If you had asked us when we planned this trip what we thought we might be doing on our first full day in Los Angeles, moving hotels might not have been high on the list of possiblities.
Yet that is exactly what we find ourselves doing at just gone 8.00am following the farcical episode yesterday afternoon. Over breakfast at Fawlty Towers we read in the paper that it is absolutely bitching down in San Diego. We are due to arrive there on Friday. It is now Wednesday.
Shortly after a pointless grapple with a waffle-making machine, we are packing up the car and moving on. We had booked in to Hotel Marina Del Rey the previous night when we got back from the baseball. Memories of sleepless nights worrying about how to get home from Berlin were all too fresh to leave it to chance until the morning.
It's only a short journey to Hotel Marina Del Rey and so soon after 9.00 we are at the reception (having made it along the seemingly endless driveway) and keen to start again. It's almost like our first, farcical moments in LA never happnened and we are filled with optimism again. Even the further delay of THREE failed attempts by the hotel staff to give us the correct key for the disabled access room do not dampen our spirits. There would be plenty to do that later.
Foolishly, we take a taxi down to Santa Monica pier, the departure point of the Los Angeles city tour bus. It costs $20, which surprises us given that our friend Jesson had claimed yesterday that Santa Monica pier is only four miles from Washington Boulevard. Maybe Los Angeles cabs are expensive, I don't know. It's the first and last one we use during our stay. Once, in Tenerife, we had no choice but to go everywhere by taxi which cost us hundreds of Euros by the end of the week. Somehow, and wrongly as it turned out, we expected better from Los Angeles.
I don't want to go on about money, but it is $100 for two tickets for the Los Angeles tour bus. Admittedly this includes unlimited use of the bus for two full days. They call it hop-on, hop-off access, but forget to mention that if you find hopping a physical challenge, you're screwed. After paying the money at the kiosk to two very pleasant but staggeringly ill-informed ladies we make our way through the maze of lifts and ramps and doorways to the bus stop, only to find that the bus pulling in is not accessible. Of course.
Not only that, but NONE of the Los Angeles tour buses are accessible. A specatucularly frustrating and pointless conversation ensues, embarrassing for the driver and utterly futile for all concerned. It transpires that all of these buses should have an on-board ramp. This one does not. Even if it did, the fact that the others do not would entirely defeat the object in any case. Hopping off an accessible bus is an enormously bad idea when you are then going to be unable to hop back on any subsequent buses. It's a two-hour wait before the one that you hopped off reaches you again.
As I feel the weight of your (Yes YOUR, able-bodied scum) society conspiring all of it's efforts against me I am dealt another killer blow. A woman rolls up alongside me in a rather more cumbersome, cheap wheelchair. Brian Potter would baulk at this piece of kit. She stands up and WALKS on to the bus! No access on the bus? No problem, just walk on, what's the matter with you?
Able-bodied scum.
Beaten all but into submission by this, we trudge back to the ticket kiosk to cause seven kinds of blue murder. Only the pleasant ladies are all apologies and we didn't knows, and can't return our money fast enough. It's genuinely hard to be angry with them, able-bodied scum though they are. They advise us that it is pretty easy to get around the city on public buses which are, they are certain, accessible to everyone. They scurry around scribbling on maps, circling points of interest and being apallingly nice. They are as helpful as they can be under the circumstances and, devoid of any choice in the matter, we embark on the epic quest for public bus access to Los Angeles' main tourist attractions.
While trying to figure out the best route (frankly, the pleasant ladies just confuse us), we drop for a drink in a small cafe near to the bus information centre. It is here that we meet possibly the rudest person in America;
"I'll be right with you." barks the lady behind the counter, not even looking at me, nor doing me the honour of allowing me to actually ask for something first. This dismissal is accompanied by a wave of the hand normally reserved for guests on the Ricki Lake Show who don't think you have a very valid point of view. She wanders off. Somewhere in the distance behind her, she might hear me ordering a couple of drinks.
Later, as we are about to leave Emma attempts to glean some information about bus routes from her. It's the mistake we should have expected it to be;
"Oh, don't talk to me about buses. I don't take the bus, I don't know anything about buses."
All of this is delivered as if we have asked her for advice on how best to strangle a kitten. She's clearly affronted by our insolence. We leave.
The plus side of being lost in Santa Monica looking for the right bus stop is that you get to walk around what is actually quite an attractive little city. If we hadn't spent our whole time there trying to get to somewhere else perhaps we could have enjoyed it's beautiful coastal scenery and it's vibrant city atmosphere. I'm more than certain now that we should have just stayed there and got blasted on vodka. Unfortunately, we were trying to get to Hollywood, which if we had listened to Michael Buble in the first place we would have known was a mistake.
Hollywood is indeed dead.
It's lunchtime and we are back at a bus information centre, trying to find out about the RED bus that will take us to North Hollywood. Everything we have seen so far has been related to the BLUE bus which will take us to downton LA. One day. Maybe. At one of the desks there is a man talking very loudly. He's a real slice of America, mulleted, moustache, hat that is pure country;
"What do you mean I can't have my cane?" he screams at the unfortunate person behind the glass;
"You have to show us your ID, sir."
"I ain't got no ID, I told y'all, I lost my ID. And my phone, and my god-damn cane! God damn it."
Or something.
He begins to mutter obsceneties under his breath as the receptionist goes to consult with someone. In the meantime I can hear him on his mobile phone trying to convince someone that they should pay for the privelege of listening to him play his guitar, which until that moment I hadn't noticed him carrying;
"Well sure, we're loud but when they hear us play they're gonna know how awesome we are!" he boasts, genuinely convinced of his own musical genius. We forget about him until a while later when, as we wait for the second of two buses we have to take to reach North Hollywood, he's busking to pass the time.
Earlier, and to a chorus in my head of Hallelujahs, we had found THE RIGHT BUS STOP. It was opposite a Hooters bar, though I resisted the temptation to delay us further. There'll be one in LA, Emma assured me. If there is, I thought, I hope it differs from this one in that it does not have a man sat outside it talking to himself. He appeared to be entranced, spouting some kind of religious drivel about what we're all doing wrong in the world. A little further up the road there sat a man who looked like a friend of mine. It obviously wasn't him, but if you had told me that after pushing around Santa Monica for two hours I would end up back in Thatto Heath I wouldn't have been that surprised. Things were going that way.
Finally we are on the second bus, crazy guitar man on board also. Though not for long. He takes an age to get on to the bus, staggering around on his one good leg (I had been wondering about the need for a cane), while trying to carry his guitar and said cane. At some point someone in the queue behind him lays his hands on the cane. Cue another bout of neurosis;
"Where's my cane? Who's got my god-damn cane?" he demands, all of a fluster. It's passed back to him. The joke's over, and people just want to get this bloody bus moving again. Especially us. We've been travelling for days, it seems. Guitar man is still muttering as he fumbles around for something approaching currency with which to pay for his bus ride. The bus is very busy, so he's perched awkwardly at the front, arms, legs, canes and guitars everywhere.
No more than a couple of blocks down the road, he's gone again;
"Stop the bus, stop the bus." he shouts, still stumbling around trying to keep hold of his many posessions;
"I wanna get off this bus, you're driving it like it's a god-damn go-kart!" he tells the driver.
As soon as she can, she stops and lets him off. There's a final showing of his stumbling idiot routine before he then announces that he has lost his phone. Presumably the phone he was using to try and book a gig for his band earlier. So, not only has he lost his cane, his ID and his dignity today, but also his phone. The last I see of him he is on the opposite side of the road as the bus pulls away, still muttering to himself. He's kicking a nearby wall and patting the back of his jeans in a frantic bid to find the phone. You get the feeling that there might not be a gig tonight after all. At least he still has the guitar.
Towards the end of this tortuous ride I catch the merest glimpse of the famous Hollywood letters. It is only a glimpse, but it at least let's us know that we have arrived somewhere close to where we need to be. When we finally get off the bus opposite the Chinese Theatre, we are immediately accosted by a man trying desperately to get us on to another tour bus. If only he knew.... This one took in all of the Hollywood homes, but if you are trying to sell me a product you are barking up the wrong tree (or even on the wrong bus) in offering me the words Arnold and Schwarzenegger. Besides there is no time. We have wasted an awful lot of time not knowing where we are, and we need to see the theatre, and the walk of fame, before figuring out how to actually get back to Marina Del Rey before September.
Staggeringly, while we are busily trying to snoop around the theatre reading all of the messages from all of the famous names outside we are again hassled by someone trying to sell us the original bus tour. You know the one? The inaccessible one from the beginning of this story? She insists it's accessible, consulting all sorts of people associated with the company until eventually we have a laughable conversation with one particular agent. He can't understand why we don't want to pay $50 each for a hurriedly arranged, whistle-stop tour with no prospect of any hop-on, hop-off. Like a night out in the Springy.
I have my photograph taken with a man dressed as Darth Vader. Why? I hate having my photograph taken but the awful truth is that I do have a strange obsession with all things Star Wars and in particular Darth Vader and Anakin Skywalker. It's just the greatest story ever told, and the only piece of science fiction that I don't regard as utter camel faeces. The exception that proves the rule, if you like. I pay him $5 for the privelege and he's genuinely surprised and grateful. If everyone paid him $5 he could go home before tea-time. I wouldn't advise him to take the bus, though.
There's a Hollywood-themed store across the street which, just because the other attractions have failed to capture my imagination, I spend a significant amount of time in. Yet all I'm doing is looking at movie stills. Rocky, Star Wars, Angelina Jolie in Tomb Raider, The Godfather, Goodfellas, Angelina Jolie in Tomb Raider, Scarface, Chinatown, Nightmare on Elm Street, Gone With The Wind, Angelina Jolie in Tomb Raider. I don't buy anything, not even a tacky t-shirt or another mug for my absurd collection of unused mugs. Frankly I'm tired of Hollywood, let down by LA, and bewildered at the prospect of having to get the bus back to Marina Del Rey. Buses, I should say. Plural. This feeling is not helped by the fact that we then miss the last guided walk on the history of the chinese theatre by a matter of minutes.
We can't even go for a drink in Hooters. Well we could have, but so crushed was our collective spirit by then that I declined to make the effort. As Emma had predicted there was a Hooters bar on the very same street as the chinese theatre and the walk of fame. Unfortunately there was a couple of steps leading up to the main bar area. There was a lift, one of those awkward-looking white things that travel at slug-speed and are at best, erratic. The truth is I just couldn't be arsed. Who needs large-breasted women in tight tops when you've had your picture taken with Darth Vader? Right.
Instead of Hooters it's Hard Rock Cafe, but it still isn't straightforward. The only tables low enough for me to sit at are in the restaurant area. We're not having food. We'd already eaten between bus stops at a Jack-In-The-Box complete with toilets unlocked by the serving staff using an electronic switch. It takes more negotiation than should be necessary to convince the bar staff at Hard Rock to let us sit in the restaurant with just our drinks. Ironically, this is arranged through a girl at the bar who is barely an inch taller than me, and would probably struggle herself with the high chairs and tables which dominate the bar area.
We sit down with our multitude of maps and leaflets and plan a visit to Downtown LA for the next day. Even then we are questioned by more bar staff as to why we are using the lower seating in the restaurant if we are not going to have so much as a single french fry. Two beers and a well-earned rest later, we are back on the bus. We pass the bus stop where we had got on the bus earlier (we'd found a different route back, somehow) and there is a man sat there in an armchair. We presume him to be homeless. A large number of people in Los Angeles are, or at least purport to be. You can see them at various points half-heartedly begging for change, otherwise engrossed in a novel or strumming a guitar. Not all of them are lucky enough to have armchairs. At our last stop we wait patiently on a main road while buses marked 'Inglewood' pass by, and locals direct us towards Venice where they think the tourists should be. It's just possible that we are out of our depth here.
It feels like we've been lost all day.
Friday, 10 June 2011
Saturday, 4 June 2011
LA Story
It's taken an unreasonable amount of time to check out of Circus Circus thanks to it's complex geography, but finally we are in the lift with our suitcases heading towards our next destination. An older couple make small talk with us while we travel down the 13 floors;
"So, you guys heading back home now?" says the lady, having sharply spotted our luggage;
"No, we're going on to Los Angeles for a few days." I say.
She looks at me like I've just deffacated on her expensive rug. Seemingly in shock, she turns to look to Emma, mouth still open, quizically awaiting an explanation.
'Did it just talk?' you can hear her thinking;
"Oh, no we are going to Los Angeles." confirms Emma on my behalf. The woman understands, and her expression changes to one of possibly overhwelming relief;
"Oh great...." she says, her rug apparently rescued;
"Well, y'all have a great time now......."
It's 284 miles from Las Vegas in Nevada to Los Angeles in California. This is roughly around the same distance between London and Newcastle. At the very least it is a four hour drive, nearer to four and a half.
Of course, we knew this before we planned this trip so we're prepared for a long journey. Still, it's funny how 284 miles doesn't feel like such a long distance until you are actually trying to cover it. I suppose because America is so vast compared to the UK you imagine it might be impossible to travel between cities in different states without leaving the ground. When you find out that it is actually just about within the boundaries of reasonable driving distance you feel inspired to do it. Tben you try and do it.
Almost five hours have passed by the time we reach the street that our hotel is supposed to be on. Except it's not there. We're booked into a Holiday Inn for the next three nights. We've used them because Emma has family who work within the company and we got a little money off thanks to some 'friends and family' tarrif that they offer. Yet without going into figures, it is still expensive. Certainly expensive enough to expect the hotel to be where it is supposed to be.
It's supposed to be on Washington Boulevard. The thing is, we're on Washington Boulevard and unless Holiday Inn have downsized dramatically in the last few months it is not here with us. The satellite navigation insists that we have arrived at our destination, but all we can see is grubby bars and bashed in buildings in what looks frankly like a bit of a run down area. Eventually we find semi-civilisation at a burger bar on the corner of the street and decide to go in and ask about the possible whereabouts of the Holiday Inn.
We've already tried to phone them, but Emma's attempts to make her phone usable in the States appear to have failed. Predictably I am far too irresponsible to have even made any attempt to prepare any lines of communication. I'm on holiday. I don't necessarily want to be contacted. Not by you, at any rate. Surprisingly there is no real debate between the two of us about how we arrived in this situation. I'm more than prepared to believe that Emma's phone providers are too useless to have set up communication for her, and one operational phone should, probably would have been enough. There was no need for me to have my phone available. Until now.
A few minutes after entering Emma returns from the burger bar none the wiser. The people there have never heard of any Holiday Inn on Washington Boulevard. They don't speak very good English anyway. Of course they don't. This is a major world city and everybody knows that nobody who lives in a major world city is actually from the same country, much less that city. I remember driving around Edinburgh many years ago with my best mate Paul looking for a place called Niddrie. We were supposed to be playing a basketball game up there but every time we stopped to ask for directions we were met with unhelpful replies in verying degrees of broken English by Norwegians, Danes and of course, the bloody drunken Irish. Sadly, Paul is no longer with us but one of the first questions I might ask him when I eventually get to see him might be whether or not he ever found Niddrie. I bet he didn't.
And we never found Holiday Inn. Having found the burger bar civilised on the outside but useless on the inside we stop at a building further down the road to ask again. We are told that the only hotel on that road is the small white building a few doors down, but that it is no longer a Holiday Inn. The implication seems to be that it had once been a Holiday Inn, so we explore. We have very little to lose at this point other than what is left of our collective marbles.
There are two men outside the building, and it looks as though they are carrying out some kind of refurbishment on the premises. They're not American (of course), but they know enough English to tell us that this is not a Holiday Inn but that it is a hotel and it is open. Confused and staggeringly underwhelmed, Emma runs in to ask the manager what is going on. It transpires that this used to be the Holiday Inn, but that it is now just the plain old Inn at Marina Del Rey. It's small, miles from anywhere that you could picture in your mind if I gave you the phrase 'Venice Beach', and what is more it is, as we suspected, undergoing some sort of renovation. The pool is out of use as a result of this and there is no bar or restaurant.
Emma passed the signpost marked 'The End Of Her Tether' some time ago, and it soon becomes clear that we will be moving again. Understandably she is very upset at this shambolic performance, and even more so with the fact that nobody from either Holiday Inn or the company who now run the hotel have deemed it right and proper to let us know about the change of ownership and the refurbishments. We're heading for some sort of consumer rights television show with Nick Knowles or some such pleb, except at the moment it's not very funny. The manager (ably assisted by his patronising asisstant Jesson. Jesson? Come on.....) is refusing to reduce the rate or to offer any satisfactory explanations about the breakdown in communications that has led us here. Emma's becoming more upset and it's all getting a bit depressing.
She rings Holiday Inn customer services, and is put on hold for 45 minutes. That's not even an exaggeration. It's time enough for me to have another conversation with both Jesson and the manager after which it becomes clear that we are going to have to stay here tonight and try to find something else on the internet in the morning. Free internet access is just about the only redeeming feature of this hotel. Eventually Emma is told by someone on the phone that it is not the reponsibility of Holiday Inn to let customers know should they decide to arbitrarily shut down their hotels. It's up to er..........somene else anyway. Jesson and his boss stick to their party line too, that it is not up to them to let us know. Finally, the manager agrees not to charge us for any cancellation fees or for either of the next two nights if we just stay one night and look for somehwere else over the internet. He recommends Hotel Marina Del Rey, more on which will doubtless follow.
For now we have a baseball game to get to. We've booked tickets to see the LA Dodgers play the Milwaukee Brewers at Dodgers Stadium. Jesson tells us it's about a 45-minute drive so we don't have a lot of time thanks to the accommodation shennanigans and the refusal of Holiday Inn Customer Services to answer their bloody phone. Yet we didn't come all this way to let bad management spoil the party, so we get a quick change and head out.
Dodgers Stadium is not in a very affluent area of Los Angeles. In fact our visit would leave us doubting that LA has any such areas. The area around the stadium is quite residential which I suppose in many ways is not dissimilar to the location of the Anfield and Goodison football grounds in Liverpool. It doesn't look like the sort of place you would want to be walking around late at night unless there's a game on. Even then Dodgers Stadium is apparently a dangerous place. A couple of days later we read in USA Today about an incident there on the opening weekend of the season in which a San Francisco Giants fan was beaten to death by a group of alleged Dodgers 'fans'. All of which is terrifying and explains the large police presence outside the ground when we left. I don't remember that level of security when we left Tropicana Field in St.Petersburg, Florida last year.
The Dodgers, like their stadium, like the city of LA so far, are awful. Luckily for them the Brewers appear to be worse and, though Emma is a closet Brewer thanks to friends and family based in Wisconsin, we enjoy most of the home side's 3-0 win. Obviously we indulge in the obligatory 'Dodger Dogs', ludicrously large cokes and pretzels, but the most important acquisition on the night are our Clayton Kershaw 'wobbly head' dolls. Clayton Kershaw is a Dodgers pitcher, and the doll is supposed to look like him. Except it's head wobbles. One assumes that Kershaw's head doesn't really wobble in this way but I can't vouch for that. The vagaries of the MLB clubs' squad rotation systems mean that he doesn't play tonight, though the Brewers do have a pitcher by the name of Randy Wolf. Superb.
Perhaps Kershaw was at Holiday Inn all along.
"So, you guys heading back home now?" says the lady, having sharply spotted our luggage;
"No, we're going on to Los Angeles for a few days." I say.
She looks at me like I've just deffacated on her expensive rug. Seemingly in shock, she turns to look to Emma, mouth still open, quizically awaiting an explanation.
'Did it just talk?' you can hear her thinking;
"Oh, no we are going to Los Angeles." confirms Emma on my behalf. The woman understands, and her expression changes to one of possibly overhwelming relief;
"Oh great...." she says, her rug apparently rescued;
"Well, y'all have a great time now......."
