Do Ye Know Ken More?

It seems I have been spending a little bit too much time with Ninjasaurus Rex over the past week. I don't think there was a day where we didn't have a liquid lunch, shopping trip or general get together over World War One terrain. It all culminated on Thursday with lunch together and then a trip to the cinema. In very different circumstances it would have been considered a lovely romantic day. However he is a 36 year old man and I am a 35 year old man and I find the idea quite nauseating. It's not because I'm a homophobe, cos I'm not, but you haven't seen what he looks like... I haven't seen him since Friday afternoon since I think his wife, Sarah, was getting suspicious and made him stay in for the weekend. The film we went to see on Thursday was The Hurt Locker. It comes very well recommenced and it certainly deserves its Oscar for best film. Which is also great because it was up against Avatar, so the win was a two fingers up to that steaming pile of shit and the Directer James Cameron as The Hurt Locker was directed by his ex-wife, Kathryn Bigelow.

Boom! Boom! Shake the room!

I went out last night with Mainy, Linzi and Joolia to celebrate Joolia's birthday. T'was a good night and I bumped into many people I haven't seen for a while. I got hideously drunk and ended up in Renoirs... Again. It's Mainy and Linzi's influence I tell thi. I awoke this morning with the fear that the house had been broken into at some point last night. Well that would be the only explanation as to why it felt like a tramp had shat in my mouth...

With only hazy memories of last night, this is how it easily could have ended. I'm not quite sure...

OK with not much else to tell you, I'll give out a few plugs to some blogs that I'm reading at the moment. First off is Logan Josh's seminal work on the fractious nature of humanity. That is when he's not writing boorish and drunk posts. Al Sithee is still harping on about Iceland. Please God will it ever end? Tarquin Sheen's blog is always very good once you get through the usual racist rhetoric. Owen updates about once a week, it seems to be less nowadays since he got himself a bird, but it's rightly amusing when he does. Hildemaus NEVER UPDATES, EVER! And neither does Mithraea. Ashley's updates are fairly regular and his stories are good, as are his descriptions of sleeping rough in the woods... And finally, this is not a blog but I haven't mentioned it before, here is the New Pylon Cafe. Run by the evil mastermind Darren Rea, it is a revamp of the much loved and much missed original Pylon Cafe. The original site's forum has now been turned into a Book by Danny Salter of which there are about six million different editions.

I am not a number! I'm a free man!

Before I begin, here's a little plug for Al Sithee's BLOG. He's just got back from Iceland and is harping on about it like no one else has ever been there before. I suggest you ignore a large portion of it and concentrate on the stuff he writes about me.

Iceland: It's a keeper...

Back to me. as you may remember from my previous POST, I had been jerked around by the Job Centre; having to go home to call the office I had just been in, yadda yadda yadda. Anyway, the weekend rolled to its inevitable conclusion and I got up reasonably early on Monday morning to attend my Indepth Review at the Job Centre. From its flowery description one would expect it to be a lengthy process of interviews, of having to endure a torrent of being pushed, filed, stamped, indexed, briefed, debriefed and numbered. I half supposed I would be tied to a chair in a small room lit only by a single light bulb, the floor awash with urine and faeces from previous interviewees. A hard nosed guard would enter the room and scream at me in an unintelligible language whilst slapping my face. This would continue for days whilst they kept me awake by throwing buckets of icy water over me. Finally I would crack and give them the details of the work I had been doing. When it would be ascertained that I had worked less than sixteen hours I would be released without a single word, left standing in the bright sunlight, clothed only in filthy rags and starving.

'Mr Sotheran to Room 13, Please'

As it happened the actual 'Indepth Review' consisted of me telling the guy behind the desk that I had done 14hrs of work and then me signing two boxes on a form to confirm it. He asked me if I had any questions. I paused. Yes I had a question. I asked him why had the Job Centre had dragged me down to town to sign two boxes. Couldn't I have filled the form in online? Couldn't I have signed it when I signed on the previous Wednesday? (I knew the answer to the last one, if that fat sack of shit from Wednesday wasn't going to even bother setting up an interview for me, then she was damned if she was going to produce a form for me to sign, to avoid me having to come back.) You know what he said? He said yes, you could have filled it in when you signed on. In fact he gave me the sheet and said if I get any more work fill it in and hand it in when I sign on again in two weeks. The problem was not me getting up early on Monday morning, it was the inconvenience of having to do something I could have done the previous fucking week. The thing is, Monday is a day for looking for work, it's the start of the week, people know what is in store for them as they start on a new site. Signing two boxes took me out of the job market for over an hour. It's like the Job Centre are punishing people for actually going out and finding work.

