Thing what I did done

I’m really rubbish at posting when I’m busy! I hope I don’t lose my huge swathes of adoring readers.

Things that have happened: I got to go to the National Museum on a trip, and saw an awesome exhibition on life and death, with every pill the average person takes in their life (about 14,000) sewn into a piece of cloth. I also fulfilled a lifelong ambition to go to the Crobar in Soho. I was a week too late to catch Dave Grohl and Josh Homme in there, but I did see a crazy man assault a waitress. One of my Italian students came out as a neo-Nazi in my class. All my other students are really pleasant and much nicer than hoards of wailing Vietnamese children. I booked a trip to go from Munich to Berlin (LADS ON TOUR WOO WHO ARE YA) and I plan to develop a mature taste for fine Bavarian beer, rather than only enjoying weak Vietnamese piss-water. I’ve been inspired by this man to take up writing poetry, and have so far amassed a oeuvre of one whole poem. I hosted a tea party for the Taiwanese.

Good luck to my baby brother, who turned 17 yesterday and who’s going to Vietnam on his own tomorrow. Big adventure!

Pedo jokes don't go down well around here

Still hanging out in South South London ('Kent') and occasionally popping to Camden or Soho for gigs - Hanoi just doesn't do music like London does. We saw this band last night and they blew my mind - like, proper rock'n'roll.

I don't have any photos of anything because it's against company policy. Someone pointed out that if you were into pedofilia and that, the Internet would probably serve you better than taking a blurry photo of some teenagers reading a book. Teaching is going pretty well though, and I've discovered I might not be the worst thing to happen to the teaching profession since they abolished corporal punishment. I haven't had any tears or vomiting yet (from me or the students) so it's going well.

Tomorrow we're going to Sonisphere, woop woop, maybe I'll put some photos up after that.

Dirty smelly hippies

Everyone loves Glastonbury!

Onwards from Bristol, we arrived on the farm on Sunday evening and set up camp. This gave us a leisurely three days of wandering and sitting around at the Stone Circle before anyone else arrived on Wednesday, and meant that when punters did start arriving, we were easily the muddiest, smelliest people there (aided by a vicious Rej-Goob mud-battle early Wednesday afternoon). Evidently I consider this an achievement, because if you’re not a mess at Glastonbury then you’re not doing it right.

Come Wednesday, I was champing at the bit for music and dancing and running around like a hooligan. I guess there’s not much point in describing everything that happened from here on in, because it’d just be “We went to see this band and it was amazing! Then we went dancing and it was amazing! Mud! Cider! Fire!” There were also 20 hours spent with my head in a bin sifting through poo in exchange for my ticket, but I kinda like that.

There aren’t any photos from after Friday night, because my battery died and plus I’m too busy being awesome to record how awesome I am.

The first Sunday night...I love bin.

I love longdrop.

sunset view from Stone Circle on Sunday

tea in a boot and a Goob in a tent

Goob models how to keep warm at night

stuff getting set up in the Unfairground

muddy

ciders in boots

flags! by the Other Stage. everything looks so clean and grassy here.

tipis

mud buddies in the Greenfields

Columbo on a stone

campfire in the workers’ tent

Wednesday night fireworks at the Stone Circle

flags! somewhere in the greenfields. it’s all about the flags.

I love mud

lying in a nest in the greenfields on Thursday

goob in a nest... before we met a cockroach from Wales, heroically saved a worm, and discovered that all the flag poles are covered in greasy dead flies.

crazy spinning rope gymnastic mindblowingness. after leaving a shitty rainy Radiohead, we sat by a campfire and then stumbled across this. fuck the hype!

crazy sexy fire-breathing burlesque dancers.

then we went for a stompy dance in the mud in front of a fire-blowing monster spider.

tube train crashed into a tower block, in Block 9

smoking car crashed into an 80’s style gay disco that requires a mustache for entry

Shangri-La... we are all infected

the King Blues playing an tiny unlisted awesome gig on the Strummerville stage... so so good, it actually makes me tingle remembering it

So that’s only up to Friday night... Saturday I saw Flogging Molly and pogoed like I was 14 again, Sunday we ran around Shangri-La like kids in a sweet shop, Goob tried to sell cigarettes to Bez from the Happy Mondays, and Columbo swapped all his clothes for a pair of Doc Martens. Monday everyone had left so we went tatting (rummaging through abandoned tents to find valuable or otherwise desirable objects) and then Columbo made big fire and we sat with our new friends, drinking too much tatted booze and barbequing tatted bananas. This is one situation to which not even my usual epithet ‘rad’ can do justice... just the best times.

