Merry christmas to you all!
Good day faithful reader, and a very Merry Christmas to you all! I hope that you've all had an absolutely wonderful day with your family and friends. As for myself, the day has nearly concluded, and although it was rather sad not to be able to spend probably my favourite day of the year away from my family, the day was quite enjoyable.
One thing that I can say about it is that it started a lot earlier than I ideally would have liked! My parents/brother called at just after 8am, which would normally be a quite respectable time were it not for the fact that I had to work until 1:30am the previous night. Since I was then fully awake I had a nice lesiurely breakfast of scrambled eggs, cereal, coffee and juice. After this came the painful part of the day where I was required to work for a couple of hours, however the time went past very quickly thanks to the fact that there were so many people!
Even though I don't often give it the credit it deserves, I have to say that I come from an unbelievably good family (including aunts, uncles, cousins, grand parents), and I wouldn't trade them for anything. I'm sure that this gives me a somewhat skewed view of the world, however I really wonder about the lives of some of the clientel of the world famous Blue Anchor Pub when they choose to spend the greater portion of the day at the pub rather than with their loved ones.
Of course I spent the day at the pub also, however I can assure you that this was not by choice, and it was with the closest thing that I have to loved ones at the moment. After work we were treated to a rather nice lunch, with of course as much to drink as we liked of pretty much whatever we wanted. This was followed up with many games of pool, several failed attempts to play cards and more drinks.
Thats brings us to now, just before it's time to go to bed. So I shall now sign off, cut myself one more slice of the delicious Christmas cake that my Nick and Ed (my brother and his girlfriend) sent me and enjoy one more coffee before I go to bed and once again begin the count down to Christmas.
Best wishes to you all!
Itchy feet?
Good day faithful readers. Well, I've been over here in London for nearly two months now, so I've decided that it must certainly be time for me to go on holidays! I've had my holiday leave approved by the powers that be here at the world famous Blue Anchor Pub, so from 23 to 29Jan2006 I shall be touring around France and Spain!
To start with I'm going to be headed down to the village of Mielan, which is about 2hours SW of Toulouse. It's a fantastic little village in the foothills of the Pyrenees, an area in which you could easily spend weeks just touring around exploring and taking it easy. While I'm there I'll be staying in a beautiful cottage owned by Osborne House European Cottages (see the link on the side of the page), a very reputable company! Did I mention that I am a part owner of said company? You can't blame me for a little bit of free advertising can you?
During my stay there I'm going to making sure that some work that is supposed to be happening on the house during January actually happens. I also hope that I'll have a chance to meet a French girl that I have been corresponding with (in French) since I've been here. She attends university in Tarbes, but lives in a village only about 15-20km from Mielan and apparently is a very nice person as she took pity on my poor old mother when she was searching for the train station and showed her the way.
After Mielan I'm going to be going to Madrid (although how exactly I cover the distance is still to be decided) to see one of my best friends from when I was in Paris last year. Being a native Madrid-ian she has promised to show me all of the best places in town, so hopefully I'll get to see some the not so touristy stuff that I didn't see when I when I dropped by last year. Despite what seems to be popular opinion, I actually prefer Madrid to Barcelona. Barcelona has all the Gaudi stuff, which is excellent (particularly the Sagrada Familia), but Madrid seems to have more history to it and to me has more of a Spanish character.
There was an young australian who lived in a s**thole
Good day faithful readers. As part of my employment arrangement with the world famous Blue Anchor Pub, I am supplied with accommodation free of charge. The accommodation in question is about 30m from the pub and used to belong to the gentleman who owns the pub.
Now I'm not one to look a gift horse in the mouth, but this place seems to be steadily falling down around my ears! A large part of the reason for this would be the fact that it has been occupied for several years at least by people who, like myself, are only here for a couple of months, and unlike myself, don't seem to mind if they live in squalor. When I first arrived there was dirt all over the floor, dishes piled high and general disgustingness all around. Through the effort of myself and one other and through the departure of several key mess contributors the place has improved somewhat, but you can only do so much.
There are also things wrong with the house that are just due to lack of maintenance. For a couple of weeks now we've been living with intermittent heating/hot water. Personally I haven't had a problem with the heating, although the females in the house seem to start complaining as soon as the temperature inside drops below 30C. The real problem is the hot water, which seems to turn itself on and off as it pleases, which is great fun when you're standing in the bathroom in the morning shivering while you try to detect the faintest increase in temperature which may let you know if you're going to be having a shower that morning. Thankfully, if the hot water does decide not to work we're able to use the showers in the hotel rooms, so don't think that we're all just running around stinking.