Don't even think of getting a job!

But then this is what the Job Centre is all about, inconvenience. They make you attend Back To Work sessions which take time out of your day whilst they state the fucking obvious. They force an unwanted career path on you (more of this later when I attend my second phase back to work interview...), they drag you down to the office to sign two boxes when you could actually be looking for work. I don't understand it and I don't think anyone ever will. It's a riddle tied up in a big dollop of shit.

Floundering in a Sea of Dunces and Incompetency

Check this out: On Wednesday I went down to Rotherham Job Centre to sign on as usual on every other Wednesday. This time it was slightly different however. This time I had something to say when they asked 'have your circumstances changed at all?' Yes, I replied, yes they have. I had work for York University on Thursday and Friday. As this was legitimate and going through the books, then I thought it best to declare it. When you sign on you are allowed to work up to sixteen hours in a week and still claim your benefits. As the work was only about fourteen hours I was well within this limit, so I thought I'd do the responsible citizen thing and tell them before I worked that I was working. I told the fat lump of a lady who resembled a big dollop of shit in a hessian sack tied up tightly with string sitting behind the desk about my impeding work. Now, from previous experience I had been told that I would have to get in touch with the Barnsley Office to sort out my declaration of work. The piece of useless crap behind the desk asked me to sign on, then handed me a piece of paper with a phone number on to call and sort out an appointment when I got home. I didn't really look at the number but called it when I got home and the phone was answered by some fucking insect in the ROTHERHAM JOB CENTERE!

The Job Centre: Don't bother trying to get work!

Literally: What The Fuck? I had been there not half an hour previously! I had sat in front of a big pile of excrement and told her I had work, she sent me away with a phone number for the SAME FUCKING OFFICE SHE WORKED IN!! The fat lazy sack of dogshit couldn't be bothered to press the mouse button a few times or pick up the telephone in her pudgy fingers, mash the buttons with her sausage fingers and arrange the appointment for me there and then. I fucking despair, I really do. Office work sucks the fucking life out of people, the Job Centre seems to do more so than any other job. Mind you, working in a place that seems to consist of endless lines of tracksuit wearing fucktards demanding to know where their 'fucking giro' is would be enough to grind anyone down. But for that lazy shitbag to not even bother calling upstairs for me is beyond the Pale. How humanity ever managed to get to the Moon is beyond me...

'Houston, this is Eagle One, come in, over'
'Hello, you have reached the Houston voicemail service, we are all at lunch, please leave your message after the tone...'

Anyway, the job I was doing was teaching York University students how to field walk in a proper and archaeological sense. It was a right laugh, I basically strutted around like I owned the place, shouted at the students to work harder and laughed at them when it rained. I was staying at Anna's place for the night where she fed me a steak as big as MY FUCKING HEAD and gave me sausage sandwiches for lunch on Friday. Happy days.

Om Nom Nom...

But... Whilst in York I was also checking out a three bedroomed house Lauren had found on the Internet. I will be working in York for a period of about three months along with Lauren and we both thought it would be a good idea to get a house for the time we are there. Lauren has a shorter period to work, but the Evil Docktor Clay will move in for the last month as he and I shall be working together again. Allow me to clarify that for you. I need a house for three months. Lauren needs it for five weeks, THEN Clay will move in for the last period. Simple yes? Lauren contacted this house advertised on Gumtree and explained that we needed TWO ROOMS for THREE MONTHS. Simple? I went and saw the house, talked to the very nice Landlady, explained again WE ONLY NEED TWO BEDROOMS FOR THREE MONTHS BETWEEN THREE OF US. She seemed happy with it, I seemed happy with the house. I called Lauren and told her I was happy with the house. Lauren called the landlady to confirm a few things. Now, somewhere in between Lauren initially emailing the woman detailing our needs and me telling the woman the EXACT same needs, face to face, and Lauren calling her the mighty egg whisk of Chaos was applied and the woman told Lauren we were being expected to pay for the whole house; three bedrooms, not the two we had told her we needed and not the two she had agreed to to face to face with me! At the risk of repeating myself, What The Fuck? Didn't she read Lauren's email? Wasn't she listening to me? Was she just smiling and nodding whilst I was talking, but thinking about kittens or knitting or whatever it is that women think about? I told Lauren to tell her to get fucked, we'll find somewhere else. Fucking landlords, they think they own the fucking planet. Well, it's their loss, they could have had money off us for three months, but know they get nothing. Next time I'm in York I've got a good mind to go round and put bricks through their newly installed double glazed windows...

