For we are young and free.

Both my trains were delayed today, and I spent so much time waiting at the Station that after a while I actually forgot where I was suppose to be going. It was only after looking at the grey faced morose Laptop bag wearing Peons on the Platform did it trigger my memory. Work, I’m headed to work.

But it’s not so bad today, I’m only going to be ploughing through the inane drivel of Middle Management emails until 1pm and then I’m heading to the pub. Because it’s January 26th.

Australia Day.

It was on this day just over 400 years ago that Ned Kelly fought off Apache Indian Tribes, Russian Spies and Malaria to establish Australia’s first colony – Botany Bay.

We commemorate his efforts by heading to the nearest boozer and getting stupidly drunk. (As opposed to getting “smartly drunk”, where you drink alcohol and then end up doing something clever. Like Isaac Newton when he drank a six pack of beer and went out into his backyard and invented gravity).

Happy Australia Day to the 20,999,999 sons and daughters of the Motherland. (The population was 21 million, but you have to take into account that Steve Irwin died).

And happy Australia Day to the rest of the world too. We’re such a multicultural chunk of Earth that we’ve been influenced by every Nationality and culture on the Planet.

God bless you kids.

Ignore the last Post, it's fucking freezing.

Mother Nature is a filthy whore.

A dirty, knife wielding, carpet burned whore.

I finished writing that post on the pleasant British winter, and wandered outside to be greeted with a face full of Fuck You Irony. A Cold Snap has hit, and I’m freezing my fucking nuts off.

Is that the correct terminology? Cold Snap? I’m too disinterested to look it up.

But oh my is it chilly. And these icy conditions bring new reasons for the trains to be delayed, and why my journey to and from work feels less "public transport" and more "rusty scalpel Vasectomy".

They completely shut down the Northern Line today, resulting in every man and his dog wanting to catch my train to Clapham Junction. The station was a jam packed Cluster Fuck, so I ended up yelling “Fuck this!” to nobody in particular, and sat in a café drinking coffee until the crowd slowly diminished.

And then the train from Clapham to Feltham was 20 minutes late. The announcer told us that the train had been held up at the central station because the driver scheduled to steer the train had been stuck on another train trying to get to work. The announcer laughed into his Microphone:

"Ha ha, so your train was on time…but the driver was late. Ho ho!"

Yeah that’s fucking hilarious you Cocksucker. You won’t find too many of the waiting travellers laughing with you, because their faces are frozen stiff. Prick.

I swear Tripitaka didn’t suffer as many hardships travelling the entire land of India searching for Buddha, than I do trying to get to work each and every day.

Work, Bah. Busting my nuts to get to a place I don’t even want to go to. Life is fucking stupid.

Still, this Cold weather has brought Snow with it, which is a novelty for a South Australian like me.

The closest thing we have to Snow back home is when the Koalas get dandruff.

And when the Koalas get dandruff, the Bush Fire Emergency Services have to send Crop Dusters full of Shampoo to spray the Gum trees. This gets rid off the Dandruff, but it also temporarily blinds the farmers when they get the shampoo in their eyes. As the Farmers grope around helplessly in the dark, waiting Dingoes break into the houses using Crow Bars and steal the babies.

Life is dramatic down South.

Three Cheers for Global Warming

It’s cold and rainy today.

But I’ll give credit where credits due – this is my third British Winter and easily the least miserable. Hell, some days the weather can even be considered pleasant, and we have one phenomenon to thank for this

GLOBAL WARMING.

I’m not environmentally savvy enough to know the exact reasons behind the destruction of the Ozone layer (from what I remember from School its a combination of Mobile Phone Emissions and Walrus farts?), all I know is the Summers are getting warmer, and the Winters are getting warmer and too. And I couldn’t be happier.

but beef - The icebergs are melting, and omg the penguins won’t have anywhere 2 live!!!1! :("

Well I didn’t say there wouldn’t be any repercussions kids. You can’t make an omelette without breaking eggs.

"omg beef!!!1!! the world will be completely uninhabitable in 50 years :("

Really? Well I’ll be in Hell playing Super Mario Kart with Satan by that point, so that fact doesn’t really ruffle my feathers either.

All I know is we’re smack bang in the middle of a British Winter and should be hiding indoors from Mother Nature's misery. Instead, the weather was so nice on the weekend (blue skies and all) I spent Sunday walking around Hyde Park with a young lady enjoying the scenery.

