting spirit of Pasha's soldiers is indomitable and he is quick to gain advantage, so we had to work fast if we were to give him a thorough drubbing. Lord Roberts used his usual form of coercion upon the Greek, that is, with the stout end of his billy-club. The labour was quickly completed, a d--n good thing too, as the heat was playing havoc with my distemper, and we were able to leave the isle of Santorini. To Naxos we were bound.

Farewell, Isle of Disrepute...

Naxos; the birth place of that most heathen of Greek deities; Dionysus. A man I would have no truck with, a licentious beast given to the baser of humanities depravities. So it was with a wary eye I travelled to Naxos. During the crossing Lord Roberts and I made the acquaintance of a middle aged travelling lady from the Atlantic colonies. She was engrossed in a tour of sites of antiquity and spoke eloquently of history and conjured up wonderful images of the graceful ancients. Lord Roberts fell into a deep slumber upon such utterances, but I was enraptured. I have often wondered why it is that well-to-do ladies of a certain age are enthralled by the Ancient Hellenistic Culture. One hopes it is nothing to do with the large amounts of phalluses that are on display.

All the girls like a Greek

As we set about our stabilising the defences of Naxos I took the chance to commandeer a schooner out to the ancient island of Delos. I brought Lord Roberts along in a vain attempt to distil some culture upon his persona. Upon dispatch from the great Motherland I had also been instructed that this was not a purely military expedition and we were to return to London with treasures of the ancients. The Greek has left his past to go to rack and ruin and as Europe's retainers the English were in the perfect position to corral and protect his treasures. Lord Elgin had already done marvellous work at the Parthenon and we were not about to be over-shadowed by his achievements. We brought several strong-arm boys with to help in the task (these boys seemed to follow Lord Roberts wherever he went; when I pressed him on their presence he always muttered ‘women for dynasties, boys for pleasure’ I was always at a loss to fathom his words). We arrived at Delos and immediately set about our task with gusto. The statues offended my eyes with their nakedness and I instructed the boys to remove the offending articles with chisel and hammer. The ladies of London would no longer have to suffer fainting fits when gazing upon such marvels of the ancient epoch.

The scaffolding isn't original...

We left Delos empty of treasure and set sail for the island of Mykonos. The poverty and desperation we saw there made us flee almost as quick as we had arrived and I for one was glad to not have to stayed another moment in that G-d forgotten land.

What a dump

For those with an interest in that sort of thing, I prepared several Lithographs during my time in Greece, they hang in a public gallery which may be seen here: TRAVELS AMONGST THE ANCIENTS

Mercury's Moustache

This is completely anachronistic, but I'm going to tell you about something I got up to last year when I was out in Zanzibar. Exactly a year ago I was in Tanzania, excavating some olden days shit. When we'd finished the work I was left alone in East Africa to fend for myself. My colleagues cast me off to the lions with no protection besides a crumpled copy of Catch 22 and a beard as big as a house.

I'm ready for anything...

Anyway, I found myself on a bus from Arusha heading down to Dar es Salaam, it was a nine hour bus journey that I would not wish on my worst enemy. I did befriend two people though, one a kindly middle aged gentleman who was wearing a safari company t-shirt. I asked him if he worked as a safari guide. He told me no, he worked in a bank and the t-shirt was given to him by his friend who DID work as a safari guide. He seemed to be pretty intent on helping me, despite me not asking for any help. Maybe he would have been a good safari guide and was wasted in the bank. Who knows? The other person I befriended on the bus was a kindly middle aged woman. I was sat in my seat and she climbed on the bus and sat right down next to me. She was, shall we say 'big boned', and took up at least two thirds of the seat, crushing me against the window like that face in the car in Jacob's Ladder. Besides that she was lovely. After sitting down she announced 'Hello, I am magnificent!' I responded; 'Hi, I'm doing great as well!' It took me a little while to realise her name was Magnificent and she was not referring to her state of being. Anyway, these two made the journey a little more bearable and I was soon in Dar. I was also soon heading out of that fucking dump on a ferry bound for Zanzibar.

The best way to see Dar es Salaam, disappearing on the horizon....