It's 284 miles from Las Vegas in Nevada to Los Angeles in California. This is roughly around the same distance between London and Newcastle. At the very least it is a four hour drive, nearer to four and a half.
Of course, we knew this before we planned this trip so we're prepared for a long journey. Still, it's funny how 284 miles doesn't feel like such a long distance until you are actually trying to cover it. I suppose because America is so vast compared to the UK you imagine it might be impossible to travel between cities in different states without leaving the ground. When you find out that it is actually just about within the boundaries of reasonable driving distance you feel inspired to do it. Tben you try and do it.
Almost five hours have passed by the time we reach the street that our hotel is supposed to be on. Except it's not there. We're booked into a Holiday Inn for the next three nights. We've used them because Emma has family who work within the company and we got a little money off thanks to some 'friends and family' tarrif that they offer. Yet without going into figures, it is still expensive. Certainly expensive enough to expect the hotel to be where it is supposed to be.
It's supposed to be on Washington Boulevard. The thing is, we're on Washington Boulevard and unless Holiday Inn have downsized dramatically in the last few months it is not here with us. The satellite navigation insists that we have arrived at our destination, but all we can see is grubby bars and bashed in buildings in what looks frankly like a bit of a run down area. Eventually we find semi-civilisation at a burger bar on the corner of the street and decide to go in and ask about the possible whereabouts of the Holiday Inn.
We've already tried to phone them, but Emma's attempts to make her phone usable in the States appear to have failed. Predictably I am far too irresponsible to have even made any attempt to prepare any lines of communication. I'm on holiday. I don't necessarily want to be contacted. Not by you, at any rate. Surprisingly there is no real debate between the two of us about how we arrived in this situation. I'm more than prepared to believe that Emma's phone providers are too useless to have set up communication for her, and one operational phone should, probably would have been enough. There was no need for me to have my phone available. Until now.
A few minutes after entering Emma returns from the burger bar none the wiser. The people there have never heard of any Holiday Inn on Washington Boulevard. They don't speak very good English anyway. Of course they don't. This is a major world city and everybody knows that nobody who lives in a major world city is actually from the same country, much less that city. I remember driving around Edinburgh many years ago with my best mate Paul looking for a place called Niddrie. We were supposed to be playing a basketball game up there but every time we stopped to ask for directions we were met with unhelpful replies in verying degrees of broken English by Norwegians, Danes and of course, the bloody drunken Irish. Sadly, Paul is no longer with us but one of the first questions I might ask him when I eventually get to see him might be whether or not he ever found Niddrie. I bet he didn't.
And we never found Holiday Inn. Having found the burger bar civilised on the outside but useless on the inside we stop at a building further down the road to ask again. We are told that the only hotel on that road is the small white building a few doors down, but that it is no longer a Holiday Inn. The implication seems to be that it had once been a Holiday Inn, so we explore. We have very little to lose at this point other than what is left of our collective marbles.
There are two men outside the building, and it looks as though they are carrying out some kind of refurbishment on the premises. They're not American (of course), but they know enough English to tell us that this is not a Holiday Inn but that it is a hotel and it is open. Confused and staggeringly underwhelmed, Emma runs in to ask the manager what is going on. It transpires that this used to be the Holiday Inn, but that it is now just the plain old Inn at Marina Del Rey. It's small, miles from anywhere that you could picture in your mind if I gave you the phrase 'Venice Beach', and what is more it is, as we suspected, undergoing some sort of renovation. The pool is out of use as a result of this and there is no bar or restaurant.
Emma passed the signpost marked 'The End Of Her Tether' some time ago, and it soon becomes clear that we will be moving again. Understandably she is very upset at this shambolic performance, and even more so with the fact that nobody from either Holiday Inn or the company who now run the hotel have deemed it right and proper to let us know about the change of ownership and the refurbishments. We're heading for some sort of consumer rights television show with Nick Knowles or some such pleb, except at the moment it's not very funny. The manager (ably assisted by his patronising asisstant Jesson. Jesson? Come on.....) is refusing to reduce the rate or to offer any satisfactory explanations about the breakdown in communications that has led us here. Emma's becoming more upset and it's all getting a bit depressing.
She rings Holiday Inn customer services, and is put on hold for 45 minutes. That's not even an exaggeration. It's time enough for me to have another conversation with both Jesson and the manager after which it becomes clear that we are going to have to stay here tonight and try to find something else on the internet in the morning. Free internet access is just about the only redeeming feature of this hotel. Eventually Emma is told by someone on the phone that it is not the reponsibility of Holiday Inn to let customers know should they decide to arbitrarily shut down their hotels. It's up to er..........somene else anyway. Jesson and his boss stick to their party line too, that it is not up to them to let us know. Finally, the manager agrees not to charge us for any cancellation fees or for either of the next two nights if we just stay one night and look for somehwere else over the internet. He recommends Hotel Marina Del Rey, more on which will doubtless follow.
For now we have a baseball game to get to. We've booked tickets to see the LA Dodgers play the Milwaukee Brewers at Dodgers Stadium. Jesson tells us it's about a 45-minute drive so we don't have a lot of time thanks to the accommodation shennanigans and the refusal of Holiday Inn Customer Services to answer their bloody phone. Yet we didn't come all this way to let bad management spoil the party, so we get a quick change and head out.
Dodgers Stadium is not in a very affluent area of Los Angeles. In fact our visit would leave us doubting that LA has any such areas. The area around the stadium is quite residential which I suppose in many ways is not dissimilar to the location of the Anfield and Goodison football grounds in Liverpool. It doesn't look like the sort of place you would want to be walking around late at night unless there's a game on. Even then Dodgers Stadium is apparently a dangerous place. A couple of days later we read in USA Today about an incident there on the opening weekend of the season in which a San Francisco Giants fan was beaten to death by a group of alleged Dodgers 'fans'. All of which is terrifying and explains the large police presence outside the ground when we left. I don't remember that level of security when we left Tropicana Field in St.Petersburg, Florida last year.
The Dodgers, like their stadium, like the city of LA so far, are awful. Luckily for them the Brewers appear to be worse and, though Emma is a closet Brewer thanks to friends and family based in Wisconsin, we enjoy most of the home side's 3-0 win. Obviously we indulge in the obligatory 'Dodger Dogs', ludicrously large cokes and pretzels, but the most important acquisition on the night are our Clayton Kershaw 'wobbly head' dolls. Clayton Kershaw is a Dodgers pitcher, and the doll is supposed to look like him. Except it's head wobbles. One assumes that Kershaw's head doesn't really wobble in this way but I can't vouch for that. The vagaries of the MLB clubs' squad rotation systems mean that he doesn't play tonight, though the Brewers do have a pitcher by the name of Randy Wolf. Superb.
Perhaps Kershaw was at Holiday Inn all along.
Tuesday, 31 May 2011
Las Vegas (Part Two)
It's 7.30 am Pacific Time. We're already on our way down the strip. I had suggested breakfast but Emma's not hungry. She wants to explore, which is understandable given the dizzying array of other-worldly sights which stretch over the next four miles or so.
Nowhere else in the world that I can think of can you see anything like this. Hotels that have theme parks, theatres and box offices, casinos aswell as several restaurants and bars. All of that without factoring in the spectacular monuments which stand outside some of the main buildings. They may be smaller, slightly tackier models, but the Eiffel Tower and the Statue of Liberty in particular are still an imposing sight.
As we move down the strip it is noticeable that there is a disturbing amount of pornographic literature littering the streets. You wouldn't want to have to walk down here with your kids and have them ask awkward questions about the disgarded magazines and picture cards which you can't help but notice sweeping across the pavements in the wind. A little further up there is a row of newspaper vending machines, only one of which dispenses what we would recognise as an actual newspaper. The rest deliver only porn. It's like a road accident. You just have to look. Unlike a road accident, we laugh it off.
At this end of the strip it seems that the most interesting places are on the other side of the road, so we cross the street. This takes an eternity. Their pedestrian crossings are slightly different to ours. At the other side of the road is a red hand, illuminated like the little red man at our crossings. You push the button and wait. And you wait. And you wait. What seems like days later, the red hand is replaced by a pale figure, similar to our walking green man, but almost white in colour. It doesn't flash, but to help you on your way there is a clock counting down above. This lets you know roughly how much time you have before you will be hit by a pick-up truck or a Chevvy. At certain crossings you get plenty of time, around 25 seconds or so, but at others you get less than 10 and it is a desperate rush to get across. All of which jolts you slightly, given that you have just spent the last five minutes wondering if the button which stops the traffic is actually working.
Some Americans take the rules regarding pedestrian safety very seriously. Later that day, we are crossing the street again when a group of people decide that waiting for the all-clear from the lights is not for them. They just run across, a practice which they call jay-walking. They make it safely to the other side, but those waiting patiently for the lights are suitably unimpressed;
"They should just be shot." remarks one man, nodding towards the offenders as he finally get the signal to cross.
God Bless America. This is a country where almost every single individual believes in the right to bear arms (in other words, be in possession of a deadly weapon), yet they dissaprove heartily of someone crossing a road at their own risk. It's almost illegal to hold the view that guns are too dangerous to be entrusted to the population at large, yet the comparatively lesser danger caused by jaywalking is apparently punishable by shooting. Perhaps they just want something to shoot. They are Americans after all.
Back to the plot. Pedestrian crossing successfully negotiated, we arrive at the Riviera hotel. It can't be long after 8.00am but it is already lit up and there are pockets of activity visible from outside. We go in to investigate an advert for a show. It's a tribute to the Rat Pack. Frank Sinatra, Dean Martin, Sammy Davis Junior and that other bloke whose name nobody remembers. Jason Orange, possibly. As it's so early the Box Office is still shut so we pick up a leaflet and leave. Before we do I see what turns out to be the first of many cocktail waitresses. She's not what I expected. Not the kind of cocktail waitresses you imagine getting Tiger Woods into trouble, at any rate. She's.........mature, yet still has the brass to dress skimpily. It's not a pretty sight, but the cocktail waitresses would become far more useful than just mere eye candy.
We reach The Venetian Hotel. It's another imposing sight, complete with obligatory water at the front. There are gondolas stationed at one end of the small canal. You can actually ride these for a small fee, but for now they remain unused. It's a beautiful sight really, despite the merest hint of tackiness, so we take the opportunity to get a few photographs. My stomach has forgotten about what little of that Sampler I managed at Rock'N'Rita's last night, and I need to eat something. We go inside and again have to walk through rows of what used to be known as slot machines to get to anything edible. More cocktail waitresses pass by, serving their drinks to the small but still surprising number of people who will take them at this hour.
Breakfast is a sizeable egg and bacon sandwich accompanied by a carton of tea the size of Holland. To our surprise it is nice tea. By and large Americans drink coffee rather than tea, and it would prove difficult to get a good old fashioned cuppa. There is nothing old fashioned about the carton in which the tea is served here, but it's like a taste of home. And we've only just arrived. I make a mental note, promising myself to stop being so bloody English. If I end up in a British pub watching Eastenders you have, as Sir Steve Redgrave once famously proclaimed, permission to shoot me.
A little tired of walking around (well pushing, at any rate), we decide to spend some time in the casino. Not being regular gamblers we have absolutely no idea what we are doing. We're just shoving odd dollars into machines here and there. You can no longer use coins, hence my reluctance earlier to accept the term slot machines. If you don't have notes, or bills as they call them, you have to use a card to play on the machines. It is not until it is pointed out by a member of staff that we can get one of these for free that we investigate further. She tells us we can get up to $15 free if we get ourselves a membership card. She presses a few buttons on a computer and directs us to the Players Club desk.
Here's how it works. You go to the desk, give in your name and address (telephone number or email optional, in other words don't), and they register you on their system. They give you a players card. Some may ask for some form of identification, and in most cases a driving license is sufficient, a passport even more so. It would vary from casino to casino, but at The Venetian we got £15 free play. Anything you win, you keep. Since it doesn't dispense change the slot machine will instead print out a ticket showing the value of your winnings. All the while it is deducting anything you claim from your playing card balance, but since you didn't pay for it anyway you are up on the deal.
"Drinks, cacktails......drinks.....cacktails." calls a voice behind us as we become suddenly engrossed in electronic poker. Before I have chance to consider what 'cacktails' might be I turn to see the cocktail waitress approaching us. She repeats the offer and we order drinks. Naively, we ask what we can have, and are told that a full bar is available. I order a beer and am surprised when Emma does too. Not only does she normally wait till a more sociable hour (I'm an old hand at early morning drinking thanks to several coach trips to Wembley and Cardiff to see Saints in finals), but she does not normally drink beer. If it isn't too early for beer, perhaps her usual Smirnoff Ice would be taking things a tad too far.
Minutes later the waitress returns and we tip her a generous $2. By the end of our first visit to a Las Vegas casino we have had more than an hour and a half's free play and a couple of drinks each. It has cost us the princely sum of $4 after we pushed our luck and reduced our tip to $1 second time around. Wisely we have drunk slowly. It is only just after midday after all. There are plenty more casinos to visit, so many more drinks to be had, 'cacktail' waitresses to tip.
Our most successful haunt is Treasure Island, where we win close to $15 via the new found gift of free slot play. Mostly we either break even or win a dollar or two more than what we spend, disregarding drinks. A day in the casinos in Las Vegas pays for itself, we find. Of the casinos we visit only Caesar's Palace sends us on our way empty handed, and that's because they need passport ID before they will issue their not so generous $5 free slot play. It's to be expected from a casino that is charging in excess of $150 dollars to see Celine Dion.
We get as far as Bellagio, taking in (in no particular order that I can remember) Mirage, Imperial Palace and Harrah's along the way. Bladdered and still fairly jet-lagged we make our way back to the hotel, where we witness a short acrobatic performance by the 'Internationally Acclaimed Maria' (I kid you not, PLSU) before heading up to our room. It's only just after 8.30pm, but with the long drive to Los Angeles ahead of us in the morning we slowly pass out......
Nowhere else in the world that I can think of can you see anything like this. Hotels that have theme parks, theatres and box offices, casinos aswell as several restaurants and bars. All of that without factoring in the spectacular monuments which stand outside some of the main buildings. They may be smaller, slightly tackier models, but the Eiffel Tower and the Statue of Liberty in particular are still an imposing sight.
As we move down the strip it is noticeable that there is a disturbing amount of pornographic literature littering the streets. You wouldn't want to have to walk down here with your kids and have them ask awkward questions about the disgarded magazines and picture cards which you can't help but notice sweeping across the pavements in the wind. A little further up there is a row of newspaper vending machines, only one of which dispenses what we would recognise as an actual newspaper. The rest deliver only porn. It's like a road accident. You just have to look. Unlike a road accident, we laugh it off.
At this end of the strip it seems that the most interesting places are on the other side of the road, so we cross the street. This takes an eternity. Their pedestrian crossings are slightly different to ours. At the other side of the road is a red hand, illuminated like the little red man at our crossings. You push the button and wait. And you wait. And you wait. What seems like days later, the red hand is replaced by a pale figure, similar to our walking green man, but almost white in colour. It doesn't flash, but to help you on your way there is a clock counting down above. This lets you know roughly how much time you have before you will be hit by a pick-up truck or a Chevvy. At certain crossings you get plenty of time, around 25 seconds or so, but at others you get less than 10 and it is a desperate rush to get across. All of which jolts you slightly, given that you have just spent the last five minutes wondering if the button which stops the traffic is actually working.
Some Americans take the rules regarding pedestrian safety very seriously. Later that day, we are crossing the street again when a group of people decide that waiting for the all-clear from the lights is not for them. They just run across, a practice which they call jay-walking. They make it safely to the other side, but those waiting patiently for the lights are suitably unimpressed;
"They should just be shot." remarks one man, nodding towards the offenders as he finally get the signal to cross.
God Bless America. This is a country where almost every single individual believes in the right to bear arms (in other words, be in possession of a deadly weapon), yet they dissaprove heartily of someone crossing a road at their own risk. It's almost illegal to hold the view that guns are too dangerous to be entrusted to the population at large, yet the comparatively lesser danger caused by jaywalking is apparently punishable by shooting. Perhaps they just want something to shoot. They are Americans after all.
Back to the plot. Pedestrian crossing successfully negotiated, we arrive at the Riviera hotel. It can't be long after 8.00am but it is already lit up and there are pockets of activity visible from outside. We go in to investigate an advert for a show. It's a tribute to the Rat Pack. Frank Sinatra, Dean Martin, Sammy Davis Junior and that other bloke whose name nobody remembers. Jason Orange, possibly. As it's so early the Box Office is still shut so we pick up a leaflet and leave. Before we do I see what turns out to be the first of many cocktail waitresses. She's not what I expected. Not the kind of cocktail waitresses you imagine getting Tiger Woods into trouble, at any rate. She's.........mature, yet still has the brass to dress skimpily. It's not a pretty sight, but the cocktail waitresses would become far more useful than just mere eye candy.
We reach The Venetian Hotel. It's another imposing sight, complete with obligatory water at the front. There are gondolas stationed at one end of the small canal. You can actually ride these for a small fee, but for now they remain unused. It's a beautiful sight really, despite the merest hint of tackiness, so we take the opportunity to get a few photographs. My stomach has forgotten about what little of that Sampler I managed at Rock'N'Rita's last night, and I need to eat something. We go inside and again have to walk through rows of what used to be known as slot machines to get to anything edible. More cocktail waitresses pass by, serving their drinks to the small but still surprising number of people who will take them at this hour.
Breakfast is a sizeable egg and bacon sandwich accompanied by a carton of tea the size of Holland. To our surprise it is nice tea. By and large Americans drink coffee rather than tea, and it would prove difficult to get a good old fashioned cuppa. There is nothing old fashioned about the carton in which the tea is served here, but it's like a taste of home. And we've only just arrived. I make a mental note, promising myself to stop being so bloody English. If I end up in a British pub watching Eastenders you have, as Sir Steve Redgrave once famously proclaimed, permission to shoot me.
A little tired of walking around (well pushing, at any rate), we decide to spend some time in the casino. Not being regular gamblers we have absolutely no idea what we are doing. We're just shoving odd dollars into machines here and there. You can no longer use coins, hence my reluctance earlier to accept the term slot machines. If you don't have notes, or bills as they call them, you have to use a card to play on the machines. It is not until it is pointed out by a member of staff that we can get one of these for free that we investigate further. She tells us we can get up to $15 free if we get ourselves a membership card. She presses a few buttons on a computer and directs us to the Players Club desk.
Here's how it works. You go to the desk, give in your name and address (telephone number or email optional, in other words don't), and they register you on their system. They give you a players card. Some may ask for some form of identification, and in most cases a driving license is sufficient, a passport even more so. It would vary from casino to casino, but at The Venetian we got £15 free play. Anything you win, you keep. Since it doesn't dispense change the slot machine will instead print out a ticket showing the value of your winnings. All the while it is deducting anything you claim from your playing card balance, but since you didn't pay for it anyway you are up on the deal.
"Drinks, cacktails......drinks.....cacktails." calls a voice behind us as we become suddenly engrossed in electronic poker. Before I have chance to consider what 'cacktails' might be I turn to see the cocktail waitress approaching us. She repeats the offer and we order drinks. Naively, we ask what we can have, and are told that a full bar is available. I order a beer and am surprised when Emma does too. Not only does she normally wait till a more sociable hour (I'm an old hand at early morning drinking thanks to several coach trips to Wembley and Cardiff to see Saints in finals), but she does not normally drink beer. If it isn't too early for beer, perhaps her usual Smirnoff Ice would be taking things a tad too far.
Minutes later the waitress returns and we tip her a generous $2. By the end of our first visit to a Las Vegas casino we have had more than an hour and a half's free play and a couple of drinks each. It has cost us the princely sum of $4 after we pushed our luck and reduced our tip to $1 second time around. Wisely we have drunk slowly. It is only just after midday after all. There are plenty more casinos to visit, so many more drinks to be had, 'cacktail' waitresses to tip.
