Sunday afternoon again. The customers are back to good spirits. Had a loud happy birthday party in the pub last night. Some guy I think works in construction. Spilt Sambuca on one of the tables and set it on fire, sort of rippling blue flame. Usually I'd get pissed and kick people out for setting the furniture on fire. I wasn't in the mood and it didn't seem to be doing any damage to the surface. And I have a fire extinguisher handy if I need.

The thought of turning a fire extinguisher on a crowd of drunken young men set alight with blue flames, hozing them into awkward flailing snowmen in a hissing torrent of white powder appeals to me. Gives me an evil grin of an inner smile. Perhaps I shouldn't tempt fate.

There was some live music at the pub next door last night, some sunshine today, people are in a better mood. I think cigarettes also have something to do with it. People have either quit or gotten over their New Years resolutions. People on nicotine withdrawal resonate bad energy, just humming with it. Little black holes of irritability and internal conflict. Any room with that is an unhappy room, and no ammount of feng shui will fix it. But that's past and the bar's happy again now.

In my (smug) opinion quitting smoking's all about imagination. And hamsters. It's like if you tell someone an idea you have and they don't like it, they got this hamster on a little wheel in their head. If you ask them 'Yo, what's wrong with it?' Their hamster starts running around on it's wheel and *ping* they come up with some valid criticism of your idea, some reason they've come up with because they were asked to.

Simmilarly, if you ask something like, 'How would you fix that?' or 'What else would it be good for then?' Off goes the hamster. *ping* Suddenly you've got a solution to your problem or some other useful bit of thought. You've just gotten free use of their idea hamster.

It's the same with smoking. You decide you want to quit, like suddenly and cold turkey, you have this urge to smke, so you're thinking about it, and your hamster is turning like crazy, becuase you're subconciously asking if you can have a smoke and why not. And the hamster is coming up with these 'reasons' you might be able to have one, and how nice it might be, and you're going to fail because of this.

Being in a bar, around people smoking, with alcohol making your cravings worse and eroding your will, doesn't help. You fail, and then feel bad, and you've spent however long feeling crap and taking it out on everyone around you. Waste of time IMO. I did that several times, failed, felt hopeless and without will.

And then one day I just stopped. I'd been thinking a lot about how much damage I was doing to myself, and probably losing the years I should be kicking back and enjoying my life's work. And it occured to me how bummed my family would be if I died a horrible death of lung cancer. Dwelt on that for awhile. Then the next time I moved to light up I just looked at the thing and decided I didn't want it. My imagination was working for me. So, after five years, that was it. I still have one very occasionally, and I can because I know I don't want one.

So that's what you've got to do, get the hamster on your side, using your emotions in a useful way. If you know you can have a cigarette anytime you like, and you just don't want one, don't feel like it, then it's easy not to. Also, if you do have a cigarette, don't enjoy it much, then you haven't failed at anything, you're just having a smoke like you do every day, and it's no big deal. Also, you start to reinforce your emotional response to smoking, giving it some momentum so you'll feel even less like having one next time.

I should try find more application for this. I bet there's a bunch of stuff this technique would be useful for. Me, I could use more motivation sometimes. And I bet once I've got that I can think of a way to harness other peoples creativity in fun ways. Sounds like something that might have value in the 'people skills' department. hmmmm.... *ping*

Hello World. There is another beautiful night outside, just saw the moon set, went all red as it got to the horizon. Orion was very bight, I'm still not used to how it looks from the northern hemisphere, even after two years this side of the equator. Strange to think the sky is something I see every day and can still do a double take and realise it's wrong. Kinda. Anyway, for all you people who don't go stalking about the middle of nowhere alone in the small hours, I recommend it. It's peaceful, helps me put things in perspective.

Also nice to have some rugged coastline to go walking on in a place that's safe at night. I'm still very happy I came to Alderney, all through summer the locals were warning me I'd change my mind in the winter. It's bull, winter's great. Completely different atmosphere on the island, much more rural. It's cold and it rains. I like it. The strongest winds we've had so far gusted at over 65mph. That's hurricane force. The weather's just not as interesting inland. And I like rain. Water is life.


I'm coming to like the people here better as well. Could just be the end of culture shock or something. I haven't made as much time as I could for people the last few years, time I made more of my social life I think. I have a very social job so I tend to keep my own company when I have free time. I have have many excellent friends off the island, mostly form home and university, I should I should work on some friendships here. I meet plenty of very cool people across the bar, think I might have myself a house warming or something and invite a subset of like minded younger people.

