Fear Of Falling Satellites

Fear Of Falling Satellites

Hello, you

A week from now and I go off air for as long as it takes me to walk to Nick's and use his computer. For I move house. Goodbye, broadband, until I sort it out in the new place, obviously. Like all of us here, I need my electronic drip. I generally say to myself, I'll spend an hour on myspace and then off to read challenging works of literature or watch high-brow French drama. So after four hours of googling anything that comes into my head, looking for free mp3 and sound recording software and listening to streaming BBC 7 I realise it's 1am and everyone has gone to bed. I won't be able to do that for a while.

And goodbye other things. Sky TV is one, although there is rarely anything to watch, and if there is it's generally stuffed to bursting wth adverts for car insurance or personal injury claims or cheap, affordable loans. If there's one thing the world needs more of, it's cheap personal loans. I also am looking forward to the cricket season, and that's all on Rupert-O-Vision as well. So I'll have to get hooked up, because everyone else I know with digital telly either loathes all sport or will be watching the World Cup. My minor cricketing pecadillo will be left behind, and good though The Guradian's over-by-over coverage is, it's not quite the same.

Goodbye to the cat and dog, and I will miss them. I normally have little time for animals. I don't dislike them, not at all, and I get quite exercised about needlessneglect, wanton cruelty or fox hunting. But I just don't feel the same fuzzy warmth and empathetic bond that some other people do. It used to make my last girlfriend very angry that I felt no need to feed the cute baby goats at petting zoos. She loved everything to do with them. I looked at the feed pellets, I looked at the goat, and felt precisely nothing. I know this makes me the baddie in any number of childrens films, and I am not proud of it at all. It's just the way I am, just like some people are gay or eat their earwax or vote Conservative. But I do like cats, as they are proof of re-incarnation. Well, who gets a cushier number than the domestic cat? Do fuck all but sleep and eat and get stroked for the best part of twenty years. These are clearly karmic remards, bestowed on those who dedicated their lives to the poor and disadvantaged, and as a reward from the Almighty, they get to be cats. QED. My cat used to be Ghandi.

Goodbye to the careless purchase of consumer goods. I have far more CDs than I need, more DVDs than I have time to watch, but still I buy them. I am a sucker for the "5 for 30" sales you get. I buy all five and then put them on a shelf to gather dust. I love music but I own several albums I have never listened to a note of. I will even load them onto my iPod and then skip the tracks when they come up. I may as well be smashing Faberge eggs in the faces of the poor. Well, no more. I will have to pay for council tax and rent and water instead. Goodbye excess income.

But it's not all bad. It's goodbye to having to drive 15 miles to see my friends. Now I know to all my American readers (hello, you two) that's franky no distance at all, and I have absoultely nothing to be complaining about. Very true. And 30 minutes in the car is hardly the very worst thing that can happen to a man. But I am sick of it. I generally ply the way between Market Harborough and Leicester six times a week, quite often seven. I do not drive to work but refuse to use the train for travel on my own time. It's my time, and I don't want to do what I do every working day again at the weekends. So I get into my hateful, whinnet-ridden car and creak along up the wanker-infested and ever clogged A6 to see where my life is kept. As of Frday, no more, and I will catch the train again with a light heart, knowing I am doing it for nothing but leisure.

And so it follows that it is goodbye to giving 110 of my pounds to Midland Mainline every month for the privilege of a bit of floor to sit on on their crappy trains in the morning. The very thing I want after getting up and all that bollocks is to have to sit on the floor in the wheelchair alcove. But then, they must need the four coaches of first class with no-one in them for some reason. Bah, I say. They tempt us on with offers of free tea and comfy seats, promises of convenience and endless ease, but it's all smoke and mirrors. They can't even provide enough seats and room for more than one bike. I would give them 1320 a year, and there are about forty people at my station alone in the morning. Midland Mainline is owned by the National Express group, who last year made 215,000,000 profit.

Lastly, it's goodbye to Mum and Dad, who have taken me back in for the last six months after my life so spectacularly fell apart over one week in September last year. They have let me come and go as I please and not tell them anything, but still left me dinner in the oven. They have listened to me moan, whinge, shout and cry. I have, in short, been a nightmare. And they have asked nothing in return except some money for board and that I occasionally walk the dog. I hope one day to be properly able to tell them quite how much it has meant to me.

