Pale blue dot

I’ve just noticed it’s three years to the day that I started this blog… spooky.

I haven’t posted for a while. The time between March and now was difficult, but things have turned round and I’ve started another new chapter in my life. I can feel a good few rants coming on so check back soon.

This has been a public service announcement, thank you for your patience.

It looks like I’ve solved the bandwidth issue, a company in Yorkshire was racking up over 600 hits a day on my site. As a result my allowance was used by mid month. I’ve barred the offending IP addresses and it looks to have done the trick. Thieving bastards.

Almost exactly four years ago I was in Prague, wandering the cold snowy streets in search of something to do. I found myself in a little courtyard about half a mile from Wenceslas square, and looking round a few shops I found a little book shop. I expected all the books to be in Czech, and was happily mistaken. I bought a book about a young man who wandered off into the Alaskan wilderness.

The book, by Jon Krakauer, is a true story and despite the sadness of the story, it is still a very uplifting one. Yesterday I watched the film of the book, directed by Sean Penn and staring Emile Hirsch it was better than I had hoped. They made a great job of it and would recommend a look.

IMDB

There are few things better than lying on a beach in the sun, under the shade of a palm tree, reading a good book. In between chapters I quite enjoy people watching, and this is where the Caribbean isn’t as enjoyable as other places I have been. Topless sunbathing makes life difficult for the people watcher; it seemed every direction I looked, filling my field of vision, was all shapes, sizes and ages of naked breast. Apart from ensuring that I can’t gape round the beach like a slack-jawed hillbilly, why would you want to sunbath topless? Come on ladies, I need answers. It’s not like you get them out at Tesco’s on Saturday afternoon, or stretch out butt-nekid in your garden at the first sight of the summer sun. In fact there is a distinct possibility that the only person to see your nicely tanned, nut-brown boobies is your partner. So, why?

Whilst away I read three and a half books. The half was “The cold six thousand” by James Ellroy, set around the time of the Kennedy assassination; it delves into the mob, bent cops and the Hoover era of US politics. It’s heavy going, using very short, punchy sentences and there seems little flow to it, I’m glad I saved it till last. I’ll tell you more when I’ve finished it. The first book I read was “The lost Continent” by Bill Bryson. Bryson makes me laugh out loud with his observations; I get funny looks when I’m reading his books. This one is about his return to the country of his birth a few years after leaving to live in the UK. His mixture of culture, history, observation and musings is the perfect travel book in my opinion. Second was “Ludmilla’s broken English” by DBC Pierre. This a strange story about Russian brides and conjoined twins, along with a sub-plot of war, drugs, Russian mob and secret government departments. The plot lines come together late on, so it’s a little predictable but still highly enjoyable. If you have read Vernon God Little and liked it, you’ll like this. The third was the best in my opinion, “Borders up” by Vitali Vitaliev is another travel book, but one with a difference. He splits Eastern Europe into Beer lands, Wine lands and Spirit lands, he then travels to the individual countries and drinks with his new friends. The book seemed to highlight the differences between pre and post communist Eastern Europe, and even more startling, the very distinct similarities. Fascinating, funny and very enjoyable.

As the warmth of the Caribbean sun is leached from my bones by the frigid air of an English winter, I find myself wondering whether I would go back to the Dominican Republic. The resounding answer is no, not even for the 84 degree heat of mid-winter.

It’s an easy question to ask, but with a complex answer, so if you can be arsed to read the rest of this I suggest you get a brew and make yourself comfy.

Don’t get me wrong, there’s nothing wrong with the place, the sun was hot, the sea was blue and the sand was like talcum powder but there is a feeling that that’s all there is, no depth to the culture and no sense of national pride from the Dominicans. The whole place was a huge tourist trap, designed to part me from my cash. I know most holiday destinations are similar, but if you engage a Jamaican or Egyptian in conversation about culture or religion you get more, you get passion and colour, and this was sadly lacking here. I have waffled about my opinions on the differences between travel and tourism before so I’ll not go into it again here (here if you’re interested 4th July 1995), but suffice to say that if tourism is all about your destination, then there are far better places in the Caribbean to visit than the Dom’ rep’.