Our most successful haunt is Treasure Island, where we win close to $15 via the new found gift of free slot play. Mostly we either break even or win a dollar or two more than what we spend, disregarding drinks. A day in the casinos in Las Vegas pays for itself, we find. Of the casinos we visit only Caesar's Palace sends us on our way empty handed, and that's because they need passport ID before they will issue their not so generous $5 free slot play. It's to be expected from a casino that is charging in excess of $150 dollars to see Celine Dion.
We get as far as Bellagio, taking in (in no particular order that I can remember) Mirage, Imperial Palace and Harrah's along the way. Bladdered and still fairly jet-lagged we make our way back to the hotel, where we witness a short acrobatic performance by the 'Internationally Acclaimed Maria' (I kid you not, PLSU) before heading up to our room. It's only just after 8.30pm, but with the long drive to Los Angeles ahead of us in the morning we slowly pass out......
Monday, 30 May 2011
Las Vegas (Part One)
Normally I'm not a particularly ambitious person.
I'm quite content to stick at my modest job without entertaining any ideas of promotion, so long as it continues to earn me enough money. Quite happy to accept that the few magazine and fanzine articles I have had published are the beginning and end of my writing career. Content to admit that I played wheelchair basektball to a reasonable level without ever troubling the thoughts of any GB Men's coaches. I lack the necessary drive to gain greater power or social influence. I don't want the responsibility. I'm a soldier, not a general.
Or just a lazy shit.
Except when it comes to choosing my holiday destinations. Some of you will have already read the accounts of my three-day trek through the Berlin snow, followed by two full days spent queuing pointlessly at the airport. Before that you may have perused my eye-bleedingly endless log of a two-week trip to Florida last summer. So how do you follow that? Well, how about flying to Las Vegas, hiring a car and visiting Los Angeles, San Diego and Palm Desert, before heading back to Vegas for the finale of a 1,200 mile road trip? Trust me, it'll be a breeze.....
I can only apologise for going over old ground but I'm afraid that, just like Orlando last year, there were problems on the flight. At 10 hours 15 minutes it is almost two hours longer than the flight to Florida. Two hours is an awfully long time for someone who's watch tells him when he needs a wee, and who is on board an aircraft with toilets which appear to have been designed for meerkats. If I were 12 inches tall I'd have space enough to spend my pennies in peace. Unfortunately I'm at least 14 inches tall, and have all the balance of Nani within 20 yards of his opponents goal. This makes it difficult enough but the real stinker, the real steaming logger on the pavement is the fact that I need the on-board aisle chair to even reach these miniature loos. All of which means turning on your call light to attract attention - the aviation equivalent of putting your hand up and asking Miss if you can go to the toilet.
"Do you know where the aisle chair is?".
That's not me asking. That's the supervisor of the air stewards asking ME the question. Do I know where THEIR aisle chair is?
Hang on, I'm sure I left it here somewhere after my last flight with you lot a year ago didn't I? Oh bugger, have I not brought it on board with me? How stupid of me! Christ! I can't even be trusted to remember to pack Virgin Atlantic's mobiity equipment for the general use of people with disabilities and mobility problems. Idiot.
The clock ticks interminably, laughing out loud at my bladder as it does so until eventually, the staff get their act together and bring THEIR aisle chair. Not that the indignity is over. Aisle chair's have no large wheels and so are impossible to self propel. So what follows is a degrading weave through the aisles to the economy class toilet. I've only paid for economy class air travel, economy is where I'll be weeing. Except it's not. We get to the toilet and, predictably, it is occupied. Probably by a family of meerkats. Possibly shamed into taking the financial hit by the possibility of me weeing on the aisle chair, she takes me back to the premium class toilet. It's three rows in front of my economy class seat. Lord!
We touch down in Vegas, pick up the car (a nice low Chevvy, no repeat of the Mini-Me/Beyonce antics of Orlando) and within 10 minutes are at the strip. Las Vegas Boulevard. Traffic is arse-achingly slow, which is not all bad because we get to take in the sights. The sphinx at The Luxor, the Statue of Liberty at New York, New York, the Eiffel Tower at Paris, and the countless billboards advertising the myriad of Las Vegas shows. We're staying at Circus, Circus which apparently is at the cheaper end of the market. There's a moment when I think this might be because it is so far down the strip. It seems to take a Virgin Atlantic toilet trip of an age to get there, and when we do, it's very windy.
Emma has two cases, and the added bonus of the company of a man who cannot carry a case. She struggles to get the luggage out of the car as howls of gusty wind take hold. I can barely get myself out of the car because the door keeps blowing in my face. My shoes, which always fall off when I get in and out of the car, blow UNDER the car and are only just within reach. Farcical. I resolve once again to cut my feet off at the earliest opportunity. I need feet like Nick Clegg needs someone to sort through his fan mail.
Circus, Circus might be cheaper than The Luxor or Mandalay Bay, but it's no less bloody enormous. From the car park we have to move through the casino, past a restaurant, cafe and theme park (theme park?) before we even reach the reception desk. They call it registration, for no other reason I can find other than that Americans enjoy conjuring annoying alternatives for items and places which have perfectly good names to begin with. Why is the car park a garage? Explain to me why the lift has to be called the elevator? And registration? Really.
Checked in, our journey is not yet over. We have to go back outside to one of the two large tower buildings which house the rooms. It's almost like the rooms are an afterthought, and that the point of this hotel's existence is something else entirely. We're on the 13th floor but we could just aswell have been on the 35th. You can imagine that getting in and out of lifts is not going to be as straightforward as it at say, The Park inn in town. The room is nice. It doesn't look cheap. If it's not the journey, perhaps it is the enormous and garish clown's face outside the hotel which brings it down into the more affordable bracket of hotels on the strip?
We dine at 'Rock'n'Rita's', which is a bit like a burger bar which, like most bars in my experience of America, has large screens showing baseball, ice hockey and rodeo all around. We share something called a sampler, which is full of chicken-related products with nachos and prawns in breadcrumbs thrown in. In the middle of the gargantuan plate is a ceramic volcano which billows with dry ice and looks likely to erupt further menace at any moment.
Two beers later we hit the wall. Las Vegas is eight hours behind the UK. It's 10.00 at night, but our bodies think it is 6.00am Monday morning.
Exploration was for another, hopefully less windy day.
I'm quite content to stick at my modest job without entertaining any ideas of promotion, so long as it continues to earn me enough money. Quite happy to accept that the few magazine and fanzine articles I have had published are the beginning and end of my writing career. Content to admit that I played wheelchair basektball to a reasonable level without ever troubling the thoughts of any GB Men's coaches. I lack the necessary drive to gain greater power or social influence. I don't want the responsibility. I'm a soldier, not a general.
Or just a lazy shit.
Except when it comes to choosing my holiday destinations. Some of you will have already read the accounts of my three-day trek through the Berlin snow, followed by two full days spent queuing pointlessly at the airport. Before that you may have perused my eye-bleedingly endless log of a two-week trip to Florida last summer. So how do you follow that? Well, how about flying to Las Vegas, hiring a car and visiting Los Angeles, San Diego and Palm Desert, before heading back to Vegas for the finale of a 1,200 mile road trip? Trust me, it'll be a breeze.....
I can only apologise for going over old ground but I'm afraid that, just like Orlando last year, there were problems on the flight. At 10 hours 15 minutes it is almost two hours longer than the flight to Florida. Two hours is an awfully long time for someone who's watch tells him when he needs a wee, and who is on board an aircraft with toilets which appear to have been designed for meerkats. If I were 12 inches tall I'd have space enough to spend my pennies in peace. Unfortunately I'm at least 14 inches tall, and have all the balance of Nani within 20 yards of his opponents goal. This makes it difficult enough but the real stinker, the real steaming logger on the pavement is the fact that I need the on-board aisle chair to even reach these miniature loos. All of which means turning on your call light to attract attention - the aviation equivalent of putting your hand up and asking Miss if you can go to the toilet.
"Do you know where the aisle chair is?".
That's not me asking. That's the supervisor of the air stewards asking ME the question. Do I know where THEIR aisle chair is?
Hang on, I'm sure I left it here somewhere after my last flight with you lot a year ago didn't I? Oh bugger, have I not brought it on board with me? How stupid of me! Christ! I can't even be trusted to remember to pack Virgin Atlantic's mobiity equipment for the general use of people with disabilities and mobility problems. Idiot.
The clock ticks interminably, laughing out loud at my bladder as it does so until eventually, the staff get their act together and bring THEIR aisle chair. Not that the indignity is over. Aisle chair's have no large wheels and so are impossible to self propel. So what follows is a degrading weave through the aisles to the economy class toilet. I've only paid for economy class air travel, economy is where I'll be weeing. Except it's not. We get to the toilet and, predictably, it is occupied. Probably by a family of meerkats. Possibly shamed into taking the financial hit by the possibility of me weeing on the aisle chair, she takes me back to the premium class toilet. It's three rows in front of my economy class seat. Lord!
We touch down in Vegas, pick up the car (a nice low Chevvy, no repeat of the Mini-Me/Beyonce antics of Orlando) and within 10 minutes are at the strip. Las Vegas Boulevard. Traffic is arse-achingly slow, which is not all bad because we get to take in the sights. The sphinx at The Luxor, the Statue of Liberty at New York, New York, the Eiffel Tower at Paris, and the countless billboards advertising the myriad of Las Vegas shows. We're staying at Circus, Circus which apparently is at the cheaper end of the market. There's a moment when I think this might be because it is so far down the strip. It seems to take a Virgin Atlantic toilet trip of an age to get there, and when we do, it's very windy.
Emma has two cases, and the added bonus of the company of a man who cannot carry a case. She struggles to get the luggage out of the car as howls of gusty wind take hold. I can barely get myself out of the car because the door keeps blowing in my face. My shoes, which always fall off when I get in and out of the car, blow UNDER the car and are only just within reach. Farcical. I resolve once again to cut my feet off at the earliest opportunity. I need feet like Nick Clegg needs someone to sort through his fan mail.
Circus, Circus might be cheaper than The Luxor or Mandalay Bay, but it's no less bloody enormous. From the car park we have to move through the casino, past a restaurant, cafe and theme park (theme park?) before we even reach the reception desk. They call it registration, for no other reason I can find other than that Americans enjoy conjuring annoying alternatives for items and places which have perfectly good names to begin with. Why is the car park a garage? Explain to me why the lift has to be called the elevator? And registration? Really.
Checked in, our journey is not yet over. We have to go back outside to one of the two large tower buildings which house the rooms. It's almost like the rooms are an afterthought, and that the point of this hotel's existence is something else entirely. We're on the 13th floor but we could just aswell have been on the 35th. You can imagine that getting in and out of lifts is not going to be as straightforward as it at say, The Park inn in town. The room is nice. It doesn't look cheap. If it's not the journey, perhaps it is the enormous and garish clown's face outside the hotel which brings it down into the more affordable bracket of hotels on the strip?
We dine at 'Rock'n'Rita's', which is a bit like a burger bar which, like most bars in my experience of America, has large screens showing baseball, ice hockey and rodeo all around. We share something called a sampler, which is full of chicken-related products with nachos and prawns in breadcrumbs thrown in. In the middle of the gargantuan plate is a ceramic volcano which billows with dry ice and looks likely to erupt further menace at any moment.
Two beers later we hit the wall. Las Vegas is eight hours behind the UK. It's 10.00 at night, but our bodies think it is 6.00am Monday morning.
Exploration was for another, hopefully less windy day.
Friday, 29 April 2011
Royal Rage
Somewhere in the depths of my Facebook page there is an embarrassing photograph doing the rounds. In fact there are several.
I can't say I'm all that proud of the one in which I am wearing a black curly wig, with someone's finger (I think it's actually my boss' but I can't be sure) pressing a false moustache above my top lip. Then there's the one in which my face is far too close up to the camera and I'm looking straight down the lens in the manner of Verne Troyer trying to scare some small children. Quite honestly I look demented.
That's possibly because I am. But anyway I'm not as disgusted by either of these as I am by the one of me sat freezing with my old school friends, frowning fiercely as Princess Anne walks by. She's barely regarding the poor disabled children, and the scowl on my face shows that actually I'd rather be anywhere else in the world than right there, right then at that moment.
I don't know if this brief and underwhelming experience of Royalty has any part to play here, but the point of all this is that I'm by turns confused and frankly apalled at the behaviour of Great Britain today, the day that Prince William finally got hitched to Kate 'who gives a fuck?' Middleton. Our great country came to an absolute standstill as a reported 2 billion people worldwide tuned in to see this alleged 'historical event'.
It's not that I'd rather be working but, I'D RATHER BE FECKING WORKING!!!! My mother told me that nobody is any better than me (nor any worse) yet here we are as a nation doffing our collective cap to some buck-toothed slap-head and his bit of posh totty. It actually beggers belief that we defer to these unelected toffs who have zero talent, and have earned precisely NONE of the riches and priveleges which routinely fall into their laps on a daily basis. If we're going to have Kings and Queens, Princes and Princesses (and we wouldn't if I had any say in it), let them be people who have got where they are by talent and hard work.
And it's not just that we have to put up with this bullshit on the day either. The build-up has been an experience similar to the one I had when I had an absess drained from my mouth when I was around seven;
"But don't you want to see how beautiful she looks in her dress?" someone seriously asked me the other day. No, I friggity frigging don't. She's not my Princess. Ok, so she's half way attractive, but so were at least five of the women I saw hanging round Bar 44 in town last Sunday night. Will I get a day off work for their weddings if I promise to put up bunting and generally lick their arses?
No.
"Oh but William is so handsome, isn't he?" I've heard.
No. He isn't. As discussed he is a buck-toothed slap-head, the son of an adulterer (a crime for which I would be publicly flogged and hung on the corner of Dorothy Street) and an all around useless git. This boy is no Johnny Depp or David Beckham. For handsome, read rich, prestigious and powerful. Women seem to get those things muddled up somehow. Wasn't it Peter Crouch who, when asked what he would be if he were not a footballer, replied 'a virgin'? I think that makes the point beautifully.
Other arguements I have heard as to why I should have been glued to my television today drinking Pimms are equally knuckle-headed. Someone argued with me earlier in the week that we should celebrate the Royal Family because they are a part of our history and tradition.
So is slavery.
Not everything that is traditional is a good thing. There is such thing as change for the better. The Royal Family have a history of bloody violence and serial philandering. That we should look upon them as somehow the very definition of our Englishness strikes me as bordering on the deeply tragic. I'm all for celebrating our Englishness. Political correctness has gone berserk in it's attempts to stop us from doing so, but don't let our nationalism manifest itself like this. We're better than that, aren't we?
I am. My mum said. Despite some photographic evidence to the contrary.
I can't say I'm all that proud of the one in which I am wearing a black curly wig, with someone's finger (I think it's actually my boss' but I can't be sure) pressing a false moustache above my top lip. Then there's the one in which my face is far too close up to the camera and I'm looking straight down the lens in the manner of Verne Troyer trying to scare some small children. Quite honestly I look demented.
That's possibly because I am. But anyway I'm not as disgusted by either of these as I am by the one of me sat freezing with my old school friends, frowning fiercely as Princess Anne walks by. She's barely regarding the poor disabled children, and the scowl on my face shows that actually I'd rather be anywhere else in the world than right there, right then at that moment.
I don't know if this brief and underwhelming experience of Royalty has any part to play here, but the point of all this is that I'm by turns confused and frankly apalled at the behaviour of Great Britain today, the day that Prince William finally got hitched to Kate 'who gives a fuck?' Middleton. Our great country came to an absolute standstill as a reported 2 billion people worldwide tuned in to see this alleged 'historical event'.
It's not that I'd rather be working but, I'D RATHER BE FECKING WORKING!!!! My mother told me that nobody is any better than me (nor any worse) yet here we are as a nation doffing our collective cap to some buck-toothed slap-head and his bit of posh totty. It actually beggers belief that we defer to these unelected toffs who have zero talent, and have earned precisely NONE of the riches and priveleges which routinely fall into their laps on a daily basis. If we're going to have Kings and Queens, Princes and Princesses (and we wouldn't if I had any say in it), let them be people who have got where they are by talent and hard work.
And it's not just that we have to put up with this bullshit on the day either. The build-up has been an experience similar to the one I had when I had an absess drained from my mouth when I was around seven;
"But don't you want to see how beautiful she looks in her dress?" someone seriously asked me the other day. No, I friggity frigging don't. She's not my Princess. Ok, so she's half way attractive, but so were at least five of the women I saw hanging round Bar 44 in town last Sunday night. Will I get a day off work for their weddings if I promise to put up bunting and generally lick their arses?
No.
"Oh but William is so handsome, isn't he?" I've heard.
No. He isn't. As discussed he is a buck-toothed slap-head, the son of an adulterer (a crime for which I would be publicly flogged and hung on the corner of Dorothy Street) and an all around useless git. This boy is no Johnny Depp or David Beckham. For handsome, read rich, prestigious and powerful. Women seem to get those things muddled up somehow. Wasn't it Peter Crouch who, when asked what he would be if he were not a footballer, replied 'a virgin'? I think that makes the point beautifully.
Other arguements I have heard as to why I should have been glued to my television today drinking Pimms are equally knuckle-headed. Someone argued with me earlier in the week that we should celebrate the Royal Family because they are a part of our history and tradition.
So is slavery.
Not everything that is traditional is a good thing. There is such thing as change for the better. The Royal Family have a history of bloody violence and serial philandering. That we should look upon them as somehow the very definition of our Englishness strikes me as bordering on the deeply tragic. I'm all for celebrating our Englishness. Political correctness has gone berserk in it's attempts to stop us from doing so, but don't let our nationalism manifest itself like this. We're better than that, aren't we?
I am. My mum said. Despite some photographic evidence to the contrary.
Friday, 15 April 2011
Bristol
We were in Bristol last weekend. Emma's brother lives there with his wife and their 6-month old daughter.
Since crashing through their front door at 2 in the morning while the baby sleeps upstairs doesn't seem the done thing, we stayed in a hotel for the first of our two-night stay. That meant we could go out and have a few drinks with our meal, and generally behave in a loutish manner without upsetting anyone. Well, not anyone we knew, anyway.
Before we left for the restaurant we asked the man at reception whether there were any pubs in the area. We never asked if there were any nice pubs, just pubs. Nevertheless he seemed concerned for our safety straight away. He thought about it for far longer than you would think necessary before finally offering;
"It's not that great for pubs around here." Keep in mind that this is in Bristol city centre. We were a little surprised to say the least. Usually the one thing you can be sure of finding in city centres is pubs.
"They're all a bit iffy." he added.
I wondered if he knew where we had come from. It's a stretch to believe that there is any pub in Bristol that is more 'iffy' than say, The Vine, or The Elephant in Thatto Heath. Maybe it was because Emma asked. She sounds like she comes from somewhere civilised whereas I sound like I come from Thatto Heath. Maybe he'd listened to her accent and raised the bar just that little bit too high in terms of our expectations.
"It's just round the corner." he said finally.
"You can try it if you want."
Well thanks. So we did. We had gone past the signpost marked tipsy by the time we left the restaurant. Red wine will do that to you. Well, it will do it to me and Emma. She doesn't drink that often, and although I tend to go to the pub more I don't sit with my mates in the Springy drinking red wine. If ever you were to find justification for beating up a disabled person, that might be it. A man drinking red wine in the Springy is a man whose favourite film is Dirty Dancing and who has tickets to see JLS.
So back to the pub, and Dennis, one of our main protagonists in this wearisome tale. The pub was a kind of mock-tudor building called the Stag and Hound, which surprised us because our friend the receptionist had told us that it was Brazilian themed. Amusingly, Emma and I missed the fact that there was a short cut on a bend near a roundabout, and so wasted at least five minutes waiting patiently at several pedestrian crossings, one of which was broken. It was like Frogger on the ZX Spectrum for anyone old enough to put that into any kind of context.