Just another week...

Good night, and good luck
Doug

The Second Great Train Chase

Time then to tell you all a story. Oh, I know you are dying to hear my opinions on the new Labour Party Political Broadcast with the cycling chameleon that is supposed to be David "Dave" Cameron, or the story of whar really went on at the gala viewing of Doctor Who on Saturday, but if you have read my page before, you can probably guess, i.e not much and nothing.

It is the summer of 1999. I am midway through an Interrailing adventure wth my friend Guy. We had been inspired by the events of the previous summer (there were none) to get out of Harborough as far as we could. To that end we had bought Interrail tickets and spent the whole of the following year planning our route around Europe. Emails passed regularly between me in Leicester and Guy in Lincoln. Our agreed itinerary - Copenhagen, Hamburg, Berlin, Dresden (to visit my friend Jana), Prague, Vienna, Rome, Barcelona, Paris, Bayeux, Brussels, Amsterdam and home. An ambitious 4000 miles, in a hectic four weeks. But me and Guy are good mates, we'll be fine. We were 20, crazy and out for adventure.

It is now three weeks in. Having abandoned our plans as early as Denmark (we heard that Berlin was full and so went to... Hannover, I have no idea why now) we had argued our way across the continent as far as Paris. I had just realised I had left my wallet in Bayeux and begged a hundred quid off Guy, who in Rome I had come as near to punching as I ever have anyone. So we were not in the best of moods when we pulled in to the Gare D'Austerlitz, only to find that the metro line we wanted was closed. We had thirty minutes to get our connecting train to Brussels, or pay a fine. Bollocks. In response to our new-found problems, I immediately lost my passport.

Having found it by having a saintly man in a Liverpool FC shirt follow me down the street as I panicked blindly, and who walked off without taking a word of thanks, we found the replacement bus. This took ten minutes as RATP decided that the one thing the replacement bus didn't need was a sign telling us where it was going. We boarded the third bus that came past as the first two had been closed for some reason. The bus took off, and a voice said "Prochaine arret, Gare du Lyon" This was entirely the wrong direction. We got off at the next metro stop, crossed the road and boarded the third bus that came along, the first two having been closed for some reason.

Fifteen minutes, and we were back where we started. Back on the bus to the right place, a gloomy silence descended. Where the fuck is the Gare du Nord? Suddenly, through the insane Parisian traffic, a huge building loomed. We got off. A stop too early. Eight minutes. Bollocks. Again.

Then, a miracle. We were at the right station, just the wrong end. A gate marked "Gare du Nord" revelaed a length of railway track and in the distance, buildings and trains. Perhaps we would make it. The July sun beat down on us. We had been up since 4am; I have a photo of the clock at Bayeux train station saying 0455, a time I was hitherto unaware was possible. I really, really wanted a wee. Our mind wordlessly made up, we ran.

I can confidently say I have never been so uncomfortable. My backpack was pulling my arms off, my boots were rubbing the skin on my ankles through to the bone, my moneybelt was cutting off the blood to my leg. I had sunburn on my neck, arms and shoulders. And you have no idea how far it is from the back maintainence gate of the Gare du Nord to the ticket office. We had to walk up the far end of the furthest platform, over the ticket barrier for the suburban trains and thence to the Grande Lignes terminal. It was about a mile, and every inch was agony. We did it in eight minutes exactly, and watched our train leave from the comfort of the wrong side of the turnstile before Guy fell over. I leant on the counter of the suburban line ticket office and put my head in my hands, which slipped on the perspiration I had worked up running into the staton, and landed heavily against the ticket window, leaving a trail of blood, sweat and tears.

After a while spent laying in silence on one of the busiest railway concourses in the world, we walked to the ticket office to see how much the TGV supplement was for the train to Brussels that was due to leave an hour from then. It was twenty francs. Two pounds. Guy and I looked at each other for a long, long moment.

Good night, and good luck
Doug

John Simm

And a big hello to you all.