In other news, still very busy, as I like to be. Things are working out and carrying on. Traffic to this here site is picking up, and I'm finally indexed by google. I've been on some of the ther search engines for awhile, now I have a top 3 raking for a couple of my keywords, and top 10 on a few others. Given the the huge complex subject that is page ranking, I'm very happy, it's exceeded my hopes for it. Quick trivia contest: A noddy badge via first class mail to the first three people who identify the keywords for my top 3 result on google. :-) [start with 'stream']

I've got two new projects in the offing, one I'm fairly sure will make a modest ammount of money and one I'm tentatively hoping will make a very small ammount to start with. If it works and breaks even I will be very excited. I've been writing software for the better part of my life now, I think of it as making machines to make things. Systems to take inputs and create something you want, business cards, financial reports, inputs for other software, all sorts. Now I want to make software that can produce money. That is the output I want from the program I'm writing, real dollar transactions, that I can invest or withdraw as cash.

The beauty of what I have in mind is that computers can do things so very quickly. Thay can complete complex tasks with thousands of calculations in a tiny fraction of a second. So if I can come up with something a computer can do that results in money being made, less than a cent on average, even negaitve ammounts some of the time, the process can hopefully be run again and again, very fast, indefinately, which is where the possibility of large sums of money being generated becomes real. Not a daydream or 'one day'. Real, like I've seen done. I know other people have done simmilar things in various areas online, I owe it to myself to do the same, and succeeed.

It's a fairly ambitious project, and I'd hoped to be finished it long before now. When it first started the projct was a lot different in how it would work. It's become apparent a couple times that what I was doing wasn't going to work, or had been done before. Good ideas that failed because of something I didn't figure on to start with. Which is good, the more I fail with my best shot the further along I am on this particular learning curve. And I'm sincerely optimistic for the medium term future. Of course that has been the case many times before, so what?

My goal for the other project is to take me home. I haven't been back to Zimbabwe since... years. So I'm starting an eBay store, I have a source of stuff to sell so the real challenge will be running it efficiently, so it performs with minimal effort. I have about enough money to make the trip I have in mind, but travelling tends to eat all my capital, so I want another source of revenue specifically for that.

Sometimes when I'm working the bar and it's quiet I'll get a guy who wants to tell me his troubles, and these are very practical cautionary tales. Mostly they involve a woman, some children and debt. So many people spend their whole working lives making payments on debt for stuff they can't back out of because of responsibility to other people. They find their whole life worked away. Which is why I want money to invest. If I can have can have money coming to me from investment instead of away from me into a morgtgage or credit cards or whatever my life will be so much richer in other ways. Free, even. I should mention, my parents have been excellent role models in this. Rather rent a caravan than mortgage a house.

So I should save more. And that's my plan for the year. To make an online entity make money. Also to develop my social life and visit home sometime around May. And on that note, I have a lot to do :-)

Yeah Baby! 2005. I am so stoked about it. December was a little grey for me, some shitty stuff happened in December, or at least I thought it was shitty at the time. And I turned 24. Wasn't looking forward to that, didn't feel I've achived all I wanted to by this point in my life. To the way I think, 23 is still like being a teenager, one can be still exploring the world and yourself, carefree and living. Just living, doing stuff and enjoying it, still dreaming about 'adult' life. Life after 23. Career and crushing responsibility and mortgages and all that stuff. Getting a receding hairline. Writing a will. Damn.

So yeah. I was thinking in terms of a lot of negatives about age. And that's pretty dumb, but I was. Thinking about it, most of the people I know on this island who I find cool and interesting and enjoy spending time with - just for the sake of it - are a fair bit older than me. People who are still living and full of energy and keen to try new things. People with stories, because they've tried lots and lots of new things.

I still had a some negative self image things going on, a feeling of loss like I couldn't be a kid anymore. Sounds dumb when I read it written down, still one has got to acknowledge these things to work them out. And I think I've worked out what it is. In my life and the last two years of working bars I have spent time with so many half dead people. Old folks who can bash my ear for an hour while I nod my head and go ''mmm... yes... really....'' They'll be talking about some dog that the owners of the pub, 14 years and three landlords ago, used to have. Or about how they cant get used to new measurements (the currency changed in 1972 - 8 years before I was born - from old pounds to new pounds, some old folks dont like the new ones). Something very unimportant compared to the scale of a human life. People who will not talk positively about anything contemporary, especially if it's in the news. They want to tell you about how things should (ie, used to) be.

And then it happens. They notice I have an accent and then ask where I'm from. And I say 'Harare'. And then tell them it's in Zimbabwe. ''Oh, Rhodesia!'' they say, brightening up. Because I am a Young-Person, and I have A-Lot-To-Learn, and they now want to share their wisdom with me about what a mess 'the blacks' have made in 'Rhodesia' and how wonderful it used to be (under the apartheid of the Smith regime). Because as a young person, with such a lot lot to learn, I obviously know nothing about my own country, to which he's never been. And something I really hate, as an African, is racism. People putting down my african friends and countrymen in my presence is not cool.

I could say something sharp. There's no point, it won't do any good. So I just clench my toes and carry on with the head nodding. There's no reason to assert myself against a person like this, to try and change their view of the world. They're too scared of it. Changeing to them would mean letting go of the past. A person like this is intimidated by the timer on their VCR. That to me is what old means. To not want to change. To fall off the horse and not keep getting back on.