This is what you get if you fuck with me!

Vorwärts!!

I don't want to bore you more to tears than you already are by these posts. I don't really have much to tell you about this past weekend, unless you want a blow by blow description of the Square Bashing game Ninjasaurus Rex and I had on Sunday, which I won by the way. I'm not going to describe the take away pizza I had on Saturday night (Spicy Pepperoni, by the way) nor the side of dipping chicken that I had. I will not talk about the way I waded through Saturday night entertainment provided by Harry Hill, Ant & Dec, Louis Theroux and Alan Yentob as I sat slumped, half cut from an afternoon drink with Ninjasaurus Rex. Neither will I give you a track by track review of the new Burzum album which I have listened to about six times every day since I got it. Well, eleven years is a long time to wait for something new from Mr Vikernes. So, as I am not going to do any of that, I am going to Navel gaze for a while. You may want to stop reading here, because it will be of no interest to anyone but me. Don't blame me for carrying on reading...

Last week, or the week before, I forget, I set up a Myspace page for my Great War Black Metal 'project' Abwehrschlacht. Basically, Abwehrschlacht was a return to where I began with music. Back to the Black, so to speak. The Black in question being Black Metal. It has been nearly twenty years since I recorded any form of Black Metal so this was coming full circle. Back in 1993 I was involved in the band Xaztur and my later solo project Immanis. During my time in both of these bands I was involved heavily in the underground Black Metal scene that was bubbling under the surface of music. This was the best time in my opinion for Black Metal: it was dark, underground, mysterious, dangerous, dynamic and very difficult to penetrate both musically and physically.


By the latter, I mean, to get hold of records one did not simply walk into your local branch of HMV or Tower Records like today and pick up the latest Dimmu Borgir or Cradle of Filth album like the Pop Music they are. In fact this was actively discouraged. No, we had to write to the bands themselves or record labels and distributors in order to get hold of the recordings. Many were the hours I spent putting dollar bills into envelopes along with hand written letters in order to get the latest albums by Mayhem, Burzum, Emperor, Gorgoroth and the like. This was also the way the latest news about new releases was spread. I would write to a band to get a copy of their demo (on cassette tape) when it arrived they would send a handful of flyers, promoting their band and others, which I would send on in the next letters I wrote to friends or bands.


Why am I telling you this? To put you in the picture of how difficult it was to get hold of new music back in the day. There was no file sharing, no MP3s and no Myspace. With reference to my earlier bands, Immanis and Xaztur, I don't remember exactly how many demo tapes we sent out to people (Xaztur had one rehearsal tape and one full demo, Immanis put out two rehearsal tapes), but the final Immanis rehearsal tape was hand numbered and I think I sent out no more than thirty copies. The numbers would have been much higher for the previous releases as the last rehearsal tape for Immanis was when I decided to call it a day. Now, since setting up the Myspace page for Abwehrschalcht, it has had, to date, 555 profile views and the songs have been played 167 times. This is by no means a massive amount, but compared to 1993, it is astronomical. It is the equivalent to sending out over forty demo tapes within a week. But I still look back twenty years and feel we've lost something from the Black Metal scene. The sense of immediacy has destroyed the sense of achievement one felt when a new album came through the post.

Keep the fires burning...

Kimberworth Chainsaw Massacre

Over on his Dreamland Chronicles blog, Logan Josh was writing about nutters he has met through work, now far from making this a mutual cock sucking session I suggest you read it. As it happens I have also been working for the past week in the company of nutters. My father is a tree surgeon/landscape gardener and I have been helping him and his sometime work partner Darren on a rather large job which consisted of seemingly cutting down primary rain forest on the outskirts of Rotherham. My main task was dragging the trees onto a fire and burning them on site.