The oldest known inhabitants of the island were the Taino Indians, replacing older tribes around 600 AD, the Tainos named the island Quisqueya, which means “mother of the earth”. The hunter gatherers lived on the island until a little after Columbus landed on the 5th December 1492. By the early 1500s they were all but gone; smallpox, enslavement, suicide and war with Spanish ended their rule of the island. Since then Hispaniola, as Columbus named it, has been in Spanish, French and US control until finally becoming a republic. You would think, with such a rich history, that some of it would filter through to today’s society. Unfortunately I didn’t see it.

Anyway, back to the holiday. You may now be under the impression that we didn’t have a good time. Nothing of the sort, it was a great holiday. We had a good laugh, read some great books, saw some mind boggling things and got a fine tan. All will be revealed in the next few posts.

I have blatantly stolen this from Steve. Look, I’m short of ideas at the moment. Anyway, below is the top 100 books list, of which I have read 37. A poor show really, but considering the average is only 6 it’s not as bad as it could be. Mine are in bold, the ones I have no intention of reading are struck out. The rest are on my list along with a shed load of others that didn’t make this one. I must say I’m disappointed that Willie Russell’s Wrong boy didn’t make the cut.

1 Pride and Prejudice - Jane Austen
2 The Lord of the Rings - JRR Tolkien
3 Jayne Eyre - Charlotte Bronte
4 The Harry Potter Series - JK Rowling
5 To Kill a Mockinbird - Harper Lee
6 The Bible (I have read a good wedge of this shite)
7 Wuthering Heights - Emily Bronte
8 Nineteen Eighty Four - George Orwell
9 His Dark Materials - Philip Pullman
10 Great Expectations - Charles Dickens
11 Little Women - Louisa M Alcott
12 Tess of the D’Urbervilles - Thomas Hardy
13 Catch 22 - Joseph Heller
14 Complete Works of Shakespeare
15 Rebecca - Daphne Du Maurier
16 The Hobbit - JRR Tolkien
17 Birdsong - Sebastian Faulks
18 Catcher in the Rye - JD Salinger
19 The Time Traveller’s Wife - Audrey Niffenegger
20 Middlemarch - George Eliot
21 Gone With The Wind - Margaret Mitchell
22 The Great Gatsby - F Scott Fitzgerald
23 Bleak House - Charles Dickens
24 War and Peace - Leo Tolstoy
25 The Hitch Hiker’s Guide to the Galaxy - Douglas Adams
26 Brideshead Revisited - Evelyn Waugh
27 Crime and Punishment - Fyodor Dostoyevsky
28 Grapes of Wrath - John Steinbeck
29 Alice in Wonderland - Lewis Carroll
30 The Wind in the Willows - Kenneth Grahame
31 Anna Karenina - Leo Tolstoy
32 David Copperfield - Charles Dickens
33 Chronicles of Narnia - CS Lewis
34 Emma - Jane Austen
35 Persuasion - Jane Austen
36 The Lion, The Witch and The Wardrobe - CS Lewis
37 The Kite Runner - Khaled Hosseini
38 Captain Corelli’s Mandolin - Louis De Bernieres
39 Memoirs of a Geisha - Arthur Golden
40 Winnie the Pooh - AA Milne
41 Animal Farm - George Orwell
42 The Da Vinci Code - Dan Brown
43 One Hundred Years of Solitude - Gabriel Garcia Marquez
44 A Prayer for Owen Meaney - John Irving
45 The Woman in White - Wilkie Collins
46 Anne of Green Gables - LM Montgomery
47 Far From The Madding Crowd - Thomas Hardy
48 The Handmaid’s Tale - Margaret Atwood
49 Lord of the Flies - William Golding
50 Atonement - Ian McEwan
51 Life of Pi - Yann Martel
52 Dune - Frank Herbert
53 Cold Comfort Farm - Stella Gibbons
54 Sense and Sensibility - Jane Austen
55 A Suitable Boy - Vikram Seth
56 The Shadow of the Wind - Carlos Ruiz Zafon
57 A Tale of Two Cities - Charles Dickens
58 Brave New World - Aldous Huxley
59 The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Nightime- Mark Haddon
60 Love In The Time Of Cholera - Gabriel Garcia Marquez
61 Of Mice and Men - John Steinbeck
62 Lolita - Vladimir Nabokov
63 The Secret History - Donna Tartt
64 The Lovely Bones - Alice Sebold
65 Count of Monte Cristo - Alexandre Dumas
66 On The Road - Jack Kerouac
67 Jude the Obscure - Thomas Hardy
68 Bridget Jones’s Diary - Helen Fielding
69 Midnight’s Children - Salman Rushdie
70 Moby Dick - Herman Melville
71 Oliver Twist - Charles Dickens
72 Dracula - Bram Stoker
73 The Secret Garden - Frances Hodgson Burnett
74 Notes From A Small Island - Bill Bryson
75 Ulysses - James Joyce
76 The Bell Jar - Sylvia Plath
77 Swallows and Amazons - Arthur Ransome
78 Germinal - Emile Zola
79 Vanity Fair - William Makepeace Thackeray
80 Possession - AS Byatt
81 A Christmas Carol - Charles Dickens
82 Cloud Atlas - David Mitchell
83 The Color Purple - Alice Walker
84 The Remains of the Day - Kazuo Ishiguro
85 Madame Bovary - Gustave Flaubert
86 A Fine Balance - Rohinton Mistry
87 Charlotte’s Web - EB White
88 The Five People You Meet In Heaven - Mitch Albom
89 Adventures of Sherlock Holmes - Sir Arthur Conan Doyle
90 The Faraway Tree Collection - Enid Blyton
91 Heart of Darkness - Joseph Conrad
92 The Little Prince - Antoine De Saint-Exupery
93 The Wasp Factory - Iain Banks
94 Watership Down - Richard Adams
95 A Confederacy of Dunces - John Kennedy Toole
96 A Town Like Alice - Nevil Shute
97 The Three Musketeers - Alexandre Dumas
98 HAMLET - William Shakespeare
99 Charlie and the Chocolate Factory - Roald Dahl
100 Les Miserables - Victor Hugo

