My Mental Body

Rain in England never really bothered me; in fact, most of the time I quit enjoyed it.  It always cheered me up when I was at work & it was pissing it down & I could stay in the office laughing at the poor suckers that come running in drenched from it, & you don’t feel like you’re missing out on anything when you’re at work in the rain either, apart from a good afternoon drinking session in the local pub.  I liked the sound of it & I didn’t even mind walking in it.  Out here though it’s a whole different storey.  It’s warmed up this week; it’s a positively balmy +4 in the village & not much colder at the top so all this potential snow is falling on us as dirty stinking French rain.  It turns the snow into slush, blinds you &, obviously, soaks you.  For this reason we haven’t been boarding this week yet, I attempted it yesterday but turned round before I even got to the chair lift.  Boarding in slush is bad but walking in it is worse.  The workers concentrate on keeping the roads safe (I say driving on ice is fun, not a danger!) so the pavements get left, 6inches of snow turns into a quagmire of cold slushy slush which splashes up your legs, goes in your shoes & makes you slide back & forth like a demented curling team.  But it gets worse, slush that turns to ice.  Our little side road is only 30m long & ever so slightly on a hill but it’s a fucking death trip in the mornings, there is no shoe in the world that would grip, ice skates wouldn’t even work because its covered in little ice marbles.  So I sit in our apartment with not much in the way of news to tell you, so I thought I’d tell you about my mental body.

The human body is amazing, the way we do all the things we do without even thinking, it heals itself, renews itself & adapts to most things, but since being here I discovered a few things about mine that is just a bit weird.  Firstly, as you may or may not know I’m a diabetic, I have to have 4 injections a day to keep myself alive (or at least I did in England) & to date there is no known cure.  Up here in the cold altitude it seems I’m cured (almost anyway).  There are so many things that I don’t understand about this disease even though I’ve got it, but this just makes no sense what so ever.  Not that I’m complaining only having to stick a needle in myself once a day has got to be an improvement but it does make forever paranoid that it’s going to catch up with me at any moment & turn me in to a mumbling wreck. 

Secondly, sweaty eyelids.  Who the f#ck gets sweaty eyelids.  I don’t get them when I’m hot, I get them if I have any form of spice.  I love a bit of spice on my food, I can’t truly say the more chilli the better but most food can be improved by big kick of heat.  But for some reason when I have a dose of spice (doesn’t even need to be that hot) I start getting sweaty eyelids.

And finally & possibly the most weird of all.  For as long as I can remember being hot hasn’t really agreed with me, I love a summer holiday on the beach but I’m usually found covered up under tree or keeping cool in the sea doing my best to reduce the uncomfortable boils that spring up all over me.  This is 1 of the reasons that an escape to the mountains was so inviting.  But this I first discovered over New Years Eve last year while in Stockholm.  As you may guess Sweden in the winter gets very cold, whilst we was there it was between -5 & -11 during the day & much colder at night & now here.  Apart from this freak hot spell we’re having it is around -5 in the village & -15 up high, cold I’m sure you’ll agree.  But what happens to me?  I get f#cking heat rash! -15 & f#cking heat rash, what’s all that about.  Now I know some of you might be thinking that it’s not heat rash, it’s some form of dirty lurgey or the Aids is back, but as I say, I’ve been getting this on summer holidays all my life, I know what it is, besides I’ve a got a text from the NHS proving I’m aids free, how many of you can say that (Nige, high 5 brother).  Its heat rash, I can only guess it’s coming in from the cold into hot heated buildings, but still weird & very annoying. 

Anywho, I’m down the pub later to watch the football, Tuesday night is boys night the world over (unless its Wednesday night) so I’m off to the Pacific Bar & their 7 massive TV’s, not even close to £9 for a 4 pint jug though.  In fact that is just dream these days.  COYS

Type this yesterday (Tuesday) I know we managed a 3-3 draw.  Top of the group.

Out in the snow

Gripe of the week.  Internet.  I’m not going into details coz it makes me far too mad but the jist is this.  We bought a mobile internet dongle so we could use the internet from our apartment, not least so we could skype people, after 2 days of joyous use the credit run out & we needed to charge it up.  It won’t let us though, no matter what we do.  This French company don’t want to let us give them money, no wonder their economy has gone to shit.  So it’s back to using Wi-Fi in cafes & bars on limited battery & dodgy signals but hey, if that’s the only thing we have to moan about then life must be good.

