She's right again!

I was all ready to blow out Sicily & southern Italy, shoot over to Sardinia & spend the last couple of weeks chilling out on some beach.  But the wife talked me into the opposite.  We’ve blown out Sardinia & come down to Sicily.  But we’ve got of the main land & are staying the week in Malfa on the small Aeolian island of Salina (did you notice that, Aeolian is jus a ‘u’ short of having all the vowels in 1 word, bit greedy don’t you think).   I must say that I’m glad she talked me into it.  It is one of the best places I’ve been to in Italy.  It’s a tiny island, just 27km in circumference, made up of 2 volcano’s.  The 2 cones of the volcano look like a giant pair of boobs & we’re staying right in the cleavage.  There are 7 islands in total & all volcanic but its only Stromboli that’s still active & at night we can sit on our veranda looking out over the Med & watch it erupt into the night.  It is brilliant.

We’re here for a week & we are just going to enjoy the views, eat, drink & sleep but yesterday we hired a boat for the day & motored round the perimeter & I fucking loved it.  We set of at about 10 & spent the whole day exploring the grottos & caves of our little island.  We anchored in tiny bays with the vertical walls of the volcano shooting steeply either side so we had the places all to our selves.  Diving in from our boat & swimming to shore & just chilling out on the deck in the sun, even the wife (who is an avant scaredy cat when it comes to the sea) managed to jump in a few times.  We even see a couple of flying fish as we speed out to sea.  They were great, out of the water by about 2 meters & flying along for about 300m before the splashed back in again & it was like they was racing us, they were so close the wife even thought we were going to hit 1.

Our boat for the day.

Or was it this 1?

From here we go back to main land Sicily for 3 nights & stay in Catania then we fly back home to the UK for a little while.  We haven’t decided what to do while in Catania but lets hope the journey there will be a bit better than getting here!

We left Positano at 10:30am on Saturday  & got here at 12:30 the following afternoon.  It took 4 buses (2 crashed & 1 cult on fire) a train, a ferry, 2 hydrofoils & a scary taxi ride with a Mafia burger flipper!  It surely can’t be any worse than that?

I've seen the Future

When we left we gave ourselves a budget & when that was spent we would either have to get a job or go home.  We had spent our budget some time ago but now was the time to make some decisions.

We knew it was pretty unlikely to find a job here in Italy, but we quickly ruled out even looking.  It’s just to dam hot.  The only real opportunity open to us is teaching English, that would mean being in a city & we don’t really want to live in a big hot city.  So we had to decide weather to go back home to England & try to settle down in to some form of normality or carry on traveling.  We’d all but decided on the former & plans were being made of where to live & what to do.  Then, out of the blue, an old friend who I hadn’t spoken to in a while called up on Skype.  We had a good old catch up & we were both slapping each other’s backs about how good each others life was at the moment when he suggested we go over to his place.  He was on an 8-week break from work &, with the family, had travelled north to help out the in-laws.   This meant their place in the city was free & we were welcome to stay there for a while.  Fate, it seems, choose where we were to go to next, so in a little under 2 weeks we fly of to Stockholm.  Unlike Italy, a Swedish summer is bearable & unlike Italy almost everbody speaks English.  This should make finding a job a little easier & maybe, just maybe, we can escape reality just a little bit longer.

But whilst we’re here I want to give a massive thank you to our lovely Swedish friends.  Thanks Buddy & see you soon.

Positano

So then, Positano.  I told you all about the shit arse journey it takes to get here & I really mean that, but it is worth it.  It’s a lovely little town perched on the side of a mountain along the Amalfi Coast.  Its difficult to explain why its so good, its not a paradise beach like you get in the Maldives, its not an isolated island where you can wander the sea front naked & you could look at all the Photo’s & think ‘yeah its nice but what’s all the fuss about?’  Its not even as if its vastly different from other places, it has a touch of the Cinque Tere, a bit of Portofino & even splash of a Greek white-washed village to it.  But I suppose its all this that makes it so good.  All those places are lovely & if you take the best bits & make a seaside town out of them you’ve got Positano.  We’ve been here before & we loved it & still after another 2 weeks we still love it.  The only downside is the relentless heat & the swarms of American’s.  The heat really shouldn’t be a surprise, it is the Mediterranean in the heart of summer after all, but fuuuuuck it’s hot.  Before we came away my pre flight gripe was the potential heat & how bad I am at copping with it.  I was not wrong, I just can’t cope with it, but neither can anyone else & that must be the reason that business shut in July & August or the ones that don’t, close between 1 & 5 every afternoon.  It is too hot to even just sit & drink beer.  You have to get out of the sun.

We didn’t do a lot in the 2 weeks we were there.  In the 1^st week we hoped on a boat & sailed over to Capri (the Island, not the 70’s car).  That was a day of my life & €150 I’ll never get back!  We’re all led to believe that Capri is some ultra exclusive holiday mecca.  All it is though is a very expensive island with some very expensive shops on it.  It hasn’t even got a beach, not really.  The only reason people would chose to go on holiday there would be so they could say ‘I am considerably richer than you!’

Then the 2^nd week we spent the day back down the Hellish train line in Pompeii & Sorrento.  The Journey was still fraught with filth but Pompeii did live up to the hype.  I’m not going to bore you too much with the Pompeii shit, it was a Roman port town that got buried under 6m of ash & lava when MT Vesuvius erupted.  It was a huge expanse of ruins & excavations & was in the main pretty interesting but it was disappointing that they’d removed all the ash formed bodies that it is famed to have all round the place. 

From here we moved onto Sorrento.  Not much to say about here.  It was nice, it was big & we were glad we didn’t stay here.

Also, during our stay in Positano we had to decide our next course of action.  Do we return to the real world, do we stay here or do we bugger of somewhere else. It was a big dilemma? 

Supposed to add to the photo update but I forgot.
I went there, not what it says on the tin!

Photo update

Our beautiful view in Sestrie Levanti

Fucking weather, fucking cheap arse Italian umbrella

The Camp statues of Pisa

& Some wonky tower

Who's that fucker in my garage

Big man, little cock

Rome sweet Rome

Positano

Things you're not told

Here’s that quick recap I promised you in the last blog, but if you did bother to read the wife’s, it kind of irrelevant.  Hers is much more detailed & descriptive, I get bored with all that so I’ll skip over the details & try to point out the things a guide book, or a wife, forgets to mention.