The wildlife in Hyde Park are so used to human interaction they’ve become incredibly docile. The Swans and Squirrels creep up to you and shyly nibble food from your open palms. I even saw a guy walking a rabbit on a leash, which amused me to no end.

In fact, I was so impressed with mankind’s kindred spirit with nature, I was going to rate the day a highly successful 10/10. But then a Fox jumped out of the bushes and mauled those two kids to death just as we were leaving.

So that dropped it back to a 9/10.


Global Warming is great.

This just in: British Rail Sucks Ass

When I was a school boy, I had a class mate who was this chubby annoying fuck that nobody liked and smelt kind of funny. We weren't allowed to watch PG rated films at school, because his parents were so strict they didn't want him to watch them - which means the rest of the class couldn't. We had a sleepover in the School Library (I don't remember why, the Teacher must have been insane) but the high light of the night was an impending feast of Pizza the School was going to pay for. But guess what, the annoying kid couldn't eat Pizza (Dunno why. Diabetic? Lactose Intolerant?) so the School organised a heap of salads and things instead. Which is the last fucking thing you want to eat at a Sleepover when your 11 years old. And then to add viscous insult to ulimate injury - the kid didn't rock up to the Sleepover anyway.

I don't remember that kid's name (fuck him, I hope he's dead) but for some reason whenever I think of the British Rail Service, I think of that kid. Useless, annoying, worthless kid.

Fucking British Rail. One of many contributing factors that may see me last an entire year without cracking a smile.

I spent 30 minutes at Clapham Junction Wednesday last week. All of the trains had been put on hold, the message boards declaring that somebody had "taken ill" on an earlier train from Central. This is Britain just remember, you break a nail you take five days off work. Somebody is "taken ill" on one train and all of them come to a halt. Piss off.

Thursday night after a particularly long and fuck-awful day at work, myself and a couple of work-mates headed to Feltham Station to find that all of the trains had been cancelled. This resulted in a 20 minute bus ride to the closest tube station (Hatton Cross, one down from Heathrow), and a 20 minute wait for the tube. I grabbed a spare copy of The London Paper (the idiotic free evening news paper that caters for the worn out white collar pleb. It's crap, but still better than looking at the morose zombies you're travelling with) which revealed why the train services had been decimated. According to the head of Metro Transport (who should obviously stop sniffing glue):

"London transit has had serious delays today. It's windy, and a train hit a tree." **

Jesus Galloping Christ. That doesn't even make fucking sense.

It's like the Transport head got bored with the usual excuses, so asked his five year old son to come up with a new reason. End result was a two hour tube ride through Hell instead. Fuck.

But the high-light of this month - a couple of weeks ago at Clapham Junction when I walked onto Platform 15 to find a large build up of people, and none of the message boards working. Everybody was confused, until the Announcer put us out of our misery:

"We apologise for any inconvenience. Due to a signal fault, we will not know when the next train is coming until it arrives. Also, we will not know the trains destinations until we can ask the driver."

Everybody on the platform was dumbfounded, how fucking stupid. But that is exactly what happened. As each train pulled up, the announcer would have to head up to the driver's window with his Microphone, and like some kind of bizarre Talk Show Host ask the driver which stops he would be making. The waiting travellers had to laugh. This is 2007 for fuck's sake, we should be in flying cars by now. The Wild West had a better service than this.

If I was a train driver and an announcer came up to me with a microphone inquiring about my journey, I would grab the fucking microphone and yell

"All Aboard! I'm jumping this bastard off the next bend and ploughing it straight into the fucking Thames! We're going fishing Mother Fuckers!"

But I'm not a train driver, so that won't be happening any time soon.



** In defence of the Head of Transport, England was experiencing Gale Force Winds on that particular day. But who wants to get facts in the way of a decent rant? Not me kids.

End of an Era

One of the undeniable truths of living is that nothing lasts forever, and that people will come and go from your life. Never is this more true than on the foggy streets of London, where holiday visa and work permit restrictions increases the turnover of colleagues and cohorts exponentially.

So there is a constant string of new and felonious lunatics to meet, but the flip-side is that at the end of each year you lose a heap of good drinking partners too.

This is the case with our House-mate, Co-worker, and Shoddy Blog stalwart - Jimmy, who won’t be joining us in London this year, as he chosen to return to his University studies back in Adelaide.