Zanzibar was amazing, a really great little spot, friendly locals, cheap booze and pretty waitresses. Stone town was a good place to be based, but I soon grew tired of the hustle and bustle of the big smoke and wanted to break away to the country. I decided to head north to where the beaches are with an idea of spending some time sunning my corpulent body and having a proper relaxing time.

The grind of the daily commute was wearing me down...

I should have known better. The last time I had a 'beach holiday' was in America in 2004 and we stopped near Galveston at Fred's insistence to spend some time on the sea front. After two days of building sand castles I was bored out of my tiny mind and was desperately trying to chivvy the others on so we could continue the road trip. I arrived in north Zanzibar and booked into a beach resort. I instantly took a dislike to practically everyone else there, all being young, bronzed, slim and attractive. I plonked my old, farmer tanned, fat and ugly self on a sun lounger and spent the first day reading a Biggles book I found in the library at the resort. The occasional swim in the warm sea could do nothing to dampen my boredom. Then I spotted a scuba expedition that was being run by the hotel, I signed up for it. It was great, I really enjoyed the day looking at fish and breathing in about half of the Indian Ocean in the process. But then it was back to the resort.

It's got nothing on Whitby...

I packed up after three days and headed back to Stone Town, despite planning on staying at the resort for six days. The place I was staying in Stone Town, The Pyramid Hotel, had day trips on offer and I thought I might as well go on a couple. One was out to a spice farm where I was trussed up like a cunt without my consent:

I never asked for this...

I also met a nice Dutch couple on the bus to the spice farm, I saw them again the next day at breakfast and they asked me to exchange emails after I made a flippant comment about calling on them if I was ever in Holland. In a pure Larry David moment, I said no, I wasn't going to give them my email. I asked them what was the point? Are we really going to email each other about the time we all went to the spice farm together? No. It was a waste of my time. I carried on eating my 'continental' breakfast with a feeling of Davidian triumph. I also went on a 'swimming with dolphins' trip during my time in Stone Town. Now, for some people, swimming with dolphins is a dream come true, a chance of a life time. It has healing properties, so they say, dolphins can cure cancer just with their playful squeaking and twittering. A dolphin leaping through the waves has led to great advances in the treatment of AIDS. Unfortunately this is not the experience I had.

What I could have won

We (myself, a crazy middle aged French woman, a Korean couple and a Chinese couple (can you imagine the faux pas I made when I thought they'd all travelled together? Almost as bad as when I mistook the pre-mentioned Dutch couple for Germans...)) were taken by bus to some back water where we joined by a couple of girls from Leeds. They had been out on the lash the night before and were in no fit state to be standing up, never mind out on the ocean wave. And what a wave it was! The only time I have been on rougher seas was between the Westmann Islands and Iceland when the ferry was almost flipping over in the waves. This time we were on a tiny fishing boat clinging on for dear life.

We're going to need a bigger boat...

The waves buffeted us and we were thrown about like kittens in a washing machine. The two girls from Leeds were suffering the most, one was spewing the entire time we were on the boat. And we were on the boat for about an hour. God knows where all this vomit was coming from. Then dolphins were spotted off the starboard bow, the fishermen instructed everyone to ready themselves for the experience of a lifetime. That meant putting on a scuba mask and flippers and getting into the squall. Just before getting in the water, the French woman was thrown from her feet by a massive wave and smacked her head on a metal bar. Despite being obviously dazed she was still insistent on swimming with the dolphins. I declined the opportunity and decided it would be better to take my chances on the boat rather than dropping into the perfect storm. The ones that braved the water were thrown about and most of them nearly drowned. The chance of even seeing a dolphin in these conditions was minimal to nil, never mind swimming with one of the fuckers. Finally the fishermen decided we'd had enough water torture and headed back to the beach. So, as for my experience of swimming with dolphins, exhilarating was not the word...

'OK, time to start fishing the corpses out of the water'

TIA BABY!! PART TWO (Pt3)

That twisted maniac Herr Doktor Clay whined that I wasn't talking enough about the archaeology at Engaruka in the previous posts. Now, I assume that most of you reading this are not archaeologists, neither are you interested in archaeology. If you are, you're not right in the fucking head. But for the benefit of the poor buffoons that have a slight interest in Heritage Intervention and to stop Dr. Clay ringing me in the middle of the night, screaming down the phone and hanging up, I will give you a brief summary of the archaeological shizzle that went down at Engaruka.