And it is.  We’ve had a week on the snow now & its f#cking brilliant.  We’ve had a few white out days but thats not a problem as its dumping 20cm of snow on the mountain, & it has been dam cold up there, -20 on average but what do you expect when to come to a place like this.  We have tiered & aching muscles already but then I came here with a particular dodgy back & The Wife’s knee has never been the same since 1 of you boys smashed into it after half a day’s ski lessons only to decide he didn’t need any more (granted he did spend most of his time videoing some old bird on the drag lift) he lost control & tried to stop all his 16 stone of, err let’s call muscle (?) on her leg.  I don’t think either of them stopped.  We also have 3 flights of steps to get up at the end of the day, this is not easy at the end of a hard day sliding about on your arse.  We’ve covered a lot of the mountain already but probably on about half of the lifts are open so there are still loads more to do.  The ski conditions themselves are good for this time of the year.  The higher slopes are fluffy powder with only the runs into resort getting icy.

On to the more important stuff.   Beer (I can’t bring myself to call it Après Ski).  We’ve been to all the bars that are open (not that many, yet) with varying degrees of enjoyment.  Let’s start with the bad, The Blue Note – We’d heard a lot of good stuff about this bar, but we couldn’t bloody find it.  After being directed to it for about the 19^th time we eventually found it but it wasn’t really worth it.  Think youth club out of Byker Grove & full of students on their gap year full of their own self importance all talking over each other to convince others that they were really vain, humourless & boring.  We were convinced so we left.  Then there’s the Pettie Danois – This is easy to explain, think of a shit-pit you’ve been to then add in some complimentary smoked, dried & cured meats & few boiled eggs & leave them on the bar for the day, then fill the place with scuzzers that can’t afford dinner so they go there for a free meal get pissed on the all full beer & wine then throw it up on the floor where there standing.  We won’t be going back.  Lucky though, all the bars that are not bad are good.  Our favourites being; The Lodge, V Spot & XV.  (Strangely it’s the bars full of French that are best).  I’ve also discovered my Football pub, the Pacific Bar, very similar to the Ashes back home but more underground (I mean literally, not in the cool exclusive sense).  The drinks are expensive, about 8 euro’s for a beer & glass of wine but as the other local workers get to know you then a few free drinks find themselves coming our way, let the rich tourists make them a profit.  The bars are all having opening parties as well.  1, The Morris Pub, had theirs last week & we was going to go.  When we was away before 1 of my mates (the 1 mentioned above actually) sent out a batch of mini disks for me (do you remember mini disks, they were around for about 6 months before being replaced by mp3 players) anyway one of them he sent me out was the debut album by the Coral & to this day it remains as 1 of my all time favourites.  Well would you believe it they were playing the opening night so we was going.  We got into the V Spot though & got a fair few pints down our neck & then couldn’t be bothered to walk the 30m to get there.  As it turns out though we had a result, they came on about mid-night, played 1 song complained that the sound was shit & stormed off. 

The really bad news is, we start working next Wednesday, we have to start at 10am as well.  Tough, Tough, Tough.

In the mean time I will be solely concentrating on Snow & beer, the important things in life.

And so it Begins

The slopes are open.  It was a mission getting up them though.  Winston Churchill knew what he was on about when he said ‘France, a great country wasted on the French’.  Here they are with 300km of maintained slopes, 2 glaciers & all within 10,000 hectares of pristine mountains.  It’s been here forever, unsurprisingly it was the English that brought the world skiing as a recreation, but being France they like to do things their own way, which is invariably slowly.  I don’t know how long Val D’isere has had chair lifts which you need a ‘ski pass’ to use but it must be over 50 years.  In all this time, year after year there is estimated to be around 30,000 people a day using these lifts during peak times.  You would of thought they would be able to sell (for actual real cash) these lift passes without too much of a problem.  We didn’t, but we were very, very wrong.   1^st we were told it would take 5 days to process our lift passes as we are seasonairs & need a 6 month pass.  The ticket office didn’t open 5 days early so that we could ski on the opening day.  No the lazy tw#ts didn’t open till the day before, at 4pm.  But they still couldn’t get us a pass because they did have the right paperwork.  They told us come back in the morning & it would be sorted then, she also said we needed to photo for their records.  I had some passport photos but the wife didn’t so we asked where we could find a photo-me-booth type arrangement.  There isn’t 1.  Anywhere.  We thought this a bit odd so we produced my photos.  ‘Oh no’ she said, ‘we don’t need them it’s done on a web camera’.  Why make a fucking point of needing photo’s when you don’t need fucking photo’s.  We went back the next day and it being France we took every single piece of documentation with us (they didn’t tell us we needed it but they love a bit of red tape, the French), they wanted our works contract (we don’t have a job), our proof ownership of property (we are renting, as are the thousands of other residence) the French equivalent of National insurance (we not fucking French) & a breakdown of our genetic code (I might of made that last 1 up, but the rest is true).   We finally managed to convince them that we just wanted to buy the season long pass (the kidz who rep & other such tw#ts get a discounted rate, we knew we couldn’t get this so we weren’t even trying to blag it) after taking down every single piece of information our sad little lives have ever produced & a good hour we eventually got our passes.  Let me remind you that they would have to do this many, many thousands of times, it’s not just because we’re English either, all the French people were having exactly the same problem & they would of been doing it every year of their lives.  Any way anyway, enough of the Chris Moyles style rant (as in, long winded & un-funny), we’re here for the mountains & now we can get to them.