I can’t remember the last place I told you about, what with all the fucking weather we had then all the moving about.  I cant be bothered to read my other blogs, it was painful enough the 1^st time so I’ll start with when we left Sestrie Levantie, the place of trains & rains.

We boarded the train & just a few hours later we were in the small city of Pisa.  It was a little stroll to our hotel then we was straight out to see the sights, or as we are led to believe, the sight.  Pisa is a very small place & we had walked the whole perimeter & criss-crossed the middle by the end of the 1^st day but it was a very pleasant place to be.  It’s a big university town so we were never far from a few decent bars & the food was good.  The big surprise was, as well as being the home of a badly engineered tower its is also the birth place of the camp statue (& I don’t mean university rules).  1^st one I saw I dismissed as my immature mind (I know you all think I’m a deep serious person but yes, I do find farts funny!) the next couple drew a more curious look but then the 4^th statue I see I couldn’t ignore.  It was a big stone carving of a man in a loin cloth adopting the typical ‘I’m a little tea pot’ pose with his hips pushed dramatically to 1 side & a very obvious limp wrist.  He had a naked & very busty wench at his knee, which he was ignoring (?) & gazing off into the distance (no doubt where his servant was ploughing the fields & getting all sweaty in the sun.  It wouldn’t of looked more camp if the Family Guy crew had drawn him for 1 of Peters cut aways to describe a camp man.   It wasn’t just me, even the wife agreed.  So there we have it, the camp statues of Pisa.

The next stop was Bologna.  This is famed for its amazing food markets & fountain of Neptune with his dozen sirens spraying water from their nipples.  What they don’t tell you is that its full of wrong-uns that wouldn’t be out of place in Chatham. 

Modena is a city that was shut.  Marrinello was a town that was shit (even with the beautiful cars surrounding you).  So onto Florence!  Everybody loves Florence & I can see why but for me it was just far too hot & far too busy to be loved.  It was more like that women from accounts, good to look but far too many people have been in & out of her Doumo!  We stayed there for a week & it was the only way I could of got round the place.  It was so hot we could only manage a few hours a day before we had to retreat to the comfort of our apartment or, as was more likely, an air-conditioned bar.  The thing about Florence that nobody tells you is they are sneaky.  It is famous for all the Art its acquired, but the sneaky basterds spread it out into all the hundreds of museums in the city so each place has 1 painting you would recognise & the rest is filled with crappy religious art that has been plundered from some tiny church in the middle of nowhere.

From Florence we moved to Rome.  I love Rome, it is an incredible place.  So does the wife & she cant see how anybody wouldn’t.  I’m not going to do a Venice & tell you you really must go.  Rome is a massive, busy working Capital & it was very very hot.  No matter how good Rome is you still have to like Massive busy capitals.  But Rome is like no other; it is steeped in History & intrigue.  Its Architecture is spectacular & the grandeur is monumental, but it’s even more than that.  You can kind of feel the hum of the place.  When your at the Coliseum, St Peters Basilica, Pantheon or any of the thousand other Fountains, statues or monuments you can imagine how people would of felt when they were new, the awe, the inspiration & the fear.  And as many tourists as there are, & there is millions, the place is still dominated by the locals & the locals love a good time.  Around every corner is a bar all the squares are filled with restaurants & at Mid-night the place is just as busy as at mid-day.  There are very few places I would want to visit again & again & again but on that very short list; probably at the top it would be Rome.

Which brings us to now.  I sit here in my little terraced garden next to my lemon tree, looking out on the steep sides of the cliff face that makes up Positano on the Amalfi coast.  We liked it so much we decided to spend another week here, but I think you need 2 weeks after the journey from Rome.  We’ve done the journey before, we knew what to expect but it is the worst journey we’ve ever had to do.  Even worse that the 3 straight days without sleep, shower or even bed it took us to get from Toronto to Fiji, even worse that the death ride we took to get to Istanbul & even worse (I never thought I would say it) than the shear hell & filth that was a tuk-tuk across Bangkok.  The train to Naples is no real hardship even if you take the slow cheap train, as we did.  You don’t have to see much of actual Naples so that is lucky but from then on its filth, heat, crowds & bad bad bad.  You have to get on a local train from Naples to Sorrento.  This is like a very old fashioned underground train except its almost entirely over ground.  It is slow & boiling hot, you melt into the plastic chairs & you sweat like a fat pig on slaughter day.  You are surrounded by the criminals from Naples all trying to part you from you luggage or wallet.  Its 50 degrees & your crammed into fat people.  Your like this for about 2 hours.  Then you have a 40min wait in the scorching Sorrento sun for the bus.  By this time there are a far more people than seats so it’s a full out scrum to get on board, if your lucky enough you then have to stand on a packed bus with people trying to squeeze past you to find seats that are already full.  Then the bus goes for 20 min in completely the opposite direction you need, does a big circle & goes back the way it came.  It makes no stops; no one gets on or off.  Then after another hour we arrive in Positano.  There are 4 stops but nobody knows which one they need so everybody’s on & of, pushing & squeezing there sweat drenched body’s it is truly disgusting.  We made it though & we needed the extra week, we deserve I think after all that! 

The important things

I nearly gave up the blogging.   It feels a bit like being in the pub with my mates but I am the only 1 buying the rounds.  But then I got to thinking, you don’t miss your rounds there must be a reason & I know that reason.  It would be the same reason I wouldn’t bother emailing or commenting.  Laziness.  I just wouldn’t be bothered & you lot are no different & there is nothing wrong with that.  So after my little sulk I’m back to bore you with some more shit.

Since my last blog we have moved around a lot.  Going from Setrie Levantie to Pisa, Bologna, Modena, Marrinello, Florence, Tuscan Hills, Rome & now we are in a lovely little apartment in Positano on the Amalfi coast.  Lots of things have happened but I’m not going into that here, if you’re desperate to know the details go to the wife’s blog www.snowystylista.blogspot.com I might fill you in a bit later but for now I’m going to, as my good friend reminded me to do, keep it real & tell you about the important things in life.