It may be part of the hot water problem, I'm not sure, but this morning we discovered water running down the wall underneath the bathroom (which is on the first floor). It was also running down the outside of the house, which resulted in some rather spectacular icicles hanging off our verandah (I'll attach photos when I get around to moving them off my camera). Anyways, after weeks of complaining to management we're supposed to have plumber coming in the next couple of days to try and sort the numerous problems out. Lets just hope that bath doesn't decide to go plummeting through the floor with me in it before he has time to visit!
There's nothing so lonesome, morbid or drear than to stand at the bar of a pub with... carrot sticks!
Good day faithful readers. Today I'm going to conduct a little market research. One of the benefits of working at the world famous Blue Anchor Pub is that we regularly have drinks bought for us by the customers, we can enjoy as much softdrink as we like and have anything off the menu free of charge. As good as this sounds, it isn't exactly good for the waistline (I'm not saying I'm putting on weight either in case you were wondering. I do have a little self control, but mostly I just have to do lots of exercise).
Anyway, I'm deviating. I was discussing this with one of my fellow barstaff the other day, and in particular how we continually have to wander off to the supermarket to buy fruit (which shall be the topic of a whole other post when I get around to it) in order to ward of scurvey. This conversation got me thinking. What if I were to open up a bar for the health conscious? Instead of peanuts and chips there would be carrot sticks and fruit platters. Instead of smoke there would be highly filtered air (and maybe even oxygen tanks!). We'd have 'healthy' beer, whatever the hell that is... maybe organic, maybe US type 'light' beers that are low in calories rather than low in alcohol.
So being the intelligent lot that you are faithful readers, what do you think? Would there be a market for such a pub? Are there people out there who long to go to a pub but are held back by fears for their health? Or perhaps the whole idea is ridiculous and even healthy people like to go to pubs because it is their chance to be a little naughty.
Cold christmas... what's all that about?
Good day faithful reader. Last year when I was when I was in Europe I made it to 21Dec, but this year I'm going to make all the way to 25Dec and a winter Christmas! I don't know exactly what it is, but a winter Christmas seems much nicer than a summer Christmas. It may have something to do with the fact that the same Christmas themes are used in Australia as those that they use in the northern hemisphere, and there's just something wrong with singing songs about snowmen while people are wandering around in shorts and thongs in 40 degree heat!
Of course there are many benefits to a summer Christmas, not the least of which is that you can enjoy Christmas lunch outside in the sun. However, you don't get to enjoy things like going iceskating! I visited London for three days in Decemeber last year and discovered that they set up iceskating rinks at various places around the city, one of which is at Sommerset House. They have a big Christmas tree set up with a cafe/restaurant, and basically it is really nice, so this year I decided to take the opportunity and go along. In case you were wondering who that gorgeous person in the photo is, it's me... but standing alongside me is Fiona, a fellow Australian who used to work at the world famous Blue Anchor Pub, who I managed to convince to come along with me. After all, I needed someone to laugh at all my antics!
Some of you may be wondering, "does he actually even know how to skate"? Well the answer to that is that I do thank you very much! Since the last time that I skated was literally about 12months ago when I went skating on the Eiffel Tower, I was a bit rusty, but it only took 15mins or so until I was back to my wobbly best. I was quite proud that I managed to go the full hour without falling over once! Well, that's not entirely true, I did land on my butt once. But I swear that I did it on purpose, because beforehand I was assuring Fiona that she would get a good laugh at seeing me go for a tumble, and I couldn't disappoint!
We went skating during the daylight hours, however they also hold night time sessions, which are very popular. During these sessions they have torches lit up around the edges of the rink and the building surrounding the rink (it's set up in what is basically the court yard of Sommerset House) is all illuminated, so it is very attractive.
Advice to those under the weather
Good day faithful readers. Today I have a little advice for you if you happen to be suffering from the flu, cold or a similar type of ailment. Are you ready? STAY AT HOME AND GET BETTER!!! Don't try and be a hero and "tough it out". If you go to work you'll take longer to recover, you won't be terribly productive while you are there anyway and you'll most likely pass on whatever you're suffering from to whomever you come in contact with.