We approached the bar and find Dennis stood there with his wife and little dog Misty. At first he didn't pay much attention to us but as soon as we sat down he decided to get himself acquainted. I shall spare Emma the trauma of re-living the event fully but for a warm-up he made several comments about her which might otherwise be deemed inappropriate. He thought he was being complimentary, clearly, but it was just kind of embarrassing. It wasn't quite the stuff of Keys and Gray but clearly Dennis had not wooed his wife by means of chivalry and romanticism.
And then he told her a joke about buggery. There, I said it. Buggery. Neither myself nor Emma would consider ourselves prudish but I think I can put my hand on my heart and say that I have never gone up to a strange couple in a pub and told the lady a joke about buggery. I mean, it's just never been the gentlemanly thing to do, has it? When did it become ok to tell women you have never seen before jokes about buggery? And did you hear the one about the............. No, we're not going there. I actually can't remember the joke now, which is a pity because it might have made for good copy for some of you.
Now, we're too polite to have said anything to Dennis about his rather forward approach to pub comedy, so he probably never even got even a mere whiff of the idea that we might have been offended. He bought the next round, in fact, which in my book goes some of the way to repairing the damage.
And Misty was a lovely dog..............
Since crashing through their front door at 2 in the morning while the baby sleeps upstairs doesn't seem the done thing, we stayed in a hotel for the first of our two-night stay. That meant we could go out and have a few drinks with our meal, and generally behave in a loutish manner without upsetting anyone. Well, not anyone we knew, anyway.
Before we left for the restaurant we asked the man at reception whether there were any pubs in the area. We never asked if there were any nice pubs, just pubs. Nevertheless he seemed concerned for our safety straight away. He thought about it for far longer than you would think necessary before finally offering;
"It's not that great for pubs around here." Keep in mind that this is in Bristol city centre. We were a little surprised to say the least. Usually the one thing you can be sure of finding in city centres is pubs.
"They're all a bit iffy." he added.
I wondered if he knew where we had come from. It's a stretch to believe that there is any pub in Bristol that is more 'iffy' than say, The Vine, or The Elephant in Thatto Heath. Maybe it was because Emma asked. She sounds like she comes from somewhere civilised whereas I sound like I come from Thatto Heath. Maybe he'd listened to her accent and raised the bar just that little bit too high in terms of our expectations.
"It's just round the corner." he said finally.
"You can try it if you want."
Well thanks. So we did. We had gone past the signpost marked tipsy by the time we left the restaurant. Red wine will do that to you. Well, it will do it to me and Emma. She doesn't drink that often, and although I tend to go to the pub more I don't sit with my mates in the Springy drinking red wine. If ever you were to find justification for beating up a disabled person, that might be it. A man drinking red wine in the Springy is a man whose favourite film is Dirty Dancing and who has tickets to see JLS.
So back to the pub, and Dennis, one of our main protagonists in this wearisome tale. The pub was a kind of mock-tudor building called the Stag and Hound, which surprised us because our friend the receptionist had told us that it was Brazilian themed. Amusingly, Emma and I missed the fact that there was a short cut on a bend near a roundabout, and so wasted at least five minutes waiting patiently at several pedestrian crossings, one of which was broken. It was like Frogger on the ZX Spectrum for anyone old enough to put that into any kind of context.
We approached the bar and find Dennis stood there with his wife and little dog Misty. At first he didn't pay much attention to us but as soon as we sat down he decided to get himself acquainted. I shall spare Emma the trauma of re-living the event fully but for a warm-up he made several comments about her which might otherwise be deemed inappropriate. He thought he was being complimentary, clearly, but it was just kind of embarrassing. It wasn't quite the stuff of Keys and Gray but clearly Dennis had not wooed his wife by means of chivalry and romanticism.
And then he told her a joke about buggery. There, I said it. Buggery. Neither myself nor Emma would consider ourselves prudish but I think I can put my hand on my heart and say that I have never gone up to a strange couple in a pub and told the lady a joke about buggery. I mean, it's just never been the gentlemanly thing to do, has it? When did it become ok to tell women you have never seen before jokes about buggery? And did you hear the one about the............. No, we're not going there. I actually can't remember the joke now, which is a pity because it might have made for good copy for some of you.
Now, we're too polite to have said anything to Dennis about his rather forward approach to pub comedy, so he probably never even got even a mere whiff of the idea that we might have been offended. He bought the next round, in fact, which in my book goes some of the way to repairing the damage.
And Misty was a lovely dog..............
Wednesday, 30 March 2011
Why Do You Blog?
I was asked this yesterday. Not in a genuinely inquisitive tone. It was more dismissive, in the way that I myself might ask someone why they watch Glee or listen to Cheryl Cole. The disapproval was evident, the implication being that 'blogging', as it were, is pointless and rubbish.
So anyway it got me thinking. Why do I blog? Neither this blog nor it's writer denies the charge of being pointless and rubbish. You can't change the world with a couple of hundred words of ire and angst every once in a while. What you can do is try to entertain or persuade. It will seem unfathomable to the person asking me the question why, but there have been positive comments about this column from a number of people. Some of them are hopelessly biased, admittedly, but if even one person has gleaned a modicum of pleasure from these pages then it is a worthy pursuit.
And to be frank my questioner seems to enjoy very little. Very little created by anyone else but himself, at any rate. Even if he were to accept blogging as a worthwhile endeavour, you can be sure it would be something that he had done before. Ten times better with sugar on top. His is an approval I'm not going to gain. There's a queue of people who wish to express their disapproval of me, mate. Please join the back and wait your turn.
My answer to the question when it was originally posed was impossibly pompous, bordering on pretentious. 'Writing is it's own reward' I said, which is some arse-wash that I once heard that uber-pretentious warbler Sting say when accepting an award. In that sense I wasn't really helping myself. That happens a lot. My mouth opens before my brain engages and before you know it there's a perception of me which I don't think is particularly accurate, or pleasant. Getting back to Sting,I don't recommend 'Fields Of Gold' when it comes to shaping one's philosophy, but I understand where he is coming from here. Writing does help. It's at least partly cathartic. I enjoy this, whether you do or not. And actually I was slightly affronted that the person asking why couldn't see the value in the concept, even if the content is invariably poor. I can accept it if you think my rantings are abysmal, self-serving, even, but I can't see how you can question the intent.
I suppose I am pondering this at a bad time. Another crisis of confidence seems to have taken hold after what has been a pretty turbulent week. It's Wednesday, which is at once a shocking and bewildering thought. And it shouldn't be. It should just be Wednesday. Maybe at bettter times in my life I wouldn't accept the point that there needs to be a reason for blogging. At such times the question would just wash over me and I wouldn't feel any need to write dark responses such as this. Maybe blogging should just be like skiing or table tennis. There isn't any rational explanation other than that you might enjoy it. The only question might be whether it harms anyone else. But I think it's fair to say that this blog has reasonable restrictions. Nowhere will you find out that so and so is a so and so (except maybe Cheryl Cole in one of my less articulate rants). And she doesn't count because I don't know her and so the chances of her ever being offended by my words are zero. It's really not about trying to bad-mouth or name and shame anyone for any wrongs that I perceive. Not even bad pop music. Or even failing to see the value in blogging.
So really, where's the harm?
Why do I blog? Why not?
So anyway it got me thinking. Why do I blog? Neither this blog nor it's writer denies the charge of being pointless and rubbish. You can't change the world with a couple of hundred words of ire and angst every once in a while. What you can do is try to entertain or persuade. It will seem unfathomable to the person asking me the question why, but there have been positive comments about this column from a number of people. Some of them are hopelessly biased, admittedly, but if even one person has gleaned a modicum of pleasure from these pages then it is a worthy pursuit.
And to be frank my questioner seems to enjoy very little. Very little created by anyone else but himself, at any rate. Even if he were to accept blogging as a worthwhile endeavour, you can be sure it would be something that he had done before. Ten times better with sugar on top. His is an approval I'm not going to gain. There's a queue of people who wish to express their disapproval of me, mate. Please join the back and wait your turn.
My answer to the question when it was originally posed was impossibly pompous, bordering on pretentious. 'Writing is it's own reward' I said, which is some arse-wash that I once heard that uber-pretentious warbler Sting say when accepting an award. In that sense I wasn't really helping myself. That happens a lot. My mouth opens before my brain engages and before you know it there's a perception of me which I don't think is particularly accurate, or pleasant. Getting back to Sting,I don't recommend 'Fields Of Gold' when it comes to shaping one's philosophy, but I understand where he is coming from here. Writing does help. It's at least partly cathartic. I enjoy this, whether you do or not. And actually I was slightly affronted that the person asking why couldn't see the value in the concept, even if the content is invariably poor. I can accept it if you think my rantings are abysmal, self-serving, even, but I can't see how you can question the intent.
I suppose I am pondering this at a bad time. Another crisis of confidence seems to have taken hold after what has been a pretty turbulent week. It's Wednesday, which is at once a shocking and bewildering thought. And it shouldn't be. It should just be Wednesday. Maybe at bettter times in my life I wouldn't accept the point that there needs to be a reason for blogging. At such times the question would just wash over me and I wouldn't feel any need to write dark responses such as this. Maybe blogging should just be like skiing or table tennis. There isn't any rational explanation other than that you might enjoy it. The only question might be whether it harms anyone else. But I think it's fair to say that this blog has reasonable restrictions. Nowhere will you find out that so and so is a so and so (except maybe Cheryl Cole in one of my less articulate rants). And she doesn't count because I don't know her and so the chances of her ever being offended by my words are zero. It's really not about trying to bad-mouth or name and shame anyone for any wrongs that I perceive. Not even bad pop music. Or even failing to see the value in blogging.
So really, where's the harm?
Why do I blog? Why not?
Saturday, 26 March 2011
In Rod We Trust
Yesterday was a strange old day.
I left work early owing to the joys of flexi and spent the afternoon paying an extortionate amount for Carling lager while watching New Zealand's 49-run victory over South Africa in the ICC Cricket World Cup quarter final. I was alone, but also surrounded by a Georide girls night out. Day out, actually. Weekend, probably. At first I thought it was a hen party but their t-shirts revealed that they were celebrating the 30th birthday of someone called Sara. They were loud and their shoes even more so. Particularly Sara. I know which one was Sara because the t-shirts also helpfully carried the name of each individual in the group. My God, you should have seen the state of Dawn......... And it was only 3.30pm.....
The plan was to meet Emma at my local at some point. She was out for a meal with her work colleagues in Liverpool, and said she'd be at the pub some time after 9. Wigan were playing Warrington in Super League at 8, but as it turned out I wouldn't get to see it. What I saw instead was far more memorable.
I left the extortionate bar in favour of some equally over-priced fast food, then headed for my occasional battle with the railway station. I don't know if it was the couple of pints I'd had but I was feeling rather moody. I get like that. Sometimes for no reason at all. Like a girl. It's a terrible affliction. I'd hesitate to call it depression but there are certainly a large number of days when I wish the world would go fuck itself. There have been more of these in recent weeks I have noticed, but then there has been more beer.
So I arrive at the Springfield pub at about 7.30 with my mood. To my surprise my cousin and his brother-in-law (my other cousin's husband, can you keep up with that?) are sat at a table in the corner. My cousin doesn't live in St.Helens and though his brother-in-law does it is still rare to see him in that particular pub. It was a pleasant surprise anyway, so I start to relax and the Budweiser flows. And it's a good deal cheaper than the Carling in Liverpool. I don't mind missing the rugby now. We're having fun catching up, talking mostly tittle-tattle but then deep conversations aren't good for my mood. Can't let that back in at this point.
There's a small raised area which passes for a stage in the Springfield. On it is a microphone on a stand, behind which sits a man on the back bench. We used to own that bench, back in the day. When the Springy was a very busy place and I knew everyone in there. Now it's rarely occupied, much like the rest of the pub itself except for night's like this when there's entertainment provided. The man is middle-aged, greying hair cut in a sort of semi-mullet, uncomfortably reminiscent of Rod Stewart's infamous barnet. If only I'd known......
Shortly after Emma arrives the man moves. He takes up a position at the end of the bar. Half an hour earlier there had been a spectacular cat-fight. One of the protagonists was a woman who has been part of the furniture for as long as I have been going in there. I couldn't see who it was she was shouting at and trying to run towards, but what I can tell you is that the language turned the air blue. This blog is biblical in it's lexicon by comparison;
"Honestly, you don't see that a lot in here." I said to my companions, only for a woman sitting at a table behind us to retort;
"You don't come in here all that often then, do you love? It's always like that in here."
I've been going in The Springfield for about 20 years. In all that time I have probably seen about five fights, the worst of which prompted the then landlords to call the police after a woman started throwing chairs at her partner. All hell broke loose. Even the karaoke was cancelled the week after. It is not always 'like that' in The Springfield, although I confess that my visits have been fewer in recent years since I found The Brown Edge karaoke. I'm a self-confessed karaoke whore, and I'll go wherever it is in the way that Stephen Fry will go wherever a television crew are.
Finally the pair were torn apart, leaving our man Rod with space to enjoy his pint and chat with a few locals. It was clear he wasn't from Thatto Heath. They just don't do mullets like that around here any more. Not since I ditched the gel and spikes and began the cruel descent into monthly head-shaving. It was a formidable effort though not, Emma and I agreed, as good as the Barnsley cab driver who once picked us up on night out in that beautiful Yorkshire town as students. His was the real deal. He wasn't playing games. His was a good six inches higher than this Rod's, and longer at the back. A top, top effort.
Soon the lights go out and he's introduced. Sure enough our worst fears are confirmed. He's a Rod Stewart tribute act and he's going to be entertaining us for the rest of the evening. What is more, and with the kind of irony that Alanis Morissette could learn a lot from, his name is Springfield. Dave Springfield. Dave, naturally. Everyone is called Dave aren't they? So it's Dave Springfield at The Springfield. Instead of Wigan v Warrington. In Thatto Heath? Christ.
Have you ever seen a tribute act that really buys into the idea that they are the person they are imitating? I once saw a Bon Jovi tribute act at the old Chicago Rock in town who, in between and sometimes during songs, would talk to the crowd in what he probably thought was a convincing Jon Bon Jovi accent. Unfortunately Rod was similarly inclined. In fact, he followed his idol's crisis of origin to the letter by announcing that we would be enjoying some Scottish music, but doing so in a hardly audible mockney accent. It was the sort of accent that would make Dick Van Dyke's seem suitable for a part in Eastenders.
In truth Rod, or Dave, wasn't bad as Rod Stewart tribute acts probably go. He strained a bit at times but he was whole hearted. I defy anyone to not enjoy Maggie May with eight lagers and three whiskey and cokes down their hatch. And remember this is me we're talking about. Not exactly Mr Excitable. And then there was my mood. Included in Dave's repertoire where several costume changes, some of which unfortunately took place on stage. Like the real Rod he liked his football shirts, changing back and forth from Celtic to Scotland while at one point misguidedly opting to go topless. It was by far the worst topless show I had ever seen but then to be fair he wasn't charging an extra fiver for it.
Evenutally Dave ran out of Rod Stewart material that this kind of audience would recognise, so we were treated to covers of tracks by Take That, Bon Jovi (without the accent this time), Queen and even The Script! A good night was, I'm sure, had by all.
And Wigan lost....................
I left work early owing to the joys of flexi and spent the afternoon paying an extortionate amount for Carling lager while watching New Zealand's 49-run victory over South Africa in the ICC Cricket World Cup quarter final. I was alone, but also surrounded by a Georide girls night out. Day out, actually. Weekend, probably. At first I thought it was a hen party but their t-shirts revealed that they were celebrating the 30th birthday of someone called Sara. They were loud and their shoes even more so. Particularly Sara. I know which one was Sara because the t-shirts also helpfully carried the name of each individual in the group. My God, you should have seen the state of Dawn......... And it was only 3.30pm.....
The plan was to meet Emma at my local at some point. She was out for a meal with her work colleagues in Liverpool, and said she'd be at the pub some time after 9. Wigan were playing Warrington in Super League at 8, but as it turned out I wouldn't get to see it. What I saw instead was far more memorable.
I left the extortionate bar in favour of some equally over-priced fast food, then headed for my occasional battle with the railway station. I don't know if it was the couple of pints I'd had but I was feeling rather moody. I get like that. Sometimes for no reason at all. Like a girl. It's a terrible affliction. I'd hesitate to call it depression but there are certainly a large number of days when I wish the world would go fuck itself. There have been more of these in recent weeks I have noticed, but then there has been more beer.
So I arrive at the Springfield pub at about 7.30 with my mood. To my surprise my cousin and his brother-in-law (my other cousin's husband, can you keep up with that?) are sat at a table in the corner. My cousin doesn't live in St.Helens and though his brother-in-law does it is still rare to see him in that particular pub. It was a pleasant surprise anyway, so I start to relax and the Budweiser flows. And it's a good deal cheaper than the Carling in Liverpool. I don't mind missing the rugby now. We're having fun catching up, talking mostly tittle-tattle but then deep conversations aren't good for my mood. Can't let that back in at this point.
There's a small raised area which passes for a stage in the Springfield. On it is a microphone on a stand, behind which sits a man on the back bench. We used to own that bench, back in the day. When the Springy was a very busy place and I knew everyone in there. Now it's rarely occupied, much like the rest of the pub itself except for night's like this when there's entertainment provided. The man is middle-aged, greying hair cut in a sort of semi-mullet, uncomfortably reminiscent of Rod Stewart's infamous barnet. If only I'd known......
Shortly after Emma arrives the man moves. He takes up a position at the end of the bar. Half an hour earlier there had been a spectacular cat-fight. One of the protagonists was a woman who has been part of the furniture for as long as I have been going in there. I couldn't see who it was she was shouting at and trying to run towards, but what I can tell you is that the language turned the air blue. This blog is biblical in it's lexicon by comparison;
"Honestly, you don't see that a lot in here." I said to my companions, only for a woman sitting at a table behind us to retort;
"You don't come in here all that often then, do you love? It's always like that in here."
I've been going in The Springfield for about 20 years. In all that time I have probably seen about five fights, the worst of which prompted the then landlords to call the police after a woman started throwing chairs at her partner. All hell broke loose. Even the karaoke was cancelled the week after. It is not always 'like that' in The Springfield, although I confess that my visits have been fewer in recent years since I found The Brown Edge karaoke. I'm a self-confessed karaoke whore, and I'll go wherever it is in the way that Stephen Fry will go wherever a television crew are.
Finally the pair were torn apart, leaving our man Rod with space to enjoy his pint and chat with a few locals. It was clear he wasn't from Thatto Heath. They just don't do mullets like that around here any more. Not since I ditched the gel and spikes and began the cruel descent into monthly head-shaving. It was a formidable effort though not, Emma and I agreed, as good as the Barnsley cab driver who once picked us up on night out in that beautiful Yorkshire town as students. His was the real deal. He wasn't playing games. His was a good six inches higher than this Rod's, and longer at the back. A top, top effort.
Soon the lights go out and he's introduced. Sure enough our worst fears are confirmed. He's a Rod Stewart tribute act and he's going to be entertaining us for the rest of the evening. What is more, and with the kind of irony that Alanis Morissette could learn a lot from, his name is Springfield. Dave Springfield. Dave, naturally. Everyone is called Dave aren't they? So it's Dave Springfield at The Springfield. Instead of Wigan v Warrington. In Thatto Heath? Christ.
Have you ever seen a tribute act that really buys into the idea that they are the person they are imitating? I once saw a Bon Jovi tribute act at the old Chicago Rock in town who, in between and sometimes during songs, would talk to the crowd in what he probably thought was a convincing Jon Bon Jovi accent. Unfortunately Rod was similarly inclined. In fact, he followed his idol's crisis of origin to the letter by announcing that we would be enjoying some Scottish music, but doing so in a hardly audible mockney accent. It was the sort of accent that would make Dick Van Dyke's seem suitable for a part in Eastenders.