The 1^st afternoon up on the slopes was a tough, tough ride.  Visibility was terrible, it was -20 plus a 30mph wind, the slopes were hard & patchy, lots of ice & mounds of powder, I was hungover & my boarding was shite.  We stayed out for a few hours then called it a day after I face planted into a pile of Ice on a flat run.  Incidentally, this wasn’t the 1^st fall of the holiday.  Whilst in the apartment Skyping the Sister-in-law from the comfort of our sofa the wife got up & on her way to the kitchen she tripped over the power cable & landed flat on her face & smashing her remaining good knee, she has a habit of falling over (ask anyone who knows her about the sign outside a busy pub!) but somehow this wasn’t as funny as normal. 

Sunday was a much better day.  It was only -10 degrees very little wind & we could see.  We was without hangovers & got up the mountain early to enjoy a full days boarding.  We went to a different area & the conditions were actually pretty good.  I’d swapped & tweaked with my snowboard so it was all set up for a fat lad on hard snow & we had a brilliant day.  We stuck to mostly green & blue runs where the snow was best & we soon got back into the groove of carving out some tidy turns & we finished it all off with a few beers in a lovely little bar at the end of the day.  This is what it’s all about.  & to top it all off, we beat the Scouse 2-1 with a 94^th minute goal from the little lad Lennon.  Life is good.  I’m not going into work next week, too much snow!

Update

This f#cking blog shit is starting to p#ss me off.  Who ever designed blogger has clearly not lived in the real world, nothing is easy or straight forward.

Any way after much swearing I have attached a few photo's to the older blogs, check them out, if only to see the cock.

The Road Trip

This was nothing like those crappy American movies full of high jinks & cheerleader troops flashing their t*ts at us as we overtook their coach, mores the pity.  It was 12 hours of motorway driving through rural French country side.  This was very similar to diving through our own country, shouldn’t really surprise me but hey, the only difference being the lack of traffic jams & hold ups.

  The day started off at 5am where I had to use all those years of Tetris skills to load the contents of a 3 bedroom house into a 4 seater car.  The amount of crap we took really is unbelievable.  There was not a space left unfilled with shit.  We had a washing machine, ironing board, clothes airier, more clothes the M&S, 2 snowboards, the wife’s 500 pairs of shoes, 7 books that we’ve read before, half our kitchen, a fridge freezer & a cuddly toy.  Maybe not all of that but the list is more generation game than holiday check list.  It wasn’t until we unpacked that the full extent of the useless shit became apparent.  Not just the wife either.  I brought 4 watches (1 doesn’t work) 7 coats, a DVD player when there’s 1 in the room & on my laptop & even an odd sock.  An odd f#cking sock, how did that happen?  Once we’d unloaded the car we had the hellish task of getting it into our apartment.  We had to go up a flight of steps into the entrance, up another flight of steps to the lift, send it up in the lift (me loading on the ground floor, wife unloading on the 1^st floor), into the apartment then into ever available nook & cranny a 1 bed flat has to offer.  In all fairness it has all fitted in but if we use half of what we’ve bought I’ll be amazed. 

I think I’ve managed quit well on the whole France thing, it was a good 10 hours in before I had a rant about the useless French, I’m sure it won’t be my last.  We then had to suffer the indignity of loosing football to the garlic munching surrender monkeys (see), luckily our TV hasn’t got a power cable yet so we missed it.  I also managed to miss the mighty Lilywhite’s trounce the Arse.  Again.  Champions league on Wednesday, shant be missing that.