I was stood reading the magazines in WHSmiths today, and picked up Empire. It seems a lot of bad films are heading our way - Basic Instinct 2 and Failure To Launch are already with us, but more's to come. Marvellously, one is a film called Snakes On A Plane. The story is that the Mafia are after a grass, and have decided to have him rubbed out. So, rather than concrete shoes, concrete overcoat or concrete, I dunno, gloves or something, they decide to... put him on a plane and release 10,000 poisous snakes in mid air, killing everyone and handily incinerating the evidence in the resulting crash. It saves having to explain 10,000 dead snakes, for a start. Those would be some awkward questions. This is the best comedy idea I've heard in ages. I would think that snakes are a bit inefficient, perhaps lions would do a better job. But what's best is that Samuel L Jackson insisted on keeping the working title of the film, lest he walk off the set. Hence Snakes On A Plane. Star power.

My own life continues in a much more ordinary vein. Today for work I took the bus to Ratby, one of Leicester's fine suburbs. And it was there, amongst the bungalows and double garages (it's that kind of suburb) I saw, in someone's front garden, a lovingly restored Gilbert Scott red phone box. This is a very English thing to do. This was bourne out by the experience of my friends James and Louise who live in Streatham Hll, South London. When the last of the London Routemaster buses was taken out of regular service on their local route 159 from Streatham Hill to Marble Arch , South London was full of misty-eyed types waxing nostalgic about lost days and the soullessness of now. So full, in fact, that the people who actually had to use the bloody things every day (who were overjoyed to be rid of them in favour of buses with enough room that were warm, didn't leak and didn't shake fillings from their sockets) couldn't get on them and so were late for work. The big banner on the front of the Lambeth Disabled Action Group building saying "Good Riddance Routemaster" was apparently missing the point, being not a statement regret and sadness at the passing of one of Lodon's icons, but of the joy the disabled have at finally seeing the back of buses they couldn't get on at all. We can now travel from Streatham Hill to Marble Arch in comfort and even some style (save for the ever present man having an argument with himself or girl having a loud mobile phone argument with her boyfriend). I admit, the Routemasters had charm, and jumping on or off one that was moving always felt very cool. But charming means decrepit in estate agent speak. Telling.

Ths may matter if we are still alive tomorrow. The BBC have announced that there is H5N1 bird flu in one dead swan in a village miles from anywhere, in the north of Scotland. So we should all be toes up by teatime Friday. It must be true, the BBC said so. This is annoying, partly because I am moving on the 28th, but also just because it is. One dead bird does not an epidemic make. And hearing that bird flu is endemic in China does not fill us with confidence, because endemic sounds like epidemic. Does that mean epidemic? It means endemic. But does that mean epidemic? Well, that's what it sounds like it means. Plus you can't use the words "bird flu" without using the word "deadly" in front of them. That means that it's invarably fatal and you can catch it from looking at a picture of a chicken. There was a piece on East midlands Today about how this may afftec Lincolnshire's poultry farmers. The last time I looked, Lincolnshire was 500 miles from Loch Fyne, so better stay indoors and try not to breathe too much. Mind that duck.

One day we will have context on the news, and so between stories about England and Wales having the highest rate of people in prison in Western Europe and current rates of taxation being the highest since World War Two we will hear that the rate in the US is four times higher than ours, and at 39 percent of GDP our overall rate of tax is in fact lower than everywhere in the EU except Ireland, Cyprus and Malta. We might also hear that out of 100 people who got H5N1 in China, seventy survived and those who did sadly die lived in mud huts in the middle of nowhere with chickens in their beds, unlike the entire poluation of Europe, say. I didn't hear this on the news, though. I had to look. I am very dull when the moment takes me.

I am, then, an informed person. Konwledge is power. I am as a God these days, thanks to Google and Wikipedia. Just one thing eludes me I need to know is the identity of the woman in the new Nivea ads, exhorting us to "Accessorise your Underarms". Who is she? How must it feel to know that a fair percentagre of everyone has seen your armipts? Do her friends now call her "The armpit lady"? We must be told.

Good night, and good luck
Doug