BBF, I’ve heard the youth mention this & I have no idea what they are on about but for me it’s for the 3 most important things in this world.  Beer, Boobs & football, so I thought I would share the things I have learned about the Italian versions.  Now I kind of remember doing a similar blog about the time I spent in France so I think I can compare to both the Dirty French & the English.  So lets start with where all the great conversations do, with Beer.  I love beer; there is nothing better than getting into the shade after a hard day at the golf, under blistering sun & taking a big few gulps of ice-cold lager.  It surprises me that wine is still drunk so often in these temperatures there is never an exclamations as apt as ‘Ahhhhh that hits the spot’ as a good beer in boiling weather.  I’m partial to a drop of the old Vino every now & again but its just not the same.  Hot weather needs beer & over here just lately it’s been hot, very hot.  I’m not complaining, it beats the rain we’d been having earlier but it does make everyday life just that little bit more difficult & our old friend beer is a necessity.  Luckily the Italians do like a good lager, much better than that French piss water & (unlike the French) they serve it in pints, not those pathetic demi’s.  They even have Beer bars where they sell there own brew.  One we went to in Genoa was full with mostly Lagers (they haven’t quit grasped a good Ale yet) but they were good.  They had beer shooters, beer cocktails (for the girls & gays) beer tasters, beer in 2ltr jars & bought to your table with its own pump & just straightforward beer.  The biggest down side of the beer over here is the price, on average its about €5 a pint, they do happy hour (aparativo) but instead of getting cheap drinks you get buffet food & nibbles, as good as this is we know that eating is cheating & what we really want is cheaper booze not garlic & pesto bruschetta.  Also the locals are so much better at drinking than the French.  They are more like us, they are social, like a chat & a laugh & they go out most nights, unlike us they don’t get shit faced, they are sensible with there drink.  Weird!

With beer the conversation inevitably gets round to boobs.  Before I came away one of the boys said that the only reason I’m going to Italy is because its full of ‘my types’.  As I have mentioned before I am happily married (who’s wife reads this) so my type is the wife, but to explain what he meant, it was women with long dark hair & big boobs.  That had nothing to do with it but there are a lot of dark haired women out here & a lot of them have boobs.  It could be just because its warmer out here so everybody wears just a bit less, it could be that they are a very vain nation & show off anything & everything available to them or it could just be that Italy loves boobs.  I think all of the above.  All the adverts, TV, magazines everything has, almost solely, scantily clad women on it.  It is helped by being led from the top, good old Berlusconi is like a dog on heat drooling over everything, he even found time to Perv up the rescue crew after an earthquake.  There is even footage of him on Youtube dry humping a police women as she was writing out parking ticket, that is the role model for Italians!

Finally football.  Italian football has always been the most difficult for me to watch.  There is no denying the skill of the National team but their leagues are filled with cheating, acting, whinging & (even after the massive point deduction scandal) corruption.  Obviously you can’t see the corruption so it makes no difference to me but the rest just makes for painful viewing.  As with everywhere else in Europe the season is over but football is still on all the time it is just as big as at home but without the football shirts being worn all the time.

Are You All Dead?

I've been away for a month now & I've put the effort in & blog what I'm up to fairly frequently.  To date I have had emails & comments from just 1 person.  If your not dead are you reading this?  I can only assume your not.  If you are let me know whats going on, what your up too or even how much your glad I'm not there.  Its not as if any of you do any work when in front of the computer is it.  Strange as it is; I do miss you all!

Fucking, fucking Weather

In the haste of my self-indulgent hard done by weather rant I neglected to tell you the worst of it all.  During the terrific storms, the torrential rain, the gale force winds that can even ground a ferry on a lake, we had snow.  Yes, snow.  We have spent 6 months at 3000m in the heart of the French Alps desperate for the stuff but whilst we are staying by 1 of the prettiest lakes in the world & our own private swimming pool, not 100m meters above us it snowed almost every evening.  Now I’m no meteorologist & I don’t quite know how these things work but even though it was somewhere between 20-30 degrees every day (even in the rain) we was surrounded by snow capped peaks.  They wasn’t quite the mountains that we were used to seeing but from my extensive engineering & surveying background the lake was about 700m above sea level, our apartment was about 500m above that & within a good pissing distance was snow.  Every fucking night.  What the fuck is all that about? 

Now all this is, for us at least, a bit annoying but let’s get serious about our luck for a moment.  It rained in a desert for 45min whilst we were there for 45 minutes when it hadn’t rained for 4 YEARS, it rained for a week in a place that boasts an average of 360 days a year of sun, we arrived in Sydney in the heart of the worst forest fires NSW has ever experience – not long after that the rain had put them out, we spent our 1^st & only week of our camping experience in the middle of a freak cyclone & now?  We are about to visit a place that is prone to volcanic activity & is over due an eruption by 14 years!!  We all know in geological terms 14 years is barely a blink of the eye but consider the fact that Vesuvius (of the Pompei killing fame) has been spunking its load into the Nepalese sunset on a constant 30 year cycle, a cycle that has never had its wheels buckled & has plodded along its merry Volcanic path since the Romans invented the gorgonian calendar.  Being so regular the little fella’s out here have got quite good at dealing with the molten laver that threatens their pasta trees but this additional time is a worry, an extra 50% load on top of the usual money shot.  Imagine you’re a regular once an hour farter, then imagine going to a crowded cinema with a hot new date & having to hold onto last nights curry, just in case, then on the way out discussing how that little that Cruise fellow must really be a gay you let it out.  Its going kill the people in the immediate vicinity instantly, then it going to set fire to the metal escalators which will then explode sending cogs into the surrounding restaurants which will ignite all the gas sending a gigantic fire ball into the nearby substation which will then have catastrophic power surge magnetising the power station which will suck all the planes out of the sky & the resulting mushroom cloud will be potent enough to go out on dates with its friend from Chernobyl.  That’s why we don’t hold in the fart.  That’s just our fat arses; imagine what’s going to happen when it’s a giant mountain!  That’s what’s going to happen when we get down to the Amalfi coast.  It’s just our luck!

On the plus side, we have bought an internet key (formally known as a dongal) & it works.  We have the web at last!