Fucked

As I may have mentioned in previous posts, the Engaruka site was situated on the edge of the modern village of Engaruka, what a coincidence, imagine that! The fucking mind boggles! The actual archaeological site covers an area of over nine kilometers (that's over five miles in old money) from the base of the escarpments of the Engaruka valley. Think about that. Go on. Yeah, it's big isn't it? Although we had such a big team of archaeologists we had little hope of more than scratching the surface of the site. Even with Posh Bastard opening random holes all over the place, usually just before a meal break, there is still massive amounts left to do. Mind you, it's probably going to be difficult getting tools to site in the future since we buckled the chassis of one Landrover and fucked the shock housing of the other.

Fucked

Anyhoo. There was two main area that we worked on. One was on the flat part of the valley and consisted of stone built circles and field systems. HOW FUCKING EXCITING IS THAT? Field systems!! Holy fucking shit! Let's have a street party! The people of the past farmed in FIELDS!!! Just like us! They're almost the fucking same as us. Except they're dead and we're alive and we have stuff like tractors and combine harvesters and massive barns with massive chickens hidden away in. But except for that, people of the olden days are exactly the same. Peas in a pod. Because of this, I took on the task of excavating one of the stone circles. I figured no one these days has stone circles but people use fields all the time. We're tripping over fields there's so many of them. All across Britain Town Halls have to be regularly cleaned of field droppings, but stone circles? Name one person you know who owns a stone circle. You can't. You know why you can't? Because no one has them today. There is no greater symbol of the enigma of the ancient past than a stone built circle. It's like the dim and distant past rising from the grave and belting you round the head with a full round house kick from down memory lane. Tackling a stone built circle is the equivalent of recieving a full Nelson from a bygone age.

Fucked

So we decided as a collective that Kirk should get the easy archaeology of the field systems and Ted and I would tackle the elusive stone circles. I was joined by my hand picked team of savvy go-getters in attempting to answer the riddles of the ancients. Over the course of the excavations we suffered as Ted and Kirk stole all the tools and left me and my team with only rudimentary implements to excavate with. Undeterred we fucked a great big hole in the centre of the circle. We fucked everything out of it.

Fucked

We fucked so much out of it apparently we fucked all the evidence for any kind of occupation out of it as well. We found NOTHING in the quarter section we fucked out. Not a single fucking piece of pottery, not a single bead, not one tiny iota of testament that people had been anywhere near these stone circles. Earlier excavations on similar structures in the recent past at Engaruka had yielded so much pottery that it had to be air lifted off the site in shipping containers by Chinooks. At least that's what Posh Bastard told me. Engaruka has it's own type of pottery. It is unique to the site. It was not made on site and was most likely traded in to the area. It appears who ever was making the stuff was making it for the people of Engaruka specifically. A case of: 'Those daft cunts down at Engaruka like lines and dots all over their pots, so we'd best put a load all over them, but don't get them mixed up with the good stuff we sell to that other village.' But the circle I was working in had not a scrap of this stuff. There was only two conclusions to leap to, either they weren't living in the circles and they were being used as some kind of cattle corral OR they were the cleanest Iron Age folk in all of Africa, carefully picking up every thing they dropped. Sweeping up everyday and tidying the place constantly. Every day was a spring clean for them. I prefer the latter theory.

Fucked

The circles threw up more questions than they answered and in the end we'd have been better if we'd left them well alone. There was the whole riddle of the doorways and why a load of stones had been fucked about at the entrance like some kind of ankle breaker and 'unwelcome mat', if you will. But before I had a mental breakdown considering the eternal mysteries of our forebears I was moved up the hill. Above the valley sat the hills and on these hills sat terraces and on these terraces sat house platforms and on these house platforms sat... Oh fuck off. This is not a nursery rhyme. The hill was the ace in the hole for Posh Bastard. It was the place where the people of Engaruka lived and loved, laughed and cried, dreamed their dreams. It was going to make Daryl a rich man. If only he could work out the sequence in which the terraces were built. If he could unfurl the intricate patterns of confusion that were the embodiment of the terraces he would be revered in the archaeological world as a God, no longer a mere mortal but the living incarnation of archaeological science. He could retire on his discovery and live a life on a Bahamian island surrounded by dusky maidens surrendering to his every whim. There was one snag, he had Ted, Kirk and I in charge. He was completely fucked.