I am very, very afraid of getting old. The thought terrifies me.

And that's where I had it wrong. I'm never going to get old. I won't let myself. Sure, my body will age, time will pass, and that's fine. Because I will never give up wanting to live. I know that with a certainty. I think that people who let themselves be old, never had that desire to start with. They're bitter about life carrying on without them after they gave up on it. Which is why they won't say anything nice about the present, and are enthusiastic about the past, non-commital about the future.

I'm always going to want to change myself. To keep ahead of the times. And I have some great role models to spend time with. I know some excellent senior citizens who are younger than I am. People who will still rush off to Amsterdam to check out an art expo and smoke some weed. And boy do they have excellent stories. And in all the time they've spent, doing all this cool stuff and growing as people, they've learnt a lot about life the universe and everything, and I want to hear about it from them. They're not alone in a bar, talking at some bored foreign guy. They're out, living. And when that takes them to my bar, I want to talk to them.

These people don't say 'If I knew at your age...' or 'Back in my time...'. Because they don't have regrets, they learnt from their mistakes and the crap they were served, gained from it, and kept on living. And they're still doing it now, and the present is still 'their time'. And that's how I want to be :-). It's going to be pretty cool to have all those great memories to look back on, and all the stuff I think about more worked out.

And I can wait. There's going to be a lot I want to do between now and then. And I am really looking forward to it. It's going to be awesome. Starting............ Now. :-)

Force 11 gale windy, strong enough to tip shipping containers over. Wrecked a couple yachts and closed the harbour. The sea's huge, rolling into the island and exploding over the breakwater. Magnificent. I enjoy big weather :-)

And hey! It's xmas. A time of buying stuff and having to listen to that creepy perv Tom Jones sing about how crap the weather is. And doubtless there'll be another crappy xmas movie aimed at 'family' audiences. Probably it will be about St Nick having some dumbass problem and needing the help of some cutesy American kid, or some BS like that. Oh well. You know which xmas movie I'd like them to make so I can watch it? Alien Vs Santa Claus. Rated R18, now that would be cool. How about it Hollywood?

Somewhere the Salvation Army is rallying. I think a key part of army's identity is the music it marches to. It sets up personal and group boundary and security things. It's like drinking songs. An anthropologist writing this would probably have stuff to say about territoriality and tribal bonding rituals and stuff. Every army has a sound: bagpipes to chimurenga songs played on african instruments, it defines them. And I think that singing christmas carols is the reason why the Salvation Army will never take over the world.

So, I guess I'd better go buy some stuff, huh?

Today I bought myself a super-soaker. A big flourescent orange and purple water gun. Because they're stylish and sexy, and I look like a brute hunk of man walking through town with it. Actually, it's because of a nasty hairy turd that spends the day barking itself retarded outside my front door. I'm very fond of my flat, it's great and I've put a lot of work into fixing it up, I don't want to move. The catch to living here is this shitty idiot animal my elderly landlady dotes over. She actually calles her house the [dog's name] house.

I've tried to explain politely that I work nights and need to sleep at least some of the day, and ask her not to let the thing out the second she gets up and about (5am), but it's hard to explain anything when she's absorbed in cooing at the thing. What makes old people talk to animals anyway? She's otherwise sane and has plenty of friends. The animal is widely hated, several neighbours and aquaintances have offered to help me mete it with an 'accident', but I'm just not arsehole enough to upset the owner. She's like 90 years old.

Anyways, I did some reading on animal psychology online and it turns out that when not caused by painful rectal mites, endless barking is caused by dogs being stressed or bored. In either case, dogs seek attention or resassurance from people, so hollerin' at them is only going to make the problem worse. It's not effective negative reinforcement. Repeated electric shocks and exposing dogs to citronella - a smell dogs don't like - does tend to solve the problem. Not real practical for me though.

A better recommendation was to throw a can of water in the face of a barking dog, like across a fence, or to use a pressure hose. Apparently, it's important to approach the dog calmly and quietly, to simply be around it friendly like - right until it barks for the first time. Then as it does, throw the water in its face, same time as yelling at it. That way the dog comes to know 'Quiet!' means 'shut the hell up' ratherthan 'I'm paying attention to you'.

My hallway's carpeted, so I can't use a bucket of water, hopefully shooting water up the thing's nose will be coersion enough. Oh well. If I had enough time, I'd go sit on the beach and read a book. If I had spare time after that I'd make a violent computer game called 'Poodle Hunter'. As it is I have stuff to do.

I've put the stream ripper on hold for awhile. When I get into crazed-enthusiasm-for-programming mode everything tends to get put on hold, I barely eat or sleep and drag myself to work by force of will, much as I like my job. So after the last week stuff like housework is backing up on me, think I might take today to set it right. I always feel that it's time wasted. I can spend six hours doing a week's ironing and then my afternoon's gone, nothing achieved. All this ironing and tidying is just vanity anyway, clothes are exactly as warm and practical unironed. But I can't go work dishevelled, and I guess I do care if people think I'm a slob, so I iron. I know I shouldn't care and nor should anyone else, but hey.