Fucking Weather

By now you all know of our luck when it comes to weather.  After spending our 1^st & only season in the worst conditions for 35 years but it continues.  Whilst we were in the lakes in rained most nights & we had some spectacular storms.  It only really effected us 2 days making us change plans, in the main it was quite pleasant sitting on our massive balcony watching the storms exploding all round the lake getting merrily pissed.  It’s getting beyond a joke now.  When we checked the weather Friday night for our return to the coast there was an Italian shaped rain cloud over Italy, the only cloud in Europe.  It rained the whole way down here.  Sunday Rain, Monday rain, Tuesday (today) rain.  We did go to Genoa yesterday & managed to stay dry but today was to be spent on beaches & boats.  That’s not going to happen.  This is, again, unseasonal weather.  They think it’s going to continue for the next few days as well.  It’s just not cricket.  Or perhaps it is!

Can you see the rain?  We couldn't miss it!

More lakes

We finished our stint at the lakes & the northern end of Italy.  From Garda we spent a few days out travelling the sights & our 1^st destination was Verona.  Verona was a weird place, where as in Milan I was pleasantly surprised; here I was a little disappointed.  Not to say it was horrible or any thing it just didn’t live up to the expectations.  But then where are they from?   The city is famous almost entirely from an ancient English Author who wrote a fictional play that just happened to be set there, a place (I’m pretty sure) he never even visited.  1 of the most visited tourist spots is Juliette’s balcony, which is place from the mind of a dead play-write about a person who never existed?  The whole place has an air of Disney about it not helped by the thousands of yanks waddling about.  It is also the home of the most complete Roman arena in the world which is still used today, not for the joy of killing Christians (mores the pity) but for fat Italians singing stories or in the case when we were there, a little gay pop stars putting on a concert.  We didn’t bother with Ricky Martin but we did go in & I suppose even I could see how good a night at the opera might be there, shame it didn’t start till July.  Dam it we couldn’t possibly come back!

Where for art thou

Two years ago, on our 1^st wedding anniversary, we spent 5 days in Venice.  We loved it, it is a spectacular place.  As we were so close to it again we couldn’t miss the opportunity to see it again so we popped back for a day trip.  It was every bit as amazing.  I’m not 1 to tell anybody to visit a place, we’re all different & we all know what we like & where we want to go but if you haven’t already been, GO TO VENICE.  There really is no place like it, or even close to it anywhere else in the world.  You don’t need me to tell you what its all about, you already know but seeing it as often as we have on TV, even being there before it is still an incredible place.  We had done all the sights before & didn’t need to go into any of the palaces or cue for the regular sights; we just spent the day ambling about finding the quieter (no such thing as ‘of the beaten track‘ here) parts.  We Kris crossed the labyrinth of streets & canals & must of walked a good few miles but it is well worth it.  We would still go back.

We spent a few more days visiting the lake side towns that surround Garda, got out on the water, took a few thousand more photo’s & drunk lots more booze before we set off for Bergamo.  This is an old town right in the middle of the thigh of Italy.  It’s more medieval than other places in Italy & totally different from the Milan, Verona et al that we’d been to previously.  Built on the top of a big hill it is an ancient collection of streets built behind a 5km wall.  You’re probably getting bored with reading it, I’m certainly getting a bit bored with saying it but it was great.  We had a bit of scare on the way back though.  We were in dire need of fuel & the whole city seemed devoid of petrol.  We did just about cough & splutter into the 1^st & only open garage we see.

On Saturday we drove all the way back to Milan, dropped off our little car, got the bus & then train down to the beach side town of Sesetri Levante.  We are back on the med.  All the towns surrounding Genoa (top left of Italy) kind of merge into 1 making a massive sprawling town built around a road & a train track.  It could be beautiful but its not.  Some of the coves & bays are stunning but the town is never ending & it seems all a bit tainted with commercialism.  It’s going to happen, I know that, but it’s a bit of a pity.  It’s a bit like Italy’s version of the Costa del Sol.  We haven’t been to Portofino or Santa Margareta yet & they are the jewels of the crown of this coast so my opinion may yet change.  Also from here we’re going to visit the Cinque Terre which is another UNESCO world heritage sight made up of 5 little fishing villages built into the mountains perched over the Med.  It’s supposed to be lovely, at the moment we cant see a thing for all the rain!

Lakes

Lets waste another 5 minutes of your life.  Where were we, Milan.  I must be honest I wasn’t looking forward to Milan.  I heard it was congested, busy, full of smog & expensive but I was pleasantly surprised.  It was expensive but we’d spent the last 6 months in Val, which is 1 of the dearest places on earth, so it wasn’t shocking, but the rest turned out to be false rumours.  For a city, it wasn’t especially congested, it was very clean, quite open & a near on relaxed feel to it.  The 1^st night we got the metro down to the Duomo (Cathedral) & it is a mighty spectacular building, even the wife (who is used to impressive sights) let out an involuntary ‘wow’. 

We spent a couple of days doing the sights and enjoying the Milan invention of Apperitevo.  They do this in all the bars & its great when you get used to it.  You buy an alcoholic drink for a set price (between 7-10 euros) then help yourself to an all you can eat anti-pasti buffet type thing.  We had a couple of drinks each & gauged ourselves on Italian food in a funky bar for a total of €30.  Blinding. 

The fresco of Leonardo Da Vinci’s ‘The Last Supper’ is in Milan.  We went but it’s a 2-week waiting list to see it, that’s a cue too much for me so, unfortunately, we missed it.  We all know what it looks like though don’t we; Jesus & his whore girlfriend getting pissed with his mates with 1 Judas threatening to slit her throat unless he gets a blowjob!  That’s how I see it anyway.  Indecently, was Judas named after Sol Campbell?  You wouldn’t want to be spending more than a couple of days in Milan though unless you wanted to spend your life savings on expensive shoes (& the wife was sorely tempted) so we got back on the train to the airport to pick up our car.  We saved €200 going back out of the city well worth trek round the underground with our luggage.  We picked up our Italian 2 seater, a beautiful silver 1.2L Lancia Y.  Technically it was a 4 seater but there is no way in this earth that you would fit 4 people in it but it was ideal for the tiny little lanes of our next destination.