In truth Rod, or Dave, wasn't bad as Rod Stewart tribute acts probably go. He strained a bit at times but he was whole hearted. I defy anyone to not enjoy Maggie May with eight lagers and three whiskey and cokes down their hatch. And remember this is me we're talking about. Not exactly Mr Excitable. And then there was my mood. Included in Dave's repertoire where several costume changes, some of which unfortunately took place on stage. Like the real Rod he liked his football shirts, changing back and forth from Celtic to Scotland while at one point misguidedly opting to go topless. It was by far the worst topless show I had ever seen but then to be fair he wasn't charging an extra fiver for it.
Evenutally Dave ran out of Rod Stewart material that this kind of audience would recognise, so we were treated to covers of tracks by Take That, Bon Jovi (without the accent this time), Queen and even The Script! A good night was, I'm sure, had by all.
And Wigan lost....................
Saturday, 29 January 2011
Any Other Business
I don't know if any of you are familiar with Saturday morning radio. Probably not. You're probably still perservering with that inane excuse for an entertainment show they call Soccer AM. The best part of 20 years on our screens and still doing the same lame joke. It's some achievement when you come to think about it, but I'm afraid I gave up on it some time ago.
That was when I found Fighting Talk on Five Live. It's advantages over Soccer AM include the fact that it has never been hosted by Tim Lovejoy, but that's not all. For the uninitiated it is a panel show (isn't everything these days if it doesn't consist of some celebrity gobshite cooking?) in which guests try to earn points for what they call 'punditry'. It's presented by the ubiquitous Colin Murray, who poses the questions to which the contestants have to come up with witty or interesting answers. Think QI without Alan Davies. And on a sporting theme. Utopia.
Yet this column is nothing if not furious and angry, and Fighting Talk is no different to anything else in that it wouldn't get a mention if it hadn't rubbed your writer up the wrong way. In the penultimate round the contestants are asked for 'Any Other Business', for which they are given half a minute or so to ramble on about anything (sport-related or not) that has caught their attention in the past week. And this is the point at which one Kevin Bridges wrote his name into the archives of Musings Of A Fire Hazard;
"I was watching Deal Or No Deal the other day." began the Scottish comedian. You know the one? The one whose Christmas DVD was advertised to death from around November 1 to twelfth night? And not only that, but it was the same clip, in which he oh so hilariously cracks a gag about naming his offspring after the places in which they were conceived;
"This is my son, the garage." he quips, bed-wettingly.
And so back to the plot;
"I was watching Deal Or No Deal the other day, and there was this guy in a wheelchair on."
Oh oh, stand by for excruciating patronisation;
"Anyway it was a real tear-jerker. It came down to the last two boxes and he was going to win something like £50 or £100,000, and he went for it and he won, and everyone was crying and even Noel Edmonds looked human for a moment. I shed a little tear there, though."
Excuse me, Kevin? I couldn't tell whether he was joking or not by this point but I would still like someone to explain to me why it is any more 'tear-jerking' or 'emotional' to watch a disabled person in this situation as opposed to anyone else? Because that is what he is saying by mentioning it on national radio. But anyone who has ever seen Deal Or No Deal will know that it's neurosis-suffering contestants cry on a regular basis. It would not surprise me if the questions on the application form read something like; Are you an overly emotional lunatic?. Can we rely on you to cry if someone who came on to the show with nothing leaves with nothing?. Better still would you cry with joy if someone you met 35 seconds ago won £250,000?'
All of which leaves little doubt that Bridges thought this particular bout of whailing and sniffling to be special. Somehow different. Justified. And if what he says is to be believed, Edmonds did too. I don't know the young man who won, but I do know some people who do due to my links with the wheelchair basketball fraternity. I don't know his personal circumstances and I'm delighted for him that he has been so fortunate. I don't begrudge him a penny. But it's a TV game show. It's not a matter of life and death. He, like the rest of us, is not a hero or a role model because he manages to get out of bed every day and get on with his life. The only difficulty in doing that is provided by the prejudices of an able-bodied community which tries to either patronise, ignore or discriminate us into submission.
Compared with that, meeting Noel Edmonds is a stroll in the park. And that concludes Any Other Business for today.
That was when I found Fighting Talk on Five Live. It's advantages over Soccer AM include the fact that it has never been hosted by Tim Lovejoy, but that's not all. For the uninitiated it is a panel show (isn't everything these days if it doesn't consist of some celebrity gobshite cooking?) in which guests try to earn points for what they call 'punditry'. It's presented by the ubiquitous Colin Murray, who poses the questions to which the contestants have to come up with witty or interesting answers. Think QI without Alan Davies. And on a sporting theme. Utopia.
Yet this column is nothing if not furious and angry, and Fighting Talk is no different to anything else in that it wouldn't get a mention if it hadn't rubbed your writer up the wrong way. In the penultimate round the contestants are asked for 'Any Other Business', for which they are given half a minute or so to ramble on about anything (sport-related or not) that has caught their attention in the past week. And this is the point at which one Kevin Bridges wrote his name into the archives of Musings Of A Fire Hazard;
"I was watching Deal Or No Deal the other day." began the Scottish comedian. You know the one? The one whose Christmas DVD was advertised to death from around November 1 to twelfth night? And not only that, but it was the same clip, in which he oh so hilariously cracks a gag about naming his offspring after the places in which they were conceived;
"This is my son, the garage." he quips, bed-wettingly.
And so back to the plot;
"I was watching Deal Or No Deal the other day, and there was this guy in a wheelchair on."
Oh oh, stand by for excruciating patronisation;
"Anyway it was a real tear-jerker. It came down to the last two boxes and he was going to win something like £50 or £100,000, and he went for it and he won, and everyone was crying and even Noel Edmonds looked human for a moment. I shed a little tear there, though."
Excuse me, Kevin? I couldn't tell whether he was joking or not by this point but I would still like someone to explain to me why it is any more 'tear-jerking' or 'emotional' to watch a disabled person in this situation as opposed to anyone else? Because that is what he is saying by mentioning it on national radio. But anyone who has ever seen Deal Or No Deal will know that it's neurosis-suffering contestants cry on a regular basis. It would not surprise me if the questions on the application form read something like; Are you an overly emotional lunatic?. Can we rely on you to cry if someone who came on to the show with nothing leaves with nothing?. Better still would you cry with joy if someone you met 35 seconds ago won £250,000?'
All of which leaves little doubt that Bridges thought this particular bout of whailing and sniffling to be special. Somehow different. Justified. And if what he says is to be believed, Edmonds did too. I don't know the young man who won, but I do know some people who do due to my links with the wheelchair basketball fraternity. I don't know his personal circumstances and I'm delighted for him that he has been so fortunate. I don't begrudge him a penny. But it's a TV game show. It's not a matter of life and death. He, like the rest of us, is not a hero or a role model because he manages to get out of bed every day and get on with his life. The only difficulty in doing that is provided by the prejudices of an able-bodied community which tries to either patronise, ignore or discriminate us into submission.
Compared with that, meeting Noel Edmonds is a stroll in the park. And that concludes Any Other Business for today.
Thursday, 27 January 2011
Dr...........Noooooooooooo!!!!!!!!
Following my blatant but still unfortunate bout of sexism yesterday, I became the victim today.
Hard to believe I know, but once again I have something approaching whooping cough, enough phlegm in my throat most of the time to drown Lancashire, and some rather wiffy watery waste. Not a pleasant image, but it does explain why I had to take yet another trip to see my local doctor this morning.
Anyone who has read my piece entitled 'Dancing With The Doc' will know the outcome of the medical stuff. That part of the experience was no different than any other visit to the doctor in the last three years or so. A quick re-cap for those who missed that piece might look something like this. I see the doctor. I tell him or her about said symptoms, he or she prescribes a course of leeches before trying to persuade me to have a blood test. Something about protein levels. The difference here was in how we got there.
It was a new doctor. Doctor Sage. Doctor Sage is a young-ish and, yes, attractive-ish female. This would not ordinarily be an issue for me. Female doctors are every bit as adept at their profession as female assistant referees. More so, in many cases. They've never let me down yet, although it has to be said that diagnosing ANOTHER urinary tract infection in me is one of the easier tasks that medical people might have to undertake. This is not a mystery illness, baffling the entire NHS!
As is procedure in my regular quick-step with the quack, Dr Sage asked me to provide a sample of my aforementioned whiffy, watery waste. All fair so far. How else is she supposed to prove that my suspicions about my ailments are correct? It might be an easy and predictable diagnosis to make, but you still have to go through the motions of proving yourself right. Anything else would just be sloppy.
So she hands me the cup. A small cup distinctly lacking in anything resembling a lid. Normally you get a cup, with a lid, inside a bag, with a syringe-style plunger for collection. Hygiene is paramount. Unless you're Dr Sage who is obviously something of a maverick. She has her own rules.
I take the cup from her, a little taken aback but choosing to roll my eyes and get on with it rather than call in the Health Minister. And then she hits me with;
"Do you want to take that to the bathroom or do you want to do it here? I don't mind."
You what now?
I don't know what colour my face became but suddenly the room was awfully warm. Perversely, she became more attractive, when you might expect this suggestion to have repulsed me. Well that's deviants for you isn't it? Remembering myself, and with as much haste as I could muster I blurted out that I would be off to the bathroom at that point, and sped out of the door with the cup in hand;
"OK." she said;
"Just give us a knock again when you have finished."
Are you sure about that? Are you sure you don't want to hold it for me or something, doc?, I thought, but did not say.
I've got to tell you, it's a long time since anyone outside of my relationship has talked about the prospect of viewing my tackle so matter-of-factly. That she was young and getting more attractive by the second scared the bejesus out of me. I hadn't been this embarrassed since I last looked at my Facebook photographs!
As if visiting the doctor wasn't already traumatic enough for me, there is now the possibility of being sexually harrassed to consider. It might be a bittersweet prospect but I shouldn't have to put up with it.
It's sexist.
Hard to believe I know, but once again I have something approaching whooping cough, enough phlegm in my throat most of the time to drown Lancashire, and some rather wiffy watery waste. Not a pleasant image, but it does explain why I had to take yet another trip to see my local doctor this morning.
Anyone who has read my piece entitled 'Dancing With The Doc' will know the outcome of the medical stuff. That part of the experience was no different than any other visit to the doctor in the last three years or so. A quick re-cap for those who missed that piece might look something like this. I see the doctor. I tell him or her about said symptoms, he or she prescribes a course of leeches before trying to persuade me to have a blood test. Something about protein levels. The difference here was in how we got there.
It was a new doctor. Doctor Sage. Doctor Sage is a young-ish and, yes, attractive-ish female. This would not ordinarily be an issue for me. Female doctors are every bit as adept at their profession as female assistant referees. More so, in many cases. They've never let me down yet, although it has to be said that diagnosing ANOTHER urinary tract infection in me is one of the easier tasks that medical people might have to undertake. This is not a mystery illness, baffling the entire NHS!
As is procedure in my regular quick-step with the quack, Dr Sage asked me to provide a sample of my aforementioned whiffy, watery waste. All fair so far. How else is she supposed to prove that my suspicions about my ailments are correct? It might be an easy and predictable diagnosis to make, but you still have to go through the motions of proving yourself right. Anything else would just be sloppy.
So she hands me the cup. A small cup distinctly lacking in anything resembling a lid. Normally you get a cup, with a lid, inside a bag, with a syringe-style plunger for collection. Hygiene is paramount. Unless you're Dr Sage who is obviously something of a maverick. She has her own rules.
I take the cup from her, a little taken aback but choosing to roll my eyes and get on with it rather than call in the Health Minister. And then she hits me with;
"Do you want to take that to the bathroom or do you want to do it here? I don't mind."
You what now?
I don't know what colour my face became but suddenly the room was awfully warm. Perversely, she became more attractive, when you might expect this suggestion to have repulsed me. Well that's deviants for you isn't it? Remembering myself, and with as much haste as I could muster I blurted out that I would be off to the bathroom at that point, and sped out of the door with the cup in hand;
"OK." she said;
"Just give us a knock again when you have finished."
Are you sure about that? Are you sure you don't want to hold it for me or something, doc?, I thought, but did not say.
I've got to tell you, it's a long time since anyone outside of my relationship has talked about the prospect of viewing my tackle so matter-of-factly. That she was young and getting more attractive by the second scared the bejesus out of me. I hadn't been this embarrassed since I last looked at my Facebook photographs!
As if visiting the doctor wasn't already traumatic enough for me, there is now the possibility of being sexually harrassed to consider. It might be a bittersweet prospect but I shouldn't have to put up with it.
It's sexist.
Wednesday, 26 January 2011
I, Sexist
So there I was fighting the good fight.
It's the day following Andy Gray's sacking from Sky Sports for sexist comments made about referee's assistant Sian Massey and toward Sky Sports presenter Charlotte Jackson. I was just in the middle of explaining to a colleague of mine that football is not the impenetrable bastion of machoism that it would like itself to be, and that women are involved in far more important and more physically demanding pursuits, when the tide turned against me once more.
As regular readers will know, my path is strewn with cow-pats from the Devil's own herd. So it is unsurprising then to note that, when the conversation turned toward the possibility of a female actually playing, rather than officiating, in a professional men's football match, I turned out to be the sexist. You see I just wasn't having it. For all it's namby-pamby awful-ness, football remains a reasonably physical game. Whether we like it or not, the woman has not been born yet who is strong, fit (in the aerobic sense of the word) and fast enough to compete alongside men on a football field.
These issues are far less relevant when it comes to officiating, hence Sian Massey was able to do an excellent job during the Wolves v Liverpool match last weekend. Yet this part of the conversation becomes but a distant memory, a myth that old people might tell their grandchildren, because someone chose the inopportune moment just after that to walk into the office. This person happens to be a University academic and a regular reader of this column. I vaguely remember her hitting me over the head with something which, looking on the bright side and given the amount of information about our conversation that she had access to, could have been something a lot heavier.
I just feel wronged by all of this. I have colleagues who think that women should not even be allowed to go and watch football because they think that somehow they don't belong. That their poor little ears might bleed if they are exposed to a few thousand morons who fritter away their hard earned money screaming at millionaires they could never hope to connect with. If Massey had any fears about some cretin shouting 'gerrum out, love!' from a few yards behind then I am sure she would choose another career path. Football, the self-styled national obsession, is blinded by it's arrogance if it genuinely believes that women have no place in it.
And that's really all. Hardly an Earth-shattering return to form blog-wise but slowly, slowly. Or something. I have shamelessly used this column to set the record straight, the pity of that being that the real sexists in this office would no more read my blog than they would take their daughters to the match.
It's the day following Andy Gray's sacking from Sky Sports for sexist comments made about referee's assistant Sian Massey and toward Sky Sports presenter Charlotte Jackson. I was just in the middle of explaining to a colleague of mine that football is not the impenetrable bastion of machoism that it would like itself to be, and that women are involved in far more important and more physically demanding pursuits, when the tide turned against me once more.
As regular readers will know, my path is strewn with cow-pats from the Devil's own herd. So it is unsurprising then to note that, when the conversation turned toward the possibility of a female actually playing, rather than officiating, in a professional men's football match, I turned out to be the sexist. You see I just wasn't having it. For all it's namby-pamby awful-ness, football remains a reasonably physical game. Whether we like it or not, the woman has not been born yet who is strong, fit (in the aerobic sense of the word) and fast enough to compete alongside men on a football field.
These issues are far less relevant when it comes to officiating, hence Sian Massey was able to do an excellent job during the Wolves v Liverpool match last weekend. Yet this part of the conversation becomes but a distant memory, a myth that old people might tell their grandchildren, because someone chose the inopportune moment just after that to walk into the office. This person happens to be a University academic and a regular reader of this column. I vaguely remember her hitting me over the head with something which, looking on the bright side and given the amount of information about our conversation that she had access to, could have been something a lot heavier.
I just feel wronged by all of this. I have colleagues who think that women should not even be allowed to go and watch football because they think that somehow they don't belong. That their poor little ears might bleed if they are exposed to a few thousand morons who fritter away their hard earned money screaming at millionaires they could never hope to connect with. If Massey had any fears about some cretin shouting 'gerrum out, love!' from a few yards behind then I am sure she would choose another career path. Football, the self-styled national obsession, is blinded by it's arrogance if it genuinely believes that women have no place in it.
And that's really all. Hardly an Earth-shattering return to form blog-wise but slowly, slowly. Or something. I have shamelessly used this column to set the record straight, the pity of that being that the real sexists in this office would no more read my blog than they would take their daughters to the match.
Wednesday, 22 December 2010
The Nightmare Of Berlin
It's pretty hard knowing where to start in telling this story. Like Blackadder's Palladium stage show it starts badly, tails off a bit towards the middle and the less said about the end the better.
And yet I feel it should be documented.
We'd planned a trip to Berlin. Emma's mum and dad had invited us. They had been a number of times before to visit the Christmas markets. This didn't sound much like my sort of thing but Emma seemed keen, and I could certainly put up with a few hours shopping if it meant I got to spend my evenings in quaint European bars drinking interesting German beer.
Since we only had three days (Friday to Sunday) we needed to get out there early on Friday morning. Unfortunately, this meant that we were unable to fly from Manchester because the only flights on offer from there would have got us to Berlin a little too late. Instead we decided to fly from Heathrow, leave the car there and meet up with Emma's mum and dad who live in the altogether more Heathrow-friendly location of High Wycombe.
This left us with a four-hour drive which we decided to take on the Thursday night straight after work. There's always problems on the roads around that time but we got to the Premier Inn (when we eventually found it) for around 9.15. Whereupon we encountered our first problem. We hadn't eaten since lunchtime and were told that while the restaurant was open, it would only be open for around another half an hour. As quick as possible we dumped the bags and sat down to eat.
The service was abysmal. It seemed like forever had been and gone by the time our food arrived and even then we still had not been given our drinks which had been ordered first. In mitigation the restaurant was quite busy, but that is a situation not helped by service staff standing around talking to each other about the weather. Well, they may have been talking about the weather. I couldn't tell because none of them appeared to speak any English.
At 3.00am on Friday the alarm went off. We had to be at the airport for around 5.30 for our 7.05 flight. I was feeling groggy but still optimistic, and so it wasn't such a wrench to be out of bed at that hour. Emma's mum and dad (we shall henceforth refer to them as Susan and Roland, because those are their names) met us at the hotel and we drove on to Heathrow's long stay car park. It was here that it first dawned on me how cold this weekend was going to be. Despite my thick gloves my fingers stung as I waited in the bus shelter for the bus to take us to the terminal. Perhaps it hadn't helped that I had momentarily taken my glove off so that I could use my phone to check the cricket score on the internet.
We checked in without any fuss and went for a cup of tea. There were screens all around displaying flight information but, having been told we would be met by the gate at 6.15, this time came and went without any gate information. There was going to be a delay. All of which was unsurprising given that it had snowed in Berlin. At around 6.40 the information flashed up and we proceeded to the gate. I fended off the usual attempts by airport staff to manhandle me (what is it about my form that drives them so crazy that they feel they have to touch me, and why doesn't that work in the world outside of airports?), and was assisted without too much incident on to the plane.
Where we sat and waited. And waited. Susan rather unhelpfully began telling us a story of a friend of hers who boarded a plane recently which remained on the ground for four hours because of a delay in obtaining clearance to depart. Not wishing to hear the denouement of this sorry tale I closed my eyes and put some music on until it was time to take off. Eventually we received our clearance from Berlin and the flight began. We landed in Germany only around 90 minutes later than scheduled (what were those flight times from Manchester I wondered, but daren't ask) and I waited for more man-handlers.