The island's electricity comes from antique and roaring diesel generators, the waveform of their output has been decribed as 'a row of bloody christmas trees', as opposed to a smooth sine wave. This puts a lot of stress on the cheapo AC to DC power supplies of small consumer electronics (switchmodes like on a PC seem to do OK). These power supplies wear out relatively quickly and then blow their internal fuses like they're supposed to, so that the power unit can be replaced without damaging the rest of the device. Only not everyone knows this so I see a lot of VCRs and Sky boxes at the tip, I have a couple I found there with perfectly good mechanisms and circuitry that just want standardized power units swapped in.

What has this to do with ironing? Well, I don't usually watch TV, I don't keep one in my home because I don't have the time to watch one and because terrestrial stations in the UK are dire. BBC and ITV broadcast the most incredible parade of crap and sports, focused around terrible British soap operas and football matches, in between the same baby product and homeloan commercials day in and day out. Soul sucking stuff. Come 2am, however, the lowest common denominator is asleep and they broadcast some quality programs, documentaries that are actually fresh and interesting and some adult education material, open university, et al. I think the government makes them do this.

In any case I think I might fix a VCR and record some 2-5am broadcasting, then hitch the VCR to my computer with a tuner card - which I also found at the Impot, amazing what people throw away - and see if I can't feed my mind a little while I get on with this ironing lark.

Oh well, best get on with it. And I've downloaded some new Evanescence music videos to watch. And there's an annoying sound biting at my concentration. Time to go water the dog again...

Whoo! Finally got my stream ripper working :-) Downloaded myself a copy of Linkin Park's 'Breaking the Habit' as proof. Excellent music video, gritty CGI anime, compliments the track perfectly. Probably the best music video I've seen this year. One of the things I like best about Japanse animation is the way good anime and mangas have such cool symbolism. This one has lots of gears and spinning circles (continuity?), gasses, pulsing fluids, steam, mists, haze, bubbles (breath/life?).

I'm not an expert on anime or Japanese icon, and this won't be everyone's mug of beans but it's an excellent piece of art in an authentic style. And a very motivational song. Go see it.

Otherwise, its been a good week. The weather's been lovely so I took some time off to go climbing last Tuesday and Wednesday. Alderney's directly in the way of massive tidal movements between the English Channel and the Bay of Biscay, the whole sea's always moving in one direction or the other against the island. This makes for some very powerful currents in the narrow stretch of water between here and France.

So, how the island disposes of it's trash is to incinerate what it can and then push the ash and what's left over a cliff into the rough, racing water of the Swinge. Around the neap tide this water can go way, way down, exposing a rocky wash.

One of my regulars once told me about how his father used to collect old coins and medals from this beach under the impot (municipal facility). So that's what I went to go see. You'd think it would be foul, with all the crap they push off the cliff from the tip, but it isn't. The tide tears away all but heavy pieces of metal and ceramic. It's actually really cool, it's like a pebble beach but with lumps of metal worn smooth by the sea. Brass goes orange, copper goes pink or dark green, aluminium weathers into smooth pieces and steel rusts into dark, pitted forms, sometimes black, sometimes orange with rust. Bits of very stained stainless steel. Drifts of little opaque sanded glass pebbles.

There's supposed to be a band on this wash where the physics of it all are right for small pieces of metal to accumulate, where it's good for coins etc. The water wasn't far enough out when I went there, but I did see some neat things. I'm always astonished at school art classes giving kids fake-o stuff like plastic glitter and white copy paper to be creative with when such beautiful materials are quite literally being bulldozed into the sea. Vivid things, like when pyrex goes irridescent from being battered by rocks. But then I'm a charcoal on brown cardboard sort of guy more than a crayon on white paper sort of guy.

Anyhoo, what I did get down there was a brass boule and a length of thin copper tubing that had been rolled into a tight ball. Both now live in my fruit bowl. The climb down took about an 45 minutes, the cliff's steep but chunky so it's easy climbing. Getting to the face involved a lot of blackberries, just coming into fruit this time of year. The trick to moving through blackberries - without ending up like that creature from Event Horizon - is not to be in a hurry. For safety I would have preferred to have someone climbing with me, but as it was I had to make to with someone at the impot knowing where I was. From the bottom I could see a much easier way up, so getting back only took about fifteen minutes. It's always easier to go up then down.

Other than that, mostly uneventful. Spent three days and nights fairly solidly wrestling with this stream ripper, I can get a little carried away with things like that sometimes. In the end I didn't use RTSP/RTP but went with using MMS framed streams over HTTP, turned out better for what I'm doing. So it's working, but it's not a finished product yet.