Fucked

The terrace structures are unique in African archaeology. They consist of a sequence of platforms backed by stone built walls, often ten feet high. It's the African equivalent of Stonehenge. What we did to them was the equivalent of taking a JCB piped with a breaker to Stonehenge and turning it from an attractive stone feature into a pile of aggregate. Oh yes, we fucked holes through those walls, we blasted chasms into the side of that hill. We were like Belzoni burying into the Pyramids at Giza. Did we answer any research questions? I've no idea but it sure was fun pulling the walls to bits. I think Posh Bastard had some idea of what was going on with the sequence of building, but you'll have to wait until the ultra-exciting report is published sometime in 2054 to find out the answers.

Fucked

OK, I think I've bored you enough with the exciting world of archaeology that I inhabit. The next post about Africa will be about the FUN things we did. I forgot to put these on the previous posts but here are links to the pictures from my Facefuck account:

Album One
Album Two
Album Three

TIA BABY!! PART TWO (Pt2)

When I sat in Montgomery Hall in Wath-Upon-Dearne listening to Martin giving an introductory lecture for his Archaeology night class on a rainy night in 1996 little did I imagine that I'd end up working on the side of  mountain in East Africa. Mind you, I never thought I'd end up having to work in Wales either, but for the Grace of God I did. But East Africa is far more interesting than Wales and I'm here to tell you about that, not the land of leaks. As I said in the last entry, we'd hit the road from Nairobbery towards the Tanzanian border and Engaruka. The plan was to travel straight to the site in a day, but as with all the best laid plans, we took two days to get there. An unscheduled stop at the large town of Arusha, just over the border of Kenya and Tanzania, was in order. Arusha serves as the jump off point for most of the Northern Tanzanian Safari parks. This translates as millions of touts trying to sell you a trip to stare at the Lions or a Sunday afternoon walk up Kilimanjaro. We only spent a night in Arusha so the touting wasn't such a big problem, this time. No sir, we were off to Engaruka and nothing would stop us!

Fuck off Arusha!! We don't need your batiks or Muzungu T-Shirts!

How does one get to Engaruka, I hear you cry. Well, it's pretty simple, you take the road out of Arusha, follow the metalled road out to Mtu wa Mbu (the name translates as 'River of Mosquitoes'; probably not the best advertisement for a town in a Malaria hot spot...), go through the town and then on the left you'll see a dirt track. Follow that, unless the rains have washed away all traces of the road, for about 2 hours. Make sure you have a four wheel drive as a Toyota Yaris may not be able to cope with all the rocks the size of a house, soft sand, crevices, and giraffes that you'll undoubtedly meet along the way. Calling out the AA is not really an option: 'Yeah, we're stuck in some soft sand on the road to Engaruka. Where abouts? Erm, well there's some scrub land around us. There's some massive mountains in the distance. There was three giraffes but they've moved now. There's some kids waving and asking for money. Can you get our position from that?'

Turn left at the giraffes...

So after two hours of bouncing around like a tennis ball in a washing machine in the back of the Landrover because Posh Bastard refused to slow down, we arrived at the edge of Engaruka village. Daryl then refused to pay the $10 entry fee that the village council were charging for tourists. He was well within his rights since the barrier was not recognised by the Antiquities Authorities and was a local cash raising initiative, but I still feared we'd all be speared by Masai spears in the dead of the night. After a Mexican stand off that lasted for what seemed like ages we were allowed into the village and found our way to the campsite that would be our accommodation for the next six weeks. It was dark by the time we arrived and we had to set up in the pitch black but somehow we managed not to put the tents up upside down.

Did anyone see where I put that tent peg?