Again more fending of unwelcome advances. I transferred to an aisle chair and as we got close to the exit I became a little nervous that the plane had not managed to stop at an airport terminal, but that instead a bus was waiting at the bottom of the steps to take us inside. This meant that I would be carried down the stairs by the man-handlers on the aisle chair. The same steps about which the other passengers had been warned because of the amount of ice covering them. If they were dangerous for able bodied people to walk on, what status would you attach for people carrying an overweight biff on an aisle chair? I looked upwards to the sky the whole time and hoped for the best.
It was snowing heavily. Germany was arse-achingly, ball-breakingly, finger-stingingly cold. The good news was that the bus to take us to the hotel was waiting right outside the airport terminal once we had cleared the usual immigration shenannigans. German transport links are far superior to ours. I cannot imagine being refused entrance on to a German bus because there's already a wheelchair user on board. All of their buses are fully accessible (except annoyingly the city sightseeing tour buses) and it was very easy for us to get to our hotel. The bus dropped us off right outside the Park Inn at Alexanderplatz. Despite this convenience, I couldn't help but feel a little disappointed to have travelled so far to end up in a Park Inn, given that there is one next to Tesco in St.Helens. And that one probably has tea making facilities in the rooms.
It took an age to check in. Where Germany does not differ from England is in their outright fear of disability. The lady took one look at me and panic set in. The rooms we had booked were mere double rooms, and so she spent a lifetime scrambling around to find me a wholly unnecessary disabled access room. She has no idea of the amount of non-accessible rooms I have slept in particularly on basketball trips, where shuffling to the bathroom on one's posteria is par for the course. That's bloody difficult to do after a skinful of Stella but you just get on with it. In the end they gave me both a double (which we would use) and a single which had extra disabled facilities should I need them. Since I had them available I ended up using them, but couldn't help but feel a bit grumpy about the fact that the disabled room was a single. What were they saying socially about disabled people in doing that? Like I say, not that different from England after all........
And so it was time to hit the Christmas markets. I was overwhelmingly underwhelmed, if I'm honest. The heavy snow didn't help, but trudging around from stall to stall looking at what can only be described as Christmas tat did very little for me. There didn't seem anything special about the markets. There's supposed to be an 'ambience' they say, but I couldn't feel it. All I could feel was the cold. It was around -13 which wasn't really a problem while we were moving around, but became one when we stopped at one of the stalls for a drink. The others drank Gluhwein, a kind of hot wine very popular with the locals. I didn't like the look of it, but then I'm extremely fussy with food and drink. To my mind it looked like some kind of flu remedy. I can drink Lemsip, but I tend not to do so for pleasure. Instead I sampled a local beer, the name of which I probably couldn't spell even if I could recall it. Something like Schofferhoffer, but I'd be guessing wildly. Roland informed me that it was a wheat beer, and said he was surprised that I liked it. It was good stuff, but clinging on to the icy cold glass while I drank it was beginning to make me shiver.
We took a train (yet more high quality transportation to be fair) to another Christmas market but it didn't change my view. There was more Gluhwein and more beer and so I loosened up a little. We were refused entry into the Hard Rock Cafe due to a private party which is almost unfathomable, and instead found a restaurant nearby. I was almost dancing. A warm place where I could drink local beer and eat junk food. Determined to avoid sausage I scoffed down a baconburger and a couple of Berlin Pilsners. Again this disappointed me slightly on account of the fact that I can get Pilsner at home. What I really wanted was something a little more specialised.
Day two was a sightseeing day. We took a bus down to the Reichstag, the parliament building of the original German Empire in the early 20th century, and where modern day parliament often meets. However on this day it was closed to the public. There was a large police presence and barriers all around. Susan had said that it had been open not long ago but there had been some sort of terrorism scare which forced them to close it to the general public for a while. It is still an impressive sight from the outside and certainly something for enthusiasts of architecture to go and have a look at.
So too is the Brandenburg Gate. This is the only remaining gate of a series which once signalled the entrance into Berlin. It was built as long ago as 1791 but restored at the start of the 21st century. Perhaps more interestingly, and as Roland pointed out as he gestured to a spot just further on, it is where Gary Lineker and the team based their television studio while presenting the BBC's coverage of the 2006 FIFA World Cup. Now, at around that same spot there were men dressed as border guards and, rather more cryptically, bears and even one kitted out as Darth Vader. He was quite a small man, which made him look a little more like the Space Balls version of the Dark Lord rather than anything George Lucas had in mind. He was clearly a fraud, as at one point he removed his helmet and there wasn't so much as a slight singe mark on his face and head. This was not a man who had been cast into the molten lava on Mustafar.
On route to Checkpoint Charlie we were getting very lost, and were fortunate enough to bump into a local man with at least a rudimentary grasp of English. It turned out we had reached the location of part of the former Berlin Wall, and as he pointed towards it he also informed us that we may be able to visit the Gestapo museum. All of which seemed a little 'Allo Allo' to me, and put me in mind of an otherwise awful film called Rat Race, in which in response to his daughter's request to visit the Barbie Museum, one of the characters takes her instead to the Museum of Klaus Barbie, a Nazi Captain and notorious war criminal.
"Socialism. It crazy idea ya?" said the man. You can forgive Berliners their dislike of socialism. It's only just over 20 years since their people were being shot for trying to escape into the West through Checkpoint Charlie. Close to that site there is a wall of large photographs depicting some of the people and events from that time. Their stories are truly harrowing but genuinely fascinating too. There is one shot of American and Soviet tanks facing off just yards either side of Checkpoint Charlie in 1961. Now around the actual checkpoint there are more mock border guards and it is all photo opportunities and laughter. There's even a McDonalds, into which we quickly dived for a much needed drink and to plan our next move.
The Gestapo Museum was closed. There was a foot of snow all around it in any case, and so we resolved to move on. Herr Flick would have to wait, perhaps forever. Any enthusiasm I had for Berlin was already wavering at this point. Maybe things would pick up with a visit to the Olympic Stadium. It was there that Jesse Owens defied Nazi logic on racial supremacy to win four gold medals at the 1936 Olympic Games. It was only a short train ride away, and the snowy roads around it did at least have clear pathways around and about so that I could get closer. Unfortunately, and as was becoming the theme for the day, it was closed.
Emma and I had been to Barcelona's Olympic Stadium last year and were fortunate enough to be able to view the inside, albeit from a fairly lofted position at the back of the stand. There was a souvenir shop enjoying a roaring trade. There was no such activity here. We were met only with high walls and locked gates. The only tell-tale sign that this actually was an Olympic Stadium were two towers between which hung the iconic Olympic Rings. A man jogged down the path running the entire breadth of the stadium without once looking up to admire it. There was nothing to see here.
I could compel you with more tales of Christmas markets and restaurants. I ate a salami pizza and enjoyed a few more of the local beverages but in the context of a European weekend excursion it was uneventful. So we'll leave me there to my pizza and beer and skip to Sunday.
The flight home was at 6.00pm. We still wanted to visit the Berlin Wheel. You know the drill by now. Every city seems to have one these days. You get into an enclosed carriage and are lifted around in a giant circle at vomit-inducing heights, but on the plus side you get some spectacular views of the city. After a large breakfast we made it there for about 10.45am and it was.......well.......closed. Thankfully we were told that it should be open for business by about 11.15 so we dived into a little hut for some tea and warmth. There were an awful lot of tea and warmth stops across the whole weekend, but this one was particularly welcome given the inactivity outside.
There was one carriage wide enough to allow my wheelchair to pass through but once inside I decided to jump out on to the seat. Spinning around at ludicrous heights is less comfortable in a brake-less wheelchair. Helpfully, they offer blankets inside the carriages to keep you warm. It is exceptionally cold inside, so you'd be well advised to make use of them should you ever find yourself there. Finally settled, I really can say I enjoyed the experience. There were some awesome views as advertised, and there is nothing like coming to a grinding halt at the very top of the cycle for what seems like a fortnight, but was probably no longer than about 30 seconds. We moved on again just in time before Susan began to scream, which she had promised us she would if things got a little hairy.
Shortly afterwards it started to snow once more. We made our way back to the hotel, still with around three hours to kill before it was time to leave for the airport. Emma and I managed to sneak off for some light lunch, a seriously poor cheese and tuna baguette from a cafe next to the hotel. There was a Burger King opposite which may have been a better option. Yet we hung around, for once enjoying the privacy and for another thing, there was only the chairs in the lobby to rest on. There was more room on the restaurant benches.
Now apparently you've had some snow over the weekend here in the UK. Blissfully unaware of this we reached the airport to find that our flight had been cancelled. Roland went to investigate, and reported back that there was a queue of people similarly affected heading towards the Lufthansa ticket desk. We would have to join and try to book another flight. We reached the end of the queue (some distance from the start of it) and waited. And waited. And waited. It was fully four hours before we reached sight of the ticket desk. The only crumb of comfort came when airport staff moved along the endless line with a cart dishing out free drinks. Small drinks. Cans the size of those you might get on board your flight. Thirsty or not I took them and stored them. I was going to need them.
Finally we reached the desk and were informed by the airport agent that Heathrow was closed, and that therefore there would not be an available flight there until 7.20 on Tuesday morning. While slightly inconvenienced by this I reasoned to myself that if we could guarantee being on that flight and that it would go I could cope with another couple of nights in a hotel, provided the airline was paying for it. Roland, however, could not. He wanted to find another way home, and so began the debate about where else we could fly to to then get a connection. They came up with a flight to Zurich and then a further one to London City airport. I didn't fancy the idea of two flights but foolishly did not intervene. Even the thought of being lugged on and off two flights in the most undignified manner imaginable could not stir any response from me given Roland's reluctance to wait. It was ok for me, I could quite easily get an extra day off work, but he was clearly more worried about his situation.
So I kept it shut, and we went to the airport hotel at the airline's expense. They had given us a voucher for food, but we were told that we would only be able to have whichever meal they were offering with the voucher. In the event it was a rather dry looking potatoes and turkey. I paid eight and a half Euros for a sickly cheese omelette. At 6.15 the next morning Susan phoned through to our room. Roland had been up half the night on the internet and found that there was no accessible transport from London City airport to London Heathrow, where the cars were parked. We had to go back to the airport, back to the four-hour queue, back to the desk to get our tickets changed again.
We had been in the queue for around two hours when a member of staff strolled by. She wasn't pushing a drinks cart, but instead picked us out of the queue and told us to follow her. She led us to the front of the queue. It was a miracle, freak occurence, whatever you wanted to call it. This was it. It got better, as we reached the desk and were told by the agent that the best solution would be if we were to go straight on to the plane that was waiting to leave for a temporarily re-opened Heathrow right there and then. She printed our tickets and we raced off to check-in.
There was endless security, so the 11.20 to Heathrow was going to be late, but we were going to be on it. A man-handler tapped me on the shoulder and shouted 'Board' at me. I brushed him away and pushed down the tunnell to the aircraft. Poor Emma was carrying what seemed like all my worldly goods as I was carted down the aisle to my seat. It was an indignity, but we were going home. We were sat on the plane half asleep. Half an hour or so had passed before the captain announced that he was sorry for the delay, but the aircraft had a broken tow bar. No matter, they were in the process of moving a new one into position and we would be on our way soon.
Another passage of time. It could have been half an hour, maybe more. I was still drifting in and out of consciousness, still dizzy with relief at finally being able to go home. And then it came. The captain addressed us again;
"Well ladies and gentlemen I'm afraid I have some bad news."
What? England lost at cricket? We had to stop off at a Berlin Christmas market on the way? The in-flight meal was sausage? Er......none of these........
"While we have been waiting for our new tow bar to arrive Heathrow have imposed further restrictions and are cutting flight arrivals down to 33%. Ladies and gentlemen I'm sorry to tell you that this means that we will not be able to take this flight today. In a moment we will ask you to disembark the aircraft and re-enter the terminal building."
It was like being kicked in the genitals by a Grand National winner. I felt physically sick. We were now not going home, but instead going back into the queue to get our tickets changed again. Only this time, though we didn't know it at that point, the queue had grown. The monster of this morning had quadrupled in size. The Lufthansa ticket desk is near to gate 11. The queue began just outside gate 5 where we had disembarked. This time there would be no staff member to pull us out of the queue and fast-track us to the desk, no Heathrow-bound plane waiting at the gate once we got to the desk. None of this. Just an unhelpful woman who insisted that we could not book on a flight to Heathrow but that she had to book us on something, regardless of the fact that nothing else seemed sensible in terms of access.
Staggeringly, it was a further two hours before we got away from the desk. The agent had insisted on booking us a flight to Cologne and then a connection to Heathrow for Tuesday afternoon, but then found that computer had said no. She couldn't print out the tickets because Heathrow was still closed on her system. I wanted to ask why she had suggested it then, and why she had been able to print out one ticket and not the others. It was 11.30pm. We had disembarked at 1.15pm. Even now, Emma and I were sent on to another hotel without Roland and Susan while they waited to resolve the ticket problems.
This hotel was 20 minutes away in a taxi. On arrival we were told that the restaurant would be closing in 25 minutes. We dumped the bags in reception and sat straight down. It was a buffet meal and, being the fussiest eater since Ian Brady, I couldn't find anything that I could digest. I had a go at a chicken and potatoes concotion but in truth the whole experience was making me sicker by the minute. I couldn't even bring myself to enjoy a beer, instead gulping down a couple of cokes like they were tequila slammers. When we were all together again we discussed plans for the next day and got nowhere. Should we settle for the Cologne plan and go the airport for that 2.55pm flight, or go early again and queue up in the hope of Heathrow re-opening? We went to bed still undecided.
Sleep was impossible. I woke up at regular intervals suffering from shortness of breath. No matter how much I tried I couldn't get enough air into my lungs. I was wheezing and feeling sick. At 4.30am the phone rang again. Susan. They had seen on the airport information screen downstairs that the Cologne flight had been cancelled. Our decision had been made for us. We would have to get up there and then, and go straight to the desk to change our tickets once again. This would be the fifth flight plan we would be booked on, and still we seemed no nearer to getting anywhere resembling England.
We arrived at the airport at around 5.00am. It's just an enormous circle. There's around 15 gates and the building just loops around all of them until you end up back where you started. Most likely that is in a queue. It's The Circle Of Despair. Mercifully we'd arrived before the queue got really serious, and found Roland at the check-in desk having been told that a flight to Heathrow was scheduled for 7.20am. It was full, but there would probably be cancellations. This being far from a given, Susan and I went back to the Lufthansa desk to see if we couldn't guarantee some seats by outright unfair and desperate means. It was only a half-lie, but when we again reached the desk we told them that due to my disability we were fast running out of medication and other necessities, and that if I didn't get home that day I would be in a Sticky The Stick Insect situation.
Miraculously, she didn't question it. On the contrary, she issued us with four tickets for the supposedly full 7.20 to Heathrow there and then. We later met a woman at the departure gate who told us that she'd been issued with tickets for it the previous evening, the evening when computer said no to us, but only because she had told them of her son's arthritis. Either they like seeing people suffer, or the airlines deliberately leave some seats vacant in case passengers come forward with problems of this type. The woman also told us that this was the sixth flight she had been booked on, and that if this did not leave she thought we would not get home for Christmas.
It was going to be a nervous old wait. It didn't help that we were asked to board two hours early. Apparently they do this because they then have to send a ready signal to the destination airport and await clearance. We had a time slot of 9.20am UK time, three hours later than scheduled. The captain told us that this had been brought forward to 8.55am but we still faced an interminable wait. I have never been more nervous and terrified in my life. The prospect of having another flight cancelled at that late stage again made me very ill. There was nothing to pass away the time except Susan going over worst case scenarios over and over until even Emma snapped at her. The only mild diversion was the de-icing machine they use which looks rather like a little Star Wars droid. It lights up and sprays the body and wings of the plane. It's a very clever little piece of kit.
More waiting, and more, and more. And then, wonderfully, we began to back away from the terminal. The impossibly nice stewardesses began the safety demonstration, a stage we had not reached on the previous day's aborted flight. Again they checked overhead lockers and underneath seats before finally we started to taxi towards the runway. At that moment I recalled another story from the woman with the arthritis boy, one in which they had once taken off on a flight and been re-routed to Dublin. Even if this thing got in the air we were seemingly not out of the woods.
We gathered speed as we entered the runway and the plane lifted. I forgot about Dublin and began instead thinking of London. The nerves slowly eased, though I stopped short of eating anything. Touching down in London was one of the greatest feelings of relief I've ever experienced. And this is a place I normally refer to as England's toilet. We still had a pain-in-the-arse bus ride and a four-hour drive ahead of us before we reached home, but at least at that moment we were in control again.
I've never been so pleased to see my front door. Even if I couldn't get to it until Emma had cleared the path with a shovel. Poor Emma.
And yet I feel it should be documented.
We'd planned a trip to Berlin. Emma's mum and dad had invited us. They had been a number of times before to visit the Christmas markets. This didn't sound much like my sort of thing but Emma seemed keen, and I could certainly put up with a few hours shopping if it meant I got to spend my evenings in quaint European bars drinking interesting German beer.
Since we only had three days (Friday to Sunday) we needed to get out there early on Friday morning. Unfortunately, this meant that we were unable to fly from Manchester because the only flights on offer from there would have got us to Berlin a little too late. Instead we decided to fly from Heathrow, leave the car there and meet up with Emma's mum and dad who live in the altogether more Heathrow-friendly location of High Wycombe.
This left us with a four-hour drive which we decided to take on the Thursday night straight after work. There's always problems on the roads around that time but we got to the Premier Inn (when we eventually found it) for around 9.15. Whereupon we encountered our first problem. We hadn't eaten since lunchtime and were told that while the restaurant was open, it would only be open for around another half an hour. As quick as possible we dumped the bags and sat down to eat.
The service was abysmal. It seemed like forever had been and gone by the time our food arrived and even then we still had not been given our drinks which had been ordered first. In mitigation the restaurant was quite busy, but that is a situation not helped by service staff standing around talking to each other about the weather. Well, they may have been talking about the weather. I couldn't tell because none of them appeared to speak any English.
At 3.00am on Friday the alarm went off. We had to be at the airport for around 5.30 for our 7.05 flight. I was feeling groggy but still optimistic, and so it wasn't such a wrench to be out of bed at that hour. Emma's mum and dad (we shall henceforth refer to them as Susan and Roland, because those are their names) met us at the hotel and we drove on to Heathrow's long stay car park. It was here that it first dawned on me how cold this weekend was going to be. Despite my thick gloves my fingers stung as I waited in the bus shelter for the bus to take us to the terminal. Perhaps it hadn't helped that I had momentarily taken my glove off so that I could use my phone to check the cricket score on the internet.
We checked in without any fuss and went for a cup of tea. There were screens all around displaying flight information but, having been told we would be met by the gate at 6.15, this time came and went without any gate information. There was going to be a delay. All of which was unsurprising given that it had snowed in Berlin. At around 6.40 the information flashed up and we proceeded to the gate. I fended off the usual attempts by airport staff to manhandle me (what is it about my form that drives them so crazy that they feel they have to touch me, and why doesn't that work in the world outside of airports?), and was assisted without too much incident on to the plane.
Where we sat and waited. And waited. Susan rather unhelpfully began telling us a story of a friend of hers who boarded a plane recently which remained on the ground for four hours because of a delay in obtaining clearance to depart. Not wishing to hear the denouement of this sorry tale I closed my eyes and put some music on until it was time to take off. Eventually we received our clearance from Berlin and the flight began. We landed in Germany only around 90 minutes later than scheduled (what were those flight times from Manchester I wondered, but daren't ask) and I waited for more man-handlers.
Again more fending of unwelcome advances. I transferred to an aisle chair and as we got close to the exit I became a little nervous that the plane had not managed to stop at an airport terminal, but that instead a bus was waiting at the bottom of the steps to take us inside. This meant that I would be carried down the stairs by the man-handlers on the aisle chair. The same steps about which the other passengers had been warned because of the amount of ice covering them. If they were dangerous for able bodied people to walk on, what status would you attach for people carrying an overweight biff on an aisle chair? I looked upwards to the sky the whole time and hoped for the best.