Incinerate them all, pig after pig, village after village...

Usually when one starts a fire it drags all the local misfits out to poke their nose in where they think it belongs. Surprisingly this time it didn't despite the fact the smoke that was coming off it was like the Chernobyl radiation cloud. We were burning hawthorn and as I say, it was my job to drag the wretched stuff to the fire. The aptly name hawTHORN tore my arms to shreds so they ended up looking like Niklas Kvarforth from Shining's arms:

Suicide is painless...

But personal injury and smoke billowing about like the dust clouds thrown up in Tunguska in 1905 are not what this blog is about. I'm going to tell you about the nutters that came on site as we worked. The first we didn't really have much contact with as he was busy with his work, so without a name to call him we christened him the Kimberworth Commando:

Don't tell em your name, Pike!

You will note his attire. Combat gear, head to foot. This day was the first warm one we've had for a while so he was without his black beret which he otherwise proudly sported. It turns out he wasn't actually in the proper military at all, but had been a member of the TAs. Yes, the Kimmy Commando had been a weekend warrior, cannon fodder on minefield clearance duty. Yet he still clung desperately to this sense of worth as he emptied the bins for the pub. Darren reckoned he had every box set of Dad's Army in his backroom. We were also graced on the site with the presence of David, the ex-miner, ex-taxi-driver, ex-bread maker, ex-airline pilot, ex-public speaker, blue collar green Eco warrior with his own chainsaw:

'I've got my own saw, do you need any help?'

Darren had been filling our heads with stark warnings about gypsies coming on site and eyeing up the tools. He had spotted cars full of gypsies coming into the pub car park, waiting for us to drop our guard. To Darren, every truck that went past was packed full of Romanies slowing down to survey the site for things they could rob. Apparently they were everywhere, so it comes as no surprise to learn that as David approached I thought 'this is it, my number's up!' He was going to slit my throat, rape me to death, steal the chainsaws and eat my babies. But no, he only wanted to know what we were doing with the logs and if he could have them for his Aga. Now, from a previous POST, I had always assumed that only the very posh had Agas. David proved me wrong. He had had one for twenty years and he was as working class as they come.

Agas, now available for the poor!

David turned out to be a really nice guy except for one problem. He talked. And he talked. And he talked. And he talked. It was a fucking wonder his jaw didn't fall off. There was no pause in it either, it was just one continuous stream of consciousness. He told us everything in mind numbingly minute detail, we learned all about his stray cat, all about his solo flights and all about how many times he went and picked up 'our Gert' from work. We assumed his wife, 'our Gert', worked both a day shift and a night shift just to get some respite from his continual flow of verbal diarrhea. Having said that he did occasionally come up with a little gem of information, but after four days of listening to him continually whitter on most of it was lost on me. If you can, imagine a stream, nay, a torrent of Human Effluence cascading over you, with the occasional tiny nugget of gold sticking out and that was what listening to David was like.

Fore!

I forgot to mention in my last post about Stainforth that we took luncheon at the local cafe. Well, we actually took morning break in the cafe; McCoy and Jackson were too scared by the old battle-axe serving us to go back for Tiffin. They said she was speaking in a foreign language that they didn't understand, I told them it was normal South Yorkshire dialect and I had to stand in as translator. During this outreach program for the local community a gentleman approached us. He and his 'wife' had been sitting in the cafe drinking tea and as he was waiting for her to finish her ablutions our eyes met. He seized the chance to approach me with a stout business deal. The fellow had about his person a bag of golf clubs and asked if any of us would like to buy them. He offered no price but told us in great detail that he had just bought a new set and was wishing to rid himself of these old clubs. Curiously he told us they were not branded, although I pointed out both a Wilson and a Dunlop club to him. He quickly passed this by and proceeded to inform us that he'd recently had them re-shafted. On our refusal at such an attractive offer he told us that he and his 'wife' were heading 'down town' to offload them. He was hoping to get 'about fifteen quid' for them. I advised him to place them on EBay, an idea which was poo-pooed as too much faffing about. After he left, several aspects of the encounter played on my mind; Why would you be selling some golf clubs you have recently fixed up? Why didn't he identify at least two named brand clubs within the set? And more importantly he didn't look like a golfer, he looked more like a smack head. Just what was going on here? Were we being duped into buying stolen goods in order to give him a 'fix'? Would we have been propping up the seedy underside of Stainforth's heroin trade? In the end we wished him God Speed in his endeavour and said our farewells, he left us to our sausage sandwiches and cups of tea and I was left thinking I should have bought them and sold them on EBay...