The population of London will be suffering through some Jimmy withdrawal symptoms (except for that barmaid from Belarus, she hated your guts Jimmy but we never knew why?) and he will be sorely missed by the Wandsworth Demons Football team.

I still remember the first game he played for the Demons, he was so hung over he almost passed out a dozen times – yet went on to make the best players list anyway. I’m not sure why I remember that, I wasn’t actually here at the time. But it’s a fond memory none the less. His legacy will live on with the down-right inspirational recruitment posters found around London. Click to enlarge kids, and if this poster doesn’t inspire you to chuck on a Guernsey and get out on the grass for a kick, then I’m sorry - but you’re dead inside.

Oh and Jimmy, if you haven’t chosen a university yet – go for the UniSa Magill Campus. The student population is 85% female.

God I miss that place.

New Year. New Post. Same Old Fuckery.

Time for an update, and this one is dedicated to Richo who is sick of re-reading the Christmas Post.

Happy New Year you cheeky sluts.

It's time to wipe '06 off our guts with a dirty sock, and start barring up for '07.

Did you all have a nice Christmas Day? You don't have to answer that. It was a rhetorical question and besides I can't hear your response through your computer screens. Plus I don't give a fuck. But Merry Christmas anyway.

I managed to pull off a life time ambition, in that I pretty much skipped Christmas Day. I've always wanted to skip just one Christmas, just to see if it could be done. In the end it wasn't that hard to do, seeing how my entire family and most of my friends are on the other side of the planet. It didn't hurt that all of my London cronies were off holidaying outside of London too.

It got to about midnight Christmas Eve and I still didn't have plans, but I ended up flaking out on Toby's couch and we spent Jesus' Birthday drinking booze and watching sitcoms on cable TV. Quite pleasant.

Don't get me wrong, there was plenty of Christmas Spirit flying through Beef town earlier in December. I went to half a dozen Christmas parties, gave Season's Greetings to at least a thousand people, and think I might have caught "girl germs" under the Mistletoe. But it got to the point where if I heard one more Christmas Carol I was going to fire bomb an orphanage, and decided to give it a rest by the time the 25th hit.

Dear God you should have seen London for the entire month of December. If you're thinking a lit up Harrods and Chimney Sweeps drinking Egg Nog, sorry but your way off. It was a stone cold motherless DRUNKEN ORGY. I swear everybody older then 10 and younger then 100 had booze squirting out of their fucking ears from pure unbridled alcohol engorging. The doors of a bus or train would open, and you'd have a second to bask in the stench of liquor before a dozen drunken bastards would fall on top of you. And I just love the way alcohol is still the world's greatest social equalizer. That Vice President of the Law Firm with the 200K job and the trophy wife? He's sitting in the gutter with a three piece suit covered in vomit because he can't hold his brandy. Ha, love it. Stupid Prick.


Yes it was quite the debaucherous month, so much so that I woke up on the 31st and wondered if I could actually muster the strength for a New Year's party (for some strange reason a group of us went and got shit-carted at a bar in Leicester Square on the 30th, New Year's Eve's Eve. Retarded). But after boozing solidly all year it would have seemed dopey to give the "Biggest night of the year" a miss. Besides, a party would just seem empty without me scowling in the corner.

So I ended up at a House Party at a flat in North London, drinking with a heap of people from Adelaide I hadn't met before. I got wasted on Guinness then tried to convince a Nurse to help me pull apart the Stereo Speakers so we could build a set of defibrillators. Then I spent at least an hour explaining to the inhabitants of the house that we should cook some Spaghetti in the Washing Machine. Throw some pasta in the tumbler, Bolognaise Sauce and a clove of garlic in the detergent tray. Let it wash through a cycle, then come back in an hour and everybody can eat out of it. Fuckin' Drunken MacGyver I am, but my plans were lambasted as irresponsible and nobody let me see them through to fruition.

In hindsight, home-made defibrillators are probably a bit stupid. But you can't shake that Washing Machine Pasta from my mind. You can use the Iron to toast some Garlic Bread while your waiting for the tumbler to stop spinning. Try it tonight kids, your parents will love it.

So here we are, 2007.

It's the fucking future already. And we've made it this far without neither the Apes nor the Robots taking over - which strangely has left me feeling more disappointed than relived. We should have at least had an Alien invasion by now. Oh well. Here's to the Zombie Holocaust we'll be living through in 2008 (after World War III later this year).

12 brand new months of Shoddy Blogging. God help us all.