There is the most beautiful night outside. I finished work at about 12 and took some food out onto the sea cliffs at the end of my road. You can see for miles from the top of the cliffs. The moon's not quite full but it's bright, and shining through high, wispy clouds. There's a warm breeze blowing in and the sea's flat calm. On my left there's a slight front on the horizon following the French coast, with some low nimbus over Cherbourg, glowing orange on the underneath from the lights of the city. There's rows of orange lights all along the coast, odd little towns and lighthouses. On my right I can see the lights of Jersey. Straight ahead is the Bay of Biscay reflecting the moon. Awesome.

The sky here is one of the best things about Alderney. On England the horizons were close and the sky is small and dirty, the stars faint from light pollution. I missed it. My end of Alderney is a plateau above the sea, the sky is huge, and it's often clean, so the stars are brighter, or if it's a bit dirty it makes for red sunsets.

Otherwise, today's been uneventful. Spent most of it struggling with the an RFC, trying to implement the RTSP (real time streaming protocol) in PHP to make a stream ripper. I've been taking an interest in launch.yahoo.com recently, specifically it's regional versions. I might publish what I've worked out about it so far, and some tools I've made in dissecting it. Will hold doing that while I ponder how much poo that could land me in, if any.

Went to work, pleasant enough. A bunch of mainland girls came in dressed as cowgirls. Took some photos and assured me at length that one of their number didn't have genital warts. Good to know I suppose, maybe that's like the mating call of the Midlands or something. A wedding came in, pub crawling. Happy bunch, no one I knew. Folks here seem to celebrate everything with a pub crawl across St Anne. Finished at a marquee on the Butes.

A pleasant end to an unevetful week. Didn't get as much done as I'd like. Finally got carpets laid in my place. Built a database of proxy servers and some scripts to feed and use it. There's a website on owls (genus strix :-) ) I've used to test it which must be wondering why all those hundreds of Argentinians are visting recently *grin*. I think it's cool how stuff like google text ads translate themselves to other languages when you surf out of foreign servers. So that at least is done. Also finally got round to servicing some monitors, got a pair of 17 inch ones now for my box, lookin' sweet, and I put in another 20GB drive for a project I have in mind.

Got myself a copy of Candice Alley's music video 'Hello'. Been watching it all day. That girl has the most incredibly green eyes. Hello. Also got myself a packet analyser, if I've time tomorrow I'll use it to watch some RTSP transactions. I'm a big boy now, I should be able to work this fiddly thing out. But not tonight. It's 2am and I'm going to bed. Bye.

I have been way too preoccupied recently to know what's going on in the world. So today I had a good long gawp at a newspaper stand. Jaw open and all. Nothing much really, a bunch of moron interest stories and some drivel about TV soaps and sports. Consumer media. The Google IPO seems to be going ahead, which I'm as excited about as anyone: excellent news for Tech, but I already knew about that.

Then a headline struck me. Apparently the A Level results are out and 96% were passes. I find this disturbing. If employers know that any NAAFI cretin can pass A Levels then mine aren't any good to me, they don't set me apart. I put two years into getting them and the learning was good, but I'd hope they have more value. Bummer. Maybe I should take a half dozen more, learn some eclectic subjects maybe. Hmmm....

I've seen this years crop of A Level candidates. There are some gems amongst them, but I wouldn't describe 96% of them as academic. In fact, some of them couldn't tell their own ass from a textbook. 'Me is well pleased wiv me A's, they is all passes!'. Dammit.

Oh well, maybe by the time I next see the newspaper stand it will have rained hedgehogs somewhere or something.

Boy do I ever have a lot of crap to do. There's movies I got on the mainland 3 months ago that have been staring at me since then and I haven't watched. I get a lot done, take on more instead of enjoying being finished and up to date with everything.

So, I have a mountain of ironing casting a great looming shadow over my laundry room, bits of carpentry to finish, electonics to service, drivers to find... some things never manage to make it into the list of stuff I have enough time for any particular day.

I wish days were 72 hours long and I could sleep for 3 of them, put in a full day at work and then still have time to get through everything I've been meaning to.

And I haven't typed up all of my travel journal yet. Or got the photos developed. I haven't written to most of my friends in a longass time. My site's still pretty rough.

So tomorrow I am going to stop. I'm not going to spend my day rushing around doing things. I'm not going to make a list. I know I have cabling that urgently needs attention. I know the sooner I sort my personal logistics out with the shipping company the happer I'll be about it. I know I really ought to find and read the terms and conditions for my broadband subscription, find discrepancies with local laws here, and then harangue someone at my ISP about it.

Instead, I'm going to sit on my ass. I might make a script for CONNECT proxies, I've wanted one forever. And I might tidy my site. I'll email some people. Maybe learn to make burritos. That would be cool, knowing how to make burritos. Burritos it is :-)

It's 3:30 in the morning and I'm in Pisa. Italy's stunning but I think I might make this a quick trip. Trains and stations in Italy are skanky and I don't feel safe. I really ought to see the tower and I'm sure I will. One day. As for now I've just spent four hours eyeing some shady lurker eyeing my backpack and I'd rather have been sleeping.