The Italian lakes & more precisely, Lake Garda.  This is the biggest & most commercial of the lakes & that’s why we choose it.  We intended to look for a job here working with all the English & Yank tourist that plague the place.  It is simply stunning.  There is an element of over development about it but that doesn’t stop it being a picture of lake elegance & beauty.  Round every single of the many corners is another postcard vista & I’m truly grateful for the digital era, if I had to develop my camera-film like back in the day I would have sell my good kidney!  It’s a shame I can only put a few photo’s on for you but our luck with the Internet continues.  We booked a place specifically with Internet access, it turned out that this meant via a mobile O2 dongle, but it doesn’t work so it’s back to the good old Wi-Fi cafes.  Cant really complain though, the view is incredible. 

Our View from the Balcony

Home & Away

We left France on the 3^rd of May.  We made good time along the French motorways, only being held up by the geniuses of P&O.  The 1^st thing we noticed about being back in Blighty (& we continued to notice it) was just how fat most people were.  Don’t get me wrong, nobody would mistake me for a bulimic, but I’m talking about proper fat, the sort of people who can no longer walk but waddle.  The rest of Europe just doesn’t do fat like we do.  We arrived home the way you should, floating towards the white cliffs of Dover & I would like to say that I was really happy to be home, but I wasn’t.  I couldn’t wait to see my family & friends & we received an overwhelming amount of generosity but I was depressed.  Not least because after 6 months in the mountains coming down to sea level & the country was in its full spring bloom the hay fever didn’t gradually come over me over weeks but slapped me in the face like wet tar forcing me to take tablets, hay fever tablets always bring out my dark side but I was a bit miserable.  I shouldn’t of been though, we were staying in a friends house for free whilst they were on holiday, another friend met us at 11pm to help me unpack & give us a carrier bag full of essential supplies, we was bought lunch, made dinner & got drunk.  After a couple of days & being the hero I am I stopped with the hay fever drugs & everything became fun again.  All be it in a very hectic & rushed way.  After meeting up with the family & seeing the progress of the parents new home, collecting our clothes from all corners of the county & repacking from winter to summer it was time to get back into the local pubs.  The wife was out with the girls so most of the men were forced to baby-sitting duties, all but 1.  He had to come out but the poor boy was grey, very hungover from night before it took him just over an hour to finish his 1^st beer.  Finish it he did though (it was touch & go for a while), he kept it down & we managed a good 12 hour session ending in a row of tequila’s each.  We can’t remember who was responsible but I do know it pushed me over the edge.   It delayed my sample production for another day!  Before we left to France in November I got the snip, we’ve never wanted kids & it was the sensible but painful solution but to be given the all clear my fertility needed to be tested.  As the old saying goes, ‘your either a wanker or a liar’ & I’m no liar but doing on command wasn’t as easy as you’d expect.   There’s so many rules.  These are the actual notes I was given; do not use the withdrawal method, it is not to be passed into the container orally, no lubricant can be used, no trace of soap can be left & the sample must be produce directly into the pot without contamination!  Add the fact that it had to be taken to the hospital within an hour of production & the necessary hospital was half an hour away & the sample needed to be kept in a pocket to keep it at body temperature the whole thing took on military planning.  I had to produce, pot, bag & deliver during a week day morning with the neighbours builders drilling & shouting out through the open windows, the wife stomping about downstairs packing & all the time the pot sitting there winking at me like Jabba the huts ugly sister.  Every time I got close & picked up the little plastic basterd the whole moment was lost.  There is jut no romance these days!  Anyway, job done.

We were at home for 2 weeks & we only spent 1 evening in.  It was a feast of food, booze & company. That was all great but the 2 weeks did make us both realise that as much as we have missed the people at home we still don’t want to go back there.  It took us the 2 weeks to finalise our plans to get away, not booking our accommodation until 3 days before we left, but the day to leave arrived so off we went.  It was 1 of the worst days travelling we’ve ever had & most of it was down to my own stupidity.

My parents were driving us to the airport & they arrived half-hour early, which I’m going to blame.  We made excellent time getting to Heathrow T5 in just under an hour so we had a good 3 hours to relax into the airport shops & bars.  Whilst enjoying a coffee before check in the wife, checking I had every thing, said got your injection, cause I had!  Oh fuck.  As you may know I’m a diabetic.  Not being 1 to over dramatise a situation without insulin I will die & as we intended to be away for a few months I had quite a lot of it.  It was left in the fridge round our friends house, my parents where carrying on to see some friends & the rest of my mates were at work apart from 1 hapless buddy who happened to be on the night shift.  I went into the airport Boots & they contacted my doctor who was able to give me an emergency prescription for a few douses but I needed the lot.  I woke the poor basterd up who then had to drive round Kent to get the keys, pick up the life saving insulin then hot foot it to Heathrow before check-in closed.  The irony of it is is that back in his single days & previous job (making drugs for a pharmacy company) 1 of his regular chat up lines was that he saved lives for a living!  He made it though & we were on our way.

1^st Stop Milano.  It was an easy flight & an easy train ride to Central station.  This was by far the most impressive train station I’ve ever been to.  Easily beating all the London ones (as great as they are) & even Grand Central Station NY.  We had a short walk to our hotel & that’s when problem 2 started.  We had been moved hotels without prior warning.  Granted we had been upgraded from a 3 to 4 star hotel because of it but it was another 20min walk in the sweltering heat with all our luggage (which in total consisted of 6 bags) to a more remote area back the way we had come by the train station.  As we all know, the train stations the world over attract the down & outs, vagrants & in this case 50 year old Chinese transsexual hookers.  We made it to our hotel with both our luggage & arseholes in tack & hit our 3^rd problem.  They had only booked us in for 2 nights instead of 3!  After what seemed like an ice age since we left Kent we were finally in our room, which, as we have no other address, would be our home. 

This blog is becoming  bit long now & I know some of you need to get back to work(?) so I will tell you all about it later.

The end of an era

Its been a while since my last post but before I fill you all in I just need to give a massive thanks to my good friend, you know who you are, who yet again put himself out & this time it really was to save a life.  He is the brunt of most of our jokes (mostly coz he gives as good as he gets, better a lot of the time) but he helped me out of a bad situation.  Its not often us men are very genuine but I can say with all sincerity, Thanks you bender!  I will fill the rest of you in when I get there, now its recap time.