'How much mate?'
'£15 or whatever you've got in your wallet...'

Herr Docktor Clay steered me towards this article on the BBC News website. As Clay rightly pointed out U2 made $109m last year, which is over three time MORE than the British Government gave in aid to Haiti. What has happened to that money? Has any gone to help the people suffering half way around the world, or has it just gone straight into U2's offshore accounts so the only people they are helping are themselves? Now, before you all start bleating about 'it's their money they can do what they want with it!' Yes that's true, it is their money and they can eat it, burn it or shove up their fucking collective arses for all I care. But it stinks of FUCKING HYPOCRISY when Boner is telling the rest of the world to give up our hard earned cash for charity. This money is going towards flying hats on first class seats to Italy, it goes towards impressing teenagers with a $12m yacht. What is worse is that the U2 fans stand by and support this bunch of wankers by buying more of their albums and paying to watch them prance about on stage like a bunch of Moldovan Bears on hot plates. Are you so fucking dumb? It boils down to this, if you like U2 then you are dumb and you're the kind of person that liked Avatar as well and that means you are a CUNT! A DUMB CUNT!

Ha ha, yeah I'm laughing at YOU, you DUMB FUCKING TOSSERS!!

Don't fence me in...

I had a day's work yesterday, it was through His Royal Highness Viscount McCoy. Together with his lordship I was working alongside Rear Admiral 'Action' Jackson. We were working in Stainforth, the arsehole of Doncaster which in itself is the arsehole of South Yorkshire. It's like the shit has no where else to drop except Stainforth. As an archaeologist I generally get to work in places that the rest of the world don't want to see and this site was no different. We arrived after battling the traffic to be greeted with a view not dissimilar to the latter stages of the Battle of Stalingrad:

Stainforth, a stain on the good name of South Yorkshire

At that point we had no site facilities, the boys had only been on site for the previous day and after inquiring about the welfare cabin I was directed to the site hut:

'Break time!'

Before getting down to work, Mike gave me a brief site tour or rather, a tour of what overlooked the site. It included the travelling circus storage lot, the dog track, the gypsy camp (whom we were warned about repeatedly through the day) and the two burned out houses in the distance. The site entrance was flanked by a betting shop and Bargain Booze. Who ever thought that perfect juxtaposition up has to be border line genius.

BYOB

I was on trench laying and fence erecting duty for the day but while we waited for the fence panels to arrive Richard began working the machine on the first trench. He was very mindful of missing the active sewer marked on the service map but it quickly became apparent that this would be no easy task of machining out a trench, cleaning it and recording it:

I need someone to get in to draw these sections...

As Rich contemplated the contaminated water pissing into the bottom of the trench, Mike and I set about laying out the rest of the trenches. We used the time honoured method of marking the trench ends with a house brick. This would lead to great confusion later for Rich as we were working on a site covered in house bricks. The fencing duly arrived and the guy driving the truck introduced himself to us as 'Mad Mick'. It quickly became apparent how he got his name when he demonstrated to us his patented way of getting the fence panels off the back of the truck:

'Mind your heads'

A proper site hut arrived and it was like nothing like I've ever seen on an archaeological site before. It has an electricity generator, a toilet and even heating! It was scoped at various times throughout the day by the passing gypsies, and far be it for me to cast dispersions on the Romany folk's impeccable nature, but I bet it won't be there when we return to the site... I then spent the rest of the day erecting fence panels and tightening bolts until we were finally finished an hour and a half late. Mind you, I still got to enjoy the local Flora and Fauna of Stainforth:

Rat au Van (a rat that's been run over by a van)

All in all a Cake and Arse Party of the highest degree...

I received my new Burzum Album today. Eleven years was far too long...