About 20 minutes into the journey a conductor came around with pieces of recovered stolen property. Short while after that I had the privilege of watching Italy's finest run some unfortunate loser down.

They paraded the guy up and down the train for awhile along with some luggage. Presumably to allow the public to venture information or something. An official looking person came by and sternly told me something just after that. I don't speak any Italian so I've no idea what.

Last thing I need now is to be subpoena'd as a witness or whatever so I just shut up. None of the 'Speak-English-?-Parlez-vous-Francais?' routine. Other than that the trip was uneventful. Spent it looking out into a windy night of docks and industrial parks. This shady guy in my compartment made it all uncomfortable.

First thing he did is come sit right by me asking (in English) personal questions about me and my journey. I lied, tersely. I really hate to lie to anyone but there's such a thing as common sense. Also I especially hate the smell of spearmint gum and he was chewing it noisily in my face. In short, very glad to be off that train.

I spent yesterday cooking in Nice (it's groovy). I'd love to get to Florence right now, to a hot shower and a chance to do some laundry. But the train I scheduled online isn't here. It's not coming. Of all the days Rail Italia could choose to go on strike it would be June 18th.

So I might see that tower after all. The world delivers good news via suppository sometimes. /me winces, sees bright side.

A bunch of people are stranded here. There's a litter of Texan schoolgirls curled up dozing in one corner of the station, but I really don't have the energy. They're cute and all and they're going my way (Firenze), I probably smell like a hobo after the garlic I've been eating and all the swimming in the Med I didn't get to do today (growl).

Chase schoolgirls another day. I'm going to see how much sleep I can get on the information counter before someone arrives to gesticulate at me about the error of my ways. And they might speak English, French or German. I don't actually speak German, but if Italians are going to be incomprehensible they might do it in a language that slows them down enough for me to have a stab at figuring out what's going on with this strike. 'Sprechen Sie Deutsches?'

In Italy. On the coast. At sunset. The countryside here is gorgeous. Chunky sandstone hills falling into the sea. Palm trees. A fountain. A dusty railway station. Greens and browns in the yellow light. Really tired. Dreamy. Surreal.

The beaches of the 8me Arrondissement are bounded by a breakwater of huge boulders piled into rows, about 300m paralell to the shore. I was climbing around out here on the rocks tonight, watching the waterfront and it's lights reflecting in the bay. I came across two guys fishing.

I'm still a little in England mode: I was expecting to have to come up with a witty answer to 'Oi! What the fuck are you doing?' or some such, climbing rocks in the middle of the night.

Instead I just got a cheery 'Bon Soir'. I also saw some kids on the rocks, which made me feel less like a gargoyle watching the city. And I was happy to see them catch a fish. I think England may have helped me become somewhat unfriendly. People are nicer hereabouts.

''No one calls you 'piece of shit' with as much love as I do'' - Mehma Tibb

Marseille is downright lovely. My first night here I spent under a wrecked car outside a TGV station way north of the city (I'd caught a bus there from the airport, long story). Kept carefully leeward of the security camera at the Hertz rent-a-car place, fairly sure no one knew I was there. Sleeping out is OK but it would suck to be deported for vagrancy.

A fox came by to check me out some time after the trains stopped running. I tossed pebbles at it when it came too close, and we watched each other for awhile. I'd never seen a fox in the wild before so that was pretty cool.

I once met a marine in Wilton who was a big fan of foxes and talked a lot about them and their habits. It's interesting stuff to think about.

5am saw me hiking to Aix en Provence (13km) and then on to Marseille (20km). Very beautiful country. I got to see the sun come up over the choppy hills around Aix. Very orange pink, the sky was all crossed with contrails from the night. The town's under some sort of sky lane. There were never less than three planes in the sky heading south.

The countryside is bleached but not barren. Wild wheat and grass heads. Red poppies and black, prickly thistles. Spiky dry weeds on white quartzy ground.

It was a lovely walk, despite feeling gritty and short of sleep. One curious thing: the roadside was littered with gloves. I've no idea why, but it seems Provence is where the world's single gloves go on holiday. All types and sizes.

I hitched a ride outside of Aix into the harbour at Marseille. The city's inside a crescent of white mountains facing out into the mediterranean. Opposite the harbour at the centre of the city are a set of small rocky islands, crusty with ancient battlements and crumbling walls.

Coming in over the mountains the city is miles and miles of red tile roof tops and spires of varying catholic and islamic form. The city was founded by the Phonecians some great long time ago and has considerbaly more history than can be written here.

At a rocky, weathered castle overlooking the bay a most pleasant and unexpected thing happened. I met an American girl who invited me to explore the city with her and two friends. They were students and really fun people. Togther we made an African, Indian, Russian and American. We saw the ancient church of Notre Dame and the old port, palace and city fortifications. We swam in the Med and chattered about ourselves and everything and being in France.