The ski season is over.  I skied for the 1^st time in my life & probably the last in May, I did just 1 run on the last day of the season.  The top half was amazing, true spring snow conditions, the mountain all to myself & a seasons worth of experience in my legs.  It was great.  If any of you are yet to experience spring snow its like the softest of powder days, you float through it like boarding on sugar, it’s the best.  The bottom half was quite the reverse, the sugar turned to slush, the mounds turned to mud & the dips turned to puddles.  There was a section where I had to speed over some mud, skim a slushy puddle & turn before the snow run out.  The run complete I joined the wife in a celebratory beer & reminisce of the season complete.

The last week in Val was spent almost entirely in a state of drunkenness  & 1 day with top 5 bad hangover.  On the Monday it was the wife’s birthday, so we packed up a picnic & set of to hunt for the elusive Marmot (which we shall all call the European Beaver from now on).  We went deep into the backcountry searching moist crevices & overgrown shrubbery & then there it was, the European Beaver poking out between 2 rocky lips looking all cute & like it needed a tickle.  The European Beaver satisfied we went out for, what was supposed to be a nice long meal & a sensible amount of drinks.  1 out of 2 aint bad!  After the meal we had to walk home as the buses had stopped running for the season.  I had to clear some of the lovely Italian wine from my body so we thought we might as well pop into Café Face & have a nightcap while we’re at it.  It was a very surreal experience, I’m not sure if it was the staff end of season party or what but there was only about 10 people in there & all of them were behind the bar out of there nut passing round a microphone MC-ing to the music.  We got told the drinks were on the house & was subsequently thrust 2 very big Bombay Gin’s & tonics (usually about €10 each).  They were doing roly-poly’s over the sofa’s, swapping T-shirts & generally acting every bit of drunk they clearly were.  We were in a different world to them & just couldn’t quite manage it so we carried on our Journey down to V-Spot where we proceeded to quickly leave our world behind.  The next day was our wedding anniversary & we intended to go round all the posh hotels & have a cocktail crawl, instead we went up the mountain to the Folie Douse for a very over priced & hungover lunch. 

The Wednesday was my works party.  As with the spirit of the season & the forward planning I came to expect from the job; at 9:45 I was asked if I could help out for the day & could I start at 10!  It was 1 of the best working days of my life.  I was paid to burn things & drink beer, 2 of my most favourite things in the whole world.  So by 10:30 & 2 pints down we had managed to get a raging fire, we dumped on the coals & the BBQ began.  The person I was supposed to be “helping” was swanning round on the pretence of taking photo’s so it was down to me to take all the money from the punters & give them the obligatory stamp.  It was disgraceful; some of the tramps even wanted me to stamp their thighs & chests!  We soon drunk the place dry of beer so I had to resort to the red wine.  The problem with that though was I was drinking it in pints & as fast.  I don’t know what time I made it home only that I didn’t make all the way upright.  The next day though, Oh My.  I wasn’t like death warmed up, I would of dreamed of feeling that good.  I didn’t think I was going to die or the world was going to end.   The world had ended, I had died & gone to hell then that had ended & the devil himself was released of doing evil every again as I was suffering for everybody’s past & future pain all in 1 day!  Then what made it 10 times worse?  I had to go to fucking work.   

For the next couple of days I hit the slopes getting in a bit of last minute boarding.  It even snowed when I was up on the glacier for the last time.  But all things must end & soon enough the packing was done, the car was loaded (only half as full for the return leg) & farewells were said.  It wasn’t sad leaving, we were ready to go but I don’t know.  There was so much good about it but unfortunately there was as much bad & it’s that, I suppose, that is just shame! 

The Final Count Down

With 1 week to go it’s looking likely that this will be our 1^st & last year as a seasonair.  There is so much good out here, as I have been banging on about for the past 5 months, but there is also a lot of bad.  It comes down to how much you enjoy the actual snow.  For me, I love it.  I love getting up the hill & challenging myself on the hardest runs in difficult conditions.  But in order to do it again next year I would have to work 6 days a week getting up at 5:30am & not finishing till 11 or 12 pm (granted there would be a substantial break in the middle of the day for boarding) during that time I would have to be cleaning others peoples shit, driving the little shits around, taking them out on to the mountain & putting up with there shit & dealing with all the shit that France throws at you, which is a fuck load.  I would get paid barely any money & it certainly wouldn’t help me in my future return to real life.  I love boarding, but do I love it that much?  Next year we’ll be out here but joining the ranks of tourists again.  As I sit here typing this over looking the amazing view of the Solaise & Bellvarde Mountains it does make me a bit sad, but (& it’s a big but) the truth is I would never get this view again without spending £320,000, instead we’d be in a tiny little bedroom covered in pine overlooking a car park with some brat of a child stomping its foot demanding Frosties for breakfast from its ignorant over indulging English parents who would be staying in our Chalet.

So what to do in the last week?  The snow is poor & getting worse.  I have forced myself out there a couple of times but its borderline torture.  The snow is bad here but there is still snow, the other surrounding resorts (including Plagne, Les Arcs & La Rosiere) are all but shut.  This means all the punters from those resorts end up here making it incredibly busy on top of the tricky conditions.  I just didn’t have the heart to stand in big queues to get to the top of a muddy slushy run, so I gave up after about 2 hours.  To get down though (I still refuse to get the cable car) I came down the black run of which I’ve mentioned before, the Face.  Its tough in good conditions but it was an ever-changing mix of ice, rocks, grass, slush & massive mounds of a combination of the lot.  I can safely say it was the hardest run I’ve ever had to do.  I got down it though without a single fall but my legs were on fire by the time I was drinking my celebratory beer at the bottom.

Without the snow the only thing left to do is drink.  Life is still good.

With the return to England on the horizon I’ve been thinking of the things I’ve been missing & therefore looking forward to most.  Obviously my family.  My parents are towards the end of building their dream house on the coast.  It wont only be great to see them but it’ll be great to see how the home is getting on & trying to help out with the stresses they are facing.  Also, to see my brother & the family.  We missed my little nephews 1^st birthday recently & it’ll be great to see him, hopefully he’ll be walking, then I’ll be able to trip him over! 

Getting out & having a few beers with the boys.   I’ve meet a few people here but nothing can replace the high level of bollocks we can speak when we’re 5 pints down surrounded by people who you have no reservations at all in calling a c*nt. & that understand how your twisted brain works   Bon times. 