Over the next couple of days we met Israel, the guardian of the site and local wide boy. Over the period we were working in Engaruka Israel managed to shift his entire family into the service of Daryl. He guided, his wife cooked, when she wasn't available, his brother took over, some young lad who must have had familial connections ran around clearing plates after dinner and I'm fairly sure it was Israel's older relative who owned the camp site. On arrival, Israel took myself, Kirk, Ted, Benson and Johnpius around to have a look at the archaeology. We stumbled upon some Masai lads who gave us some of their soup, made from tree bark and dung by the taste of it. They were the warrior caste, called Moran. Basically, all the men of the village between eighteen and thirty years old leave and live together out in the wild, eating roots and berries, killing lions and generally training to be warriors. It's a pretty good system as it gives the Masai an ever present warrior army and separates the testosterone fuelled youngsters from the elders and the rest of the village,  therefore cutting down on power struggles between young and old. It got me thinking, we have a similar set young lads in the UK, between 18 and 30 who also spend their time out in pubs, drinking and fighting. Except over here we call them Morons.

Drink this soup or we'll fucking stab you...

After a couple of days of flouncing around the site looking at the archaeology we were joined by the Kenyan student; Grace, Mary, Linda, John Junior and Steve Ugali, along with Charles the Tanzanian antiquities representative who had more testosterone than the entire male staff of English Heritage combined. Later we were joined by the Tanzanian students and we began working. My team consisted of John Junior, Irene, Catherine, Edith and Linda. As you will notice, I was surrounded by birds for the first few weeks and women being women, they were obsessed with soap operas. The particular soap they were obsessed with was Shades of Sin, a Latin American show that was screened across East Africa. This filtered it's way onto site through osmosis and we were all renamed after characters in the soap. I was Papushka, Catherine was renamed Mamushka and John Junior became Paco. These names stuck for the duration of the excavation. What else can I say about the students? They were great overall, very funny, friendly, hardworking and very polite. None of them complained like the whining York students when they had to climb up a fucking mountain everyday in a Death March led by that Posh Bastard Daryl. Oh no, the students at Heslington East whined when they had to get out of bed to get to work for half past nine. How would they have coped if they had to have got out of bed to be on site at 7.00am after walking for nearly an hour up hill to do a full days work.

No shirkers here...

I'll take a break here to talk about the food on site. Given that it was a student excavation run on a tight budget the food was expected to be quite bad. 'Quite bad' would do it too much justice. Let's say 'downright fucking terrible'. Each and every meal, Lunch and dinner, was made up of beans along with cabbage (at least I think it was cabbage...). To bulk out this culinary combination we were provided with rice for dinner and for lunch, Ugali. Now for those that don't know, Ugali is an African specialty. I had had it before in South Africa, where it is called Mielie pap. I tried it in one of those moments that tourists have: 'let's try what the locals eat, it can't be that bad!' It wasn't at the time, but then I only had it for one meal. After six weeks of forcing this glutinous slop down just in order to get something in my belly after a full day's work I'd rather eat a bowl of my own shit and vomit than another plate of Ugali. You think I'm kidding? At least shit and vomit would taste of something. Ugali has literally no taste, even sticking my dusty fingers into it improved things. It was great for dieting, I'd work a full day, walk back down the mountain starving hungry, see the Ugali waiting for us and instantly loose my appetite.

 Bleurghhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhh

OK that's enough shit for this part, I'll return to Africa soon with tales of what we did on our days off and my holidays through Zanzibar...

TIA BABY!! PART TWO (Pt1)

I kept a diary each day whilst I was in East Africa, the entry dated 17/18th July says: 'laid on a bed in a room in a 'hotel' in Nairobi with walls so thin I may as well be sitting in the bar outside attempting to sleep, I'm also listening to what sounds like the world falling out of Kirk's arse in the next room [turns out I was mistaken about this and it must have been the dodgy plumbing...]. Already been electrocuted by the shower, the light bulb is dimming and brightening and the plug for the TV doesn't fit the socket. Welcome to Africa...' Welcome indeed, to Africa and welcome to TIA BABY!! PART TWO. This is the first of several parts (I don't know how many yet, I haven't written the fucking thing have I?) of my blog on my latest trip to Africa. I'll try to make these entries short so you don't get too bored reading them, but they will also be interrupted by a trip to Belgium I will be taking this coming Saturday, so that will give you a bit of time to recover...