It was snowing heavily. Germany was arse-achingly, ball-breakingly, finger-stingingly cold. The good news was that the bus to take us to the hotel was waiting right outside the airport terminal once we had cleared the usual immigration shenannigans. German transport links are far superior to ours. I cannot imagine being refused entrance on to a German bus because there's already a wheelchair user on board. All of their buses are fully accessible (except annoyingly the city sightseeing tour buses) and it was very easy for us to get to our hotel. The bus dropped us off right outside the Park Inn at Alexanderplatz. Despite this convenience, I couldn't help but feel a little disappointed to have travelled so far to end up in a Park Inn, given that there is one next to Tesco in St.Helens. And that one probably has tea making facilities in the rooms.
It took an age to check in. Where Germany does not differ from England is in their outright fear of disability. The lady took one look at me and panic set in. The rooms we had booked were mere double rooms, and so she spent a lifetime scrambling around to find me a wholly unnecessary disabled access room. She has no idea of the amount of non-accessible rooms I have slept in particularly on basketball trips, where shuffling to the bathroom on one's posteria is par for the course. That's bloody difficult to do after a skinful of Stella but you just get on with it. In the end they gave me both a double (which we would use) and a single which had extra disabled facilities should I need them. Since I had them available I ended up using them, but couldn't help but feel a bit grumpy about the fact that the disabled room was a single. What were they saying socially about disabled people in doing that? Like I say, not that different from England after all........
And so it was time to hit the Christmas markets. I was overwhelmingly underwhelmed, if I'm honest. The heavy snow didn't help, but trudging around from stall to stall looking at what can only be described as Christmas tat did very little for me. There didn't seem anything special about the markets. There's supposed to be an 'ambience' they say, but I couldn't feel it. All I could feel was the cold. It was around -13 which wasn't really a problem while we were moving around, but became one when we stopped at one of the stalls for a drink. The others drank Gluhwein, a kind of hot wine very popular with the locals. I didn't like the look of it, but then I'm extremely fussy with food and drink. To my mind it looked like some kind of flu remedy. I can drink Lemsip, but I tend not to do so for pleasure. Instead I sampled a local beer, the name of which I probably couldn't spell even if I could recall it. Something like Schofferhoffer, but I'd be guessing wildly. Roland informed me that it was a wheat beer, and said he was surprised that I liked it. It was good stuff, but clinging on to the icy cold glass while I drank it was beginning to make me shiver.
We took a train (yet more high quality transportation to be fair) to another Christmas market but it didn't change my view. There was more Gluhwein and more beer and so I loosened up a little. We were refused entry into the Hard Rock Cafe due to a private party which is almost unfathomable, and instead found a restaurant nearby. I was almost dancing. A warm place where I could drink local beer and eat junk food. Determined to avoid sausage I scoffed down a baconburger and a couple of Berlin Pilsners. Again this disappointed me slightly on account of the fact that I can get Pilsner at home. What I really wanted was something a little more specialised.
Day two was a sightseeing day. We took a bus down to the Reichstag, the parliament building of the original German Empire in the early 20th century, and where modern day parliament often meets. However on this day it was closed to the public. There was a large police presence and barriers all around. Susan had said that it had been open not long ago but there had been some sort of terrorism scare which forced them to close it to the general public for a while. It is still an impressive sight from the outside and certainly something for enthusiasts of architecture to go and have a look at.
So too is the Brandenburg Gate. This is the only remaining gate of a series which once signalled the entrance into Berlin. It was built as long ago as 1791 but restored at the start of the 21st century. Perhaps more interestingly, and as Roland pointed out as he gestured to a spot just further on, it is where Gary Lineker and the team based their television studio while presenting the BBC's coverage of the 2006 FIFA World Cup. Now, at around that same spot there were men dressed as border guards and, rather more cryptically, bears and even one kitted out as Darth Vader. He was quite a small man, which made him look a little more like the Space Balls version of the Dark Lord rather than anything George Lucas had in mind. He was clearly a fraud, as at one point he removed his helmet and there wasn't so much as a slight singe mark on his face and head. This was not a man who had been cast into the molten lava on Mustafar.
On route to Checkpoint Charlie we were getting very lost, and were fortunate enough to bump into a local man with at least a rudimentary grasp of English. It turned out we had reached the location of part of the former Berlin Wall, and as he pointed towards it he also informed us that we may be able to visit the Gestapo museum. All of which seemed a little 'Allo Allo' to me, and put me in mind of an otherwise awful film called Rat Race, in which in response to his daughter's request to visit the Barbie Museum, one of the characters takes her instead to the Museum of Klaus Barbie, a Nazi Captain and notorious war criminal.
"Socialism. It crazy idea ya?" said the man. You can forgive Berliners their dislike of socialism. It's only just over 20 years since their people were being shot for trying to escape into the West through Checkpoint Charlie. Close to that site there is a wall of large photographs depicting some of the people and events from that time. Their stories are truly harrowing but genuinely fascinating too. There is one shot of American and Soviet tanks facing off just yards either side of Checkpoint Charlie in 1961. Now around the actual checkpoint there are more mock border guards and it is all photo opportunities and laughter. There's even a McDonalds, into which we quickly dived for a much needed drink and to plan our next move.
The Gestapo Museum was closed. There was a foot of snow all around it in any case, and so we resolved to move on. Herr Flick would have to wait, perhaps forever. Any enthusiasm I had for Berlin was already wavering at this point. Maybe things would pick up with a visit to the Olympic Stadium. It was there that Jesse Owens defied Nazi logic on racial supremacy to win four gold medals at the 1936 Olympic Games. It was only a short train ride away, and the snowy roads around it did at least have clear pathways around and about so that I could get closer. Unfortunately, and as was becoming the theme for the day, it was closed.
Emma and I had been to Barcelona's Olympic Stadium last year and were fortunate enough to be able to view the inside, albeit from a fairly lofted position at the back of the stand. There was a souvenir shop enjoying a roaring trade. There was no such activity here. We were met only with high walls and locked gates. The only tell-tale sign that this actually was an Olympic Stadium were two towers between which hung the iconic Olympic Rings. A man jogged down the path running the entire breadth of the stadium without once looking up to admire it. There was nothing to see here.
I could compel you with more tales of Christmas markets and restaurants. I ate a salami pizza and enjoyed a few more of the local beverages but in the context of a European weekend excursion it was uneventful. So we'll leave me there to my pizza and beer and skip to Sunday.
The flight home was at 6.00pm. We still wanted to visit the Berlin Wheel. You know the drill by now. Every city seems to have one these days. You get into an enclosed carriage and are lifted around in a giant circle at vomit-inducing heights, but on the plus side you get some spectacular views of the city. After a large breakfast we made it there for about 10.45am and it was.......well.......closed. Thankfully we were told that it should be open for business by about 11.15 so we dived into a little hut for some tea and warmth. There were an awful lot of tea and warmth stops across the whole weekend, but this one was particularly welcome given the inactivity outside.
There was one carriage wide enough to allow my wheelchair to pass through but once inside I decided to jump out on to the seat. Spinning around at ludicrous heights is less comfortable in a brake-less wheelchair. Helpfully, they offer blankets inside the carriages to keep you warm. It is exceptionally cold inside, so you'd be well advised to make use of them should you ever find yourself there. Finally settled, I really can say I enjoyed the experience. There were some awesome views as advertised, and there is nothing like coming to a grinding halt at the very top of the cycle for what seems like a fortnight, but was probably no longer than about 30 seconds. We moved on again just in time before Susan began to scream, which she had promised us she would if things got a little hairy.
Shortly afterwards it started to snow once more. We made our way back to the hotel, still with around three hours to kill before it was time to leave for the airport. Emma and I managed to sneak off for some light lunch, a seriously poor cheese and tuna baguette from a cafe next to the hotel. There was a Burger King opposite which may have been a better option. Yet we hung around, for once enjoying the privacy and for another thing, there was only the chairs in the lobby to rest on. There was more room on the restaurant benches.
Now apparently you've had some snow over the weekend here in the UK. Blissfully unaware of this we reached the airport to find that our flight had been cancelled. Roland went to investigate, and reported back that there was a queue of people similarly affected heading towards the Lufthansa ticket desk. We would have to join and try to book another flight. We reached the end of the queue (some distance from the start of it) and waited. And waited. And waited. It was fully four hours before we reached sight of the ticket desk. The only crumb of comfort came when airport staff moved along the endless line with a cart dishing out free drinks. Small drinks. Cans the size of those you might get on board your flight. Thirsty or not I took them and stored them. I was going to need them.
Finally we reached the desk and were informed by the airport agent that Heathrow was closed, and that therefore there would not be an available flight there until 7.20 on Tuesday morning. While slightly inconvenienced by this I reasoned to myself that if we could guarantee being on that flight and that it would go I could cope with another couple of nights in a hotel, provided the airline was paying for it. Roland, however, could not. He wanted to find another way home, and so began the debate about where else we could fly to to then get a connection. They came up with a flight to Zurich and then a further one to London City airport. I didn't fancy the idea of two flights but foolishly did not intervene. Even the thought of being lugged on and off two flights in the most undignified manner imaginable could not stir any response from me given Roland's reluctance to wait. It was ok for me, I could quite easily get an extra day off work, but he was clearly more worried about his situation.
So I kept it shut, and we went to the airport hotel at the airline's expense. They had given us a voucher for food, but we were told that we would only be able to have whichever meal they were offering with the voucher. In the event it was a rather dry looking potatoes and turkey. I paid eight and a half Euros for a sickly cheese omelette. At 6.15 the next morning Susan phoned through to our room. Roland had been up half the night on the internet and found that there was no accessible transport from London City airport to London Heathrow, where the cars were parked. We had to go back to the airport, back to the four-hour queue, back to the desk to get our tickets changed again.
We had been in the queue for around two hours when a member of staff strolled by. She wasn't pushing a drinks cart, but instead picked us out of the queue and told us to follow her. She led us to the front of the queue. It was a miracle, freak occurence, whatever you wanted to call it. This was it. It got better, as we reached the desk and were told by the agent that the best solution would be if we were to go straight on to the plane that was waiting to leave for a temporarily re-opened Heathrow right there and then. She printed our tickets and we raced off to check-in.
There was endless security, so the 11.20 to Heathrow was going to be late, but we were going to be on it. A man-handler tapped me on the shoulder and shouted 'Board' at me. I brushed him away and pushed down the tunnell to the aircraft. Poor Emma was carrying what seemed like all my worldly goods as I was carted down the aisle to my seat. It was an indignity, but we were going home. We were sat on the plane half asleep. Half an hour or so had passed before the captain announced that he was sorry for the delay, but the aircraft had a broken tow bar. No matter, they were in the process of moving a new one into position and we would be on our way soon.
Another passage of time. It could have been half an hour, maybe more. I was still drifting in and out of consciousness, still dizzy with relief at finally being able to go home. And then it came. The captain addressed us again;
"Well ladies and gentlemen I'm afraid I have some bad news."
What? England lost at cricket? We had to stop off at a Berlin Christmas market on the way? The in-flight meal was sausage? Er......none of these........
"While we have been waiting for our new tow bar to arrive Heathrow have imposed further restrictions and are cutting flight arrivals down to 33%. Ladies and gentlemen I'm sorry to tell you that this means that we will not be able to take this flight today. In a moment we will ask you to disembark the aircraft and re-enter the terminal building."
It was like being kicked in the genitals by a Grand National winner. I felt physically sick. We were now not going home, but instead going back into the queue to get our tickets changed again. Only this time, though we didn't know it at that point, the queue had grown. The monster of this morning had quadrupled in size. The Lufthansa ticket desk is near to gate 11. The queue began just outside gate 5 where we had disembarked. This time there would be no staff member to pull us out of the queue and fast-track us to the desk, no Heathrow-bound plane waiting at the gate once we got to the desk. None of this. Just an unhelpful woman who insisted that we could not book on a flight to Heathrow but that she had to book us on something, regardless of the fact that nothing else seemed sensible in terms of access.
Staggeringly, it was a further two hours before we got away from the desk. The agent had insisted on booking us a flight to Cologne and then a connection to Heathrow for Tuesday afternoon, but then found that computer had said no. She couldn't print out the tickets because Heathrow was still closed on her system. I wanted to ask why she had suggested it then, and why she had been able to print out one ticket and not the others. It was 11.30pm. We had disembarked at 1.15pm. Even now, Emma and I were sent on to another hotel without Roland and Susan while they waited to resolve the ticket problems.
This hotel was 20 minutes away in a taxi. On arrival we were told that the restaurant would be closing in 25 minutes. We dumped the bags in reception and sat straight down. It was a buffet meal and, being the fussiest eater since Ian Brady, I couldn't find anything that I could digest. I had a go at a chicken and potatoes concotion but in truth the whole experience was making me sicker by the minute. I couldn't even bring myself to enjoy a beer, instead gulping down a couple of cokes like they were tequila slammers. When we were all together again we discussed plans for the next day and got nowhere. Should we settle for the Cologne plan and go the airport for that 2.55pm flight, or go early again and queue up in the hope of Heathrow re-opening? We went to bed still undecided.
Sleep was impossible. I woke up at regular intervals suffering from shortness of breath. No matter how much I tried I couldn't get enough air into my lungs. I was wheezing and feeling sick. At 4.30am the phone rang again. Susan. They had seen on the airport information screen downstairs that the Cologne flight had been cancelled. Our decision had been made for us. We would have to get up there and then, and go straight to the desk to change our tickets once again. This would be the fifth flight plan we would be booked on, and still we seemed no nearer to getting anywhere resembling England.
We arrived at the airport at around 5.00am. It's just an enormous circle. There's around 15 gates and the building just loops around all of them until you end up back where you started. Most likely that is in a queue. It's The Circle Of Despair. Mercifully we'd arrived before the queue got really serious, and found Roland at the check-in desk having been told that a flight to Heathrow was scheduled for 7.20am. It was full, but there would probably be cancellations. This being far from a given, Susan and I went back to the Lufthansa desk to see if we couldn't guarantee some seats by outright unfair and desperate means. It was only a half-lie, but when we again reached the desk we told them that due to my disability we were fast running out of medication and other necessities, and that if I didn't get home that day I would be in a Sticky The Stick Insect situation.
Miraculously, she didn't question it. On the contrary, she issued us with four tickets for the supposedly full 7.20 to Heathrow there and then. We later met a woman at the departure gate who told us that she'd been issued with tickets for it the previous evening, the evening when computer said no to us, but only because she had told them of her son's arthritis. Either they like seeing people suffer, or the airlines deliberately leave some seats vacant in case passengers come forward with problems of this type. The woman also told us that this was the sixth flight she had been booked on, and that if this did not leave she thought we would not get home for Christmas.
It was going to be a nervous old wait. It didn't help that we were asked to board two hours early. Apparently they do this because they then have to send a ready signal to the destination airport and await clearance. We had a time slot of 9.20am UK time, three hours later than scheduled. The captain told us that this had been brought forward to 8.55am but we still faced an interminable wait. I have never been more nervous and terrified in my life. The prospect of having another flight cancelled at that late stage again made me very ill. There was nothing to pass away the time except Susan going over worst case scenarios over and over until even Emma snapped at her. The only mild diversion was the de-icing machine they use which looks rather like a little Star Wars droid. It lights up and sprays the body and wings of the plane. It's a very clever little piece of kit.
More waiting, and more, and more. And then, wonderfully, we began to back away from the terminal. The impossibly nice stewardesses began the safety demonstration, a stage we had not reached on the previous day's aborted flight. Again they checked overhead lockers and underneath seats before finally we started to taxi towards the runway. At that moment I recalled another story from the woman with the arthritis boy, one in which they had once taken off on a flight and been re-routed to Dublin. Even if this thing got in the air we were seemingly not out of the woods.
We gathered speed as we entered the runway and the plane lifted. I forgot about Dublin and began instead thinking of London. The nerves slowly eased, though I stopped short of eating anything. Touching down in London was one of the greatest feelings of relief I've ever experienced. And this is a place I normally refer to as England's toilet. We still had a pain-in-the-arse bus ride and a four-hour drive ahead of us before we reached home, but at least at that moment we were in control again.
I've never been so pleased to see my front door. Even if I couldn't get to it until Emma had cleared the path with a shovel. Poor Emma.
Wednesday, 15 December 2010
I've started to tweet.
Or should that be Tweet, with a capital 'T'?
I've always been pretty resistant to technological advancements. I don't like change. I'd no more have a Blackberry or an i-pad in my house than I would have a student with a very heavy axe to grind. The very idea of Kindles instead of real books makes me vomit, and I pray for the day when Hollywood studios finally stop trying to make everything 3-D.
But Twitter is different. Either that or I'm a hypocrite. Either way, it is because of this very blog that I thought Twitter might be a good idea. I already post the link on Facebook, and I thought anything that might help give it further exposure must be considered A Good Thing.
I struggled at first. I'd set up an account a year ago, so I didn't have any trouble in that area. My problems started when I realised I had nothing to say, or 'Tweet' and nobody to really say or 'Tweet' it to. So I posted the link to my blog. And nothing happened. Well it wouldn't. That was mostly because; a) I had nobody to read it and b) I hadn't written http:// in front of it. I'd just typed the address, because I'm just that technologically retarded.
So I thought I had better get myself some people to follow. After a little advice from some friends I started to build up a list of people to follow. They're mostly sports people, sports teams, sports organistions and the like. Or fit birds. Joss Stone is a given, but I'm also following Sarah-Jane Mee and Georgie Thompson (though even the latter two are connected with sports). Karen Gillan from Doctor Who has so far eluded my clutches but I fear for her sake that this is a temporary state of affairs.
Of course the thought has occured to me that 'Tweeting' is a form of stalking. Why do I need to know that Joss is back in Devon for Christmas, or that Sarah-Jane was interviewing Duran Duran on Sunrise this morning? I don't, but the way I see it if they didn't want me to know all this they wouldn't have plastered it all over Twitter now would they? I have discovered that very little is private on Twitter, so if you are going to start Tweeting my advice to you would be to keep your innermost thoughts out of it. You could start a blog for that. Just don't tell anyone about it and don't, under any circumstances, post the link on Facebook if you don't want anyone to know that you got stuck on your driveway or fell out of your chair in your local park.
You can send people personal messages, but only if they are 'following' you. At this point the rules and conventions of 'following' and '@usernaming' get a little complex and I have to admit that I am still learning as I go. To date I have offered only 9 'Tweets' because I'm still not sure who is reading what and what it all means. If you send someone a direct messsage it means that only they and you can see it, whereas if you write @username before your 'Tweet' then whoever follows the person you are 'replying' to will be able to see it also. I think. One of my eight or so readers will correct me if I'm wrong I hope. Get it? No, me neither.
What I do know is that some people must spend an awful lot of time using Twitter, whether it be on their pc's or by mobile phone. There are certain users that I have inadvertently ended up 'following' who seem to post something new every few minutes. Disappointingly, it's often just a link to a story they have blatantly lifted from somewhere else. As if they are spending their day reading the news on the internet and passing on their findings to you. As helpful as this may or may not be, I can't shake the feeling that Twitter lacks a bit of creativity at times. I don't think it helps users that they are limited to 140 characters per 'Tweet', and so it is crucial to be succinct. The trouble is, if you're being succinct the chances are you are not being altogether insightful.
Where it does entertain is when some celebrity with too much time on his or her hands decides to impart their wisdom on us. Sir Ian Botham has been offering odds on who might score the most runs in England's first innings in the Third Ashes Test due to start in Perth tonight, while James Anderson and Stuart Broad are locked in a FIFA 11 tussle as they try to while away the hours before the start of the match, whereupon England will win the toss and bat and they'll be looking for ways to while away the hours. Broad is injured anyway and will not play, and I didn't need Twitter to find that out.