How about you?

Are you boycotting the Olympics? You are? You complete twat. Take a look around your house, how much stuff have you got that was made in China? Of the stuff that wasn’t, how much of it was made from Chinese raw materials? A fuck load that’s how much. I can’t fucking abide bandwagon jumping; try picking a cause that isn’t popular. What about marching for the rights of paedophiles? Or against the mistreatment of crazed Muslim suicide bombers? Write to your MP and complain that there just aren’t enough Burberry-wearing single mothers to consume all the putrid shite that Greggs makes on a daily basis, something must be done.

Please don’t say “but Simon, what about the human rights?” It hasn’t bothered anyone before; I have never heard anyone wandering about in Primark or Matalan complaining that the prices are too low, and that manufacturers should pay their sweatshop kiddies more money to combat the unbearable nature of their lives. No, you buy your £5 suit and think no more about it. You see, underneath all the false concern we secretly don’t give a flying monkey’s cock whether someone 12,000 miles away is hungry, because as long as someone else is hungry, we aren’t. Economics is shit, but it’s the truth.

Evolutionarily speaking we are a social animal, but we aren’t that social. Beyond our family groups we actively try to kill and maim anyone who may affect our chances of survival. So, asking us to be vaguely fucking bothered is a waste of time. It’s fashionable to care, but deep down inside we don’t, so watch the Olympics and marvel at the spectacle, if you can see it through the smog.

If it’s illegal to talk on a mobile phone whilst driving, why are we still allowed to smoke behind the wheel? Why are billboards allowed on the road side? What about having sweets in the car? Or passengers for that matter? Kids, obviously need to be banned forthwith. There are a thousand and one distractions when you’re behind the wheel, that’s why it’s hard. We carry out thousands of risk assessments in our head every time we drive away from home. I know phones and driving have caused accidents, but so have a lot of other things, are we to ban everything? We are in danger of making living too easy. There needs to be some risk because if there isn’t we will get too complacent, and that’s worse. The future would be bleak, wrapped in cotton wool cocoons, plugged into the net, and hooked up to the McFood outlet, we wouldn’t have to leave the house.

Welcome to the matrix.

Celebrity chefs. What a pointless bunch of cunts. A few years ago I had a twats league table, but I abandoned it after it became apparent that the celebrity chefs were unreachable at the top. By far the worst is Delia, how the fuck she manages to stay on TV is anyone’s guess, she must have something on someone. I was channel hoping the other day and happened across a program with Sofie Grigson, the last time I saw her she was relatively svelte but now she’s the size of a small county. If you couple this huge weight increase with the fact that Ainsley Harriot hasn’t been seen in a while….. well I’ll let you put the pieces together. I only hope she didn’t burn the sauce.