After some searching we found a supermarket, bought some random stuff and headed up one of the hills behind the city. We watched the sun set over over the sea, lit a fire and burnt some food. I couldn't have designed a better day, it was so good just to get on with these girls. I could be myself and not feel I was talking up to someone or down to someone, and I didn't have to feign interest in any dumb thing like motor racing or horses.

That's been really rare since I left Africa. And they were interesting people. So in all, a very pleasant day.

It was also something of a peek from the other side of the game. Wandering around with these three girls they were constantly hit on, by other tourists and locals of all sorts. Most seemed pleasant enough, some of the beach bully and drug dealer types were obnoxious. They had a sort of group dynamic going on that was magic itself to watch. They effortlessly put down advances and manipulated little everyday sitations in a way that was so polished and natural it must have been almost subconscious they were so good at it.

On the one hand I know exactly how much courage and indifference one must come up with to a group of strange girls and try to capture their interest. And how they can compeltely and cruelly trample on one's ego. But, I'm shy and a little sensitive and my ego's been kicked around.

On the other hand, watching these beachy stupid sounding jerks swagger up and more or less proposition them I could care less if their feelings were hurt by sharks.

Bearing this in mind it's all the more amazing they chose to hang out with me of all people. I'm glad they did, I had a really good time. And I'm staying awhile longer. Marseille's great, especially since I only came here to look for breasts. Which I found. Walking along the beachfront with a composed and thoughtful expression on the outside and grinning like a Cheshire Cat on the inside.

More mutton than lamb on the grill, but hey! Marseille rocks!

There's just been some disturbance at the airport. French police swarmed out with their big guns and little hostess uniforms, herded the passengers out of a section of the terminal and set up a cordon.

You'd think the English take first place for dressing their police officers up in funny uniforms. You should check out some of the palace guards on horses in London. Turns out the French also like to see young men in bonnets and tassely shoes.

Police in Napoleon hats: now that would be cool :-) [The dress kepi of certain monument gaurds in Paris are almost as good.]

It's offical, Paris kicks ass! This place truly is awesome. My French isn't great but it passes, and many people here can speak English, though they make a point of saying they don't.
The French are very different. So far I like it. Case in point: last night I went to a restaurant bathroom (unisex) Instead of the toilet I was expecting was this small room with a hole in the floor. It was neatly finished in ceramic and bergundy wallpaper, with two raised stands (to stand on presumably) and a tassely cord to pull to flush the floor. Lots of ordinary everyday things are simply done another way here.

Street life. Really awesome. I managed to get myself lost looking for an address on Bvd Richard Lenoir (turned up on Rue Richard Lenoir) when I came across a gang of youths. THey were drinking beer out of tiny bottles and... playing boules. And table tennis. In the street. At 11pm. The cafes were still open and the place had a friendly, buzzy vibe. The boulevards a beautiful and the architecture just fits together.

The people are colorful. Paris is very mixed ethnically, the dress seems to fit into an all sorts/mismatched theme. It's good to be back in style.

Paris is not as expensive as London but it's still pricey. If I fixed my French I can see it as a place I'd like to live. And there's lots and lots of cheese :-)

But I'm pressing on. I can't find a hostel for tonight so I'm heading south. Bus to airport �7.50, flight �20 something plus tax. I've heard Marseille has topless beaches on the Mediterranean. I could be going for the history or the art galleries, seems from where I'm standing I could go in any direction for those. So I'm going to Marseille. It's been a long long while since I've seen a pair of breasts, and I think it would do me good.

Got fleeced in Dover for a couple pounds on my ferry ticket but hey! I'm in France! And riding on the most retro looking train you ever saw :-)

UPDATE: Above is the total, complete blog post from 2004, which is getting a baffling ammount of traffic recently. I imagine most people are searching for Gare de Lille-Flandres, the central train station in the city of Lille, France. I'll try be helpful.

The station was built between 1869 and 1892 and currently serves regional and SNCF Intercity trains on the Paris, Rouen, Leige and Ostend lines, among others. Wikipedia says: The station front is the old front from Paris' Gare du Nord and was dismantled then reassembled in Lille at the end of the 19th century.

The station was built for Chemin du Fer du Nord (a train company) by Sydney Dunnett and Léonce Reynaud, shown here worrying about the English.

From Lille you could go to:

And on to Paris. I hope. I'm trvalling with a very flexible itinerary. Doesn't go down well with travel agents and ticket booths, but I'm not going to plan anything in advance just because it's convenient to them. I've cast off for awhile, I'll travel and do things and spend time in places as I feel at the time. It's great, and I don't want a schedule, that would introduce stress and restriction on my happy jaunt.

So the lastminute.com people can continue to look incredulous when I ask them to sell me a ticket right now to anywhere, for the best rate they've got. And, no, I don't think I should have booked two weeks in advance Ms Constipated travel agent, so make with the ferry times like it says in the window.