Back to the arrival, it was at night so we couldn’t really see a lot & we were both knackered so we couldn’t even be bothered to go out for an arrival beer so it was early to bed.  When we got up though it was to a scene that confirmed we’d done the right thing, we were home.  The mountains were giving of that readybrek glow & the sky was filled with snow floating down in front of our full height, full width windows .  It snowed all the 1^st day & the village was looking great, the slopes need plenty more on them but with a week till opening day we’re still hopeful.

veiws from our balcony

Our 1^st few days have been spent generally lazing about, getting the lie of the land.  Drinking & eating & meeting other seasonairs.  A bunch of holiday company reps turned up the other day.  They are so young, no wonder so many people’s holidays end in tears.  All students on a gap year being paid by loans or mummy & daddy, let’s see how long it is till they p#ss me off.   I also experienced the 1^st dose of snowboard snobbery.  Like many of us my snowboard only gets used 1 or 2 weeks of the year, I bought a new 1 in January but when in the bar discussing with a young lad (with his baseball cap pulled over his ears!) he said ‘oh what last year’s model’.  The little tw#t, the pisser of it all though, he’s probably brilliant as well.  I bet I could down a beer quicker than him though.



Home sweet home

Morning Benders

What’s the point of a blog?  None.  All blogs are full of self-indulgent boasts of people’s sad little lives that no one really cares about.  My blog though, my blog is going to be no different what so ever.  I wasn’t going to bother doing one at all, it was only after reading the wife’s that full of shoes, shopping & sex in the shitty that I felt the world needs balance.  So this is going to be my little piece of Ying to her Yang.   It is to say all the bollocks that I would normally spill out to my mates over a few beers in the pub.  So with that in mind, this will be fully devoid of fact but full of opinion, nonsense & outright lies loosely based on the wife & me leaving the county & living a life in the French Alps.

So a quick account of what’s been happening in my life in the last year.  I have been working as surveyor on a large building site in east London.  There are privacy rules about this particular site which I’m not sure about so I can’t possibly say what site it was.  Let’s just say it is a very large sport related site that has to be complete by 2012 so that athletes from all over the world can compete in various ‘games’ (you’ll never guess where).  My contract was due to be up towards the end of the year & what with the country going to shit & both the wife & me needing to get out of the ridiculous money driven work obsessed life that seems to breed in this country (unless your an unemployed single mother addicted to Heroin then you can be given your own house, money, food vouchers because you can’t be trusted to spend the handouts on essential & even your H supplement).  We have done a year backpacking before & it was always our intention to do a season in the Alps.  So we sold our house, furniture & car (this is a long a tedious story in itself, I can’t bear to regale it makes me feel sick) rented an apartment in Val d’Isere in France & here we are.

I finished work on the 12^th November, although I probably stopped working sometime before that, it wasn’t intentional it was just hard to concentrate when I had such a big move on.  Who am I kidding; I’m just a bit of a work shy waster.  I can’t say I was sad to leave, 2 and half years on that site is enough for anyone, but I would be leaving behind some good new friends.  Being a man though we can never say that; so I called them a bunch of  c#nts punched them on the arm & marched out calling behind me ‘so long losers’.  But for the record & with the witness of all 6 people that will end up reading this (4 of which are family) I want it noted that I meant every word of it, but that’s no bad thing.

Then on to all the goodbyes of the friends & family.  At no point did I ever regret the decision to leave but that doesn’t make it any easier to leave the people you’ve known all your life, sometimes longer!  We had the obligatory boy’s night out.  The usual, down the local pub, into a bar then into a dodgy club.  The difference this time that 1 of my stupid mates thought that the wife & all her friends had finished for the night (they were having a night in with wine & gossip, probably comparing boobs & touching each other) so we should go back there, nightclubs never really been my thing & we’re all in our 30’s now & can’t really talk with all that racket I jumped at the chance.  But bugger me they were still all there squawking & cackling, arguing who’s done the most roller-blading whilst on the blob & all that girl shite that we will never understand (somebody told me to try listening once, fuck that it’ll make my ears bleed).  It turned out to be the usual drunken ending most weekends turn into, insulting  each other, drinking games & shaving a cock into my mates chest hair.      

The family was done over a couple of nights, both over dinner & both a rather civil affair.  I was expecting a few more tears but everybody was fine, even my mum, maybe they were pleased to get rid of me after all.  Or more likely they were pleased to see someone actually attempting to change their life instead of moaning about it.

Don’t get me wrong here.  We had a good life & I enjoyed it almost all the time but our out-looked changed.  We were both working long hours (as before when I say working long hours, what I mean is that I was at work for long hours, work was just something to past the time between chatting,  fuzzing a ball about & generally arsing around).  I worked early & the wife finished late which meant we didn’t seem to see much of each other, it did however, give me plenty of time to review the numerous porn sites that are talked about, but that’s for another time.  We didn’t earn bad money but what we did earn we wasted on too many clothes, holidays & going out just to justify the fact we’re out the house for near on 60 hours a week.  There must be more to life than that, so we’re giving it a go.

1 more thing.  This is my 1st blog & I'm doing it in a cafe with limited battery.  When I get internet at home I will pad it out some more.

Take care benders