TIA BABY!!

So what was I doing in Africa? Well, I'd heard on the grapevine of a job supervising a research excavation on some olden days stuff in Tasmania. After further inquiry I found out it was actually TANZANIA in East Africa and not a island off the south coast of Australia. Naivety on the leader of the project, Dr Daryl's part allowed me to worm myself onto the caper. I thought to myself, well, I've been to Morocco in North Africa, I've been to South Africa and Swaziland in, er, South Africa, but I've never been East or West in Africa. Since East Africa only carries the dangers of Malaria and AIDS and the West carries the dangers of your vehicle being stopped by armed insurgents in Technicals and having your arms being macheted off by drugged up teenage boy soldiers, the East seems to be a much nicer prospect.

No drugs and machetes here...

The project was dealing with a 'lost' village at a place called Engaruka in Northern Tanzania. This village consisted of several field systems of complex furrows and water channels along with mysterious stone circles and a mountainside terraced with house platforms. This whole thing had gone out of use about three hundred years ago, but they was little evidence of who the people were who had lived there. The Masai who lived in the area now only moved in around two hundred years ago and their oral histories had no recollection of the people of the village. It's not as Scooby Doo and mysterious as it sounds, given that these people were farmers it was probably a climate change that brought around their disappearance and they just fucked off to a wetter area. We were there not to discover who these people were, that would be almost impossible anyway, but to work out the sequences of construction between the house platforms and field systems. Whew, that's the boring archaeology out of the way, come on, wake up, I'll try not to mention it again too often.

Yawn...

We (the supervisors were myself, Kirk and Ted. The project was led by that Posh Bastard Daryl) flew into Nairobi as that is where the British Institute in Eastern Africa (BIEA) is located. It's in a lovely leafy suburb of Nairobi and it gave one the impression that Nairobi was a idyllic place, an oasis of green in the dusty desert. It was only an impression. Nairobi isn't called Nairobbery for nothing and a walk through the park could result in either getting raped, robbed, injected with a syringe full of AIDS or all of the above*. The opening account was written sitting in a hotel called NIBS (Nairobi Institute of Business Studies, the students ran the hotel as a project) which was just around the corner from the BIEA and despite Ted's protests was cheaper than the YMCA. Despite this saving, I was electrocuted by the shower. I hadn't been wearing the plastic slippers provided and the TV had a two pronged plug for a three holed socket.

'Has this shower had a HSE inspection?'

Having said that, NIBS did the best Nyama Choma that I'd ever had. Well, it was the only Nyama Choma that I'd had until that point, but that hardly matters does it? Nyama Choma is an East African speciality, basically it's a load of cooked meat served with some chilies, sometimes some grilled bananas. You order it by the kilo and Ted, Kirk, Sarah (an American woman who came along despite having A MASSIVE FUCKING INFECTED HOLE in her leg from an insect bite...) and I ordered two kilos of unspecified meat. This brought on the first of many fevered meat dreams.

'What animal is this?'

'Who cares, just keep eating!'

The BIEA was where the expedition was to be launched from as the site was in Northern Tanzania and was easier and closer to reach than from Dar Es Salaam, the capital of Tanzania. Besides, all the equipment was located at the BIEA, what were you expecting us to do? Dig the site out with our fucking teeth? The few days spent in Nairobbery were busy with meeting some of the students who we would be working with and packing the two Landrovers that we would be taking with us. These first students were from the University of Nairobbery and had just completed their anthropology degrees. I'll tell you more about these in a later post, but we were also working with students from Dar Es Salaam University and they were to arrive at a later date. After quick introductions during which I promptly forgot every one's name, myself, Daryl, Ted, Kirk, Sarah, Johnpius (another graduated Student from Dar Es Salaam) and Benson (our site surveyor) set off for the long journey south to the wilds of Tanzania in the Landys. What was waiting for us there? Would we be mauled by tigers? Eaten by Polar Bears? Assaulted by boxing kangaroos? Find out in the next part of TIA BABY!! PART TWO... (Don't hold your breath though, I'll be away for a week...)

On the road motherfuckers!! 

* For Mary's sake, all of this is a joke.

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...