Food.  France is famed for its cuisine but is all very samey here in the Savoyard.  I cant wait for a bacon sandwich, a proper curry & a Chinese.  More importantly some proper beer.  The beer here is either piss water or liquorice tasting 8% sludge.  Give me a proper larger or a pint of Guinness & I’ll be a happy boy.

Golf.  I haven’t played for 6 months now so I’ll be even more rubbish than usual but golf is a great way to get out & talk even more bollocks in the pretence of doing sport.  It’ll probably be raining but I’m getting on the course & hacking my way round as many times as I can convince people to come out with me.

And finally & somewhat surprisingly England.  One of the reasons we left was because we were fed up with the way the country is.  It might be a mess but it’s our mess & we understand it.  France is a difficult country to be in.  The language is ridiculous, the lifestyle is backwards & the bureaucracy is quit frankly laughable (or at least it would be if it did make you want to kill yourself then everyone around you).  Getting back to a place where most people are friendly & polite, where you can buy a drink or a meal or anything when you want, a place where supermarkets don’t close for 2 hours at lunch & a place where (as long as you avoid the students) the majority of people wash.

Sun, C and VAT.

Sorry about the lack of blogs, there is no excuse other than complete laziness.  There have been times as I’ve been slouched on the sofa or sunning myself on the balcony when I have been a bit bored & thought I should write you all an update but I just couldn’t be bothered.  You see its been scorchio here for the last couple of weeks.  It’s been up to 28 degrees in the village.  This isn’t just unusual, it has been, up until this season, completely unheard of.  You don’t need me to tell you that that sort of temperature is not helping the otherwise average snow conditions.  It has melted 40cm in 2 weeks.  All the snow in the village has disappeared, the runs into resort have receded to just leave a slushy white stripe in an otherwise brown muddy mountain & even high up the conditions are very poor.  I still give credit to the piste bashers for having any runs at all open.  Other resorts are down to just 2 or 3 high altitude runs or closed completely, here is still running at about 80%.  But what with all this heat & the poor conditions I have only boarded for about 8 hours in the last month & apathy has set in.  It’s a bit like when, all those thousands of years ago, we were on school summer holidays.  Haven’t really got anything to do but cant be bothered to do it.   We have been out & about visiting the nearby villages of Annecy & Chambrey.  The Chambrey visit was due to a giant of a friend of ours who managed to slice his finger open in spectacular fashion & we needed to take him to have surgery.  Bloody stupid basterd (typical 18 year old, well not quite typical but definitely stupid) he was making his lunch of Saussicon & the work top was dirty, instead of cleaning it like a normal human being he held the meat in his hand like a policeman’s truncheon &, using a serrated steak knife, attempted to saw it horizontally in the air.  Saussicon being the toughest of all sausages meant he had to give it some serious force.  It was only a matter of time till the inevitable happened & the knife slipped & sliced though his index finger so deep it was only his bone that stopped him slicing the whole thing off. Another 1 of his colleagues brought him some bandages but he still had to get on the public bus with his hand & arm covered in blood &, to stem the flow of blood to his hand, he had to hold it above his head making him look like some sort of ballerina of Death.  They gave him 4 stitches but referred him to surgery to repair all the tendon & nerve damage he has caused.  But Chambrey was quite nice, a medieval town & we’ve been to Annecy before which is a lovely town right on a big lake.  But France being France & their desire to make everything difficult we couldn’t drink when we wanted a drink or eat when we wanted to eat.  Tossers.  The outcome of it all though is that the big gay bear has to go home on Saturday, he’s really pleased to be going home but we’ll miss him.  Good luck big man.

Val D’Isere is a very big and internationally renown ski resort & as such quite a few celebrity’s come through town during the season.  I’ve already mentioned a few I met including Heston Blumenthal, Holy from Red Dwarf, Timmy Mallett & Nicky Clarke.  These are people who I have actually met (even the wife had her photo taken with Timmy) & made laugh with my amazing sense of humour?.  But since then I’ve got a couple more to add to my list & we even move out of the Z lister’s.  Whilst at work the other weekend 1 of the girls got a call from her husband & was told that a major movie star was in town & in the tourist information office, none of us believed him but as I was in a bit of a lull at work I thought I ought to check it out so I legged it the 150m to the tourist info office.  It was empty.  When I came out though I notice the shop next door was unusually busy so I thought I may as well, whilst I’m here, check it out.  As I marched a military pace (so as not to miss too much working time you understand) I rounded the corner and quite literally bumped into Arnnie.  Yep the superstar & governor of California Arnold Schwarzenegger was in town.  He looked great (all be it a bit old nowadays), massive barrel chest & an old beaten classic top-gun leather jacket on.  What was surprising was that he was about the same height as me.  I thought he was going to be at least 7 foot.  Anyway after a quick chat, a few beers discussing the various wars we’ve been in & a wrestle I had to get back to work.  But the celebrity spotting hadn’t finished for the day.  As I banged on about before, for my work we go to the best Chalets in resort & fit up the clients for ski’s & boots.  The poshest of the lot is a place called the Eagles Nest.  We got the heads up that a very famous Lady would be staying there but we wasn’t to make it common knowledge around town.  Even I had heard of this women, but as it turns out, not recognise.  There I was fitting about 6 well-behaved children (very rare for expensive chalets) and a few adults, I’m on to the very last person.  Everybody else had been fitted with no problems what so ever but we didn’t have the right boots for this final lady.  She was very polite & gracious about it and it wasn’t a major problem but bloody typical it was her.  The celebrity that we were told to keep as happy as possible & not disturb her anymore than was strictly necessary.  “Can I just take your name please, you know, for security purposes”  “oh yes” she replies, “its Stella.  Stella McCartney”.  The daughter of 1 of the most famous men that’s ever lived & the super successful fashion designer who I knew to be staying there but still didn’t recognise.  Anyway, we returned with the correct boots, sorted out her skis & left her to get on with her holiday.  Before this season started the most famous person I’d seen was Anton DuBeck from Strictly Come Dancing.  Now I’d met 2 megastars on the same day.  They didn’t give me any money though.  Tight arse’s.