I'm enjoying this hostel in London, mad mix of people. Last night was quieter, with the Canadians fast asleep, the Texan surfing porn on his phone and the Australian guy in the bunk above me muttering in his sleep.

I skimmed a few chapters of 'The Interpretation of Dreams' once, maybe tonight should have a poke at figuring out what's all in his head. Last night he mumbled ''where's my pants'' or ''my pants'' a few times, so I guess he was having one of those naked dreams.

I really like Americans, they have no clue sometimes but on the whole I enjoy their company. There are three in my dorm of eight. I woke up this morning to find the two guys shaving the back or each other's necks while the girl was curling her eyelashes. Here we are, al living out of a single bag effectively homeless in a foreign country and she has eyelash curling apparatus. I'm impressed. Can't say I've ever had someone shave the back of my neck before I leave the house though. Never would have occured to me.

To me, life seems to be lived on different scales in different places.
In small villages life is infuriatingly slow and simple. People are more honest and sincere. Life is lived outside more and folks tend to know know each other, and sometimes mistrust strangers. I was in a little village in Lincolnshire a few days ago and the crowd in the town pub (social nexus) were planning a vilage ball for the summer, basically hoedown in a field nearby. People were volunteering and making arragements. It was a comunity.

I think of it as life on a small black and white TV. Lovely and simple and somewhow wholesome, but smaller than my ambitions in a way I can't quite nail down.

Life in a big town/small city is different. Sort of suburban and still sort of small. People don't all know each other, but they're not just faces to each other as in big cities. Aspirations aren't much higher than in small towns and it's all very Ordinary. House, job, mortgage, 2.4 kids, retirement. Suburban drug problems. Small businesses. Chain stores. Life on a family TV from a wholesale supermarket.

If you're from a small village you're a somebody to the people who live in nowhere with you. In a larger town you're a nobody in a nowhere. A marketing statistic. A completely soul destroying and uninspired life. I could not live like that.

Big cities. Diversity. If cities are cinemas the London (New York, Tokyo?) is an IMAX. A chance to be a nobody in a somewhere. You're anonymous and insignificant, it's a function of the sheer press of millions of other anonymous insignificant nobodies, but it's not opressive or deliberately unfriendly. There are more people who will have the same goals as you: filling a certain job, renting a certain apartment, getting a certain date. Your chances of succeeding are smaller because of that. The more people one competes with, the greater chance that one of them is better at achievng your goals than you are.

There's also a lot to see and do. And the freedom of being anonymous and independant. Existentialism. Wow this is a ramble. I'm going to shut up now.

Beautiful women. There's something London has in spades. Two possible reasons for this: London's more cosmopolitan, diet and attitude to healthy living are better here. And: a large proportion of Londoners are also foreigners.

Traditional English food - in my experience - is some dead animal (often cow or sheep) cooked in grease and maybe served with mushy vegetables that have had all the goodness boiled out of them. The best 'traditional' English food 've come across that's vegetarian is Yorkshire pudding with roast vegetables. Bland and mediocre at best. This I think is why Indian restaurants selling spicey food are so popular here.

But they wolf it down, with butter and beer, and refry the leftovers for breakfast. And so more than half of British women are what doctors call unhealthily overweight, and 30something percent are outright obese. Lots of fat chicks over here. Lots. But London's the happy hunting ground.

This is an ethical problem I have with myself. I would like to think about people based on how good and interesting a person they are. And I would like to be attracted to people by things like emotional compatability and intellectual partnership.

But I can't. I don't choose who I'm attracted to, my friend Zeus does, and he's not interested in how cool a person is. He likes slender young teenage girls (and on occasion an especially cute guy - but that's another story :-) So here's the problem: beautiful teenage girls aren't ideal partners: they're difficult to land, don't always make great conversation and their parents cause a hard time and make things complicated. And I'm not sure yet f I should feel bad about hitting on people based on sexual attraction alone.

On the other hand, if you can pull it off, success is it's own reward and then some. Getting down and intimatea willing girl (optional bonus: that you care about) is about the most amazing thing in the world. I have so far lived a full life, and tried all osrts of things, from riding in hot air balloons to experimenting with drugs, and no other experience comes close to the exhiliaration and fulfillment of finally getting with a beautiful girl you really want. For comparison, I gave up illegal drugs long ago, they just don't excite me that much.

But there aren't all that many hot young women in Britain, and competition is fierce for them. And there are so many intelligent, interesting women out there who aren't foxes who could still be an excellent friend and partner. And here's me too proud to lower my standards and just settle.

I don't know if that's a good thing or not. But hey, getting back to London food, I've found an all-you-can-eat-pizza joint. I don't stop for many square meals on the road so this could take awhile. So... I can contemplate the dilemma of the 'haves' versus the 'should haves'. And my blind slavery to evolution's forces. And there are these two stunning teenagers eating pizza over there....

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