And now, I’m sitting in halls at the University of Greenwich, because tomorrow I start teaching English to more bratty spoilt kids who aren’t interested in learning. I’m hoping that this job will go well, because I definitely have negative feelings towards teaching and perhaps towards children in general, which I didn’t have this time last year or even six months ago. I’d like to be a good teacher, so I’m going to be smiley yet authoritative and hope it goes well...

I still would rather be sitting next to the campfire in Strummerville, drinking a can, with my boots stuck in the mud.

Adventures in the West

lots of naked people in Trafalgar Square – they were protesting about something, but despite the exuberant mass nudity and little willies perched on bike seats, none of them ever made it very clear what they were protesting about.

Covent Garden

On Saturday, I had a fun night out at the Royal Operah House, as you do, and then caught the long scenic train down the south coast to Falmouth, right down on the pointy bit of Cornwall, where my young son Goob resides. Cornwall is full of fun things to see and do, like cider and rocks.

Goob proudly surveys her domain

Gina, Goob and Shorty

My first couple of nights here were mainly focused on the important task of rediscovering cider, and rum, and Weapons Grade ginger beer, and other good things, which meant that the days were focused on sleeping and eating. However, a headache drove us to the beach for a recuperative brisk sea walk, which turned into a fascinating wildlife discovery, and which was much more fun than melting in bed. We saw loads of baby seals playing together right near the coast, which was fucking cool, as I have never seen wild seals before and didn’t even know that they lived in Cornwall. There were several big birds of prey, and I sat in a ladybird nest. We went home and ate Thai curry.

The next day we drove to somewhere where I didn’t know where we were, but Nolly was there, and we went swimming in the sea, there was another seal and some mussels, I got bitten by a weaver fish, and it was ace. We went home and ate Indian curry.

Yesterday we completed our wildlife adventures by driving to The Lizard, which is the name for the skinny bit of land right at the south of the pointy bit at the end of Cornwall, culminating in the MOST SOUTHERLY POINT IN THE WHOLE OF ENGLAND!! We went for another brisk coastal walk, and saw something that might have been a sea lion or it might have been another seal. I’m going for sea lion. They also often have 11m long basking sharks here, but we didn’t see any. And we sat by the nesting site of a bird called a clough. This was a very cool trip; I don’t know why it’s so exciting to be right at the extreme of somewhere, but I found it very thrilling.

a tourist standing at the most southerly place in England !!!

ice cream faces

some rocks

some cormorants and some SHAGS sitting on a rock

a beached whale

Friday morning there were big explosions and fires at Falmouth docks! But I don’t really know much about it except that I got woken up by a really noisy siren, and that some men in high-viz jackets said I couldn’t run where I would otherwise run. Then we went to see some arty degree show things, and went to a sea shanty festival. Yesterday we came to Fred’s house in Bristol, where I am now blogging, and soon we drive to Glastonbury.

Travel

"That is why we need to travel. If we don't offer ourselves to the unknown, our senses dull. Our world becomes small and we lose our sense of wonder. Our eyes don't lift to the horizon; our ears don't hear the sounds around us. The edge is off our experience, and we pass our days in a routine that is both comforting and limiting. We wake up one day and find that we have lost our dreams in order to protect our days.
Don't let yourself become one of these people. The fear of the unknown and the lure of the comfortable will conspire to keep you from taking the chances the traveller has to take. But if you take, you will never regret your choice. To be sure, there will be moments of doubt..."

I read this in a book or something, I like it.

Hello from windy Cornwall

This photo was not taken in Cornwall, it was taken on a boat on the Mekong, somewhere upstream from Luang Prabang in Laos. I think it's a very good photo, so I'm putting it up in lieu of a lengthy explanation of everything that's going on in my life. Many fun things are happening, and I will write about them one day soon. Maybe.

goats

goats

goat close-up

baby goats

goaty love

goat attack

goat bums

pig!

unfortunately these pigs don’t have such impressively large testicles as the last male pig we had. those grand jewels of Billy ‘Bollocks’ Bacon were made into sausages and now make up the bodies of my family and their friends, which is a nice thought.

Elsa and I have invented a new game, which involves a squash racquet, a tennis ball, and biting Puff on the neck when she gets in the way

Stripey is looking more ill by the day, which we compensate for by giving him bowls of Häagen-Dazs or whole roasted chicken breasts whenever he desires. seen above in some erotic poses from his glamour shoot.

here is new baby alpaca Rafael, still soggy from the womb on Tuesday morning.

here he is with the whole crew, having dried off and learnt how to use his legs.

here is my brother holding a polystyrene gun.