Then reality came & bought me down with a crashing bump. I had a few text messages from my brother saying he’s about to have all his stuff repossessed unless I sort out my VAT bill.  After 5 months of lounging around & messing about in the snow with the biggest stress being what cocktails to get in 2-4-1 happy hour this was all a bit of a pisser.  So I rushed to open my emails to be confronted with an £11 grand bill that needed to be paid within 7 days.  FUUUUCK.  I had a flap, stressed around town a bit, shit myself then called the VAT office.  HM Customs & revenue, if a call centre wants to know how to improve their service they should call them.  Tax & VAT is wank, we all know that but that’s why I think they are so good, sort of camaraderie in the ranks and all that.  Granted they had fucked up & sent some very scary letters to my brother, but & this is the all-important thing, it was sorted out instantly & efficiently.  I am very rubbish with my tax & VAT returns & they have to talk me through them like some sort deranged ape so its probably to do with my uselessness that started of the problems but to receive a letter telling you your about to have all your things removed because someone else might not of paid a bill must be very scary.  Sorry Big brov, Sis in Law & Baby Nephew.  It turned out I had paid & they had neglected to remove me from the records when my company shut down.  A very bad few hours that though.

And finally.  The end of the dream.  After all those heroics, nail-biting performances & luck we are no longer going to win the Champions League.  I’m not disappointed, we over achieved, we did better than all the pundits thought we could & got further than Arsenal.  Well done mighty Spurs.  All you need to do now is win all the remaining prem games so we can do it again next season.

Back to basics

After the 1 & only comment I had on the last post I have reread some of my previous blogs & I think they have been too serious by far & we need to get back to talking about what makes us happy, that is Beer, boobs, Boarding & insulting the French.

1^st of all lets cover the ever beautiful, medicinal & fun inducing qualities of Booze.  Like back at home I try & have a mid week drink then a few over the weekend.  As I work the weekend I tend to have a few on Thursday/Friday.  But unlike at home I do have a beer with lunch or dinner almost everyday.  The past week was fairly typical.  Beer with lunch everyday then Tuesday night the wife & I polished off a couple of bottles of wine & few Gins.  I have been lucky lately & avoided hangovers, not this time though, a nagging head-of-doom all day.  I’m blaming the French wine, they cant even do that right.  Then Thursday night (St Patrick’s Day) we went out for a few.  Started of in the Lodge bar (our local) where we meet some of the wife’s colleague’s & a few of their clients (a bunch of lads with a very sad man trying to chat up the wife’s mate who is about 60 & looks it).  We then meet up with a few of my mates & hit the drink properly, as with at home everybody came back to ours & we polished off 2 bottles of Gin as well as the beer.  It was a very drunken & funny night that eventually ended at 4am (unfortunately no roads were closed during the evening).  I woke up about 11 & MY GOD what was going on with my head.  It was like the Val D’Isere bell tower had relocated inside it & the monks were trying to recapture there lost your & recreating some punk classics in there.  Dam.  We were heading over to Tignes to watch the X-games but I found out I had to go into work instead.  I didn’t want to do either; all I wanted to do is hide under a table with a crash helmet on & rock gently till the inevitable death came along.  But no, I missed the X-Games & had to go into work, not only that I was on my own for the 1^st time & I also had to drive the van!  It was the longest 2 hours of my life but I made it & I only run a few tourists over so that’s ok.

On next to the Boobs.  It was not the boobs that made this though.  On Sunday evenings, as part of my ski technician profession, we go round to the best Chalet’s in Val.  As mentioned before these are in excess of €35,000 per week & as we all know the rich managed to afford shallow girls who just so happen to have some redeeming features.  It doesn’t happen very often but last week we arrived at 1 of the better 1’s.  All the people were supper friendly & it was quit a pleasant fitting.  During the middle of it the people who had there own equipment came down to the boot room to unpack their ski gear.  This 1 particular women was very difficult to miss but being the professionals that we are we carried on without too much drooling.  She was stunning & in very tight see through clothing, she had just bought new ski boots (or her boyfriend had just treated her to) & she wanted me to fit them to her skis & could I check her boyfriends for him.  A little while later the boyfriend turned up.  My boss likened him to ‘an aging hippy’.  Which I think is a fair assessment of him.  An old man with long bleached hair covered in fake tan with numerous beads, necklaces & cross draped round his neck below an open shirt with 3 or 4 too many buttons un done.  As we drove away we both exuberantly lamented the wonders of this young bit of stuff & expressed our confusion of how the aged hippy come to be with her.   The following day we found out that the aged hippy was Nicky Clarke, the multi award winning celebrity hairdresser & she was his new girl friend, 22 years younger.  In the words of Mrs Merton ‘I wonder what she see’s in the multi millionaire Nicky Clarke’.

We’re here to board so I ought to mention what’s been going there.  I have more or less given up with the board park, I’m too old & too rubbish so I’ve been sticking to slopes & doing little tricks off the sides.  I’m pretty confident on any slope know & even blasted down the Face (a black run which is the steepest down hill run on the world cup circuit) the other day.  Pissed it.  But just 2 runs later, on a simple Blue run I had my biggest fall of the season so far.  I was just doing some gentle carving but & high speed after just shooting out the end of a wide gully.  I don’t know how I did it but I caught a front edge which flipped me forward onto my knees & face then tumbled for about 100m head over hills & spinning in all directions bashing ever single bone & muscle on my useless boarding body.  I managed to find my feet before the fall came to an end & made it down without any serious damage but I am still in pain.  It feels like I been stonewashed in a giant washing machine.

& Finally it comes to insulting the French.  I’ve all ready mentioned the X-games.  They came to Tignes from Wed to Friday last week & in the words of Ron Burgundy in ski terms ‘there kind of a big deal’.   We drove over on Wednesday afternoon so we could watch the final (finishes after the last lift to Val).  It was the Slope Style final 1^st.  The French in there infinite wisdom wouldn’t let spectators up the edges of the course so you had to watch from the very bottom.  But the French being French still weren’t completely satisfied with the view so they built a huge jump directly in front of the spectators so that it was the only thing of the course you could see, but as the course was running slower than usual none of the competitors had enough speed to even get up this let alone do any tricks of it.  The only thing we could see of this were the riders slowly limping over the side & down into the interviewing area.  Ridiculous, only in France.