Elsewhere NFL superstar Larry Fitzgerald is telling me not to worry about failing, but instead to worry about not trying (as if I haven't got enough to worry about!) and Sunderland striker Darren Bent is 'rocking the Air yeezy Net today'. No, I don't know what that means either but you can't help but be strangely fascinated by the mad meanderings of a one-time England centre-forward.
Well, I can't. If any of this sounds like your sort of thing, or even if you are just a completely nosey bastard like myself, follow me @Stephen9021.
Or should that be Tweet, with a capital 'T'?
I've always been pretty resistant to technological advancements. I don't like change. I'd no more have a Blackberry or an i-pad in my house than I would have a student with a very heavy axe to grind. The very idea of Kindles instead of real books makes me vomit, and I pray for the day when Hollywood studios finally stop trying to make everything 3-D.
But Twitter is different. Either that or I'm a hypocrite. Either way, it is because of this very blog that I thought Twitter might be a good idea. I already post the link on Facebook, and I thought anything that might help give it further exposure must be considered A Good Thing.
I struggled at first. I'd set up an account a year ago, so I didn't have any trouble in that area. My problems started when I realised I had nothing to say, or 'Tweet' and nobody to really say or 'Tweet' it to. So I posted the link to my blog. And nothing happened. Well it wouldn't. That was mostly because; a) I had nobody to read it and b) I hadn't written http:// in front of it. I'd just typed the address, because I'm just that technologically retarded.
So I thought I had better get myself some people to follow. After a little advice from some friends I started to build up a list of people to follow. They're mostly sports people, sports teams, sports organistions and the like. Or fit birds. Joss Stone is a given, but I'm also following Sarah-Jane Mee and Georgie Thompson (though even the latter two are connected with sports). Karen Gillan from Doctor Who has so far eluded my clutches but I fear for her sake that this is a temporary state of affairs.
Of course the thought has occured to me that 'Tweeting' is a form of stalking. Why do I need to know that Joss is back in Devon for Christmas, or that Sarah-Jane was interviewing Duran Duran on Sunrise this morning? I don't, but the way I see it if they didn't want me to know all this they wouldn't have plastered it all over Twitter now would they? I have discovered that very little is private on Twitter, so if you are going to start Tweeting my advice to you would be to keep your innermost thoughts out of it. You could start a blog for that. Just don't tell anyone about it and don't, under any circumstances, post the link on Facebook if you don't want anyone to know that you got stuck on your driveway or fell out of your chair in your local park.
You can send people personal messages, but only if they are 'following' you. At this point the rules and conventions of 'following' and '@usernaming' get a little complex and I have to admit that I am still learning as I go. To date I have offered only 9 'Tweets' because I'm still not sure who is reading what and what it all means. If you send someone a direct messsage it means that only they and you can see it, whereas if you write @username before your 'Tweet' then whoever follows the person you are 'replying' to will be able to see it also. I think. One of my eight or so readers will correct me if I'm wrong I hope. Get it? No, me neither.
What I do know is that some people must spend an awful lot of time using Twitter, whether it be on their pc's or by mobile phone. There are certain users that I have inadvertently ended up 'following' who seem to post something new every few minutes. Disappointingly, it's often just a link to a story they have blatantly lifted from somewhere else. As if they are spending their day reading the news on the internet and passing on their findings to you. As helpful as this may or may not be, I can't shake the feeling that Twitter lacks a bit of creativity at times. I don't think it helps users that they are limited to 140 characters per 'Tweet', and so it is crucial to be succinct. The trouble is, if you're being succinct the chances are you are not being altogether insightful.
Where it does entertain is when some celebrity with too much time on his or her hands decides to impart their wisdom on us. Sir Ian Botham has been offering odds on who might score the most runs in England's first innings in the Third Ashes Test due to start in Perth tonight, while James Anderson and Stuart Broad are locked in a FIFA 11 tussle as they try to while away the hours before the start of the match, whereupon England will win the toss and bat and they'll be looking for ways to while away the hours. Broad is injured anyway and will not play, and I didn't need Twitter to find that out.
Elsewhere NFL superstar Larry Fitzgerald is telling me not to worry about failing, but instead to worry about not trying (as if I haven't got enough to worry about!) and Sunderland striker Darren Bent is 'rocking the Air yeezy Net today'. No, I don't know what that means either but you can't help but be strangely fascinated by the mad meanderings of a one-time England centre-forward.
Well, I can't. If any of this sounds like your sort of thing, or even if you are just a completely nosey bastard like myself, follow me @Stephen9021.
Wednesday, 8 December 2010
Still Dancing On Ice
Emma's car is in the garage.
A light keeps coming on. There's a dizzying array of lights that keep coming on. We've spent hundreds on putting out lights. This one is a fetching yellow light in the shape of a car engine. I've never been interested in cars so I don't have a clue what it means, which makes me about as knowledgable as Emma on the subject.
All of which illumination ignorance means that we have to go to work on the train. What is more, we have to get to the train station under own steam. The first part of this was more straightforward than I had feared. Inexplicably, my next door neighbour has took it upon herself to grit my driveway. Perhaps she saw my farcical antics on Monday night (see blog below - Coffin Dodging) and felt sorry for me. Whatever the reason, I should like to thank her wholeheartedly, which is just hard luck because there is no way she is reading this.
So Emma and I are on our way to the train station and we get to the park. The quickest way to the station is to cut through the park, otherwise it is quite a trek all the way around and up the hilly main road. There is a slope leading into the park which, not unexpectedly given recent conditions, is covered with thick ice. Laziness took over at this point. I just couldn't face the long way round at 7.45 in the morning in temperatures that polar bears find a little fresh. In addition, I feared missing the 8.01 train and having to wait another half hour for the next one in those same freezing conditions.
So I went for it;
'Stephen, please don't go down there, you will fall.' Emma said, not unreasonably;
"I'll be fine." I said, unreasonably.
I knew I wouldn't be able to do it on all four wheels so I tipped my chair backwards on to two. At first I felt fully in control and it wasn't until about half way down the slope that things began to change. Suddenly my wheels were no longer gripping and I found myself wheel-spinning dangerously. I was convinced that at that rate I would fall backwards which would have almost certainly led to my hitting my head on the ice and a possible concussion. So I put my front wheels down.
As soon as I did the chair took on a life of it's own. Most people think it has a life of it's own but that's another, far darker and grumpier blog that we just don't have time for. I started to slide down the slope with Usain-Bolt-like speed. There was a point where I thought everything would turn out fine, when as I approached a small post at ludicrous speed I hit upon the idea of grabbing it to stop myself. The plan was to throw an arm around it and use it to turn the chair in the opposite direction. I put my arm out, but just as I did I hit what must have been either a crack in the surface or a pot-hole of some description........
I was flung head-first towards the cold stuff. I put my arms out to stop myself and crashed to the floor with a sickening thud. Todd Carty's ice-skating exploits sprung to mind as I smashed into the rock hard ice beneath me. My hands are scratched and cut and my knees are still sore from the impact. It took me some time to get up off the floor and when I did I had still to negotiate the task of getting back into the chair. I couldn't put my hand down on the floor because the ice was just that cold, so I had nothing to steady myself as I pushed myself up towards my seat. Eventually (and with a bit of help from Emma), I managed to get hold of my chair frame and hoist myself back into position.
Hands and knees still stinging, we made it to the station on time to catch the train at least. Emma has just emailed me to say that the car will be ready today so there should be no repeat of this slippery chicanery tomorrow.
Unless another bloody light comes on..........
A light keeps coming on. There's a dizzying array of lights that keep coming on. We've spent hundreds on putting out lights. This one is a fetching yellow light in the shape of a car engine. I've never been interested in cars so I don't have a clue what it means, which makes me about as knowledgable as Emma on the subject.
All of which illumination ignorance means that we have to go to work on the train. What is more, we have to get to the train station under own steam. The first part of this was more straightforward than I had feared. Inexplicably, my next door neighbour has took it upon herself to grit my driveway. Perhaps she saw my farcical antics on Monday night (see blog below - Coffin Dodging) and felt sorry for me. Whatever the reason, I should like to thank her wholeheartedly, which is just hard luck because there is no way she is reading this.
So Emma and I are on our way to the train station and we get to the park. The quickest way to the station is to cut through the park, otherwise it is quite a trek all the way around and up the hilly main road. There is a slope leading into the park which, not unexpectedly given recent conditions, is covered with thick ice. Laziness took over at this point. I just couldn't face the long way round at 7.45 in the morning in temperatures that polar bears find a little fresh. In addition, I feared missing the 8.01 train and having to wait another half hour for the next one in those same freezing conditions.
So I went for it;
'Stephen, please don't go down there, you will fall.' Emma said, not unreasonably;
"I'll be fine." I said, unreasonably.
I knew I wouldn't be able to do it on all four wheels so I tipped my chair backwards on to two. At first I felt fully in control and it wasn't until about half way down the slope that things began to change. Suddenly my wheels were no longer gripping and I found myself wheel-spinning dangerously. I was convinced that at that rate I would fall backwards which would have almost certainly led to my hitting my head on the ice and a possible concussion. So I put my front wheels down.
As soon as I did the chair took on a life of it's own. Most people think it has a life of it's own but that's another, far darker and grumpier blog that we just don't have time for. I started to slide down the slope with Usain-Bolt-like speed. There was a point where I thought everything would turn out fine, when as I approached a small post at ludicrous speed I hit upon the idea of grabbing it to stop myself. The plan was to throw an arm around it and use it to turn the chair in the opposite direction. I put my arm out, but just as I did I hit what must have been either a crack in the surface or a pot-hole of some description........
I was flung head-first towards the cold stuff. I put my arms out to stop myself and crashed to the floor with a sickening thud. Todd Carty's ice-skating exploits sprung to mind as I smashed into the rock hard ice beneath me. My hands are scratched and cut and my knees are still sore from the impact. It took me some time to get up off the floor and when I did I had still to negotiate the task of getting back into the chair. I couldn't put my hand down on the floor because the ice was just that cold, so I had nothing to steady myself as I pushed myself up towards my seat. Eventually (and with a bit of help from Emma), I managed to get hold of my chair frame and hoist myself back into position.
Hands and knees still stinging, we made it to the station on time to catch the train at least. Emma has just emailed me to say that the car will be ready today so there should be no repeat of this slippery chicanery tomorrow.
Unless another bloody light comes on..........
Tuesday, 7 December 2010
Coffin Dodging
Are There Many Left?
At the weekend I went out with some old friends from school. You wouldn't call it a reunion. These are people I keep in touch with regularly via the gift of Facebook, or who I see socially on a fairly regular basis. Nevertheless it was exclusive in the sense that I only invited people who had that particular school in common, which meant they all happened to be disabled people.
I was relaying this tale to my taxi driver on the way;
"Where is it tonight?" he'd asked. He and I are quite familiar, given the number of times he has rescued me from a town centre gutter at 3.00 on a Sunday morning;
So I explained where I was going and who with;
"Are there many left?" he asked.
I had to ask him to repeat that.
"Are there many left of all them disabled people?" he said, astoundingly.
Now, it's fair to say that I have tragically lost more than one or two friends down the years. It's fairer still to say that their passing might have had quite a lot to do with their disability. However, the implication seemed to be that death is a minor inconvenience, and fair game for polite conversation in the way that one might start a discussion about the snow or last night's telly.
Worse was to come, when he went on to question me about my own life expectancy;
"How long do they reckon you'll live, then?" he asked.
I was going out drinking so the thought crossed my mind that if I'd made it to 8.00 the following morning it would be something of a triumph, but I didn't tell him this. Instead I told him about how my kidney specialist once told me that there was no reason why a man with Spina Bifida shouldn't live until 'well into his 60's these days'. He seemed relieved by this, almost as if he were the one affronted by all of this death. Why should he have to put up with picking up passengers whose friends won't stop bloody dying? He only came out to make a few quid!!
We arrived at our destination just in time to stop his own life expectancy from being greatly reduced......
On Thin Ice
Alcohol is not the theme here but again I was out with some friends yesterday. We went for our office Christmas lunch. It wasn't a silly one, so I left Liverpool at about 6.00pm and headed to my local to watch Liverpool v Aston Villa on Sky. A few more beers wouldn't hurt an already tortured mind, I decided, and it helped that Liverpool actually managed to play well and win for once.
The trouble started when I went home. As you will have noticed it has been pretty chilly in recent days. The snow of last week has been replaced by great big thick slabs of ice which pepper the pavements, turning them into mini death traps. There's a narrow, unlit path which leads diagonally towards the main road past the doctor's surgery close to where I live, and it was here that I first discovered that getting home might not be so straightfoward. I slid on a patch of ice half the size of Brazil, hit a crack in the pavement and tipped slightly forwards. Fortunately, four wheels returned to the ground before I ended up in the bushes, but I had been warned.
Five or so minutes later I approached my house. I was cold and tired from my excesses and so quite keen to get inside, make a brew and go to bed. I approached the pavement outside my house fully expecting to mount it with the usual ease, but had reckoned without the ice. My wheels stopped spinning mid-ascent which sent my chair veering to the right, back down the ramped part of the kerb and into the middle of the road. It was going to need a bigger run-up. Luckily I live in a quiet road where traffic is slow, especially at 10.00 at night. This meant that I could cross the road towards the house opposite, and take a full run (wheel?) up to get enough momentum to conquer the troublesome pavement ramp.
Mission accomplished. Or so I thought. There is a large ramp leading towards my house. It is meant to be a driveway for the car, but Emma never uses it as such. It isn't very wide so the car would probably block me from getting to the main entrance located at the side of the house. There isn't the same room for a run-up so I just had to try and make do. It wasn't happening. I started to push up the ramp and succeeded only in pulling off more wheel-spins. Using what passes for my initiative I grabbed hold of the wall which runs between the front garden and the driveway. It was excruciatingly cold. It reminded me of the mock iceberg that can be found at the Titanic-themed museum on International Drive in Florida. They get you to put your hand on it and try to keep it there for 10 seconds, which gives you some idea of how cold it would have been in the Atlantic that night. It's much more difficult to last than it sounds, and if memory serves me Emma didn't last the full 10 seconds. Which is usually my domain.
I digress. The wall was freezing my hand rapidly but I knew that it was a case of either trying to pull myself up by that, or letting go and sliding all the way back down the driveway and into the road. Sliding backwards down the driveway didn't seem the safest option so I hung on in great discomfort. I was stuck. Horribly and hopelessly stuck. And not even particularly drunk. Time for more initiative, so I took out my mobile phone and rang Emma, who to this point had been sat in the house blissfully unaware of my presence and it's dramatic struggle. Trying not to laugh, she dutifully came out of the house and walked down the path. Slipping everywhere herself, she had to physically push me up the driveway and on to the ramp outside the front door.
All of which is mortifyingly embarrassing, and set me wondering what would have happened if I had been single. Many of my disabled friends live alone. Who is going to rescue them from their driveways if they are ever stupid enough to venture out to watch a mediocre football team in arctic conditions? These are the sorts of things keeping me awake at night.
Luckily, there aren't that many of them left.
At the weekend I went out with some old friends from school. You wouldn't call it a reunion. These are people I keep in touch with regularly via the gift of Facebook, or who I see socially on a fairly regular basis. Nevertheless it was exclusive in the sense that I only invited people who had that particular school in common, which meant they all happened to be disabled people.
I was relaying this tale to my taxi driver on the way;
"Where is it tonight?" he'd asked. He and I are quite familiar, given the number of times he has rescued me from a town centre gutter at 3.00 on a Sunday morning;
So I explained where I was going and who with;
"Are there many left?" he asked.
I had to ask him to repeat that.
"Are there many left of all them disabled people?" he said, astoundingly.
Now, it's fair to say that I have tragically lost more than one or two friends down the years. It's fairer still to say that their passing might have had quite a lot to do with their disability. However, the implication seemed to be that death is a minor inconvenience, and fair game for polite conversation in the way that one might start a discussion about the snow or last night's telly.
Worse was to come, when he went on to question me about my own life expectancy;
"How long do they reckon you'll live, then?" he asked.
I was going out drinking so the thought crossed my mind that if I'd made it to 8.00 the following morning it would be something of a triumph, but I didn't tell him this. Instead I told him about how my kidney specialist once told me that there was no reason why a man with Spina Bifida shouldn't live until 'well into his 60's these days'. He seemed relieved by this, almost as if he were the one affronted by all of this death. Why should he have to put up with picking up passengers whose friends won't stop bloody dying? He only came out to make a few quid!!
We arrived at our destination just in time to stop his own life expectancy from being greatly reduced......
On Thin Ice
Alcohol is not the theme here but again I was out with some friends yesterday. We went for our office Christmas lunch. It wasn't a silly one, so I left Liverpool at about 6.00pm and headed to my local to watch Liverpool v Aston Villa on Sky. A few more beers wouldn't hurt an already tortured mind, I decided, and it helped that Liverpool actually managed to play well and win for once.
The trouble started when I went home. As you will have noticed it has been pretty chilly in recent days. The snow of last week has been replaced by great big thick slabs of ice which pepper the pavements, turning them into mini death traps. There's a narrow, unlit path which leads diagonally towards the main road past the doctor's surgery close to where I live, and it was here that I first discovered that getting home might not be so straightfoward. I slid on a patch of ice half the size of Brazil, hit a crack in the pavement and tipped slightly forwards. Fortunately, four wheels returned to the ground before I ended up in the bushes, but I had been warned.
Five or so minutes later I approached my house. I was cold and tired from my excesses and so quite keen to get inside, make a brew and go to bed. I approached the pavement outside my house fully expecting to mount it with the usual ease, but had reckoned without the ice. My wheels stopped spinning mid-ascent which sent my chair veering to the right, back down the ramped part of the kerb and into the middle of the road. It was going to need a bigger run-up. Luckily I live in a quiet road where traffic is slow, especially at 10.00 at night. This meant that I could cross the road towards the house opposite, and take a full run (wheel?) up to get enough momentum to conquer the troublesome pavement ramp.
Mission accomplished. Or so I thought. There is a large ramp leading towards my house. It is meant to be a driveway for the car, but Emma never uses it as such. It isn't very wide so the car would probably block me from getting to the main entrance located at the side of the house. There isn't the same room for a run-up so I just had to try and make do. It wasn't happening. I started to push up the ramp and succeeded only in pulling off more wheel-spins. Using what passes for my initiative I grabbed hold of the wall which runs between the front garden and the driveway. It was excruciatingly cold. It reminded me of the mock iceberg that can be found at the Titanic-themed museum on International Drive in Florida. They get you to put your hand on it and try to keep it there for 10 seconds, which gives you some idea of how cold it would have been in the Atlantic that night. It's much more difficult to last than it sounds, and if memory serves me Emma didn't last the full 10 seconds. Which is usually my domain.
I digress. The wall was freezing my hand rapidly but I knew that it was a case of either trying to pull myself up by that, or letting go and sliding all the way back down the driveway and into the road. Sliding backwards down the driveway didn't seem the safest option so I hung on in great discomfort. I was stuck. Horribly and hopelessly stuck. And not even particularly drunk. Time for more initiative, so I took out my mobile phone and rang Emma, who to this point had been sat in the house blissfully unaware of my presence and it's dramatic struggle. Trying not to laugh, she dutifully came out of the house and walked down the path. Slipping everywhere herself, she had to physically push me up the driveway and on to the ramp outside the front door.
All of which is mortifyingly embarrassing, and set me wondering what would have happened if I had been single. Many of my disabled friends live alone. Who is going to rescue them from their driveways if they are ever stupid enough to venture out to watch a mediocre football team in arctic conditions? These are the sorts of things keeping me awake at night.
Luckily, there aren't that many of them left.
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