It used to really annoy me when people did this in my previous job in Australia, and it seems that it is not something that was confined to that particular work place, because the manager at the world famous Blue Anchor Pub also seems to think that it is admirable to come into work when you've hardly got the energy to stand up. As a consequence half of the staff also developed the same flu, myself included. Me, who never gets sick! Thankfully I don't seemed to have suffered anywhere near as badly as the others, who seemed to think they were knocking on Death's door. My symptoms seem to have merely been feelings of being run down and a big glob of phlegm (such a phonetically nice word to describe such a vile substance) on my lungs. I was suffering a somewhat yesterday, which probably wasn't helped by going on a 14km run, but today I'm feel quite a lot better.
On the road to paris
Anyone who knows me for very long will know that I take my sports of choice very seriously. Generally speaking I refer to myself as a cyclist, however the over the past 12 months my beloved bike has been gathering cobwebs (metaphorically of course, I would never let such a thing really happen) while I've been pounding the pavement. The greater part of the last Australian winter was spent training for my first marathon in Adelaide, which I successfully completed in just over 4 hours. The time was a little slower than I would have liked, but considering my training program was somewhat interupted when I developed shinsplints, it wasn't too bad.
Thankfully now I'm am completely injury free and I'm in training for the Paris marathon on 09Apr2006. Thankfully for this event I'm starting from a somewhat stronger base than when I began training for Adelaide, when the furtherest that I could run was 5km. I did get something of a shock the other day when I suddenly realised that I should already be a week into my training program. Somehow I managed to convince myself that if I started training at the start of January I would have 4 months of preparation... as you can tell, I hadn't thought about it for too long! Anyway, it didn't really matter because my base fitness is already quite good and the first few weeks are easy.
Obviously breathing in smoke all day isn't really doing me a lot of good, but one good thing about working at a pub is that I usually don't have to start until well into the day, which means that I can go running in the daylight. And let me tell you, when it is well below 0 degrees you don't really need to add darkness to the equation when you're trying to drag yourself out of bed! The one time that I did have to get up really early to go for a run since I've been here resulted in the sweat in my hair freezing!
Living in Byfleet doesn't quite have the same excitement to it as would living in central London (it's only 50mins by train to Waterloo), but it does have its benefits. One of these is that it is located right alongside a canal system that was apparently constructed sometime before WWI in order to promote trade around the area. It wasn't a success, but it has now made for a very attractive place to go running/walking. People also seem to cruise up and down in their house boats (see picture), which I would imagine would be quite a relaxing activity on a nice summer's day.
The canal system goes in several directions. If you keep following it down stream you'll eventually run into the Thames. If you take one of the forks you'll make your way to Woking (home of the Mclaren F1 team - which I haven't managed to locate just yet). If you head up stream you seem to end up running through muddy fields... at which point the whole thing became far less attractive and I turned around!
If you notice any periods on here when I haven't written for a while, it's undoubtedly because I'm trying to run a huge number of kilometers and I'm exhausted!
Every blog begins with one post...
Good day faithful (or at least hopefully soon to be faithful) readers, and welcome to my blog. For several years now I've been keeping a diary of my activities and just generally anything that happens to be floating around in my head at the time. As well as keeping a nice record of everything that I've done, it has always acted as a sort of therapy in getting all those muddled thoughs out and into some sort of logical sequence.
Since I've now made the move from Australia to London I thought that this was a good opportunity to move this process to the web so that it can serve a dual purpose keep faimly and loved ones up to date with what I'm doing. For some reason they seem to be in constant fear that something dire is going to happen to me! I'm sure my parents will be grateful too, since there won't be such demand for them to act as a go-between... that being said, I have a sneaking suspicion that they don't really mind regaling anyone who will listen with stories of what my brother and myself are doing.
I've been planning on setting up this blog for a little while now (I've actually been in London for just over a month now). For those of you who either don't know me or just haven't been kept informed, here's the last month in brief... hold onto your hat!
Arrived on 01Nov2005, spent the first week staying with a friend in Chelsea while sorting out phone accounts, bank accounts etc and did a bit of sightseeing while I was at it. Moved to Byfleet at the end of the first week where I started work at the world famous Blue Anchor Pub (see picture above) in order to provide some sort of income while I search for a "real" job. The search continues...
Of course I spent the day at the pub also, however I can assure you that this was not by choice, and it was with the closest thing that I have to loved ones at the moment. After work we were treated to a rather nice lunch, with of course as much to drink as we liked of pretty much whatever we wanted. This was followed up with many games of pool, several failed attempts to play cards and more drinks.
